Slade House

by David Mitchell

  Marinus stares back, then peers through the half-gone blinds over the ghostly windows. “Dark nights, in these parts. We’re in your attic at Slade House, right?” I don’t answer. The intruder returns to Jonah’s question. “Your ‘crematorium’ disposes of bodies well enough, but inorganic matter falls through the cracks. In the old days it hardly mattered—a button here, a hair clip there, but in this century”—Marinus turns back to us and weighs the recorder in the palm of her hand—“angels really do fit onto pinheads, and the lives of the multitudes inside a memory stick. We are few, Miss Grayer, but we’re well connected. Artifacts like this,” she drops the recorder into her pocket, “have a habit of finding us, sooner or later.”

  I’m forming a theory. Enomoto Sensei spoke about “vigilantes” with a pathological urge to slay fellow Atemporals.

  “Who is this ‘us’?” Jonah demands of the intruder.

  “Why not ask your sister for her view? She gets out more.”

  I keep my eyes on Marinus. “She’s from across the Schism.”

  “Warm.”

  “Le Courant Profond,” I guess. “The Deep Stream.”

  Her hands are free to glyph. “Warmer.”

  What a stupid guessing game. “You’re an Horologist.”

  “Oh, say it with more venom. Spit out the vile word.” Marinus, like Jonah, has a taste for burlesque irony. Like Jonah, she may trip.

  Jonah, naturally, hasn’t heard of Horology with a capital H: “She makes clocks?”

  Marinus’s laugh sounds genuine. “Miss Grayer, I almost understand why you tolerate this plodding clerk, this risible thesp, this dim corgi who fancies himself a wolf. But come: Between you and me, is he not a liability? A ball and chain? An aptly named Jonah? Did your Sayyid never tell you what he thought of him? ‘A preening fool composed of a pig’s afterbirth.’ His words, I swear. We hunted your former master down in the Atlas Mountains, with the aid of Freya’s recording. So we must thank your brother for that much, at least. The venerable Sayyid begged for mercy. He tried to buy it by telling us more than we had hoped to learn. We showed him the same mercy he’d shown his prey down the decades. No more, no less. And now Jonah has proven to you what a lethal encumbrance he is—”

  She breaks off, having brought my simmering brother up to the boiling point: Jonah is glyphing up a pyroblast with his bare hands. I telegram Don’t! but Jonah’s head is roaring and he can’t hear so I shout it out loud—“Don’t!”—as the vestiges of the hospital room fall away, revealing the long attic of Slade House. Eighty years of metalife end at this forking path: Do I join Jonah’s assault against an untested enemy who has goaded us to attack her? Even if our victory would end in voltaic starvation? Or do I forsake Jonah, watch him fry, but keep alive a fetal hope of survival? Even as Jonah rashly, rashly, applies every last volt in his soul to Marinus’s incineration, I don’t know what to do…

  · · ·

  …Marinus, fast as thought, glyphed a concave mirrorfield; it quivered under impact, I heard the crackle of lava and saw Marinus’s face snap with pain, and for a moment I dared hope that our intruder had underestimated us; but the mirrorfield held, regained its flat plane and flung back the refocused black light straight at its source. There was no time to glyph or warn or intervene—Jonah Grayer lived for over 42,000 days, but he died in a fractured second, killed by a beginner’s trick, albeit a trick deployed by a master. I glimpsed a carbonized Jonah with melted lips and cheeks, trying in vain to protect his eyes; saw him wither into split briquettes and grainy cinders; and watched a nebula of soot lose its human form and fall to the floorboards, smothering a constant candle.

  My decision had made itself.

