Slade House (17 page)

Freya u angry? if so dnt undrstnd

sorry, cldnt sleep cnt think worried

sick. Lottas wedding begins noon

dnt know if I shd go or call police

or wot. dont care what happnd or

if u with anyone but pls PLS call.

Avril doesn't do head-screwing jokes like this, but if it isn't a joke, it's a mental meltdown. “If u with anyone”? We're monogamous. We have been since day one. Avril knows that. She should know that. I try calling our neighbor, Tom, but it's still
NO SIGNAL DETECTED
. Maybe there's a pay phone in the bar—The Fox and Hounds is pretty much stuck in the 1980s. Otherwise I'll ask Maggs the Moody Cow if I can pay to use her landline. I read the final text:

told Lotta u have glandular fever

so we stay at home. called Nic n

Beryl but they not hear from u.

police say wait 48 hrs b4 search.

PLS FREYA CALL ME, AM

LOSING MY MIND!!!

Nothing Fred Pink has said tonight disturbs me as much as this. Avril's the sane one who soothes away my nightmares; who reattaches my handle when I fly off it. The only explanation is that, yes indeed, she has lost her mind. I hurry down the steep stairs to the bar below…

…and when I arrive, I enter the upstairs room I just left…and I stand there gasping and shuddering, as if I've just been drenched in icy water. My hand grips the doorframe. The same tables, the same chairs, the same nighttime window, the same enameled Guinness ad with a leprechaun playing a fiddle: the
up
stairs room of The Fox and Hounds. By going
down
I went
up.
My brain insists this happened. My brain insists this can't have happened. My digital recorder's still on the table we were sitting at—I forgot to pick it up in my panic—between my undrunk tomato juice, my empty cashew-nut packets and Fred Pink's brandy glass. Behind me, the stairs are going
down,
and I can see the floor of the bar below, an ugly chessboard pattern. I hear the
Have I Got News for You
theme tune from the TV.
Breathe, Freya; think
. Stress does this; your job is stressful; hearing a nutter tell you your sister had her soul converted into diesel was stressful. Avril's texts were stressful. Memory's a slippery eel at the best of times, so obviously,
ob
viously, you just, just “preimagined” going downstairs but didn't actually go. If you walk down the stairs again—I mean now—one calm step at a time, I'm sure—

My phone rings. Fumblingly, I get it out of my handbag; the screen says
CALLER NOT RECOGNIZED
. I fire off a fierce secular prayer that it's Avril and answer with a frantic “Hello?”

All I hear is an uncoiling sandstorm of static.

I speak at it: “This is Freya Timms. Who's this?”

Maybe standing by the window will strengthen the signal.

I speak more loudly and clearly: “Avril? Is that you?”

Big trees on Westwood Road smother streetlamps.

Deep inside the static, words form:
“Please! I can't breathe!”

Sally. Sally. It's Sally. I'm crouching on the floor. My sister.

It can't be; it
is;
listen!
“No! You can't! It's mine! Please! Nonono—”

My sister's alive! Hurt and scared, but alive! My words unblock and my tight throat opens enough to say, “It's Freya, Sal—where are you? Sal! Where are you?”

The static howls and beats and flaps and wails and thrashes and I hear
“Someone'llstopyouonedayyou'llsufferyou'llpay
—”

The line's dead, the screen says
NO SIGNAL DETECTED
and in my head I'm screaming
NO!
but that won't help so I'm clicking through the menus to
CALL REGISTER
but I hit
GAMES
and activate Snake and my stupid bastard phone won't let me go back until it's all loaded, but Sal's alive alive alive, and I should call the police now, but what if she calls back when I'm talking to them, or what if she's been locked in a psycho's cellar for nine years like that Kampusch woman in Austria who escaped from her captor a couple of months ago or what if—

My phone's trilling and flashing. I answer: “Sally!”

“No, dearie. This is the Moody Cow from downstairs.”

Maggs the landlady? “Look, I'm coming down, I need—”

“It's a bit late to help Sally now, I'm afraid, dearie.”

I hear her say the line one more time in my head.

I can't speak, or move, or think, or do anything at all…

…the dead flies in the strip light have woken up.

“That was only her echo, dearie. Her residue. Time's voicemail, if you like, from nine years ago. Oh, very well, then—it was your sister's ghost talking.”

