Mean Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  ‘But suppose they were the kind of person who …’ scrabbling at the pants. Got to be in a pocket. Got to ‘… who would not be that scared. Who would not think it was so weird …’

  ‘Like a medium,’ Kurt said.

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘You guess.’

  The light blinded her. She dropped the pants.

  Kurt Campbell was sitting up on the bed. He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t erect. When she was through blinking she saw that the long key lay on the coverlet between his legs.

  ‘Uh … right.’ She breathed quickly in and out. ‘OK, Kurt, here’s what’s gonna happen. You … are gonna toss me that key. You’re gonna stay right there on that bed. And I’m gonna unlock the door.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Uh huh. In return for this consideration and in light of me perhaps failing to make it sufficiently clear that you were not gonna get laid, I will formally undertake not to write about any of this in the New York Courier or any other publication. Or indeed my diary. Hell, Kurt, I will forget about it.’

  ‘You really don’t need me, do you?’

  ‘Kurt, in other circumstances, who can say—’

  ‘Because you’ve just fucked yourself very nicely, haven’t you, Grayle?’

  Silence. The Andean band had stopped. There was no audible applause, just the wind whipping the window.

  ‘What … what did you call me?’

  Kurt said, ‘Gary recognized you at once.’

  ‘What … whaddaya mean?’ She backed up against the door. ‘Who’s Gary? I don’t know any Gary.’

  ‘He and a friend were visiting Seffi at Mysleton Lodge one night. You apparently became quite hysterical. Overreacted.’

  Oh no. She saw the eyes through the holes in the hood, heard the cold voice, You … are dead. A numbness began to eat in. Oh, please God, no.

  ‘Naturally, he made a point of finding out who you were. But as he didn’t get any further than your name and the fact that you were American, it was quite a stroke of luck you turning up here.’

  ‘Oh …’ Felt like she was going to vomit. ‘Oh, dear God.’

  ‘Gary was going to have a chat with you earlier on, but I said, “Gary, the woman’s been driving me potty. I’ve just … I’ve really got to shag her, you know?” Gary was fine about that. He says, “OK, you’ve got two hours.”’

  She closed her eyes. She couldn’t think.

  ‘You could’ve been so much less tense by now, you silly bitch. Afterwards, I’d have relaxed you. It could all have been so much easier for you.’

  Grayle found that she was still holding the champagne bottle. She lifted it, hefted it like an axe.

  ‘OK. Either you give me that key …’ her hand was trembling; the bottle was almost full, champagne glugging out, splashing on the floor. ‘Or I hurl this through the window.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Everybody’s gonna hear it. Everybody down there.’

  ‘No, they aren’t.’

  ‘Or I’ll smash it against the wall and I’ll … I’ll cut you up.’

  ‘No, you won’t.’

  ‘Yeah, I will.’ Don’t look at his eyes. ‘I damn well will. You … you better believe that, you asshole.’

  ‘OK,’ Kurt said lightly. He picked up the key and tossed it to her. It fell at her feet. ‘There you go.’

  ‘All right.’ She bent down, still clutching the bottle. Maybe he was thinking about what she’d done that night with the hedge hacker, what she could do to his pretty TV face with a broken bottle. She snatched up the key, poked around for the lock, glancing back at him on the bed, but not at his eyes.

  He didn’t move. He just looked disappointed, cheated.

  She found the keyhole. The key turned at once.

  ‘And don’t you come after me, you hear?’

  ‘Christ,’ Kurt said, ‘what do you think I am?’

  And she turned the door handle, and she was out of there on to the little landing, panting with a mixture of fear and elation.

  OK … so what she’d do, she’d go right down the stairs, but at the bottom of the tower she’d turn the other direction, away from the banqueting hall and the entrance hall; what she had to do was find the kitchen where that nice woman Vera was and maybe Cindy, also; or she’d get out the back way and if she couldn’t find Cindy or Bobby, she’d avoid the truck and get over a wall, run to a cottage or a farmhouse, and she’d call the cops, no messing around this time. So terribly small and sordid. Cindy was right. And Kurt, he was mixing out of his league; Kurt was no killer, but he’d downshifted, gotten involved, maybe out of greed, with people for whom killing was a small thing, a tidying up.