  · · ·

  I see the glow of the candle through my own birth-eyelids. I hear the faintest wheeze and crackle of beeswax, boiling in its pond at the wick’s stem. Time, then, has bled into the lacuna. Our operandi is dead. When I open my eyes, instead of Jonah opening his eyes, I will see Grief. Grief and I exchanged words in Ely many years ago after Mother died, poor wretch, coughing her lungs up, telling me to take care of Jonah, to protect him, because I was the sensible one…And for over a century I honored that promise, and protected my brother more assiduously than poor Nellie Grayer meant or dreamed, and during these years Grief was only a face in a crowd. Now, however, Grief intends to make up for lost time. I’m under no illusions. Jonah’s soul is gone to the Dusk: his birth-body is an ankle-high soot drift around my feet and the base of the Ninevite Candle. The pain Grief intends to inflict will be colossal. Yet, curiously, for now, just for now, I find myself sitting in the dead wreckage of our operandi, amongst the grainy remnants of my twin brother, able to consider my position with a calm clarity. Perhaps this calm is the silty stillness between the sucked-away sea and the tsunami’s roaring, horizon-wide, hill-high arrival, but while it lasts, I’ll use it. I let Jonah die his futile death alone—proving, I suppose, that my love of survival is stronger than my love for Jonah. Survival is also an ally against Grief: if I buckle now, I won’t survive. The killer is here, in our attic. Where else would she be? I heard her a little while ago. She picked herself up, gasped with pain—good—and creaked across the old oak boards towards the candle flame like a monstrous, hobbling moth. She’s waiting for me to open my eyes and begin the next round. I’ll keep her waiting a little longer.

  · · ·

  Dark skin in the dark space, she watches me watch her, a hunter watching her cornered quarry, our optic nerves connecting our souls. Jonah’s murderer, Marinus the Horologist, who brought death into our stronghold. Yes, I hate her; but how far short it falls, this petty, neutered verb. Hatred is a thing one hosts: the lust I feel to harm, maim, wreck and kill this woman is less an emotion I hold than what I am now become. “I was expecting you,” she speaks in a funereal hush, “to join your brother’s assault. As, doubtless, was he. Why didn’t you?”

  The end begins. “Because it was an abysmal strategy.” My throat, as usual, is dry as I reinhabit my own body. “If we lost, we’d”—I look at the soot on my feet—“end up like this.” I stand—my joints are stiff—and take a few steps back, so the candle is equidistant between Marinus and me. “Yet if we won, we’d die when the lacuna collapses and the world’s time catches up with our bodies. Typical of Jonah. Even when we were children he would act rashly and leave me to sift through the wreckage and somehow make things right. This time, I can’t.”

  Marinus considers this. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Your condolences disgust me,” I say, mildly enough.

  “Grief hurts, yes. Every human you ever fed on had loved ones who suffer now as you do. Without even a figure to blame, to hate. But you know the proverb, Miss Grayer: ‘Who lives by the sword—’ ”

  “Don’t quote proverbs. Why didn’t you kill me just now?”

  Marinus makes an It’s complicated face. “First, cold-blooded murder isn’t the Deep Stream’s way.”

  “No, you prefer to goad your enemies into shooting first, so you get to plead self-defense.”

  The hypocrite doesn’t deny it. “Second, I wanted to ask you if you’d kindly open this inner aperture”—she indicates the tall mirror—“and let me out.”

  So she’s neither all-doing nor all-knowing. I don’t tell her that even I can’t open the aperture now the operandi is dead. I don’t even confirm that the aperture is the mirror, in case she’s merely guessing. I just think of Marinus dying when the air in the attic runs out. A satisfying image. I tell her, “Never.”

  “It was a long shot,” Marinus admits, “but it would have been more elegant than Plan B, which is also a long shot.” She steps towards the candle and reaches into a thigh pocket. I marshal my voltage for a defense. Instead of a weapon, however, she produces a smartphone.

  “The nearest network is sixty years in the future,” I tell her, “and the aperture won’t relay phone signals to the real world. So sorry.”

  Her dark face glows in the smartphone’s cold li
ght. “Like I said, it’s a long shot.” She points her device at the aperture; stares; waits; checks the screen; frowns; waits; waits; steps around the candle and the soot-drift to crouch by the aperture and examine the surface of the mirror; waits; presses her ear against it; waits; and finally gives up with a sigh. “Too long a shot, it would appear.” She puts away her smartphone. “I stashed half a kilo of plastic explosive in the shrubbery, by the outer aperture, when you-as-Bombadil weren’t looking. My canvas bag. You felt something was amiss as we walked beneath the wisteria, I believe, so I distracted you. I hoped the explosion would blow open this aperture from the other side, but either the phone signal didn’t reach the detonator or your operandi is too solidly built.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I enjoy saying. “Might there be a Plan C, or is Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby going to die today?”

