Slade House

Astronauts, 2015

Bombadil’s iPhone vibrates over his heart. With his cold fingers, I fish out the device from the large skiing jacket I had him buy near our anonymous hotel earlier when I saw the ominous state of the sky. Sleet peppers the screen. The message is from the Blackwaterman:

yr guest parked 50m from Westwood Road

entrance to alley, navy blue VW Tiguan.

I reply concisely:

ok

Our operatives are masters of their martial craft and need no further orders. I half feared the wintry weather might delay our guest, or even deter her from making the car journey altogether. Turning a no-show into a show would have complicated the day in tense, unpleasant ways, but instead, our guest is a quarter of an hour early and we can afford to relax a little. On a whim, I locate Philip Glass’s music for The Truman Show on Bombadil’s iPhone, and listen to it by way of pre-prandial entertainment. Jonah and I saw the film at a backstreet cinema in St. Tropez at the turn of the century. We were moved by the protagonist’s horror at the breadth and depth of the gulf between his own life and the quotidian world. The Côte d’Azur could be the right sanctuary for Jonah to spend a few weeks after nine static years in his wounded body. The Riviera has no lack of privileged hosts whose hair Jonah could let down, and I would enjoy the sunshine on a host’s skin after five days of this absurd weather. A moon-gray cat appears at Bombadil’s feet, miaowing for food. “You’re not as hungry as we are,” I assure it. The wind slams down Slade Alley, flurrying sleet and leaves in its roiling coil. I zip up Bombadil’s hood to protect his earphones, restricting my view to a fur-lined oval, and think of sandstorms at the Sayyid’s house in the Atlas Mountains. How the century hurtled away. The cat has given me up as a lost cause. Bombadil’s toes are numb in his flimsy trainers, but he’ll be dead before his chilblains can bloom. My conscience rests easy.

A short, slim figure, bulked out by cold-weather clothing, walks down Slade Alley, backlit by sleet-whitened, hurrying light. Doctor Iris Marinus-Levy is a psychiatrist from Toronto on a placement at Dawkins Hospital, outside Slough. Two twists of fate set her on the path that leads to our Aperture. The first is that in 2008 she obtained the notebooks of Fred Pink, the former Dawkins patient who died in 2005. She wrote a series of academic papers on abduction psychoses, drawing from the notebooks, in which she describes Pink’s obsession with Jonah and Norah Grayer, a pair of long-dead “soul vampires.” The second twist of fate is that Iris Marinus-Levy is, against quite delicious odds, an Engifted herself, and is therefore fair game. The Mighty Shrink proved absurdly easy to lure here. She stops, a few paces away; a black professional in her late thirties — a smooth, sub-Saharan, black-leather-jacket black that sharpens the whites of her eyes and teeth. Marinus dresses dowdily for work, and even off duty she hides her figure under mannish clothes: a sheepskin flying jacket, rumpled trousers, hiking boots, a moss-green beret, a keffiyeh around her neck and little or no make-up. She wears her wiry hair short. A khaki canvas bag is tucked under her shoulder. Calmly, she sizes up Bombadil, a skinny Caucasian in his early twenties, with bad skin, an ill-advised lip-stud, a sharkish chin, a cheesy smell, and sore eyes. My host is swallowed up by his XXL ski jacket. Iris Marinus-Levy, PhD, sees her next research subject, her Fred Pink the Second, and this one, she gets to meet in the flesh. I unplug Bombadil from his headphones and have him give Marinus a Got a problem? face.

She recites the first line of the word-key: “Yes, I’m looking for a pub called The Green Man.” Her voice is deep, clear and has an accent that used to be labelled “mid-Atlantic.”

Bombadil has a muttery, wandering Estuary English accent I leave the way it is: “No. The Green Man’s gone the way of The Fox and Hounds.”

Iris Marinus-Levy offers her gloved hand. “Bombadil.”

I feel the prickle of psychovoltage, even through her cashmere gloves. “Doctor Iris Marinus-Levy.”

“Nine syllables wears you out. ‘Marinus’ is fine.”

I notice the blue checks of her keffiyeh are in fact half-centimeter-wide Stars of David. What a smug piece of symbolism. Our handshake ends. “Isn’t that, like, calling you by your surname?”

