by Mike Carey
‘No fucking way,’ he said then.
‘I’m telling you what I saw, Nicky.’
‘Then you were stoned. Roman ghosts? In togas? Please! Were there any ghost-cavemen there, throwing spears at ghost-mammoths?’
‘The Aldwych end of the Strand,’ I repeated doggedly. ‘Close to what used to be Wych Street. Apparently there was some work done there around the turn of the century. The twentieth century, I mean.’
‘Some work done?’ Nicky snorted. ‘They levelled the whole area to build Aldwych. Which is Anglo-Saxon, by the way – it means “old settlement”. From a logistical point of view, you could take that as a hint that there might have been buildings of some sort there when the Romans came through. But it’s still ridiculous.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why is it ridiculous? Give me the reasons.’
He didn’t even have to pause for thought. ‘First off, ghosts don’t last that long. You know that as well as I do. Second, ghosts don’t interact with other ghosts. I know you’ve got that weird little dead-girl posse, but I never heard of anything like that anywhere else. Ghosts interact with the living, or else they’re locked in on themselves and they just replay their death. What they don’t do is have kaffee-klatches with other ghosts. And third, the ground level would have been a good thirty feet lower back then. I know you were in the basement, so that’s a few feet below the street, but it still wouldn’t have been low enough.’
‘Suppose their anchor isn’t a physical place. It could be something that was used in the building. Some of the stonework behind the tiles of the swimming pool, say. Maybe they moved because their anchor was moved.’
‘And they end up twenty feet closer to God, still playing out whole conversations like scenes from a silent movie? Why doesn’t that explanation convince me? Face it, Castor, the behaviour you’re describing doesn’t fit with anything you’ve ever seen before.’
‘That’s precisely the point,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t. So whatever the explanation turns out to be, it’s going to be new. I don’t want to rule anything out just because it sounds weird.’
‘Or insane,’ Nicky added. ‘Yeah, I hear you. But even Sherlock Holmes liked to eliminate the impossible before he got moving. Otherwise he would’ve fingered a lot more leprechauns and unicorns than he did.’
I was too tired to argue. ‘Just check the site out,’ I asked him. ‘Tell me if anything weird has happened there before now.’
Nicky shrugged irritably. ‘Castor, that’s what libraries are for. Seriously. Don’t use me to research stuff that’s in the public domain. It’s fucking insulting.’
‘Why do you care, if I’m paying?’ I asked, exasperated in my turn. ‘What, you have to have job satisfaction too?’
He gave me a sour look. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I do. Because what you pay me, frankly, it’s symbolic. It’s stuff I like to get, but I can get it elsewhere. I work with you because it’s interesting. You start treating me like Wikipedia, we’re done.’
He was serious, so I backed off. I knew damn well how many favours I owed him, and how much more I needed his digging skills than he needed the old sounds and rare reds I trawled for him. But since our relationship is based on a foundation of solid bullshit, I backed off bullshitting all the way.
‘Sorry to injure your professional pride, Nicky,’ I said. ‘I’ll make sure only to use you for big, philosophical stuff in future. And since the payment’s symbolic, I’ll switch to IOUs.’
‘Try it,’ he suggested, his voice dripping with sarcasm. He slammed the van’s doors shut and then turned to face me again. ‘I’m still working on the Tlallik thing,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a couple more avenues I haven’t tried yet. Far-Eastern mystical texts, and some African stuff. Different demons seem to work different territories, or at least to go by different names when they travel. I’ll be in touch.’ He headed round to the front of the van, then stopped halfway. ‘Oh, one other thing. On the subject of demons, and how to survive them . . .’
‘Yeah?’ My interest quickened. ‘Is this the thing you were so cagey about last time?’
‘I wasn’t cagey; I just don’t like coming out with half of the answer to a question. But I’m stretched on other fronts, so I figured you’d rather hear this now. Maybe get the bitch queen to put some of her people on it, because I’m not making much headway. You ever hear of a guy name of Martin Moulson?’
‘No. Should I have?’
