Vicious Circle Page 17

  The headache did, though. It felt like a really bad hangover, but casting my mind back over the night before it didn’t seem to me like I’d overindulged. I could only remember the whisky I’d swallowed to dull the edge of the pain while Pen scrubbed my wound out with TCP and lavender soap.

  The wound. It felt uncomfortably hot, but not particularly painful. I prodded it gingerly, and flexed my arm in various directions to see how much traverse it had. There was a little bit of stiffness, but all things considered it didn’t feel nearly as bad as it had the night before. If I were a concert pianist, I’d probably be worried; being the human wreck I am, I figured it would all come out in the wash.

  It was about six in the morning, and Pen was still asleep: at least, there was no sound from the basement except for the occasional creaking and rattling as Edgar or Arthur stirred on his perch and shrugged his bony shoulders. Like rust, ravens never sleep. I went through into the kitchen and made some coffee, then drank three cups of it while I flicked through Pen’s A–Z and worked out a route to Thamesmead. There was no sense driving—I’d have to go through the Blackwall Tunnel or take the Woolwich Ferry, both hassles that I can do without at the best of times. The smart option was to go to Waterloo and then take an overground train to Woolwich Dockyard. From there I could walk it.

  A brisk wind had come up in the night and swept the thunderheads away to someplace else, so it was sunny but fresh as I walked to Turnpike Lane tube station, and my head started to feel a little clearer. I was glad of the change in the weather for another reason, too: shredded at seam and shoulder, and crusted brown with blood on the left-hand side of the collar, my paletot was hors de combat for the time being. I was wearing the only other coat I owned that had enough pockets for all my paraphernalia: a fawn trenchcoat with a button-down yoke that makes me feel like an exhibit in some museum installation about the evolution of the private detective.

  Since I’d gotten such an early start on the day, I couldn’t get a Travelcard, so I just took a single. I didn’t know where I’d be going after I left the Collective. Maybe Paddington and Rosie Crucis: it depended on whether I found any leads I could actually use.

  Bourbon said that Dennis Peace used to be a rubber duck. In trade jargon, that meant only one thing: an exorcist who chose for professional reasons to live on water rather than on dry land. It’s something we all try out, at some point, if only to get a decent night’s sleep: no ghosts can cross running water, and the morbid sensitivities that keep us in business are all anesthetized for once. Takes a certain kind of personality to live with it long term, though: I always end up feeling like I’m trussed up inside of a plastic bag, my own breath condensing on me as cold sweat.

  The Collective is a floater community on the Thames. Everybody in my world knows it, everybody’s been there, but that doesn’t mean you can necessarily find it when you want to: like the Oriflamme, the Collective is a movable feast. Come to think of it, there’s another link between the two, although it’s an accidental and tendentious one along the lines of “how many degrees of separation are you away from Kevin Bacon?” Only for Kevin Bacon read “Peckham Steiner.”

  Steiner is one of the few flamboyant legends of our reclusive and insular profession. He was an exorcist before the fashion really got going: by which I mean before the huge upsurge of apparitions and manifestations in the last decade of the old millennium turned people like me into a key industry. Specializing in spiritual eradications for the rich and famous, he garnered a certain amount of fame (or at least notoriety) for himself along the way—along with a shedload of money. An American heiress was in it somewhere, if I remember rightly. Her dead ex-husbands had been giving her all kinds of grief until Steiner sent them on to their last judgment, and out of gratitude she left him the bulk of her fortune when she died. Her kids from all three marriages sued, and the case dragged on for years, but as far as I know none of them ever managed to lay a legal finger on him. By that time, anyway, he had three books out, a movie deal for his life story, and a controlling share in ENSURE, a company that made ghost-breaking equipment and consumables. He retired at forty-six, richer than God.

  Unfortunately, he was also crazier than a shithouse rat. Maybe the instability had always been there, or maybe it was the pressures of the job and then the explosive de-repression of having enough money to remake yourself and the world closer to your expectations. I mean, look what that did to Michael Jackson.

  I met him once—Steiner, I mean, not Jacko—and it was a scary thing to see. By that time I’d already read a couple of his books, and I’d come to respect (although not actually to like) the cold, clever mind that was on show in them. But when I got to talk to him, it was as though that mind had deliquesced and then solidified again in a different, largely nonfunctional shape.

  It was at some weird party or other in a London hotel that was hosting a conference on Perspectives on the After-Life. Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, an exorcist-turned-academic who’d taught me a lot of the tricks of the trade when I was still very wet behind the ears, had blagged a ticket for me and insisted that I come along: the chance of meeting Steiner had swung it.

  From what I can still recall of that conversation, he was already well on the way to becoming the surly, crazed recluse that everybody now remembers him as. He talked about the dead and the living as though they were two armies in the field, with himself as some kind of commander marshaling the forces of the warm-blooded. He looked the part, too, I have to admit: spirit-level straight, unyielding as stone, his gray hair cropped close to his scalp. And if he were a general, he seemed to feel that the exorcists were his crack troops: an elite commando unit trained to take anything the enemy could throw at us. The enemy? I hedged at first, sure that there was some subtlety I was missing, but there wasn’t. “The dead,” he said. “And the undead. The ones that want to supplant us, and take the world away from us.”

