by Mike Carey
‘You should probably start somewhere where he’s actually been,’ Sam pointed out, but Trudie winced and Etheridge raised a finger to his lips, as stern as a school librarian.
Trudie went back to the centre and started again, this time moving out in long slow loops. Etheridge had now picked up a pen from somewhere and stood expectantly by her side, but she didn’t speak.
The area of the map was huge, but her hand was a good two feet above it. The circles she was describing made up the cross section of a cone that had its base on the map, so she was making relatively small movements to cover wide areas.
After a couple of minutes of this, she went back to the centre for a third time. Sam let out a long breath, like a sigh, and that seemed to break the spell. ‘Are you getting anything?’ Gil demanded a little irritably.
Trudie looked him straight in the eye. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am. But it’s not directional yet. There’s a sense of him, and it changes when I move but . . . randomly, almost. It’s not like I’m getting warmer or colder.’
‘Maybe you want to keep the focus in the loop,’ I said.
She gave me a look, irritated or just uncomprehending. ‘What?’ she demanded.
I pointed to the nail, still lying on the table. ‘You’re relying on a second-hand contact,’ I said. ‘Slip the fingernail under the string so it’s pressed against your palm. Like calls to like, right? That’s the principle here. Also, you want to get your hand in closer to the map. That’s the hardest part, logistically, but what’s the use of getting a bite that could come from anywhere between Charing Cross Road and Dulwich? If you’re in close, that sense of direction might come through a bit more strongly.’
They all stared at me for a moment, in silence.
‘Do it,’ Gil grunted and walked out. Then he stuck his head back in through the doorway and said, ‘Castor, you’re with me.’
I threw Trudie a nod and followed him out. It was a cold nod, but there was grudging respect in it. Trudie was trying to do something I’d never managed to do myself. To use Jenna-Jane’s cute terminology, she was making fine adjustments to her modality.
Every exorcist has their own special way of doing the necessary: a tin whistle, a typewriter, a deck of cards, any damn thing you can think of. It’s the same knack in each and every one of us, the same synapses closing somewhere and making the same things happen, but the tools we use depend on who we are and where we’ve been. That’s a pretty good indication that the tools don’t ultimately matter; they only reflect our experience, our tastes, our comfort zones. Faced with the unknowable, we hide behind the known and take potshots from cover.
I’d seen Trudie perform an exorcism, or try to. She had woven the string around her fingers in intricate and changing patterns, like kids do in the game of cat’s cradle. But Trudie knew that the string was just a security blanket. The real power was inside her, and it used the string as an excuse to come out and play. So now she was making it work for her in a different way. Whether she succeeded or failed, she deserved a certain amount of credit just for trying.
On the other hand, she’d gone from Gwillam’s employ straight into Jenna-Jane’s – from the foam-flecked zealots to the necro-vivisectionists – so what the hell did I care? I only had to work with her.
‘You’re on late shift tonight,’ Gil said, as we rode the lift down to the first floor. ‘Midnight. Charing Cross station, Strand north-side exit. Bring your whistle. In the meantime, Professor Mulbridge wants to record you playing your tune. She thinks we can learn something from it.’ There was a sardonic edge to his voice.
‘You don’t agree?’ I asked mildly.
‘I think if you knew how to deal with Asmodeus, you would have done it years ago,’ Gil said. ‘The fact that you’re here at all means you’re out of ideas.’
‘And the fact that J-J took me back?’ I asked. ‘What does that mean? I got the distinct impression she’s got some shit going on that you people can’t deal with.’
The lift doors opened with a flattened pinging sound, like a bullet bouncing off a bum coin. Gil laughed with what sounded like real amusement. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You’re her favourite ghost-breaker. But it’s not because you’re any good. It’s just because you’re the one that got away.’ He pointed down the corridor. ‘Lab 3,’ he said. ‘They’re expecting you.’
I started to walk away.
‘Castor.’
I turned back. Gil was holding the lift door open with his finger on the button. ‘She hates you for that too,’ he said. ‘For leaving, I mean. So the way I see it, she’s going to fuck you into roadkill sooner or later.’