‘Maybe not. This was a while back, and he was never in with the in crowd, as far as black magic is concerned. But the word I’m getting is that he had a passenger – a big bastard too. Not as big as Asmodeus, probably, but who is? But he got out from under, somehow. Fixed himself a spiritual enema, and came up demon-free. That, at least, is how the story goes. Unfortunately, it’s a story that ends with a whimper, because the guy seems to have vanished off the face of the Earth. If you can track him down, I figure you and him might have a few things to talk about.’
‘Yeah, I’d say so,’ I agreed, falling in with his understated tone. ‘Any leads at all?’
Nicky blew out his cheek. ‘Urban legends, mostly. It’s kind of like an Elvis deal: everyone’s got a story.’
‘Well if all else fails, you can look him up in Wikipedia.’
‘Drop dead, Castor.’
‘Working on it, Nicky,’ I said as I walked away. ‘One day at a time.’
* * *
‘My Lord, Felix, you look exhausted!’ Jenna-Jane’s face was the picture of concern. Maybe someone had hung the picture a little crooked; the effect was subtle enough that you had to look twice to see it.
‘Long night,’ I said, stating the obvious.
‘And productive, I hope.’ J-J was standing, I was sitting, which gave the meeting the flavour of an interrogation, even though she hadn’t asked me any questions yet. Slowly and deliberately, she pulled the cords that angled the slatted blinds to their closed position. She had to lean over Gil McClennan to do it, because the cords were in the corner where he was sitting. She treated him as part of the furniture, which to be fair was probably nothing personal. I was sure it was how she thought of all of us deep down.
‘You don’t mind if Gil sits in, do you?’ she asked me belatedly. ‘His experiences of the Super-Self entity will make a useful double check against yours, assuming’ – a momentary hesitation – ‘you’re able to take us beyond what we know already.’
It was the next morning, although for me it was continuous with the night before. I was contending not just with physical tiredness but also with a lingering feeling of disconnectedness which had hung over me ever since I walked into the pool area at Super-Self. At some point during the day I was going to have to find or make the time to crash, if only for half an hour. I’d probably wake up more exhausted than ever, but I’d be back in the real world, not floating a few feet above it.
‘What do you know already?’ I asked Jenna-Jane. The best defence is sometimes a pre-emptive strike, but it was her game and her rules. There was no way she’d ever play with an open hand. She didn’t even bother to answer; McClennan did it for her.
‘Everyone on my team has already filed a report on this. We’re here to listen to yours.’
I shrugged, giving it up. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Start with the obvious. It’s not what it looks like.’
Gil sneered nastily, and Jenna-Jane favoured me with an austere frown. ‘It’s an apparition, Felix, with no physical substance. It can be perceived by the naked eye but fails to register on any recording medium and is opaque to every other human sense. Surely by its very nature, it is exactly what it looks like.’
‘So a layman might think, Professor Mulbridge,’ I said solemnly. ‘But a woman of science and erudition like yourself knows the difference between phenomenon and epi-phenomenon – between the causal and the merely collateral.’
Jenna-Jane actually smiled, but only for a second, acknowledging both the distinction and the fact th
at I was slapping her in the face with her own overblown technical register. ‘Go on,’ she said.
‘The ghosts in the pool,’ I said. ‘They’re so weird and inexplicable, everyone looks at them first and assumes that they’re what needs to be explained. I did that myself. But then I went away and thought about it, and on second thoughts they’re pretty much beside the point.’ Nobody interrupted me, so I went on. ‘The bigger mystery – and certainly the bigger danger – is the one you can’t see. There’s something in that room that makes everyone who goes in there experience sudden, blind terror. You’ – I flicked a glance at Gil, who I was ignoring for the most part – ‘said that some of the other exorcists who’ve been into Super-Self have actually had mental breakdowns as a result of contact with that thing. You took them into the pool and made them stay long enough to attempt an exorcism. They failed, and they were fucked over. It broke them. Am I right?’
There was a moment’s silence. ‘You put the situation very dramatically,’ Jenna-Jane chided me, ‘but yes, we have had casualties. Poor Victor Etheridge, to name but one. And it’s true that this is a peculiarly tenacious haunting.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it isn’t. Call it that, and you’re never going to get anywhere – because you’ll be charging off to battle in the wrong direction.’
