by Mike Carey
I hate hospitals, all exorcists do. A lot of people die there, and a significant percentage of them die scared, confused, angry or in desperate pain. Ghosts in various states from new to badly eroded congregate thickly, shouting and begging and sobbing for attention. A psychiatric unit isn’t as bad as, say, a general surgery wing or a terminal ward, but it’s plenty bad enough. I whistled tunelessly as I followed the two uniformed heavies. The tune was a mild stay-not, pushing the ghosts back from my immediate vicinity and giving me some room to breathe.
Jenna-Jane’s office was at an intersection of two corridors. It had probably been a nurses’ station at one time because two adjacent walls of it were solid glass from floor to ceiling, commanding a panoramic view in both directions. Austere white vertical blinds hung over them now, but the blinds were open.
The office was sparsely furnished. There was something monastic about Jenna-Jane’s dedication to her cause. Probably she and Father Gwillam would have found a lot to talk about if they’d ever met, even though her religion of science was the antithesis of his old-school apocalyptic fundamentalism. There was only an antique roll-top desk against one wall, a number of office chairs on castors, a phalanx of five four-drawer filing cabinets in battleship grey, and a bookcase filled with formularies and medical textbooks. Jenna-Jane didn’t read for pleasure. Classical music was a vice she admitted to, but most of her passions were tied up in her work. In tribute to that jealous god, a statuette standing on one of the filing cabinets – a stylised human figure with its back arched, like the Oscar statue yawning and stretching – was inscribed on its wooden base with the words EXCEPTIONAL ACHIEVEMENT IN EMPIRICAL RESEARCH. Josef Mengele probably had one of those on his desk too.
Two other people were in the room, besides Jenna-Jane – a man and a woman – but I didn’t know either of them, and my attention flicked over them to land on the vivid, self-contained figure behind the desk. Jenna-Jane stood, closing the lid of her laptop with an automatic gesture. ‘Felix,’ she said, a warm smile on her face. She held out her hand, and I took it because there was no use straining at gnats considering the camel I’d come here to chow down on. ‘You’re looking really well, as always. And as always, it’s very, very much a pleasure. You find us at sixes and sevens, so you’ll have to excuse us: the move occupies so much of my time right now.’
Jenna-Jane is like one of those trompe l’oeil paintings where you think you’re looking down a long corridor and in fact it’s a solid wall. That’s the only way I know to describe her, because nothing else in nature is so absolutely impenetrable while seeming so entirely wide open. You look at her small frame, her grandmotherly face, her straight, dignified bearing, and you feel an instinctive swell of affection and respect. Unless you know her; in which case the more she smiles the more you find yourself thinking about what happened to the young lady of Riga. She was dressed down today, in blue jeans and a gingham shirt. That degree of homespun camouflage boded bad news for someone, and it was probably going to be me.
I took my hand back, suppressing the urge to count the fingers and make sure they were all still there.
‘This is Karin Gentle, my PA,’ said J-J, indicating the woman, who stood as her name was mentioned. She had a ring-bound reporter’s notebook in her right hand, but she transferred it to her left so we could shake. As we did, she bobbed her head in a subliminal echo of a formal bow. She was Asian, in her mid-twenties, and handsome despite a slightly pockmarked face.
‘It’s a pleasure to meet you,’ she said, confirming my suspicion that it was her voice I’d heard over the intercom. ‘You’re the man who survived the embrace of the succubus Ajulutsikael, and then tamed her. Isn’t that right?’
‘You think she’s tame?’ I asked. ‘I should introduce you.’
It was just a flippant comment, but the Asian woman’s eyes widened. ‘Then it’s true? She stayed on Earth? She went native? I could meet her?’
The eagerness in her stare was unsettling. Maybe she was younger than she looked: no exorcist should be that happy at the thought of tangling with a demon. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ I advised her. She blinked, looking a little hurt.
‘And I believe you know Gil,’ J-J went on smoothly, indicating with a nod of her head the man sitting in the corner of the office. Unlike J-J and Gentle, he didn’t bother to stand. He just looked me over, toe to head and then back down to toe, without finding anything that he liked on either leg of the journey.
