by Mike Carey
I was on the other side of the road, though, so when I saw the woman standing out on the pavement next to the doorway of the Bonnington, her arms hanging at her sides and her head bowed, my first thought was that it was Alice calling it a day after a stupendous stint of unpaid overtime.
Then I registered the hood, and a moment after that, the way her body became more and more washed out and hard to distinguish from its surroundings the closer you got to the ground. And finally she raised her head to stare at me, which stopped me dead in my tracks, because the stare was being conducted without the benefit of eyes. The upper half of the woman’s face was a formless, rippling plane of undifferentiated red. Dark hair, decorously tousled, then cherry red lips and a neotenously rounded chin. Nothing, nothing but redness in between.
What she was wearing was harder to determine. She was dressed in white, the way everybody said, but white what? There was too little of her to form a judgment from. She raised an arm to point toward the building, and it was a bare arm, spectrally pale. It seemed as though she was fighting against the pull of gravity, her movements as strained and slow and full of terrible effort as the way your legs pump in dreams when you’re running away from the bogeyman.
I pulled myself together and stepped out into the road—almost into the path of a Routemaster bus; the blare of its horn floated behind it like the bellow of a wounded animal as I jerked back at the last moment, out of its path.
I thought she’d be gone now, her dramatic exit hidden by the bus in line with all the best movie clichés. But she was still there, and as I broke into a run, I tried to assemble the sense that went with the vision—the fix. I began to drop the mesh of my weird perceptions over her, dredging up notes in sequence, turning her into music. It was hard. Even though she was there in front of me, the trace was so faint, it almost wasn’t there at all. It was as though I was looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope. That wasn’t something that had ever happened to me before, and I didn’t understand it. But if she stayed where she was for just a few moments longer, it wouldn’t matter.
Then a door opened about twenty feet behind her, and bright white light stabbed through her. She turned away, and as she turned, she disappeared. I found myself staring at Jon Tiler, who was looking at me with a startled-rabbit expression on his face. He had a satchel in his hand, which he lifted up by way of explanation—or protection, because he looked like he was expecting to be spanked.
“I went back for my bag,” he said. “Was that . . . Shit, were you—”
I ran through a range of answers in my mind, most of them revolving around the word fuckwit. But none of them would achieve anything beyond the immediate emotional catharsis.
So “Lock the door behind you” was all I said over my shoulder as I walked away.
Seven
THE DINNER PARTY WAS FLAGGING.
In fact, that was a polite word for it. It had died. Even my father, who when he’s in full flow can be silenced by nothing short of decapitation, had finally given up and was just staring at his plate. My headmistress from primary school, Mrs. Culshaw, was fiddling with her greens. The clown sitting next to my mother picked his nose forlornly, and she wagging a finger at him without any real conviction.
All around the table, faces turned to me.
“Give us a tune, Fix,” Pen said with an insinuating lift of the eyebrows. “I bet you know some amazing ones.”
I shook my head, but they were all nodding. Old school friends, old enemies, women I’d slept with, the man from the corner shop back in Arthur Street, everyone wanted some free entertainment, and I was on the spot.
Slowly, I stood up.
“Play the one your sister Katie liked,” my father said. “The one you played to her before she died.” A chuckle went around the table at his little joke. He exchanged a glance with my mother, who nodded appreciatively as if he’d scored a point in some unacknowledged game.
“Play her back to life again,” my brother Matthew suggested. He blessed me ironically with the sign of the cross.
That did it. That always did it. I wanted to make them all shut up, and the quickest way to achieve that was to do what they said. I put my whistle to my lips and blew a single note—strident, shrieking, sustained. The faces around the table went in an instant from smug challenge to dismay. Then I modulated that one high note into a wailing, skirling tune, and they gasped.
I don’t always remember what song I play in this dream, but this time it was “The Bonny Swans.” By the time I got to the first refrain, everyone was clutching their heads or their stomachs, sliding down off their chairs, collapsing across the table with moans of agony.
