by Mike Carey
‘Yeah, but also we’re dealing with at least three exorcists. You’re telling me an exorcist could walk into a roomful of ghosts and miss them?’
The corner of Gil’s mouth twitched. ‘When they’re on Etheridge’s level? Yeah. I could believe that.’
‘You’re missing the point,’ Trudie said, still glaring at Gil as if she was hoping to gore him to death with her eyeballs. ‘Both of you. You’re saying ghosts as though you know what those things are. But they’re not what they look like. They can’t be.’
That was bothering me too. Something here was way out of whack, in fact, a lot of somethings. Apart from Rosie, nobody had ever seen or raised a ghost from more than a century ago, and the older a ghost was, the less likely it was to manifest as anything that looked remotely human. They lost their shape and their coherence as their memory of themselves, or else the residual energy left over from being alive, slowly and inexorably faded. Again, Rosie was the exception, but her resurrection had taken the sweating, straining best efforts of a dozen exorcists, and she was barely 500 years old. The spirits in the swimming pool were dressed as Roman centurions, Roman legionaries, Roman civilians in togas and sandals. I wasn’t sure exactly when the Roman empire had sold its UK holdings, but on the face of it the ghosts we’d seen had to be getting on for 2,000 years old. That was flat-out impossible.
But Trudie took that as read and went for the other impossibility. ‘Ghosts don’t team up,’ she said between gritted teeth. ‘They can haunt the same place, but they almost never acknowledge each other, even if they died at the same time. Those spirits were talking, interacting: they were replaying something they’d all been involved in. And there are at least a dozen of them. When has that ever happened before?’
‘I’ve never heard of it,’ I agreed. I was thinking of the Stanger ghosts. The three little girls who’d been Charles Stanger’s victims, and Abbie Torrington, whose death had come five decades later. They managed to interact okay, were the best of friends and seemed (allowing for the fact that that they were dead) to be having the time of their lives. But I’d had to intervene to cut them free from their past, from their place, with the help of my tin whistle. And they were young ghosts, in both senses, not beaten down and partially erased by the passage of time, whether pre- or post-mortem.
‘Something about the place,’ I mused. ‘About the history of the place. Maybe it’s got unusual properties. Has anyone researched that angle?’
‘I already told you we pulled the records,’ Gil pointed out with exaggerated patience. ‘All the way back to when the block was built. It was part of a big land-clearance project some time in the 1890s, when they built Aldwych. There used to be a road cutting through from the Strand to the market back then – Wych Street – right around here. But it was a shithole and they knocked it down. So yeah, before it was a building it was a street. A street with kind of a bad rep, but not in any way that would matter to us. It was just thieves’ rookeries, gin dives, that kind of thing.’
‘Do we know what it was like during the Roman occupation? ’ I pondered.
‘Probably harder to get a smoke,’ Gil said. ‘Listen, my brief was to bring you here and show you that thing. I’ve done it. The professor wants to hear your thoughts tomorrow morning at eight. Me, I couldn’t care less. I’m not expecting you to see anything I’ve missed. So unless you want to tell me you’ve cracked this thing, and pour forth your enlightenment on the grateful masses, I’m out of here.’
He gave me a sardonic look. I shrugged, and he nodded, satisfied. He held out his hand.
‘Keys,’ he demanded.
‘I’d like to hold on to them,’ I countered. ‘I think it might be useful to get some measurements. Maybe take another look into that swimming pool.’
Gil’s eyes boggled. I was bullshitting him about going back down to the pool: there was no way I was up for that just yet. But I was serious about wanting to take another look at Super-Self. Probably in daylight though, and probably not alone.
‘I keep the keys,’ Gil said.
‘I’ll give you them back first thing in the morning.’
‘I keep the keys.’
‘It would be really helpful to—’
‘Castor, give me the fucking keys!’
I shrugged and handed them over. ‘Thanks, Gil,’ I said. ‘Don’t let us keep you.’
