by Mike Carey
Trudie threw out her hands, her temper getting the better of her contrition. ‘What do you want from me?’ she demanded.
‘Not a thing,’ I growled back. But it was a fair question. I was sniping at her like a jealous husband, and she was probably right that she was more screwed against than screwing. I just couldn’t unbend with her because she was a part of that night – of the blood and the horror and the guilt. My guilt, mostly, but clearly I was more than happy to spread it around.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘We’re working together, so I’ll try to be civil whenever we’re rubbing shoulders. Beyond that, we don’t really have to talk, do we?’
Trudie stared at me unblinkingly. ‘I’ll leave that up to you,’ she said with an edge in her voice. ‘I know something about Ditko – Asmodeus, rather – that I haven’t told Professor Mulbridge. I was thinking that I’d tell you, and leave it up to you who else finds out. But maybe I’m giving you the benefit of too many doubts, Castor. Maybe you’re more concerned about your own righteousness than you are about helping your friend.’
She turned to walk away and ran straight into Gil McClennan, who had somehow got up really close to us without either of us seeing him. ‘Not interrupting anything, am I?’ he asked, with an expression on his face that was the second cousin to a leer.
‘Group prayers,’ I said. ‘Where are the others?’
‘It’s just the three of us tonight.’ Gil moved his index finger round in a circle to indicate Trudie, me and himself. ‘Devani and Etheridge have already seen this, and they came up blank. You two are new, so now it’s your turn to look comically amazed. Whenever you’re ready.’
He walked on, heading away from Trafalgar Square, up the Strand. I glanced at Trudie, who shrugged and followed him. Whatever she had to tell me, it would clearly have to wait.
We walked almost the full length of the Strand, stopping just short of Aldwych. On the side of the street opposite the Savoy, a little way past the Vaudeville theatre, Gil stopped and waited for us to catch up. He was standing in front of an inconspicuous door jammed into a narrow space between a camping shop and an Italian restaurant. To one side of the door, a glassed-in display cabinet contained nothing but a poster. SUPER-SELF GYM AND FITNESS CENTER, it proclaimed, flaunting the American spelling like a visible link to a far-off land of tans and six-packs. Underneath the gilt-edged words, a sprawl of photos showed exercise bikes, treadmills, a swimming pool, a sauna.
Gil produced a bunch of keys, put one in the lock and turned. As he opened the door, a red light flashed in the darkness beyond and a siren started a two-tone sotto voce complaint. Gil tapped numbers into a keypad just inside the door until the light and noise stopped. Then he flicked some switches and the lights came on, showing a small lobby with another door directly facing us. He crossed the lobby and held the far door open for us.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Over to you.’
Pax and I moved forward in a truncated skirmish line, death-sense awake and receptive, like soldiers advancing across a minefield. The space beyond was just a corridor, but it was much wider than the lobby as well as longer. One wall was a painted frieze on the theme of physically perfect human beings running, jumping, swimming, touching their toes. The other wall was entirely of glass, with darkness beyond. Staring into that fathomless black void, I felt something like dread rising inside me, so suddenly it took me by surprise. I wasn’t scared of the dark: I was scared of how little I knew about that darkness. The unlit room, separated from me by a single thickness of glass, could be as big as a cathedral or as small as a cupboard. What would it feel like to be lost in that darkness? To have no idea how far away from you the walls were?
Beside me, Trudie drew a shuddering breath. Her hand sought mine for a moment, then she seemed to realise what she was doing and lowered it again with a visible effort.
‘Yeah,’ Gil agreed dryly. ‘You’re starting to feel it, aren’t you?’ He hadn’t moved from the threshold; in fact he was standing a little way back from it, which meant that he’d propped the inner door open somehow. The street door too, I noticed. Over his shoulder I saw a night bus roll by, heard the distant hoot of a garbage boat on the Thames.
‘Feel what?’ I demanded.
Gil smirked, or tried to. He had his hands in his pockets, trying for a casual pose, but I could see from their outline that both fists were clenched. ‘Well, you tell me, Castor,’ he said. ‘What are you feeling? The joys of fucking spring?’
