Slade House (3 page)

I've stopped, because the far end of the garden, the wall with the small black door—it's gone all faint and dim. Not because of evening. It can't even be four o'clock yet. Not because it's misty, either. I look up—the sky's still bluish, like it was before. It's the garden itself. The garden's fading away.

I turn round to tell Jonah to stop the game, something's wrong, we need a grown-up. Any second now he'll come hurtling round the far corner. The brambles sway like underwater tentacles. I glance back at the garden. There was a sundial but it's gone now, and the damson trees too. Am I going blind? I want Dad to tell me it's fine, I'm not going blind, but Dad's in Rhodesia, so I want Mum. Where's Jonah? What if this dissolving's got him too? Now the lattice tunnel thing's erased. What do you do when you're visiting someone's house and their garden starts vanishing? The blankness is moving closer like a storm front. Then, at the far end of the brambly side path, Jonah appears, and I relax for a second because he'll know what to do, but as I watch, the running-boy shape gets fuzzier and becomes a growling darkness with darker eyes, eyes that know me, and fangs that'll finish what they started and it's pounding after me in sickening slow motion, big as a cantering horse and I'd scream if I could but I can't my chest's full of molten panic it's choking me choking it's wolves it's winter it's bones it's cartilage skin liver lungs it's Hunger it's Hunger it's Hunger and
Run!
I run towards the steps of Slade House my feet slipping on the pebbles like in dreams but if I fall it'll have me, and I've only got moments left and I stumble up the steps and grip the doorknob
turn please
turn
it's stuck no no no it's scratched gold it's stiff it's ridged does it turn yes no yes no twist pull push pull turn twist I'm falling forwards onto a scratchy doormat on black and white tiles and my shriek's like a shriek shrieked into a cardboard box all stifled and muted—

“What on earth's the matter, Nathan?” I'm on my banged knees on a carpet in a hallway, my heart's going
slap slap slap slap slap slap
but it's slowing, it's slowing, I'm safe, and Lady Grayer's standing right here holding a tray with a little iron teapot on it with vapor snaking up from the spout. “Are you unwell? Shall I fetch your mother?”

Woozily, I get up. “Something's outside, Norah.”

“I'm not sure I understand. What kind of a something?”

“I mean, a, a, a…kind of…” A kind of what? “Dog.”

“Oh, that's Izzy, from next door. Daft as a brush, and she
will
insist on doing her business in the herb garden. It's jolly annoying, but then she's very sweet.”

“No, it was a…bigger…and the garden was vanishing.”

Lady Norah Grayer does a smile, though I'm not sure why. “
Fab
ulous to see boys using their imaginations! Jonah's cousins kneel before the TV with their Atari thingummies, their bleepy-bleepy space games, and I tell them, ‘It's a beautiful day! Play outside!' and they say, ‘Yeah, yeah, Auntie Norah, if you say so.' ”

The hallway has black and white tiles like a chessboard. I smell coffee, polish, cigar smoke and lilies. Through a little diamond-shaped window in the door, I peer out and see the garden. It's not at all dissolved. Down the far end, I can see the small black iron door onto Slade Alley. I must have imagined too hard. Down the stairs comes Tchaikovsky's “Chant de l'alouette.” It's Mum.

Norah Grayer asks, “Nathan, are you feeling all right?”

I looked up Valium in a medical encyclopedia at the library and in rare cases it can make you hallucinate and you have to tell your doctor immediately. I guess I'm rare. “Yes, thanks,” I say. “Jonah and me were playing fox and hound and I think I got carried away.”

“I
thought
you and Jonah might have a rapport—and golly gosh, Yehudi and your mother are getting on like a house on fire! You go on up to the soirée, up both these flights of stairs. I'll find Jonah, and we'll bring the éclairs. Up you go now. Don't be shy.”