‘Thanks for the warning,’ I said.
Gil shook his head. ‘It would only be a warning if it was going to make a difference,’ he said. ‘You killed a good man, you bastard. A father. You wrecked a family.’ The lift pinged again several times, and the servos in the doors groaned as they tried to close.
‘Gabe raised a demon,’ I pointed out. ‘It killed him. All I did was get out from between them.’
‘And then the demon ended up as your partner. Watch your back, Castor. Because I will be.’
He took his finger off the button, and the doors slid shut between us. The lift mechanism whined slightly as it carried him back up to the second floor.
In Lab 3 a stolid, stocky guy who looked more like a longshoreman than a medical technician was tweaking the controls of a graphic equaliser as big as a two-car garage. ‘You’re Castor?’ he demanded. ‘Great. I’m Davey Nathan. Let’s do this thing. I got a shit-load of transcriptions piling up here.’ He hustled me into a soundproofed booth rigged up in a space that might once have been a toilet cubicle. He had a transatlantic drawl, and when I asked him where he was from he said he was on loan from the CIA. ‘Seriously,’ he added, looking at me warily in case I was going to question his word.
‘Langley?’ I asked.
‘No, not Langley exactly,’ he admitted, looking sheepish. ‘OSINT. Open Source Intelligence. We’re just geeks, really, sieving publicly available sources for useful information. Only we don’t say useful. We say actionable.’
‘How’d you wind up here?’ I asked.
Nathan shrugged morosely. ‘Pissed off the wrong people, Mister C. Pissed off all the wrong people, from God on down. But fuck, you know? A bi gezunt . . .’
‘A what?’
‘Yiddish. Means “so long as you’ve got your health . . .” But you have to look unhappy when you say it.’
We did some run-throughs for acoustics, then he locked me in and I played my ‘Etude for Hell-spawn’, the tune I’d developed to give Asmodeus a sedative when I’d first discovered that I couldn’t exorcise him. The recording sounded okay to me on playback, but Nathan wasn’t happy with it.
‘It goes way flat around 8,000 hertz,’ he grumbled. ‘This equaliser is a piece of shit. Go on back inside and hit me again. I’m gonna fuck with the RF bias.’
The second take sounded identical to the first, but Nathan liked it better. ‘Three’s the charm,’ he said. ‘Go on, we’ll nail it. Trust me.’
Apparently we nailed it. At any rate, there wasn’t a fourth take. I thanked Nathan for his efforts and asked him what the transcriptions were he was working on.
‘Fifty per cent of my time,’ he said, throwing his hands in the air in exasperation. ‘The ghost-breakers go to some place where there’s a spook – in your sense rather than the CIA sense – and they record it. Only the sound doesn’t show up on tape, right? When ghosts talk, either they don’t make the air vibrate at all or they got some way of hitting the human ear selectively. So that’s what I’m looking for – a wiretap for the fucking spirit world. I told Professor M., if we find it, it’s gonna be just white noise. A billion voices all at once. Only we won’t find it unless it propagates through the air and why the hell should it? So that’s what I’m wasting my life on. All because I missed some survivalists saying, “Let’s all make a bomb.” I didn’t think they could tie their ow
n goddamned shoelaces.’
I was about to leave Nathan with his woes, but a few things clicked together in my mind before I got to the door, and I turned on the threshold. ‘Yeah?’ he asked.
‘The transcriptions. Fifty per cent of your time?’
He shrugged. ‘Give or take.’
‘Is the other fifty per cent Rosie Crucis?’
‘Give the man a cigar. Yeah. She gets an hour with either the professor or that McClennan guy twice a week. I tape the conversations and index them.’
‘You can keep the cigar,’ I told him, ‘but how about the combination for the keypad on her door? Rosie and me go back a long way. And it’s been a while since we got to talk.’
Nathan shook his head theatrically, as though to snap himself out of a trance. ‘Security, Castor. It’s called that because it’s meant to be secure.’
I took a long slow look around the cramped room. ‘You worried about losing your job?’ I asked.