Not bothering to answer, I waited him out. After a few moments he gave an impatient toss of the head as if he despaired of me.
‘What have you got here?’ I demanded.
‘I wouldn’t want to prejudice your professional objectivity,’ Gil said, deadpan. ‘Here. Go take a look for yourself.’ He took his right hand out of his pocket and threw something through the air to me. It smacked into my palm with a metal-on-metal clank. The bunch of keys. Gil pointed towards the far end of the corridor. ‘Check out basement level one. The swimming pool area. Pax, you and me will make a circuit of the outside of the building. Then we’ll meet back here and compare notes.’
Well, it was what we’d come here for. But before I moved, I found another bank of light switches and flicked them all on. Neon strips flash-bang-flickered into life in the room beyond the windows. It was an exercise area, reassuring in its complete banality, full of nothing more menacing than ski machines and rowing benches.
Feeling a little stupid, I walked on down the corridor and started to descend the stairs. When I got to the first bend I heard Gil yell something, followed by the sound of footsteps. I looked back as Trudie rounded the turn behind me. She passed me and kept on going, ignoring my questioning glance.
‘I thought you were meant to be doing the outside,’ I said.
‘I told Gil I wanted to get the full picture,’ she muttered. ‘He tried to pull rank and I left him to it. What’s the outside of the building going to tell us?’ I could see from the grim set of her jaw that this place had her as rattled as it had me, but that seemed to make her all the more determined not to show any fear.
Basement one was bigger than the street level – or at least the part of the street level that we’d seen. This was the gym’s reception area, with a counter in the centre of an open space, a quarry-tiled floor, a set of signs pointing away towards AEROBICS, WEIGHT TRAINING, PILATES STUDIO. With the lights blazing and the whole room deserted, it looked more like a stage set than a place in the real world – and thinking of it like that made me wonder whether someone or something was about to make an entrance. The irrational feeling of unease, even of fear, that had stolen over me upstairs came back even more strongly now. I had to fight the urge to look over my shoulder. The sense of threat was palpable. Something brushed faintly against the edges of my awareness, on the wavelength reserved for the dead.
‘There,’ said Trudie, pointing to a sign that read OLYMPIC POOL. Her voice trembled a little. Clearly I wasn’t the only one having a bad time of it down here.
We followed the sign to a double door, where there was a pause while I found the right key. Opening the door released a rush of chlorinated air. We stepped through into a smaller anteroom, with doors on either side bearing the male and female symbols and an open archway straight ahead, darkness beyond. We looked around for light switches but couldn’t find any. Somehow that seemed sinister. Why hide the light switches? What didn’t they want us to see?
Whatever it was, I had the sense that it was directly ahead of us, that what we’d come here to find was only a few steps away, on the other side of the arch. As if to confirm that, I was suddenly aware of the rhythmic slap of water against stone very close by. We’d found the pool.
‘Let’s go back,’ Trudie whispered from just behind me. I shook my head, as much to clear it as to disagree with her. This was absurd. The place was empty, and there was nothing down here to be afraid of. True, it might be haunted, but we were both exorcists. We were well placed to deal with anything that mig
ht be waiting beyond that archway.
‘We’ll just . . . take a look,’ I said with an effort. ‘And then we’ll come away.’
‘We won’t see anything,’ Trudie pointed out querulously. ‘It’s too dark.’
I put an end to the discussion by taking ten steps forward, passing under the arch and into the larger space beyond. I was walking on tiles again, hollow echoes rising with each step. A faint phosphorescence in the water showed me the edge of the pool now as my eyes began to adjust to the darkness.
In fact, it wasn’t completely dark. Even though we were below ground level, there was a light well in the centre of the room that must lead up through the centre of the building to the sky far above. Muddy radiance filtered down; seemed to hang in the air in granulated drifts.
But the light from the pool was unconnected to the light that came from above. It was stronger now, more defined, and there were eddies of movement within it. I was aware of two things: the first was that Trudie was standing at my side; the second was that my death-sense, which had been registering faint scrapes and whispers ever since we first came down the stairs, flared up now into a thousand-throated shriek like an air-raid siren.
