Slade House

You Dark Horse You, 2006

I nodded off for long enough to slip into a stressful dream. I dreamed I got cold feet about meeting Fred Pink here this evening. Halfway across the cold park I turned back, but a black and orange jogger sprayed my face with an asthma inhaler. Then I saw a woman in a wheelchair being pushed by Tom Cruise. Her face was hidden by a raincoat hood and Tom Cruise said “Go right ahead, take a look.” So I lifted the hood and it was me. Then we were going down an alley, and someone said “You pay an army for a thousand days to use it on one.” Last of all was a black slab like the black slabs in 2001: A Space Odyssey and as it opened I heard Sally saying, You have to wake up, so I did and here I am, alone, in the upstairs room at The Fox and Hounds. As arranged. It’s seedier than how I remember it from 1997. The tables are scarred, the chairs are rickety, the wallpaper’s scraggy and the carpet’s the color of dried vomit. My tomato juice sits in a smeary glass, as appetising as liquidized roadkill. The Fox and Hounds is on its last legs, clearly. Downstairs there are only six drinkers at the bar and one of them was a dog for the blind — and on a Saturday evening. The one gesture to jollity is an old-time enameled Guinness ad, screwed to the wall over the blocked-up fireplace, with a leprechaun playing a fiddle for a dancing toucan. I wonder if that leprechaun noticed Sally nine years ago, and if she noticed him. They sat up here, the “X-Files Six.” Several witnesses saw them, but nobody agreed at which table.

I press my forehead against the window. In the street below Fred Pink’s still having his “quick catch-up with Misters Benson and Hedges.” The streetlights are coming on. The sun sinks into tarmac-gray clouds, over one-way mazes of brick houses, gasworks, muddy canals, old factories, unloved blocks of flats from the sixties, multi-story car parks from the seventies; tatty-looking housing from the eighties; a neon-edged multiplex from the nineties. Cul-de-sacs, ring-roads, bus lanes, flyovers. I wish Sally’s last known place of abode could have been prettier. For the millionth time I wonder if she’s still alive, locked in a madman’s attic, praying that we’ll never give up, never stop looking. Always I wonder. Sometimes I envy the weeping parents of the definitely dead you see on TV. Grief’s an amputation, but hope’s incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. Like Schrödinger’s cat but with a box you can never get open. For the millionth time, I flinch about wriggling out of inviting my sister to New York the summer before she started uni here. Sally wanted to visit, I knew, but I had a job at a photo agency, fashionista friends, invitations to private views, and I was just starting to date women. It was an odd time. Discovering my Real Me and babysitting my tubby, dorky, nervy sister just felt all too much. So I told Sal some bullshit about finding my feet, she pretended to believe me, and I’ll never forgive myself. Avril says that not even God can change the past. True, but I still can’t forgive myself. I get out my mobile and text Avril:

At pub. Real dive. FP no nutter so far but we’ll see.

Interview begins in a mo. Home when I can. Xxx

SEND. Avril will be heating up yesterday’s lasagna, opening a bottle of wine, settling down to an episode or three of The Wire. Wish I was with her. I’ve known livelier morgues than The Fox and Hounds. The whiskery landlady tried to crack a funny when we came in: “Evening, dearie, you must be Our Fred’s latest girlfriend, then. Fred, you dark horse, you — what magazine you order this one out of, eh?” I should’ve said, “Hot Ukrainian Dykes Weekly.” When the landlady learned I’m a journalist with an interest in Slade Alley, she turned frosty and her “dearie” grew thorns: “That’s the media for you, innit? Why let a sleeping dog lie when you can flog a dead horse, eh, dearie? Eh?”

Footsteps clomp up the stairs. I get out my Sony digital recorder, a gift from Dad and Sook, AKA Mrs. John Timms III, and put it on the table. In walks Fred Pink, a withered gray man in a tatty brown coat and a schoolboy’s leather satchel that looks half a century old. “Sorry to keep you, Miss Timms. I do need my little fix.” He’s got a gruff, friendly voice you want to trust.

“No problem,” I say. “Will this table do?”

“Best seat in the house, I’d say.” He puts his beer on the table, sits down like the old man he is and rubs his skin-and-bone hands. His face is pocked, saggy, and spiky with bristles. His glasses are fixed with duct tape. “Bloomin’ parky out. This smoking ban’ll be the death of us, I tell you: if cancer don’t get us, the double pneumonia will. Still can’t get my head round not smoking — in a pub? Political correctness gone mad, and brought in by a Labor government. Ever interview Tony Blair or Gordon Brown or that lot, do you, in your line of work?”

“Only in press packs. You have to be at the top of the food chain for a private audience. Mr. Pink, could I record our interview? That way I can concentrate on what you’re saying without taking notes.”

“Record away.” He doesn’t add, “and call me Fred,” so I won’t.

I press RECORD and speak into the microphone: “Interview with Fred Pink at The Fox and Hounds pub, Saturday twenty-seventh October, 2006, 7:20 P.M.” I swivel the recorder so the mike’s facing him. “Ready when you are.”

The old man takes a deep breath. “Well. Once you’ve been a psychiatric patient, no one gives you the benefit of the doubt again. Easier to fix a bad credit rating than a bad credibility rating.” Fred Pink speaks with care, as if he’s writing his words in permanent ink. “But whether you believe me or not, Miss Timms, I’m guilty. Guilty. See, I’m the one who told my nephew Alan about Slade Alley, about Gordon Edmonds, about Nathan and Rita Bishop, about the nine-year cycle. It was me who whetted Alan’s appetite. Alan’d told me there was twenty or thirty of them in his club so I reckoned, safety in numbers. Atemporals fear exposure, see. Six kids vanishing was big news, but twenty or thirty? They’d never dare. All sorts’d’ve come running: MI7, FBI if any Americans were involved, my friend David Icke; the whole bloomin’ shebangle’d be all over Slade House like a dose of the clap. If I’d known Alan’s group was down to six, I’d’ve told him, “Too risky, just forget it.” And if I’d done that, my nephew, and your sister, and Lance Matthews, Todd Cosgrove, Angelica Gibbons and Fern Penhaligon, they’d still be in here, living their lives, with jobs, boyfriends, girlfriends, mortgages. Knowing that’s a torment, Miss Timms. A torment.” Fred Pink swallows, clenches his jaw and shuts his eyes. I write “Atemporal?” and “David Icke” in my notebook to give him time to compose himself. “Sorry, Miss Timms, I …”

“I’ve got regrets about Sally too,” I assure him. “But I think you’re being too harsh on yourself.”

Fred Pink dabs his eyes with an old tissue and sips his bitter.

“In your email you mentioned a backstory, Mr. Pink,” I say.

“I did. The backstory’s why I asked to meet you here this evening, so I can tell it you face to face. On the phone, you’d hang up. In places, you’ll think, ‘Ruddy Nora, the mad old wreck’s lost the plot.’ But hear me out. It leads to Sally. Trust on me on this.”

“I’m a journalist. I know reality’s complex.” I remember Avril using those very words — a “mad old wreck”—when she read Fred Pink’s first email a couple of weeks ago. But I tell the old man, “I’m listening.”

“We’ll kick off over a century ago then, near Ely in Norfolk, at a stately home called Swaffham Manor. Nowadays a Saudi Arabian pal of Prince Charles owns the place, but back then it was the ancestral seat of a family called the Chetwynd-Pitts, who you’ll find in the Domesday Book, if you please. In 1899, twins was born at Swaffham, a girl and a boy. Not in the big house, mind, but in the gamekeeper’s cottage on the edge of the estate. The father was Gabriel Grayer, the mother was his wife Nellie Grayer, and the twins were named Norah and Jonah. They never got to know their father that well, ’cause Gabriel Grayer got shot three years later by a toff who mistook the peasant for a pheasant, so to speak. Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt felt guilty about the accident, so they let Nellie Grayer and the children stay on in the gamekeeper’s cottage. More than that, they took care of Norah and Jonah’s schooling, and when Nellie Grayer died of rheumatic fever in 1910, the twin orphans moved into Swaffham Manor proper.”

“You’ve done a lot of research,” I tell Fred Pink.

“It’s my hobby, like. Well, my life, really. You should see my flat. It’s all papers and files, everywhere. Now: you’ll have heard stories about the empathy between twins, I’m guessing. Y’know, where one twin gets hit by a bus in Istanbul, say, and the other falls over in London at the exact same moment. But did you know that twins’ll sometimes speak a language that only they understand, specially when they’re still learning to talk?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. When I lived in Manhattan I used to babysit for toddler triplets who talked in their own private dialect. It was amazing to hear.”