The Mighty Shrink duly notes my nomenclatural sensitivities: “Marinus is more of an inner name than a family name.”

I have Bombadil shrug. “Welcome back to Slade Alley, Marinus.”

“Thanks for reaching out to me.” She knows better than to ask for my real name. “Your emails were fascinating.”

“Thought it’d broaden your mind, seeing a real live orison, like.”

“I’m curious to see what we’ll see, Bombadil. Say, this wind’s sharp as a razor. Would you prefer to talk where it’s warmer? I’m parked just on the street, or I passed a Starbucks at the Green. Did you have lunch already? I’m buying.”

“I never talk where I haven’t swept for wires,” I tell her.

Marinus makes a mental note of this. “I understand.”

I nod along the alley. “Let’s jump in at the deep end, like.”

“Go straight inside the ‘orison’ you mean?”

“Yup. Still there. I went in yesterday, too.”

“So that’s once on Thursday, and yesterday? Twice in total?”

“One and one is two.” I nod, amused by her professional demeanor. “They don’t happen along very often.”

“And the way in, the ‘Aperture,’ it’s still”—she looks along the claustrophobic middle section of Slade Alley—“down here?”

“Sure is, Doc. Exactly where you said Fred Pink said Gordon Edmonds said he found it, all those years ago.”

Marinus marvels that this gawky geeky English boy reads the American Journal of Psychiatry. “Lead the way.”

Twenty paces later we stop at the Aperture, and for the first time our guest is flummoxed. “It’s small, it’s black, it’s iron,” I enjoy spelling out the obvious. “Just as Fred Pink said.”

Marinus touches it. “There wasn’t a door here three years ago.”

“There wasn’t a door here three days ago. But when I did my post-dawn recce on Thursday morning, voilà.”

Marinus looks up and down the alley, then crouches down to inspect the sides. “Looks as if it’s been here for years. This lichen, this scuffed concrete …”

“Apertures are chameleons, Doc. They blend in.”

She looks at me, her faith in a logical explanation shaken but as yet intact. “What’s on the other side?”

“That’s the cool bit. Look over the wall with a twelve-foot ladder, you see this …” I have Bombadil produce a photo from an inner pocket. “The back garden of a semi-detached house, built in 1952, home to Jamal and Sue al-Awi and their two point four children — literally, she’s in her second trimester, according to her hospital records. But if you go through the Aperture”—I rap the soundless surface with my knuckles—“you’ll find the terraced garden of Slade House, as it appeared in the 1930s, on a foggy, mild day.”

Marinus gives me an assessing look.

“The fog was a total surprise,” I tell her.

Marinus is wishing she was recording all this. “You mean the same Slade House which got razed in the Blitz, in 1940?”

“December twentieth, 1940. Just in time for Christmas. Yes.”

“So are you saying this door’s a kind of … time-portal?”

“No, no, no, that’s a classic mistake. An aperture’s a portal into an orison. A reality bubble. God, I wish you could see your face, Doc.”

The Mighty Shrink looks shifty and puzzled. “I have faith that you believe, Bombadil, but science requires proof. As you know.”

“And proof requires reliable witnesses,” I have Bombadil answer, “ideally with a PhD after its name.” The wind bounces a plastic bottle off the floor and walls of the alley. We stand aside to let it pass. Tall weeds sway.

Marinus raps her knuckles on the Aperture. “No sound when you hit it. It’s warm, too. How do you open it? There’s no keyhole.”

I have Bombadil do a zipped-up smile. “Mind power.”

Marinus waits for me to explain, shivering despite her cold-weather clothes.

“Visualize the keyhole,” I elaborate, “visualize the key, visualize it opening. If you know what you’re about, it opens.”

She nods to assure me she doesn’t disbelieve me. This woman’s amusing. “And when you went inside, what did you do there?”

“On Thursday, I didn’t dare leave the shrubbery. I learned to be a bit cautious after my last orison in New Mexico. So I just sat there for ten minutes, watching, then came back out again. Yesterday, I was braver. Walked up as far as a big gingko tree — not that I knew what it was, but I brought a leaf back and looked it up. I’ve got an app.”

Marinus, of course, asks, “Do you still have this leaf?”