I was pretty sure J-J was wrong on that one: I didn’t know the guy. He looked to be a few years younger than me, which put him just over thirty, with a slightly ratty physique, watery blue eyes, and brown hair with oddly placed blond highlights. Something about those blond tufts raised echoes in my mind, but I would have needed a quieter place to hear what they were whispering.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever—’
‘My name is McClennan,’ the guy said. ‘Gilbert McClennan. You knew my uncle.’
I nodded slowly, wondering how to respond to that one. Gabriel McClennan had been the biggest rat’s arse I’d ever had the misfortune of working with. Based in Soho, he’d systematically lied and cheated and stolen his way out of the good graces of the entire ghost-breaking community. We’d never had a whole lot in common, even before I’d accidentally got him killed.
Since then I’d met a McClennan daughter, Dana, and now here was a McClennan nephew. It seemed to bear out my theory that exorcism was a hereditary trait. Too bad it couldn’t have chosen a better field to sow its seeds in.
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘I knew your uncle. How’s he doing?’
‘He’s dead,’ Gil said. The words were voiced way back in his throat, and he bared his teeth on the final consonant.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I meant since then. Do you keep in touch?’
Gil stared at me hard for a second or two, not saying a word. But I knew the answer in any case, and it was no. Gabe McClennan had run into Juliet back when she was still going by her old name. Physically and spiritually, he’d been chewed up, swallowed down and shat out a long time ago.
‘Gil is a very valued member of our in-house team,’ Jenna-Jane said, gesturing me to a chair as she sat down again herself. ‘Doing your old job, Felix. The job of pontifex and psychopomp. Do you miss it at all? We’d love to have you back.’
The pontifex and psychopomp thing was one of J-J’s favourite lines. They were two of the pope’s official titles: builder of bridges between this world and the next, and chief dispatcher of human souls to their eternal reward. An exorcist wasn’t really either of those things, but pride was always J-J’s besetting sin. If even her servants held the power of life and death, then what did that make her?
‘I don’t have the stomach for that stuff any more,’ I said, knowing as I said it that it was the kind of half-truth that everyone takes to be a lie. But Jenna-Jane nodded as though I’d confirmed a suspicion she already had.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was the moral dimension that made you feel you had to leave us in the first place. Your concerns over our Rosie.’
Our Rosie. She meant Rosie Crucis, the oldest ghost in captivity. But she said it in such an affectionate tone that the horror and cruelty of Rosie’s capture were momentarily occulted by the homely phraseology.
‘You won on that one,’ I reminded her, since I couldn’t say that my feelings on the subject had changed in the years since.
‘Nobody wins when friends quarrel, Felix,’ Jenna-Jane chided me seriously. ‘No, I think it’s true that our work induces a certain . . . narrowness of vision. Inevitably, I’m afraid. Morality reveals itself on the macroscopic scale, but is invisible in the detail work.’
‘I have no idea what that means,’ I said.
‘It means we’re serving the greater good,’ Gil McClennan chipped in, offering his opinion like an apple for the teacher and getting a smile and a nod in return.
‘Yes,’ said J-J. ‘The greatest good. I have something more to say to
you on that subject, Felix, but I’d like to let it sit a little while. What was it you wanted to talk to me about?’
The crunch point. Probably better to get it over with quickly, because the longer I sat here the more likely I was to do something irrevocable – possibly involving the EMPIRICAL RESEARCH statuette.
‘Rafi Ditko,’ I said tersely. ‘I think maybe it’s time we collaborated.’
J-J affected surprise, although presumably it was the mention of Rafi’s name that had got me in through the door. She glanced at Gil, who made a non-committal gesture, and then at Gentle, who nodded. ‘I’m familiar with the case, Professor Mulbridge,’ she murmured.
‘Good.’ Jenna-Jane returned her attention to me, looking a little perturbed. ‘If you’ll forgive me for being blunt, Felix,’ she said, ‘Rafael Ditko is the very last subject on which I’d expect us to find common ground.’
J-J sets the bar high, but that was a miracle of understatement even by her standards. We’d been fighting an undeclared war over Rafi for the best part of a year now. I’d only taken him from the Stanger Care Home in the first place to keep him out of her eager, grasping little fingers, and I’d told her more than once that if it came to a choice between shooting Rafi in the head and letting the MOU have him, I’d probably end up having to toss a coin.
