Slade House

by David Mitchell

  No no no, I must be breathing, I think. I’m still conscious.

  “Not for much longer,” replies Jonah. “After four minutes without oxygen, brain damage becomes irreversible, and although I don’t have my watch on me, I’d say you’ve had two. You’d die after six minutes, but we intervene prior to the final agony. We’re not sadists.”

  I feel like I’m plunging upwards. What did I do to deserve this?

  “What does ‘deserve’ have to do with anything?” Norah Grayer lifts her sharp eyebrows. “Did the pig whose smoked flesh you ate at breakfast ‘deserve’ her fate? The question’s irrelevant. You desired bacon and she couldn’t escape the abbatoir. We desire your soul to power our operandi, and you can’t escape our lacuna. That’s it.”

  Men who scare easily don’t last long in the force, but now I’m scared as hell. Although religion always struck me as daft, suddenly it’s all I’ve got: If they’re soul-stealers, pray to God. How does it go? Our Father…

  “Splendid idea,” says Jonah. “I’ll do you a deal, Detective Inspector. If you recite the Lord’s Prayer from start to finish—Book of Common Prayer version—you win a Get Out of Jail Free card. Go on. See how far you get.”

  “This is juvenile, brother,” sighs Norah.

  “Fair’s fair, he should have a chance. On your marks, Plod; get set; ‘Our Father, which art in heaven…’ Go on.”

  This Jonah’s a skunk and a snake, but I’ve got no choice. “Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thou name—”

  “Was that a ‘thou’ or a ‘thy’ you quoth?” asks Jonah.

  I have to play this bastard’s game. I think, Thy.

  “Bravo! Onwards, onwards. ‘Hallowed be thy name.’ ”

  What’s next? “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and lead us not into temptation, and forgive us our trespassers, as we—”

  “Ooooo! ‘Trespassers’ as in ‘Git orf my larrrnd!’ or ‘trespasses’ as in ‘transgressions’? Former or latter? Person or act?”

  Jesus, I want to glass his sodding face. I think, The act.

  “Plod’s on a roll! ‘Forgive us our trespasses…’ ”

  “As we forgive those who…who…who…”

  “What’s this? A thought-stutter or an owl impression?”

  “Who trespass against us. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, Amen.” I’ve done it. I look at him.

  The bastard actually smiles. “Alas, it’s ‘forgive them that trespass against us’; temptation comes after trespasses; and you forgot the ‘deliver us from evil’ bit. Ironically.”

  I’m going to die.

  This hour.

  Now. Me.

  “The point of that little interlude being…?” asks Norah.

  “A sprinkle of last-minute despair gives a soul an agreeably earthy aftertaste. Ready when you are, sister?”

  Norah mutters, “I’m always ready,” and the Grayer twins begin tracing symbols in the air. They’re chanting, too, a chant in a language I don’t know, and something appears above the candle flame, a bit above eye level: a bruise in the air, a glowing lump, lit reddish from inside, beating like a heart, big as a brain. Worms or roots or veins snake out from it. Some grow towards the twins, and several come my way and I try to pull my head back or swat them away or even shriek or shut my eyes but I can’t; they enter my mouth, my ears, my nostrils, like sharp tiny fingers, and get to work inside me. I feel a nail of pain sink into my forehead, and in the mirror I see a black dot there…Not blood. Seconds pass. Something oozes out and hovers there, a blob the size and shape of a golf ball, right in front of my eyes. It’s almost see-through, like gel, or egg white, and filled with shiny grains of dust, or galaxies, or…

  God, it’s beautiful.

  Jesus, it shimmers.

  It’s alive, it’s mine…

  …the twins’ faces loom up, Jonah to my left, Norah to my right, smooth-skinned, hungry, pursing their lips like whistlers, sucking, so sharply that my soul—what else could it be?—is slowly but surely stretched like Blu Tack. Half my soul streams like smoke into Norah’s mouth and half into Jonah’s. I’d sob, if I could, or I’d say I’ll get you I’ll kill you I’ll make you pay, but I’m just the residue of Gordon Edmonds now. I’m his husk. I’m his flesh-and-skin suit. The twins gasp and let out soft groans like junkies shooting up when the drug hits the bloodstream. Now there’s a rushing noise louder than the end of the world. Now it’s quiet like the morning after the end of the world. The floating brain-thing’s gone; its air-veins are gone too. Like nothing was ever there. The Grayer twins kneel across the candle from each other, as still as the flame that never moves. The mirror’s empty. Look at the scorched tiny papery scrap. There, on the floorboard. That was a moth, once.

