by Mike Carey
Alice put on a sour, disapproving face at the sexual metaphor, but I think they all got it.
“So we can use that now,” I concluded, simply. “If Rich reenacts the wound, the ghost may respond. It ought to feel the ripples from the original event stirred up again by the replay. If we’re lucky, it won’t be able to help itself. It might be drawn right here, in which case I’ll probably be able to finish the job tonight. But whether it comes or not, it should look in this direction; it should be pulled toward us. And I’ll sense it. I’ll be able to triangulate on where it is.”
All eyes turned to Rich, who shrugged as nonchalantly as he could.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m not scared of a little prick with a needle.”
In the tense, expectant atmosphere, nobody touched the straight line. Rich held out his hand, and without preamble, I jabbed him once with the sharp, on the ball of his forefinger. He had enough self-control not to wince.
“Squeeze out a drop of blood,” I said. “On the desk, preferably.”
“I can’t authorize the cleaners to wipe up blood,” Alice objected, but Rich was already doing it. Clenching his right forefinger in his left hand, he tightened his grip, and a pearl of blood welled up from the tiny wound. It reached critical mass and fell onto the desk with a slight but audible splat.
I handed Rich a swab of cotton wool from the kit, and he reached out his good hand to take it. But before he could, both the cotton wool and the sharp were swatted from my fingers by an invisible force. Rich gave a yelp of shock as his hand was flicked away, too. All the heads present, including mine, snapped around—to stare at empty air.
Then the entire room went crazy.
It was as though there was a wind—a whirlwind—that we couldn’t feel: a whirlwind that flesh was immune to, but that swept all other substances before it with implacable fury. Both doors to the room slammed deafeningly shut; books and files leaned over, tumbled, and fell to the floor; and papers flew from every desk and shelf to envelop us in an instant A4 blizzard. At the same time, the floor shuddered to a series of pounding thuds, the vibrations so powerful that my jaws clacked shut on the tip of my tongue. Cheryl swore, and Alice screamed. Rich gave a choking cry, backing away from the swirl of papers and striking ineffectually at the air. Jon Tiler and the other guy whose name I’d already forgotten both hit the floor in best Protect and Survive style, with their arms over their heads as though they were expecting a nuclear attack.
As for me, I just stood and watched as maps and posters and fire-drill charts hauled themselves off the walls and added themselves to the general melee. It was instinctive: not arrogant, or defiant, or particularly brave. It was just that this was information, and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t miss anything that might turn out to be important.
So when one small piece of paper or card came fluttering toward me, sailing against the storm, I noticed it at once. Unlike most of the diabolically animated paperwork, it was a lot smaller than A4. More to the point, it was dancing to the beat of a different drum, almost hovering, its short feints to left and right keeping it more or less directly in front of my face. I reached up and grabbed it out of the air. I couldn’t look at it because file folders and envelopes and catalogs and worksheets were beating against me and wrapping around me. I closed my hand on it instead, used the other hand to shield my face until, only a few seconds later, the tempest stopped. It didn’t slacken or falter, it just died, and everything that had been snatched up into the air fell simultaneously to the ground. Except for the scrap of card that I was holding—that went into my trouser pocket.
The archive staff blinked and looked around them, shell-shocked and disbelieving. Only Alice and Rich were still on their feet; Cheryl had ducked under her desk to join Jon Tiler and the other guy on the floor. Nobody said a word as they all got up again and stared around at the debris.
“Well, that was what we call a positive result,” I said into the silence.
“The—the damage!” Tiler stuttered. “Look at this! What have you done, Castor? What the fuck have you done?” Alice was just staring at me, and I saw that her hands were trembling.
“I don’t think anything much is broken, Jon,” Cheryl offered. “It’s a terrible mess, but look—most of it’s just paper.”
“Just paper? It’s my worksheets,” Tiler howled. “I’ll never get them sorted out again.”