Fear shunts me back through gluey air. “Who are you?”

Maggs sounds teasing and friendly: “Surely one of
Spyglass
magazine's top journalists could hazard an intelligent guess after everything you've heard this evening?”

What have I missed? “Let me speak with Mr. Pink.”

“The real Fred passed away months ago, dearie. Prostate cancer. A horrible way to go.”

A deep gulp inflates my lungs: a bona fide psychopath who impersonates the dead and keeps a fan club of sicko helpers—the other customers? A locked-up pub; blinds down; murder.
Murder
. I go to the window. It's a sash design, but it has frame locks and it won't open.

The landlady's voice crackles out of my Nokia: “Still there, are you, dearie? The connection's breaking up.”

Keep her talking: “Look, just tell me where Sally is, I'm sure—”

“Sally's not anywhere. Sally's dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.”

I drop the phone and let it lie and grab a chair to smash the window and scream blue bloody murder and wake the street and scramble down a drainpipe or jump out but when I turn back to smash the glass the window's gone. It's wall. It's gone. It's wall…

…I turn to the stairs. The stairs are gone. There's a pale door instead, with a worn gold doorknob. The landlady's on the other side. She's doing this. I don't know how, but she's doing this, and she's inside my head. Or wait wait wait—

I'm
doing it.
I'm
the one with the psychosis, not Fred Pink.

I need an ambulance, not a police car. 999. Dial it. Now.

Really, which is likelier? The laws of physics breaking down, or a stressed-out journalist breaking down? I pick up my phone, praying this lucidity lasts. A crisp, efficient-sounding lady answers straight off: “Hello, emergency services?”

“Yeah, hi, I—My name's Freya Timms, I—I—I—I—”

“Calm yourself, Freya.” The operator sounds like my mum, but efficient. “Tell me the situation and we'll see what we can do to help.”

If I speak about hallucinations in pubs, she'll fob me off with a helpline number. I need something drastic: “I've gone into labor; I'm on my own, but I'm in a wheelchair, and I need an ambulance.”

“That's fine, Freya, don't worry; what's your location?”

“A pub—The Fox and Hounds, but I'm not from around here so—”

“It's fine, Freya, I know The Fox and Hounds. My brother and I live just down the street.”

I think,
Thank God!
but then I understand.

I understand why she just sounded so amused.

I understand there's no way out of here.

“Better late than never,” says the stern voice on the phone. “Turn around and look at the candle on the table, behind you. Now.”

As I obey, the room dims. A candle sits on an ornate candlestick engraved with runes on its stem and base. The flame sways.

“Watch the flame,” orders the voice.
“Watch.”

Reality folds in, origami-like, and darkens to black. I can't feel my body but I'm kneeling, I think, and three faces have joined me. Left of the candle hovers a woman in her midthirties. She's familiar…it's Maggs the landlady, but twenty years younger, slimmer, blonder, smoother-skinned and eerily beautiful. Right of the candle is a man of the same age, also blond, and also known to me…as I study him, a young Fred Pink emerges from his face. The two are twins. Who can they be but Norah and Jonah Grayer? They are absolutely motionless, like the candle flame, and like the third face watching me over the candle. Freya Timms staring out of a mirror. I try to move a limb, a thumb, an eyelid, but my nervous system has shut down. Is this what happened to Sal? I suspect the answer is yes. Did she think of me? Did she want her big sister to come and rescue her? Or was she past that stage by then?

“Unbelievable!” Norah Grayer's face flickers into fury as the candle's flame untwists and twists. Maybe I've been here minutes, maybe days. Time needs time to be measurable. “How
dare
you?”

“Sister.” Jonah Grayer swivels his jaw as if it fits poorly.

Me, I'm still paralyzed from the eyeballs down.

“You told our entire life story to this wretched reporter!”

“Fred Pink had to share
some
of his findings, or the Oink's sister would've decided he was wasting her time and cleared off prematurely. Why the hysteria?”

“Don't ‘hysteria' me!” Spittle flies over the candle. “For even
nam
ing the Shaded Way, the Sayyid would nullify you. On the spot and with just cause!”

“Oh, I'd like to see the Sayyid
try
, peace be upon him. What are you afraid of? Our story's a banquet of marvels, and it's exactly
never
that the chance comes along to share it with a discreet listener. Because she
is
discreet. Shall we ask her how discreet she is? Let's. It'll put your mind at rest.” He turns to me. “Miss Timms: Do you intend to publish Fred Pink's backstory, as you heard it told on this memorable evening?”