Still bristling, giving us both a bare nod of acknowledgement, he walked away. I gave him a cheery wave. Trudie looked at me with scorn and exasperation then laughed incredulously as she saw what was sitting between my index and forefinger. It was the key to Super-Self’s front door, which I’d slipped off the ring and palmed, one-handed, as soon as it was clear Gil was going to be awkward.
‘Smooth,’ Trudie said.
‘My middle name.’
We looked at each other. ‘What was this thing you had to tell me?’ I asked.
She gave me an appraising stare. ‘Buy me a drink?’
‘At this hour? Where?’
‘I know a place.’
‘I’m skint.’
‘I’ll spot you a tenner.’
‘Then yeah,’ I allowed. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’
The place that Trudie had in mind was the Bridge that Fell, on Victoria Embankment directly behind the Savoy. It was a hot and cold bar: in other words, an establishment where the living and the dead were equally welcome. Like I said, zombies really shouldn’t eat or drink at all, because they don’t have functioning digestive systems any more and the stuff just sits in their stomachs and rots, hastening the final collapse of their bootstrapped bodies. But some go ahead and do it anyway, and others like Nicky Heath like the smell of booze even when they don’t actually drink it. Bars that take that kind of custom tend to stay open way past midnight, because their daytime trade is virtually non-existent.
We sat in the first-floor bar with a view over the river, in a room that smelled of cheap incense, embalming chemicals and organic decay. Most of the other patrons were zombies, and they were keeping themselves to themselves, nursing half-pints of beer through the watches of the night and dreaming of long-gone glories in the days when their hearts still pumped blood. I wondered as I got the drinks in how the place kept going. DMWs aren’t big spenders, after all. It’s hard for them to hold down a job, and since they can’t legally own property they mostly don’t succeed in taking any of their wealth with them when they die.
I realised the answer as a large party came in – three men and four women – talking in hushed, excited voices and taking photographs of anything that moved. Yeah, of course. The tourist dollar must subsidise a lot of places like this, the same way it did the London theatre.
That thought glanced off something else in my recent memory, something that seemed important but refused to come clear. I left it alone, knowing that chasing it wouldn’t work.
Trudie took her whisky and water out of my hand before I’d even sat down, and emptied a good half of it in a single, prolonged swig. She shuddered as the alcohol went down, shaking her head as if to clear it. ‘Cheers,’ she said belatedly, clinking glasses.
‘Cheers,’ I agreed. ‘Super-Self still in your system?’
‘Yeah. Yours too?’
‘More than somewhat.’
The tourists ambled past our table, saw that we were alive and kept on going. They didn’t bother to take any photos of us.
‘How did you first get into this business?’ Trudie asked.
‘By not being any good at anything else,’ I said. ‘How about you?’
She thought about it for a second before answering. ‘The redemption train,’ she said at last.
‘Which is what, exactly?’
Trudie swirled the liquid in her glass, staring down into it like my mum reading tea leaves. ‘What it sounds like. You try to make up for something bad you’ve done. Balance the books. That’s how a lot of people get into the order. It makes a lot of sense, at first, even though it’s never that easy. Atonement’s got i
ts own built-in logic. But you, Castor . . . you’re a mystery to me.’
‘Yeah?’ I asked. ‘In what way?’
Trudie shook her head. ‘You’ve been through all this shit – Ditko’s possession, the White City Riot, the insanity at the Salisbury – but you never seem to put two and two and two and two and two together.’
‘Meaning . . . ?’
‘Meaning that it’s not just isolated incidents. So why do you pretend it is? “Nothing is at stake.” Do you remember saying that to me? I remember it. It was the night when the Salisbury burned and Asmodeus got free.’
‘The night when you and Gwillam carved me up,’ I reminded her – not to pick a fight, just to keep things clear.
She rolled her eyes. ‘If you like. But my point is that you said it, even when the world was coming to pieces all around us. You’re like some anti-Chicken Licken, running around telling everyone the sky isn’t falling, when you ought to be able to see that it damn well is.’
Some of the things that had happened since that night flashed through my mind like a slide show, things that weren’t on Trudie’s list but made her point, if anything, even stronger.
