by Mike Carey
‘And this is Samir Devani,’ Jenna-Jane said. I shook hands with the last man. He had a book in his other hand, his thumb between the pages to mark his place: Kurt Vonnegut’s Man Without a Country. He was Asian, well built and surprisingly tall, maybe a year or so younger than me but in much better shape. And, like everyone else in the room except Jenna-Jane and Etheridge, he was dressed down - as befitted a dirty job, in a denim shirt, slate-grey chinos and well-worn DMs. He gave me a thoughtful, appraising look, his eyes narrowing slightly, as if he was trying to remember where he’d seen me before.
‘Looks like you’ve been in the wars,’ he said. ‘You’re favouring that left arm. It’s Sam, by the way.’
‘Fix.’ I said it automatically, and cursed myself silently as soon as the word was out of my mouth. I didn’t intend to be on first-name terms with anyone here. Unlike me, they’d presumably chosen to be in Jenna-Jane’s employ. I didn’t owe any one of them the air to breathe, let alone civility. ‘It’s just an old war wound,’ I finished tersely.
‘We tend to work in groups of four or five,’ Jenna-Jane said, forestalling any further getting-to-know-you chit-chat. ‘I make the allocations myself, balancing different techniques so that each team can deal with a broad spectrum of supernormal phenomena. Trudie performs her bindings and exorcisms via a purely physical-manipulative modality, Samir by channelling a second personality, Gil by means of spirit drawing and Victor through actual prayer.’
‘Who’s on drums?’ I asked. Samir laughed, and Jenna-Jane looked pained.
‘We all deal with the emotional stresses of our peculiar line of work in our own individual ways,’ she said dryly. ‘Felix chooses to do so through inappropriate levity. He is, however, a very fine exorcist, and we can all be grateful that he’s been unable, thus far, to push his comedy career to the professional level.’
I took the rap on the knuckles like a man.
‘Okay,’ I said, getting down to brass tacks. ‘I’m thinking we’ll start from what we know. Asmodeus has been staking out the house where I live, in Turnpike Lane. We need someone watching the house on a rota. Two someones, ideally. The rest of us can spread out across the city and scry towards the cardinal points until we get an echo. If we do that enough times, and if he’s not moving around too much, we’ll be able to zero in on him a bit at a time. Then when we think we’ve got it narrowed down enough, Jenna-Jane can bring in the heavies. We’ll use nerve gas first - OPG, assuming you’ve got enough to go around. Soften him up with that, because in my experience he won’t sit still long enough for us to try anything fancy. If we play our cards right, nobody ends up dead.’
The silence that met my little Agincourt speech was deafening. By turns, everyone looked to Jenna-Jane, who glanced at Gil and nodded. ‘Mr McClennan,’ she said.
‘Everyone’s already briefed,’ said Gil, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘I’ll be briefing Castor on the Strand haunting later, but there’s nothing we can do there until after dark, so the order of the day is Asmodeus. Pax and Etheridge are staying here to work on the raw data from the sightings. Pax is going to apply her own techniques to the map I was setting up. I’m still working through the grimoires with Klee and Middleton, so Sam and Castor can go over to the Stanger and grab us a focus. Sam’s in charge on that little outing, Castor, and you speak when you’re spoken to. Dr Webb, who’s in charge over there, made it clear to me when we spoke that he hates your guts, and the only reason he’s letting you back into the place at all is because of the respect he’s got for Professor Mulbridge. Does anyone have any questions?’
I had one, but since it was ‘What the fuck?’ I didn’t ask it. I didn’t have to; J-J answered it anyway.
‘You don’t just walk in and head a team, Felix,’ she pointed out reasonably. ‘You’ve been away from the unit for a long time, and our operating methods have changed very significantly. Gil has my complete confidence, and I’m sure you’ll find him an inspirational leader.’
She turned on her heel and left, with a final nod to my new colleagues.
‘Any questions?’ Gil asked again, in a voice that expected the answer no. ‘Okay, then get moving, people. There’ll be time enough to sleep when we’re dead.’
‘Or possibly not,’ Samir observed scrupulously as we headed for the lift.
