by Mike Carey
‘I’m here to see Mr Moulson,’ I said.
Crackle. Hiss. Blat. ‘Are you a relative?’
I might as well be. Anything that would get the job done was fine with me. ‘He’s my great-uncle,’ I said.
The random static was replaced by a sustained metallic chainsaw sound as the receptionist buzzed me in. I stepped through into a reception area that looked like a doctor’s waiting room, except that it was deserted.
The formidable-looking woman at the reception desk took her thumb off the buzzer and instructed me to sign the visitors’ book, which I did. I even used my own name.
‘He’s in his room,’ she said, sounding apologetic. Her accent was Australian. ‘We try to get him to come out from time to time, but he prefers his own company.’
‘He always did,’ I bluffed automatically.
She nodded, looking at me a little curiously. ‘And to be honest,’ she added, ‘it’s a bit of a relief. That’s an awful thing to say, I know, but he scares a lot of the other residents when he does come out. Do you have any ID, Mr Castor?’
I showed her my driving licence, and she added a tick to the visitors’ book. ‘Can’t be too careful,’ she commented. ‘After that journalist tried to get in to see him. I’ll tell him you’re here.’
Shit. That wouldn’t do at all. ‘I’d rather surprise him,’ I said hastily, but the receptionist was already lifting the receiver on her switchboard phone and tapping the keys. She kept the receiver to her ear as she looked up at me. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Trust rules. Won’t take a moment.’
There was a long pause. I could just about hear the phone at the other end of the line ring three, four, five times. I was already thinking out my next avenue of attack: Great-Uncle Martin didn’t know about our branch of the family, because my mother’s pregnancy had been kept secret, but now I needed to see him because Grandma was dead and he was the only heir to her vast fortune. For half a heartbeat or so I considered just cutting loose while the receptionist was busy and trying to find Moulson by myself, but I had no idea what room he was in, or what he looked like besides scary, or what sort of on-site security this place might have.
‘Hello, Mr Moulson,’ the receptionist said. ‘I’ve got a visitor for you here. Mr Felix Castor. Your great-nephew. Can I send him up?’
A brief silence.
‘Your great-nephew. Yes.’
Another pause. I tensed, opening my mouth to get my explanation in as soon as she hit the panic button.
She put the phone down and gave me a polite smile.
‘I’ll show you the way,’ she said.
With a slight feeling of unreality, I followed her as she left her post and led the way down a short corridor to a flight of stairs. ‘Room 17,’ she said, pointing. ‘First floor. It’s not locked. Can I bring you up a cup of tea, Mr Castor?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No thanks. I’ll be fine.’
I went on up, passing a very old woman who was also climbing the stairs, at a more deliberate pace. She did it by assembling both feet on each step before launching an attempt on the next one. I was going to offer her a hand, but she was muttering under her breath, and when I got close enough to hear the words, I realised she was swearing to herself. ‘Fuck. Shit. Bastard. Cunt. Fuck . . .’ I didn’t want to break her concentration, which was scarily intense, so I squeezed round her and kept going. When I got to the top, she was still swearing and still climbing.
I knocked on the door of room 17, then opened it and went on in. The door opened onto a hall the size of a toilet cubicle, with a mirrored wall on the left and a row of three coat hooks on the right. The only door was facing me. It was half-open, but I couldn’t see anything beyond it because the room was completely dark. The institutional smell of boiled cabbage and floral disinfectant was strong, but something that was sharper, nastier and not so easy to identify lay under it, half-submerged like an alligator in a mud wallow.
‘Mr Moulson?’ I said in a conversational tone. The space was so confined, there didn’t seem to be any need to raise my voice.
‘Tell me why you’re here, you snot-nosed little fuck,’ someone said in the darkened room. The voice was slow and quavering, with a brittle click behind the words, a harmless-little-old-man voice that conjured up an image of the ageing, amiably bumbling Albert Einstein. The dislocation between the voice and the words - or for that matter between the voice and the grim, deadpan threat of the tone - was absolute. ‘And you’d better not bullshit me. I’ve got my hand on the emergency cord, but that’s the least of your worries. The first time you lie to me, you’ll be crying blood, you understand?’