I take off my shoes and put them side by side and climb the first flight of stairs. The walls are paneled and the stair carpet's thick as snow and beige like nougat. Up ahead, there's a little landing where a grandfather clock's going
krunk…kronk…krunk…kronk…
but first I pass a portrait of a girl, younger than me, plastered with freckles, and wearing a pinafore thing from Victorian times. She's dead lifelike. The banister glides under my fingertips. Mum plays the last note of “Chant de l'alouette” and I hear applause. Applause makes her happy. When she's sad, it's only crackers and bananas for dinner. The next portrait's of a bushy-browed man in a regimental uniform: the Royal Fusiliers. I know because Dad got me a book about British Army regiments and I memorized it.
Krunk…kronk…krunk…kronk
goes the clock. The last portrait before the landing is a pinched lady in a hat who looks a lot like Mrs. Stone, our Religion teacher. If Mrs. Marconi asked me to guess, I'd say this hat lady was wishing she was anywhere but here. From the little landing, another flight of stairs to my right carries on up to a pale door. The clock's really tall. I put my ear against its wooden chest and hear its heart:
krunk…kronk…krunk…kronk…
It has no hands. It's got words instead, on its old, pale-as-bone clock face, saying
TIME IS
and under that
TIME WAS
and under that
TIME IS NOT
. Up the second flight of steps, the next picture's of a man who's twenty or so, with slick black hair and squinty eyes and a look like he's unwrapped a present and can't work out what it is. The last-but-one portrait's a lady I recognize. It's the hair. The lady I saw in the window. Same dangly earrings, too, but a dreamy smile instead of streaky eyeshadow. She must be a friend of the Grayers. Look at that mauve vein in her neck, it's throbbing, and a murmur's in my ear saying,
Run now, as fast as you can, the way you came in
…and I say, “What?” and the voice stops. Was it even there? It's Valium. Maybe I shouldn't take any more for a while. Only a few steps to the pale door now, and I hear Mum's voice on the other side: “Oh no, Yehudi, you mustn't make me hog the limelight when there's so much talent in the room!” The reply is too soft to hear, but people laugh. Mum, too. When did I last hear Mum laugh like that? “You're all too kind,” I hear her say. “How could I say no?” Then she starts up “Danseuses de Delphes.” I take two or three steps and draw level with the last portrait.

Which is me.

Me, Nathan Bishop…

Wearing exactly what I'm wearing now. This tweed jacket. This bow tie. Only in the picture I've got no eyes. That's my big nose, the zit on my chin I've had all week, my scarring from the mastiff under my ear, but no eyes. A joke? Is this funny? I never know. Mum must've sent a school photograph plus photographs of the clothes I was going to be wearing to Norah Grayer, and she got the artist to paint this. How else? This isn't bad Valium, is it? Is it? I blink hard at the portrait, then kick the skirting board; not hard enough to break my toe, but hard enough to hurt. When I don't wake up, I know I'm awake. The clock's going
krunk-kronk-krunk-kronk
and I'm trembling with anger. I know anger when I feel it. Anger's an easy one, it's like being a boiling kettle. Why did Mum play a joke on me on a day she told me to Act Normal? Normally I'd wait until Debussy was over before opening the pale door but Mum doesn't deserve manners today so I put my hand on the doorknob.

I sit up in bed. What bed? Not my bed in my titchy room in England, that's for sure: This is three times the size, with sunlight blasting through the curtains and Luke Skywalker on the sheet-thing. My head's humming. My mouth's dry. There's a desk; a bookshelf full of
National Geographic
s
;
strings of beads over the doorway; a million insects outside; a Zulu-style tribal shield and spear decorated with tinsel that brings the answer closer now, closer, closer…

Dad's lodge in the Bushveld. I let out this bark of relief and all my dream-anger at Mum goes
phffft
. It's Christmas Eve, and I'm in Rhodesia! Yesterday I flew here on a British Airways flight, all on my own, my very first time on a plane, and asked for the fish pie because I didn't know what boeuf bourguignon was. Dad and Joy met me at the airport in his jeep. On the way here we saw zebras and giraffes. No spooky portraits, no Slade House, no mastiff. Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic
F
if anyone ever writes “I woke up and it was all a dream” at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it's a cop-out, it's the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But every single morning we really do wake up and it really was all a dream. It's a shame Jonah's not real, though. I lift up the curtain by my bed and see slopes of woodland and grassland, going on forever. Down below's the brown river where there're hippos. Dad sent me a Polaroid of this exact view. It's on my wall at home in England by my pillow, but here it's the actual view. African birds, African morning, African birdsong. I smell bacon and get up. I'm in my Kays Catalogue pajamas. The pine floor's knotty, warm and grooved on the soles of my feet, and the strings of beads are like lots of fingertips on my face…

Dad's at the table, reading his
Rhodesian Reporter
and dressed in his short-sleeved khaki shirt. “The Kraken wakes.” Dad always says that in the mornings. It's the title of a book by John Wyndham about a monster who melts the ice caps and floods the world.

I sit down. “Morning, Dad.”

Dad folds his newspaper. “Well,
I
wanted to wake you for your first African dawn, but Joy said, ‘No, let the poor lad sleep in, he flew twelve hours nonstop.' So we'll do all that tomorrow. Hungry?” I nod—I guess I must be—and Dad tilts his head at the kitchen hatch: “Joy? Violet? Young man needs his chow!”