“Looking on the bright side,” I said, “it worked. I got a really strong line on the ghost. I can pinpoint more or less exactly where it came from.”
They all looked at me expectantly.
“The first floor,” I admitted. “Just as we thought.”
Eight
I BEAT THE KIND OF RETREAT THAT COULD BE CALLED either hasty or strategic, depending on which side of the line you were watching it from. I was helped by the fact that Alice seemed unable even to frame, let alone speak, the many harsh words that she wanted to say to me. I assured her that I’d taken more from that brief encounter than just a confirmation of what we already knew, and I promised her definite progress tomorrow. Then I was out of there.
The lights in the corridor had already been turned off, but there was a strip light on in the stairwell. By its subliminally flickering glare, I reached into my pocket, took out the offering that the ghost had thrown at me, and examined it. It was card, not paper: a white rectangle about five inches by three, printed with pale blue lines and perforated close to one of the long edges by a single circular hole. This hole had once been about half an inch away from the edge, but was now joined to it by a ragged tear.
It was a card ripped out of a Rolodex or file-card index. On it there were four letters and seven numbers.
ICOE 7405 818.
ICOE? Was that a name? An acronym of some kind? The Institute of . . . Christ knew what. The rest of it looked to be a central London phone number, though—logical enough if this was from someone’s desk directory. Leaving aside the question of what I was meant to do with it, it represented a sort of breakthrough in a job—I almost thought case—that had otherwise brought me nothing but a day of aggravation.
I fished out my mobile phone—no time like the present. But the battery is faulty, and the damn thing is always out of charge; this time was no exception. I thrust both the phone and the card back into my pocket and carried on down the stairs.
The security office was already locked, and there was no sign of friendly Frank. I went behind the counter to pick up my coat, but of course it was shut into one of the lockers, and I didn’t have a key. I was contemplating kicking the flimsy door open when Alice came down the stairs at my back and saw me. I turned to face her, bracing myself for a bollocking, but what I read in her face wasn’t anything as straightforward as anger.
“Great show,” she observed, her voice tense. “Fun for all the family.”
“I don’t know,” I countered. “I think I need some tunes you can actually hum.”
“So how is it done?”
I considered tact and courtesy. Briefly. “You get a ghost. You drive it rat-arse crazy with a drop of blood. The recipe’s in the Iliad.” She didn’t answer, so I tried again. “Look, I didn’t expect that kind of a response. I’m sorry about the damage. I thought the ghost would come in for a low pass over the blood, but the reaction we got was completely—”
Alice wasn’t listening. She came around the counter and wielded her totemic key ring to liberate my coat. I took it from her outstretched hands, nodded a curt thanks. I thought she was going to say something else, but she didn’t. She just took her own coat and handbag out of the next locker along. Her hands hadn’t stopped trembling, and when she unhooked her big, unwieldy key ring and tried to slide it into her bag, she couldn’t manage it. With a muttered “Shit!” she thrust it into her coat pocket instead. I left her to it.
Outside, a light drizzle was falling, but the wind on my face—only a breeze, really—felt good after a day in the archive’s stingily recirculated air. I could have taken a t
rain from Euston and changed, or hopped a bus heading north through Camden Town, but I decided to walk to King’s Cross and grab the Piccadilly line direct. I was two or three blocks away from the archive, walking head down along the Euston Road, when I realized that Alice was keeping pace with me—shivering despite her coat, her arms clasped around herself, her keys jangling audibly in her pocket.
I stopped and turned to face her, waiting for the other shoe to drop. She stared at me, her eyes sullen and haunted.
“I’m not happy about this,” she said. “I’m not happy about where it’s going.”
I carried on waiting. I thought I knew what she meant, but I needed a bigger clue than that.
“I thought—” It was a difficult admission, and she had trouble getting it out. “I thought it was all bullshit. I thought Clitheroe was lying, and everyone else was hysterical. Because if there’d been anything there, I would have seen it, too—and I didn’t see anything. Until tonight.”