“Well, events took place at Swaffham Manor what suggested Norah and Jonah Grayer combined these two skills. To call a spade a spade: telepathy.” Fred Pink gives me a probing look. “Do we have a problem with telepathy, Miss Timms?”

My nutter-detector glows amber. “I am rather a fan of proof, Mr. Pink.”

“So am I. So am I. Albertina Chetwynd-Pitt — Her Ladyship — published a memoir in 1925 called Rivers Old and Lost. It’s all about what I’m telling you now: the twins, their upbringing, and everything. In it, she says how one January evening in 1910, her, her daughters and Norah Grayer were playing cribbage in the drawing room at Swaffham. All of a sudden, Norah cried out, dropped her cards, and said that Arthur, the eldest Chetwynd-Pitt boy, had fallen off his horse at Poole’s Brook — over a mile away from the manor — and couldn’t move. He needed a stretcher and the doctor, right away. Lady Albertina was shocked that Norah’d tell such a baseless fib. But Norah begged her to send help, ’cause, and I quote, ‘Jonah is with him and Jonah is telling me.’ By now the Chetwynd-Pitt daughters were properly spooked too, so against her better judgment, Lady Albertina sent a servant running off — who found the scene as Norah’d described it, in every detail.”

I reach for my tomato juice but it still looks like roadkill and I change my mind. “It all makes a good anecdote, but how is it ‘proof’?”

Fred Pink takes out his Benson and Hedges, remembers the smoking ban and puts the cigarettes back, tetchily. “The day after, the twins were interviewed by Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt with their friend Dean Grimond of Ely Cathedral. Dean Grimond was a no-nonsense hardboiled Scot who’d been an army chaplain in the Crimea and had none of the airy-fairy about him. He ordered the twins to tell him how Norah’d known about Arthur coming off his horse at Poole’s Brook. So the twins confessed they’d been able to ‘telegram’ thoughts for years, but kept it a secret ’cause they’d noticed it scared people and drew attention to them. Like you, Miss Timms, Lord Chetwynd-Pitt wanted proof, so he devised this experiment. He gave Norah a pencil and paper, led Jonah to the billiards room in Swaffham Manor, and read out a random line from The Jungle Book. His Lordship asked Jonah to ‘telegram’ the line to Norah, back in the library. Jonah shut his eyes for a few seconds, then said the job was done. Then they both went back to the library to find that Norah had written down the very same line from Kipling.” Fred Pink looks at me like the matter is now beyond dispute.

I say, “Remarkable,” but think, If all this actually took place.

“Next, Dean Grimond got Norah to ‘telegram’ a verse from St. John’s Gospel.” Fred Pink shuts his eyes: “ ‘He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.’ That one. Back in the billiards room Jonah wrote it down, word-perfect. Lastly, Lady Albertina wanted a go. She had Jonah ‘telegram’ a verse from a nursery rhyme in German. Norah wrote it word-perfect, though with a few spelling mistakes, ’cause neither of the twins knew a word of German, see.” Fred Pink slurps his bitter and dabs his cracked lips with the frayed sleeve of his jacket. “Dean Grimond told the twins that some of God’s gifts are better left unexamined, and that they shouldn’t refer to their ‘telegrams’ in public, ‘lest excitable persons be tempted down wrong paths.’ Norah and Jonah promised to obey. Dean Grimond gave them both a humbug and went back to his cathedral. Job done. Nice work if you can get it.”

A TV roar of disappointment wafts up the stairs. Checking my Sony’s still working, I ask, “How do you know Lady Albertina is a trustworthy source?”

Fred Pink rubs his scalp and dandruff falls. “Same way you judge your sources, I imagine, Miss Timms. By developing a nose for a lie, an ear for a fib, and an eye for a tell. Right? Lady Chetwynd-Pitt’s book is detailed where a fraud would gloss over stuff, and rough where a liar would polish it better. Anyway, where’s her motive for lying? Not money — she was loaded. Not attention — she only had a hundred copies of her book printed, and by the time it was published, she was a virtual recluse, like.”

I swivel my gold ring from Avril around my finger. “In journalism, we try to cross-corroborate an informant’s more contentious claims.”

“ ‘Cross-corroborate.’ Good word. I’ll store that away. It’s time you met Doctor Léon Cantillon.” Fred Pink unfastens his satchel, takes out a dog-eared folder and produces a laser-scanned copy of an old hand-tinted photograph of a man of about forty. He’s wearing a French Foreign Legion uniform, a raffish smile, a couple of medals and, around his neck, a stethoscope. The caption underneath reads: Le docteur L. Cantillon, Légion étrangère, Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, Croix de guerre. “Léon Cantillon. Colorful figure, you might say. Born in 1874 in Dublin in an old French Huguenot family; grew up speaking French; studied Medicine at Trinity College, but he had a hot-headed streak and had to leave Ireland after shooting the son of a Member of Parliament in a duel, no less. Bang. Straight between the eyes, dead before he hit the deck. Cantillon joined the French Foreign Legion a few months later — we’re up to 1895 now — and served as a medic in the Mandingo War on the Ivory Coast, and later in the South-Oranese Campaign. Dirty little wars in the carve-up of Africa, these — even the French’ve forgotten ’em nowadays. Cantillon had a knack for languages, too. When he wasn’t doctoring and soldiering he was learning Arabic, and claims he spoke it fluently by 1905, when he got himself a plum job at the Legion’s hospital in Algiers. It was in Algiers that his interest in the occult took root, by his own account. He mingled with Prussian theosophists, Armenian spiritualists, Ibadi Muslim shamans, Hassidic Kabbalists, and one mystic in particular who lived south of Algiers in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. He’s known as the Albino Sayyid of Aït Arif, and by and by he’d be playing a major role in the Grayers’ lives.”

This is all sounding a bit Da Vinci Code for me. “What’s your source for all of this, Mr. Pink? Lady Albertina’s book?”

“No. Léon Cantillon wrote his memoir too, see. The Great Unveiling. My own copy’s one of just ten known survivors, and it’s this what cross-corroborates Lady Albertina’s story, so to speak.” He turns away to cough a smoker’s cough into the crook of his elbow. It lasts a good while. “So. Doctor Cantillon met Lord Chetwynd-Pitt in early summer of 1915 at the house of mutual friends in London. After a few schooners of port, His Lordship began telling the soldier — doctor about Lady Albertina’s ‘chronic hysteria.’ The poor woman was in a terrible state by this point. In March of 1915, all three of Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt sons’d been gassed, blown up or machine-gunned in the very same week at the Somme. All three. Imagine that: on Monday, you’ve got three sons, by Friday you’ve got none. Lady Albertina had just, y’know, caved in. Physically, mentally, spiritually, brutally. Her husband hoped that Léon Cantillon, as a sympathetic spiritualist and a man of medicine, might be the man to help where everyone else’d failed, like. To bring her back from the brink.”

Fred Pink’s framed by the window. Dusk’s falling. “So the Chetwynd-Pitts had been dabbling in spiritualism since the ‘telegram incident,’ had they?”

“They had, Miss Timms, they had. The craze for séances was in full swing by this point, and the likes of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle no less was saying it was founded in science. To be sure, there was no shortage of shysters all too happy to milk the craze, but thanks to Norah and Jonah, the Chetwynd-Pitts knew that some psychic phenomena, at least, was genuine. As a matter of fact, Lord Chetwynd-Pitt’d brought several mediums up to Ely to channel the spirits of their boys, but none of them’d proved themselves to be the real McCoy, and with each dashed hope Lady Albertina’s sanity took a fresh battering.”

I bring the tomato juice to my lips, but it still looks like a specimen jar in a blood bank. “And could Doctor Cantillon help?”

Fred Pink rubs his wiry bristles. “Well, as it turned out, he could — though he never claimed he was a medium. After examining Lady Albertina, Cantillon said that her grief’d ‘severed her ethereal cord to her spirit guide.’ He performed a ritual he’d learned off of a shaman in the Mountains of Rif and prescribed an ‘elixir.’ In her book, Lady Albertina wrote that the elixir gave her a vision of ‘An angel rolling away a stone from her entombment’ and she saw her three sons happy on a higher plane. In his book, Cantillon mentions that his elixir contained a new wonder-drug called cocaine, so make of that what you will. I’d add to the mix the benefits of the talking cure, as well. The chance for an Edwardian lady to spill her guts in private and vent her spleen at God, King and country must’ve been therapeutic, to say the least. Like grief counselling, nowadays. Certainly at this stage in proceedings, Doctor Cantillon seems to’ve been a very welcome guest indeed.”

