by Mike Carey
‘What about Myriam Kale?’ I asked. ‘Where does she come in?’
For a moment I thought Covington hadn’t heard me. He was looking up at the ceiling, his posture one of acute attention.
‘Did you hear Lionel crying?’ he demanded.
‘I didn’t hear a thing.’
He relaxed a little. ‘Okay. Just the wind, I guess. I picked this room because it’s right under his: if he stirs, we’ll hear him. You’ll notice I sent the nurses away, so I’m . . . on duty tonight. Myriam, right. Myriam was Yoko Ono. The femme fatale who gets the blame for breaking up the band.’
He took another long swig of whisky. He’d been drinking pretty regularly and pretty determinedly at every pause in the conversation and the bottle was mostly empty now. He was nerving himself up for something, but I wondered whether he might already have missed his stop.
‘By the 1960s,’ Covington said, ‘I was in my eighth body, if you can believe that. We wore them out pretty quickly: the psychic punishment is reflected in premature ageing. Our numbers were up to two hundred, which is where they’ve stayed ever since, and we’d already had the idea of moving out of organised crime into legitimate business – things that would make us just as rich, but at the same time lessen the chance of any police investigation finding us by accident.
‘For me, it was getting . . . claustrophobic. I wasn’t enjoying the company of my peers much at all. And I’d been practising meditation techniques: I found that if I was really disciplined I could maintain control of the body I was in more or less indefinitely, without reinscription.
‘I went to the States intending to take a good long holiday – to stay away from Mount Grace for as long as possible. But I needed an excuse and so I made up this bullshit story about making contact with the American mobs. Then, to make it look like I was doing that, I spent some time with the Chicago families. That’s how I met Myriam.
‘I think I loved her because she was the opposite of everything I’d become. Okay, she was a killer: to that extent we were the same. But there was no calculation in anything she did. She was spontaneous, just following her instincts all the time whether they were bad or good. Whereas at Mount Grace calculation was our heart and soul. We’d become parts of a machine, and the machine ground on. And she was vulnerable and damaged, where we were immortal and beyond all harm. I don’t know. I can’t psychoanalyse myself. I was drawn to her. I wanted to help her. Probably the love came later, and it was never consummated. The closest we came to having actual sex was me masturbating her once, while we were at a drive-in movie. She cried when she came: cried buckets. Like she couldn’t bear it. God, what had been done to her! She was still strong, but . . . broken. Broken way past mending.
‘But like I said, this was just a holiday. I came home and I threw myself back into the day-to-day, life-to-life stuff. The Krays, who were never part of our little clique, were arrested and carted off to Broadmoor, and we had the whole of the East End to ourselves. Then I read about Myriam being caught and convicted, and I made up my mind right then to bring her in.’
‘Are we up to the sins yet?’ I asked.
Covington smiled humourlessly. ‘Almost. The rest of the committee were against it from the start. They could see all kinds of trouble arising from having an actual psychopath in our club – and they were right, obviously. I saw most of the potential problems myself, but I didn’t care. I was determined to try. I felt . . . responsible for her, somehow. And I hoped, against all the evidence, that in a new body she might somehow recover. Get over her madness and become what she was meant to be before all the rapes and the beatings.
‘It didn’t work. And yeah, now we’re up to the sins. I feel sorry and I feel ashamed when I think of the men she murdered. I never did acquire much of a taste for torture – and for personal reasons I hate it when violence and sex get mixed up together. It always makes me think of poor Ginny.
‘But the harm was done, now. The committee were terrified that Myriam would draw unwanted attention. They even paid to have that poor bastard Sumner – the hack writer – bumped off because he wrote a book about her. It got harder and harder to convince them to give her another chance – and last year, when I suggested giving her a man’s body as a way of jolting her out of her old behaviour patterns, they told me it was the last time. That meeting got kind of heated. I told them they were pathetic little echoes of what they’d been when they were alive: so scared of losing their creature comforts that they weren’t really living at all any more. They accused me of being too big for my boots, trying to run Mount Grace as though it was my personal empire. They threatened to expel me, and I told them they couldn’t. Not any more. I didn’t need them now to keep my hold on this body – and I could take another one, any time I wanted to, without their help. That was probably an unwise thing to say: when they realised how strong I was, they broke with me completely. By that time . . . it came as something of a relief. Because by that time I had something else eating at me. Worse even than Myriam.’