I have Bombadil hand her a ziplock freezer bag.

She holds it up: “Yep, that’s a gingko leaf,” she says, not adding that it could have come from anywhere. “Did you take any photos?”

I puff out Bombadil’s near-frozen cheeks. “Tried. Took about fifty on Thursday, but on the way back they all got wiped. Yesterday I took in my old Nikon and shot off a reel but when I developed it last night — blank. No surprise, to be honest: of the five astronauts I’ve met and believe, not one has a single photo or a video clip to show for it. There’s something about orisons.”

“ ‘Astronauts’?”

“It’s what we call ourselves. It’s online misdirection. ‘Orison tourist’ or something like that’d attract the wrong sort.”

Marinus hands back the ziplock bag. “So astronauts can bring samples of flora out, but not images?”

I have Bombadil shrug. “I don’t make the laws, Doc.”

Behind a wall, someone’s bouncing on a squeaky trampoline.

“Did you see any signs of life inside the orison?” asks Marinus.

The Mighty Shrink still thinks she’s studying a psychiatric phenomenon, not an ontological one. I can be patient: she’ll learn. “Blackbirds. Plus a squirrel — cute and red, not gray and ratty — and fish in a pond. But no people. The curtains in Slade House stayed drawn and the door stayed shut, and nobody’s used the Aperture since four o’clock on Thursday.”

“You sound very sure of yourself.”

“I am.” I touch a brick opposite the Aperture. “See this?”

The Mighty Shrink straightens up and looks. “It’s a brick.”

The trampoliner’s giggling his head off. He’s a young boy.

“No. It’s the facia of a brick, bonded onto a steel-framed box containing: a webcam, a power-pack and a sensor to switch the lens to infra-red. What the camera sees through this two-mil hole—” I point “—feeds straight to my phone.” I show Marinus my iPhone. Its screen shows me showing Marinus my iPhone.

She’s duly impressed. “A neat bit of kit. You built it yourself?”

“Yeah, but full credit to the Israelis — I hacked the specs from Mossad.” I give my spy-brick — installed by the Blackwatermen earlier today — a friendly pat and turn back to the Aperture. “So. Ready?”

Marinus hesitates, wondering how I’ll react when my own private fantasy island fails to materialize. Scientific curiosity trumps caution. “I’ll follow in your footsteps, Bombadil.”

I kneel before the Aperture and place a palm on it. Its warmth is pleasant on Bombadil’s icy hand, and Jonah becomes telegrammable: Brother, our guest has arrived — I presume everything’s ready?

Look who it isn’t. His signal is weak. I thought you’d buggered off to a “retreat” in Kirishima again …

Give me strength, No, Jonah — it’s Open Day, and our metalives depend on my being here, and your having the orison and sub-orison ready.

Jonah sniffs, telegrammatically. Well, it’s very kind of you to bother visiting your incarcerated brother.

I visited you yesterday, I remind him. My trip to Kirishima was six years ago — and I was only gone for thirteen months.

A grumpy pause unwinds: Thirteen months is thirteen eternities if you’re stuck in a Lacuna. I would never have deserted you, were the shoe on the other foot.

I shoot back: Like the time you didn’t desert me in Antarctica for two whole years? For a “joke”? Or the time you didn’t forget me on the Society Islands while you went “yachting” with your Scientologist friends?

Another grumpy Jonah pause. Your birth-body didn’t have a hairpin stuck through its throat.

After nearly twelve decades together, I know better than to feed my brother’s self-pity: Nor would yours now if you’d heeded my warnings about the Operandi’s aberrations. Our guest is waiting and Bombadil’s body is shivering. I’m opening the Aperture on the count of three, so unless you fancy committing suicide and fratricide in a single fit of pique, project the garden now. One … two …

I slip Bombadil’s body through first. All’s well. The Mighty Shrink follows, expecting a poky back yard, but finding herself at the foot of a long, stepped garden rising to a pencilled-on-fog Slade House. Iris Marinus-Levy, PhD, straightens up slowly, her eyes as shocked and her jaw as drooping as you’d hope. I have Bombadil do a taut giggle. Our Operandi is utterly depleted, so Jonah has only a glimmer of voltage to project today’s orison, but it won’t need to bedazzle or seduce like the Hallowe’en party or PC Plod’s honey-trap: this orison’s mere existence is enough to render Marinus pliable. I clear Bombadil’s throat. “Is this proof yet, Doc?””