My phone buzzes in my bag. Avril texting me back, I expect, but I ignore it. “Where are the Grayer Twins in all this?”

“Right: Jonah was an apprentice clerk in the Swaffham Manor estate office. Short-sightedness and a dicky ticker’d saved him from the trenches, though as these conditions never troubled him in later life, I can’t help but wonder how real they were. Norah was a weekly boarder at a school for ladies in Cambridge, to up her marriage prospects. Léon Cantillon’d heard about their ‘telegrams’ from the Chetwynd-Pitts of course, so the first chance he had, he asked for a demo. It took place on the doctor’s first weekend at Swaffham. He was impressed. He was very impressed. ‘An annunciation of the New Age of Man,’ he later called it. A fortnight later, Cantillon put a proposal to his hosts. If they ‘lent’ him Norah and Jonah, and if the twins was willing, he’d ‘provide a psychic education consummate with their gifts.’ The doctor said he knew an occultic teacher who’d train the twins in spirit channelling. Once Norah and Jonah’d mastered that skill, he said, Lady Albertina’d be able to freely speak with her sons from their higher plane, without fear of being gulled by swindlers.”

Now I sniff a swindler. “How for real was Doctor Cantillon?”

The old man rubs a watery blue, red-rimmed eye and growls thoughtfully. “Well, the Chetwynd-Pitts believed him, which is what matters in this backstory. They agreed to his proposal to educate Norah and Jonah, though here’s where the doctor’s version of events and Lady Albertina’s begin to part ways. She wrote that Léon Cantillon’d promised the twins’d be away no more than a few months. Cantillon’s claim is that the Chetwynd-Pitts gave him guardianship of the Grayers with no small print about expiry dates, time or distance. Who’s telling the truth? That I don’t know. Truth has this habit of changing after the fact, too, don’t you find? What we do know is that Léon Cantillon took the twins first to Dover, crossed over to Calais, passed through wartime Paris, carried on south to Marseille, then sailed by steamship to Algiers. Lady Albertina calls this journey ‘an abduction, no more, no less,’ but by the time she and her husband found out about it, the horse’d bolted. Repatriation of minors is tricky enough now. Back then, when sixteen-year-olds were adults in most senses, and with the Great War in top gear, so to speak, and inside French colonial jurisprudence — forget it. The Grayer Twins were gone.”

I’m not clear: “Were they taken against their will?”

Fred Pink’s face says Hardly likely. “Which would you choose? Life as an orphaned pleb in the Tory Fens in wartime England, or life as a student of the occult under the Algerian stars?”

“It depends on whether I believed in the occult.”

“They believed.” Fred Pink sips his bitter. “Sally did, too.”

And if she hadn’t, I think, she wouldn’t have been playing Ghostbusters in unfamiliar backstreets at night; and whatever happened to her wouldn’t have happened. Either I bite my tongue or kill the interview. “The Grayers stayed in Algeria, then.”

“They did, yes. Norah and Jonah already knew telepathy. What other powers might they acquire, in the right hands? Léon Cantillon was a sly operator, there’s no doubt, but a sly operator can still be the right man for the job.” He looks at Léon Cantillon’s photo again. “He took the twins to the Albino Sayyid of Aït Arif. I mentioned him before. The Sayyid followed an occult branch called la Voie Ombragée, or the Shaded Way, and lived in a ‘dwelling of many rooms’ by a fast-flowing stream at a ‘high neck of a secret valley’ a day’s ride from Algiers; and that’s about all the info Cantillon gives us. The Sayyid accepted the odd foreign twins — who couldn’t speak a word of Arabic at this point, remember — as disciples in his house, so he must’ve seen something in them. Cantillon returned to his duties at the Foreign Legion hospital in Algiers, though he made the journey to the Sayyid’s once a fortnight to check up on his young charges’ progress.”

Outside the pub, a woman hollers, “You’re s’posed to indicate, moron!” and a car roars off. “Mr. Pink,” I say. “If I can be frank, this story feels a long way away from my sister’s disappearance.”

Fred Pink nods, and frowns at the clock on the wall: 8:14. “Give me ‘til nine o’clock. If I haven’t connected all of this with your Sally and my Alan by then, I’ll call you a taxi. On my honor.”

While I don’t have Fred Pink marked down as a liar, I do have him marked as a dreamer-upper of alternative histories. On the other hand, after all these years my own enquiries into Sally’s disappearance have led exactly nowhere. Maybe Fred Pink’s tracking me down is a hint that I need to look for leads in less obvious places. Starting now. ‘Okay: nine o’clock. Was channelling dead spirits on the Sayyid’s syllabus, as Cantillon had promised Lady Albertina?”

“You’ve got a knack of asking the right question, Miss Timms. I’m impressed.” Fred Pink gets out a box of spearmint Tic Tacs, shakes out three, offers me one — I refuse — and puts all three in his mouth. “No. Léon Cantillon had lied to the Chetwynd-Pitts about séances. I think he knew perfectly well that séances are almost always fraud. When you die, your soul crosses the Dusk between life and the Blank Sea. The journey takes forty-nine days, but there’s no wifi there, so to speak, so no messages can be sent. Either way. Mediums might convince themselves they’re hearing voices from the dead, but they’re not. It’s impossible.”

Well, that’s whacko. “That’s very exact. Forty-nine days?”

Fred Pink shrugs. “The speed of sound’s very exact. So’s pi. So are chemical formulas.” He crunches his Tic Tacs. “Ever been to the Atlas Mountains in North Africa, Miss Timms?” I shake my head. “I have, believe it or not, just a few years back. Thanks to three thousand quid I won on a scratch-card. Goes a bloomin’ long way in Algeria, does three thousand pounds, if you watch out for the pickpockets and rip-off merchants. Those buckled-up mountains, the dry sky, the hot wind, the … oh, the whole massive … Otherness of it, so to speak. I’ll never forget it. Rewires your head, if you stay long enough. Little wonder all the hippies and that lot made a beeline for places like Marrakesh in the sixties. Places change you, Miss Timms, and deserts change us pale northerners so much, our own mothers wouldn’t recognize us. Day by day, the twins’ Englishness ebbed away. They picked up Arabic from the Sayyid’s other disciples; they ate flatbread, hummus and figs; Jonah let his beard grow; Norah wore a veil, like a good Muslim girl; and sandals and dishdashas made more sense than shoes and cufflinks and petticoats and what-have-you. The calendar lost its meaning for them, Cantillon writes. One, two, three years passed. They learned occult arts and obscure sciences that there aren’t even words for in English, things that not one mind in a hundred thousand learns, or could learn, even if the chance came along. The Grayers’ only link with the outside world was Doctor Cantillon, but when he brought them up to speed with that world — the slaughter in Flanders, in Gallipoli, in Mesopotamia; the politics in Westminster, in Berlin; the sinking o’ the Lusitania—to Norah and Jonah it all sounded like stuff going on in places they’d read about years ago. Not real. For the twins, their true home was their valley. Their fatherland and motherland was the Shaded Way.” Fred Pink scratches his itchy neck — he suffers from mild psoriasis — and stares through my head, all the way to a moonlit dwelling in the Atlas Mountains.

The cracked clock says 8:18. “How long were they there?”

“Until April 1919. It ended as suddenly as it’d begun, like. Cantillon visited the Sayyid one day and the master told him he’d taught the twins all the knowledge he could impart. The time’d come for the great globe itself to be their master, he said. Which meant what, exactly? And where? England held no great attraction for any of them. There’d be no fond welcome home from the Chetwynd-Pitts at Swaffham Manor, that was for sure. Ireland was having birth-pangs and gearing up for a vicious civil war. France was on its knees, along with most of Europe, Algeria’s boom years as a war port were over, and Léon Cantillon, who was better at spending money than earning it, now found himself with a pair of oddball semi-Arabized English twins in tow. How to convert the Grayers’ occultic knowledge into a well-padded lifestyle, that was the doctor’s dilemma, wasn’t it? And the answer? The good old US of A, that was the answer. The three of them sailed for New York in July, second class, with Cantillon posing as the twins’ Uncle Léon. Norah and Jonah were hungry to see the world, like gap-year kids nowadays. They took a town-house in Klinker Street in Greenwich Village.”