Nathan laughed full-throatedly. ‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘You remember that battle you guys fought, against the French?’
‘Oh man. There’ve been so many . . .’
‘The one that mattered. The one where they kicked your asses all over the countryside and then moved into the big house.’
‘Hastings.’
‘Bingo. Add twenty, and that’s your magic number.’
‘Thanks, Nathan. You’re a mensch.’
His face lit up at the Yiddishism. ‘A shaynem dank dir im pupik, Castor. You’re welcome.’
I went down to street level and, after a couple of wrong turns, found Rosie’s door. I tapped the keys and the lock clicked. 1086. Jenna-Jane hadn’t had the Battle of Hastings in mind when she set that code; she was thinking of the Domesday Book. That was an enterprise after her own heart.
I opened the door and stepped inside. It was like walking into another world. Rosie’s quarters were schizophrenic in the extreme. The bed was a hospital bed, big and ugly, mounted on a hydraulic pillar for raising and lowering and adjusting of angles. And beside the bed there was a fearsome assemblage of machines with red LED readouts and old-fashioned pressure dials on their fascias. But elsewhere there was a sofa, table and chairs, a TV, cheap prints on the walls – evidence of a general effort to make this institutional space, which in reality was a prison cell, look a little like home.
Rosie was in bed, which is where she spends most of her time these days. It’s a side effect of the wards that J-J uses to keep her contained, and it’s worsened steadily over the years. She spends about half of every day asleep, and it never takes very much effort or emotion to exhaust her. The weird thing is that these symptoms persist and repeat themselves in every body she occupies.
Currently her fleshly tabernacle was male. A guy of about twenty stared back at me from the bed. He blinked a couple of times, and then a smile gradually suffused his features.
‘Felix!’ Like the exhaustion, Rosie’s deep sexy burr always sounded the same no matter whose body she had squatter’s rights in. ‘My darling! My sunbeam! Come and shine on me.’
‘Hello, Rosie,’ I said. ‘How’s your love life?’
‘Entirely . . . theoretical.’
I ambled over and sat down on the edge of the bed. She lifted her pale hand and rested it on mine. Maybe the guy was already pale when he got here, or maybe Rosie’s transformative magic was working on him, making him over subtly into her image.
The rules that govern the afterlife are unfathomable, but they seem to be pretty consistent. Whatever form you take in death, flesh or spirit, you don’t stick around for all that long. Twenty or thirty years is the average, fifty is already pushing it, and a century seems to mark the upper limit. For zombies the attrition is rapid, ruinous and irrevocable; for ghosts there’s a slower and more subtle disintegration as the ego – the glue that holds a human being together – atrophies and melts away.
Rosie is the anomaly. A dozen exorcists working in an insane daisy chain had raised her, pulling on the psychic threads attached to a box of Tudor artefacts that J-J had acquired from God knows where. We caught her in a web made out of our own guts and our own arrogance, and then we decanted her into a waiting body, the first of many. It was a feat that had never been repeated.
Technically what Rosie does – the way she manages to keep on going on the material plane – is spiritual possession. The bodies are those of willing volunteers – psychology and medical students, mostly, who house the old ghost for a week or a fortnight and then walk away clutching (by way of payment) the tapes and transcripts of what she’s said through their lips. The quick turnover means that Rosie’s sedentary lifestyle does no harm to her hosts, although some of them have claimed that they got flashbacks weeks or months later, spontaneous memories of events from Rosie’s life. I suspect that’s part of the draw. To a certain kind of mind, there’s something attractive about the idea of a cheap holiday in the Wars of the Roses.
Rosie is a strange woman. Her name is a joke, or a mask, and she’s never told anyone what name she went by back when she was alive. What I can tell you is that she’s playful, coquettish, filthy-minded and full of life – impressive in a lady who’s been dead for five centuries. She’s also garrulous. She likes to talk about her adventures, and that occasionally includes stories about where she’s been during the 500 years between her death and resurrection. She lies outrageously, contradicts herself without blushing, kids us all straight-faced and then laughs her leg off when we fall for it. And Jenna-Jane writes it all down and pores over it, looking for the needle of truth in the city-sized haystacks of Rosie’s magnificent bullshit.