  “Five,” pronounces Axel Hardwick, astrophysics postgrad, corduroy-clad, hair short, black and curly, real name Alan not Axel, but he thinks Axel makes him sound more Guns N’ Roses. Axel looks at us as if we’re the ones who haven’t bothered turning up. “Some shrinkage is inevitable as the dead wood drops out, but a head count of six, at this point in the term, is frankly dismal.” There’s a beery racket booming up the stairs from the main bar below and my mind sort of floats off, and I wonder if I’d have met more people if I’d joined the Photography Society in Freshers’ Week instead of the Paranormal Society, like I meant to. But then I wouldn’t have met Todd.

  Todd Cosgrove, second-year maths, a shyish elfish guy, black coat, white T-shirt, maroon jeans, camel boots, vice president of ParaSoc, fan of the Smiths. Across the table from me, Todd sips his Newcastle Brown Ale. His mad, quiffy hair’s brown, too, brown like strong stewed tea before you add the milk. Todd lives with his parents here in town but he’s not creepy or helpless, he’s bright and kind and strong, so there’s probably a good reason why he still lives at home. My mouth and brain seize up if I try to speak with him, but when I shut my eyes at night, Todd’s there. It’s crazy. But like every love song in the history of love songs says, love is crazy.

  “The walk may have deterred some of the waverers,” opines Angelica Gibbons. Definitely more Gibbons than Angelica, she’s a second year studying anthropology, has floppy indigo hair, Doc Martens, dresses like a fortune-teller, and is as big-boned as me. I thought we might be friends, but when we only scored 18 percent on the telepathy test she blamed me and said I had “no psychic potential whatsoever.” It was the way she said “whatsoever.”

  Axel scowls. “The Fox and Hounds is a twenty-minute walk from campus. Tops. I refuse to eat into ParaSoc’s budget by laying on fleets of buses for a two-mile walk.” He starts spinning a beer mat. A leprechaun on an enameled Guinness ad over the fireplace catches my eye. He’s playing his fiddle for a dancing toucan.

  “I completely agree, Axel,” says Angelica. “I’m just saying.”

  “Maybe a gang of them are coming but got lost en masse, like.” Lance Arnott, final year philosophy, dandruff, Pink Floyd The Wall T-shirt, pongs of hamburgers. Lance made a pass at me at the Roman ruins at Silchester. Frightmare on Elm Street or what? I lied about a boyfriend in Malvern, but he thinks I’m just playing hard to get. He turns to Fern: “Where’s that mate of yours this week, Ferny?”

  Fern Penhaligon, first year like me but doing drama, Rapunzel hair, slim as a model, Cornish-born, Chelsea-bred, Alexander McQueen jeans, Union Jack parka and here to “research the supernatural” for a stage version of Ghost that she’s starring in, curls her lip. “It’s Fern; and which ‘mate’ do you mean?” She sips the Cointreau she let Lance buy her, but he’s a bigger dick than he acts if he thinks he’s in with a chance.

  “The one who came to Saint Aelfric’s. The one with the huge gazonking”—Lance mimes a pair of breasts—“personality. The Waylsh one.”

  Fern swirls ice cubes round her glass. “Yasmin, you mean.”

  “Yasmin. Get a better offer tonight, did she? Eh? Boyo?” Lance gurns at Todd. I send Todd
a telepathic message saying, Ignore Lance, he’s a plonker. And lo and behold, Todd ignores Lance, so maybe it’s actually Angelica who has no psychic potential “whatsoever.” I try again: Look at my fingernails, Todd, I painted them peacock blue. But Todd’s got his apple-pip brown eyes on Fern, who’s explaining that her absent friend Yasmin was underwhelmed by the last field trip.

  “ ‘Underwhelmed’?” Axel stops spinning his beer mat. “By any standard metric, Saint Aelfric’s is England’s most haunted church.”

  Fern shrugs. “She was hoping to catch a glimpse of an actual ghost instead of catching a head cold.”

  “Paranormal entities don’t come when you whistle,” Angelica tells her. “They’re not like live-in Filipino maids.”

  I’d be stung by that, but for Fern it’s water off a duck’s back. “It’s ‘Filipina,’ for females, you’ll find—and I’d know, of course, being so awfully, frightfully posh.” Fern places one of her Gauloises cigarettes between her lips and lights it. Angelica’s squished like a bug and I think, Direct hit! and Fern gives me a knowing look.

