by Mike Carey
“Are the sightings clustered? I mean, does the ghost haunt any particular room?”
“Not really, no. She—she wanders around, to a large extent. But within limits. I believe she’s been seen in almost every room on the first floor and in the basement. Sometimes, less often, on the upper stories.”
That peripatetic aspect was unusual, and it piqued my interest. “You say she, so I assume her form is recognizably human?”
This question seemed to alarm Peele a little. “Yes. Of course. Are there some who aren’t? She appears to be a young woman, with dark hair. Dressed in a hood and a white gown or robe of some kind. It’s only her face that”—again he seemed to have a brief struggle with some word or concept that was difficult for him to get a handle on—“her face is very difficult to see,” he offered at last.
“And her behavior?” I glanced at my watch. I still had to confess to Pen that I’d screwed up badly at the party, and now there was Rafi’s letter to deal with. The quicker I got through the sympathetic-ear routine and got on my way, the better. “You said she was inoffensive until recently.”
There was a pause on the line, a long enough pause that I was opening my mouth to ask Peele if he was still there, when he finally spoke.
“Most of the time, when people saw her, she’d just be standing there—especially at the end of the day. You’d feel something, like the gust of air when a door opens, and you’d look around and see her. Watching you.” There was a very meaningful pause before those last two words; Peele was reliving an experience in his mind as he spoke, and it wasn’t a pleasant one. “Never from close by. From the other end of the room or the bottom of a staircase. We have a lot of stairs. The building has a very distinctive design, with a great many . . .” He pulled himself back to the point, with some effort. “We have thirty people on staff, including several part-timers, and I believe everyone has seen her at least once. It was very frightening at first. As I said, she tended to favor the end of the afternoon, and at this time of year, it’s often dark by four. It was very disconcerting to be looking for a book in the stacks and then to look up and see her standing at the end of the aisle. Staring at you. With her feet a few inches above the floor or her ankles sinking into it.”
“Staring at you.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You said that twice,” I pointed out. “That she looks at you. But I believe you also mentioned that her face is indistinct. How do you know what it is she’s looking at?”
“Not indistinct,” Peele objected. “I never said that. I said you can’t see her face. Not the upper part, at any rate. It seems to have . . . a curtain over it. A veil. A red veil. I can’t quite describe the effect, but it’s probably the most disconcerting thing about her. The veil covers everything from her hairline to just below her nose, so that only her mouth is visible.” He paused for a moment—consulting his memory, I assumed—and his voice became even more hesitant. I could hear him picking his words, turning them over in his mind to check for nuances. “But you feel her attention,” he said. “You know you’re being watched. Examined. There’s no possibility of doubt on the matter.”
“You get that in a lot of hauntings,” I agreed. “Ectoplasmic eyeballing. You can even get it without the ghost itself ever showing up; and then, of course, it’s a lot harder to deal with—a lot harder to spot for what it is. What you’ve got is the more usual variety: she looks at you, and you feel the pressure of her gaze. But”—and once again I forced him back to the real issue—“she’s doing more now than just looking, right?”
“Last Friday,” said Peele unhappily. “One of my assistants—a man named Richard Clitheroe—was mending a document in the staff workroom. A lot of the original manuscripts in our collection have been indifferently cared for—inevitably, I suppose—and so a large part of our work is maintenance and reconstruction. He picked up a pair of scissors, and then there was—there was a commotion. Everything on the table started to fly around wildly, and the scissors were snatched from his hand. They cut his face, not deeply but visibly, and—and mutilated the document, too.”
He fell into silence. I was impressed that he’d put the damage to the document last. To judge from his hushed tone, it was obviously the thing that had frightened him the most. So Peele’s archive had a harmless and passive ghost who had suddenly become enraged and active. It was unusual, and I felt curiosity stir in my stomach like a waking snake. I clenched my teeth, holding it sternly down.