  “Traditionally, we’d stage another climactic battle between good and evil. We’d never agree which of us is which, however, and the only prize on offer is a slower death by oxygen starvation. Shall we forgo tradition?”

  This false levity is repugnant. “Death for you is just a short break, I understand.”

  She steps back, around the candle, and sits where our guests are—were—usually positioned, opposite the aperture. “It’s more troublesome than that, but we do come back, yes. Was Enomoto or the Sayyid your principal informant on the Deep Stream?”

  “Both. Both masters knew of you. Why?”

  “I met Enomoto’s grandfather in a former life. A murderous demon of a man. You would have liked him.”

  “You deny us the privileges you enjoy.” My voice sounds chipped and cracked. It’s this thirst.

  “You murder for immortality,” states Marinus. “We are sentenced to it.”

  “ ‘Sentenced’ you say? As if you’d willingly swap your metalife for a bone clock’s snatched, wasted, tawdry handful of decades!” I feel unaccountably tired. Suppressing my grief over Jonah’s murder must be wearing me out. I sit down, a foot or so back from my usual place. “Why do you Horologists conduct this…this…” the word’s gone, it’s Arabic, it’s used in English these days, too, “this…jihad, against us?”

  “We serve the sanctity of life, Miss Grayer. Not our own lives, but other people’s. The knowledge that those future innocents whom you would have killed to fuel your addiction to longevity—people as guiltless as the Timms sisters, as Gordon Edmonds, as the Bishops—will now survive: that’s our higher purpose. What’s a metalife without a mission? It’s mere feeding.”

  What Bishops? “All we did”—my voice sounds too wavery—“was to seek survival. No more than any sane, healthy animal—”

  “No,” Marinus scrunches up her face, “please, no. I’ve heard it so often. ‘Humanity is hardwired for survival’; ‘Might is Right is nature’s way’; ‘We only harvest a few.’ Again and again, down the years, same old same old…”

  Pain is growing in my hips and knees, a pain I’ve never known. I wonder if Marinus is responsible. Where’s Jonah got to?

  “…from such an array of vultures,” the woman’s saying, and I wish she’d speak up, “from feudal lords to slave traders to oligarchs to neocons to predators like you. All of you strangle your consciences, and ethically you strike yourselves dumb.”

  The pain has spread to my left wrist. I examine it and if I could, I’d drop it, horrified. My skin is sagging like a grotesque ill-fitting sleeve. My palm, my fingers are…old. A repulsive illusion, surely, of Marinus’s creation. I peer forward—with unseemly effort—to look into the aperture. A white-haired witch stares back, aghast.

  “The explosion didn’t smash the aperture,” says the black woman, “but it did make a crack. Across the middle, there. See?” She crouches next to me and runs her finger along a thick line. “There. The world’s leaking in, Miss Grayer. I’m sorry. You’re aging at, perhaps, a decade every fifteen seconds.”

  She’s speaking English, but what’s she talking about? “Who are you?”

  The woman stares at me. Which is very rude. Don’t Africans teach their children manners? “I am Mercy, Miss Grayer.”

  “Well then, Mercy—get me…Get me…” I know his name, I know I know his name, but his name doesn’t know me. “My brother. This instant. He’ll sort it all out.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Mercy. “Your mind’s decaying.” She rises to her feet and picks up our…what’s it called? The thing the candle sits in? She’s going to steal it! “Put that back!” I try to stop her, but my feet just twitch uselessly in a pile of dirt. This place is filthy. Where’s the housekeeper? Why is this African holding up our candlestick? That’s the word: candlestick! We’ve had it in the family for generations. It’s three thousand years old. It’s older than Jesus. It’s from Nineveh. I call out, “Bring me Jonah this instant!”

  The African lifts it up, like a, like a, you know, like a thing…and swings its heavy base into the mirror.

