David Mitchell - Slade House

Jonah, if that’s his name, sneers my way. “It’s all true, Sweetie. Every word.” His Australian accent’s gone: he has a plummy public school voice. “I was inside Todd Cosgrove’s head and I promise you, he found Sally Timms as erotic as a tub of lard forgotten at the back of the fridge. He detested you.”

You’re lying! Todd kissed me. Todd tried to help me escape.

“Let me translate it into Stupidest Oink Oink. Everything from the pub to the Aperture in Slade Alley was real. This attic is real, too, and these are our real bodies. Between the iron door and waking up here, however, was what we call an orison: a live, 3D, stage set, projected from this Lacuna in time,” Jonah drums on the floorboards, “by my outrageously gifted sister. A scripted vision. I was in it too — or strictly speaking my soul was there — moving Todd’s body, saying Todd’s lines, but everything else — the people you met, the rooms you passed through, the tastes you tasted — was a local reality brought into being by my sister. You and Todd’s thrilling bid for freedom was another part of the rat’s maze we had you run through, an orison inside an orison. We call it a sub-orison. We need a better name. I’d ask you to think of one, but you’re dying.”

My stubborn Me insists, You’re lying, this is all a bad acid trip.

“No,” Jonah sounds disappointed, “you’re really dying. Your respiratory system. No muscles. Think about it. Is that the bad acid trip too?”

To my horror, I realize he’s right. My lungs aren’t working. I can’t gasp, or fall over, or do anything but kneel here and slowly suffocate. The twins now appear to lose interest in me. “I am speechless with admiration, Sister,” Jonah’s saying.

“You haven’t been speechless for a hundred years,” says Norah.

“If the Academy awarded Oscars for Best Orison, you’d be a shoe-in. Truly, it was a masterpiece. Cubist, postmodern — superlatives fail me.”

“Yes yes yes, we’re geniuses — but what about the policeman? His residue was substantial enough to speak with the guest. And the Aperture — appearing of its own accord like that, and open. The girl nearly bolted.”

“Ah, but she didn’t bolt — and why? Cupid’s noose was firmly around her neck, is why. Todd Cosgrove was a trickier role to pull off than Chloe Chetwynd, you’ll concede. Plod would’ve mounted a gashed slab of raw liver, while this little piggy needed proper wooing.”

These words would normally draw blood, but right now I’m worrying about how long you can survive without oxygen. Three minutes?

Norah Grayer twists her head as if screwing it into a socket. “As per usual, you’re missing the point. With each Open Day, these aberrations grow worse.”

Jonah flexes his spidery fingers. “As per usual, Sister, you’re spouting paranoid nonsense. Once again, dinner is served without hitch or hiccup. Once again, our Operandi is charged for a full cycle. Personally, I blame your sojourn in Hollywood for these histrionics. Too many actors’ hairy buttocks in too many mirrored ceilings.”

She half-whispers, half-growls: “It really isn’t in your best interests to speak to me like that, Brother.”

“Oh? Will you take another unannounced sabbatical to the Chilean Andes to divine the meaning of metalife? Go, by all means. Do you good. Possess some fucking peasant or an alpaca. I’ll drive you to the airport after dinner. You’ll be back. Just as I will. Neither of us will last as a solo act. The Operandi’s bigger than both of us, Baby.”

“The Operandi’s sixty years old. To cut ourselves off from the Shaded Way—”

“—avoids unwanted attention from the only beings on Earth who could cause us trouble. We’re demigods in thrall to no one. Can we please keep it that way?”

“We’re in thrall to this risible pantomime every nine years,” replies Norah acidly. We’re in thrall to these”—she indicates her body with disgust—“birth-bodies to anchor our souls in the world of Day. We’re in thrall to luck ensuring that nothing goes wrong.”

I’m still not breathing and I feel my skull’s beginning to cave in. Desperately, fiercely, I think the word, Help!

“Can we please dine? Unless you plan to kill the Operandi in a fit of pique?”

My skull throbs as my body groans for air. Please! I can’t breathe—

Norah exhales like a moody adolescent and grudgingly nods. The Grayer Twins’ hands then begin to weave through the air like Todd Cosgrove’s did earlier, leaving short-lived traces on the dark air. Their lips move and a quiet murmur grows as something solidifies above the candle, cell by cell; a kind of fleshy jellyfish, pulsing with reds and purples. It would be pretty if it weren’t something from a nightmare. Tendrils grow out of it, tendrils with sub-tendrils. Some twist through the air towards me, and one pauses for a moment an inch from my eye. I see a tiny orifice at its tip, opening and closing like a carp, before it plunges up my left nostril. Luckily I barely feel it or the others as they worm into my mouth, up my right nostril and into my ears. I feel a drill-bit of pain in my forehead and see, in the mirror opposite, a shimmering something oozing through one of my mask’s eyeholes. It gathers in a small clear sphere in front of my eyes. Tiny luminous plankton hover inside it. So souls are real.

My soul’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

But now the Grayer Twins close in on both sides.

No! You can’t! It’s mine! Please! Nonono—

They purse their lips like they’re about to whistle.

Help help help Freya Freya anyone help help I need—

The twins inhale, stretching my soul into an oval.

Someone’llstopyouonedayyou’llsufferyou’llpay—

My soul splits in two. Norah inhales one half, Jonah the other.

Their faces look like Piers’ did that night in Malvern …

… and now it’s over. They’re sitting back where they were.

The tendril things have gone. The glowing lump has gone.

The Grayers are as still as sculptures. As is the candle-flame.

In the mirror, a Miss Piggy mask slaps the floor.

I nodded off for long enough to slip into a stressful dream. I dreamed I got cold feet about meeting Fred Pink here this evening. Halfway across the cold park I turned back, but a black and orange jogger sprayed my face with an asthma inhaler. Then I saw a woman in a wheelchair being pushed by Tom Cruise. Her face was hidden by a raincoat hood and Tom Cruise said “Go right ahead, take a look.” So I lifted the hood and it was me. Then we were going down an alley, and someone said “You pay an army for a thousand days to use it on one.” Last of all was a black slab like the black slabs in 2001: A Space Odyssey and as it opened I heard Sally saying, You have to wake up, so I did and here I am, alone, in the upstairs room at The Fox and Hounds. As arranged. It’s seedier than how I remember it from 1997. The tables are scarred, the chairs are rickety, the wallpaper’s scraggy and the carpet’s the color of dried vomit. My tomato juice sits in a smeary glass, as appetising as liquidized roadkill. The Fox and Hounds is on its last legs, clearly. Downstairs there are only six drinkers at the bar and one of them was a dog for the blind — and on a Saturday evening. The one gesture to jollity is an old-time enameled Guinness ad, screwed to the wall over the blocked-up fireplace, with a leprechaun playing a fiddle for a dancing toucan. I wonder if that leprechaun noticed Sally nine years ago, and if she noticed him. They sat up here, the “X-Files Six.” Several witnesses saw them, but nobody agreed at which table.