Vicious Circle

by Mike Carey

  I saw him to the door, and he started down the stairs. Before he reached the bottom he looked back, as if conscious that I was still watching. Caught out, I closed the door. There’s something magnetic about tragedy. What I was doing was the equivalent of slowing down on the motorway to watch a wreck in the opposite carriageway. I felt a brief twinge of unease and self-disgust.

  I felt something else, too: a sense of puzzlement that I couldn’t quite nail down. The Torringtons had just aired so much dirty linen in front of me, and bared so many wounds—metaphorical and otherwise—that in some ways I felt I knew them a hell of a lot better than I wanted to. But at the same time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something about their relationship that I wasn’t getting; some point where I’d added two and two and got to five. Maybe it was that barbed-wire tangle of emotions I’d picked up from Mel, and the fact that fear seemed so dominant there. Not just one fear, either: all sorts of fears looping through one another. Her love for her husband was strong, too, and it came through so loud and clear it seemed almost like religious devotion. But the fear wound itself around that, too, like some kind of pathological bindweed.

  Well, even if I took the job I wasn’t signing on to give them relationship therapy. No sense in worrying about it.

  I went back to the sprawl of objects on the desk, but I knew as I stared down at them that I wasn’t ready yet. I needed to fortify myself for that particular journey.

  * * *

  Grambas looked up from his sudoku book as I walked into the café. “So,” he called out, tucking his pen behind his ear, “you got a job, Castor?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. I told them I’d think about it.”

  He wiped his clean hands on his dirty apron. “Yeah,” he commiserated, “must be tough, your slate being so full. Not knowing whether or not you can squeeze anything else in . . . ”

  “Double coffee,” I grunted. “To go. Hold the sarcasm.”

  As he was pouring the thick, black Greek coffee into a Styrofoam cup, Maya walked in with a plastic washbowl full of chipped potatoes. “Castor’s in a sour mood,” he told her.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I knew that.”

  “You knew it?”

  “Sure.”

  “How’d you know it?”

  “He was awake.”

  I got out of there before they could start doing old music hall numbers. The rain was letting up so I took the coffee and my Abbie hangover up to the bridge on Acton Lane, where there’s a bench that gives a view out over both the railway cutting and an overgrown, factory-backed stretch of the Grand Union Canal. Call me a hopeless romantic. That vista appeals to me somehow: London with her pants down, but still trying to keep her dignity.

  I sat and sipped the hyper-caffeinated sludge, trying to rein my black mood in while bringing my nerves’ responsiveness up to a point where it might be dangerous to drive. The two goals were probably mutually exclusive, but in the absence of whisky the coffee was what I felt I needed right then.

  The painful intensity of Abbie’s residual emotions had taken me by surprise. Okay, psychologically speaking, teenagers are perfect storms: when they’re sad, they’re very, very sad. But still . . . an attractive girl from an affluent, middle-class family? Parents who seemed to dote on her, and clearly couldn’t cope with her loss? What was her tragedy? What had made that tide of misery well up inside her to a point where it overflowed into her toys and left a residue that wouldn’t fade?

  I wanted to know. And I guess, in the end, that was why I’d said maybe instead of no.

  I finished up the coffee, which didn’t seem to have helped much, and headed back to the office. I could leave this until later, but it was on my mind now. I might as well find out how far Abbie’s orphaned treasures would take me. I wasn’t going to be thinking about much else if I put it off.

  With the door closed and locked and the phone disconnected at the wall, I threw off my coat and sat down at the desk. I put my whistle down on my right-hand side, but I wasn’t ready yet to start to play. First I had to remind myself of what I was fishing for.

  I touched the doll gingerly, with the tips of my fingers, and pricked up the ears of my soul. Dead Abbie’s sorrow was there again: an endless looped tape of long-ago despair, trapped behind the painted-on smile and the oddly flattened shape that time and circumstances had given to the rag-stuffed body. This time I rode with it for a while longer, paying closer attention to the nuances and the expression. With my left hand, at the same time, I picked up the cloisonné hair slide, which looked to be of more recent vintage than the doll. It had a different resonance, but still in the same general key of inexpressible sorrow.

  After five minutes or so, I set both things down, picked up my tin whistle, and put it to my lips.

  The opening note was low, and I held it for a long time. A second note followed, equally sustained, but then when you thought it might fade, opening out into a plangent trill that finally kicked the tune into gear. It wasn’t a tune I’d ever heard before, or one I was consciously composing as I played. My mind was as passive as I could make it, just resonating with the echoes of Abbie’s misery that were still in my head. I was turning her into music. Describing her in the medium I knew best. Putting out a psychic APB: Have you seen this girl?

  In spiritualist circles, this kind of thing usually gets called a summoning, but people in my business just call it the magic lasso. It’s the first phase of an exorcism. Before you can send a ghost away, you have to bind it; wrap your will around it like duct tape, although that’s actually a very unpleasant image and I wish I hadn’t thought of it. In any case, I was telling Abbie, wherever she was, that she had to dance to my tune now. I was telling her to come to heel.