I was as careful as I could be: a neutral observation, not loaded at all. “You saw Rich getting that wound on his face.”
“It wasn’t the first time—Rich hurts himself a lot. He shut his hand in a drawer a few months back. And another time he tripped and fell down the main stairs. I thought it was an accident he was too embarrassed to own up to.”
“But you saw—”
Alice cut in, her tone brittle and dangerous. “I saw him prancing around like an idiot, yelping, waving the scissors. Then he managed to cut his face, somehow. It wasn’t like tonight.”
She was staring at me, and I saw in her eyes what a heroic understatement it had been when she’d said she was not happy. I’d pigeonholed her the day before, and now I knew I was right. Alice wasn’t even a vestal; she was what we refer to in the trade—often with a certain degree of contempt—as a DT, or sometimes just as a Thomas: one of the absolute nonsensitives who stood at the opposite end of the human bell curve from wherever I was. She couldn’t see ghosts at all.
Funny. After her behavior up to now, seeing Alice so scared and unhappy should have been a feast of schadenfreude for me. But in fact, I felt a reluctant sympathy for her. I’d been there. We all have to go there, eventually. We all have to drop the shield of skepticism and bow our heads to the axe of that’s-just-how-it-fucking-is.
“I know,” I said, feeling a weight of tiredness drop onto my shoulders. “When you see one for the first time—when you realize it’s all true—you have to swallow a lot of very heavy stuff all at once. It’s hard.”
I let the words hang in the air. Yes, I was sorry for her, but I had troubles of my own, and she was one of them. Did I really want to help her dry her eyes and square her shoulders? No.
But some things come with the job.
“I’m going home,” I said gracelessly. “I’ve got ten minutes. If you want my version of Metaphysics 101, you can have it.”
Alice nodded, probably as reluctantly as I’d made the offer.
“Better make it somewhere inside,” she said. “Otherwise I don’t think I’ll last that long.”
The nearest “somewhere inside” was Saint Pancras’s church. It was open and empty. We sat down in the back row of pews. It was almost as cold as it was outside, but at least it was dry.
“Metaphysics 101,” Alice prompted me, her voice shaky.
“Right. Blake hit the nail bang on the head, didn’t he? ‘What is now proved was once only imagined.’” Thanks for that one, Pen. “If ghosts are real, then a whole raft of things that you were happy to think of as metaphors, or folk myths, or medieval clutter left behind in the wake of the Enlightenment turn out to be sober truth. You start wondering about Heaven. And Hell. You start asking yourself what’s going to happen to you when you turn your toes up. Are you going to be stuck in some dismal pit of a place just because you lived there or worked there or died there? Is the afterlife like this one, only with no sex, no drugs, and no time off for good behavior?”
Alice nodded, slowly and unhappily.
“Well, the answer is nobody knows. If you’re religious, you could talk to a priest about it. Or a rabbi, or whatever flavor you favor. But I’ll tell you how I get through it.”
She was watching me, expectantly. Someone else was watching, too. I felt that prickle again; that pressure on my skin lighter than touch. I glanced into the shadows near the door, thought that maybe I saw someone moving there.
“I stick with Blake,” I said, “and I draw a line. Between what’s proved and what’s just jerking off—premature reification. If I see my Aunt Emily get decapitated in a freak piano-tuning accident, and then a bodiless shape that looks just like Auntie Em comes walking through my bedroom wall at three in the morning with its head tucked underneath its arm, I don’t just jump for the nearest conclusion—which is that whatever is on the label has to be in the box. You know the Navajo?”
“The Navajo Indians?” Her expression was blank, nonplussed.
“Yeah, them. They see ghosts as some kind of evil force of nature. Chindi, they call them. They’re the part of the soul that can’t go on to something better—all the nasty impulses you don’t usually follow up on. All your selfishness and greed and stupidity. They’re not you; they’re just a sort of negative afterimage you leave behind you when you trade up to eternal life.”
