Why they
stayed
here was more of a mystery. I’d cut them loose with one of my better tunes, a partial exorcism that permitted them to roam as far as they liked away from this sick building with its self-and-mutually-tortured inmates. And they did roam. They were a common sight in the West End, and there were reported sightings as far afield as Greenwich and Stanmore. But for some reason they always came back. This was where they lived, in spite of everything.
An association of some kind stirred in my mind.
‘Everything all right?’ Sam asked, stepping out into the corridor and slamming the door behind him. The half-formed idea skittered away to the back of my mind and hid itself under a clump of childhood traumas.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Are we good?’
Sam made a
tch
sound. ‘Gil says we should have gone for something bigger,’ he grumbled. ‘Doesn’t understand a bloody thing, that man. The shit’s like static electricity, isn’t it? It focuses to a point. I know this will do the job.’
We went back to the MOU, Sam regaling me all the way with war stories about some of the weird stuff he’d seen and dealt with while he was working for Jenna-Jane. He had a lot more respect for her than he did for Gil, it seemed. I was curious to know how he felt about the Gulag in J-J’s basement, but I’d probably have to wait until I knew him better before I could ask.
Trudie received the fingernail with genuine excitement. We found her and Etheridge in one of the rooms that hadn’t been redecorated yet, a builder’s shell with bare plasterboard walls scrawled with measurements and instructions for the electricians. There were no wall sockets, but someone had run an extension cord from the room next door and an anglepoise lamp had been plugged into it. The lamp was on the floor, so the room had adequate lighting up to about knee level.
The two of them had laid out a colossal map on a row of trestle tables. It was a composite, made from about thirty Ordnance Survey maps taped together at the edges, and it covered most of London, from Oakwood in the north to Richmond in the south. Etheridge looked happy taping the edges of the maps together. He still twitched and flinched from time to time, but he seemed calmer than when he’d tied himself in knots trying to say hello to me. And he couldn’t do enough for Trudie. He kept showing her the progress he’d made so she could thank him and he could say it was no problem, a ritual that was repeated three times while I was there.
‘This is definitely Ditko’s?’ Trudie demanded, tipping the bag and allowing the jagged fragment of fingernail, brown with blood along one edge, to slide out onto an unused table on which a carpenter’s hammer and a dozen or so six-inch nails were lying. She was looking at me, but Sam answered.
‘It was stuck in the wall,’ he said. ‘We checked, and the cell hasn’t been assigned to anyone else since Ditko left. Webb doesn’t think it will be. You couldn’t stick a human being in a place like that; it’d be like Guantanamo Bay!’
I started to speak, but Trudie beat me to the punch. ‘Rafi Ditko
is
a human being,’ she said sharply. ‘He’s just carrying the demon the way you carry a virus or a parasite. It’s not a good idea to forget that, Sam.’
Sam put up his hands in a mean-you-no-harm gesture. ‘Sorry to offend your liberal sensibilities, Pax. I didn’t know you were a Breather.’
That word - that label - can be almost value-neutral in everyday use; spoken by an exorcist, it always carries an implied insult. The Breath of Life movement is the Amnesty International of the Twilight Zone, its members lobbying to extend human rights to the risen dead. If they ever manage this, exorcism as a profession will vanish overnight, so there’s a lot of cordial hatred on both sides.
Trudie didn’t acknowledge the slur. She was passing her hands over the broken fingernail, first the left and then the right, moving them in small circles as though she was making some kind of blessing.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, her voice sinking almost to a whisper. ‘It’s his. It’s good, Sam. It’s very good.’
‘You’re welcome,’ said Sam. He looked at me over Trudie’s head, rolling his eyes.
‘Shall I fix up the plumb line?’ Etheridge asked, looking to Trudie for another pat on the head. Possibly he was even younger than he looked. Jenna-Jane did the university milk rounds these days. She could have snatched this kid right out of the cradle. I wondered if he’d been in better nick when she acquired him.
‘No.’ Trudie shot him a distracted smile. ‘Not yet, Victor. I need to charge up. And Gil said we weren’t to start until he was here. Perhaps you could go tell him we’re ready?’
Etheridge scooted off eagerly to do her bidding, while she made some more passes with her hands over the nail. ‘I think this might actually work,’ she murmured. ‘I wasn’t sure, but . . . I’m feeling it really clearly.’
She straightened and started to unwind the string from her hands. I suddenly had an inkling of how she was going to put all these bizarre ingredients together, but it was such an insane idea I thought I must be wrong.
Voices in the corridor told me that Gil and Etheridge were returning. Then Gil himself breezed in, waving his arms like a conductor. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m here. Get it moving, Pax. This isn’t the only thing on the clipboard.’
Trudie didn’t bother to answer. She’d unwound about three feet of string from each hand now. They were loops, but she’d untied the knot in each one to unravel them to their full extent, and now she was tying them together into a single length.
While she worked Etheridge scooped up the hammer and one of the nails, jumped up onto a chair and drove the nail deep into the bald plasterboard of the ceiling. Trudie passed him one end of the string and he made it fast around the nail with an inelegant lasso knot.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘It’s . . . we’re . . .’
‘Thank you, Victor,’ Pax said gently.
Since Etheridge had mentioned a plumb line, I thought Trudie might actually tie the broken fingernail to the other end of the string and make the most lightly weighted pendulum in the history of the world. What she did was even stranger than that, if anything. She tied another lasso knot in the free end of the string, looped it over her hand and lowered her arm again until the string was taut. It meant that her hand could only move in a circle defined by the length of the string.
As we watched in silence, she moved her hand to left and right, up and down over the map, keeping the string stretched out tight so there was no give in it. She started in the centre, and the arcs at first were very tight, but they got wider as she worked. Her eyes were closed, and there was a look of intense concentration on her face.
‘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 own goddamned shoelaces.’