It froze me in place for a second, and in that second Trudie walked past me to the edge of the pool. Silhouetted against that faint unsteady glow, she stared down into the depths. A strangled cry escaped her mouth. Her knees gave way and she almost fell. Lunging forward to catch her, I saw what she was seeing.
It was only incomprehension that saved me from falling myself. It took a couple of seconds for the movement below me to resolve itself into coherent shapes, and a couple of seconds more for my mind to process those shapes into meaning.
There were people moving around at the bottom of the pool, lots of them. They were visible by their own faint light, like so many Chinese lanterns burning under the water. Some wore armour. Others wore long, pale gowns that left their arms bare. All had sandals on their feet. One carried a short staff like a badge of office, which he brandished emphatically as he talked. And he was talking a lot: to the armoured soldiers, to another man dressed almost identically, to a woman whose long black hair was held back by a comb. They listened respectfully, all eyes on him as he gestured, turned, gestured again.
It was a convocation of ghosts – a caucus, a parliament of the dead – and it was impossible on a great many levels. But why did the sight of it fill me with such dread? Why was it suddenly impossible to draw a breath?
Trudie struggled free from my grip and backed away from the water’s edge, throwing up her hands as though to protect herself against some physical attack. I would have been happy to do the same thing, but I couldn’t move. Darkness was seeping in again from the edges of my vision, bringing with it an incandescent panic that swept away thought, deactivated muscles.
It was coming from above, I realised suddenly. It was hanging in the air over my head, and it was descending: falling around and over me like sand pouring into the lower half of an hourglass, burying me a grain at a time.
I tried to think through the fear, and then I tried to listen through it, which was even harder. This thing, whatever it might be, was dead, and it had an imprint, an essence that I could hear with my death-sense. It was almost drowned out by the screaming of my nerves, but it was there: the suggestion of pattern, of coherent form. If I had my whistle in my hands, I could start to play it. I’d have the beginnings of an exorcism.
Forcing my hands to move, I groped inside my coat, found my whistle on the third try and hauled it out. It slipped from my half-paralysed fingers, but I groped, flailed, caught it again before it fell. I pressed it to my lips and blew a note – a random, forlorn, pointless note, but it was something just to have made a sound. My fingers moved on the stops, and the next note crept a little closer to a place that meant something. I elided it into a phrase, unlovely and shrill.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Trudie’s hands move. Then she raised them in front of her face and the spider’s web of lines stretched out between them was dimly visible in the faint light from the pool. A cat’s cradle. She was working with me, bolstering my patterning with her own. It gave me strength, and the strength became music, still ham-fisted and painful to hear, but elbowing at the fear and pushing it away on one side and then the other. It became possible to think.
‘Castor!’ Trudie panted.
‘I’m with you,’ I snapped, taking my mouth away from the whistle as briefly as I could. ‘Move!’
We backed towards the arch, like two unwary picnickers who’d blundered into a minefield. Trudie wove her hands through forms that looked as though they had names like the two-headed cow and how to sever your thumb, and I supplied the music. I got one last glimpse of the ghosts at the bottom of the pool. Ignoring us, ignoring the pall of dread, they continued their lofty and animated discussion.
With each step we took, the fear lifted a little more. When we reached the archway, the feeling had diluted to the point where it was only a knot in my bowels where previously the knot had taken in my entire body. Trudie shuddered – an involuntary shrug of her whole body, like a dog shaking itself dry after climbing out of a river – then she turned and fled for the stairs. I was a negligible fraction of a second behind her.
But some wordless communication passed between us in the reception area, and we forced ourselves to slow down to walking pace. When we reached the turn of the stairs and ascended back into Gil McClennan’s field of vision, we were walking at something like normal strolling speed. Gil’s face fell. He was obviously hoping for something a lot more dramatic and demeaning. It was a real pleasure to disappoint him.
‘So,’ Gil said. ‘That was Super-Self.’
