David Mitchell - Slade House

My decision had made itself.

I see the glow of the candle through my own birth-eyelids. I hear the faintest wheeze and crackle of beeswax, boiling in its pond at the wick’s stem. Time, then, has bled into the Lacuna. Our Operandi is dead. When I open my eyes, instead of Jonah opening his eyes, I will see Grief. Grief and I exchanged words many years ago after Mother died, in Ely, poor wretch, coughing her lungs up, telling me to take care of Jonah, to protect him, because I was the sensible one … And for over a century I honored that promise, and protected my brother more assiduously than poor Nellie Grayer meant or dreamt, and during these years Grief was only a face in a crowd. Now, however, Grief intends to make up for lost time. I’m under no illusions. Jonah’s soul is gone to the Dusk: his birth-body is an ankle-high soot-drift around my feet and the base of the Ninevite Candle. The pain Grief intends to inflict will be colossal. Yet, curiously, for now, just for now, I find myself sitting in the dead wreckage of our Operandi, amongst the grainy remnants of Jonah, able to consider my position with calmness and clarity. Perhaps this calm is the silty stillness between the sucked-away sea and the tsunami’s roaring, horizon-wide, hill-high, arrival, but while it lasts, I’ll use it. I let Jonah die his futile death alone; proving, I suppose, that my love of survival is stronger than my love for Jonah. Survival is also an ally against grief: if I buckle now, I won’t survive. The killer is here, in our attic. Where else would she be? I heard her a little while ago. She picked herself up, gasped with pain — good — and creaked across the old oak boards towards the candle-flame like a monstrous, hobbling moth. She’s waiting for me to begin the next round. I’ll keep her waiting a little longer.

Dark skin in the dark space, she watches me watch her, a hunter watching the hunted, our optic nerves joining our souls. Jonah’s murderer, Marinus the Horologist, who brought death into our stronghold. Yes, I hate her: but how far short it falls, this petty, neutered verb. Hatred is a thing one hosts: the lust I feel to harm, maim, wreck and kill this woman is less an emotion I hold and more what I am become. “I was expecting you,” she speaks in a hush as if we’re at a funeral, “to join the attack. Why didn’t you?”

The end begins. “It was an abysmal strategy.” My throat, as usual, is dry as I reinhabit my own body. “If we lost, we’d”—I look at the soot on my feet—“end up like this.” I stand — my joints are stiff — and take a few steps back, so the candle is equidistant between Marinus and me. “Yet if we won, we’d die when the Lacuna collapses and the world’s time catches up with our bodies. Typical of Jonah. He’d act, and leave me to sift through the wreckage and make things right.”

Marinus considers this. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Your condolences disgust me,” I say, mildly enough.

“Grief hurts, yes. Every human you ever fed on had loved ones who suffer now as you do. Without even a figure to blame, to hate. But you know the proverb, Miss Grayer: ‘Who lives by the sword—’ ”

“Don’t quote proverbs. Why didn’t you kill me just now?”

Marinus makes an It’s complicated face. “Firstly, cold-blooded murder isn’t the Deep Stream’s way.”

“No, you prefer to goad your enemies into shooting first, so you get to plead self-defense.”

The hypocrite doesn’t deny it. “Secondly, I wanted to ask you if you’d kindly open this inner aperture”—she indicates the tall mirror—“and let me out.”

So she’s neither all-doing nor all-knowing. I don’t tell her that I can’t open the Aperture now the Operandi is dead. I don”t even confirm that the Aperture is the mirror, in case she’s merely guessing. I just think of Marinus dying when the air in the attic runs out. “Let me consider your request for a moment: Never.”

Marinus nods. “It was a long shot, but it would have been more elegant than Plan B, which is also a long shot.” She steps towards the candle and reaches into a thigh pocket. I marshal my voltage for a defense. Instead of a weapon, however, she produces a smartphone.

“The nearest network is sixty years in the future,” I tell her, “and the Aperture won’t relay phone signals to the real world. So sorry.”

Her dark face glows in the smartphone’s cold light. “Like I said, it’s a long shot.” She points her device at the Aperture; stares; waits; checks the screen; frowns; waits; waits; steps around the candle and the soot-drift to crouch by the Aperture and examine it; waits; presses her ear against it; waits; and finally gives up with a sigh. “Too long a shot, it would appear.” She puts away her smartphone. “I stashed half a kilo of plastic explosive in the shrubbery, by the outer Aperture when you-as-Bombadil weren’t looking. My canvas bag. You felt something was amiss as we walked beneath the wistaria, I believe, so I distracted you. I hoped the explosion would blow open this aperture, but either the phone signal didn’t reach the detonator or your Operandi is too solidly built.”

“I’m bereft for you, truly. Might there be a Plan C, or is Doctor Iris Marinus-Levy going to die today?”

“Traditionally, we’d stage another climactic battle between good and evil. We’d never agree which of us is which, however, and the only prize on offer is a death by oxygen starvation. Shall we forgo tradition?”

This false levity is repugnant. “Death for you is just a short break, I understand.”

She steps back, around the candle, and sits where our guests are — were — usually positioned, opposite the Aperture. “It’s more troublesome than that, but we do come back, yes. Was Enomoto or the Sayyid your principal informant on the Deep Stream?”

“Both. Why?”

“I knew Enomoto’s grandfather in a former life. A murdering demon of a man. You would have liked him.”

“You deny us the privileges you enjoy.” My voice sounds chipped and cracked. It’s this thirst.

“You murder for immortality,” states Marinus. “We are sentenced to it.”

“ ‘Sentenced’? Hypocrite! As if you’d swap your metalife for a bone clock’s snatched, wasted, tawdry handful of decades!” I feel unaccountably tired. It’s the weariness of grief breathing down my neck. What else could it be? I sit down, a foot or so back from my usual place. “Why do you Horologists conduct this … this …” the word’s gone, it’s Arabic, it’s in English a lot, too, “this … Jihad, against us?”

“We serve the sanctity of life, Miss Grayer. Not our own, but other people’s. The knowledge that the Timms sisters, the Gordon Edmondses, the Bishops, and those future innocents whom you would have killed to fuel your addiction to life, will live: that’s our higher purpose. What’s a metalife without a mission? It’s mere … feeding.”

What Bishops? “All we did—” my voice sounds too wavery “—was seek survival. No more than any sane, healthy, animal—”

“No,” Marinus scrunches up her face, “ please , no. I’ve heard it so often. ‘Humanity is hardwired for survival’; ‘Might is Right is nature’s way’; ‘We only harvest a few.’ Again and again, down the years, same old same old …”

Pain is growing in my hips and knees, a pain I’ve never known. I wonder if Marinus is responsible. Where’s Jonah got to?

“… from such an array of vultures,” the woman’s saying, and I wish she’d speak up, “from feudal lords to slave-traders to oligarchs to neocons to predators like you. One simply cannot discuss ethics with those who voluntarily amputate their consciences.”

The pain has spread to my left wrist. I examine it and if I could, I’d drop it, horrified. My skin is sagging. My palm, my fingers are … old . A repulsive illusion, surely, of Marinus’s creation. I peer forward — with unseemly effort — to look into the Aperture. A white-haired witch stares back, aghast.