  Grayle hurried on to the spiral staircase and went down three steps, and then stopped, in sick dismay, the stomach bile really rising into her throat this time.

  Two of them.

  Just like at Mysleton Lodge, only this time they were in uniform.

  And not cops.

  Part Seven

  From Bang to Wrongs: A Bad Boy’s Book,

  by GARY SEWARD

  I done all right.

  That’s what I always say. I mean, nobody, no matter how they spent their life, is going to say I done all wrong, are they? I’ve robbed people and I’ve hurt people, but most of the people I’ve robbed, well, they had it to spare, didn’t they? And most of the people I hurt, they done things what could not be tolerated in a civilized society, in terms of being too cocky and grassing up straight villains and whatnot. All you need to understand is that our world is a rigid and conservative world and we never got around to banning corporal punishment nor, indeed, the Final Deterrent.

  Now, I don’t want to give you all that Frank Sinatra stuff, but it’s true. I done it my way. You’ll never hear me bleating, Oh, it’s my social background, I was abused as a child and all that old toffee. Everything I done was considered and decided on, and that’s the way it will always be.

  I suppose that’s why death still bothers me a bit. ‘Cos you lose control, don’t you? I really hate the thought of losing control, and if anything keeps me awake at night it’s that.

  I just cannot bleeding tolerate the thought of losing control.

  XLIX

  THEY WERE NEVER VERY ROUGH WITH HER, BUT WHEN SHE OVER-came her initial fear and became frantic and garrulous and started bouncing questions off of them (‘How many of you guys are there here? Is this your full-time job, or are you just on a retainer for special events? Is it a good organization to work for, Forcefield? Are there fringe benefits? Do you get overtime for this?’) they taped her mouth.

  The bastards taped her freaking mouth!

  Using this stuff about two and a half inches wide, so it covered from her chin to her nose, and she guessed she recognized it from someplace deep in the Cotswolds, and when the bile rose again she was convinced she was going to choke to death on it, on her own puke, a sad, disgusting death.

  All this time they were using thinner stuff – electrical tape from a roll, ripping it out and biting it off – to secure her hands, wrist to wrist, tight and chafing behind her back.

  This was after they’d all come down the stairs, one in front of her, one behind, and, ironically, had turned exactly the way she’d been aiming to go, and the building was dumping whole centuries again, switching from medieval Gothic to dingy early-twentieth-century industrial.

  And then they put a bag over her head.

  Which was just so disgusting – slimed and smelling of someone else’s sweat and clinging to her face, getting sucked in – that she could hardly breathe and could only make this high-pitched puppy whine in the back of her throat.

  All of this happening within a hundred yards of the gentle New Age fiesta, folk discussing the journeys of the soul, to the floating woodwinds of the Andean band. Overlaid in her head by the voice she now knew to be Gary Seward’s, coming at the end of a long, awful, blood-misted silence and flat with cold certainty. You … are dead.

  Stumbling, tripping o
ver her own feet, a big hand in the centre of her back, blackness in her eyes. The sounds of doors being opened but no voices; wherever they were headed, people seldom came this way, leastways not people who might be moved to question the sight of a trussed woman dragged along by two big men dressed like para-cops. She tried to bring up a picture of these two men’s faces; one had a beard, this was all she could recall.

  And then she knew, by the coldness of her bound-up hands and the sound of the wind through the bag, that they were outside, and she recalled horror stories of IRA executions, the hood over the head, the moment of silence before the bullet through the brain, and she suddenly wanted to pee very badly.

  A door creaked. Inside again. A close, flat atmosphere. Another door. ‘Steps,’ one of them said. ‘You take it slowly, luv, or you’ll gerra broken leg.’

