The Madness Underneath: Book 2 (THE SHADES OF LONDON) (23 page)

I thought about this when I woke up in the guest room at Jane’s and heard the
tick tick tick
of the bedside clock. Well, I thought about it after I figured out where the hell I was. It took me a few minutes to sort out which things in my head were reality and which were fantasy. The wallpaper, for example. In this room, it was a series of bronze circles that nested in each other. It was the kind of wallpaper that looked exciting and dramatic in the dark, because all you saw was the gold. In the morning, it was strange. And it was even on the ceiling. I had to stare at it for a while before I decided it went into the “real” column. I spent another few minutes considering the black lacquer bureau and the slightly gold-tinted mirror that rested on top of it. Also real.

And the heat. The house was warm. And also I was in a large bed, and yes, the blanket appeared to be some kind of fuzzy tiger print. I opened the (also black) curtains and some weak sunlight slithered in. I examined myself in the gold mirror. My eyes were bloodshot. My hair was a rat’s nest on one side. A hair tumor. That’s what I had.

“Awesome,” I said.

I returned to the bed and lifted up the bedside clock. Right before I had gone to sleep, I had transferred Boo’s number onto a piece of paper towel I’d snagged in the kitchen. There was a knock on my door, and a second later, it opened by itself. A dripping Devina stood there, dressed only in a towel. I balled the paper towel in my hand.

“I thought I heard you,” she said. “I just woke up myself. We tend to sleep late here, don’t worry. Jane’ll be up, though.”

“Is that you, Rory?” Jane called from downstairs.

“She’s awake!” Devina yelled back.

“Good morning! Do come down for something to eat!”

“I’ll see you down there,” Devina said, continuing to her room, leaving a trail of wet footprints in the carpet.

I felt the need to secure the number—to keep it with me. I was wearing borrowed pajamas with no pocket, so I tucked the number into the side of my underwear at my hip. Stupid, but it made me feel secure, like I was keeping my friends close.

There was music coming from the kitchen, nothing I recognized. Some kind of rock, not recent, but not bad. Jane was wearing something approaching normal today—pants and a white blouse. It was still a funky pants and white blouse, puffy in all kinds of unexpected places, full of more folds I couldn’t understand.

“Coffee or tea?” Jane asked pleasantly.

“Coffee, please.”

She poured me a cup from a French press that was ready and waiting.

“How do you feel this morning?”

“Kind of shocked,” I said.

“Yes, I remember the feeling. I ran away when I was your age. Took a night bus from up north. Slept on the bus. Woke up alone in London, ejected onto the streets in the pouring rain. I hope this was a slightly nicer way to face your first morning of freedom.”

She offered me the usual plate of baked goods, but I shook my head.

“I’m not really hungry,” I said. “I’m still kind of nervous.”

“Sure? I can make you what you like. An egg, some toast…no? All right then.”

“My parents,” I said. “They’re going to be really upset.”

“Undoubtedly so.” She nodded and leaned on the counter while she sipped her coffee. “But that will be temporary. And I have a recommendation. Write your parents a letter. Speaking to them on the phone will be too difficult right now. But you can express all you need to in a letter. Tell them you’re fine, that you just need some time. A letter will put them at ease.”

It sounded like good advice. I wrapped my hands around my mug and enjoyed the warmth.

“I’ve been thinking about our next steps,” she said. “It might be good for you to get away from London, just for a bit. This is where they’ll concentrate their search—not that it’s easy to find people in London. Moreover, I think you could use a change of scene. I own a property out in the country. It’s lovely this time of year. I was thinking we could drive there today. I’ll have some of the others come along, and you can get to know everyone. We always have a good time in the country.”

Running across London was one thing, but this idea of now running to the country seemed like…well, really running away.

“Darling, you’ve already done it,” she said. I guess she saw my hesitation. “In for a penny, in for a pound. The house is exquisite. It belonged to the people who owned this house. It was their family seat. This was just their London residence.”

“The people who owned this house?”

“Friends of mine,” she said. “They died in the early seventies and left it to me. They made my entire lifestyle possible, which is why I, too, like to share the wealth. Finish up your coffee and have a nice shower. We’ll leave whenever you’re ready. Devina
will show you where the towels are. You’re just about Mags’s size, so you can have some of her clothes.”