It was clear that the music was killing them. That made me feel a little bad, in a way, a little sick with myself, but it didn’t make me stop. They’d asked for a tune. I gave it to them, as the ones who were trying to crawl toward the door collapsed and curled in on themselves, and the ones who’d just slumped in their chairs withered and decayed in fast-motion.
I killed them all. No more embarrassment. No more demands. They asked for it, and they got it. Finally I lowered the whistle, which now felt hot to my touch, like a gun after it’s been fired. I slotted it back into my pocket, grimly satisfied.
Then there was a liquescent gurgle from behind me. It was a terrible sound—a sound of indescribable distress and pain. The sort of sound that means either pull me back or finish me off, but don’t leave me stuck here in between like a rabbit on a barbed-wire fence.
The whistle had let me down. This one I was going to have to kill with my bare hands.
I turned around slowly. I didn’t want to see, but it was my responsibility. I knew if I didn’t do this, the next time I blew into the whistle, no music would come. This was the price I had to pay for the gift that had been given to me. This was the place and time where the rent fell due.
The body slumped at my feet was twitching feebly, like a goldfish on the bathroom floor. It was too dark to perceive anything apart from that vague sense of movement. I gripped its shoulder, hauled it onto its back. It didn’t resist as my hands found its throat.
The lights came up slowly as I squeezed.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Pen asked. She padded into the kitchen in bare feet and scarlet silk dressing gown, rubbing her eyes.
I took a sip of coffee. I’d made it on the stove top, using Pen’s 1930s moka pot, and it was thick and black and lethally strong—not exactly calculated to cure insomnia, but just right to stop my hands from shaking.
“Have you ever noticed,” I asked her, “how characters in movies always sit bolt upright when they get to the scariest part of the dream? It’s like they’ve got some kind of psychic ejector-seat mechanism. They get to the money shot and boing, they’re awake.”
She poured herself a cup from what was left in the pot. It would be three sips and some sludge, but they’d be potent sips.
“You dreamed about your sister again.”
I shook my head. “This time it was Rafi,” I said glumly.
She sat down opposite me, in silence. I finished the cup, and she offered me hers.
“Nobody blames you,” she said, at last. “Nobody thinks you screwed up.”
“I did screw up.”
“You tried to help him. It didn’t work. Nobody else could have done anything.”
I was sorry I’d mentioned it. Honesty isn’t usually a vice I indulge, but with Pen, you get into the habit. She never lies—not even the white kind that spare feelings and avoid embarrassment. You tend to give her the same courtesy back.
“Maybe nothing would have been the best thing to do,” I muttered.
Exorcism is both more and less than a job. You do it because it’s something you find you can do, and because once you’ve started, there’s something about it that doesn’t let you stop. But, in the long run, it gets to you. Exorcists who live long enough to be old are very strange people indeed—like the legendary Peckham Steiner, who lived the last few years o
f his life on a houseboat on the Thames and wouldn’t set foot on dry land because he thought the ghosts were about to launch a blitzkrieg on the living, and he was the first target.
I thought about Rafi as he was when I first met him: elegant, selfish, and beautiful, a dancer with a thousand delighted partners. Then I thought about him steaming in that bathtub full of ice water, his eyes shining in the dark, looking as though the fire that was inside him was about to break out through his skin at any moment and leave nothing but black ash.
It wasn’t that I convinced myself I knew what I was doing. I didn’t. I’d never seen anything like this, and it made me literally piss my pants. But it didn’t seem possible to just sit there while Rafi burned; it seemed like I had to do something, and there was only one thing I knew how to do. So I took out my whistle and I closed my eyes for a moment, looking for the sense of him, the fix. Easy. The place was saturated with it. So I started to play—just like in the dream.
