David Mitchell - Slade House

Sister, Jonah telegrams, what is she?

Danger, I telegram back . Change. A fight. An ending.

Kill her, Jonah urges. Kill her. Now. Both of us.

If we kill her we lose her soul, I telegram my uncensored thoughts, and if we lose her soul, our Operandi dies — it won’t last nine more hours, let alone another nine years. And if the Operandi dies, there’s no more Lacuna.

“And without the Lacuna,” Marinus says out loud, “the world’s time floods in, shrivels up your birth-bodies, and then your soul’s off to the Dusk, right? One hundred and sixteen years: over and out.”

Jonah’s appalled face reflects my own: he telegrams, Can this trespassing bitch hear us, Sister?

Marinus tuts. “Mr. Grayer! Shoddy abuse. ‘Bitch’ is a stingless insult these days — it hurts like, I don’t know, a celery-stabbing. And ‘trespassing’? You invited me here today to get my soul sucked out — and for accepting your invitation I’m now a trespasser? Not nice.” With a casual glyph, Marinus revokes the IV drip and neck-brace. We can’t conceal our astonishment. “Yes, I know about sub-orisons in orisons, a bubble in a bubble, the attic in the house. It’s not a bad copy; but Evian water? In an NHS hospital? Don’t tell me — that was his genius idea, wasn’t it?” The intruder looks at me but nods towards my brother. I don’t answer. Unhurriedly, she gets out of bed and Jonah and I both take a step back. “ You ’d know better than to conjure up fancy French mineral water, Miss Grayer, after your top secret undercover stake-out at Dawkins Hospital. I saw you, studying me through Viv Singh’s eyeballs. I reeled you in, as you reeled me in. A company of reelers. Nice pajamas, but …” she glyphs and her own clothes reappear. “I’m a creature of sartorial habit.”

Jonah has let the sub-orison half fade to conserve voltage, which is wise. A brute-force attack on Marinus however, which I fear Jonah is planning, would be less wise. I sense she’s expecting it.

“You have us at a disadvantage,” I say. “You are?”

“I am who I am, Miss Grayer. Born Iris Levy, 1980, in Baltimore; ‘Marinus’ got added later, hereditary reasons, long story; my family moved to Toronto; I studied psychiatry; and here we are.”

I probe. “But you’re telepathic; you glyph … Know what this is?” I float a gentle psychowave her way, which she deflects at the Evian bottle. It tips over, trundles to the edge of the table-top, but vanishes before falling off. “Look at that, Jonah,” I say. “Our guest and we are three peas in a psychosoteric pod.”

Marinus’s jocularity slips. “Leave me out of your pod, Miss Grayer. I don’t use human beings like disposable gloves. Did you even thank that poor wretch Mark—‘Bombadil’—before tossing him into the garbage just now?”

“What a lofty hill of divine compassion you sit on,” I needle, I speculate, “to care for every one of humanity’s mewling, puking, rutting seven billion.”

“Ah, you people always say that,” the intruder tells me.

“Do we?” I say. “And how do you know our names?”

“Therein hangs an hour’s tale.” Marinus takes a gadget from her jacket and shows us. I see the word SONY. “One of you, at least, has seen this digital recorder before, and I’m guessing it was Mr. Grayer …” She turns to Jonah, who peers closer. “Yes. A digital recorder. See if this jogs your memory.” Marinus presses PLAY and we hear a woman’s confident voice: “Interview with Mr. Fred Pink at The Fox and Hounds pub, Saturday twenty-seventh October, 2007, 7:20 P.M.” It’s Freya Timms. Marinus presses STOP. It’s no great feat to read our faces. “She had a life,” says Marinus. “A sister she loved.” Her anger is controlled but fierce. “Go on. Name her. Or are you too ashamed?”

Jonah looks too appalled to name anyone. So the fool should be. His bragging Self-as-Fred Pink nine years ago, as he toyed with Freya Timms in my orison of The Fox and Hounds, spun this Ariadne’s thread which led Marinus to the heart of our Operandi. And when my brother regains the power of speech he spends it on the wrong question: “How did you get that?”

Marinus ignores him and looks at me.

I meet her gaze with no shame at all. “Freya Timms.”

Marinus nods, then peers through the half-gone blinds over the ghostly windows. “Dark nights, in these parts. We’re in your attic at Slade House, right?” I don’t answer. The intruder returns to Jonah’s question. “Your ‘crematorium’ disposes of bodies well enough, but inorganic matter falls through the cracks. In the old days it hardly mattered — a button here, a hair-clip there, but in this century—” Marinus turns back to us and weighs the recorder in the palm of her hand “—angels really do fit onto pinheads, and the lives of the multitudes inside a memory stick. We are few, Miss Grayer, but we’re well connected. Artefacts like this,” she drops the recorder into her pocket, “tend to find us, sooner or later.”

I’m forming a theory. Enomoto Sensei spoke about “vigilantes” with a pathological urge to slay fellow Atemporals.

“Who is this ‘us’?” Jonah demands of the intruder.

“Your sister’s forming a theory. Ask her. She gets out more.”

I keep my eyes on Marinus. “She’s from across the Schism.”

“Warm.”

“Le Courant Profond,” I guess. “The Deep Stream.”

Her hands are free to glyph. “Warmer.”

What a stupid guessing game. “You’re an Horologist.”

“Oh, say it with more venom. Spit out the vile word.” Marinus, like Jonah, has a taste for burlesque irony. Like Jonah, she may trip.

Jonah, naturally, hasn’t heard of Horology with a capital “H”: “She makes clocks?”

Marinus’s laugh sounds genuine. “Miss Grayer, I almost understand why you tolerate this plodding clerk, this risible thesp, this dim corgi who fancies himself a wolf. But come: between you and me, is he not a liability? A ball and chain? An aptly named Jonah? Did your Sayyid never tell you what he thought of him? ‘A preening fool composed of a pig’s afterbirth.’ His words, I swear. We hunted your former master down in the Atlas Mountains, with the aid of Freya’s recording. So we must thank your brother for that much, at least. The venerable Sayyid begged for mercy. He tried to buy it by telling us more than we hoped to learn: and we showed him the same mercy he’d showed his prey down the decades. No more, no less. And now Jonah has proven to you what a lethal encumbrance he is …”

She breaks off, having brought my simmering brother up to boiling point: Jonah is glyphing up a pyroblast with his bare hands. I telegram Don’t! but Jonah’s head is roaring and he can’t hear so I shout it out loud— “Don’t!” —as the vestiges of the hospital room fall away, revealing the long attic of Slade House. Eighty years of metalife end at this forking path: do I join Jonah’s assault against an untested enemy who wants us to resort to an attack? Even if success leads to voltaic starvation? Or do I forsake Jonah, watch him fry, but keep alive a fetal hope of survival? Even as Jonah rashly, rashly, applies every last volt in his soul to Marinus’s incineration, I don’t know what to do …

… Marinus, fast as thought, glyphed a concave mirrorfield; it quivered under impact, I heard the crackle of lava and saw Marinus’s face snap with pain, and for a moment, I dared hope that our intruder had underestimated us; but the mirrorfield held, regained its flat plane and flung back the refocused black light straight at its source. There was no time to glyph or warn or intervene — Jonah Grayer lived for over 42,000 days, but he died in a fractured second, killed by a beginner’s trick, albeit a trick deployed by a master. I glimpsed a carbonized Jonah with melted lips and cheeks, trying to protect his eyes; saw him wither into split briquettes and grainy cinders; and watched a nebula of soot lose its human form and fall to the floorboards, smothering a constant candle.