David Mitchell - Slade House

The Guilty Shrink takes the bait. “Then, yes. If there’s even a chance of finding him alive, let’s go.” Marinus strides over the last lawn towards Slade House, but when she looks back at me she looks past me and her eyes go wide: “Bombadil!”

I turn around and see the end of the garden is erasing itself.

“What is it?” asks Marinus. “How do we get out?”

A curved wall of nothing is uncreating the garden as the orison collapses like a spent star. I thought that by finding a guest as voltaically rich as Marinus and bringing her here, my brother, our Lacuna and the Operandi were as good as saved. We aren’t out of the woods yet, however. “Only fog, Doc. Don’t worry.”

“Fog? But surely … I mean look at how quickly it’s—”

“Orison fog looks like that. Saw it in Iona, too.” I don’t want Marinus to do a headless chicken act at this stage. I stride past her. “Trust me, Doc. Come on. Hey — would I be this calm if there was anything to worry about?”

The steps up to Slade House are mossy and stained, the once-proud door is peeling and rotten and the knocker is chewed by rust and time. I open the door and hustle Marinus inside. Behind us the gingko tree is being devoured by the dome of the shrinking orison. I close the door behind us and telegram Jonah, We’re in . We hear a noise like dragged furniture and my ears pop as the orison moulds itself to the outside of the house. When I look out again through the mullioned window in the door, non-existence stares back. Blankness is a horror. “What was that noise?” whispers Marinus.

“Thunder. The weather in here’s been neglected for so long, it’s all scrambled up. Fog, storms. Blazing sunshine’ll be next up.”

“Oh,” says the Mighty Shrink, uncertainly. Autumn leaves are strewn over the chessboard tiles in the hallway. Our old Czech housekeeper would be appalled by this version of the Slade House she kept so spick and span in Jonah’s and my corporeal days. The coving is claggy with spiderwebs, the doors are hanging off their hinges, and the panelling up the stairs is wormy and flaking. “What now?” asks the Mighty Shrink. “Should we search the ground floor, or—”

This time the thunder wallops the walls. They shudder.

Marinus touches her ears. “God, did you feel that?”

Brother, I telegram, we’re inside — what’s wrong?

A dying Operandi is what’s wrong! Jonah sounds frantic. The house is buckling. Get the guest to the Lacuna.

“It’s the atmospherics,” I reassure Marinus. “Quite normal.”

Call downstairs, I instruct Jonah.

Pregnant pause, then: What are you talking about?

Pretend you’re Fred Pink, trapped, and call downstairs .

Another pause. Jonah asks, What did he sound like?

You played him last Open Day! English, gruff .

“Are you sure it’s normal, Bombadil?” Marinus looks worried.

“There was a barometer in Milk and Honey,” I ad lib, “that—”

We hear something. Marinus holds up a finger and looks up the stairs, whispering, “I heard someone. Did you?” I look vague and we listen. Nothing. Mile-thick nothing. Marinus begins to lower her finger, and then we hear Fred Pink’s elderly, shaky voice: “Hello? Is anyone there? Hello?”

The Fearless Shrink calls out: “Mr. Pink? Is that you?”

“Yes — yes! I–I—I–I’ve had a little fall. Upstairs. Please …”

“We’ll be right with you!” Without a glance, Marinus is gone, climbing two steps at a time. For the first time since the Aperture, I feel mostly in control. I have Bombadil follow in Marinus’s wake, relieved by how the multilingual psychiatrist with a PhD — first class — from Columbus State University is so easily codded by my brother crying wolf. The carpet is threadbare, the dust has formed a light crust and when we reach the little landing, the grandfather clock is silent and its face is too scabby to read. Similarly, the portraits of our early guests are leprous with mold, and the flustered psychiatrist, befuddled by the strangest hour of her life, flies past them without a first glance, let alone a second. Marinus sees the pale door at the top of the stairs and launches herself up again, stepping over the desiccated body of an owl. As I pass Sally Timms’s portrait, I slap her, a gesture as petty as it is pointless. She caused this trouble, or her “ghost” did. She spiked my brother’s throat at the vital second, stopped us feeding the Operandi with her sister’s soul, and reduced us to psychovoltaic pauperdom. But it ends today! I collide with Marinus’s back, just a few steps short of the pale door, next to Freya Timms’s grime-encrusted portrait. I hiss, “Why’ve you stopped, Doc?”

She’s listening. “How do we know these are the right stairs?”

I begin saying, “Of course they are”; we hear timber splinter in the hallway below; and we hear Jonah-as-Fred Pink, calling through the door above us, “I’m in here, hello? Hello? I–I—need a little help, is anyone there? Please?” My brother’s acting is as hammy as ever and the volume’s too loud, but Marinus just seizes the bevelled doorknob and vanishes. On any other Open Day I would assume that the job is done and the guest is safely rendered to our Lacuna in the attic, but today I assume nothing. First, I telegram, Do you have her, Jonah?

My answer is a bellow of splitting masonry, glass and wood as the orison’s perimeter annihilates the shell of Slade House. Destruction roars up the lower stairs. Bombadil’s feet are rooted to the step. Through his eyes I watch the seething front of nothing reach the little landing, erase it and its dead grandfather clock, then surge up towards my skinny tattooed host. Death. Something orders me, Jump, it’s time; but no, the Operandi needs both Grayer Twins, and if I obeyed the impulse, I’d kill Jonah. So I egress with a few seconds’ grace, and watch Bombadil’s runty body tumble downstairs, thumpetty-thumpetty-thump. He yells, brokenly, his sentience returned too late to find his balance, much less assemble his wits; and then he’s gone, ski jacket, chilblains, iPhone, internet porn habit, childhood memories, body and all; gone in a non-flash. I-as-my soul rotate and transverse through the pale door.

I emerge in an exact copy of the private hospital room at the Royal Berkshire Hospital where I spent a recent week as a patient taking meticulous notes. True, Marinus is a psychiatrist and not an A&E mopper-upper; true, she knows North American hospitals better than British ones; but a single anomaly could end in our guest smelling an illusory rat and rejecting the Banjax, and without this anaesthetic the extraction of her soul would be messy at best. Consequently, Jonah and I evoked the room with a fanatical eye for realism: a wall-mounted TV; a washbasin with a swivel tap; two wipeable chairs; a bedside table, a chipped vase; a door with a linen curtain over its small window; and an easy-to-read clock saying 8:01, with blinds down to suggest p.m. not a.m. The air is scented with bleach and the sonic hospital backwash includes the ping of lift doors, trundling trolleys and an unanswered phone. Doctor Iris Marinus-Levy lies unconscious with a drip in her arm and her head in a neck-brace. My brother enters, evoked as himself, dressed in a doctor’s white coat. He sees my soul. “Norah. You’re late.” I look at Jonah-as-Jonah, enjoying his enjoyment at moving around again, even if the movement is as illusory as the hospital room. Then I evoke myself as a senior doctor in her forties, reverting to my own voice. “The traffic was murder.”

“Well done, Sister. How do I look?”

“Give yourself raccoon-eyes, and spread that indomitable jaw with some five o’clock shadow. Well done yourself.”