‘I may have been wrong about the sky,’ I conceded. ‘But if I admit that it might be falling, will you at least consider the possibility that fanatics like Gwillam and Jenna-Jane aren’t doing anything to hold it up?’
Trudie tapped the side of her glass, watched the ripples chase each other from edge to centre and back again. Then she looked up and met my gaze. ‘Doing something is better than doing nothing,’ she said flatly.
‘Is it? So if your bed’s on fire and you’ve got no water, you might as well douse it in petrol?’
‘You know what I mean, Castor.’
‘Yeah, I do. Have you seen what J-J keeps in the cellar yet? If not, take a look. Then we’ll talk some more.’
An uncomfortable silence descended. Trudie finished her drink and I made some serious inroads into mine.
‘You said you had something to tell me about Asmodeus,’ I reminded her. I just wanted to hear her out and get away now. The sense of camaraderie that comes from any shared ordeal had dissipated quickly, and I was feeling the distance that separated us more keenly than ever. I’d been wrong to think there could be any common ground between us.
‘After I left the order . . .’ Trudie began hesitantly. Then she lapsed into silence again. After a moment she stood up. ‘I think maybe I need another drink,’ she muttered and headed for the bar.
It took her a while to get served. Another bunch of guys with flashy cameras had rolled in and there was a logjam at the bar. Two in the morning seemed to be happy hour in this place. When she came back, bringing me another pint of London Pride and herself what looked like a triple whisky, she tried again.
‘I told Father Gwillam that same night – the night when we met – that I was out of the game,’ she said. ‘I was angry at the way I’d been set up. I told him I couldn’t be a part of the order because I couldn’t trust him any more.’
‘How did he take that?’
She laughed ruefully. ‘It didn’t seem to bother him all that much. He certainly didn’t beg me to stay, anyway. And he didn’t apologise. He just said I should think carefully about my decision, because it would be irreversible. Once I left, I couldn’t come back. The Anathemata would strike me from their list retroactively, so I wouldn’t ever have been a part of their operations. I’d be forbidden from contacting anyone in the order or talking about our work, with the implied threat that if I didn’t keep quiet, they could turn my volume down permanently.
‘So . . . I walked. And I thought that would be the end of it. But it wasn’t.’
‘Harder to make the break than you thought?’
Trudie was grim. ‘No, Castor. I said I was through, and I was through. But despite what Father Gwillam said, they weren’t quite through with me. About three weeks later I went back to the hostel where I’d been living. It was more of a barracks, really, for the members of the order, but it looked like an ordinary church hall from the outside. I needed to clear out the last of my stuff, and I’d emailed one of the deacons to say I was coming.’
She scowled into her drink, her hand gripping the stem of the glass tightly enough for the knuckles to show white. ‘I walked into the aftermath of a battle. They’d turned the dormitory into a field hospital. Every bed was occupied, and there were people running around with bandages, tourniquets, buckets. Doctors stitching up wounds. Members of the order – people I knew – screaming or sobbing or shrieking out swear-words. Some of the bodies on the beds weren’t moving. They were dead. And the wounds . . .’ She stared at me. ‘They looked as though they’d been clawed by wild animals or . . . or been dragged along behind a truck, or something.
‘I just stood there in the doorway, staring. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t move. The . . . the smell was worse than anything. Blood, and shit, and sweat, all mixed together.
‘Then someone shoved a bucket and a sponge into my hands, and at least I had something to do. Mopping up the blood, so nobody would slip in it and break their neck. I got stuck in. It was a way of shutting my mind down, so I didn’t have to think about it.
‘I worked for hours. Not just with the bucket. I stitched up a wound too, which is the first time I’ve used a needle and thread since I left seminary school. It was Speight. I think you met him. Something had gashed his arm really badly, from the shoulder down to the elbow. I stitched it up the best way I knew how, while someone else – a man I didn’t know – held his arm still and stopped him from struggling.’
‘Why do this there?’ I demanded. ‘Why not take them to a proper hospital?’