8
Samir seemed disposed to talk on the way to the Tube, and most of his talk consisted of questions. How long had I been on the staff at the MOU? Had I really been part of the team that raised Rosie Crucis? What did I think of Peckham Steiner’s books? Was the London scene any different now than it had been ten years ago?
I fielded most of these queries with grunts and monosyllables. Sam was affable enough, but I really wasn’t in the mood. Since I’d gone to bed the previous night, I’d been stabbed by a demon, patronised by Jenna-Jane and broken back to the rank of poor bloody infantry. On top of all that, being civil seemed like way too much effort.
But in the absence of any input from me, Sam had no trouble keeping up the conversation all by himself. He told me about how the ‘shit’, as he called it, had kicked in for him: how his secondary personality, who he referred to as Turk, had shown himself first in mischievous and even destructive ways - mocking his parents, picking fights with his friends. A posse of psychiatrists had examined Sam, and after flirting briefly with Tourette’s syndrome had converged steadily on a verdict of acute psychosis. Medication of increasing ferocity failed to do anything except make him as dopey as a punched-out prizefighter. ‘I was heading for a rubber room until I saw my first ghost,’ Sam said, laughing as though he found all this genuinely funny now. ‘Then Turk started swearing and catcalling and insulting it. And it just went away. Piecemeal. As though the words blew holes in it. Exorcism by fucking verbal abuse, can you believe that, Castor?’
I said I could. The window wasn’t wide enough to say anything else.
‘My mum and dad wanted me to carry on with the meds, but I was up and out. I’d had enough of that bloody game. And Turk was easier to control now, somehow. It was like he’d found something to occupy himself. He didn’t mouth off at the living any more now he’d found the dead.’ Sam laughed again. ‘So yeah, my superpower is to tell ghosts to fuck off. It’s ridiculous, really. But Professor Mulbridge loves me because I proved a point for her. There were already loads of exorcists who did it with words, but it was always either spells or prayers. She argued that any words would do, because the modality only has to make sense to the person who’s using it.’
The modality, another of Jenna-Jane’s favourite abstract nouns. Maybe it’s easier to have theories about the way it all fits together if you can’t actually do it yourself. Then it occurred to me that this massive theoretical construct that Jenna-Jane had created served the same purpose for her that my tin whistle did for me: it enabled her to touch the invisible world, and bring it within her grasp. For some reason, that insight didn’t make me feel the slightest sense of kinship with her.
At the Stanger Care Home, Dr Webb predictably refused to see us himself, but detailed one of the male nurses to be at our disposal and give us whatever we needed. In the first instance, that meant access to Rafi’s cell.
‘We’re looking for something that was close to him,’ Sam explained. ‘Physically or emotionally, doesn’t matter which - best of all would be something that was both. Some object that he kept with him and thought about a lot. That’s what makes a good focus.’
But there was nothing in Rafi’s cell; there never had been. It was kept as bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard because you never could tell what Asmodeus would take it into his head to use as a weapon. Nothing was safe in his hands, so the only option was to make sure his hands were empty. They were dangerous enough even then.
Sam wasn’t discouraged. ‘There’s always something,’ he said, crawling across the floor on his hands and knees, nose to the ground. ‘It doesn’t have to be big.’
‘What’s the focus for, exactly?’ I asked him.
/> ‘For Trudie,’ he explained - although in fact it explained nothing. ‘She’s got an idea. Well, it’s Gil’s idea, but she picked up on it because it fits in really well with the way she does her exorcisms normally. It’s all about psychic geography. Scrying by sympathies, Gil calls it. It was pretty much theoretical until now, but Pax is sure she can make it work.’
Well, it stood to reason that the two of them would get along, I thought, surprised at how pissed-off that made me feel. I tried to focus on the job in hand. Something close to Rafi. Something he thought about a lot. ‘We could go to Imelda Probert’s house,’ I pointed out. ‘Most of his stuff is there.’ My stomach knotted at the thought. Vivid images strobed in red and black in front of my eyes: Imelda’s torn and broken body sprawled on bare boards, her crushed head resting in the crook of her daughter’s arm. If we did go there, I might not even be able to bring myself to walk inside.