‘Meaning . . . ?’ Jenna-Jane asked.
‘What I said. It’s not a haunting at all. It’s something else that has a haunting as part of its furniture. The ghosts aren’t the thing we need to be looking at. Whatever lives in that room, and makes grown men and women want to piss themselves and run under moving cars – that’s what we need to be looking at.’
Gil had been having trouble sitting still through this sermon. ‘I disagree,’ he said now, emphatically. ‘Both with the reasoning and with the conclusion. What we know, Castor – the only thing we know – is that those ghosts break all the rules we thought couldn’t be broken. They’re more than a thousand years older than any other ghost we’ve found, and yet they show no signs of morphological decay; and they acknowledge each other’s presence, talk to each other, even seem to hand each other objects. Physical objects.’
He tapped the corner of Jenna-Jane’s desk as if to remind me what ‘physical objects’ meant. ‘I think whatever explains the ghosts will explain the fear too,’ he said. ‘If you’re right that we’re talking about cause and effect, the ghosts are the cause. Why shouldn’t ghosts that old generate a psychic-emotional field?’
‘Why shouldn’t ghosts that old ride in Cadillacs and smoke fine Cuban cigars?’ I countered. ‘McClennan, we’re not even arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, here; we’re trying to guess what colour their underpants will be.’
Gil started to say something, but Jenna-Jane spoke over him and he let her run with the ball. ‘Does it make any practical difference,’ she asked, ‘whether we make the ghosts or the room’s emotional resonance the centre of our investigation? We’re assuming, either way, that there’s a single agency at work here. We’re aiming to understand – and then to eradicate – both manifestations.’
I didn’t bother to challenge the mission statement. I’ve been skittish about casual eradication for a while now, but if J-J wanted to believe that I was toeing the company line and strumming the company banjo, I was happy to let her. ‘It makes a big difference,’ I said, ‘because it ties in with some other stuff that’s happening, and if I’m right, it opens up a new line of attack.’
I’d finally reached the point, but I hesitated to put it into words. It would have been hard, even with a more sympathetic audience. I was thinking of a lot of things: of Nicky, a few scant hours ago, talking about the new options that had opened up for him; of the ghost on the Salisbury estate, the spirit of a teenage boy that had metamorphosed into a newly born demon; of the time, even more recently, when I found myself sitting in the gutter in a drunken stupor with my whistle in my hands, trying to hit a note that had crept into the world while I wasn’t even looking; of the story of Chicken Licken; of the sad, wrecked old zombie in Somers Town saying, ‘World’s changing. It don’t want us no more’; and of Rosie, repeating the same sentiment almost word for word. 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.
‘I think we’re starting to see some stuff that’s totally new,’ I said, taking refuge in the jargon. ‘Things that won’t be in the grimoires, because nobody’s ever encountered them before. I think we might be coming to a point where the rulebook won’t help us all that much.’
Jenna-Jane was staring at me intently. She hadn’t sat down all this time; she’d been standing over me, like a teacher over an unruly pupil who’ll stop working as soon as he knows he’s not being watched. ‘And why do you think this is happening?’ she demanded.
‘I have no idea,’ I said, and it was the truth. ‘Maybe a balance shifted somewhere. Some big cosmic constant wasn’t quite as constant as we thought, and now it’s tilting. Maybe the sewers are blocked in Hell, and all the shit is backing up. I don’t know, Jenna-Jane. I’m just throwing it out there. But if I’m right, then I think you’ll probably already know what I’m talking about – either because you’ve had this conversation with some of your own people, or because you’ve found some way of measuring it for yourself.’
She was staring at me with an air of cool, detached appraisal that didn’t quite ring true. I met her gaze stolidly, until after a few moments she looked away.
‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘This is why I missed you, Felix. Because you work through the evidence without preconceptions.’
‘With respect,’ Gil said, his voice sounding a little thick, ‘he’s told us nothing at all about the Super-Self ghosts. He’s only justifying his own failure to reach any solid conclusions.’