  There were two good reasons why this might not work. The first was that I just didn’t know her well enough. I’d never met her, in life or in death, and so the music was incomplete—just an unfinished sketch in sound, based on the emotions I’d sensed in the things she used to own. Those emotions were strong, but they were only a single piece from a huge jigsaw puzzle; what I was doing was analogous to trying to intuit the entire picture from that one piece, without the benefit of the box lid.

  The second reason was that she could well be too far away in any case. No summoning is going to work if the ghost doesn’t hear it, and I’d never done this before for a ghost who wasn’t right there in the same space as me.

  But the rules are different in all sorts of ways once you’re dead. What’s space? What’s distance? After a few moments, I felt a tremor of response—like a vibration on some strand of a web that I was spinning in the air, invisibly, all around me. I tried to keep my own emotions—satisfaction, excitement, unease—in check as I built that response into the tune, making my approximation of Abbie a little stronger, pulling her in, calling her to me. The vibration became infinitesimally more marked, more insistent.

  And then, in an instant, it was gone.

  Dead, blank, empty air surrounded me, like the moment after the fridge stops humming and you think the silence is a new sound.

  I skipped a beat, swore under my breath, started up again. The music came more readily this time. I had a better grasp of it now, and so I was aiming better: pitching my tent where I knew she’d be.

  Again, the most tenuous and hesitant of tugs on the web of sound—from over my left shoulder, which was away to the southwest somewhere. I guess direction isn’t any more meaningful than distance, but the sense of the pull coming from that physical quarter was very strong.

  But again, when I reached for it, when I tried to move my mind or my soul out onto that part of the web, the sudden, instantaneous collapse—followed by a great deal of nothing at all.

  A suspicion was waking up in the back of my mind, like a hibernating bear roused too early and in a foul mood. But God forbid I should jump to any conclusions. I gave it a rest, filed some long-dead paperwork to get my mind back into neutral.

  Half an hour later I tried again, building from first principles. I started with the doll just like before, bra
cing myself as I prepared to dip first my toe, and then the rest of me, into that cold ocean of unhappiness—but the tide was out. This time when I held the unlovely toy in my hands there was nothing there: no emotional trace at all. Amazed and disconcerted, I picked up a teddy bear, a pair of trainers, a book. Finally I buried my hands in the sprawl of teenage treasure trove, fingers spread wide, touching as many different things at once as I could manage. They were all cold and inert.

  And now it was the conclusions that were jumping on me.

  That just couldn’t happen. The residual emotions we leave in the things we touch aren’t like fingerprints; they can be overlaid with stronger, later impressions, but they can’t be wiped clean. Or at least, that’s what I’d always assumed. But somebody had just done it: killed the psychic trail, pulled the rug out from under me and left me sitting on my arse in the middle of nowhere. And once again I had to admit to myself that I didn’t have any idea how that could be done.

  Kidnapping ghosts. Blindsiding the hunt. I was dealing with someone who was better than me at my own game. My professional pride was piqued, and slightly punctured. I had to see if I could reflate it.

  Yeah, that shallow.

  On bad days, I have to admit that I deserve everything I get.

  Four

  THE FRONT DOOR OF ST. MICHAEL’S CHURCH WAS MASSIVE: bivalved, with a lock on each side. Old wood four inches thick, set tight in a slightly narrow, low-arched narthex, and I could tell by the look of it that it had fossilized hard with age. It moved less than half an inch under my hand, and I gave it up as a bad job. I could pick the locks with nothing more than brute force and bloody-mindedness, but there wouldn’t be any point. From the feel of it, the doors were anchored at the bottom, too: there was a bolt on the inside.

  There are churches that people will travel a thousand miles out of their way to see. St. Michael’s wasn’t one of those. Don’t get me wrong—it was old, and impressive enough in its way. Early Gothic, very early, taking its shape from Abbé Suger’s original prescription, which meant that it was straight up and down and plain as a pike. A colossal ecclesiastical doghouse on which the Holy Spirit could sleep like Snoopy until the day of judgment.

  Some people would argue that he’d overslept.

  This was where Juliet had told me to meet her, but she was nowhere in sight. All I could do was wait—and while I did, I became aware of a very faint presence somewhere close by. It was something immaterial and shifting, so faint that just the act of focusing my attention on it made it roll back out of reach as though my mind were a searchlight. Whatever it was it had strongly negative overtones for me—like the psychic equivalent of some bitter medicine I’d taken long ago and never forgotten.

  Curious, I laid my hands on the church door again, closed my eyes and listened with my extra sense.