  · · ·

  Daylight floods and snowflakes swarm through the splintered plane of the aperture, covering the floorboards, scurrying around the darkest recesses of the attic, like inquisitive schoolchildren. My body has shriveled up around me like a punctured and bony balloon. Untied, unzipped, unstrapped from its senility-riddled brain, my soul floats free. Marinus, without a backwards glance, steps through the aperture even as the attic fades away into a wintry sky, above an anonymous town. It’s over. Without its birth-body anchoring it to the world, the soul of Norah Grayer is dissolving; momentarily it hovers in the midair space once occupied by the attic of Slade House. Was that my life? Was that all? There was supposed to be more. Many, many decades more. My cunning had earned it. Look below: roofs, cars, other lives, and a woman putting on a green beret, leaving the scene via an alley, with a stolen candlestick still in her hand. There is no farewell in the busy air, no hymn, no message. Only snow, snow, snow and the inexorable pull of the Dusk.

  Not yet. Not yet. Dusk pulls, but damn the Dusk, damn Marinus, I’ll pull harder. She killed my brother and now she’s walking free. Let Grief pull with me; let hatred strengthen my sinews. My stock of seconds may be meager but if there’s a way to avenge hot-headed Jonah, my precious twin, my truest other half, I’ll find that way, however faint the traces. Brick chimneys; slate roofs; thin, narrow gardens with sheds, kennels and compost heaps. Where might a vengeful soul find refuge? A new birth-body? Who can I see? A brother and sister, at play in the snow…They’re old, they’re already too interwoven with their own souls. Another boy jumps on a trampoline…he’s even older, of no use. A magpie lands on a garden shed with a crawk and a tinny thump but a human soul cannot inhabit an animal’s brain; a garden away, a back door opens, and a woman in a woolen hat steps out holding a bowl of peelings. “No snowballing your sister, Adib! Build a snowman! Something gentle!” She’s pregnant—it shows, even from thirty feet up, and now I see it all. I see the beauty of the pattern. The woman is not here by chance: her appearance is caused by the Script. Dusk hauls me to itself, but now I perceive an alternate fate. I resist. My newborn mission makes me strong, and my mission is this: one day, however distant, I will whisper into Marinus’s ear, “You killed my brother, Jonah Grayer—and I kill you now and for all time.” I transverse down with the ponderous snow, the living snow, the eternal snow; undetected, I pass through the mother’s coat, her underclothes, her skin, her uterus wall; and I’m home again, my new, warm home, my anchorage; immune to the Dusk and safe in the brain of a fetal boy, this miniature, drowsing, curled-up, dreaming, thumb-sucking astronaut.

  Acknowledgments

  Maximillian Arambulo, Nikki Barrow, Manuel Berri, Kate Brunt, Amber Burlinson, Evan Camfield, Gina Centrello, Kate Childs, Catherine Cho, Madeleine Clark, Louise Dennys, Walter Donohue, Deborah Dwyer, David Ebershoff, Richard Elman, Lottie Fyfe, Jonny Geller, Lucy Hale, Sophie Harris, Kate Icely, Kazuo Ishiguro, Susan Kamil, Trish Kerr, Jessica Killingley, Martin Kingston, Jacqui Lewis, Alice Lutyens, Sally Marvin, Katie McGowan, Caitlin McKenna, Peter Me
ndelsund, Janet Montefiore, Nicole Morano, Neal Murren, Jeff Nishinaka, Lawrence Norfolk, Alisdair Oliver, Laura Oliver, Lidewijde Paris, Doug Stewart, Simon M. Sullivan, Carole Welch. Sincere apologies to anyone I’ve overlooked.

  Thanks as ever to my family.

  BY DAVID MITCHELL

  Slade House

  The Bone Clocks

  The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

  Black Swan Green

  Cloud Atlas

  Number9Dream

  Ghostwritten

  The Reason I Jump (translator, with KA Yoshida)

  About the Author

  DAVID MITCHELL is the award-winning and bestselling author of Slade House, The Bone Clocks, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Black Swan Green, Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream, and Ghostwritten. Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Mitchell was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2007. With KA Yoshida, Mitchell co-translated from the Japanese the international bestselling memoir The Reason I Jump. He lives in Ireland with his wife and two children.

  davidmitchellbooks.com

  Facebook.com/​davidmitchellbooks

  @david_mitchell

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