‘Palance,’ I guessed.
‘Yeah,’ Covington whispered. ‘Lionel.’ He emptied the bottle in one final, three-glug swallow.
‘Who is he, Covington?’
‘He’s my son.’
In the dead silence that followed this flat assertion I did the maths and failed to make it come out even close. Covington read the calculation and the outcome in my face and made a sweeping gesture with his hand to head off any objection.
‘I didn’t father him as Aaron Silver,’ he said. ‘I was in one of the other bodies. I can’t even remember which one: they all merge together now. They all ended up looking exactly the same after I’d been wearing them for a year or so, anyway.
‘You see, Castor, once we’d got the mechanics of possession all worked out, the only problems we had left were the legal ones. We had a lot of property that we had to pass on from one generation to the next – from one body to the next – and we wanted to do it in ways that didn’t look odd to someone looking in from outside. Some of us had trained as lawyers, which meant that – as far as contracts went – we could nail down any arrangement we liked. But it had to look right. Right enough to avoid anybody wanting to look any deeper.
‘So Seb Driscoll – the guy you met as Todd – he had a brilliant idea. We have kids. Doesn’t have to be a church wedding, semi-in-the-suburbs kind of deal: we just knock some woman up every now and then, so we’ve got biological children of our own. Because if you’ve got a kid – certifiably, genetically yours – everything becomes really easy. When the time comes to take a new body, you leave everything to the kid. You top yourself. You jump. Now you’re the kid, and you’ve got the fortune, and nobody is going to ask any questions. You just look like a mensch: like a stand-up guy who saw his duty right at the end of his life and did it. End of story.’
Covington stood up, slowly and carefully: from the look on his face and the slight jerkiness in his movements, the booze was starting to kick in.
‘So what went wrong?’ I asked.
‘Nothing.’ His voice dripped with bitterness. ‘Except . . . human nature, maybe. You could forgive me for thinking I didn’t have any by this time, couldn’t you? After all the things I’d done. All the mayhem, the killings, down through the years. Life is cheap, right? But not your own. And your kids are a little bit of your own life, growing in someone else.’
He didn’t seem to know what to do with himself now that he was up on his feet again. He tried pacing, but that didn’t seem to work somehow: he’d stop after every few steps as though he was trying to remember a specific sequence of movements and it kept escaping from him, forcing him to break off and start again.
‘There were problems with Lionel,’ he said, staring at the floor. ‘We needed to make a certain land transfer at an awkward time – when he was only two years old. We went ahead and did it, because there wasn’t any other choice. Then the woman who was Lionel’s mother started making difficulties – trying to spend our money
– and Driscoll ordered a hit on her. But it was botched, and then she went public and it wasn’t easy after that to get close to her. Or rather, it wasn’t easy in any of the regular ways.
‘But Driscoll saw a way of squaring the circle. He possessed Lionel, and we got Lionel to kill her.’
In spite of everything I’d already seen and done that night, I felt an uncomfortable movement in my stomach at that moment. ‘His own mother?’
‘Yeah. When he was three months past his second birthday. Cute, huh? That train set upstairs – I don’t know if you saw it – that was what I sent him. Stupid gift for a two-year-old: he couldn’t even put the fucking track together. But it didn’t matter, anyway, because he wasn’t going to get to play with it.
‘Driscoll thought it was funny. He’d worn a lot of bodies by that time, but he’d never tried wearing a kid. So he stayed there for a few months. Made quite a joke out of it, turning up for the monthly inscription with a – with a sharp tailored suit, and looking at me out of my own son’s . . . Do you mind? I need some fresh air.’