“I know it well,” I say. “Spyglass’s New York office is on Klinker Street.”

“Is that a fact?” Fred Pink sips his bitter and suppresses a belch. “ ‘Scuse me. Small world.”

“What did they do to earn a living in the States?”

Fred Pink gives me a knowing look. “They held séances.”

“But séances are fraudulent, you just said.”

“I did. They are. And I’m not here to defend Cantillon or the twins, Miss Timms, but they weren’t hucksters in the usual manner. See, Norah and Jonah could read minds, or ‘overhear’ the thoughts of most of the folk they came across. That bit wasn’t a trick. It was just an extra sense they had. Like extremely sensitive hearing. They could rummage through their clients’ minds and see things the clients barely knew themselves. The twins knew what the grief-stricken most needed to hear, and what words’d best heal them — and those were the words they said. The only fiction was the claim that these words came from the dear departed. Now you might say that’s worse, not better, and maybe you’d be right. But is it so far away from what your shrinks and counsellors and psychowhatnots try to do nowadays? There was a lot, and I do mean a lot, of unhappy despairing if not suicidal New Yorkers who left that little house in Klinker Street certain, quite certain, that their loved ones were in a better place and looking out for them and that one day they’d be reunited. I mean, that’s what religion does, doesn”t it? Are you going to condemn every priest and imam and rabbi on Earth for doing the very same thing? No, the Grayer Twins’ séances weren’t real; but yes, the hope they gave, was. Isn’t the Yes better than the No?”

Fraud’s fraud, I think, but I just reply a possible nod. “So the New York gigs went well.”

Fred Pink nods. “Cantillon was a canny manager. Once the Grayers got a bit of a name for themselves, he switched tack: discreet appointments at wealthy clients’ homes. No props, no smoke, no mirrors, no ectoplasm, no ouija, no daft voices. No public performances, nothing vulgar or theatrical. Just quiet, calm, sane grief-relief, so to speak. ‘Your son says this’ and ‘Your sister says that.’ If Cantillon felt a possible client was only a thrill seeker, he turned them down. Or so he claimed, anyway.”

A football chant from the TV below wafts upstairs. It’s choppy, lulling and otherworldly. “If the Grayers had an array of genuine psychic powers, why content themselves with telling consoling fibs to rich Americans?”

Fred Pink shrugs like a comedy Frenchman: palms raised, shoulders high and head low. “Cantillon’s motives I’ll guess at — money — but Norah and Jonah left no written account, so who’s to say? Maybe they saw themselves as students of humanity, and séances let them study people better. They had a serious case of wanderlust, too, and their ‘séance service,’ let’s call it, was a passport valid in all territories. Personal recommendations went a long way, and Uncle Léon and his niece and nephew never traveled second class again. In spring of 1920 they moved to Boston, in autumn it was Charleston, then New Orleans, then San Francisco. Why stop there? They took a liner to Hawaii, to Yokohama and a spell in Japan, then on to Beijing, Manchuria, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macau, Ceylon. The best hotels and the houses of the grateful rich were their homes in that period. Bombay, New Delhi. A year or two in the British Raj, why not? A summer up in the hill stations. Then Aden, Suez, Cairo, Cyprus, Constantinople, Athens. A winter in Rome, a spring in Vienna, a summer in Berlin, Christmas in Paris. In his book, Cantillon describes how the twins honed their arts as they traveled, seeing the sights, and ‘settled for a brief sojourn like exotic birds in whatever local Society they found themselves in’—Norah rejected no less than six proposals of marriage and no doubt Jonah enjoyed his share of liaisons and conquests — but always they carried on westwards ‘til one drizzly day in May 1925, the Dover train trundled into Victoria Station, and the Grayers and their guardian took a cab to a house in Queen’s Gardens, a swish and leafy street in Bayswater.”

“They financed five years of luxury globe-trotting with séances?”

“They diversified, a bit, once they left the States. Disciples of the Shaded Way learn the Art of Suasion. A tackier name is ‘Mind Control.’ Maybe you can guess, Miss Timms, how a talent like that might be turned into a few bob …”

I play along: “If ‘suasioning’ were real, you could enlist a nearby millionaire to make you out a humungous bank draft.”

Fred Pink’s face says I guessed correctly. “And after, you use another Shaded Way skill — redaction — to erase your generous benefactor’s memory of ever writing the check. Some’d call it the perfect crime; others’d call it survival; a socialist’d call it the redistribution of wealth.” Fred Pink stands up. “Might I just pop to the gents, Miss Timms? The beer was a mistake: my prostate’s not what it was …”

I indicate the doorway. “I’m not going anywhere.” Yet.

“Aren’t you drinking your tomato juice, Miss Timms?”

I look at it. “I, uh, just don’t really fancy it, after all.”

“I’ll bring you something else up. Listening’s thirsty work.”

I wave him away. “No need, really.”

Fred Pink makes a mock-glum face. “Ah, but I insist.”

“A bit later.”

When he’s gone, I turn off my digital recorder. It’s all saved — not that I think I’ll ever listen to it again. Only an all-out conspiracy theorist or the mentally ill could ever connect this Norfolk-Dublin-Algerian-American-Trans-Pacific-Mysterious-Orient tale with six vanished students in 1997. God, it’s tempting just to slip away now, while there are still lots of trains back to London. Really, what would Fred Pink do if I did a runner now? Send me a pissed-off email? I’m a journalist: I get twenty pissed-off emails per hour. Fred Pink’s spent nine years of his life in a coma, more years locked away in a secure ward beyond Slough’s outer reaches, and he’s an obvious believer in the Dark Arts. The man’s brain is scrambled. But no. I gave him my word to stay until nine o’clock, so I’ll stay. It’s now 8:27. The last text was from Avril, as I thought.

O de glamour! Bt seriously hope Mr. P isnt waste of time.

Text me if u need urgent emrgncy 2 escape 2.

I reply:

Jury still out re Mr. P but will probly get train about 930

back to Padders 10 home by 11 i hope xxxF

SEND. I don’t remember eating dinner so I suppose I must have missed it. I go downstairs to the bar to see if there’s anything to eat. It looks like a stage set, and rather a cash-strapped one at that. With the departure of the blind chap and his dog, the population of The Fox and Hounds has dwindled to four. Up on the plasma screen a red team are playing a blue team, but I don’t know who is who. Avril knows that MUN means Manchester United and ARS stands for Arsenal, but I’m hopeless. It’s a corner, and the landlady waits a few seconds to watch the outcome — no goal — before dragging herself over to my end of the bar. I ask if she sells snacks and she lets a long pause elapse to illustrate her contempt for metropolitan media dykes. “Cheese and onion crisps or ready salted; dry roasted peanuts, or honey-glazed cashews. That’s it.”

Wow, what an embarrassment of riches. ‘Two bags of cashews and a diet tonic water, with lemon. Please.”

“We only sell real tonic water. Not diet.”

“Looks like I’ll have a real tonic water, then. Thank you so much.”

The landlady plucks the nuts from a rack, takes the tonic water from a shelf below, flips off the cap, retrieves a glass, drops in a limp segment of lemon, and pecks at the till. “Three pounds forty-five.” I hand over the right money. She asks, “What paper d’you write for, then?”

“Spyglass. It’s a magazine.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s bigger in the States than it is here.”

“Like Private Eye, is it? One o’ those sarcastic papers?”

“No, not really,” I say. “It’s less satirical.”

“So why do Americans give two hoots about six students who vanished in a small English city nine years ago?”

“I’m not sure if they do. My editor will decide that. But I’m curious.” I consider telling the landlady about Sally, but I don’t. “Being curious is my job.”

“It’s ancient history, all that stuff is.” She sighs, glances at the gents, and leans close enough for me to see the evidence of an exhausting life beneath her coating of make-up. “You’re not doing Fred any favours by egging him on. He blames himself for Alan’s vanishing, which really is mental. He spent six years at Dawkins Hospital, locked up with the Teletubbies — you do know that, yeah?”

“Mr. Pink’s been open about his medical history, yes.”