The upstairs bathroom, like so much else in the house, was black. Shiny black tiles with shiny silver fixtures, a heated towel bar I burned my hand on, and a big, freestanding tub smack in the middle of the room, with a circular curtain to wrap around it. The showerhead was in the ceiling, so the water poured down on me like rain.

When I returned to my room in my towel, Devina was sitting in the middle of my bed reading a book. She was wearing a very long dress today, one that covered her feet. The denim jacket was back.

“Oh,” I said. “Hi.”

“Hi. Clothes for you.”

A large pair of what seemed to be men’s jeans and an oversized sweater had been provided.

She made no indication that she was about to leave. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do—change here, or take my clothes back the bathroom. I decided to do that thing you do in gym (or, at least, the thing
I
do in gym) where you pull on your underwear under the towel. Then you maneuver into the bra with the towel on. Then you drop the towel and get into the rest of your clothes as quickly as possible.

“You going to be staying with us a while, then?” Devina asked.

“I don’t really know what I’m doing,” I said, fumbling on the bra.

“I didn’t either when I showed up.”

“How long ago was that?” The bra was being difficult and refusing to hook.

She stretched out and rolled onto her stomach.

“Oh…two years now? See, my mum had this boyfriend? Total bastard. Always creepy. Obviously creepy. A little too interested in me? And one night she went out and he started to get a little friendly. So I slapped him. And he slapped me back. I don’t think he meant to do it so hard, but he was pissed. I fell down a flight of stairs. Almost broke my neck. I managed to get myself up and out of the house and walk to A and E. And my mum actually blamed
me,
even after they banged him up for it.”

“Sorry,” I said. Though sorry didn’t seem to cover it.

“Don’t be. I met Jane because of what happened to me. I’m glad it happened. It made me stronger, better in the end. And now I have a
real
family.”

“You and Jane?”

“All of us,” she said.

“Who is all of us?”

“Oh, you’ll meet everyone. Jane’s helped a lot of people. You’ll see. She fixes people. She fixed me. I would have been a disaster if not for Jane. You’ll see.”

Devina smiled, and I noticed that she had extremely small teeth. Niblet teeth, like a child. I clutched the towel around my chest. Funny…I didn’t really care that much if Devina saw me in my underwear, but the scar, that was private.

“So,” I said, “I’ll just finish getting ready and…”

I think she got the hint. She slid off the bed.

“See you downstairs,” she said, wandering out of the room. I put on the jeans and sweater and sat on the end of the bed, kicking out my bare feet, trying to make sense of my life. If I was going to the country, it seemed wise to let someone know. I retrieved the phone number, which I had moved to the pocket of the jeans.

Boo was enough of a wild child to understand, and I felt certain that if I asked her to, she would keep the news to herself, or manage it in some way.

But I had no phone. The only one I had seen was in the kitchen. There wasn’t one in this bedroom. I would need to find one. I poked my head out of my room and had a look around. All the doors on the second floor were closed but mine and the bathroom. It didn’t seem right exactly to start poking into the bedrooms. The stairs went up to another floor. I decided to try that instead.

There were only three doors on the third floor, and the middle one was slightly open. I pushed it gently and stuck my head inside. This room was very large and, unlike the rest of the house, wasn’t quite as starkly black or white or silver. This one was pretty much what I imagined an Arabian spice market to be like, or maybe the tent of a king in the deserts of Morocco. Or something. Really, the room had no precedent.

The floor was covered in multiple Persian carpets, overlapping each other to form a soft but uneven patchwork surface. There were several low octagonal tables inlaid with mother of pearl and ebony, others made of multicolored tiles. But there were also Victorian elements—a yellow chaise lounge, a rose conversation chair. There were mirrors as well, two massive ones, leaning against the wall. The walls were full of built-in shelving, mostly filled with books. One wall contained records. There was a large wooden cabinet that appeared to have built-in speakers, but not speakers like I had ever seen before. It had to be an antique. The table was covered in pots and bowls and ashtrays, dancing golden Shivas, and three alabaster chalices.

