Slade House (18 page)

They purse their lips, and inhale, sharply.

My soul distends like a thick-walled bubble being pulled apart.

It's mine, it's me, but it's hopeless, it's hopeless, it's hope—

Suddenly a figure fills the narrow gap between the Grayers, blocking my view. She's a she, in a designer jacket. Her plump midriff blocks what little light shines from the candle and the heart-brain-thing above it. Norah Grayer falls back to my right, shock twisting her face. Jonah can't move away, even if he wanted to: one of the intruder's small hands—she has peacock-blue fingernails—grips his neck, while the other hand, swift as a bird's wing, plunges a thick, six-inch needle into one side of his windpipe and clean out of the other, like a cocktail stick piercing a very large olive. Blood seeps from both punctures, treacle-black on stone-gray in this dimness. Jonah's eyes bulge in disbelief, his head and jaw slump and his two puncture wounds froth as he tries to make a noise. His attacker releases him, but the weapon—a hairpin, if I'm not wrong—stays jammed in place. As his head tilts, I have a view of a silver fox's head with gemstone eyes at the top of the hairpin. Shouted fragments reach me from Norah, a few feet and light-years away—
Get out! Damn ghost! GET OUT!
The intruder is fading away now—I see the candle flame through her body. My stretched soul has reformed itself into a single globe and is now fading away too. My body is dead but my soul is saved. My rescuer's pendant swings through my soul, lit deep-sea green by the last of the starry atoms. Eternity, jade, it's Maori, I chose it, I wrapped it, I sent it once to someone I love.

Bombadil's iPhone vibrates over his heart. With his cold fingers, I fish out the device from the large skiing jacket I had him buy near our anonymous hotel this morning when I saw the ominous state of the sky. Sleet peppers the screen. The message is from the Blackwaterman:

yr guest parked 50m from Westwood Road

entrance to alley, navy blue VW Tiguan.

I reply concisely:

good news

Our operatives are masters of their martial craft and need no further orders. I half feared the wintry weather might delay our guest, or even deter her from making the car journey altogether. Turning a no-show into a show would have complicated the day in tense, unpleasant ways, but instead our guest is a quarter of an hour early and we can afford to relax a little. On a whim, I locate Philip Glass's music for
The Truman Show
on Bombadil's iPhone, and listen to it by way of preprandial entertainment. Jonah and I saw the film at a backstreet cinema in St. Tropez at the turn of the century. We were moved by the protagonist's horror at discovering the breadth and depth of the gulf between his own life and the quotidian world. Now I think of it, the Côte d'Azur could be the right sanctuary for Jonah to spend a few weeks after nine static years in his wounded body. The Riviera has no lack of privileged hosts whose hair Jonah could let down, and I would enjoy the sunshine on a host's skin after five days of this absurd English weather. A moon-gray cat appears at Bombadil's feet, meowing for food. “You're not as hungry as we are,” I assure it. The wind slams down Slade Alley, flurrying sleet and leaves in its roiling coil. I zip up Bombadil's hood to protect his earphones, restricting my view to a fur-lined oval, and think of sandstorms at the Sayyid's house in the Atlas Mountains. How the twentieth century hurtled away. The cat has given me up as a lost cause. Bombadil's toes are numb in his flimsy trainers, but he'll be dead before his chilblains can bloom. My conscience rests easy.

And here comes our guest. A short, slim figure, bulked out by cold-weather clothing, walks down Slade Alley, backlit by sleet-white, hurrying light. Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby is a psychiatrist from Toronto on a placement at Dawkins Hospital, outside Slough. Two twists of fate set her on the path that has delivered her to our aperture. The first is that in 2008 she obtained the notebooks of Fred Pink, the former Dawkins patient who died in 2005. She wrote a series of academic papers on abduction psychoses, drawing from the notebooks, in which she describes Pink's obsession with Jonah and Norah Grayer, a pair of long-dead “soul vampires.” The second twist of fate is that Iris Marinus-Fenby is, against quite delicious odds, an Engifted herself, and is therefore fair game. The Mighty Shrink proved absurdly easy to lure here. She stops a few paces away; a black professional in her late thirties—a smooth, sub-Saharan, black-leather-jacket black that sharpens the whites of her eyes and teeth. Marinus-Fenby dresses dowdily for work, and even off duty she hides her figure under mannish clothes: a sheepskin flying jacket, rumpled trousers, hiking boots, a moss-green beret, a keffiyeh round her neck and little or no makeup. She wears her wiry hair short. A khaki canvas bag is tucked under her shoulder. Calmly, she sizes up Bombadil, a skinny Caucasian in his early twenties, with bad skin, an ill-advised lip stud, a sharkish chin, a cheesy smell and sore eyes. My host is swallowed up by his XXL ski jacket. Iris Marinus-Fenby, PhD, sees her next research subject, her Fred Pink the Second, and this one she gets to meet in the flesh. I unplug Bombadil from his headphones and have him give our guest a
Got a problem?
face.