‘Ditko only stayed there for a few weeks, didn’t he?’ Sam answered over his shoulder, sounding indifferent. ‘He was stuck in here for years. Got to be a better bet.’ He was combing the floor inch by inch with his fingertips. Trying to get into the game, I scanned the wall before me from floor to ceiling, right to left, then did a quarter-pirouette and started in on the next wall.
The walls were pure white - or rather impure white, disfigured by a million ancient and mercifully unidentifiable stains, but they shone with a silver lustre here and there where the demon had hammered at the plaster hard enough for the undercoat of metal to show through. Asmodeus didn’t like silver. Proximity to silver weakened him and made him sluggish. Enough of it could hurt him, perhaps even kill him, but probably only if you heated it to 961 degrees Celsius and poured it in through the bastard’s ear - which wouldn’t do Rafi a whole lot of good either.
A particularly damaged area of the wall’s surface caught and held my gaze. There were rucks and gouges in the plaster, near-vertical jags where it had come away in narrow strips. Maybe my mental picture was inaccurate. Maybe Asmodeus hadn’t hammered on the walls at all. Maybe he’d attacked them in a different way.
Moving in closer, I traced the line of one of the gouges down to groin level and - unbelievably - hit the jackpot first time. Something pale and slightly curved protruded from the bottom end of the furrow where it tapered slightly to a point. The something was about a quarter of an inch long and shaped like a gibbous moon.
‘Is it okay to touch the focus?’ I asked Sam, who was still genuflecting in the far corner.
He looked up, surprised, responding to the suppressed excitement in my tone. ‘It’s better not to. What have you got?’
I pointed. ‘Rafi’s fingernail. He was clawing at the wall, and he tore it off clean.’
Sam swore loudly, or maybe that was Turk, rejoicing that the game was afoot. He came over to examine the prize, then gave me a ringing slap on the back. ‘You clever bastard, Castor,’ he said. ‘We’re in business.’
He fished the nail out with a pair of tweezers and dropped it into a ziplock bag, both items taken from a small kit in his jacket pocket. Watching this manoeuvre closely, I noticed that he was wearing a Spiro Agnew watch: the punchline to the ancient joke What does Mickey Mouse wear on his wrist? and as far as I knew the only public memorial Richard Nixon’s VP had ever earned.
He took out his mobile, flicked it open, and was instantly immersed in a long technical discussion with Gil McClennan. ‘Fingernail. Yeah. Well there’s no way of telling that, is there, but it was a fucking part of him. About three millimetres wide and eight long. Yeah, exactly. Well there’s nothing else here. The nurse said they incinerated all his clothes after he escaped . . .’
The words washed over me, became abstract sounds as I stopped listening. I was feeling hot, light-headed and more than a little claustrophobic in the ten-by-ten-by-ten cube where my friend had spent three years of his life. I stepped out of the cell into the corridor. It wasn’t much better, but right then I preferred the sour institutional stink and the yells and moans of distressed patients in the middle distance to the oppressive silence and stillness of Rafi’s cell. I breathed in and then out, slowly, releasing a tension I hadn’t felt building.
With immaculate timing, a young girl ran through the solid wall to my left, passed straight through me and kept on going, vanishing into the solid wall to my right. I’m not normally startled by ghosts, but the suddenness of her appearance and the fizz of psychic static as we intersected made me stiffen and shudder. Three more phantom girls streaked past, hot on the tail of the first and not even seeming to notice me as they pelted through me. My hair prickled, the neon tube above my head flickered once, and they were gone. The faintest echo of a giggle hung in the air for a moment, distorting as it faded.
I leaned against the wall, my heart beating fast and my momentary calm well and truly shattered. ‘We already asked,’ Sam’s voice came from inside Rafi’s room. ‘No, they didn’t keep anything . . .’
I knew those ghosts well. Three of them had died more than half a century ago, murdered by the psychopath after whom the Charles Stanger Care Home was named. The fourth - the one in the lead - had only been dead a little more than a year. Abigail Torrington. I’d been hired to find her when she went missing - already deceased - from her parents’ house, but there had been a lot more to that commission than met the eye, and a lot of blood under the bridge before I had the light-bulb moment and introduced dead Abbie to her new posse. The Stanger ghosts had welcomed her with open arms, and she fitted right in here.