  Even back then, when I was blasting unquiet spirits without qualm or question, I still couldn’t see the situation quite like that. Apart from anything else, it only seemed to lead in one direction, to a door marked “abandon hope.” Out of some halfhearted attempt to keep my half of the conversation up, I asked him how it was possible to fight a war where any casualty in your own forces became a recruit for the other side.

  “What do you mean?” he demanded, frowning at me over a glass of champagne, which he was clutching tightly enough to make me nervous.

  I made the best fist of it that I could, which wasn’t all that good because most of my concentration was tied up in looking round for an escape route: this was as big a disillusionment as finding out that the reason Father Christmas smells like Johnnie Walker is because he’s your dad in a fake beard and a red mac. “I mean we’re all going to die, Mr. Steiner. If the dead do hate the living, they don’t have to fight us: they only have to wait. In the end, everyone goes the same way, right? If life is an army, everyone deserts sooner or . . .”

  His glare made me falter into silence. I knew damn well, looking into those mad, uncompromising baby blues, that if we had been in a war zone he’d have had me shot right there and then for bringing aid and comfort to the enemy. Since we were at a party, he didn’t have that option: he was visibly weighing up alternatives.

  “Fuck off and kill yourself, then,” he growled at last. Then he turned and walked away, shouldering aside some of the great and good who’d gathered around so that they could be seen and photographed with him.

  After that, the stages of his decline were charted with endless fascination by the ghost-hunting community. From seeing himself as general and commander in chief, he came more and more to see himself as a prominent target. If the ghosts—and their servants and satraps, the were-kin, the demons, and the zombies—were engaged in a war against the living, then sooner or later they were bound to try to strike at the people who were leading the campaign on the other side: the exorcists. He started to take elaborate precautions for his own safety, and the first—highly publicized—step he took was to buy a yacht. Since the dead can�
�t usually cross running water, Steiner had decided that he’d make sure he was surrounded by running water most of the time, and only step onto dry land when there was no way of avoiding it. He suggested in a couple of interviews that this might be the lifestyle of the future. He imagined itinerant populations, floating cities built on decommissioned aircraft carriers and oil tankers.

  But crazy though he was, I guess he realized somewhere along the way that the idea of relocating whole urban populations onto houseboats would be a hard sell. Something else—some other measure, achievable but effective—was going to be needed, so that when the inevitable assault came and the evil dead overran the land the living would have somewhere to retreat to. A visionary to the last, he proposed a series of safe houses, ingeniously designed, which would stand “with hallowed ground to all four sides, behind elemental ramparts of earth and air and water.” Houses built on this design, he said, would blind the eyes and blunt the forces of the dead. The first design used actual moats: the later ones had double walls with the water flowing between them invisibly in plumbed-in metal tanks. The earth and air and fire parts I’m not so sure about. He sent the designs to the housing departments of all the London boroughs, and offered his services free as an adviser if they’d commit themselves to a building program.

  As far as I know, none of the boroughs ever responded—not even with a po-faced “your letter has been received and taken under advisement.” Steiner raged impotently; even with his millions, there was no way he could do this on his own.

  There was an upside to his madness, though: he still saw the exorcists—especially the London exorcists—as his boys, his special charges. He gave Bourbon Bryant the premises that became the Oriflamme, because he loved the idea of ghostbusters meeting up and sharing ideas (he was probably also working on the principle that there’s strength in numbers). And when he died, he left his yacht to a trust with Bryant as the first president, changing its name in his will to the Thames Collective. Money from his estate would be diverted to keeping it seaworthy and in a reasonable state of repair, and any London exorcist would have the right to live there at need for as long as they liked, with berths being strictly rotated if too many people took up the offer at the same time.

  To begin with, it looked like that might actually be a problem: a whole lot of people liked the idea of living for free in a luxury yacht. But the Collective wasn’t as luxurious as all that: to increase the number of berths, Steiner had the big staterooms subdivided with plasterboard partitions, so living space was cramped and somewhat rough-and-ready. There’d been problems with the administration of the trust, too: the idea was that London-based exorcists would volunteer for one- or two-year stretches so that the burden wouldn’t fall too heavily on a small group. But not many, even of the people who wanted to live on the Collective, were enthused by the idea of devoting any of their time to running it. It was also hard to define who was eligible, because anyone could say they were an exorcist with no more proof than a letterhead or a shingle. In a welter of resentment, recrimination, and mutual backstabbing, the trust more or less imploded. The Collective still existed, but the money that should have kept it in good repair was legally frozen and it was falling apart in melancholy slow motion. It went from berth to berth along the Thames, bringing down the tone wherever it stopped and so always unwelcome even though it could pay its way. The people who lived on it now tended to be people who were only staying in the city for a short while, or who had no other options.