Jenna-Jane smiled indulgently. ‘He’s told us his conclusions, Gilbert – although it’s true they don’t amount to a solution as yet. In that regard, Castor, do you have a solution? It would be an excellent way to round off your first twenty-four hours on my staff.’
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘I don’t. Teamwork helps, I can tell you that much. Pax and I got out in one piece because we ran interference for each other. But we didn’t even get close to attempting an exorcism. You just can’t keep your head together enough for that. Maybe you need a sort of Normandy landing approach, with exorcists advancing in waves. But even then . . .’
‘I like that,’ Jenna-Jane mused. ‘A brute-force approach. It has the merit of simplicity.’
‘And the drawback that we’ll be throwing all our people into a blind alley,’ Gil objected. ‘If it goes wrong, they could all end up like Etheridge.’
Actually, that was a fair point. If Etheridge had become the jumpy little bag of nerves he now was by getting too close to the Super-Self entity, that made a strong case for staying away from it at least until we knew what it was. It suddenly occurred to me that we should have asked Juliet that question. Erratic as her recent behaviour had been, she was still the acknowledged expert when it came to matters demoniacal: our inside man. And since I was already paying her to babysit Pen, it might not be too much of an ask to have her come down to the Strand for a consultation.
Jenna-Jane put on her Solomon-come-to-judgement face. ‘I understand your concerns, Gilbert,’ she said. ‘Still, a combined attack did pay very definite dividends in the summoning of Rosie Crucis. It’s possible that a number of simultaneous exorcisms might work where individual attempts have failed. You can organise your people into teams of two, with one leading partner in each team. The second man watches the first from further back, and pulls him out if he starts to show signs of strain.’
Gil was getting exasperated, persumably at the prospect of my plan being adopted after he’d given it the thumbs down. ‘What if the trailing man gets hit first?’ he demanded, throwing out his arms in an indignant shrug. ‘We know the pool is ground zero, but you can feel the effects of this thing from a long way
away. It would be stupid to just go in there thinking that we’re attacking the pool, or what’s in it. It would be like . . . like going after a wasps’ nest with a baseball bat and thinking you can’t get stung as long as you kill the queen.’
‘Nice analogy,’ I conceded. ‘Look, I’m not saying that going in mob-handed is a good idea. I was just thinking aloud.’
Jenna-Jane made a dismissive gesture, as if this was all just a matter of fine detail.
‘Still,’ she said, ‘I see no harm in trying. Make a list, Gilbert. Ten lead exorcists, with ten in support. Castor will be one of the leads, as will you.’
She stared at Gil for so long it was impossible to miss the point that he was being dismissed. He stood up but didn’t leave, fighting a visible psychomachia against his strong instinct to roll over and die for the queen.
‘If it doesn’t work,’ he said, ‘that’s twenty of us in the shit.’
‘The larger number spreads the risk,’ said Jenna-Jane, her tone cold and deliberate.
Gil stood his ground for a moment longer. Then he nodded curtly and headed for the door.
When it closed behind him, Jenna-Jane turned back to me with a look on her face that was almost arch. ‘Gilbert doesn’t like you very much, Felix,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried hard to bring him round to my way of thinking, but I’m afraid it’s an uphill struggle.’
‘I killed his favourite uncle,’ I pointed out. ‘Makes it a little hard for us to bond.’
‘Oh, it’s not that,’ Jenna-Jane assured me, sounding surprised at the very idea. ‘It’s much more personal, and much more straightforward. He’s afraid that you might be a better exorcist than him. That thought niggles at him. It throws him off his stride.’
‘Really?’ I demanded. ‘Why me, particularly? Everyone on the team is probably a better exorcist than him.’
Jenna-Jane shook her head admonishingly. ‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘He has a lot of raw power. More than anyone else in the family. I tested his cousin Dana, and she was impressive. She worked here for a year, and did a lot of good work for us. She left in the end for personal reasons, after a quarrel with another woman on the team turned into something more ugly. Gilbert is better than Dana, but he’s still not what you might call emotionally stable. In order to manage him, I’ve bonded with him on a very personal level. Now he sees you as a threat to that . . . closeness.’