‘You’ll need to clear the room,’ I told Gary. ‘I won’t be able to pick up a blind thing with this lot going on.’
Gary hesitated, then nodded. ‘Mandatory fag break,’ he called out to his team. ‘Collins, work on the stairwell for a bit. Webb, get some of your mob taking statements from the neighbours. I can see them all rubbernecking out there, so we might as well use them while we’ve got them.’ He pointed towards the door. ‘Everybody out.’
They left in dribs and drabs, the forensics guys packing up their kit with finicky care and looking glumly frustrated, as though they’d been smacked in the head with a wet fish in the middle of some promising sexual foreplay. A case like this doesn’t come along every day: although as far as that goes, they probably only had to wait. Things were changing around us, faster and faster. The world wasn’t a sphere any more, or at least it didn’t feel that way a lot of the time; it felt like an inclined plane.
Gary was the last to leave, and he lingered in the doorway. ‘I don’t have to tell you not to touch anything, do I, Fix?’ he asked, his expression hovering somewhere between wary and apologetic.
I looked him squarely in the eyes. I knew what he was thinking. I used to work for the detective branch in an official capacity, under Coldwood’s tutelage: consulting exorcist, by appointment, with all the privileges a civilian informant gets from the boys in blue. Then twice in the last two years I’d been the main suspect in a murder investigation, and Gary had had to bend over so far backwards to keep me out of jail that he could have won a limbo competition in Queenstown, Jamaica. It reflected badly on his judgement that I kept landing up to my neck in shit.
‘I know the drill,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I’m sure you do.’ He gave up the point. ‘Give me a shout when you’re done.’
He left at last, and I was alone with the body. I circled the broken table and stared down at her sombrely, feeling compromised and shamed in some indefinable way by her vulnerability, her violation.
But I had a job to do, and Gary would already be looking at his watch. ‘Meter’s running,’ as he liked to say, still searching for that Hollywood tough-guy persona that always eluded him because he could never quite bring himself to be a big enough bastard.
In the lining of the Russian army greatcoat which is my work uniform there’s a sewn-in pocket just big enough to house my tin whistle within easy reach of my left hand. I put my hand in now and drew it out. Putting it to my lips I played a few random notes as place-holders for a tune that didn’t exist yet.
The room darkened around me. The world of flesh and blood and words and meanings went away.
Exorcism is a peculiar way to earn a living. The pay is shit, the hours are appalling, there’s no career structure and the work itself can shade from same old same old to lethally dangerous inside of a heartbeat. But I’ll say this for it: it’s a vocation. To do it at all, you’ve got to be born to it.
It’s got nothing to do with religious faith. If it did, I’d be out of a job because, despite my Catholic upbringing, me and God haven’t been on speaking terms since I was six. It’s just an extra sense, or maybe an extra set of senses. An exorcist knows when the dead are around, and he can reach out and touch them in various ways: specifically, he can bind them and he can banish them.
And the dead are
always
around. You’ve probably noticed yourself how bad it’s got just lately. Chances are, some time in the last few years you bought a house or rented a flat and found that it was haunted; or else someone you knew clawed their way up out of the grave and decided to renew an old acquaintance; or, God help you, maybe you had a run-in with a
loup-garou
- werewolf, to use the vernacular - or one of the lesser Hell-kin. In which case, you can be thankful that you’re even alive to read this.
Maybe the huge spike in the supernatural population created its own Darwinian pressures. Or maybe not. It seems just as likely to me that the potentiality for exorcism as an innate skill was always part of the human genome, but most people who had it lived and died without ever finding out that it was there. These days . . . well, you tend to find out pretty fast.
We’ve all got our own ways of doing the job. Some people do it the old-fashioned way, with the traditional props: a bell, a book and a candle, a dagger and a chalice, maybe a bit of an incantation in hacked-up medieval Latin. I’ve even done it that way myself on occasion, but only to impress the mug punters. Any kind of pattern will do to hold a ghost: a sequence of words or sounds, lines on a piece of paper, the movements of a dance, even a hand of playing cards. If you’ve got the knack, you can choose your own tools, your own gimmick. Although in my experience it’s closer to the truth to say that it chooses you.
