by Mike Carey
I rounded one of the graves and almost stepped sideways into another. The water was up to John’s neck now, and he was staring in all directions, his eyes wide with dread.
Before I could get to him, something pulled him under. He gave a wail of terror, cut off very abruptly when his head went below the surface. When I got to the spot there was nothing to show where he’d been except for a ragged stream of bubbles, drifting away on the midnight-black flow of the urban river.
Something brushed against my leg, under the surface: something big enough to push me aside as it glided past, unseen. I jumped away, seeing the roiling water it left in its wake. It turned in a vast lazy arc and headed back towards me. I took one step back, and then another, and on the third step there was nothing there to put my foot down on. I slipped on the rim of the submerged grave pit and went under, mouth clamped shut.
I woke up gasping for air as though I really had half-drowned. Like someone in a movie I came bolt upright, my body sheathed in already cooling sweat. I groped for a bedside light, found one and after a few seconds of floundering succeeded in turning it on.
A big tabby cat that had been sitting at the foot of the bed yowled in protest, jumped down onto the floor and padded to the door, shooting me a glance of cool disapproval as it left. The stray that Carla had told me about, obviously.
Shit! That had been the worst nightmare I’d had in years. With slightly shaky hands I unzipped the sleeping bag and swung my legs out. There was no way I was getting any more sleep until my pulse rate had come back down to normal.
I went to the door, then trekked along the short passage and looked out into the living room. Turning the light on had robbed me of my night sight, so I couldn’t make out many details in the scene before me: I could hear Carla’s rhythmical breathing, though, and I could see the shadowy bump that was her sleeping form.
The coffin still stood on its trestles, undisturbed. The cat walked under it, rubbed its cheek against the legs of the nearer trestle, then strolled on with regal indifference.
A couple of cautious steps into the dark brought me to the foot of the coffin. I put a hand on its lid, the smooth wood chilly under my fingertips.
All right, mate, I said beneath my breath. Nothing formal. No promises, because when all’s said and done I don’t owe you a damn thing.
But I’ll do what I can.
8
Todd had made all the arrangements for the cremation, too. He’d told Carla that the hearse would call at ten in the morning, but he was there himself at nine-thirty to supervise. Carla was in the shower, so I opened the door for him, feeling like I’d been rolled up wet and put away dry.
I must have looked fairly rough, too, because as he walked on inside Todd gave me a glance that was almost supercilious. ‘Sleep well?’ he asked blandly.
I picked up my mug of coffee, which I’d rested on the coffin lid while I was opening the door, and took a deep swig of Carla’s bitter espresso before I answered. ‘Like the dead.’ Todd actually winced. They say that if you can make a lawyer blush you get a free pass to Heaven: I wondered if this would be good for a day trip to Purgatory.
He outlined the route to me, although this time we’d be travelling in one of the official cars so there was nothing to memorise. ‘Mount Grace Crematorium is on Bow Common,’ he said. ‘Behind St Clement’s Hospital. We’ll drive down to Primrose Hill, around the Outer Circle and then east all the way from there. Is Mrs Gittings ready?’
Todd could hear the sound of the shower as well as I could, so I gave him the only answer that question seemed to deserve. ‘Almost.’ He wasn’t listening, in any case: he was prowling around the room looking at the damage that the ghost had done, which of course he was seeing for the first time. He assessed it with a thoughtful, even professional eye, as if he was considering what it might be worth as part of a lawsuit. I finished my coffee and watched him in silence. He seemed nervous and eager to be on his way, which he probably was. I didn’t know how much he charged for estate work, but it didn’t seem likely that John had paid him enough to cover two visits to Waltham Abbey and a slap-up funeral in the East End. Or maybe I was underestimating the strength of John’s determination to have his last wishes respected. Maybe he’d given Todd a big enough retainer to cover all eventualities.
The lawyer’s circuit of the room brought him back to the door at last. It was still open because he hadn’t closed it behind him on the way in. He looked at John’s old wards with the same clinical eye, then glanced at me.