I left the MOU mostly because of how Rosie was treated there. Because of the way she’d gone from honoured guest to precious resource to de facto prisoner. Jenna-Jane had started to obsess quite early on about undocumented access, and had started to control the comings and goings of Rosie’s visitors. Rosie was allowed out of the MOU only with an escort. The outings got more and more infrequent, until finally they stopped altogether.
I’d seen her just once since then, and that was the last time Asmodeus had tried to break free from his moorings in Rafi’s flesh. It had been more than a year ago now, but Rosie would never have been so indelicate as to tear me off a strip for not visiting – and I guess when you’ve clocked up more than half a millennium the odd year here or there isn’t worth arguing about.
‘It’s so sweet that you came,’ she whispered. ‘Unless it means . . . you’ve taken that bitch’s shilling again.’
‘I’ve missed you too,’ I said, dodging the question. ‘How are they treating you?’
The truth was that she didn’t look all that well. Again, the borrowed flesh thing makes it harder to tell, but given that the guy whose body she was borrowing was a healthy young volunteer, the listlessness and lethargy had to be coming from Rosie herself.
‘They keep me occupied, Fix,’ Rosie said, her lips quirking upwards very slightly. ‘Like an expensive pet. They do everything they can to make sure I’m happy.’
‘And are you?’
The half-smile disappeared. ‘No. Not very. The company isn’t as . . . select as once it was. I see . . . a great many dullards. A great many bullies. I endure. I let them come and go, and they leave no mark on me . . . or on the world, but still . . . it saddens me.’
‘Well, I’m going to be able to visit you for at least the next few weeks. Is there anything I can get you? Grapes? Booze? Porn? A newspaper?’
She seemed to consider this for a moment. ‘Nothing,’ she said solemnly. ‘Well, porn, perhaps. If it’s witty. But I’d rather you just talked to me. Tell me how the world works.’
I did, for about an hour or so, concentrating on the sort of things I knew she’d be interested in: politics, but only broad strokes and colourful intrigues; fads and fashions, the more extreme the better; stuff from my own life, luridly exaggerated. After a while she began to interrupt me with the occasional question, but they were questions I couldn’t a
nswer. They bore on the big intangibles, the way London looked and felt these days. I did my best to describe the city as I saw it, but I’m no poet.
Finally Rosie gave a loud sigh, which I took to be a signal that I should shut up. ‘I can’t catch it,’ she lamented. ‘I can’t catch it, Felix.’
‘Can’t catch what, Rosie?’ I asked. Given my part in getting her into this mess, I figured the least I could do was play straight man to her.
‘It’s changing,’ she murmured. Her eyes were closed now, and her head was tilted to one side as if she was listening for something. ‘But so slowly. Like the light in a room when the sun comes up, or when it goes down. You don’t notice it until it’s happened.’
‘Are we still talking about London?’ I asked.
‘About the world.’ The silence that followed those three words lasted for so long I thought she’d gone to sleep, but when I stood up to leave she reached out and took my hand again. ‘Don’t get hurt,’ she said.
‘I never do,’ I said. ‘It all rolls off me, Rosie. You know that. It’s part of my ineffable charm.’
She ignored the invitation to banter. ‘It’s going to get hard to breathe,’ she said. ‘I really believe . . . yes . . . the changes will go on and on. Like water, rising over your head. Don’t drown, Fix. I’d be sad if you drowned. There’s a man here who hates you . . .’
‘Gil McClennan,’ I said. ‘It’s okay, Rosie. I had his number the first moment I saw him.’
She shook her head slowly, emphatically. ‘You think you . . .’ she began, but for some reason she didn’t finish the sentence. She shaped unspoken words with her mouth, but in the end only shook her head again. ‘Never mind,’ she sighed. ‘It all passes. It all passes. Perhaps you’ll be his . . . comeuppance, Fix. I know what a rogue you are. How hard to pin down. I hope you hurt him. I’d like to see that.’