  What did I know about Reggie Tang? Just barely north of nothing. He was a rising star of the kind that old dogs like me watch suspiciously and from a distance: rumored to be a very quick study, a bit on the quick-tempered side and very handy in a fight. His dad had been some sort of broker in Hong Kong before the handover; he was a Buddhist, or so I’d heard; and he was active on the gay scene. That was pretty much it. I’d only ever met him once, and the bulk of that had been a frank exchange of views: a shouting match, in other words, on the theme of how far any of the medieval grimoires could be said to be worth a rat’s arse when it came to defining the names and natures of demons. Reggie thought the Liber Juratus Honorii was the dog’s bollocks: I thought it was the most feeble-minded piece of crap I’d ever set eyes on. We didn’t get much further than the is-isn’t-is stage of the discussion, though, because we were both passing-out drunk. I was hoping he’d remember that evening fondly, or at least still have a vague idea of who I was. Otherwise the best I could hope for here was the cold shoulder.

  I found the Collective exactly where Nicky had said it would be, at the end of a pier just down from the Artillery Museum—but getting on board turned out to be a bit more problematic because the only way to get onto the pier was through a locked gate with a nasty tangle of razor wire on top of it. I took a look at the lock. The keyhole was a very distinctive shape: an asterisk, more or less, with seven radiating lines that were all the same length and thickness except for the one going vertically downward from the center, which was both longer and slightly wider than the rest. It was a French design, and I was never likely to forget it once I’d met it because the company that made it was named Pollux—and Castor and Pollux are the twins that make up the constellation Gemini. More to the point, I could crack the thing in a minute flat.

  But when I rummaged through the pockets of the trenchcoat, I came up empty. I’d transferred my whistle, obviously, and a couple of other bits and pieces that had survived my close encounter with the two loup-garous the night before, but I hadn’t remembered to take any of my lockpicks.

  So all I could do was hammer on the gate and shout, and then wait until somebody heard me. It was a harsh blow to my professional pride.

  Eventually, though, I got a response. There were approaching footsteps, and then the gate rattled as someone unlocked it from the far side. It swung open, and a face I didn’t know appeared in the gap.

  It was a face you couldn’t do much about, like it or not, except maybe commiserate with the owner. It was pale and flat and had the slight grayness of unbaked dough. The messiest tangle of spiky light-brown hair I’d ever seen stood up on top of it like couch grass on a sand dune. You couldn’t tell whether the body attached to a face like that would be young, old, or somewhere in between. The furthest you’d want to go would be to say that it was—on the balance of probabilities—male.

  “Morning,” I said, with a winning smile. “Is Reggie in?”

  The face just stared. I considered the possibility that it was on the end of a pole rather than a neck. But then the guy opened the door a fraction more and I could see for myself that he was alive and intact. He was the same height as me but skinny as a rake. He was dressed in ragged jeans and an op-art T-shirt, and on his feet he wore novelty slippers in the shape of Gromit the dog. “Reggie?” he said, sounding slightly baffled, as if he was hearing the name for the first time. There was an Essex lilt to his voice.

  “Yeah, Reggie Tang. You’re from the Collective, right? I heard he was living there right now.”

  The guy didn’t concede the point by so much as a nod. After a loaded pause, he said, “Who are you?”

  “I’m Felix Castor.” I stuck out my hand. He shook it without much interest, but the momentary emotional flash I got while our hands were touching had some odd harmonics in it: unease, resentment, and something like alarm.

  There was no trace of any of that in his voice, which was disengaged if not downright lugubrious. “Greg Lockyear,” he said. “So you’re Castor? Heard your name, here and there. Lot of people seem to reckon you.” His gaze went down to my feet as he said this, as if he were checking my shoes against health and safety standards, and then back up to meet mine.

  “Reggie’s inside,” he said, sounding resigned now. “Come on in.”

  He turned and led the way along the pier to the Collective’s gangplank. The ship had been a floating mansion once: now she was a wreck. I hadn’t seen her in six years, and I could see there were at least that many years’ worth of dirt on her sides. Lower down there was a slimy ring of a
lgae, and below that, winking redly up at me as the water slopped against the hull, a little rust. At this rate the Collective wasn’t going to last out too many more winters.

  Lockyear went on board, and I followed him—along a short companionway and then sharp left into a stairwell that led down to the lower level of the deckhouse. “Mind the steps,” he called out, without looking back. “One of them’s loose.” The warning came a fraction of a second too late: a plank turned under my heel and I just about managed to avoid going over on my face. I was starting to feel a little bit like an Egyptian tomb robber.

  The deckhouse was about the only space on board the Collective that was still the same size and shape as it had started out. It was on two levels, connected by a spiral staircase in carefully matched dark woods, and it still had a sort of faded elegance about it. Very faded: the original leather and built-in tables and couches were sort of overwhelmed now by bootlockers and cupboard units from the provisional wing of MFI—and there was a smell of stale grease in the air from the galley in the corner, which had an arc of smoke-blackened ceiling above it like the hovering spirit of fried meals long since past. The only other door out of the room was there, and it was half off its hinges. The balcony rails edging the deckhouse’s upper level, about eight feet above us, were missing in places, so that a casual promenade could become a life-or-death affair if you didn’t look where you were going.