Marinus can only point, weakly, towards the house.

“Yep. A big house. Large as life. As real as we are.”

She turns to check on the Aperture, hidden by camellias.

“Don’t worry. It’s stable. It’s open. We won’t get locked in.”

The Cautious Shrink crouches and peers back out into Slade Alley. My phone is ready to call the Blackwatermen, but our guest soon comes back, takes off her beret and puts her beret back on, just to buy a little time, I think. “I found an old postcard, in Fred Pink’s notes,” she says in a weak voice. “Of Slade House. That—” she looks at the old rectory “—that’s it. But … I checked the council archives, Ordnance Survey, Google Street View. Slade House isn’t here. And even if it were, there’s no space for it to fit between Westwood Road and Cranbury Avenue. It’s not here. It can’t be. But it’s here.”

“It’s a conundrum, I agree, unless Fred Pink was …” I whisper, “y’know, Doc … right. As in, not bug-fuck crazy after all.”

A pigeon is heard but not seen in the damson trees.

Marinus looks at me to see if I heard it too.

I can’t help but have Bombadil smile. “A pigeon.”

Marinus bites her thumb and examines the bite mark.

“Come on. It’s not a dream. You’re insulting the orison.”

Marinus plucks a camellia leaf, bites that and examines it.

She lobs a stone at the sundial. It hits and smacks, stonily.

Marinus presses her hand on the dewy grass. It leaves a print. “Holy hell.” She looks at me. “It’s really all real, isn’t it?”

“In its local, enclosed, pocket, bubble, orison way. Yes.”

The Mighty Shrink stands up again, puts her hands together as if in prayer, covers her nose and mouth for a few seconds, then shoves her hands into her flying jacket. “My patients at Dawkins, at Toronto, at Vancouver … my abductee-fantasists … were they all … in fact—right? For, for, for experiencing this, did I, did I — did I sign off on restraint orders and dose them to the gills with anti-psychotic drugs?”

We’re at a delicate stage. I need to coax Marinus up to the house without her sensing a trap, being crushed by remorse, or being spooked into running for the exit. “Look, real orisons are rare. Less than a single percent of your patients are real astronauts. The others, no — they needed drugs, they needed help. Get down off that cross.”

“That’s still … too many.” Marinus bites her lower lip and shakes her head. “So much for ‘First, do no harm.’ ”

“Orisons aren’t covered at medical college, Doc. Sure, you won’t be able to write all this up for the journals, but if you want to help your patients, look around. Explore. Observe. You’re a flexible thinker. That’s why I chose you.”

Marinus lets the words sink in. She takes a few steps over the lawn, looking up at the blank wet white sky. “Fred Pink — who until two minutes ago, I–I thought was delusional — Fred Pink thought Slade House was dangerous. Is it?”

I have Bombadil unzip his ski jacket. “I don’t think so, no.”

“But we — Christ, I can’t believe I’m saying this — we just stepped from our reality into another. Didn’t we?”

I feign mild disappointment at Marinus’s timidity. “We’re astronauts; and yeah, it’s a riskier hobby than collecting Lego figurines. As it happens, I strongly suspect Slade House is now a deserted orison running on autopilot, but if you’d feel safer going back to your consultancy at Dawkins, dosing up future Fred Pinks on Izunolethe and visiting them in padded cells, knowing that you were the first and last clinical psychiatrist to chicken out of exploring a real live orison, then who could blame you? Have a safe drive home.” I walk off towards the sundial.

“Bombadil.” Marinus’s footsteps hurry after me. “Wait!”

Her social conscience is a collar. I hold the leash.

Droplets of mist cling to the lavender. Lavender, I remember, was one of the happier scents of Jonah’s and my childhood on the Swaffham estate in Norfolk, where the Chetwynd-Pitts’ tenant farmers grew several acres of the stuff for the London perfumeries. I pause while Marinus pinches and sniffs. “Smells like the real thing,” she says, “but why’s everything turning black and white? The camellias were red and pink but this lavender’s gray. Those roses are monochrome.”