At the sound of the first note, the demon Asmodeus hissed and bubbled like a kettle with the lid left off and opened Rafi’s eyes wider than they were meant to go. Weakened from his long climb up from Hell, he clawed at me without strength and cursed me in languages I’d never encountered, but he couldn’t lever himself up out of the bath, and all I had to do was to step back out of his hands’ reach. I played louder to drown out the harsh gutturals that were spitting and frothing on Rafi’s lips.
And it seemed to be working. That’s the only excuse I can give for not thinking it through—not realizing what it was I was actually doing. Rafi’s body twitched and shuddered, and the steam that was boiling off him turned into roiling, curdled light. I was playing faster now, and louder, playing what I could see and feel and hear in my mind, letting the music spill out like scalpels to operate on the world. I was lost in it, mesmerized by it, part of a feedback loop that filled me up with sound as a cup is filled with sweet wine.
Then for a moment the curses stopped, and the writhing thing in the bathtub looked up at me with Rafi’s terrified, pleading eyes. “Fix,” he whispered, “please! Please don’t”—his face twisted. Asmodeus’s features surfaced through Rafi’s like oil through water, and he roared at me like a wounded animal. Except that his horns protruded in clusters through the flesh of his cheeks, and his black-on-black eyes boiled like snake pits.
Idiot though I was, the truth hit me in the face then. Rafi hadn’t been possessed by a ghost at all but by something much bigger and more terrifying. That meant that there was only one human spirit inside him, that the fix I had was on Rafi, not on his ruthless passenger. I was exorcising Rafi’s own spirit from his body.
I almost faltered into silence, but that would have been the worst thing I could possibly do. It would probably have extinguished Rafi’s soul right there and then. Instead I tried to turn the tune into something else—to break it free from the Rafi-sense that filled my head and latch it onto something else.
I played through the night, and the night was endless. The thing in the bathtub flailed and cursed, wept and moaned, laughed drunkenly and begged for mercy. Then the frosted glass of the bathroom window lit up with a dim, weary glow of yellow-pink dawn light. That seemed to be the signal for hostilities to cease. The thing closed its eyes and slept. About a half second later, the whistle fell from my mouth, and I slept, too. I didn’t surface again for eighteen hours.
I woke to the sick realization of what I’d done. I’d managed not to snuff out Rafi’s soul, but in some way I didn’t understand and couldn’t undo, I’d knotted that soul and the demon that was possessing him into one inextricable psychic tangle—turned Rafi and Asmodeus into some obscene ectoplasmic equivalent of Siamese twins.
And that was when I’d thrown my hand in—made my New Year’s resolution in midsummer and packed the tools of my trade up in a shoe box in Pen’s garage. There had to be something else I could do with my life—some job where they didn’t give you the keys to the poison cabinet until you’d learned how to mix the antidotes.
Only it turned out that keeping resolutions was another thing I couldn’t do to save my life.
“Nobody told me to let you into anything,” said Frank, rubbing his earlobe between thumb and forefinger as an adjunct to thought.
“I’m assuming that nobody told you not to, either,” I countered.
The burly security guard laughed good-naturedly, but he shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Castro,” he said. “You can use the reading room, same as anybody. And anything that’s in the public-access collections, you can get it out on a pink slip. But if I let you into the strong rooms, and then it turns out you wasn’t authorized or anything, that’s my job right there, isn’t it? No, I’ve got to have either Mr. Peele or Miss Gascoigne come down here and tell me it’s okay. Then I’ll happily take you through.”
I gave up and headed for the stairs. “You—er—you’ve got to leave your coat down here, too. Sorry.” Frank sounded genuinely embarrassed. It wasn’t in his nature to be hard-arsed, despite his scary face, but he had to walk the walk as best he could. I came back, transferring a whole lot of paraphernalia to my trouser pockets as I went. Frank stowed the greatcoat in a locker this time, because the racks were full of little macs and duffle coats in a variety of pastel shades, suggesting that somewhere in the building, Jon Tiler was up to his ears in hyperactive eight-year-olds. Good, I thought vindictively. After last night’s fuck-up, he had a lot of bad karma to burn off. I hoped piously that he’d find enough suffering to get himself back into spiritual equilibrium.