‘These ought to go,’ he said. ‘Before we take the body out.’
It was slightly embarrassing that I hadn’t thought of that myself. Of course, that could be what had caused John’s ghost to be separated from his body and stranded here in the first place. It was hard for the dead to cross magical wards if they’d been put together right in the first place – and although they were mostly used to keep ghosts and zombies out of places where they weren’t wanted, they’d work just as effectively to imprison them. Jenna-Jane’s cheerfully sadistic experiments at the MOU in Paddington had proved that a hundred times over.
I took down the birch sprig myself: it brought my dream back more vividly than I liked. ‘Not much left of me now . . .’ Todd wiped over the chalked ekpiptein with the palm of his hand, and I levered off the mezuzah. Between the two of us, we cleared the doorway inside of a minute. Todd tactfully didn’t point out that as the resident exorcist this was something I ought to have done myself before he arrived.
Carla still hadn’t put in an appearance, and the cars weren’t here yet either, so I went back through into the kitchen and brewed some more coffee – I’d bought a packet the night before, on the same expedition from which I brought back the curries and the beer. Todd accepted some – black, no sugar – and then left it to cool as he paced around the room some more.
‘Did John ever mention why he was so dead set on being cremated at Mount Grace?’ I asked. ‘Is there something special about that one place?’
He turned to glance in my direction, looking a little surprised. ‘Well, perhaps I played a part in that,’ he said. ‘I thought I mentioned this already, but maybe I was talking to someone else. Mount Grace is something of an oddity. The owners – the Palance family – are clients of ours. They bought the crematorium from the borough in the 1920s, although they founded a blind trust to take care of the actual running of the place – its running as a historical site, I mean. It’s hardly ever used for its real purpose any more, except in very rare cases – family and friends, mainly. I had the file on my desk one time when John came into the office. He was talking about cremation and I told him about Mount Grace. The idea of a crematorium that’s something of a select club seemed to appeal to him.’
So whatever it was, John’s concern hadn’t been narrowly geographical. He’d been concerned about what exactly was done to his body, rather than where it was done or where the remains were put afterwards. Burning rather than burial. Why? To close the door on his return? But it didn’t. Although a lot of ghosts tend to stay close to their mortal remains, far more linger in the place of their death, just as John had done. Being cremated only ruled out coming back as a zombie – not coming back per se.
‘Any reason why you suggested Mount Grace, then?’ I asked, for form’s sake. ‘Did John ask for something specific in the way his body was disposed of?’
Todd shook his head firmly, looking bored and perhaps even a little resentful at being questioned. ‘It was nothing like that. It was just that he wanted the whole thing settled quickly – almost on the spot. Because of my firm’s connection with the Palances, I was able to make arrangements at Mount Grace with a single phone call. And it seemed to meet John’s requirements in other respects, too. The cost is nominal, because as I said the trust sees the place mostly as a site of historical interest, and there’s a bequest that covers its maintenance.
‘There’s a garden of remembrance, where Mister Gittings’s ashes will be laid, and it’s i
n a rather beautiful spot. At least, it was beautiful and I’m sure it will be again when the building works on the site next door are finished. The crematorium has its own formal gardens. I think they were designed by Inigo Jones. In fact, that’s why the Palances acquired the site in the first place: the buildings and the grounds are very fine, and there’d been some talk of bulldozing them and building houses there. Michael Palance, who’s dead now, tried to get the building adopted by the National Trust, which was fairly new in those days, and when that failed he bought it himself.’
Carla walked in at this point, looking more than a little stunning in her widow’s weeds. She clearly wasn’t all that happy to see Maynard Todd in her living room, but almost at the same moment there was a knock at the door – the four pall-bearers reporting for duty. They hefted the coffin and we got under way immediately, avoiding any need for an unpleasant scene. A few of the neighbours watched from behind lightly twitching curtains as John went off to the next instalment of his eternal reward. Carla walked regally down the steps and into the hearse, not sparing any of them so much as a glance.