I do it with music. My second sight is more like second hearing, which means that I experience ghosts, demons and the undead as tunes. With my trusty tin whistle (Clarke’s Original, key of D) I can reproduce the tune, and tangle the ghost up in the music so it can’t get free. When I stop playing, it goes to wherever music goes when it’s not being played. Problem solved. It’s not so straightforward with demons, because they tend to fight back, but that’s the basis of what I do right there: a natural talent that I’ve turned into a steady job.
The word ‘steady’ in that sentence was meant as sarcasm.
The first part of an exorcism is the summoning, where you make a connection with the ghost and call it to you, but before you can even do that, you’ve got to learn its nature, its unique
this-ness
, so you know what it is you’re calling to. A general invitation usually doesn’t work.
I sat to one side of the dead woman, just outside the wide circle of spilled blood, and played a halting, broken-backed tune that was more like a question than a command. I was fishing: sending out feelers through the heights and depths of some vast volume that wasn’t air or water or even space, an infinity that fitted comfortably into this pokey little rented room.
Nothing. My hook was out there, but nothing bit.
It wasn’t that there was nothing there. Any building that’s more than a few years old develops a sort of emotional patina, a set of resonances that an exorcist will pick up at once if he opens himself to it. There were plenty of echoes in this room: the joys and sorrows and bumps and grinds of ordinary existence lingering in the air, in the brickwork, like the unstilled vibrations of a sound that had passed outside the range of human hearing.
But the ghost of Ginny Parris refused to come on down.
She was there. On some level, in some form, I was aware of a presence in the room. Diffuse and weak and scattered, it hung in the ether like Morse code, discontinuous but replete with meaning: a dot of misery here, a dash of fear and confusion there, and way over here an incongruous flash-silence-flash of hope. I went on playing, a little encouraged. Normally this stage of the game is kind of a cumulative thing. You start off slow, with only the barest sense of the ghost’s presence, but you zero in on it with your talent, with whatever interface you use to make your talent work for you. You describe and define and delimit it, bring it in closer, sharpen the signal. It can come fast or it can come slow, but sooner or later you reach a tipping point where it becomes inevitable. The pattern of the ghost is imprinted on your mind, and after that it can’t get away from you. You can make it come to you, bind it to your will. You can question it, and it has to answer you if it’s able. Or you can make it go away and never come back.
That wasn’t what was happening here, though; if anything, this was the exact opposite. The sense of Ginny’s presence got weaker rather than stronger: those vestigial traces effaced themselves more and more, faded away gradually and inexorably, until it seemed like it was only the music that was keeping them there at all.
I kept on playing. Typically, by this time, the random notes would have modulated into a recognisable tune. But they didn’t. They remained fragmented and formless, just as she was.
I suddenly had the terrifying conviction that a piece of Ginny Parris was clinging to the lifeline of my tune to keep from tumbling off into the abyss of whatever-comes-next. So I kept the lifeline going for as long as I could, feeling her getting further and further away from me in some direction that doesn’t really have a name. It was a strain now to maintain that contact. I felt a trickle of sweat on my forehead, and my heart was racing.
I played her until she was gone.
And in her absence, in the spaces through which her soul had trickled away, I sensed a second presence. It was even fainter than hers had been, but for very different reasons.
Dogs hunt in packs, bark their lungs out and stink the place up like a roomful of wet carpets. Cats hunt alone, in silence; crouch low to let no silhouette show above the skyline; bury their droppings so the prey won’t know where they’ve been hunting. The scariest predators are the ones you don’t see until their jaws snap shut on your throat, and so it is too with the predators of the spirit world.
I sat in the silent room, breathing in the stench of death, and waited for my heartbeat to slow back to a sustainable seventy-some beats a minute. It took a long time.
When I felt up to it, I climbed to my feet and went to the door. There was no sign of Gary on the narrow landing or in the stairwell, but a copper at the bottom of the stairs, by the street door, had obviously been briefed to give him a shout when I surfaced. He looked out into the street and called something that I didn’t hear.