I couldn’t ask Alice, but that was no fault of Frank’s. She’d taken advantage of Peele’s trip to Bilbao to call a meeting, and all the archive staff except for the SAs and the security team (which seemed to consist of Frank all by himself) were closeted with her for the whole morning. Which left me cooling my heels.
Up in the reading room, several large boxes had appeared overnight and were now piled up in front of the librarians’ station, forming an additional cordon sanitaire between the staff and the sparse sprinkling of end users. There was a young Asian woman on the desk this morning, and she gave me what seemed to be a sincere smile over the barricade of boxes. But when I asked if she could let me into the strong rooms, she gave an incredulous laugh.
“I’m not a key-holder,” she said. “Sorry. I’m only a clerical assistant. I don’t have any access to the collection at all.”
I thanked her anyway, and we introduced ourselves. She, it turned out, was Faz, the part-timer who had the thankless task of helping out Jon Tiler. What did she think about that? “He’s a little bit strange,” she said cautiously. “Not very forthcoming, you know? Hard to read. But we don’t have that much to say to one another, really. I just get on with it, and he gets on with it, and when he doesn’t need me anymore—or when I can get him to admit it—I go and do something else. Like this. A change is as good as a rest.”
I remembered that Rich had listed Faz as being there when the ghost attacked him, and I asked her about that. She was very happy to talk about the ghost, but with everyone else crowding around, she hadn’t seen very much of the drama.
“I’ve seen her in the stacks, though,” she said with a little more enthusiasm. “Three times. Once very early on, and then twice last week—two days running. I’m in the sweepstakes, but I’ll need to pick up the pace a bit to be in with a chance. Elaine’s seen her six times, and Andy’s on eleven.”
I asked her the same questions I’d asked the archivists, about what the ghost looked like and what impression she’d got of it. Faz hit the same beats as everyone else, more or less, but she had a few ideas of her own, too.
“She’s young,” she said judiciously. “And I think she’s pretty, only you can’t see because she’s got that red misty stuff in front of her face. She just looks as though she’d have pretty features—I suppose because she’s got such a nice, neat little chin. I thought she might be in her wedding dress at first, because she’s all in white, but a wedding dress doesn�
�t have a hood—and anyway, her hair’s all wild. You’d do your hair up on your wedding day, wouldn’t you?”
“What do you mean, wild?” I asked, curious. This was a new slant. My own view of the ghost, from across the street and in the dark, hadn’t been clear enough for details like that.
“Like she’s been standing on a hill, and it’s been blown about a bit.” Faz thought about this. “Only she’s wearing a hood, so obviously it’s not that. But you know what I mean. Like she’s just woken up, maybe. I don’t know.”
“Did you ever hear her speak?”
Faz looked a little distressed. “Yeah,” she said, unhappily. “I did the first time. She just kept saying ‘roses.’ Going on and on about roses. And she held out her hand to me. It was like she was begging. She’s different now. Quieter. But I don’t think she had a happy life, poor thing.”
I changed the subject. Emotional outpourings about ghosts make me uncomfortable.
“What’s in the boxes?” I asked, pointing. “New acquisitions?”
Faz glanced down as if she’d forgotten the makeshift ramparts that had been piled up around her.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s bunting, I think.”
“Bunting?”
“And glasses, and cutlery, and stuff. For the reception on Sunday. Cheryl’s mum is getting married again.”
“So I hear,” I said. “I’m lucky to be here at a time of such joy and laughter.”
Faz looked sidelong at me to make sure I was being sarcastic, then grinned conspiratorially. “It doesn’t get any better,” she said in a low voice that wasn’t meant to carry. “Maybe it will when Mr. Peele goes off to work for the Gug. Maybe Rich Clitheroe will take over. I reckon he’d be a bit more human.”
“I heard Alice was the front-runner.”
