David Mitchell - Slade House

Marinus raps her knuckles on the Aperture. “No sound when you hit it. It’s warm, too. 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 it opening. If you know what you’re about, it opens.”

She nods 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 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 gingko 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 ziplock freezer bag.

She holds it up: “Yep, that’s a gingko leaf,” she says, not adding that it could have come from anywhere. “Did you take any photos?”

I puff out Bombadil’s near-frozen cheeks. “Tried. Took about fifty on Thursday, 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 and believe, not one has a single photo or a video clip to show for it. There’s something about orisons.”

“ ‘Astronauts’?”

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

Marinus hands back the ziplock 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 inside the orison?” asks Marinus.

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 of yourself.”

“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 facia of a brick, bonded onto a steel-framed box containing: a webcam, a power-pack and a sensor to switch the lens to infra-red. 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. Ready?”

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 back yard, but finding herself at the foot of a long, stepped garden rising to a pencilled-on-fog Slade House. Iris Marinus-Levy, PhD, straightens up slowly, her eyes as shocked and her jaw as drooping as you’d hope. 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 like the Hallowe’en party or PC Plod’s honey-trap: this orison’s mere existence is enough to render Marinus pliable. I clear Bombadil’s throat. “Is this proof yet, Doc?””

Marinus can only point, weakly, towards the house.

“Yep. A big house. Large as life. As real as we are.”

She turns to check on the Aperture, hidden by camellias.

“Don’t worry. It’s stable. It’s open. We won’t get locked in.”

The Cautious Shrink crouches and peers back out into Slade Alley. My phone is ready to call the Blackwatermen, but our guest soon comes back, takes off her beret and puts her beret back on, just to buy a little time, I think. “I found an old postcard, in Fred Pink’s notes,” she says in a weak voice. “Of Slade House. That—” she looks at the old rectory “—that’s it. But … I checked the council archives, Ordnance Survey, Google Street View. Slade House isn’t here. And even if it were, there’s no space for it to fit between Westwood Road and Cranbury Avenue. It’s not here. It can’t be. But it’s here.”

“It’s a conundrum, I agree, unless Fred Pink was …” I whisper, “y’know, Doc … right . As in, not bug-fuck crazy after all.”

A pigeon is heard but not seen in the damson trees.

Marinus looks at me to see if I heard it too.

I can’t help but have Bombadil smile. “A pigeon.”

Marinus bites her thumb and examines the bite mark.

“Come on . It’s not a dream. You’re insulting the orison.”

Marinus plucks a camellia leaf, bites that and examines it.

She lobs a stone at the sundial. It hits and smacks, stonily.

Marinus presses her hand on the dewy grass. It leaves a print. “Holy hell.” She looks at me. “It’s really all real, isn’t it?”

“In its local, enclosed, pocket, bubble, orison way. Yes.”

The Mighty Shrink stands up again, puts her hands together as if in prayer, covers her nose and mouth for a few seconds, then shoves her hands into her flying jacket. “My patients at Dawkins, at Toronto, at Vancouver … my abductee-fantasists … were they all … in fact— right ? For, for, for experiencing this, did I, did I — did I sign off on restraint orders and dose them to the gills with anti-psychotic drugs?”