“There’s a woman I used to work with sometimes,” I said to Peele. Work under was the truth, but I went with the face-saving lie. “Professor Jenna-Jane Mulbridge. You’ve probably heard of her. The author of In Flesh and Spirit?” Peele exhaled—a sound halfway toward an “Aah.” JJ’s magnum opus was one of the few textbooks of our trade that had genuine crossover appeal, so everyone had heard of her even if they hadn’t read it. “The woman who raised Rosie?” Peele confirmed, audibly impressed.
Actually, it had taken a whole bunch of us to raise the ghost known half jokingly as Rosie Crucis—and it took a whole dedicated team of people to keep her raised once we’d got her—but I let that pass. “Professor Mulbridge still practices occasionally,” I said. “And she also heads the Metamorphic Ontology Clinic in Paddington, so she’s in daily contact with dozens of the best men and women in the business. I can drop her a line and ask her to get in touch with you. I’m sure she’ll be able to help you.”
Peele mulled this compromise over. On the one hand, JJ was a very sizable carrot; on the other hand, he’d obviously been hoping, as clients usually do, for instant gratification.
“I thought you might come yourself,” he said pointedly. “Tonight. I really wanted to have this dealt with tonight.”
I have a stock lecture for clients who take this tack, but I felt as though I’d already given Peele more than his fair share of tolerance and patience.
“Exorcism doesn’t work like that,” I said tersely. “Mr. Peele, I’m afraid I’m going to have to get back to you later—unless you choose to follow this up yourself elsewhere. I have another appointment, and it’s one that I don’t want to be late for.”
“So Ms. Mulbridge will perform the exorcism for us?” Peele pursued.
“Professor Mulbridge. I can’t promise that, but I’ll ask her if she’s free to take it on. If she is, I presume the archive’s number is listed in the phone book?”
“We have a Web site. All the contact details are on the Web site, but my home number—”
I broke in to tell him that the Web site would be fine, but he insisted that I take his home number down anyway. I wrote it on the back of Rafi’s envelope. “Thank you, Mr. Peele. Really good to talk to you.”
“But if the professor isn’t available—”
“Then I’ll let you know. One way or another, you’ll hear from me or from her. Good evening, Mr. Peele. Take care.”
I hung up, crossed to the door, and headed down the stairs. I’d reached the bottom before the phone rang again.
I flicked the lights off, turned the key in the lock, and walked away, heading for the car. It was still where I’d left it, and it still had all four wheels. Even at its worst, there are tiny holes in the midnight canopy of my bad luck.
A glass of whisky was calling out to me, a sultry siren song floating above the hoarse and ragged voices of the night.
But I was like Ulysses, tied to the mast.
First I had to go and see Rafi.
I changed my clothes in the car, experiencing a palpable prickle of relief as I dumped the green dinner jacket in the backseat. It wasn’t the ridiculous color of the thing, it was the feeling of being without my tin whistle, as necessary to me as a piece is to an American private eye. As I shrugged my greatcoat back on over my shoulders—hard work in that confined space—I had to reassure myself that the whistle was still there, in the long, sewn-in pocket on the right-hand side at chest height, where I can hook it out with my left hand while it looks like I’m just checki
ng my watch. The dagger and the silver cup are useful tools in their way, but the whistle is more like a part of me—an extra limb.
It’s a Clarke Original, key of D, with hand-painted diamonds around the stops and the sweetest chiff I ever came across. It comes in a C, too, but like David St. Hubbins once said, “D is the saddest chord.” I feel at home there.
Satisfied that the whistle was back where it was meant to be, I started the car and drove away from the office with the familiar mixed feelings of relief and cold-turkey disgruntlement.
The Charles Stanger Care Facility is a discreet little place about a third of the way down the long bow bend of Coppetts Road, just off the North Circular. The spine of it was made by knocking a whole row of workers’ cottages together into one building, and although there are some odd, misshapen limbs growing off that spine now, with Coldfall Wood as its backdrop the place still manages to look idyllic if you approach it on a summer’s day—and if you can ignore the colonnade of spavined bed frames and dead fridges left along the margins of the lane in the venerable English pastime of fly-tipping.