The landlady’s jaw chews phantom gum. “Meanwhile he fancies himself as this Inspector Morse who’ll solve the big mystery and maybe find Alan and the X-Files Six alive somewhere, which is double-mental. ‘X-Files Six’: as if it’s all some stupid TV show! But it’s not. It’s serious. It’s pain. It’s best left buried. Fred’s wife left him. A saint of a woman was Jackie, but when Fred buggered off to Algeria she just couldn’t take it any more and moved back to the Isle of Man. Now all Fred’s got is his theories about his Illuminati, the Holy Grail, Atlantis and whateverthebollocks it is this week. And you,” she folds her meaty arms as Fred Pink emerges from the gents in the corner, “you, you’re feeding all that. Pouring fuel on the flames. Hey, Fred.” She straightens up and smiles at Fred Pink like nothing’s wrong. “Your new best friend here was telling me how low some media scum-suckers’ll stoop just to get a story. Throw ’em to the bloody piranhas, I say. Let like eat like. Fancy a brandy this time, eh?”

“Sorry about Maggs,” says Fred Pink, back in the upstairs room. “I shouldn’t’ve told her you’re a journalist. The locals’d rather forget the X-Files Six. Too Amityville Horror, too Bermuda Triangle. Bad for house prices.”

I munch a handful of honey-glazed cashews. God, they’re good. “ ‘Scum-sucker’ is one of the sweeter names I’ve had, believe me. So, Mr. Pink: we left Doctor Cantillon and the Grayer Twins in Bayswater after their years of travel in foreign parts.”

Fred Pink sloshes his brandy around the glass. “Yes, it’s now 1925. Norah and Jonah are twenty-six, and ‘Uncle Léon’ is fifty. For eleven years he’s been their fixer, guardian, PR man, accountant. Now he wants to be their biographer, or more — their John the Baptist. You see, he’d decided the time’d come to go public and persuade the world that spiritualism and science could be respectably married. Money and a comfortable life wasn’t enough. His new ambition was to establish a new discipline — psychosoterica — with none other than Doctor Léon Cantillon as its Darwin, its Freud, its Newton. Which put him at serious odds with Norah and Jonah. See, they’d drunk their fill of the big bad world. What they wanted was to hide away and see which dead ends down the Shaded Way might not be dead ends after all. So they told Cantillon no, there’d be no biography, no great unveiling, and no more public engagements. Obedient Uncle Léon told the twins, ‘I hear and obey.’ But Obedient Uncle Léon was lying through his teeth. He spent most of the next two years writing his exposé, The Great Unveiling. It wasn’t the usual re-hash of Europe’s Top Ten Witches and Wizards, like most books about the Occult were in those days. Leon Cantillon’s book had three sections. Part one was the first ever written history of the Shaded Way, from its fifth- century beginnings to the twentieth. Part two was a biography of the Grayer Twins from their Swaffham Manor days to their return to England. Part three was a manifesto for an International Psychoterica Society to be set up in London, with Doctor Guess Who as its lifetime president.”

My phone buzzes in my bag. Avril’s reply to my reply, I bet. It’s 8:45, it’ll wait. “Why did Cantillon go against the twins’ wishes?”

“Can’t be sure. I suspect he reckoned that once the cat was out of the bag, once Uncle Tom Cobley and all were clamouring for the Age of Psychosoterica to begin, the Grayers’d see how right he was, and sign up. If that was Cantillon’s thinking,” Fred Pink ruffles more dandruff out of his hair, “he was mistaken. Tragically mistaken. On March twenty-ninth, 1927, the printers delivered ten boxes of The Great Unveiling. On March thirtieth, he mailed about six dozen copies to various theosophists, philosophers, occultists and patrons, in England and overseas. My copy of the book, which I keep in a safety deposit box in a place I tell nobody, is one of those six dozen. In the early hours of the next morning — March thirty-first — a conveniently positioned bobby was walking down Queen’s Gardens. He saw Léon Cantillon lift his fifth-floor sash window and perch on the sill, naked as a baby, shout out these words: ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven’—John Milton, if you’re curious — and jump out. He might’ve survived, but he landed on a row of pointy railings. You can picture the scene. Quite the nine-day wonder, it was. The coroner recorded a verdict of death by insanity and the Westminster Gazette covered the funeral. Jonah read the eulogy, while Norah, ‘the very model of demure grief in an ankle-length dress of black crepe’—yes, I memorized it — sobbed for her guardian. Jonah told the reporter that he prayed that Doctor Cantillon’s ‘bizarre delusions’ would show how dangerous it is to meddle in the Black Arts. Dean Grimond would’ve been proud. Weeks passed, the tragedy of the ex-Foreign Legion doctor became old news, and, copy by copy, the large stock of unposed Great Unveilings burned in the Grayers’ fireplace in Queen’s Gardens.”

I’m bothered by a phrase: “ ‘A conveniently positioned bobby’?”

Fred Pink sips his brandy. “Never cross a qualified suasioner.”

To follow this Fred Pink’s trail of breadcrumbs you have to blindfold your own sanity. “Meaning, a suasioner can also make a man jump to his death?”

“ ‘Xactly so, Miss Timms.”

“But Cantillon, in your narrative, had been a loyal friend and protector.”

“Had been, yes; but then he became a threat. A kind of apostate, too: the Occult’s like any religious order — or any bunch of extremists, come to that. It’s all beer and sunshine and ‘We are your family’ as long as you obey orders, but once you get your own ideas or start talking out of school, the gloves come off. Whether Cantillon was pushed or whether Cantillon jumped, the Grayers’ trail grows faint after the Westminster Gazette, and stays faint for four years. They left the Bayswater house in May 1927—I can date it from their launderers’ accounts — but then it’s a big blank. I’ve found a possible sighting of the twins at Sainte-Agnès in the Maritime Alps in 1928, a reference to mind-reading English twins in Rhodesia in 1929, and a ‘Miss Norah’ with a twin brother in a love-letter written in Fiji and dated 1930, but nothing’s — what’s the word? — cross-corroborated.” Fred Pink drums his fingers on his bulging satchel. “You’ve already been patient, so I’ll hurry us on to your sister’s role before the clock strikes nine.”

“I will need to get going then, Mr. Pink.”

“In August 1931, according to the local land register, Mr. Jonah Grayer and his sister Miss Norah Grayer bought Slade House, not two hundred yards from this very pub. It’d been an eighteenth-century rectory attached to the parish of Saint Brianna. Once upon a time it was surrounded by woods and fields, though by the time the Grayers moved in, Slade House was a walled fortress in a sea of brick houses, in a factory town more passed through than stopped at, so to speak. The neighbourhood was full of factory workers, full of big families, full of Irish and itinerants, full of folk coming and going and doing midnight flits. Which suited the Grayers’ purposes down to a T.”

“What purposes were these, Mr. Pink?”

“They needed laboratory rats, see.”

What I see is the whackometer needle climbing. “Laboratory rats for … what kind of experiments?”

Fred Pink’s glasses reflect and bend the grimy strip-light. “I’ll die, one of these mornings. I’m seventy-nine now, I still smoke like a flamin’ chimney, my blood pressure’s chronic. Maggs the landlady’ll die, too; whoever keeps sending you them texts’ll die; and you’ll die as well, Miss Timms. Death’s life’s only guarantee, yes? We all know it, yet we’re hardwired to dread it. That dread’s our survival instinct and it serves us well enough when we’re young, but it’s a curse when you’re older.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Mr. Pink. And?”

“Norah and Jonah Grayer wanted to not die. Ever.”

Bang on cue, a goal’s scored on the TV downstairs and the crowd surges and roars like a kettle boiling. I maintain my professional face. “Don’t we all?”

“Yes. We do. It’s the oldest dream, right? Life everlasting.” Fred Pink takes off his glasses to rub them on his shirt. “It’s why religion got invented and it’s why religion stays invented. What else matters more than not dying? Power? Gold? Sex? A million quid? A billion? A trillion? Really? They won’t buy you an extra minute when your number’s up. No, cheating death, cheating aging, cheating the care home, cheating the mirror and the dug-up corpse’s face like mine that you’ll see in your mirror too, Miss Timms, and sooner than you think: that’s a prize worth the hunting, the taking. That’s the only prize worth hunting. And what we want, we dream of. The stage-props change down the ages, but the dream stays the same: philosophers’ stones; magic fountains in lost Tibetan valleys; lichens that slow the decay of our cells; tanks of liquid whatever that’ll freeze us for a few centuries; computers that’ll store our personalities as ones and zeroes for the rest of time. To call a spade a spade: immortality.”