  “Well, I’m not hanging about any longer for people who aren’t coming or who don’t show up on time,” says Axel, passing around a thin wodge of printouts headed Paranormal Society Field Trip Briefing, 25 October 1997 and subtitled The Slade Alley Vanishings. Underneath are two photographs. The top picture’s actually split into two: the left half is a grainy school photo of a boy, about twelve, with geeky hair and a nose on the wrong side of large; the right half shows a strict-looking woman in her late thirties, dark hair bunched up, thin, wearing a blouse with a frilly neck, pearls and a cardigan. Mother and son, you can tell at a glance. Neither was comfortable looking into a camera. The caption reads, Nathan and Rita Bishop: last seen in Slade Alley, Saturday, 27 October, 1979. The bottom picture shows a man of thirty or so, grinning at the camera, sinking a beer and dressed like a cop from Miami Vice, though he’s going bald and he isn’t thin. His caption reads, Detective Inspector Gordon Edmonds: last seen entering Slade Alley, Saturday, 29 October, 1988. So I was right: He is a cop. At the foot of the page is Copyright Axel Hardwick 1997. That’s it.

  “ ‘The Slade Alley Vanishings,’ ” reads Lance. “Cool.”

  “Uh, I think we can all read the title,” says Angelica.

  “The case study would have taken an age to write down in all its detail,” says Axel, “so I’m going to brief you all verbally.”

  “It was a dark and stormy night,” says Lance in a comedy Somerset accent.

  “If you’re not serious about this,” Angelica tells him, “you—”

  “Just cranking up the atmosphere a bit. Go on, Axel.”

  Axel stares at Lance to tell him, Grow up. “It begins eighteen years ago, in early November 1979. A pissed-off landlord was banging on the door of a property he was renting to Rita Bishop, divorced mother of Nathan, pictured here. The rent check had bounced. Again. A neighbor told the landlord that he hadn’t seen either Rita Bishop or her son for at least ten days. Hearing this, the landlord notified the police, who found out that Nathan hadn’t been at school since the last Friday in October. A half-arsed search ensued. Why half-arsed? Because Rita Bishop had dual British-Canadian citizenship, an ex-husband living in Zimbabwe-slash-Rhodesia, and mounting debts. The police assumed she’d done a runner for financial reasons and filed the case in the WGT file.”

  Fern flicks her mane of hair. “ ‘WGT’?”

  “It stands for ‘Who Gives a Toss?’ ” Axel sips his bitter while Angelica acts all amused. “Next, fast-forward to September 1988. A patient named Fred Pink wakes up from a coma in the unit at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, nine years after being knocked into oblivion by a drunk taxi driver on Westwood Road.”

  “Westwood Road’s this road, right?” I ask.

  “It was on tonight’s rendezvous sheet,” says Angelica.

  Stupid moo. I sip my Diet Coke, wishing I were Fern so I could administer a barbed put-down. And pull guys. Like Todd, just for example.

  “Fred Pink began working through all the back copies of the local newspaper, to see what he’d missed during what he calls his Big Sleep. Pretty soon, he found a picture of the missing Rita and Nathan Bishop. They looked familiar. Why? Because back in 1979, just before the minicab driver hit him, Fred Pink had spoken with Rita Bishop at the Cranbury Avenue entrance to Slade Alley, one street up from Westwood Road. She’d asked if he knew where Lady Norah Grayer lived. Fred Pink said no, walked down the alley, and at the far end got knocked down by the taxi.”

  “Bang! Crash! Wallop!” Lance rearranges his genitals without a flicker of embarrassment.

  “No disrespect to Mr. Pink,” says Todd, “but how trustworthy a witness was he?” His voice has a soft yokel twang but it’s actually quite sexy.

  Axel’s nod means Good question. “The police were skeptical too. This neighborhood isn’t rough, but it certainly isn’t rich. If a genuine ‘lady’ had her ‘residence’ here, she’d stick out like a very posh sore thumb. Even so, CID didn’t want Fred Pink to feel brushed off, so they sent a man to give Slade Alley the once-over. Enter Detective Inspector Gordon Edmonds.” Axel taps the second photograph on the A4 sheet. “On October twenty-second, 1988, he entered Slade Alley and found a door in the wall. It was open. He went in, and found a garden and a ‘substantial property’ called Slade House.”

  “And living in Slade House was Lady Grayer?” asks Angelica, looping her finger through her indigo hair.