Since all three of us rode together in the hearse, conversation was sparse and strained. That left me plenty of time to mull over the change in John’s will, and to chase my thoughts around in decreasing circles until I was sick of them. Cremation. Why had it mattered to John so much that he had drawn up a new will, and gone to a new law firm to make sure that his instructions were followed – no matter how much distress it might cause to Carla?
Nicky Heath, who as a zombie takes a lively (sic) interest in stuff like this, told me once that in early civilisations cremation was kind of a patriarchal thing. ‘You could think of the smoke as a ghost phallus if you wanted to,’ he said. ‘The dead man’s last stand, kind of thing. Or if that strikes you as a little off-colour, you could go for the official symbolism. You’re seeing the soul ascend to heaven to sit at God’s right hand. Matriarchies didn’t go for that whole heaven argument so much – they favoured burial because it was going back to the womb of Mother Earth. Closing the big circle. You can’t get born again until you put yourself back.’ Needless to say, Nicky sides with the mothers on this one. Anyone who comes near him with a can of kerosene is likely to return to Mother Earth in a lot of separate pieces.
But John was a ghostbreaker through and through: there’re very few of us who have any time for religion. When you spend your life dealing with the crude mechanics of life and death, you tend to find the elegant theories less than compelling. So maybe Carla was right: maybe John’s mind had started to go, and maybe that explained both his aberrant behaviour in the last few weeks of his life and his scary transformation after death.
Or maybe there was something else going on – although it was hard to imagine what sort of something that could be if it required him to burn his body after he died as though his body contained a secret message of some kind. For just a moment, an idea stirred in the fuzzy depths of my mind, but it submerged again before I could reach for it.
Todd brought me out of my thoughts by leaning forward to tell the driver to hang a left: the unexpected sound made Carla tense, showing how strained the silence in the car had become even as it broke it. As though the ice had been broken, too, Todd turned to Carla and offered her an affable smile.
‘I haven’t made any specifications about the service, Mrs Gittings,’ he said, ‘but I believe there will be a clergyman on hand. If you want any kind of a prayer spoken over the casket, or a hymn . . .’ He left the sentence unfinished, no doubt realising as he said it how pathetic the three of us would sound striking up a chorus of ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’.
‘I just want it to be over,’ Carla said, in a low, curt tone that left no room for further conversational pleasantries.
Our route took us through a part of London that’s one of my favourites. Mile End is steeped in tragic and tragicomic history in the same way that, say, a pickled pig’s trotter is steeped in vinegar. This was where the first of Hitler’s flying bombs rained down; where the spectacularly cocked-up launch of HMS Albion killed dozens of local kids who’d taken the day off school to see it glide off the slipway; where the resurrection men plied their trade and where Bishop and Williams murdered the Italian Boy. The rising of the dead is a fairly recent thing: but in Mile End the ghosts have soaked into the stone.
We drove on through Stepney to Bow Common, and just after Mile End Station we turned off the main drag, skirted the shapely backside of St Clement’s and turned in through the gates of the Mount Grace crematorium. We had no choice in any case, because the bottom of Ropery Street was blocked off: the building site that Todd had mentioned extended on both sides of the road, and oversized earth movers prowled behind the plywood hoardings like wind-up dinosaurs in some mechanical equivalent of Jurassic Park.
Mount Grace had a small frontage out on the street, but the grounds were deceptively spacious. They opened out in front of us as we rounded the oxbow drive, lined on both sides with tall yews, and we got a glimpse of the formal gardens of cmalronf to our left. They were a pretty but slightly sombre prospect, dominated by funereal cypress trees and heavy, po-faced stone balustrades. Two massive stone urns flanking an arched gateway with passion flowers trained up it on both sides marked the entrance to the garden of remembrance. Kind of an odd choice, was my first thought: then I remembered someone telling me that the passion referred to is the passion of Christ, so I guess it was all as per the party line. Death and resurrection: pay now, and live later.