I know exactly why: after eighteen years without fresh voltage, our Operandi is now too drained even to sustain color reliably. “Decay,” I reply. “If you ask me, the Grayer Twins have deserted this orison. The fog’s another sign. We can relax a little, Doc. We’re visiting a ruin.”

Looking reassured, Marinus unwinds her keffiyeh. “Human beings created this place? Every pebble, every twig, every droplet of mist, every blade of grass? Every atom?” She shakes her head.

“I’d lay off the particle physics, Doc, if I were you. But yeah, it’s people and not gods, if that’s what you’re getting at. If it helps, think of them as set designs. Careful, a bramble’s got you.”

Marinus unpicks it from the hem of her coat. “The thorns are real, too. How many of these places have you visited?”

I draw on Bombadil’s experiences. “This is number three. First was on the island of Iona, in the Scottish Hebrides. Quite a well-known orison, that one. It was awesome. Safe and friendly, too. It’s an apse in the abbey that’s not there unless you know where and when to slip through a certain archway. The time disparity was chronic, mind. When I got back after only a day away, two years’d passed and Mum’d got remarried to a divorced Microsoft rep.”

“That’s”—the Mighty Shrink searches for words—“incredible.”

“I frickin’ know it is! Microsoft! My second orison was more hard-core. The Aperture was in a high school for the arts in Santa Fe. Yoyo, a mate from Houston, tracked it down. We went in together.”

Marinus asks, “What makes a ‘hard-core’ orison different to the one on Iona, or this one?”

“Unhappy endings. Yoyo never came out.”

Marinus stops. “He died in there?”

“No, he chose to stay inside — and he’s still there, as far as I know — but its creator was in residence and he had a bad-ass Jehovah complex. Named his little world ‘Milk and Honey.’ When I wanted to leave he accused me of apostasy and tried to, uh, kill me. ’Nother story, all that. But all this”—I have Bombadil gesture about us—“peace and quiet is a welcome change. Look, wild strawberries.” The strawberries are the Banjax Jonah and I agreed on. If I can get Marinus to eat one now, it’ll save a sub-orison later. I pick a couple of the fatter fruits and pop one into my mouth. “Awesome. Try one.”

Marinus’s hand begins to rise; but drops down. “Maybe not.”

Damn it. Damn her. I have Bombadil grin. “Scared?”

Marinus looks awkward. “Mildly superstitious. In all the tales, the myths, the rule is, if you eat or drink anything — pomegranate seeds, faerie wine, whatever — the place has a hold on you.”

Inwardly, I curse. “ ‘Myths,’ Doc? Are myths science?”

“When I’m in doubt — as I am now — I ask myself, ‘What would Carl Jung do?’—and act accordingly. Call it a gut instinct.”

If I push the Banjax too hard, she’ll grow suspicious. “Suit yourself,” I say, and eat the other strawberry. If Marinus weren’t so engifted, I could have just suasioned her to eat it; but then if she weren’t so engifted, she wouldn’t be here. “Awesome.”

The wistaria’s twisted boughs are dripping with blooms, never mind that it’s October in the world outside. But when Marinus reaches up to touch the flowers, her hand passes clean through. The only vivid colors left in the orison are the dyes in the clothes we came in with. Clothes. I’m nagged by the thought that I’ve missed something … What about? Clothes — possessions — what? It was a nagging thought that had tried to warn me before Sally Timms attacked Jonah nine years ago, but I didn’t listen closely enough. If Jonah weren’t having trouble projecting the orison I’d telegram him to pause it so I could stop and figure it out. As we emerge onto the upper lawn, a black and white peacock darting across our path just fades into the air, leaving a dying trail of Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Jonah must be running on empty. Luckily Marinus was busy watching the gingko tree loom up far too quickly for our cautious amble. “This is as far as I came yesterday,” I say, and stop: all of a sudden the fallen leaves fall upwards, all at once, and attach themselves to the tree. Marinus is enchanted by the sight, but I feel a queasiness in Bombadil’s stomach: this is malprojection, not whimsy. Jonah’s losing control. “It’s like a dream in here,” says Marinus.

My brother telegrams me: Get her inside, it’s collapsing.