But a wet November evening shows the place off in a bleaker light, and once you get through the entrance door, which is actually two doors and can only be released by buzzer from the inside, you have to dump what’s left of the idyll in the receptacle provided. Pain and madness seem to be stewed into the walls of the place like stale sweat, and there’s always someone crying or someone cursing at the limit of hearing. For me, it’s as though I’m walking out of sunlight into shadow, even though they keep the heating turned up a degree or two too warm. I don’t know how far that’s down to me being what I am and how far it’s purely autosuggestion.
Charles Stanger was a paranoid schizophrenic who murdered three children in one of those workers’ cottages just after the Second World War. The books say two, but it was three—I’ve met them. He spent the rest of his life in Broadmoor at Her Majesty’s pleasure, and in his more lucid stretches—because Charlie was Cambridge-educated and could turn a sentence like a joiner turns a table leg—he wrote eloquent letters to the Home Secretary, the president of the Howard League for Penal Reform, and anyone else who showed an interest, bewailing the lack of adequate facilities for the long-term incarceration of those whose crimes were occasioned not by malice or deviant passion but purely and simply by their being as crazy as shithouse rats.
After he died, it was discovered that he owned not just the cottage he lived in but the one next door, too. His will stipulated that they should be given over to a trust in the hope that they might someday become the seed and template for a more humane and less alienating institution in which the dangerously disturbed could live out their days safely sequestered from ordinary punters.
It’s quite a touching story, really. A bit sad for the three little ghosts, of course, because they’re now spending the afterlife in the company of an endless stream of violently disturbed men who probably bring back to them the circumstances of their own demise. But the dead have no rights. The mentally ill do, at least on paper, and the Charles Stanger Care Facility walks the usual line between respecting those rights and trimming the edges of them. Mostly the inmates are treated pretty well, unless they cut up rough with the wrong attendant at the wrong time. The place had only had four deaths in care in the last twenty years, and only one that could fairly be called suspicious. I would have liked to have met him, too, but he hadn’t stuck around.
The Stanger doesn’t pin its faith to last April’s rowan switch, and if you’ve ever seen the effect a haunting can have on the psychologically fractured or fragile, you’ll know why. The wards here are maintained on a week-by-week basis, and they come in all three flavors: a cross and a mezuzah, representing the religious worldview, a sprig of pagan woodbine, and a necromantic circle meticulously drawn around the words HOC FUGERE—flee this place.
The staff nurse at the reception desk looked up as I walked in and gave me a warm smile. Carla. She’s an old hand, and she knows why I have strolling-in-off-the-street privileges here.
“Evening, lover,” she said. That’s her usual form of address for me, but she knows I won’t get the wrong idea; her husband, Jason, is a burly male nurse and could make a novel origami sculpture out of me in the space of about five seconds. “I thought he’d been pretty good lately.”
“He’s been fine, Carla,” I said, scribbling my name in the daybook. “Tonight I’m just visiting. He wrote me a letter.”
Her eyes widened, and interest quickened on her face. Carla is an inveterate gossip. It’s her only vice, and she regrets bitterly the failure of real-life hospitals to live up to the same standards of intrigue and promiscuity as fictional ones.
“Yeah, I saw,” she said, leaning in toward me a little. “He had a hard time with it, too. You know, the strong hand writing, the other one trying to snatch the paper away.”
I raised and lowered my eyebrows in a virtual shrug. “Asmodeus won,” I said tersely, and Carla made a sour face. Asmodeus always wins. It wasn’t even worth commenting on anymore, and I’d only said it to avoid giving any other answer to her implied question.
“I’m going to go on in,” I said. “If Dr. Webb wants to talk to me, I can stick around for a while afterward. But really this one is just private stuff.”
“You run with it, Felix,” she said, waving me on. “Paul’s got the keys.”
Paul was a lugubrious black man so tall and broad that in a 4-4-2 formation, he’d count as one of the 4s all by himself. He scarcely ever spoke, and when he did, he kept it short and to the point. When he saw me walking up the corridor toward him, he said the single word “Ditko,” and I nodded. He turned around and led the way.