Perhaps because we hadn’t come screaming back up the stairs with our nerve broken and our trousers fouled, he seemed to feel the need to play it as cool as he possibly could. Leaning against one of the arches at the westernmost end of Covent Garden Market, which was where we’d retreated to, he rolled a cigarette one-handed, stuck it into the corner of his mouth and carried on talking around it as he lit up.
‘It’s a new operation. Just opened last year. The building was offices, previously. And before that it was a haberdasher’s or something, back to when it was first built in around 1901. Nothing out of the ordinary. No ghost stories or unsolved crimes. Nobody died on the premises, as far as we know.’
He exhaled smoke that smelled of menthol and wet socks. Trudie leaned a little back, away from the primary impact area.
‘Some time around the end of May,’ Gil went on, not deigning to notice, ‘the current owners contacted Professor Mulbridge, looking to get the building disinfected. They’d opened six months before that and hit the wall pretty fast. Reasonable volume of sign-ups, but everybody cancelled as soon as they could. No returns, almost no new business. The atmosphere, people said. The place had a really bad vibe.’
‘So?’ Trudie demanded. Our close encounter with the thing in the swimming pool had left her somewhat short on patience.
‘So the professor sent one of her ghost-breakers over. David Franklin. She had better people available, but this didn’t seem like anything particularly difficult or dangerous. The only odd thing about it was that nobody had seen an actual ghost. They just didn’t like the place. It made them feel uneasy.’
‘There are ghosts,’ I pointed out. ‘And uneasy doesn’t come close to describing what we felt down there.’
‘Yeah,’ Gil agreed in a detached tone. ‘It’s getting stronger. Franklin didn’t see any ghosts either, but he felt something, so he did a standard exorcism. Old school retro-me-Sathanas stuff with a bell, a book and a stub of candle. The next thing he knew, he was out on the street, bouncing off the bonnet of a Ford Mondeo. The thing hit back when it was poked – gave him the screaming shits – so he just cut and ran. Didn’t even know what he was doing. He wouldn’t go back after that. When Professor Mulbridge gave him a straight order, he quit: just gave his notice in and walked.’
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br /> ‘The ghosts,’ I said. ‘When did they turn up?’
Gil scratched his chin. ‘Couple of weeks later. We’d made two more attempts to exorcise it, and they’d both been fiascos. The third man up was Etheridge, and he had to be carried out on a stretcher. You’ve seen what he’s like, right? Well, that’s all new. Before he went down into that basement, he was pretty solid.’
‘Why didn’t you warn us?’ Trudie demanded grimly.
Gil looked away, shrugged, then met Trudie’s gaze again with cool indifference. ‘I was interested in your first impressions, ’ he said. ‘If I’d briefed you, then you’d have seen what I told you to see. This way . . . you saw it cold. With your own eyes. Got a lot more out of it.’
Trudie’s shoulders were tensed and her eyes were narrowed to slits. She still hadn’t come down from the terror-rush, and Gil’s bullshit was rubbing her up all the wrong ways. ‘You lying sonofabitch,’ she snarled. ‘If you were interested in our impressions, you would have fucking asked.’
Gil dropped his half-smoked cigarette and stubbed it out with his heel. ‘So,’ he said, ‘Ms Pax, what were your impressions?’
She actually looked as though she was going to take a swing at him. Fun though that would have been to see, I stepped in to take the heat. For better or worse, I still needed the help that Jenna-Jane’s team could offer me. If they were at each other’s throats, they’d be able to offer me a whole lot less.
‘My impression is that we’re dealing with two separate phenomena,’ I said, steamrollering over whatever Trudie was starting to say. ‘The big scary one, which is invisible, and the ghosts.’
‘Crap,’ said Gil simply. ‘They’re two aspects of the same thing.’
‘Then why weren’t the ghosts in the mix to start with?’
‘Obviously they were. But there are no rules about this stuff. A lot of people can walk right through a ghost without seeing it. We’re dealing with imperfect observers who may or may not be sensitive across the full range.’