Despite the sensory overload, I managed to find a telephone.
A dial telephone, no less, and a receiver with a spiral cord. And it was heavy, some kind of special, fancy plastic that probably could have deflected a bullet. Dialing a phone is ridiculous. You have to spin the wheel for every number and wait until it rotates back into position before you can dial the next one. The receiver, along with being weighty, was also massive, easily as long as my head. The past, I decided, was a complicated place.

Boo answered on the first ring with a cautious and confused, “Hello?”

“It’s me,” I said.

“What number is this? It says blocked.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I kind of…left?”

She paused for a moment. Then it sounded like she was moving away and closing a door.

“Left?” she said.

“Ran away. Took off. You know.”

“You didn’t,” Boo said. “Seriously?”

“Very seriously. They were going to kick me out, and I couldn’t go to Bristol. I couldn’t go home. So I left.”

“My God, you don’t do things by half, do you? We’ve been trying to call you all morning. Something’s happened near your school.”

“What? Is everyone okay? What happened?”

“It wasn’t at your school,” she said. “Just nearby. A woman died…it’s a strange one.”

“Is it related to the other thing?” I asked.

“We don’t know yet. That’s what we’re trying to work out. Where are you? We’ll come get you.”

“I’ll come to you,” I said. “Just tell Stephen I was out and
forgot my phone, okay? Don’t tell him what I just told you. I’ll tell him myself.”

“Have you been taking Stephen lessons?”

“Seriously. Let me. I don’t think he’s going to take the news well.”

“You’re probably right,” she said. “Fine. I’ll cover, but get over here, yeah?”

As I replaced the extremely big receiver on its base, I heard someone in the doorway behind me.

“Oh, here you are,” Jane said. “Phoning someone?”

“Sorry,” I replied. It wasn’t like I could deny it. “I know you said, but…it was just a friend.”

“No need to apologize. I understand the impulse.”

Her words said one thing, but her demeanor suggested another. Her face tightened a bit, like she was clenching her jaw a little. I understood why she would be mad. She was putting herself at risk to help me, and here I was breaking the rules and sneaking around her house. And I was about to break another of those rules.

“Before I go,” I said, “there’s just one thing I have to do. I have to meet someone.”

“I don’t want to tell you what to do,” Jane said, “but in my experience, it’s usually best not to do that, not at this juncture. Friends tend to report things back to authorities.”

“Not these friends,” I said. “I promise. They won’t say a word. And I’ll be careful. I just need a few hours.”

“If you feel you have to,” Jane said, her face relaxing into a reassuring smile, “then do what’s right for you. I’m glad you came up here, actually. This is my favorite room. I wanted you to see it. This, as you can see, is the library. Lots of classic works
of spiritualism, many not so classic works. And I keep the vinyl records up here, along with the turntable. As I told you, my friends and I were very involved with the rock-and-roll scene. We had just about every album that came out between the mid-sixties and the mid-seventies. It’s quite a collection. I suppose they’d be worth something, as they’re all original, but I’d never sell them. And they’re not pristine. We played our albums until they wore out. We weren’t gentle with them.”

She smiled lightly at the memory, then went over to the shelves and fished something out of a bowl. She held up a silver Zippo lighter.

“Mick Jagger’s cigarette lighter. He left it here one night. We have all sorts of things like that in here. I’ll show them all to you when we get back—that’s if you’re interested. You probably wouldn’t even know who most of the people are. I know this house must look odd to you. The early seventies were quite an unusual time.”

“I like unusual,” I said.

“That’s an
excellent
quality, and one that will certainly help, considering who we are. Now, if you’re going to go out, I think Mags has a coat that would fit you. And let’s find a hat and sunglasses as well. Devina can drive you wherever you need to go.”

In the end, I was outfitted in a red coat, something they called a “bobble hat,” and a big pair of shades. When I looked at myself in the mirror by the door, I was greeted by a bright red buglike object in a big wool hat with a puff on the top. It was definitely not my usual look.

There were two cars in front of Jane’s house—a buttery yellow Jaguar, clearly a classic from some other era, and a modern, more practical black car. We took the newer one.