The whackometer needle is stuck on 11. “I see.”

Fred Pink’s smile curves downwards. “The one little snag being, immortality’s all hooey. Right?”

I sip my non-diet tonic water. “Since you ask, yes.”

He puts his glasses on. “What if, very occasionally, it’s real?”

And so Fred Pink proves himself divorced not only from his wife, but from reality. 8:52. “If anyone discovered How Not To Die, I don’t think it’d stay a secret very long.”

Now he acts as if he’s the one humouring me. ‘Don’t you now? Why’s that then, Miss Timms?”

I strangle a sigh of exasperation. “Because the inventors or researchers would want recognition, fame, Nobel Prizes.”

“No. What they’d want is Not To Die. Which wouldn’t happen by going public. Think about it: what’s fuelling the wars in the world, right now? Oil and diamonds in West Africa,” Fred Pink counts on his fingers, “disagreements over the Prophet’s true heirs in the Muddle East, and the power-lust of a nudey Russian tsar in the Kremlin — to name but three. If people’ll cheerfully slaughter tens of thousands for motives as shoddy as these, what wouldn’t the warlords and the oligarchs and the elite do to secure the limited supply of Life Everlasting? Miss Timms, they’d kick off World War Three. Our plucky inventors’d be shot by maniacs, be buried in bunkers or die in a nuclear war. If the supply’s not limited, the prospects’re even bleaker. Yes, we’d all stop dying, but we wouldn’t stop breeding. Would we? Men are dogs, Miss Timms: you know that. Give it twenty, thirty, fifty years, there’d be thirty, forty, a hundred billion human beings pressing down on our Godforsaken world. We’d be drowning in our own shit even as we fought each other for the last Pot Noodle in the last supermarket. See? Either way you lose. If you’re smart enough to discover immortality, you’re smart enough to ensure your own supply and keep very very very shtum indeed. Like the Grayer Twins did, in an attic, close to this spot, eighty years ago.” Fred Pink leans back like a man who’s proved a point.

His belief is unshakeable and appalling. I choose my words with care. ‘How did the Grayers achieve what you’re saying they achieved?”

“A quartet of psychosoteric breakthroughs. First off, they perfected the Lacuna. A Lacuna’s a small space that’s immune to time, so a candle’ll never burn down in it, or a body won”t age in it. Second, they enhanced the transversion Sayyid’d taught them — what the new age jokers call astral projection — so they could go as far as they wanted from their bodies, for as long as they wanted. Third, they mastered long-term suasioning, so their souls could move into a stranger and occupy that body. Meaning, the Grayers were now free to leave their bodies in the Lacuna they created in the attic of Slade House and inhabit bodies in the outside world. You with me so far, yes?”

Yes, Fred Pink is barking mad. “Assuming souls are real.”

“Souls are as real as gall bladders, Miss Timms. Believe me.”

“And nobody’s ever held a soul or X-rayed one because …?”

“Is a mind X-rayable? Is hunger? Is jealousy? Time?”

“I see. So souls can fly about the place, like Tinker Bell?”

A pipe gurgles in the wall. “Provided the soul’s the soul of an Engifted.”

“A what?”

“An Engifted. A psychic, or a potential psychic. And like Tinker Bell, sort of; but a Tinker Bell who’ll live inside your mind without your consent, for years if it wants, hack into your brain, control your actions and play funny buggers with your memories. Or kill you.”

My phone’s vibrating again. “So the Grayer Twins are a pair of wandering Jews hitching rides in hosts while their own bodies stay dry-frozen in a bubble back in Slade House where it’s forever 1931?”

Fred Pink knocks back his brandy. “1935. It took them a few years — and a few lab rats — to perfect their modus operandi, so to speak. But there’s a catch. This system won’t run off the mains. It runs off psychovoltage. The psychovoltage of Engifteds. Every nine years the Grayers have to feed it. They have to lure the right sort of guest into a … kind of reality bubble they call an orison. The orison’s their fourth breakthrough, by the way. Once the guest’s there, the twins have to get them to eat or drink Banjax. Banjax is a chemical that shrivels the cord fastening the soul to the body, so it can be extracted just before death.”

What do you say to a delusional old man who expects you to be awed by the historic awesomeness of his revelations? “That all sounds very involved.”

“Ah, the Grayers make it look easy. It’s an art form, see.”

It’s batshit crazy is what it is. 8:56. “And how is it connected with my sister?”

“She was engifted, Miss Timms. The Grayers killed her for her psychovoltage.”

Right. I feel like he’s punched me. I want to punch him back. Fred Pink has dragooned my sister into his nutso fantasy.

“I knew it wasn’t Alan, and I’ve met siblings of the other four, but not one had the glow. You do, so I know it was Sally they were after.”

I feel various emotions all too mixed up to sort out, like ingredients flying around in a Moulinex. “You never even met Sally, Mr. Pink.”

“Ah, but her case study leaves no room for doubt. When I read what her doctor in Singapore wrote, I knew her psychic potential—”

“Woah, woah, woah — when you read what?”

“She had therapy sessions in Singapore. You must’ve known.”

“Of course I knew, but you — you read Sally’s psychiatric reports?”

“Yes.” Fred Pink looks surprised that I’m upset. “I had to read them.”

“What gives you the right to read Sal’s files? And how did you get them?”

He looks at the doorway and lowers his voice: “With a great deal of difficulty, I can tell you: but with a clean conscience, too. If someone’d stopped the Grayers in an earlier decade, Miss Timms, my Alan and your Sally’d still be with us. But nobody did. ’Cause nobody knew this backstory. But now I know, and I’m trying to stop them. This is war. In war, ends justify means. War is ends justifying means. And believe it or not, I’m a secret warrior in this invisible war. So yes”—a glob of saliva flies from his lips—“I make no apology for combing through Sally’s doctors’ notes from both Singapore and Great Malvern, and by adding two and two—”

Hang on—“Sally didn’t see a therapist in Malvern. She loved it there.”

The pity in the old man’s face is disturbingly genuine: “She was miserable, Miss Timms. The bullying was merciless. She wanted to die.”

“No,” I’m saying, “no way. She would’ve told me. We’re family.”

“Often as not,” Fred Pink scratches his thigh, “the family’s the last to know about the big stuff. Wouldn’t you agree?”

I can’t work out if he’s referring to my complex sexuality. Fred Pink may be sporadically insane, but he’s no fool. I sip my tonic water and find my glass is empty. 8:57. I should just go. Now. Really.

“You’re an Engifted too, see.” Fred Pink gazes at my forehead. “Call it an aura, call it a feeling, but you’re humming with psychovoltage yourself. That’s why we met here and not down Slade Alley. The alley’s where the Grayers’ Aperture opens, into their orison. They’d sniff you out.”

I’ve met enough delusionals to know they have answers for every logical objection — that’s why they’re delusionals — but I ask this: “If these ‘soul vampires’ only wanted Sally, why abduct the other five? Where are Alan and the others now?”

“The Grayers didn’t want any witnesses. Alan and the others, they were just …” Fred Pink clenches his face again, as if in pain. “Snuffed out. Their bodies were chucked into the gap between the orison and our world. Like bin-bags down a garbage chute. The only upside is, their souls moved on while Sally’s was … converted. Eaten.”

Maybe a part of me thinks logic can still save Fred Pink, or maybe I’ve a morbid curiosity about his psychosis, or maybe it’s both. “And why didn’t the police ever investigate this Slade House, if it’s so near to where Sally and Alan vanished?”

“Slade House was bombed to rubble in 1940. Direct hit by a German bomb. Cranbury Avenue and Westwood Road were built over it, after the war.”

It’s 8:59. “So how was Sally ‘lured in’ in 1997?”

“She was lured into an orison of Slade House. A copy. A shadow-theatre. For pre-surgery.”

“And why weren’t the Grayers’ preserved bodies in their attic Lacuna destroyed by the bomb?”

“’Cause in the Lacuna, it’s always a few minutes after 11 p.m. on Saturday, 26 October, 1935. The very second the Lacuna went live, so to speak. If you’d been there watching, you’d’ve seen the Grayers vanish, whoosh, like you’d just glimpsed them from a fast train hurtling by at the speed of time. But inside the Lacuna, it’s that moment eternally. Safer than the deepest nuclear vault under the Colorado Rockies.”