There’s a left turn at the end of the main hallway with a subtle upward gradient underfoot as you pass from the converted cottages into a newer, purpose-built wing. It has a different feel to it, too—on a psychic level, I mean. Old stones put out a sort of constant, diffuse emotional field like the glow of a dead fire; newly poured concrete is blank and cold.
Which may be why I shuddered when we stopped in front of Rafi’s door.
Paul bent down to check the inspection window, made a tutting sound with his tongue against his teeth. Then he put the key in the lock and turned it. The door swung open.
I always forget in between visits how small and bare Rafi’s cell is. I suppose forgetting makes the whole thing easier to bear. The place is a cube, essentially, ten feet on a side. No furniture, because even when it’s bolted down, Rafi can rip it up and use it, and there are people still working at the Stanger now who remember the last time that happened. “If in doubt, don’t,” is their fervent creed. The walls and ceiling are bare white plaster, but out of sight underneath them, instead of plasterboard, there’s a layer of silver and steel amalgam, one part to ten. Don’t ask me how much that cost. It’s the main reason why I’m poor. On the floor, the metal isn’t even covered over. It shines dully up from between old scuff marks.
Rafi was sitting in the corner in the lotus position. His long, lank hair hung down over his face, hiding it completely. But he looked up at the sound of my footsteps, parted the foliage, and grinned out at me from under it. Someone had released one of his arms from the straitjacket and given him a deck of cards; they were spread on the floor in front of him in the pattern of a game of clock patience. Hard-edged, plastic-coated—that looked like a really bad idea in my book. I made a mental note to tell Carla to slap Webb over the back of the head for me and ask him what he thought he was doing.
“Felix!” Rafi growled in one of his more unpleasant voices—all in the back of his throat, gutturals so harsh they sounded like slowed-down shotgun blasts. “I am honored. I am so fucking privileged. Come on in, now. Come right on in. Don’t be shy.”
“He gives you any trouble,” Paul said, stolid and matter-of-fact, “you just call, all right?” He closed the door behind me, and I heard the key turn again.
Rafi was watching me in silence, expectant. I le
t my coat fall open and touched my fingers to the pocket where the tin whistle nestled, the top inch or so of its gleaming metal visible against the gray lining, like half-cooled cinders. He sighed when he saw it, a sigh with a jagged edge to it.
“You gonna play us a tune?” he whispered. And it was really Rafi for a moment, not Asmodeus stealing Rafi’s voice.
“It’s good to see you, Rafi,” I said. “Yeah, I’ll whistle something up for you in a minute or two. Give you some peace—or at least some headspace.”
Rafi’s face twisted abruptly—seemed to melt and re-form in an instant into a brutal sneer. “You fucking wish!” snarled the other voice.
Well, I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. It never is. With the feeling of a man about to jump up over the top of the trench and go charging across no-man’s-land, I sat down in front of him and got into a cross-legged posture that mirrored his own. I took the letter out of my coat pocket, unfolded it, and held it out for him to see.
“You wrote to me,” I said, deliberately leaving the “you” hanging in the air. Despite what I’d said to Carla, I still wasn’t 100 percent certain whether it was Rafi or his evil passenger who had really been sailing the ship when that letter got written—and I felt like I needed to find out.
Rafi took the letter out of my hand and stared at it for a second with a calm, half-amused look on his face. Flame blossomed between his fingers, shot in an instant to all four corners of the crumpled sheet of paper, and consumed it in a single whoof of heat that I felt from where I was sitting. Rafi’s fingers opened, and black ash drifted down onto the floor between us.
“Yeah,” was all he said. “I did that.” He dabbled his finger in the ashes, staring at the ground.
“You said that I was about to make a mistake,” I prompted him, feeling more pessimistic by the second. “What mistake was that, Rafi?”
He glanced up at me again, and our stares locked. Rafi’s eyes were brown, normally; these were liquid black, as though tears of ink were welling up in them.