Gary appeared shortly after and came up to join me. ‘What did you get?’ he asked bluntly. Then before I could answer he raised a hand to shush me, fished in his pocket and came up with a digital voice recorder - an Olympus DS-50, his favourite toy from last year. He clicked the record button, held it to his mouth like a telephone. ‘Witness name is Felix Castor,’ he said. ‘Time . . .’ consulting his watch ‘. . . 1.17 a.m. Place, flat 3C, 129 Cadogan Terrace, SW2. Witness - a practising exorcist - was called in by investigating officer in CI capacity.’
He held the recorder out in my direction.
‘Talk me through it, Castor.’
‘You can forget your
loup-garou
hypothesis,’ I muttered, pushing the device away again.
Gary’s interest quickened. He shot me a stare that would have cost him plenty at the poker table.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘She didn’t answer the summoning. There were . . . pieces of her all over the place, but they didn’t add up to anything. She hadn’t just been killed, she’d been shredded.’
Gary’s eyes flicked involuntarily to the corpse.
‘Fuck,’ I said impatiently. ‘Not her body, Gary. Her soul. Whatever killed her got her soul as well. It was a demon. She was killed by a demon.’
Even a couple of years ago, if I’d told him that, he would have laughed in my face. Now he took it calmly, too calmly in fact. He seemed almost to have been expecting it.
‘Did you pick up anything else?’ he asked.
‘She didn’t die quickly,’ I said. ‘Or at least . . . she did, in the end, obviously. But the thing was in here with her for a while before that. She had long enough to go through a lot of different emotions. At one point, I reckon . . . she thought it might let her live. I don’t know why that would be.’
‘Yeah,’ said Gary. ‘I do. Maybe.’
He turned the tape recorder off and put it back in his pocket.
‘Something you’re not telling me,’ I said. It was a statement, not a question. This whole situation was screaming set-up at me in three-part harmony.
‘Yeah,’ Gary admitted. ‘The other reason why I came to you with this. I mean, you’re not really on the books any more, and your friend Juliet has it all over you in the eye-candy department. But I think this one’s yours, Fix.’
I waited, but he didn’t seem in any hurry to spit it out.
‘Well?’ I demanded. ‘What?’
‘The name didn’t mean anything to you?’
‘Ginny,’ I murmured. ‘Ginny Parris.’ Maybe it did at that. The memory wouldn’t come clear, but alarm bells started to ring, way down in my subconscious.
‘Not her real name. Birth certificate has Jane, but she liked to call herself Guinevere. When that wouldn’t fly, she shortened it to Ginny.’
My heart took a ride down to my stomach, in the express elevator.
‘Oh Jesus,’ I said. ‘She was . . .’
Gary waited for a few seconds in case I finished the sentence myself. When I didn’t, he finished it for me. ‘Yeah,’ he confirmed. ‘Rafi Ditko’s old girlfriend.’
2
I went to pieces for a while back there. It wasn’t pretty.
It began about three months ago, after the demon Asmodeus, wearing my friend Rafi’s body, broke out of the bespoke prison cell I’d run up for him at the house of the Ice-Maker, Imelda Probert, killing Imelda herself and three other people along the way, and walked out into the world to see what was new.
That was enough of a catastrophe in itself: Imelda left a teenaged daughter, Lisa, who as far as I knew had no other living relatives. Asmodeus was a monster, and his tenancy of Rafi’s flesh was an abomination. And demons being demons, I had to assume that those first four murders were only a foretaste of things to come. But what made the whole thing infinitely worse was that it was mostly my fault.
Okay, it wasn’t me who had freed Asmodeus from captivity. The honours for that fiasco went to a little-known and technically excommunicate Catholic sect known as the Anathemata and their priest-slash-general Thomas Gwillam. Gwillam wanted to exorcise Asmodeus, but the people he put on that work detail weren’t up to it. They went in half-cocked, got themselves cut to pieces, and in the process freed the demon from the psychic straitjacket I’d put him in.
But I was the reason he was there in the first place: I’d taken him to Peckham, to Imelda’s house, from the Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill, in a desperate attempt to keep him from falling into even worse hands. I was also the reason why he was strong enough to get free and fight back, because I’d allowed him to feed on part of another demon. It had all seemed to make sense at the time: feeding Asmodeus had set a young boy free from a possession that would eventually have killed him.