Maggs the landlady downstairs is right. I’m feeding a sad and broken old man’s madness. My phone buzzes again. The clock’s hands move to nine o’clock. I hear Maggs laugh long and hard: it’s a sound like the stabbing violins from the shower scene in Psycho. “Well, it’s certainly a detailed, consistent theory. But …”

“It’s a load o’ codswallop, right?” Fred Pink flicks his brandy glass. It pings.

I switch off my recorder. “I don’t believe in magic, Mr. Pink.”

Fred Pink hums a long wavery tuneless note until his lungs are empty. “Pity, you being a journalist and all. I was hoping you’d write a big exposé for Spyglass. Alert the authorities.” He looks at the dark window. “What proof’d convince you?”

“Proof that is proof; not faith masquerading as proof.”

“Ah.” He idly examines his ink- and tobacco-stained fingernails. I’m glad he’s taking rejection this calmly. “Proof, faith. Those words, eh?”

“I’m sorry I can’t believe you, Mr. Pink. Really. But I don’t, and now my partner’s expecting me at home.”

He nods. “Well, I promised I’d call you a taxi, so that’s what I’ll do. A lunatic I may be, but I’m still a man of my word.” He stands up. “Shan’t be a tick. Check your texts. Someone’s worried.”

It’s over. I feel empty. Avril’s sent no fewer than six messages.

U finished yet honey?

Cooked pumpkin soup

Soup will be perfect before I go to bed. Next up:

last london train from ur end:

twelve past midnite. U on it?

It’s thoughtful of Avril, but it’s a bit odd, considering it’s only 9 P.M. Unless that “U” means “Will u be.” I open her third text:

ok am officially worried, tried to call,

NO SIGNAL message. where r u?

U staying at hotel or wot? CALL xA

A hotel? Avril’s not one of life’s habitual worriers; why do I need a hotel? And if she can text, why can’t she call? Is it the network? The next text reads:

Hon its 3am and I know ur big tuff girl

but CALL to say ur ok or I wont sleep.

Lotta’s wedding 2moro u rmmbr?

3 A.M.? What’s she on about? My mobile’s saying 21:02; the cracked clock agrees. She never gets rat-arsed on drink and she never smokes dope. I call her mobile … and get a NO SIGNAL DETECTED message. Fantastic. Vodafone must have begun upgrading their network after Avril’s texts arrived. I scroll down to message five:

Freya u angry? if so dnt undrstnd

sorry, cldnt sleep cnt think worried

sick. Lottas wedding begins noon

dnt know if I shd go or call police

or wot. dont care what happnd or

if u with anyone but pls PLS call.

Avril doesn’t do head-screwing jokes like this, but if it isn’t a joke, it’s a mental meltdown. “If u with anyone”? We’re monogamous. We have been since Day One. Avril knows that. She should know that. I try calling our neighbor, Tom, but it’s still NO SIGNAL DETECTED. Maybe there’s a payphone in the bar — The Fox and Hounds is stuck in the 1980s. Otherwise I’ll ask Maggs the Moody Cow if I can pay to use her landline. I read the final text:

told Lotta u have glandular fever

so we stay at home. called Nic n

Beryl but they not hear from u.

police say wait 48 hrs b4 search.

PLS FREYA CALL ME, AM

LOSING MY MIND!!!

Nothing Fred Pink has said tonight disturbs me as much as this: Avril’s the sane one who soothes away my nightmares; who reattaches my handle when I fly off it. The only explanation is that, yes indeed, she has lost her mind. I hurry down the steep stairs to the bar below …

… and when I arrive, I enter the upstairs room I just left … and I stand there gasping like I’ve just been drenched in icy water. My hand grips the doorframe. The same tables, the same chairs, the same night-time window, the same enameled Guinness ad with a leprechaun playing a fiddle; the upstairs room of The Fox and Hounds. By going down I went up. My brain insists this happened. My brain insists this can”t have happened. My digital recorder’s still on the table we were sitting at — I forgot to pick it up in my panic — between my undrunk tomato juice, my empty cashew-nut packets, and Fred Pink’s brandy glass. Behind me, the stairs are going down, and I can see the floor of the bar below, an ugly chessboard pattern. I hear the Have I Got News for You theme tune from the TV. Breathe, Freya; think. Stress does this; your job is stressful; hearing a nutter tell you your sister had her soul converted into diesel was stressful. Avril’s texts were stressful. Memory’s a slippery eel at the best of times, so obviously, obviously, you just, just “pre-imagined” going downstairs, but didn’t actually go. If you walk down the stairs again — I mean now — one calm step at a time, I’m sure—

My phone rings. Fumblingly, I get it out of my handbag: the screen says CALLER NOT RECOGNIZED. I fire off a fierce secular prayer that it’s Avril and answer with a frantic, “Hello?”

All I hear is an uncoiling sandstorm of static.

I speak at it: “This is Freya Timms. Who’s this?”

Maybe standing by the window will strengthen the signal.

I speak more loudly and clearly: “Avril? Is that you?”

Big trees on Westwood Road smother street-lamps.

Deep inside the static, words form: “Please! I can’t breathe!”

Sally. Sally. It’s Sally. I’m crouching on the floor. My sister.

It can’t be; it is; listen! “You can’t do this to me — you can’t!”

My sister’s alive! Hurt and scared, but alive! My words unblock and my tight throat opens enough to say “It’s Freya, Sal — where are you? Sal! Where are you?”

The static howls and beats and flaps and wails and thrashes and I hear “Someone’llstopyouonedayyou’llsufferyou’llpay—”

The line’s dead, the screen says NO SIGNAL DETECTED and in my head I’m screaming “NO!” but that won’t help so I’m clicking through the menus to CALL REGISTER but I hit GAMES and activate Snake and my stupid bastard phone won’t let me go back until it’s all loaded, but Sal’s alive alive alive, and I should call the police now, but what if she calls back when I’m talking to them, or what if she’s been locked in a psycho’s cellar for nine years like that Kampusch woman in Austria who escaped from her captor last month or what if—

My phone’s trilling and flashing. I answer: “Sally!”

“No, dearie. This is the Moody Cow from downstairs.”

Maggs the landlady? “Look, I’m coming down, I need—”

“It’s a bit late to help Sally now, I’m afraid, dearie.”

I hear her say the line one more time in my head.

I can’t speak, or move, or think, or do anything at all …

… the dead flies in the strip-light have woken up.

“That was only her echo, dearie. Her residue. Time’s voicemail, if you like, from nine years ago. Oh, very well, then — it was your sister’s ghost talking.”

Fear shunts me back through gluey air. “Who are you?”

Maggs sounds teasing and friendly: “Surely one of Spyglass magazine’s top journalists could hazard an intelligent guess after everything you’ve heard?”

What have I missed? “Let me speak with Mr. Pink.”

“Fred passed away months ago, dearie. Prostate cancer. A horrible way to go.”

A deep gulp inflates my lungs: a bona fide psychopath who impersonates the dead and keeps a fan-club of sicko helpers — the other customers? A locked-up pub; blinds down; murder. Murder. I go to the window. It’s a sash design, but it has frame-locks and it won’t open.

The landlady’s voice crackles out of my Nokia: “Still there, are you, dearie? The connection’s breaking up.”

Keep her talking: “Look, just tell me where Sally is, I’m sure—”

“Sally’s not anywhere. Sally’s dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.”

I drop the phone and let it lie and grab a chair to smash the window and scream blue bloody murder and wake the street and scramble down a drainpipe or jump out but when I turn back to smash the glass the window’s gone. It’s wall. It’s gone. It’s wall …

… I turn to the stairs. The stairs are gone. There’s a pale door instead, with a worn gold doorknob. The landlady’s on the other side. She’s doing this. I don’t know how, but she’s doing this, and she’s inside my head. Or wait wait wait—

I’m doing it. I’m the one with the psychosis, not Fred Pink.

I need an ambulance, not a police car. 999. Dial it. Now.

Really, which is likelier? The laws of physics breaking down, or a stressed-out journalist breaking down? I pick up my phone, praying this lucidity lasts. A crisp, efficient-sounding lady answers straight off: “Hello, emergency services?”

“Yeah, hi, I— My name’s Freya Timms, I–I— I–I—”

“Stay with me now, Freya.” The operator sounds like my mum, but efficient. “Tell me the situation, and we’ll see what we can do to help.”