‘My name is Castor,’ I said. ‘I’m—’
‘I already know your fucking name. Think I’m senile? She told me your name on the phone, didn’t she? London boy. Did some good work six or seven years back, but from what I heard you were never as good as you thought you were. Why can’t you people leave me alone? What, you get yourself in over your head or something? Figure you’ll pick my brains? Fuck off back to Babylon, baby boy.’
My brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders right then, but at that point the starter motor caught and the engine at least turned over. ‘You’re an exorcist,’ I said.
‘You’re telling me you didn’t know that?’ Moulson snarled. ‘So what, you’re just out here on a frigging day trip or something? Talk sense. I mean, right now. Talk some fucking sense, or else close the door behind you.’
I drew a deep breath. ‘I heard about what happened to you,’ I said slowly. The truth seemed to be the only option, because I didn’t know what Moulson’s agenda was, what would tickle his fancy, and what would be like a flicked towel to his wrinkled arse. ‘The same thing happened to my friend Rafael Ditko. He picked up a passenger. I want to know how you got yourself clean, because I’m hoping maybe the same trick will work with him.’
There was a long, pregnant silence from the darkness beyond the door.
‘Tell me its name,’ Moulson said at last, his voice barely a whisper. ‘Who’s he got?’
‘Asmodeus,’ I said.
Moulson laughed - a harsh, unlovely sound. ‘He doesn’t have a chance,’ he said. ‘Go on home, ghost-breaker. You came here on a fool’s errand.’
‘So what you did,’ I persisted, ‘it can’t be applied to a major demon? It only works with small fry?’ I put a mocking edge in my voice. If I couldn’t reason with the old bastard, maybe I could at least goad him into giving something away. ‘Here I thought you’d done something unique, and it turns out you just swatted a fly. Okay. Maybe I am wasting my time at that.’
There was another dry laugh, like twigs breaking underfoot, then Moulson’s voice came out of the shadows again. ‘That’s what I said, isn’t it? I’ve got nothing to give you. But . . . a fly? I was possessed by Zohruen, son. Look him up when you leave here.’ A new tone had entered the voice now, a note of anger, or defiance. ‘His element is earth. I was rotting, breaking down into mulch. You think I had it easy? What I did, I did with fingers that were peeling away to the bone. I did with my teeth falling out of my jaw. So don’t you fucking tell me I had it easy.’
‘Then why won’t you let someone else get the benefit of your expertise?’ I demanded. ‘You want to sit there in the dark congratulating yourself because you got away clean, while someone else goes through what you went through, and maybe goes down under it? You made a living out of this, Moulson. Are you angling for me to pay you, is that it? You looking to get a consultancy fee?’
‘I don’t want your money.’ I hadn’t realised I was shouting until he yelled back at me. The effort cost him. He broke into a spasm of dry coughing that lasted for the best part of a minute. ‘Fuck you . . . and your money . . .’ he spluttered out when he could speak again. ‘I want to be left in peace, that’s all. I want all of you people to just tear my name out of your fucking books and stay away from me. I’ve got nothing to give you. What I did wasn’t even worth the fucking effort. I should have died back there, a
nd got it over with. Turn on the light, you smug little prick. It won’t even cost you a penny to see this freak show.’
The skin on the back of my neck prickled, but I stepped forward over the threshold. My hand groped for the light switch at the left of the door, found a cord dangling there instead. I tugged it and the light came on: a single bare bulb, painfully bright, hanging without a shade in the centre of the room.
With the heavy curtains closed, the room seemed claustrophobically small, just a cubicle really, with a bed and a table and a single chair. I thought of Jovan Ditko’s cell back at Irdrizovo. Moulson at least had a carpet, although its red and orange exploding-sun pattern recalled the worst excesses of the 1970s.
The chair had a wing back and was upholstered in brick-red leatherette, darkened here and there by the sweat-and-scuff smear marks of a couple of difficult decades. Moulson was sitting in the chair, his head slumped sideways against one of the wings, his hands resting limply on its arms. He was in shirt and trousers, his feet bare. The shirt hung open all the way down, I guess because it was a little early in the day to worry about that level of fine detail.
