David Mitchell - Slade House

“Okay, okay,” I whisper, “we’ll take you with us.”

Instantly, Lance’s face dribbles off, revealing something bonier, hungrier and toothier beneath. I try to scream but my throat’s locked. Todd steps between us and traces signs onto the air — I half-see the living black lines for a split second before they vanish — and then the real being who wears the Lance Arnott disguise flickers off and on and off … and is gone.

I gasp, “What the f—”

I unplugged the modem, Todd tells me; telepathically, I notice a moment later, and instantly accept. But the twins are waking. The kitchen’s silent.

My heart’s drumming and a vein in my neck’s twitching, in time. Some of the partygoers are turning our way, sensing that we don’t belong. Act normally, says Todd’s voice, don’t show fear, and he leads me to the back door. Locked. Not showing fear’s one thing, but I feel it. It’s slithering around my body, just under my skin. Todd makes a threading motion with his fingers and the door opens. He bundles us through. I’ll lock them in behind us, Todd tells me, and turns to trace a symbol at the door. It’s dark out. Down the garden, I make out the Slade Alley wall behind the shrubbery, just. Fern Penhaligon appears, looking delighted. “Sal, you left this on the sofa — catch!” She tosses me my Tiffany compact, the gift from Freya, and I catch it—

Black fireworks zigzagged over marbled skies; the zigzags plucked harpsichords and I floated on the Dead Sea, and could’ve stayed there forever, but a wave of pain lifted me up, high as spires, then hurled me down hard onto the pebbles at the foot of Slade House. Todd’s scared face appears up close. “Sal! Can you hear me? Sal!” My skin pops like bubble wrap and I grunt a “Yes.” “The orison’s imploding — can you walk?” Before I can answer, Todd hauls me upright and my legs are heavy and bendy and I step on something snappable — my Tiffany mirror — and we stagger across the upper lawn. We reach a wistaria trellis where a creeping shockwave catches us and bowls us over a cropped lawn covered with tiny fan-shaped leaves. I want to lie there forever, but Todd drags me up again, and Slade House by night’s shimmering fat and thin, reflected or refracted. Then figures come strolling through the shimmer. Rows and clusters of figures, ambling like they know they don’t have to hurry. Their bodies are blurs but there’s Axel’s face; there’s Angelica; everyone in my Chaucer seminar; my teachers from Great Malvern; Isolde Delahunty and her Barbies; Mum, Dad, Freya. Todd pulls me. “ Run , Sal!” And we try, God we try, but it’s like running through water; rose-thorns scratch my eyes; a bucking path trips us; damson trees claw us; and a shrubbery billows up and its roots try to hook our ankles, but here’s the small black iron door. Stupidly, I look back, like you never should in stories. The figures flicker nearer. There’s Piers, who said his night with Oink’d been like shagging a dead blubber whale on a beach, only smellier.

Todd’s saying to me: “You have to open the Aperture, Sal.”

He means the black iron door. How? “What do I do?”

“Open it, like you did before! I can’t do it.”

The faceless walkers are closing in.

I’m shaking. “What did I do before?”

“You pressed it. With your palm!”

So I press the small black iron door—

— and it presses back, just as hard.

“Why isn’t it working?”

“You’re too scared, it’s blocking your voltage.”

I look behind us. Yards away. They’ve got us.

Todd begs: “Forget the fear, Sal. Please .”

“I can’t!”

“You can .”

“I can’t !”

Todd presses his hands against my cheeks and gently, firmly, kisses my lips and whispers, “Please, Sal.” I’m still scared, but something’s unlocked, and something uses my hand as a copper wire, and the door swings open and Todd’s pushing me through into …

… a starless, bodiless, painless, timeless blackness. I don’t know how long I’ve been here. Minutes, years, I just don’t know. I passed through a phase when I thought I must be dead, but my mind’s alive, even if I can’t tell if I’m in my body or not. I prayed to God for help, or just for a light to come, apologising for not believing in him, and trying hard not to think about what a sociopathic bigot He is in the Old Testament and the Book of Revelations, but no reply came. I thought about Freya and Mum and Dad, and tried and failed to remember the last things I’d said to them. I thought about Todd. If he’d survived, he’d be helping the police look for me, even though I doubted this was a place where sniffer dogs could track you. I hoped Todd wasn’t angry at me for interacting with Fake Fern, and catching the mirror. Was that a fatal mistake, like Orpheus looking back? A dirty trick, if so. My hands just acted on reflex, to save my mirror. But legends and stories are as full of dirty tricks as life is, and however much time has gone by, nothing has changed, and all I have are memories — the brightest being Todd’s hurried kiss — to keep me company and to keep me sane in the starless, bodiless, painless, timeless blackness.

Something’s happening. A dim dot of light appears. I was afraid I’d gone blind, like Todd’s mum. Seconds or years later, the dot grows into a slit of flame, the flame of a candle, a candle on a strange candlestick that sits in front of us, on the bare floorboards. The flame’s absolutely still. It’s not bright enough to reveal much of the room — an attic? — but by its light I see three faces. To my right sits Kate Childs, the Wicked Witch of the West, dressed in a gray Arab-style cloak thing, but now in her mid-thirties. Have I really been here so long? Have all those years been stolen from me? To my left hovers another vaguely familiar face … Jesus, it’s Melbourne Mike. He’s now the same age as the older Kate Childs, too, also motionless and Buddha-posed, and also wearing an ash-gray robe. Now I see them both in the same field of vision, I realize they’re twins. The third face is Miss Piggy, watching me over the candle, about six paces dead ahead. Or rather, a kneeling girl in a Miss Piggy Mask. A girl wearing a Zizzi Hikaru jacket and a Maori pendant round her chubby neck. Me, or my reflection. I try to move, speak, or even grunt, but my body no longer reacts. My brain works, my eyes work, that’s about it. Like that Frenchman in the book Freya sent me, The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly … Locked-in Syndrome, it’s called. But the French guy could blink one eyelid, that’s how he wrote the book. I can’t even do that. Left of the mirror is a pale door with a gold doorknob. A memory of that door from before drags itself into focus … The room at the top of Slade House. The “Games Room.” Have the three of us been drugged and brought here? By who? And where’s Todd?

“The Cosgrove boy’s been let go, with the other waifs and strays you dragged in with you,” Kate Childs says. The candle-flame quivers. Her American accent’s gone, replaced by crisp, upper-class English, not unlike my mother’s. “You’re here in Slade House at my and my brother’s behest. I’m Norah, and this is Jonah.”

I try to ask, What do you mean, ‘the Cosgrove boy’s been let go’? but my mouth isn’t working, not even a little bit.

“Dead. He didn’t suffer. Don’t mourn. He never loved you. Over the last few weeks, culminating in tonight’s show, he was my brother’s ventriloquist’s dummy, mouthing all those lovey-dovey lies you yearned so badly to hear.”

I try to tell this Norah she’s insane; that I know Todd loves me.

“You tell the girl,” Norah tells Melbourne Mike — or Jonah — irritably, “or she’ll taste all saccharine and powdery.”