Easier said than done. “Let’s look inside,” I tell our guest.

“In there? The house itself? Are you serious?”

“Yeah,” I have Bombadil say. “Why ever not?”

An anxious silence is followed by a nervous “Why?”

Luckily, I think of a stronger force than her cowardice. “Look, Doc, I didn’t want to raise any false hopes before, but there’s a chance of finding Fred Pink alive in there.” I look at the upper windows.

“Alive? After nine years? Are you sure?”

Are you inside yet, Sister? telegrams Jonah. Hurry!

“There are no certainties when it comes to orisons, Doc,” I reply. “But time ran differently in the Iona orison, and Milk and Honey was habitable, so don’t we owe it to Fred Pink to at least give the place the once-over? It’s his thread, it’s his pain, it’s his truth that brought us here today.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This time the thunder wallops the walls. They shudder.

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

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

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

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

Call downstairs, I instruct Jonah.

Pregnant pause, then: What are you talking about?

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

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

You played him last Open Day! English, gruff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well done, Sister. How do I look?”

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

Jonah modifies his face and shows me his profile: “Better?”

“Better. How are our bodies doing?”

“Yours is in a state of serene perfection, as ever; mine is still skewered through the throat with a fox-headed hairpin. The attic walls are safe, but the Operandi is a husk, Sister. I give it fifteen minutes.”

I turn to Marinus. “Then let’s wake the patient and give her her medicine. We’ll recharge the Operandi first, then repair your throat, cell by cell.”

Jonah looks at the unconscious woman with impure thoughts. “Will she offer any resistance, Sister?”

“She rejected the strawberry in the garden — citing Carl Jung and ‘gut instinct,’ if you please — but then it was the hue of raw liver, and when she wakes in here she won’t know if it’s May Day, Marrakesh or Monteverdi. Do you have the Banjax?”

Jonah evokes a red and white tablet on his palm. “Sufficiently generic, would you say?”

“Make it smaller, so she can swallow it without effort. Have a glass of water ready. Deny her any chance to stop and think.”

Jonah shrinks the pill, tips it onto a dish and evokes a glass and a bottle of Evian on the bedside table. “Look, when you telegrammed from the alley, I was, uh, not at my best, and—”

“You’ve been starved of fresh psychovoltage for eighteen years, Jonah. I’d be insane by now, not just a trifle insecure.”

“No, Sister, let me finish: what I, I ‘said’ was a dying huzzah of … what I no longer believe. I’m trying to say that you’re right.”

My projected self looks at my brother’s projected self. “About?”

“About old dogs, new tricks, not-so-splendid isolation from la Voie Ombragée; and about … a higher purpose. Will that do for now?”

Well, this is a U-turn: “Have I wandered into an orison?”

“If you’re going to gloat, Sister, you can bloody well—”

“No. I’m not gloating, Jonah. I’ve been waiting thirty years to hear you say this. We’ll go to Mount Shiranui. The west of Japan is heaven in the autumn. Enomoto Sensei wants to meet you. She suggested a dozen ways to improve our Operandi.”

The projected Jonah contemplates an ending and a beginning. “Good. Okay. That’s decided, then.”

I think of my brother and I as foetuses sharing Nellie Grayer’s womb, one hundred and sixteen years ago; and of our birth-bodies, sharing our Lacuna for eight decades. Strangers are “They,” a lover is first a “You” and then a “We,” but Jonah is a half of “I.” I pull myself back to the matter at hand before I say anything sentimental. “Your throat will hurt like holy hell when I pull the hairpin out, but I’ll cauterize the wound and—”

“Now or never, Sister.” Jonah puts his left forefinger on our guest’s frontal chakra eye. With his right hand, he glyphs her awake …

… and Iris Marinus-Levy’s pupils dilate in the orison’s uncertain light. “Stay still, Iris,” says Jonah, using his own voice. “You’ve been in an accident, but everything’s fine. You’re in hospital. You’re safe.”

She’s as feeble and scared as she sounds: “Accident?”

“Black ice on the M4 side of town. Your VW’s a write-off, but nobody else was involved, and we don’t think your injuries are that serious. You’ve been here all day. You’re in the Royal Berkshire Hospital.”