If I speak about hallucinations in pubs, she’ll fob me off with a helpline number. I need something drastic: “I’ve gone into labor; I’m on my own, but I’m in a wheelchair, and I need an ambulance.”

“That’s fine, Freya, don’t worry; what’s your location?”

“A pub — The Fox and Hounds, but I’m not from round here so—”

“It’s fine, Freya, I know The Fox and Hounds. My brother and I live just down the street.”

I think, Thank God! but then I understand.

I understand why she sounds so amused.

I understand there’s no way out of here.

“Better late than never,” says the stern voice on the phone. “Turn around and look at the candle on the table, behind you. Now.”

As I obey, the room dims. A candle sits on an ornate candlestick engraved with runes on its stem and base. The flame sways.

“Watch the flame,” orders the voice. “Watch.”

Reality folds in, origami-like, and darkens to black. I can’t feel my body but I’m kneeling, I think, and three faces have joined me. Left of the candle hovers a woman in her mid-thirties. She’s familiar. She is Maggs the landlady, but twenty years younger, slimmer, blonder, smoother-skinned and eerily beautiful. Right of the candle is a man of the same age, also blond, and also known to me … as I study him, a young Fred Pink emerges from his face. The two are twins. Who can they be but Norah and Jonah Grayer? They are absolutely motionless, like the candle-flame, and like the third face watching me over the candle. Freya Timms staring out of a mirror. I try to move a limb, a thumb, an eyelid, but my nervous system has shut down. Is this what happened to Sal? I somehow know it was. Did she think of me? Did she want her big sister to come and rescue her? Or was she past that stage by then?

“Unbelievable!” Norah Grayer’s face flickers into fury as the candle’s flame untwists and twists. Maybe I’ve been here minutes, maybe days. Time needs time to be measurable. “How dare you?”

“Sister,” Jonah Grayer swivels his jaw as if it fits poorly. “What on Earth—”

Me, I’m still paralyzed from the eyeballs down.

“You told our entire life-story to this wretched reporter!”

“Fred Pink had to share some of his findings, or the Oink’s sister would’ve decided he was wasting her time, and gone. Why the hysteria?”

“Don’t ‘hysteria’ me!” Spittle flies over the candle. “For even naming the Shaded Way, the Sayyid would nullify you. On the spot and with just cause!”

“Oh, I’d like to see the Sayyid try, peace be upon him. What are you afraid of? Our story’s a banquet of marvels, and it’s exactly never that the chance comes along to share it with a discreet listener. Because she is discreet. Shall we ask her how discreet she is? Let’s. It’ll put your mind at rest.” He turns to me. “Miss Timms: do you intend to publish Fred Pink’s backstory, as you heard it told on this memorable evening?”

I can’t shake — or nod — my head by so much as a millimeter.

“We can take that as a ‘No,’ Sister dear. Just chill.”

“ ‘Chill’? So acting like a teenager is no longer enough? Our guest was damn nearly a no-show; she rejected the first Banjax and—”

“No no no no no. No, Norah. You’re doing it again — scaring yourself with all manner of ‘What ifs’ instead of examining the facts and outcome with a calm mind.”

What facts? I am desperate to ask. What outcome?

“Fred Pink told you all the answers, Honey Pie,” Jonah turns his mocking face my way, “but I’ll spell it out for you, since your sister evidently inherited the brains as well as the fat. On your way to meet me — me, in a random old man’s body I commandeered as Mr. Pink — you decided it was a waste of time, after all. Having considered this, and all eventualities, I had you followed. So at a sheltered bend in the park near the bandstand, one of my Blackwatermen sprayed an ingenious compound in your face. You lost consciousness on the spot, poor thing. Thanks to fastidious planning”—he glances at his sister—“a St. John’s ambulance was only a minute away. These worthy volunteers had you safe, sound, strapped in a wheelchair and rendered to our Aperture within five short minutes. My men even hid your face under a hood, to protect you from the spots of rain. And from prying eyes. You were rendered into our orison, which my sister had swiftly redesigned into a perfect copy of The Fox and Hounds — your original destination — and brought to the orison’s heart, the Lacuna. Given the difficulties of redacting memories from an Engifted mind, I played safe and wiped out the whole day, which is why you can’t remember leaving London. When you awoke, I treated you to the greatest scoop of your life. There.” Jonah runs his tongue along his upper teeth. “Wasn’t that satisfying? I feel like a detective laying out the facts in the final scene of a whodunit. Yes, yes Sister,” Jonah turns once more to his sister, who still looks furious, “our guest turned up her nose at the tomato juice, but we Banjaxed her good and proper with the cashew nuts. And yes, I went off script a smidgeon during my turn as Fred Pink, and told her more than I’d meant to; but she’ll be dead in two minutes, and dead journalists don’t file copy.”

Dead? He did say ‘Dead’? They’re going to kill me?

“I’m afraid so,” says Jonah. “You should have believed Fred Pink.”

“You were a fool and braggart, Brother.” Norah’s voice is hard with anger, but I’m only half hearing: “Never discuss la Voie Ombragée with anyone. Nor Ely, Swaffham, Cantillon, nor Aït Arif. Ever. Whatever the circumstances. Ever. Do you understand?”

“I’ll mend my ways, Sister dear.” Jonah gives a mock-contrite sigh.

Norah’s disgusted. “One day your flippancy will kill you.”

“If you say so, Sister.”

“And on that day I will save myself if I can, and abandon you if I must.”

Jonah’s about to reply — perhaps with a smarmy retort — but changes his mind and the subject. “I am famished, you are famished, our Operandi is famished and supper is plucked, trussed, seasoned and ready—” he turns his whole body to face me and whispers “—bewitched, bothered and bewildered. You’re not breathing, Honey Pie. Have you really not noticed?”

I want this to be a sadistic lie but it’s true — I’m not breathing. So this is it. I don’t die in crossfire, or in a car crash, or at sea, but here, inside this … nightmare that can’t be real, but which, nonetheless, is. The twins begin to ply the air with their fingers like harpists, slowly at first, then faster. Now they seem to draw on the air, like high-speed calligraphers. Their lips move too, but I don’t know if I’m hearing them or the buzzing echoes of my oxygen-starved brain closing down. Above the candle, a thing congeals into being. It’s the size of a misshapen head, but faceless. It glows, red, bright to dark, bright to dark, and stringy roots emerge from it, fixing it in the dark air. Longer roots snake their way towards me. I try to squirm my head back or shut my eyes but I can’t. I’d scream if I could, a loud, hard, horror-film scream, but I can’t. The roots twist into my mouth, nose and ears, and then I feel a spear-tip of pain where my Cyclop’s eye would be. Something is being extracted through the same spot: it hovers there, before my eyes, a translucent shimmering globe, smaller than a pool-ball, but cloudy with a countless stars. It’s my true me. It’s my soul. The Grayer Twins lean in.

They purse their lips; and inhale, sharply.

My soul distends like a blob of dough being pulled apart.

It’s mine, it’s me, but it’s hopeless, it’s hopeless, it’s hope—

Suddenly, inches away, a figure fills the narrow gap between the Grayers, blocking my view. She’s a she, in a designer jacket. Her plump midriff blocks what little light there is from the candle and the heart-brain-thing above it. Norah Grayer falls back to my right, shock twisting her face. Jonah can’t move away, even if he wanted to: one of the intruder’s small hands — she has peacock-blue fingernails — grips his neck, while the other hand, swift as a small bird’s wing, plunges a thick, six-inch needle into one side of his windpipe — and clean out of the other, like a cocktail stick piercing a very large olive. Blood seeps from both punctures, treacle black on stone gray in this dimness. Jonah’s eyes bulge in disbelief, his head and jaw slump and his two puncture wounds froth as he tries to make a noise. His attacker releases him, but the weapon — a hairpin, if I’m not wrong — stays jammed in place. As his head tilts, I have a view of a silver fox’s head with gemstone eyes at the top of the hairpin. Shouted fragments reach me from Norah, a few feet and light years away—Get out! Damn ghost! GET OUT! The intruder is fading away now — I see the candle-flame through her body. My stretched soul has reformed itself into a globe and is now fading away too. My body is dead but my soul is saved. My rescuer’s pendant swings through my soul, lit deep-sea green by the last of the starry atoms. Eternity, jade, it’s Maori, I chose it, I wrapped it, I sent it once to someone I love.