Trudie had a hard time focusing on the question. She was back in that room, in her own vivid memories, breathing in the stink of other people’s pain and terror. ‘I think . . . operational secrecy, mainly,’ she said at last. ‘We’re legal in some ways, but we’re vulnerable in others. It’s a difficult balance to keep, and if . . . if our people had left other people dead . . .’ I nodded and waved her on. I got it. When you’re an excommunicated secret sect fighting an undeclared guerrilla war, sometimes it’s best not to invite too much scrutiny. At the Salisbury the Anathemata had moved openly, but then at the Salisbury there were tower blocks burning and dead people falling out of the sky. The cops had been grateful for all the help they could get. Evidently this operation was different. More like the Abbie Torrington business, in fact, when Gwillam’s lunatics were shooting it out with another secret army in a west London church. That was an unwelcome memory. A prickle of presentiment made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
‘Speight was raving,’ Trudie went on. ‘Feverish. I think his wound was poisoned in some way. They’d shot him full of antibiotics but he was burning up. I wasn’t listening; I was too busy trying to sew up all these loose shreds of flesh into the shape of an arm. But I heard him anyway. Enough to put it together. There’s a group called the Satanist Church of the Americas . . .’
‘I’ve met them,’ I said. ‘Twice.’
Trudie nodded. She knew that, of course. The Anathemata had a file somewhere with Rafi’s name on it, and she’d presumably read it from cover to cover before she ever met me in the flesh. Most of the last three years of my life would be in there.
‘We thought they were defunct,’ she said, sombrely. ‘The man in charge – Anton Fanke – died, and after that there was a schism. They spent a lot of last year fighting among themselves. But from what Speight said, there was a clear winner in that contest. And then the order got word that SCA people were filtering into the UK, in ones and twos. Some of them were travelling on false passports, but we had people in place, watching them. We were able to track them as they started to come together.’
My throat was dry by this time. It wasn’t just the vividness of Trudie’s description, it was the growing certainty that I knew where she was going. ‘How long ago was this?’ I asked tersely.
�
�Last weekend. Six days ago. But Father Gwillam was tracking these arrivals for two weeks before that, so the Satanists started to gather in London about a week after Asmodeus broke free.
‘They didn’t come here to see the sights, Castor. They came to perform an invocation of some kind. They’d brought a girl with them: a sacrifice-child, like Abbie Torrington, born and bred to be ritually murdered. But the order was right on top of them, every step of the way. Father Gwillam called down an attack before they could finish the ritual.’
‘The girl,’ I said. ‘Did you—?’
‘Not me,’ Trudie corrected, deadpan. ‘I wasn’t there, remember? But yeah, the order got her out in one piece.’
Remembering Abbie, I bared my teeth. ‘How long is that likely to last?’ I demanded. ‘Gwillam is all about the greater good, isn’t he? He’d kill this kid in a heartbeat if he thought there was any risk the satanists would try again.’
‘That’s just it.’ Trudie tapped the back of my hand with her index finger. It was the first time we’d touched, and the tiny, subtle gesture of intimacy made me start slightly. ‘There isn’t a risk. Not any more. The order took casualties, but we wiped them out: not one of the satanists got out of that room alive. And they put everything into this. Our agents in America raided all their known chapter houses and found nothing. Even the sacrifice farm in Iowa was deserted.’
I tried to get my head round this. So either Asmodeus had contacted his acolytes as soon as he was free, or else they’d known by some other means that he was back in circulation. They’d tried to mount an operation that was a carbon copy of the one they’d pulled off two years ago when Fanke was still alive: to summon the demon out of Rafi’s body by means of an esoterically prepared human sacrifice. And they’d failed.
After that, Asmodeus had murdered Ginny Parris, attacked me, started to stalk Pen. Why? Just out of rage that plan A hadn’t worked? Or was he already working on plan B? I had to ask myself what I was missing, because there was bound to be something. Following the demon’s terrifying corkscrew logic was like trying to figure-skate on the pitching deck of an icebreaker.