Alice didn’t look convinced; it was probably a bad example.
“All I mean is, there’s no automatic assumption that ghosts are people trapped in some fuck-awful repetition of what they used to do when they were alive. We don’t know what they are. We don’t have any way of finding out.”
Her uncertainty was hardening into something else.
“And that makes it okay for you to destroy them?” she asked, her voice almost too low to hear.
I shrugged. “Is that what I do? That’s another unknown.”
“Not to you.”
“Yes, to me.”
“I don’t see that. You must know what it is you’re doing.”
This was novel. I was meant to be talking Alice through this very sudden existential crisis—and instead I found myself being asked to justify my own existence. It must say something profound and worrying about me that I didn’t just leave her to it.
“At first necromancy was something I did by accident,” I told her. It was the easiest way to put it, but accident was a pretty pale word for it all the same.
“Accident?”
“Yeah. I mean, without wanting to do it. Without deciding.” I looked toward the door again, then back to meet her unblinking gaze. “It’s easy to summon ghosts. Easier than sending them away, I mean. If you’re in the right place, and there are a lot of them around, it can be enough just to start talking to them. Or look at them. Or lift your hand and beckon. With me, it’s music.”
“What is? How do you mean?”
“The trigger. The thing I use to bring them and then to bind them. I play a tin whistle.”
She laughed incredulously.
“You don’t!”
I slipped my hand into my coat and brought it out.
“Jesus,” said Alice with a sort of pained wonder. “The magic flute!” I let her take it from me, and she sighted along it at my face as though it was a tiny rifle. That reminded me of Ditko pretending to fire bullets at my feet to make me dance—and then of the way the whistle felt hot in my dream after I’d played it. A shiver of genuine unease passed over me. I took the whistle back from her and replaced it where it belonged: ready to hand, and only to my hand.
“But exorcising the ghosts is harder?” she prompted, giving me that look again.
“Usually a lot harder. But you can’t make any kind of a rule about it—each one’s different.” I changed my tack. “Are you good at maths?”
“Better than I am at Navajos. I took it to A level—and I can multiply four-digit numbers in my head.”
“Okay, then. David Hilbert. Prussian mathematician in the late nineteenth century. He reckoned you could make a mathematical model of
anything—a chair, a sentence, the swirl of cream in a coffee cup, which side your balls will hang down when you put your pants on, whatever.”
“Okay.”
“Well, that’s a way of looking at it that sort of works. I play a tune, and the tune is a model. I’m modeling the ghost. I’m . . . describing it in sound. But then after that—if I’ve done it right—it cuts both ways. I’ve made a link of some kind; I’ve tied the ghost to the sound.”
I stopped. Words weren’t adequate for what I did; I always got myself twisted round and upside down when I tried to explain it. But Alice was running with the idea.
“Something like a voodoo doll,” she said tentatively. “I mean, a voodoo doll is a model that’s intended to work in exactly that way. You make it represent a real person, either with a spell or with a fetish, like a lock of their hair or something. Then when you stick pins in the doll, the person who the doll is meant to be feels the pain.”
I was impressed. That was a much better analogy than the one I’d been aiming for.
“Right,” I agreed. “Well, that’s what I do. I make the tune represent the ghost. I knit them together—I make them become two parts of the same thing. Then when I stop playing . . .”
I let the sentence hang. Again, I’d reached the point where language couldn’t take me any further. What did happen to the loose spirits I packaged up and shipped out? Where was I sending them? Did they go on to greener pastures or just stop existing? I didn’t know. I’d never found an explanation that didn’t sound like bullshit.
“When you stop playing?” Alice pressed.
“Then the ghost stops being there. It goes away.”
“Where to?”
“Wherever music goes when it’s not being played.”
It wasn’t what she’d expected to hear, and it left her if anything even more unhappy than before. I should have known it would.