David Mitchell - Slade House

I bring the tomato juice to my lips, but it still looks like a specimen jar in a blood bank. “And could Doctor Cantillon help?”

Fred Pink rubs his wiry bristles. “Well, as it turned out, he could — though he never claimed he was a medium. After examining Lady Albertina, Cantillon said that her grief’d ‘severed her ethereal cord to her spirit guide.’ He performed a ritual he’d learned off of a shaman in the Mountains of Rif and prescribed an ‘elixir.’ In her book, Lady Albertina wrote that the elixir gave her a vision of ‘An angel rolling away a stone from her entombment’ and she saw her three sons happy on a higher plane. In his book, Cantillon mentions that his elixir contained a new wonder-drug called cocaine, so make of that what you will. I’d add to the mix the benefits of the talking cure, as well. The chance for an Edwardian lady to spill her guts in private and vent her spleen at God, King and country must’ve been therapeutic, to say the least. Like grief counselling, nowadays. Certainly at this stage in proceedings, Doctor Cantillon seems to’ve been a very welcome guest indeed.”

My phone buzzes in my bag. Avril texting me back, I expect, but I ignore it. “Where are the Grayer Twins in all this?”

“Right: Jonah was an apprentice clerk in the Swaffham Manor estate office. Short-sightedness and a dicky ticker’d saved him from the trenches, though as these conditions never troubled him in later life, I can’t help but wonder how real they were. Norah was a weekly boarder at a school for ladies in Cambridge, to up her marriage prospects. Léon Cantillon’d heard about their ‘telegrams’ from the Chetwynd-Pitts of course, so the first chance he had, he asked for a demo. It took place on the doctor’s first weekend at Swaffham. He was impressed. He was very impressed. ‘An annunciation of the New Age of Man,’ he later called it. A fortnight later, Cantillon put a proposal to his hosts. If they ‘lent’ him Norah and Jonah, and if the twins was willing, he’d ‘provide a psychic education consummate with their gifts.’ The doctor said he knew an occultic teacher who’d train the twins in spirit channelling. Once Norah and Jonah’d mastered that skill, he said, Lady Albertina’d be able to freely speak with her sons from their higher plane, without fear of being gulled by swindlers.”

Now I sniff a swindler. “How for real was Doctor Cantillon?”

The old man rubs a watery blue, red-rimmed eye and growls thoughtfully. “Well, the Chetwynd-Pitts believed him, which is what matters in this backstory. They agreed to his proposal to educate Norah and Jonah, though here’s where the doctor’s version of events and Lady Albertina’s begin to part ways. She wrote that Léon Cantillon’d promised the twins’d be away no more than a few months. Cantillon’s claim is that the Chetwynd-Pitts gave him guardianship of the Grayers with no small print about expiry dates, time or distance. Who’s telling the truth? That I don’t know. Truth has this habit of changing after the fact, too, don’t you find? What we do know is that Léon Cantillon took the twins first to Dover, crossed over to Calais, passed through wartime Paris, carried on south to Marseille, then sailed by steamship to Algiers. Lady Albertina calls this journey ‘an abduction, no more, no less,’ but by the time she and her husband found out about it, the horse’d bolted. Repatriation of minors is tricky enough now. Back then, when sixteen-year-olds were adults in most senses, and with the Great War in top gear, so to speak, and inside French colonial jurisprudence — forget it. The Grayer Twins were gone.”

I’m not clear: “Were they taken against their will?”

Fred Pink’s face says Hardly likely. “Which would you choose? Life as an orphaned pleb in the Tory Fens in wartime England, or life as a student of the occult under the Algerian stars?”

“It depends on whether I believed in the occult.”

“They believed.” Fred Pink sips his bitter. “Sally did, too.”

And if she hadn’t, I think, she wouldn’t have been playing Ghostbusters in unfamiliar backstreets at night; and whatever happened to her wouldn’t have happened . Either I bite my tongue or kill the interview. “The Grayers stayed in Algeria, then.”