Covington took aim with the bottle and hurled it against the picture window. The bottle shattered: the window fractured across, but stayed whole. Frustrated, he crossed to the bar, picked up a heavy glass ashtray and slung it like a discus. That did the job: it went pinwheeling through the window, which shattered spectacularly, and impacted on the stone flags outside in a fountain of shards that winked and sparkled briefly in the glare of one of the security lights. As though it hadn’t happened, Covington turned to me again. His eyes were dry but his cheeks were flushed and a terrible strain twisted his mouth, making his handsome face a thing you wanted to look away from.
‘So anyway, that started a whole craze. Driscoll talked it up so much, everyone had to try. Between his second and tenth birthdays, I’d estimate that Lionel had forty or fifty different passengers. And I let it happen. I stood by, and I . . . did nothing. Didn’t think about it. Didn’t care. Told myself I didn’t care, anyway. Life is cheap, and the rest is – sentiment. Which is even cheaper.
‘At ten Lionel was left to himself for a while. They lost interest. But it was too late by then. The cognitive centres in the brain – I don’t know. I’ve heard it explained in four or five different ways. At the crucial points in his brain development, he’d been . . . asleep. A prisoner in his own body, bludgeoned into eight years of unconsciousness. He was never going to be normal now. It turned out that you couldn’t just put those years back.’
Covington took a deep, ragged breath. ‘So we had a hard choice,’ he said. ‘Lionel was still the legal possessor of a lot of land – a big chunk of our assets. He was a ward of court, in my legal custody, but there’d be problems if I just administered his property as though it was mine. That would look like malfeasance: it was exactly what we wanted to avoid.
‘We took the low road instead. Carried on possessing Lionel, carried on using him as our puppet – working on a strictly enforced rota, because the novelty had worn off by this stage and nobody was very keen to go through puberty again. We kept the whole routine up until he came of age. After that, he was as viable a suit to wear as anybody else, and it didn’t matter so much. The job was done.
‘But so was the damage. Now that it was too late, I could see – could really see, for the first time – what a monstrous thing we were doing. How big an obscenity we were.
‘I couldn’t save Lionel. I’d even been part of what had been done to him. What I could do was decide that there wouldn’t be any more Lionels. That the operation would finally be shut down. And when they lost interest in him – when he got too old, and they let him go at last – I brought him here. I’ve tried to make him comfortable, at least: I was trying for happy, but most of the time comfortable is what we can manage. He doesn’t remember much, but he has nightmares, and he’s always confused. Always a little bit panicky, as though he’s forgotten something important and something awful is about to happen and it’ll be his fault.
‘So you see, it wasn’t Myriam. They all think it was, and maybe for them that was the real crisis. For me – the camel’s back was already well and truly fucked. Whatever they let me do for Myriam, or tried to stop me from doing, I was done. I was all done.’
Covington looked at me bleakly. ‘Another drink?’
‘No.’
‘No. Not for me, either, I guess. I can see the way you’re looking at me, Castor. I would have killed you for that once.’
‘It’s your party, Aaron. It’s been your party all along.’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, it has. What time is it?’
‘About five-thirty.’
‘The next shift of nurses comes in at six. I need to make sure they all clock in: if someone doesn’t make it, I have to call the service. After that, I’m yours. We’ll go to where Myriam is. We’ll sort this.’
‘Fine.’ I pulled myself wearily to my feet. Covington could have saved his effort: breaking the window hadn’t done anything to clear the air in here. I crossed to the bar, found the hammer wrapped in bubble plastic behind it and hefted it onto my shoulder. ‘I’ll wait for you in the car. Come on out whenever you’re ready.’
Retracing my steps through the maze, I came back out onto the driveway and climbed into the car. The form-fitted leather was way too comfortable and I dozed off into uneasy dreams. John Gittings was in them: so was Gary Coldwood. When a hand on my shoulder – the one that Todd had stabbed me in earlier that evening – woke me back into the world, cold sweat slicked my body from head to foot.