Why they stayed here was more of a mystery. I’d cut them loose with one of my better tunes, a partial exorcism that permitted them to roam as far as they liked away from this sick building with its self-and-mutually-tortured inmates. And they did roam. They were a common sight in the West End, and there were reported sightings as far afield as Greenwich and Stanmore. But for some reason they always came back. This was where they lived, in spite of everything.
An association of some kind stirred in my mind.
‘Everything all right?’ Sam asked, stepping out into the corridor and slamming the door behind him. The half-formed idea skittered away to the back of my mind and hid itself under a clump of childhood traumas.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Are we good?’
Sam made a tch sound. ‘Gil says we should have gone for something bigger,’ he grumbled. ‘Doesn’t understand a bloody thing, that man. The shit’s like static electricity, isn’t it? It focuses to a point. I know this will do the job.’
We went back to the MOU, Sam regaling me all the way with war stories about some of the weird stuff he’d seen and dealt with while he was working for Jenna-Jane. He had a lot more respect for her than he did for Gil, it seemed. I was curious to know how he felt about the Gulag in J-J’s basement, but I’d probably have to wait until I knew him better before I could ask.
Trudie received the fingernail with genuine excitement. We found her and Etheridge in one of the rooms that hadn’t been redecorated yet, a builder’s shell with bare plasterboard walls scrawled with measurements and instructions for the electricians. There were no wall sockets, but someone had run an extension cord from the room next door and an anglepoise lamp had been plugged into it. The lamp was on the floor, so the room had adequate lighting up to about knee level.
The two of them had laid out a colossal map on a row of trestle tables. It was a composite, made from about thirty Ordnance Survey maps taped together at the edges, and it covered most of London, from Oakwood in the north to Richmond in the south. Etheridge looked happy taping the edges of the maps together. He still twitched and flinched from time to time, but he seemed calmer than when he’d tied himself in knots trying to say hello to me. And he couldn’t do enough for Trudie. He kept showing her the progress he’d made so she could thank him and he could say it was no problem, a ritual that was repeated three times while I was there.
‘This is definitely Ditko’s?’ Trudie demanded, tipping the bag and allowing the jagged fragment of f
ingernail, brown with blood along one edge, to slide out onto an unused table on which a carpenter’s hammer and a dozen or so six-inch nails were lying. She was looking at me, but Sam answered.
‘It was stuck in the wall,’ he said. ‘We checked, and the cell hasn’t been assigned to anyone else since Ditko left. Webb doesn’t think it will be. You couldn’t stick a human being in a place like that; it’d be like Guantanamo Bay!’
I started to speak, but Trudie beat me to the punch. ‘Rafi Ditko is a human being,’ she said sharply. ‘He’s just carrying the demon the way you carry a virus or a parasite. It’s not a good idea to forget that, Sam.’
Sam put up his hands in a mean-you-no-harm gesture. ‘Sorry to offend your liberal sensibilities, Pax. I didn’t know you were a Breather.’
That word - that label - can be almost value-neutral in everyday use; spoken by an exorcist, it always carries an implied insult. The Breath of Life movement is the Amnesty International of the Twilight Zone, its members lobbying to extend human rights to the risen dead. If they ever manage this, exorcism as a profession will vanish overnight, so there’s a lot of cordial hatred on both sides.
Trudie didn’t acknowledge the slur. She was passing her hands over the broken fingernail, first the left and then the right, moving them in small circles as though she was making some kind of blessing.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, her voice sinking almost to a whisper. ‘It’s his. It’s good, Sam. It’s very good.’
‘You’re welcome,’ said Sam. He looked at me over Trudie’s head, rolling his eyes.
‘Shall I fix up the plumb line?’ Etheridge asked, looking to Trudie for another pat on the head. Possibly he was even younger than he looked. Jenna-Jane did the university milk rounds these days. She could have snatched this kid right out of the cradle. I wondered if he’d been in better nick when she acquired him.