I can't shake—or nod—my head by so much as a millimeter.

“We can take that as a no, sister dear. Just chill.”

“ ‘Chill'? So
acting
like a teenager is no longer enough? Our guest was damn nearly a no-show; she rejected the first banjax and—”

“No no no no no. No, Norah. You're doing it again—scaring yourself with all manner of what-ifs instead of acknowledging an entirely successful outcome.”

What's happening?
I am desperate to ask.
What outcome?

“Fred Pink told you all the answers, honey pie,” Jonah turns his mocking face my way, “but I'll spell it out for you, since your sister evidently inherited the brains as well as the puppy fat. On your way to meet me—me, in a random old man's body which I commandeered to be Mr. Pink—you decided that our rendezvous was a waste of time after all. Having planned for this eventuality, I had you followed, and at a sheltered bend in the park near the bandstand, one of my Blackwatermen sprayed an ingenious compound in your face. You lost consciousness on the spot, poor thing. Thanks to my fastidious foresight”—he glances at his sister—“a St. John ambulance was only a minute away. Our worthy volunteers had you safe, sound, strapped in a wheelchair and brought to our aperture within five short minutes. My men even hid your face under a hood, to protect you from the spots of rain. And from prying eyes. You were rendered into our orison, which my sister had swiftly redesigned into a rough copy of The Fox and Hounds—your original destination—and brought to the orison's heart, the lacuna. Given the difficulties of redacting memories from an Engifted mind, I played safe and wiped out the whole day, which is why you can't remember leaving London this afternoon. When you awoke, I treated you to the greatest scoop of your life. There.” Jonah runs his tongue along his upper teeth. “Wasn't that satisfying? I feel like a detective laying out the facts in the final scene of a whodunit. Yes, yes, sister,” Jonah turns once more to his sister, who still looks furious, “our guest turned up her nose at the tomato juice, but we banjaxed her good and proper with the cashew nuts. And yes, I went off script a smidgeon during my turn as Fred Pink and revealed a little more than I'd meant to; but she'll be dead in two minutes, and dead journalists don't file copy.”

Dead?
He did say “dead”? They're going to kill me?

“You were a fool and a braggart, brother.” Norah's voice is hard with anger, but I'm only half hearing. “
Never
discuss la Voie Ombragée with anyone. Nor Ely, Swaffham, Cantillon, nor Aït Arif. Ever. Whatever the circumstances.
Ever.
”

“I'll do my best to mend my ways, sister dear.” Jonah gives a mock-contrite sigh.

Norah's disgusted. “One day your flippancy will kill you.”

“If you say so, sister.”

“And on that day I will save myself if I can, and abandon you if I must.”

Jonah's about to reply—perhaps with a smarmy retort—but changes his mind and the subject. “I am famished, you are famished, our operandi is famished and supper is plucked, trussed, seasoned and”—he turns his whole body to face me and whispers—“bewitched, bothered and bewildered. You're not breathing, honey pie. Have you really not noticed?”

I want this to be a sadistic lie but it's true—I'm not breathing. So this is it. I don't die in crossfire, or in a car crash, or at sea, but here, inside this…nightmare that can't be real, but which, nonetheless, is. The twins begin to pluck and ply the space in front of them, slowly at first, then faster. Now they seem to draw on the air, like high-speed calligraphers. Their lips move too, but I don't know if I'm hearing my captors or if it's the buzzing echoes of my oxygen-starved brain closing down. Above the candle, a thing congeals into being. It's the size of a misshapen head, but faceless. It glows, red, bright to dark, bright to dark, and stringy roots emerge from its sides and underbelly, fixing it in the dark air. Longer roots snake their way towards me. I try to squirm my head back or shut my eyes but I can't. I'd scream if I could, a loud, hard, horror-film scream, but I can't. The roots twist into my mouth, nose and ears, and then I feel a spear-tip of pain where my Cyclops eye would be. Something is being extracted through the same spot; it comes into focus a few inches from my eyes, a translucent shimmering globe, smaller than a billard ball, but cloudy with countless stars. It's my true me. It's my soul. The Grayer twins lean in.