He was in the same colour range as the chair, more or less, his skin flushed an unhealthy red that darkened locally to brown and even black. His face was like a Maori mask that had been tossed off quickly for the tourist trade, with no real feel for what a face ought to look like. Gnarled little bosses stood out from his flesh like rivets on a cast-iron bucket, stretching in two lines from his temples to the bridge of his nose, then flaring out again across his cheeks and down under his chin. There were similar bumps on the backs of his hands where they gripped the chair arm - straight lines of them radiating from wrist to knuckles. His chest, sunken in on his ribs like the sails of a becalmed ship, bore a horizontal line of swellings across the collar bone and two diagonals sweeping in towards the nipples on either side. There was also a little cluster of them to the left of his chest, where his heart would be.
Every one of the swollen bumps rose out of a nest of old scar tissue, which was what gave his skin its piebald look. There was scarcely an inch of his body that didn’t bear the asymmetrical spoor of old, unimaginable excavations.
‘Like it?’ Moulson creaked. He raised his hand in a vague, tremulous gesture, inviting me to feast my eyes. ‘It’s something to see, isn’t it? All done with my own fair hand.’
‘Why?’ was the only thing I could think to ask.
‘Inoculation,’ Moulson said. He said nothing more for a moment or two. Then his right hand, still raised, unfolded and flexed as he pointed towards the bed.
‘In the drawer,’ he said. ‘A shoebox. Take it out.’
I didn’t see what he meant at first. Then I saw that the bed was a drawer divan, the drawers mostly hidden by the unmade sheets hanging down to the floor. I pushed them aside and opened the left-hand drawer, where his hand pointed.
The shoebox sat at the front, ready to hand, nestling in a substrate of socks and underwear. I lifted it out and set it on the floor next to the bed.
‘Open it,’ Moulson commanded.
I did. It was full of tiny copper discs - halfpennies, I thought at first, but since the halfpenny hasn’t been lawful currency in Britain for two decades or more, I lifted one out and gave it a closer look.
It was a little thicker than a halfpenny, and it had never been legal tender anywhere in the world. Two words had been stamped on it, slightly off centre, in letters so small I could barely read them. The spidery diagonals of a pentagram enfolded them.
Martin Moulson.
I grabbed a handful of the things and sifted them between my fingers. Every one of them bore the same imprint, on one side only. The verso was blank.
I stared at Moulson in amazement. The magnitude of what he had done was dawning on me. It was like glancing over a garden wall and finding an abyss, unsuspected, on the further side.
‘How many?’ I managed to ask. ‘How many of them?’
Moulson grinned, his lips peeling back from regular but blackened teeth. In the virtual absence of gums, they filled his mouth from top to bottom, like the bars of a cage. ‘That’s the question, all right,’ he agreed. ‘How many? How small a hole can one of these filthy bastards crawl into?’
His hand wove across and down through the air, sketching a process I couldn’t begin to imagine, and fervently didn’t want to.
‘The first ones were the hardest, because he was fighting me. Look at this mess here.’ The old man turned his hand and tugged his loose shirt-cuff up over his skinny wrist so that I could see the inner surface of his forearm. The seamed and rutted skin was like the surface of the moon, and the bosses that stood out there were in no real order: just five ragged bumps, clustered together. ‘I made the holes with a penknife, jab jab jab.’ He mimed doing it. ‘Then just shoved the sigils in one after another. He didn’t know what I was doing at first. Probably thought I was just trying to slit my wrist, which would have been a real fucking hoot as far as he was concerned.
‘Once he realised, he started to fight me. But I knew damn well it was the only chance I had, and he couldn’t take my right hand back from me, and I was still holding the knife.’ Moulson opened his eyes wide and stared. The light from the bare bulb was stark and eye-hurting, but he was looking into the dark of his own recollections. ‘It took hours. Most of a day, I think, but it wasn’t that easy to tell because he was messing with my head. You’ve probably heard that expression about having a tiger by the tail. Well imagine how it fucking feels if you’ve swallowed the tiger and it’s fighting you from the inside.’