She recites the first line of the word-key: “Yes, I'm looking for a pub called The Green Man.” Her voice is deep, clear and has an accent that used to be labeled “mid-Atlantic.”

Bombadil speaks with a nervous mutter that I do not modify: “No. The Green Man's gone the way of The Fox and Hounds.”

Iris Marinus-Fenby offers her gloved hand. “Bombadil.”

I feel the prickle of psychovoltage, even through her cashmere gloves. “Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby.”

“Nine syllables wears you out. ‘Marinus' is fine.”

I notice the blue checks of her keffiyeh are in fact tiny Stars of David. What a smug piece of symbolism. Our handshake ends. “Isn't that, like, calling you by your surname?”

The Mighty Shrink duly notes my nomenclatural sensitivities: “Marinus is more of an inner name than a family name.”

I have Bombadil shrug. “Welcome back to Slade Alley, Marinus.”

“Thanks for reaching out to me.” She knows better than to ask for my real name. “Your emails were fascinating.”

“Thought it'd broaden your mind, seeing a real live orison, like.”

“I'm very curious about what we'll see, Bombadil. Say, this wind's sharp as a razor. Would you prefer to talk where it's warmer? My car's parked just on the street, or there's a Starbucks at the green. Did you have lunch already? I'm buying.”

“I never talk where I haven't swept for wires,” I tell her.

Marinus makes a mental note of this. “I understand.”

I nod along the alley. “Let's jump in at the deep end, like.”

“Go straight inside the ‘orison,' you mean?”

“Yup. Still there. I went in yesterday, too.”

“So that's once on Thursday as well as yesterday? Two visits in total?”

“One and one is two.” I nod, amused by her professional demeanor. “They don't happen along very often.”

“And the way in, into the ‘aperture,' it's still”—she looks down the claustrophobic middle section of Slade Alley—“down here?”

“Sure is, Doc. Exactly where
you
said Fred Pink wrote that Gordon Edmonds said he found it, all those years ago.”

Marinus marvels that this gawky geeky English boy reads the
American Journal of Psychiatry
. “Lead the way.”

Twenty paces later we stop at the aperture, and for the first time our guest is flummoxed. “It's small, it's black, it's iron.” I enjoy spelling out the obvious. “Exactly as Fred Pink described it.”

Marinus touches it. “There wasn't a door here three years ago.”

“There wasn't a door here three
days
ago. But when I did my post-dawn recce on Thursday morning, voilà.”

Marinus looks up and down the alley, then crouches down to inspect the sides. “Looks as if it's been here for years. This is odd. Check out the lichen, this scuffed concrete…”

“Apertures are chameleons, Doc. They blend in.”

She looks at me, her faith in a logical explanation shaken but as yet intact. “What's on the other side?”

“That's the cool bit. Look
over
the wall with a twelve-foot ladder, you see this…” I have Bombadil produce a photo from an inner pocket. “The back garden of a semidetached house, built in 1952, home to Jamal and Sue al-Awi and their two point four children—literally, she's in her second trimester, according to her hospital records. But if you go
through
the aperture”—I rap the soundless surface with my knuckles—“you'll find the terraced garden of Slade House, as it appeared in the 1930s, on a foggy, mild day.”

Marinus gives me an assessing look.

“The fog was a total surprise,” I tell her.

Marinus is wishing she was recording all this. “You mean the same Slade House that got razed in the Blitz, in 1940?”

“December twentieth, 1940. Just in time for Christmas. Yes.”

“So are you saying this door's a kind of…time portal?”

“No, no, no, that's a classic beginner's mistake. An aperture's a portal into an orison. A reality bubble. God, I wish you could see your face right now, Doc.”

The Mighty Shrink looks shifty
and
puzzled. “I have faith that
you
believe, Bombadil, but science requires proof. As you know.”

“And proof requires reliable witnesses,” I have Bombadil answer, “ideally with PhDs.” The wind bounces a plastic bottle off the floor and walls of the alley. We stand aside to let it pass. Tall weeds sway.

Marinus raps her knuckles on the aperture. “No sound when you hit it. The metal's warm, too, for such a cold day. How do you open it? There's no keyhole.”

I have Bombadil do a zipped-up smile. “Mind power.”

Marinus waits for me to explain, shivering despite her cold-weather clothes.

“Visualize the keyhole,” I elaborate, “visualize the key, visualize inserting the key, turning it, and the door opening. If you know what you're about, that's how you pass through an aperture.”

Marinus nods gravely to assure me she doesn't disbelieve me. This woman's amusing. “And when you went inside, what did you do there?”