It’s funny how your own words come around to drop their pants and moon you sometimes.
‘Yeah,’ I said flatly. ‘Times change. But the common ground was always there, Jenna-Jane. We both want Rafi alive. For different reasons, admittedly, but alive is alive. So I’m prepared to work with you to bring him in, in return for a guarantee that you won’t bow to any outside pressure you might get to pull the plug on him.’
J-J frowned. ‘Outside pressure? You intrigue me, Felix. But tell me, have you ever known me to bow to pressure? From any source?’
I had to admit that I hadn’t. The idea had kind of a whimsical sound to it, like Jack the Ripper holding a door open for a little old lady and saying, ‘No, after you . . .’
Jenna-Jane clasped her hands together under her chin with just the index fingers extended, pressed to her pursed lips. She considered for a few moments in silence while – out of a lack of other viable options – I sat and waited for the wheels to turn.
‘Do you know where Ditko is?’ she asked at last.
‘No,’ I admitted, ‘I don’t. But I bumped into him in Brixton last night and got close enough to touch him.’ I didn’t see any need to explain that it was Asmodeus who’d been doing the touching, and that I was the hunted rather than the hunter in the whole scenario.
‘He’s got nothing to offer us, Professor,’ Gil McClennan said, his voice dripping with contempt. ‘Our teams are close to finding Ditko already. We don’t need Castor to close this net.’
Jenna-Jane closed her eyes momentarily. I sympathised. Just by telling me that she was already looking for Asmodeus, McClennan had weakened her bargaining position. It must be a trial to be surrounded by idiots and yes-men the whole time: it’s a cross that all tyrants have to bear.
‘There might, it’s true, be ways in which we could be helpful to each other,’ Jenna-Jane said, as though Gil hadn’t spoken. ‘But – you’ll forgive me for this, Felix, I’m sure – I remain to be convinced that you’re negotiating in good faith. When we find Mr Ditko, why would you hand him over to me instead of absconding with him yourself – as you absconded once before, when he was confined at the Stanger Care Home.’
‘Nobody knows, Jenna-Jane,’ I said blandly, ‘who was responsible for springing Rafi from the Stanger. It seems to have been a team effort though. Two men and a woman, from what I heard. And as you know, I work alone.’
‘Of course.’ J-J’s smile was cold and tight. ‘Nonetheless, the question stands.’
‘The authorities want Rafi dealt with,’ I said, ‘and they don’t really care how it’s done. They’ve given the Anathemata Curialis total freedom to close the case in any way they like, and that almost certainly means they’ll kill Rafi in the course of destroying or banishing Asmodeus.’
Jenna-Jane considered this for a moment in silence. ‘Go on,’ she said at last.
‘I’ll work with your people. You’ll make the decisions and call the shots. I’ll advise and give you my skills where necessary, and leave you to choose the when and where. You’ll be in control the whole time.’
‘Your skills,’ Gil repeated, with a derisive emphasis.
Jenna-Jane glanced at him momentarily, as though slightly pained by his bluntness. Then she delivered her verdict. ‘I’ll need to think about it,’ she said, opening her palms as though to show how even-handedly she’d do that. ‘Gil, why not give Mr Castor a little tour of our new facilities while I mull his proposal over?’
McClennan looked like he’d swallowed a wasp, but a yes-man has to stick to the script or else retrain as a yes-and-no-man. ‘Very well, Professor,’ he managed. ‘Just the top floors or . . . ?’
‘Everything,’ Jenna-Jane said. ‘We’re publicly audited, Gil. Nothing we do here is a secret.’
Gil crossed to the door and opened it. I lingered for a moment, staring at J-J. ‘I’ll give you my answer when you come back,’ she said.
It was the best I was going to get, obviously. But I had to wonder, as I followed McClennan out through the door, what it was that was preventing her from giving me a straight answer on the spot. As the office door closed, she was deep in murmured consultation with Gentle, who was nodding and scribbling rapidly in her notebook.
Metamorphic ontology, a phrase that’s both resonant and anodyne, hiding itself coyly behind Ancient Greek polysyllables like a coquette peeping out from behind her fan. It means the study of the undead: science’s sheepish and undignified scramble to catch up with recent developments in the afterlife, especially as they impact on this one. Ontology ferrets into the nature of being; metamorphosis is change. Translation: ‘When they’re dead, people change into some bloody scary things. Let’s talk some serious Latin about it.’