I lifted the box in my hands so I could gauge its weight. Twenty, thirty pounds of metal? Madness. Madness born out of complete and utter desperation. The grudging respect I’d started to feel for Moulson shifted slightly, became something like awe.
‘Did you come up with this idea by yourself?’ I asked him.
His gaze flicked across to me, as though he’d almost forgotten I was there and had to remind himself who I was. He nodded slowly, distractedly. ‘It was the rule of names,’ he said. ‘I remembered my mother telling me that story when I was maybe four or five years old. How God brought all the animals to Adam to be named. “And whatsoever he called them, that they became.” As though they hadn’t been anything up until then, and the names pinned them down.’
A violent shudder went through him, but I couldn’t tell whether it was something that came from the memories he was reliving, or a purely physical thing. ‘We bring them by using their names,’ he said. ‘And we send them away by using their names. The names have got all the power in them, even now. So I drove that evil fucker out of me by driving in my own name, every few inches, until he had no place to hide, no place he could go that wasn’t marked as mine.’
‘Brilliant,’ I said, meaning it. ‘Fucking brilliant.’
Moulson showed his prison-house teeth again. ‘Brilliant? If I’d had the brains I was fucking born with, I would have used stainless steel. Or gold, if I could have afforded it. Copper’s poisonous. Did you know that? I didn’t. Came as a real shock to the system. Started to get the shakes, first, a few months after I did it. Then the shakes turned into falling-down fits. I knew what it was, but I didn’t go to a doctor because I didn’t see any point. It wasn’t as though I had a choice.
‘Then my liver started to give out, and when they took me in for the transplant they X-rayed me. As soon as they found out I was walking around with all this metal in me, they tried to get me to agree to take it out. I told them to go fuck themselves. It was touch and go for a while whether or not they’d give me the transplant, since any new liver would go the same way as the first. In the end they did it, and gave me ovalbumin injections to keep the copper salts under control. Whole load more shit too, pills and needles and all of it. I still get the fits from time to time, but I can ride them out, mostly. Been a while now since I broke a bone or anything.’
Moulson fixed me with a grim, defiant stare. ‘So that’s me,�
� he said. ‘Doing well. Doing really well. And believe me, this is the best your friend can look forward to. Except that a big player like Asmodeus won’t let you get away with a move like this. He’ll see you coming and melt the metal out of your fucking hands. Make you drink it hot, most likely.’
I didn’t answer. For a moment or two I’d forgotten why I’d come, lost in the old man’s crazy, sickening narrative. His words jolted me back to the present with deadening finality. He was right. The trick with the coins was balls-out genius, but it wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t help Rafi. I was still looking for salvation in all the wrong places.
‘Seen enough?’ Moulson demanded. ‘Then turn the light out.’ He pulled his shirt closed a little, pathetically trying to reclaim a little of his dignity.
‘Can I . . . ?’ I asked, awkwardly ‘Is there anything you need? Anything I can get you?’
He stared at me bleakly. ‘You can get the fuck out, ghost-breaker,’ he said. ‘You and all your friends. That’s what you can do for me.’
The two security men were leaning against the bonnet of the sleek black limo, looking like ugly and unlikely tumours that had grown out of its smooth lines. DeJong levered his arse off the metal and opened the door for me with ironic civility. I got in without looking at him, and he slammed it shut.
We did a tight little U-turn on the drive, rejoined the road and threaded our way back through the village. I thought we’d get back up to cruising speed as soon as we were on the open road, but Dicks held the car to a leisurely thirty-five miles an hour. ‘You want to pick up the pace a little?’ I suggested.
Dicks ignored the suggestion. ‘Learn anything?’ he asked over his shoulder as he drove.
I glanced up. He was staring at me via the medium of the rear-view mirror, his piggy eyes narrowed.
‘I learned it’s a good idea to watch the road,’ I said, deadpan. ‘But that was a while back.’
DeJong chuckled softly, and Dicks scowled. ‘Good idea to watch the road,’ DeJong repeated, savouring the joke a second time. ‘Oh, he got you, Linus. He got you there.’