  Nothing at first—except for the discomfort of the cold wood against the palms of my hands. Maybe I’d been mistaken in the first place, and all I was feeling was the remains of that psychic hangover I’d had the day before. I considered taking out my whistle and seeing if I could refine the search a little, but just then a woman’s footsteps stirred a recursive symphony of echoes on the flags behind me. I turned with a witty and slightly obscene quip ready to launch, but it died before I could even open my mouth, because this wasn’t Juliet walking toward me. It was a young woman with bookish spectacles and shoulder-length white-blond hair. She was slight and petite, pale-complexioned, and she walked with her shoulders hunched up as if against heavy rain. Except that the rain had rolled away westward: it was a fine night in late spring, and if it weren’t for the cold under the shadow of the church I might even be feeling overdressed in my heavy greatcoat. As it was, she clearly felt that her beige two-piece was too skimpy, even though the sleeves were full and the skirt was demurely calf-length; hands folded, she rubbed her upper arms nervously as she approached me.

  Lashless black eyes blinked at me from behind those “I am serious” glasses.

  “Mr. Castor?” the woman said, tentatively, as if the question might give offense.

  “That’s me,” I said.

  “I’m Susan Book, the verger. Umm . . . Miss Salazar is around the back, in the cemetery. She asked me to show you the way.”

  Her voice had that rising inflection that turns statements into questions. Normally that irritates me a little, but Susan Book was so clearly anxious to please that resenting her, even in the privacy of your own mind, would have felt like taking a hot iron to a puppy. She held out her hand diffidently. I took it and shook it, holding on long enough to listen in on her feelings. They were dark and confused: something was clearly weighing on her mind. I let go, sharpish; I’d had enough of that for one day.

  “I’m all yours,” I said, and I threw out my arm to indicate that she should lead the way. She started and spun around as though I were pointing to something behind her. Then she recovered, blushed, and darted me a quick, flustered glance.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m really nervous today. All of this—” She shrugged and made a face. Not knowing what she was talking about, all I could do was nod sympathetically. She turned on her heel and walked back the way she’d come. I fell in alongside her.

  “She’s amazing, isn’t she?” she said wistfully.

  “Juliet?”

  “Yes, Jul—Miss Salazar. She’s so strong. I don’t mean physically strong, I mean spiritually. The strength of faith. You can tell just by looking at her that nothing can shake her, or make her doubt herself.” There was something in her voice that sounded like yearning. “I really admire that.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Well, up to a point. Self-doubt can be useful, too, though.”

  “Can it?”

  “Definitely. Prevents you from jumping straight off a cliff because you think you can fly, for example.”

  She laughed uncertainly, as though she wasn’t entirely sure whether or not I was joking. “The canon says that doubts are like workouts,” she said. “If he’s right, I ought to be benching two hundred and fifty pounds by now. I seem to get doubts all the time. But this—maybe the—maybe I’ll get stronger by dealing with all of this. Good comes out of evil. That’s His way.”

  I caught the capital “H” on “His,” which my brother Matthew uses, too, but there was an almost equally weighted emphasis on “all of this,” and I was tempted to ask her what the hell it was that had happened here. But I assumed there was some reason why Juliet hadn’t briefed me in advance, so I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t say a word about Juliet herself, either, although I wondered what Susan would think if she knew what Miss Salazar’s real name was, or where she hailed from. Best to leave her with her illusions intact.

  The church stood in its own very narrow grounds on Du Cane Road, almost directly opposite the soul-dampening pile of Wormwood Scrubs—which is angry red chased with white, like bone showing through an open wound. To the left of the church itself, where Susan Book led me, there was a lych-gate, on the far side of which I could see a trim little graveyard like the stage set for a musical of Gray’s “Elegy.” This gate was locked, too, with a padlock on a chain. Susan took out a small ring of keys from her pocket, sorted through them, and found the right one. It turned in the padlock after a certain amount of fidgeting and ratcheting, and she slid the chain free so that the gate swung open, stepping aside to let me through.

  “I’ll unlock the vestry door for you,” she said. “It’s by the west transept, over there. Miss Salazar is—” She pointed, but I’d already seen Juliet. The cemetery was on a slight slope and she was sitting cross-legged on top of a marble monument of some kind, outlined against the sky. A colossal oak that had to be a couple of hundred years old held up half the sky behind her.

  “Thanks,” I said. “We’ll join you in a couple of minutes.”

  Susan Book stood for a moment staring up the hill at Juliet’s silhouetted form. Then she bustled away, casting a wide-eyed look at me over her shoulder as if I’d caught her out in a moment of self-doubt. I waved, reassuringly I hoped, and walked up the hill to join Juliet. She ha
d her head bowed and she didn’t look up as I approached. She didn’t seem to notice me, although I knew damn well that she’d heard the key rattle in the lock of the lych-gate, smelled my aftershave on the air as I stepped through, and sieved my pheromones by taste to find out what kind of a day I’d had. As soon as she was close enough so that I didn’t have to raise my voice to speak to her, I voiced what was uppermost in my mind.