Slade House Read Online Free PDF

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?
    · · ·
    The flame comes to life, and the symbols on the candlestick change, and keep changing as if it’s thinking fast and the symbols are its thoughts. Jonah Grayer’s head shifts. His clothes rustle. “Your mother sends her apologies,” he says, touching his face as if he’s testing whether it still fits. “She had to leave.” I try to ask “Why? Where?” but nothing I need to speak—jaw, tongue, lips—works. Why would Mum leave without me? The me in the mirror gazes back. Neither of us can move. Norah Grayer’s flexing her fingers like she’s just waking up. Did they inject me with something? “Every time I come back to my body,” she says, “it feels less of a homecoming, and more like entering an alien shell. A more enfeebled one. Do you know, I want to be free of it?”
    “Be careful what you wish for,” says Jonah. “If anything happened to your birth-body, your soul would dissolve like a sugar cube and—”
    “I know perfectly well what would happen.” Norah Grayer’s voice is chillier and throatier now. “The hairdresser paid an uninvited visit, I saw.”
    Jonah asks, “What hairdresser are you talking about?”
    “Our previous guest. Your ‘Honey Pie.’ She appeared in a window. Then on the stairs, by her portrait, she tried to give some sort of a warning to the boy.”
    “Her afterimage showed up in a window, you mean. It happens. The girl is gone, as gone as a smoke ring puffed out years ago in a gale off Rockall. It’s harmless.”
    A brownish moth fusses around the candle flame.
    “They’re getting bolder,” says Norah Grayer. “The time will come when a ‘harmless afterimage’ will sabotage an Open Day.”
    “If—
if—
our Theater of the Mind were ever ‘sabotaged’ and a guest escaped, we’d simply call our friends the Blackwatermen to bring them back again. That’s why we pay them. Handsomely.”
    “You underestimate ordinary people, Jonah. You always did.”
    “Would it kill you, sister, to once, just
once,
say, ‘Top job, a superb orison, you’ve landed us a juicy, tenderized soul to pay the power bills for the next nine years—
bon appetit!
’?”
    “Your African lodge could not have been a cornier ersatz mishmash, brother, if Tarzan had swung in on a vine.”
    “It wasn’t sup
posed
to be real; it only had to match the Bushveld the guest i
mag
ined. Anyway, the boy’s mentally abnormal. He hasn’t even noticed his lungs have stopped working.” Jonah now looks at me like Gaz Ingram does.
    It’s true. I’m not breathing. My switched-off body hasn’t raised the alarm. I don’t want to die.
I don’t want to die
.
    “Oh, stop sniveling, for Christ’s sake,” groans Jonah. “I cannot abide snivelers. Your