The hatch opens and Joy appears. “Nathan!” I knew about Joy, who Mum calls “your father's dolly bird,” but it was still a jolt to see Dad holding hands with another woman. They're going to have a baby in June, so they must've had sexual intercourse. The baby'll be my half brother or half sister, but it hasn't got a name yet. I wonder what it does all day. “Sleep well?” says Joy. Joy's got a Rhodesian accent like Dad's.

“Yes. Mad dreams, though.”

“I
always
have mad dreams after a long-haul flight. OJ, bacon sandwich do you, Nathan?”

I like how Joy says “OJ.” Mum would hate it. “Yes please.”

“He'll need some coffee too,” says Dad.

“Mum says I'm too young for caffeinated drinks,” I say.

“Horse pucky,” says Dad. “Coffee's the elixir of life, and Rhodesian coffee's the purest on earth. You're having some.”

“OJ, bacon sandwich
and
coffee, coming up,” says Joy. “I'll get Violet on it straightaway.” The hatch closes. Violet's the maid. Mum often used to shout at Dad, “I'm not your bloody maid, you know, Frank!” Dad lights his pipe, and the smell of his tobacco brings back memories of when he and Mum were married. He says from the corner of his mouth, “Tell me about this dream of yours, matey.”

The gazelle's head's distracting, and so are Dad's grandfather's muskets from the Boer War and the ceiling fan. “Mum took me to see a lady, like a lord-and-lady-type lady. The house was missing so we asked a sort of window cleaner man but he didn't know either…then we found it, it was this big house like in
To the Manor Born.
There was a boy called Jonah but he turned into a big dog. Yehudi Menuhin was there too, and Mum played with him upstairs”—Dad snorts a laugh—“and then I saw a portrait of me, but my eyes were missing, and…” I see a small black iron door in the corner. “That door was there, too.”

Dad looks round. “Dreams do that. Mix reality with moonshine. You were asking about my gun-room door before you turned in last night. Don't you remember?”

I must've, if Dad says so. “It all felt so real when I was in it.”

“I know it
felt
real, but you can see it wasn't. Right?” I look at Dad's brown eyes, crinkly lines, tanned skin, grayish streaks in his sandy hair, his nose like mine. A clock's going
krunk…kronk…krunk…kronk…
and there's a trumpeting noise outside, not far away. I look at Dad, hoping it is what I think it is. “Dead right, matey: a herd drifted across the river yesterday afternoon. We'll go see 'em later, but first, line your stomach.”

“Here we go,” says Joy, placing a tray in front of me. “Your first African breakfast.” My bacon sandwich looks epic, with a triple layer of rashers, and ketchup dribbling out.

“That's God's own bacon sarnie,” I say. Someone said that line on a sitcom I saw once and lots of people laughed.

“Well, aren't
you
the charmer?” says Joy. “Wonder who you get
that
from…”

Dad puts his arm around Joy's waist. “Try the coffee first. It'll make a man of you.” I lift the mug and peer down. Inside's black as oil, as holes in space, as Bibles.

“Violet ground the beans just now,” says Joy.

“God's own coffee,” says Dad. “Drink up now, matey.”

Some stupid part of me says,
No, don't, you mustn't
.

“Your mother'll never know,” says Dad. “Our little secret.”

The mug's so wide it covers my nose like a gas mask.

The mug's so wide it covers my eyes, my whole head.

Then whatever's in there starts gulping me down.

Time passed, but I don't know how much. A slit of light opens its eye and becomes a long flame. Cold bright star white. A candle, on a candlestick, on the scarred floorboards. The candlestick's dull silver or pewter or lead and it's got symbols on it, or maybe letters from a dead language. The flame's not moving, it's as if time's unspooled and jammed. Three faces hang in the gloom. Lady Grayer on my left, but she's younger now, younger than Mum. To my right is Jonah Grayer but he's older than the Jonah in the garden. They're twins, I think. They're wearing gray cloaks with hoods half down; his hair's short and hers is long, and it's gold instead of black like before; and they're kneeling like they're praying, or meditating. They're still as waxworks. If they're breathing, I can't see it. The third face is Nathan Bishop's, opposite me. I'm a reflection in a mirror, a tall rectangle, standing on the floor. I'm still wearing the tweed jacket from Oxfam, and the bow tie. When I try to move, I can't. Not a muscle. I can't turn my head, or lift my hand, or speak, or blink, even. Like I've been paralyzed. It's scary as hell, but I can't even go
Mmmfff
like scared gagged people do. I'm pretty sure this can't be heaven or hell, but I know it's not Rhodesia. Dad's lodge was a kind of vision. I'd pray it's only the Valium making me see this, but I don't believe in God. I'm in an attic, judging from the sloping ceiling and rafters. Are the Grayers prisoners like me? They look like the Midwich Cuckoos. Where's Yehudi Menuhin, all the guests, the soirée? Where's my mum?