  “No. By 1988, the owner was a young widow called Chloe Chetwynd. Edmonds’s brief report—my primary source for tonight’s field trip—makes it clear that Chloe Chetwynd knew nothing about a Lady Grayer or the missing Bishops.”

  “Ah, but she would say that, wouldn’t she?” Fern stubs out her cigarette. “In racy Victorian novels, beware of young widows. Especially attractive ones.”

  “Pity no one told Gordon Edmonds that,” says Axel. “The following Saturday he went back to Slade House. Apparently he’d recommended a security contractor to Chloe Chetwynd to fix that garden door, and she asked him to check the workmanship. A witness saw him park his car on Westwood Road at 6 P.M.”—Axel can’t resist a dramatic pause—“but Detective Inspector Edmonds was never seen again.”

  “When a cop goes missing,” says Angelica, “the fuzz don’t rest until they’ve found their man. The media join in, too.”

  “True,” replies Axel. “And Gordon Edmonds did make the front pages, for a few days. Theories about an IRA kidnapping or a suicide pact kept the story on the boil for a while, but when Edmonds refused to show up either dead or alive, pictures of Lady Di’s arse or the Poll Tax riots or the Divorce of the Day reclaimed their rightful place on the front page of the News of the Screws, and Detective Inspector Edmonds fell off the radar.”

  Angelica asks, “What was Chloe Chetwynd’s version of events?”

  “In a curious twist to the tale,” says Axel, “Chloe Chetwynd was never tracked down by the investigators.”

  We look at one another, wondering what we’ve missed.

  “Hang on a mo,” says Lance. “So who answered the door at Slade House when the cops went looking for Gordon Edmonds?”

  “In yet another curious twist”—Axel sips his beer—“Slade House turned out to be just as elusive as Chloe Chetwynd.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” says Lance. “The house disappeared?”

  “Big stone houses,” Fern points out, “don’t normally melt into the fog.”

  Axel sniffs. “Last time I looked, we’re the Paranormal Society.”

  Down in the bar a fruit machine vomits out a slug of coins.

  “Proper X-File, this is,” says Lance, teetering on his chair.

  “What if,” proposes Fern, “Gordon Edmonds made Slade House up in his notes—and invented Chloe Chetwynd, too?”

  “Why risk so much on such a flimsy lie?” asks Angelica.

  “No idea,” states Fern. “Nervous breakdown? Serial fantasist? Who knows? But wh
ich is likelier, people, really: fabricated police records or a house going poofff, in violation of the laws of physics?”

  “What did that security contractor guy say?” asks Todd.

  Axel’s pretending not to enjoy this but he is. “He swore blind that nobody ever contacted him about a Slade House: neither a Chloe Chetwynd nor a Detective Inspector Edmonds.”

  “Murderers have been known to lie,” says Angelica.

  “CID investigated him,” says Axel, “and every locksmith, builder, whatever, in the area too—and found zilch, nada, niente, sod all. Nobody had worked at any Slade House in, or near, Westwood Road.”

  Todd asks, “Was the Slade Alley connection between Gordon Edmonds’s disappearance in 1988 and the Bishops’ disappearance in 1979 made public at the time?”

  Axel shakes his head. “The factoid was suppressed. The cops didn’t want Slade Alley to become a magnet for true-crime nuts.”

  “Typical of the fascist pigs to repress the truth,” says Angelica.

  I’d like to ask Angelica how safe she thinks she’d be in a society without any police at all, but I don’t have the nerve. Todd asks, “How did you link the two disappearances, Axel?”

  “An informant brought it to my attention,” Axel looks a bit cagey, “and suggested that ParaSoc take a closer look.”

  “What informant?” Lance picks his nose and deposits his bogey under the table. I may be a bit overweight but he’s actually repulsive.

  “An uncle of mine,” admits Axel, after a short pause. “Fred Pink.”

  “Fred Pink’s your uncle?” Angelica gawps. “No shit! The window cleaner in the coma? But you’re a Hardwick, not a Pink.”

  “Fred Pink’s my mother’s brother. My mother is Hardwick née Pink. Slade Alley is Fred’s obsession, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Why ‘sorry’?” asks Fern, the question I wanted to ask.

  Axel wrinkles his mouth. “Uncle Fred feels…Oh, ‘chosen.’ ”

  “Chosen for what?” presses Fern. “By whom?”

  Axel shrugs. “Chosen to find out the truth about Slade House. He had a hard time adjusting to real life after his nine years in a coma, and he’s, uh, in care now. Out beyond Slough. In a…unit.”