It was Covington, and he was already in the passenger seat.
‘Nice car,’ he said, without much enthusiasm. ‘Did it belong to the dead woman in the back seat?’
‘Demon,’ I corrected him. ‘Yeah, it’s hers. And the rumours of her death are usually exaggerated.’
‘Whenever you’re ready, Castor.’
I turned the key in the ignition. I didn’t think I’d ever be ready. But even in the cold, damp, misty pre-dawn after a night of bloodletting and pain, you can always rely on Italian engineering. The Maserati started first time, and I eased her out through the gates.
26
Sue Book greeted the sight of her fallen lover with a wail of anguish: then she wrested Juliet’s body out of my hands and took her away from me into another room – even Sue could carry Juliet’s negligible bulk without strain – and kicked the door shut behind her. I took that to mean that if we wanted tea and biscuits we’d have to rustle them up for ourselves.
But Covington was hungry for something else entirely, and he wasn’t in the mood for delayed gratification. ‘Where is she?’ he demanded, looking peremptorily around the small hall. ‘Is she here?’
‘Up the stairs,’ I said, and he was taking them three at a time almost before the word was out of my mouth. I didn’t follow straight away. The energy Juliet had lent me had all drained away now and the events of the last few hours were taking their inevitable toll. I felt like a piece of wind-blown crud that had fetched up out of the night at the foot of these stairs and couldn’t be expected to go any further. Wind-blown crud doesn’t defy gravity: it knows its place.
But eventually I summoned the will-power from somewhere and started to climb. From the bedroom facing me I heard Covington’s murmured voice, and then a crazed laugh from Doug Hunter’s throat.
I hesitated on the top step, not sure whether this was a private party or not. Covington’s ‘We’ll sort this’ gave me no clue at all as to what he had planned – or even who the ‘we’ referred to.
Leaning my back against the wall, I enjoyed the momentary sensation of weightlessness that comes with having carried something very heavy for a long time and finally been allowed to set it down. Tomorrow there was more shit still to come, but tomorrow was another day – technically, anyway, even though it was probably less than half an hour to sunup.
The weightlessness passed, but I still felt curiously detached from my own emotions. The guilt that had bitten into me when I�
�d heard about Gary Coldwood’s car accident was mercifully dulled, but there was no sense of triumph or satisfaction in having dealt with his attackers. If anything, Covington’s account had left me feeling as though there was mourning still to be done: but I couldn’t make a start on it just yet.
Covington’s voice rose and fell in the bedroom, his words never quite becoming audible. I could hear Kale’s replies, though.
‘No. I didn’t see you. I looked for you and I didn’t see you. You left me!’
Murmuring from Covington.
‘Oh, that’s fine! That’s wonderful! Whatever you want to call it. Fucking – cocks! Cocks talking, calling themselves men! Love me? Oh yeah, I’ll bet you do. I’ll bet you do!’
Murmur.
‘Well, this is me, now. It’s not him any more, it’s me.’
Murmur.
‘I don’t even know the way. But if I knew the way, I couldn’t do it. Not on my own, Les! Not – not all that way, on my own. Don’t make me. Don’t ask me to.’
Murmur.
‘No.’
Murmur.
‘You can’t. Don’t lie to me! I won’t even have a fucking hand to hold.’
Murmur.
Long silence.
Kale laughed, and the laugh turned into a sob.
‘Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me, Les. I’m so scared.’
And now for the first time I heard him answer her.
‘I’m going, Mimi. I’ve made up my mind. And you can’t keep a hold on this body any more, not without me and the others to help you. Come now, with me, or come later, on your own. That’s the only choice you’ve got.’
Another long silence.
Covington appeared in the doorway. ‘We need you,’ he said.
At any other time I might have baulked at the thought of playing two souls at the same time: but I’d just played two hundred and come out of it with my mind intact, so this didn’t feel too hard. And Covington didn’t want a full exorcism: just an unbinding. Just something that would lift them both out of their flesh and leave them free to move.