Jenna-Jane was the leader in the field, and her MO unit at St Mary’s had been the first to set up anywhere in the world. It had been much copied since, and J-J now ran a lucrative sideline in advising other hospitals on how to do it – what staff and resources they’d need, how many tasers, how many shackles, how many metric tons of therapeutic narcotics, and of course how thick the soundproofing would need to be.
If I sound a bit sour on the whole enterprise, it’s because I was part of it once and I know what it looks like from the inside. Consequently I wasn’t looking forward to this tour at all, but I was going to roll with it anyway, and keep my eyes open the whole way through. Know your enemy, as the saying goes, especially if you’re planning to be friends.
‘This floor is staff offices and admin,’ Gil said sullenly, as we walked back down the corridor towards the lifts and the stairwell.
‘How many exorcists on staff?’ I asked.
‘Thirty.’
I gave a low whistle. In my day it had varied between two and six. J-J had called in extra help when she needed it, but strictly on a jobbing basis. Her budget must be colossal now. I wondered whether any of the permanent staff were people I knew. I hoped not. Maybe they were all McClennans.
We passed a number of offices, all empty. Most were larger than J-J’s and better furnished: it seemed like she was taking her monastic pretensions to new extremes. One of them, squeezed into a corner between the toilets and the water cooler, bore a terse white-on-black sign that read GILBERT MCCLENNAN, VOLUNTEER LIAISON & FIELD COORDINATOR.
‘Liaison?’ I asked, pointing.
Gil shrugged. ‘Rosie,’ he grunted, grimacing slightly. ‘Organising the meat train.’
‘Delicate choice of words.’
‘What do you want me to call it, Castor? She’s burning them out faster and faster. I don’t even know why we keep her around.’
Because she brings in the money, I thought but didn’t say. Because academics come from
far and wide to see the fifteenth-century ghost you’ve caught and pressed between two glass slides. And that brings the headlines, and the headlines grease the baking tin. But that was only half the answer. For J-J, the money was only ever a means to an end.
Gil led the way down to the first floor. There was building work going on here too, but not so much. Massive pieces of equipment were being welded to walls and floors in labs that looked like something out of Victor Frankenstein’s wet dreams. I did the sums in my head. The MOU had only had two floors at the Helen Trabitch, and it was a smaller building. This move must have more than doubled the scale of Jenna-Jane’s operation.
‘Analytics,’ Gil said. ‘Technical and lab support. This is where blood and tissue sampling gets done. X-rays. Computer imaging . . .’ We’d come to a door beyond which an autopsy slab stood in the centre of a small bare room, surrounded by shelves of chemicals and porcelain drainage troughs. The tiled floor gleamed whiter than white, and the heady smell of formaldehyde hung in the air. ‘And autopsies,’ said Gil, ‘as required.’
‘Where is everyone?’ I asked. ‘It’s a weekday morning. Shouldn’t this place be humming?’
‘The official move is next week. There’s only a skeleton staff here right now.’
It was such an easy straight line that I didn’t lower myself to touch it.
‘Everything here,’ Gil said, warming up a little now that he was getting the chance to show off all these shiny toys, ‘is dedicated. These facilities only serve the MOU – we’re hands-off to the rest of the hospital.’
‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘God forbid you get your CAT scanner all crowded out with sick people when you’ve got a new werewolf to play with.’
Gil shrugged, indifferent to my sarcasm. ‘We’re healing a deeper sickness, Castor,’ he said. ‘But by all means, you just sit up there on the moral high ground and watch the waters rise. Bring a picnic.’
I almost laughed out loud. It was J-J’s rhetoric, barely changed from the arguments I’d had with her before I walked out of here for what I thought was the last time. The end days were coming. Gwillam would call it Armageddon; J-J would call it a disequilibrum event, but they meant the same thing. The dead would fight the living for the top spot in Earth’s wobbly ecosystem, and it would be a fight that would leave the world we knew looking like New Orleans after Katrina. Laws are silent in times of war, Cicero said; J-J thinks they should shut up for the preliminary heats too. She can’t do her job with all that human rights garbage dinning in her ears.