Marinus swallows and looks dazed. “I … Who …?”

“Yes, I’m Gareth Bell, and this is Doctor Harriet Hayes. All quacks together. Iris, to help with your treatment program, we’d like to ask a few diagnostics — are you up to it, do you think?”

“Oh …” the Woozy Shrink squints, “yeah … sure. Go for it.”

I take over: “Thanks, Iris, that’s great. Firstly, can you tell us if you’re in any pain right now?”

Marinus checks she can move her hands, then her feet. “No, I–I … just numbness, I guess. My joints ache a little.”

“Uh-huh,” I scribble on my clipboard. “The IV’s feeding you anti-inflammatories and painkillers. You sustained some bad bruising up your left side. Secondly … limb mobility, you just did that for us, great — who said that doctors make the worst patients?”

“Well, hey, maybe psychiatrists make better ones.”

I smile. “Great, I’ll tick my ‘tribal affiliation’ box.”

“Do I have any breakages?” asks Marinus, trying to sit up.

“Woah, woah,” says Jonah-as-Doctor Bell, “Iris, take it easy. The neck-brace is just a precaution, don’t worry. We haven’t X-rayed you on the off-chance that you’re pregnant. Might you be?”

“No, my period was last week. Definitely not pregnant.”

“Great,” I say, “we’ll take you up to X-ray in an hour or so. Vision: how many fingers?” I hold up four.

“Four,” says Marinus.

“And now?” I ask.

“None,” says Marinus.

“No problem there,” says Jonah, “though we’re a tad anxious about concussion — there’s a doozy of a contusion round the back of your noggin. We’ll CAT-scan you after your trip to X-ray, but what recollections do you have of the accident?”

“Uh …” Marinus looks haggard and worried. “Uh …”

We sit down on her bed. “You recall being in your car?”

“Yes, but … I remember arriving at my destination.”

“O-kay,” Jonah says. “Where was this destination?”

“A passageway, an alley, off Westwood Road, on the edge of town. Slade Alley. I’d gone to meet Bombadil.”

“ ‘Bombadil’?” says Jonah. “Not the Green Man leprechaun-y one from The Lord of the Rings? What a bizarre alias.”

“Uh … I–I—I never read it, but my Bombadil’s a conspiracy theorist. I don’t know if that’s his real name or not. He’s a research subject. I’m writing a paper on abduction fantasies. He was … in an alley, and … there was a door in a wall that wasn’t normally there …”

“Fascinating,” I say, looking a little alarmed. “But I promise you, Iris, the only place you’ve been today is the Royal Berkshire Hospital.”

“You know better than us,” Jonah says cheerfully, “the tricks a mind’ll play on itself after a trauma or accident. But look, Iris, you’ve told us what we need. If you’d just take this paracetamol to staunch any minor internal bleeding you may have sustained—” Jonah flips up the bed’s swivel table and places the pill on a little white dish “—I’ll text Viv Singh at Dawkins to say you’re conscious and verbal. They’ve been on tenterhooks all day.”

“Yes, thanks, I, uh …” Marinus gazes at the easy-to-swallow pill.

My evoked heart in my evoked body beats a little faster.

I look back. Jonah puts a glass of Evian water by the dish.

“Thank you.” Still bleary, Marinus picks up the pill.

I look away. Swallow it, I think. Swallow it whole.

“No worries,” says Jonah, unworriedly, as if our metalives aren’t dependent on this fickle woman doing as he bids her. Jonah scrolls down his contacts, mumbling, “Viv Singh …”

“Uh … could I just ask a question?” asks Marinus.

“Fire away,” says Jonah, not taking his eyes off his iPhone.

“Why in the eleven thousand and eleven names of God would I oblige two parasitic soul-slayers by imbibing their poison?”

The wall-clock stops; the LEDs on the monitors die; a far-off telephone falls silent; and Jonah freezes, with his back to both me and Marinus. I stand and back away, stumbling and sick. My brain insists that Marinus, a guest, cannot know more about us than Jonah and I know about her; that a quotidian psychiatrist cannot be lying in an evoked bed in our inner orison, watching us like a committee member at a dull meeting: and yet she does, she is, she is. “Of all the shortcomings in your Operandi,” our guest is saying, “your ‘Banjax’ is the most antiquated. Truly! An anima-abortifacient so fragile that unless the patient imbibes it of his or her own conscious volition, it fails to work — we haven’t seen the Shaded Way use such a primitive formula for fifty or sixty years. What were you thinking, Grayers? If you’d only updated it you could have injected it into my body just now. Or tried to.”