The crematorium itself was pretty damn impressive, though. It was built in cream-coloured stone, its main mass coming forward to meet the drive while two wings extended towards the rear of the grounds on either side. It was crenellated, with scalloped curves rather than straight ups and downs: the overall effect made it look as though the building had been assembled out of jigsaw pieces.
I enjoyed it while I could. As I got closer, the presence of the dead announced itself first as a pressure, then as something like a continuous bass throbbing at the limits of my perception. As I think I mentioned before, I hate cemeteries. Crematoria are no better and no worse: they’re places where my death-sense wakes up like a jumpy nerve in a tooth.
The cortège rolled onto the gravel drive, the hearse itself taking pole position in front of the crematorium’s massive oak door. From this close up I got an even better view of the architecture. There were ornate carved crowns over the windows, and the remains of some very weathered bas-relief sculptures on the corners of the building – faceless caryatids supporting the actual cornices on their bent backs, scarred and blackened by generations of rainwater to the point where you couldn’t even guess what figures they’d been meant to represent. The four winds? The four elements? The Four Tops?
Our bearers had been travelling in the car behind. They got out first, opened the back of the hearse and slid out the runners, ready to move on Todd’s command. At the same time a man who had been standing on the front steps of the crematorium came down to greet us. From his appearance, I guessed that he wasn’t the clergyman Todd had mentioned: he was in his late twenties or early thirties, with white-blond hair and a craggy, stolidly handsome face. He was built like a rugby forward, but his face wore a solemn, measured expression that made me wonder whether my first impressions had been wrong: maybe he had taken holy orders, out in Beverly Hills somewhere. His slate-grey linen suit was as good as Todd’s; maybe better. The one I was wearing came from Burton’s. I generally pick them up in the sales when they’ll throw you in an extra pair of trousers for free, so you’ll appreciate that there are gaps in my sartorial education: once you get past the thousand-quid mark, my eye’s not good enough to make the fine distinctions.
We got out of the hearse. Todd and the newcomer locked stares in a way that was definitely hostile: viscerally, bitterly hostile, and bleeding out of their pores despite the constraints of the situation.
‘Maynard.’ The blond man held out his hand, and Todd stared at it
for a moment, nonplussed. Then, looking cornered and unhappy, he took it, shook it in a single staccato up-down movement, and let it go again.
‘Mister Covington,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect to see you here. It’s very good of you to come.’ There was a slight thickening in his voice: it cost him an effort to get those words out.
The blond man shrugged easily. ‘I was in the neighbourhood,’ he said. ‘It seemed silly to pass the keys on to Fenwick or Digby when I could just come and open up myself.’
There was a perceptible pause. ‘Yes,’ said Todd. ‘I see. This is Mrs Gittings, and this is Felix Castor. And – umm –’ turning to us ‘– this is Peter Covington.’
Covington gave me the briefest of nods and turned his attention to Carla. I could see she was impressed: there was a sudden warmth that I could feel from where I was standing – a wave of easy benevolence that made the air around us ripple with a virtual heat haze. ‘I was sorry to hear about your loss,’ he said, and I think she believed him. Certainly she let him take her hand and squeeze it. He looked soulfully into her eyes, and for a long moment she looked back. Like I said, Carla generally goes for older men, but when she finally took possession of her hand again I thought I could detect a little reluctance on her side at least.
I was half-hoping that Blondie would offer the same hand to me, for curiosity’s sake – he had a lot of poise for a guy ten years my junior, and I would have been interested in reading him, but he just stepped back and indicated the doors with a gesture that was almost a bow.
‘I presume everything is ready inside,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been able to check – I’ve got a lot to do elsewhere, and I’m running late already. And I wouldn’t presume to join you for the actual ceremony. But my very best wishes to you all – and especially to you, Mrs Gittings. If there’s anything I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to call.’