  Northern accent, a good deal heavier than Bobby Maiden’s, but the same general area, Grayle guessed – Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, someplace … don’t pee, don’t pee …

  The steps seemed to be wide and short, but she kept tripping and the big hands went up under her arms. So, if they’d come down from the tower to the ground, then this meant … Jesus, just when you thought you weren’t claustrophobic … they were going underground. Lips taped, head bagged and earth all around, Grayle began to puppy whine again.

  ‘Take it easy. Nearly there.’

  Sound of a key struggling in a door. Like the tower room, a big key, a thick door. But an old, resistant lock.

  ‘Stay back, sunshine,’ the northern guy said, ‘or you’ll get your face kicked in.’

  Then nobody was touching Grayle any more and there was the sound of the door shutting, the key grinding in the lock.

  And this other northern voice, quiet and sad.

  ‘It’s OK, Grayle. It’s OK.’

  The voice really saying, You’re still alive, but it’s not OK.

  Grayle went rapidly all around the walls, like a fly, feeling the rough, damp stone, pat, pat, pat … but it was no good: no more doors, no boarded-up windows. It was a dungeon, in the original sense; you reached up you could even feel the ceiling – stone or concrete, no boards, no plaster.

  ‘We’re screwed, right? We’re gonna die.’

  A small, black, cold cube, like the hole in the middle of a concrete block, and stinking of earth and mould and some kind of decay.

  ‘They put us down here just until it’s like the middle of the night and everybody’s off the site, and it’s safe to take out the bodies. Our bodies. Like, there’s a hundred acres out there to bury us in.’

  The one merciful aspect of absolute darkness was that nobody could see you cry, and she let it come, in floods.

  ‘Grayle, listen …’

  ‘Oh, dear God, this is not the way I planned to go out.’

  ‘Killing people …’ his voice came from the corner from which he hadn’t once moved ‘… Killing people is no big ceremony for these people. They don’t have to wait for midnight, they don’t have to worry about getting rid of bodies, they just—’

  ‘Wow. Jesus. I’m so comforted by that, Bobby.’

  She sniffed. Her tissues were in her raincoat pocket, up in Kurt’s tower; she used the cuff of her sweater.

  Bobby said, ‘All I’m saying is if they’d wanted to kill us, we’d be long gone.’

  If he came out with much more of this crap, he’d be maybe halfway to convincing himself. The instant of relief at finding she was in here with Bobby had been swiftly cancelled by the knowledge that he was no longer out there and able to resume as a cop, call in other cops and move against these bastards.

  She still couldn’t see him. He’d pulled off her bag and stripped off her tape, and they’d rubbed the circulation back into her wrists and she’d told him about Kurt, how really fucking smart she’d been.

  ‘Where are we?’ She’d thought her eyes would adjust, but no light was no light; it was like being in an immersion tank, most of what you could see was what you imagined, the forms your mind gave to the invisible.

  ‘I came in bagged like you,’ he said, ‘but I’m assuming we’re under the house. Crole had these cellars built for … I dunno, for his coal, probably.’

  ‘Oh sure, we all lock up our coal.’ Grayle breathed in deeply through her nose. ‘I’m sorry, Bobby. It’s just people in this situation, in the movies and stuff, they sit down and they say, hey, we gotta be practical here. And that’s when they find the hidden trapdoor. Or they feel around the walls, and these stones suddenly slide out and there’s this secret passage, and, OK, it’s waterlogged and full of snakes, but it’s a way out. And I just went over the walls, feeling and patting, and there is no way out of here except through that door for which we do not have a key. Oh God.’

  The pressure that wasn’t going to ease.

  Bobby said, ‘Erm, if this is … I mean, obviously I can’t see you or anything.’ His voice was stripped down to the accent you weren’t that much aware of when you could see him. ‘All I, er …. I mean, would it help if I was to put my fingers in my ears?’

  ‘Uh … yeah,’ she said. ‘I guess that would help.’

  ‘OK. I’m doing it. I can’t hear anything.’

  She went tight into the opposite corner from where he was sitting, and laid down the bag she’d had over her head. At least that would absorb most of it.

  When she was through, she stood up and shuddered with relief, and then she went and sat down next to Bobby Maiden and took his fingers out of his ears and gently kissed what she hoped was the side of his mouth.