“On Thursday, I didn't dare leave the shrubbery I found on the other side. I learned to be a bit cautious after my last orison in New Mexico. So I just sat there for ten minutes, watching, then came back out again. Yesterday, I was braver. Walked up as far as a big ginkgo tree—not that I knew what it was, but I brought a leaf back and looked it up. I've got an app.”

Marinus, of course, asks, “Do you still have this leaf?”

I have Bombadil hand her a Ziploc freezer bag.

She holds it up: “Yes, that's a ginkgo leaf.” She doesn't add that the leaf could have come from anywhere. “Did you take any photos on the inside?”

I puff out Bombadil's near-frozen cheeks. “Tried. Took about fifty on Thursday on my phone, but on the way back they all got wiped. Yesterday I took in my old Nikon and shot off a reel but when I developed it last night—blank. No surprise, to be honest: of the five astronauts I've met who are the real deal, not one has ever returned from an expedition with a single photo or video clip intact. There's something about orisons. They refuse to be recorded, like.”

“ ‘Astronauts'?”

“It's what we call ourselves. It's online misdirection. ‘Orison tourist' or something like that'd attract the wrong sort of attention.”

Marinus hands back the freezer bag. “So astronauts can bring samples of flora out but not images?”

I have Bombadil shrug. “I don't make the laws, Doc.”

Behind a wall, someone's bouncing on a squeaky trampoline.

“Did you see any signs of life?” asks Marinus. “Inside the orison, I mean.”

The Mighty Shrink still thinks she's studying a psychiatric phenomenon, not an ontological one. I can be patient: she'll learn. “Blackbirds. Plus a squirrel—cute and red, not gray and ratty—and fish in a pond. But no people. The curtains in Slade House stayed drawn and the door stayed shut, and nobody's used the aperture since four o'clock on Thursday.”

“You sound very sure.”

“I am.” I touch a brick opposite the aperture. “See this?”

The Mighty Shrink straightens up and looks. “It's a brick.”

The trampoliner's giggling his head off. He's a young boy.

“No. It's the fascia of a brick, bonded onto a steel-framed box containing a webcam, a power pack and a sensor to switch the lens to infrared. What the camera sees through
this
two-mil hole”—I point—“feeds straight to my phone.” I show Marinus my iPhone. Its screen shows me showing Marinus my iPhone.

She's duly impressed. “A neat bit of kit. You built it yourself?”

“Yeah, but full credit to the Israelis—I hacked the specs from Mossad.” I give my spy brick—installed by the Blackwatermen earlier today—a friendly pat and turn back to the aperture. “So. All set for the great adventure?”

Marinus hesitates, wondering how I'll react when my own private fantasy island fails to materialize. Scientific curiosity trumps caution. “I'll follow in your footsteps, Bombadil.”

I kneel before the aperture and place a palm on it. Its warmth is pleasant on Bombadil's icy hand, and Jonah becomes telegrammable:
Brother, our guest has arrived—I presume everything's ready?

Look who it isn't.
His signal is weak.
I thought you'd buggered off to a “retreat” in Kirishima again…

Give me strength.
No, Jonah—it's Open Day, and our metalives depend on my being
here,
and
your
having the orison and sub-orison ready.

Jonah sniffs telegrammatically.
Well, it's very kind of you to bother visiting your incarcerated brother.

I visited you
yes
terday,
I remind him.
My trip to Kirishima was six
years
ago—and I was only gone for thirteen months.

A grumpy pause unwinds:
Thirteen months is thirteen eternities if you're stuck in a lacuna. I would never have deserted you, were the shoe on the other foot.

I shoot back:
Like the time you didn't desert me in Antarctica for two whole years? For a “joke”? Or the time you didn't forget me on the Society Islands while you went “yachting” with your Scientologist friends?

Another grumpy Jonah pause.
Your birth-body didn't have a hairpin stuck through its throat.

After nearly twelve decades together, I know better than to feed my brother's self-pity:
Nor would yours now if you'd heeded my warnings about the operandi's aberrations.
Our guest is waiting and Bombadil's body is shivering.
I'm opening the aperture on the count of three, so unless you fancy committing suicide
and
fratricide in a single fit of pique, project the garden
now
. One…two…

I slip Bombadil's body through first. All's well. The Mighty Shrink follows, expecting a poky backyard but finding herself at the foot of a long, stepped garden rising to a penciled-on-fog Slade House. Iris Marinus-Fenby, PhD, straightens up slowly, her eyes as astonished as her jaw is drooping. I have Bombadil do a taut giggle. Our operandi is utterly depleted, so Jonah has only a glimmer of voltage to project today's orison, but it won't need to bedazzle or seduce the senses like the Halloween party or the policeman's honey trap; this orison's mere existence is enough to render Marinus pliable. I clear Bombadil's throat. “Is this proof yet, Doc?”