“They did, yes. Norah and Jonah already knew telepathy. What other powers might they acquire, in the right hands? Léon Cantillon was a sly operator, there’s no doubt, but a sly operator can still be the right man for the job.” He looks at Léon Cantillon’s photo again. “He took the twins to the Albino Sayyid of Aït Arif. I mentioned him before. The Sayyid followed an occult branch called la Voie Ombragée, or the Shaded Way, and lived in a ‘dwelling of many rooms’ by a fast-flowing stream at a ‘high neck of a secret valley’ a day’s ride from Algiers; and that’s about all the info Cantillon gives us. The Sayyid accepted the odd foreign twins — who couldn’t speak a word of Arabic at this point, remember — as disciples in his house, so he must’ve seen something in them. Cantillon returned to his duties at the Foreign Legion hospital in Algiers, though he made the journey to the Sayyid’s once a fortnight to check up on his young charges’ progress.”

Outside the pub, a woman hollers, “You’re s’posed to indicate, moron!” and a car roars off. “Mr. Pink,” I say. “If I can be frank, this story feels a long way away from my sister’s disappearance.”

Fred Pink nods, and frowns at the clock on the wall: 8:14. “Give me ‘til nine o’clock. If I haven’t connected all of this with your Sally and my Alan by then, I’ll call you a taxi. On my honor.”

While I don’t have Fred Pink marked down as a liar, I do have him marked as a dreamer-upper of alternative histories. On the other hand, after all these years my own enquiries into Sally’s disappearance have led exactly nowhere. Maybe Fred Pink’s tracking me down is a hint that I need to look for leads in less obvious places. Starting now. ‘Okay: nine o’clock. Was channelling dead spirits on the Sayyid’s syllabus, as Cantillon had promised Lady Albertina?”

“You’ve got a knack of asking the right question, Miss Timms. I’m impressed.” Fred Pink gets out a box of spearmint Tic Tacs, shakes out three, offers me one — I refuse — and puts all three in his mouth. “No. Léon Cantillon had lied to the Chetwynd-Pitts about séances. I think he knew perfectly well that séances are almost always fraud. When you die, your soul crosses the Dusk between life and the Blank Sea. The journey takes forty-nine days, but there’s no wifi there, so to speak, so no messages can be sent. Either way. Mediums might convince themselves they’re hearing voices from the dead, but they’re not. It’s impossible.”

Well, that’s whacko. “That’s very exact. Forty-nine days?”

Fred Pink shrugs. “The speed of sound’s very exact. So’s pi. So are chemical formulas.” He crunches his Tic Tacs. “Ever been to the Atlas Mountains in North Africa, Miss Timms?” I shake my head. “I have, believe it or not, just a few years back. Thanks to three thousand quid I won on a scratch-card. Goes a bloomin’ long way in Algeria, does three thousand pounds, if you watch out for the pickpockets and rip-off merchants. Those buckled-up mountains, the dry sky, the hot wind, the … oh, the whole massive … Otherness of it, so to speak. I’ll never forget it. Rewires your head, if you stay long enough. Little wonder all the hippies and that lot made a beeline for places like Marrakesh in the sixties. Places change you, Miss Timms, and deserts change us pale northerners so much, our own mothers wouldn’t recognize us. Day by day, the twins’ Englishness ebbed away. They picked up Arabic from the Sayyid’s other disciples; they ate flatbread, hummus and figs; Jonah let his beard grow; Norah wore a veil, like a good Muslim girl; and sandals and dishdashas made more sense than shoes and cufflinks and petticoats and what-have-you. The calendar lost its meaning for them, Cantillon writes. One, two, three years passed. They learned occult arts and obscure sciences that there aren’t even words for in English, things that not one mind in a hundred thousand learns, or could learn, even if the chance came along. The Grayers’ only link with the outside world was Doctor Cantillon, but when he brought them up to speed with that world — the slaughter in Flanders, in Gallipoli, in Mesopotamia; the politics in Westminster, in Berlin; the sinking o’ the Lusitania —to Norah and Jonah it all sounded like stuff going on in places they’d read about years ago. Not real. For the twins, their true home was their valley. Their fatherland and motherland was the Shaded Way.” Fred Pink scratches his itchy neck — he suffers from mild psoriasis — and stares through my head, all the way to a moonlit dwelling in the Atlas Mountains.