  ‘Thank you. That was the nicest thing anybody …’

  She broke out laughing then, for a blessedly insane moment, and they held each other, sitting on his jacket on the stone floor in the cold and the darkness and the ammonia fumes.

  After a while, her hands warm in his sweater, she said, ‘You know what Cindy said to me earlier? He said this was all about big egos. Egos wanting to survive death. He said you could see it being of like cosmic proportions or really small and sordid. He said it was about Kurt and Seward, but also Crole and Abblow.’

  Bobby told her what Harry Oakley had alleged about Crole and Abblow. How they liked to watch the lights go out.

  ‘This John Hodge …’ she shivered in his arms. ‘They messed with him down here? Maybe where we’re sitting. What did they do to him?’

  ‘I don’t know. But maybe Campbell and Seward do. If we assume that Seward’s fascination with spiritualism is the main reason he’s bankrolling Kurt … because he thinks Kurt’s the man who can prove something to him …’

  ‘… then it’s in Kurt’s interest to show he can come up with the goods,’ Grayle said.

  She told him what Kurt had said earlier about Abblow and Dunglas-Home; how some people had claimed to have seen him levitate, others had denied it. About the question she’d put to Kurt.

  ‘I think he wanted me to know. Though he couldn’t admit it, he wanted me to know how clever he’d been. I would bet money that he was with Callard until just days before the Cheltenham party and that he hypnotized her.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I guess it was down to auto-suggestion. He wouldn’t even need to be there. You think about this. She’s psychic – I’m not gonna deny she’s psychic, she’s proved it in all kinds of ways.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And … and the drawing, right? Sure, I know you could’ve gotten that from the picture in the book, but I think you got it from her. She has it. Whatever it is, she still has it. She talks about being washed up and all, but she still gets these spontaneous …’

  ‘She was Em,’ Bobby said.

  ‘You don’t have to talk about that. Bottom line is Marcus was right about Callard. She is an extraordinary person. But she’s also human and stupid enough to get involved with a slimeball like Kurt. She always said that the men who came on to her, half of them wanted to get into her pants, the other half wanted into her career. Maybe Kurt looked attractive because he alrea
dy had a career, was making even more money than she was, in kind of a similar area. And maybe he was therapy.’

  ‘Hypnosis.’

  ‘Like Campbell said to me just now, he can relax you. Hypnosis can take away stress and make you feel good about yourself, all that stuff. So maybe it started with her submitting freely to it, all strung up with the stresses of communication with the dead. And then he gets into her mind and he can plant all kinds of stuff in there. Plus, all that about how you can’t hypnotize someone against their will is just smoke, you ask any professional hypnotist – if you’re a suitable subject, they can get you … any time they want. So, like, Kurt has this financially fruitful relationship going with Gary Seward – does Seward have an awful lot of money?’

  ‘More than anyone’s ever likely to know about. They all have, these guys. The taxman just gets the occasional gratuity …’

  ‘So Kurt has this thing going with the most famous and glamorous medium in the Western world. And he’s into her mind. And he knows what could really blow Seward away. What if … what if Callard could be shown to have contact with the newly murdered Clarence Judge? Think about it, Bobby. Callard’s still getting the spontaneous spirit contacts, everything’s normal… until she does a formal sitting. And then, instantly, there he is … there’s Clarence. Every time, on cue. So suppose Kurt put her under one time – maybe this is just after they got laid when she’s all compliant and softened up … and he shows her a picture of Clarence Judge.’

  ‘There isn’t a picture of Clarence Judge with that scar.’

  ‘Just because there isn’t one in the book doesn’t mean there isn’t one. So he shows her a picture – or whatever – and he’s like, You will see this face every time … Jesus … every time you say the words, “The lines are open.”’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘It’s her line, Bobby! Hers and only hers. It’s widely known. You go through Marcus’s files, you’ll see that damn line used as a headline on at least two profiles of Callard.’

  ‘You’re saying there’s no ghost. No Clarence outside of Seffi’s mind?’