Sister, Jonah telegrams, what is she?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marinus ignores him and looks at me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Warm.”

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

Her hands are free to glyph. “Warmer.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

“The explosion didn’t smash the Aperture,” says the black woman, “but it did make a crack. Across the middle, there. See?” She crouches next to me and runs her finger along ia thick line. “There. The world’s leaking in, Miss Grayer. I’m sorry. You’re aging at, perhaps, a decade every fifteen seconds.”

She’s speaking English, but what’s she talking about? “Who are you?”

The woman stares at me. Which is very rude. Don’t Africans teach their children manners? “I am mercy, Miss Grayer.”

“Well then, Mercy — get me … Get me …” I know his name, I know I know his name, but his name doesn’t know me. “My brother. This instant. He’ll sort it all out.”

“I’m sorry,” says Mercy. “Your mind’s decaying.” She rises to her feet and picks up our … what’s it called? The thing the candle sits in? She’s going to steal it! “Put that back!” I try to stop her, but my feet just twitch in a pile of dirt. This place is filthy! Where’s the housekeeper? Why is this African, holding up our candlestick? That’s the word: a candlestick! We’ve had it in the family for generations. It’s three thousand years old. It’s older than Jesus. It’s from Nineveh. I call out, “Get me Jonah!”

The African lifts it up, like a, like a, you know, like a thing … and swings its heavy base into the mirror.

Daylight floods and snowflakes swarm through the splintered plane of the Aperture, covering the floorboards, scurrying round the darkest recesses of the attic, like many inquisitive schoolchildren. My body has shrivelled up around me like a punctured balloon. Untied, unzipped, unstrapped from its senility-riddled brain, my soul floats free. Marinus, without a backwards glance, steps through the Aperture even as the attic fades away into a wintry sky, above an anonymous town. It’s over. Without its birth-body anchoring it to the world, the soul of Norah Grayer is dissolving; it hovers for a moment in the space once occupied by the attic of Slade House. Was that my life? Was that all? There was supposed to be more. Many, many decades more. Look below: roofs, cars, other lives, and a woman putting on a green beret, leaving the scene via an alley, still with a candlestick in her hand. There is no farewell in the busy air, no hymn, no message. Only snow, snow, snow and the inexorable pull of the Dusk.

Not yet. Not yet. Dusk pulls, but damn the Dusk, damn Marinus, I’ll pull harder. She killed my brother and now she’s walking free. Let grief pull with me; let hatred strengthen our sinews. My stock of seconds may be meager but if there’s a way to avenge hot-headed Jonah, my precious twin, my truest other half, I’ll find it, however faint the traces. Brick chimneys; slate roofs; thin, narrow gardens with sheds, kennels and compost heaps. Where might a vengeful soul find refuge? A new birth-body? Who can I see? A brother and sister, at play in the snow … They”re old, they’re too interwoven with their own souls. Another boy jumps on a trampoline … he’s even older, of no use. A magpie lands on a garden shed with a crawk and a tinny thump; a garden away, a back door opens, and a woman in a woolen hat steps out holding a bowl of peelings. “No snowballing your sister, Adib! Build a snowman! Something gentle!” She’s pregnant — it shows, from thirty feet, and now I see it. I see the beauty of the pattern. The woman is not here by chance: her appearance is Scripted. Dusk hauls me to itself, but now I see the means, I resist. My mission makes me strong, and my mission is this: one day, however distant, I will whisper into Marinus’s ear, “You killed my brother Jonah Grayer — and now I kill you.” I transverse down with the ponderous snow, the living snow, the eternal snow; undetected, I pass through the mother’s coat, her underclothes, her skin, her uterus wall; and now I’m home, my new, warm home, my anchorage; immune to the Dusk and safe in the brain of a foetal boy, this miniature, drowsing, curled-up, dreaming, thumb-sucking astronaut.