Vicious Circle Read online

  Basically the government was trying to pull the law up by its own bootstraps so that it could slip a fairly fundamental postscript into every major statute that had ever been written. It wasn’t a case of how the law worked, exactly: it was more a case of who it applied to. The aim was to give some measure of legal protection to the dead—and that’s where it got to be good clean fun of the kind that could keep a million lawyers happily engaged from now until Doomsday. Because there were more different kinds of dead and undead entity around these days than there were fish in the sea, or reality TV shows on channel 4. Where did you draw the line? Exactly how much of a physical manifestation did you need to count as a productive citizen?

  There’d been some spirited batting around of all these issues in the Commons and in the Lords, and the pundits were saying the bill might hit the rocks if it came to a free vote. But even if it did, it seemed like it was only a matter of time: sooner or later we had to grudgingly accept that our old definitions of life and death were no damn use anymore, and that people who refuse to take the hint when their heart’s stopped beating and their perishable parts are six feet under still have at least a minimal degree of protection under the law.

  Which for a lot of guys in my profession was just flat-out bad news.

  * * *

  I guess the dead were always with us, but for a long while they were fairly discreet about it. Or perhaps there just weren’t so many of them who bothered to come back.

  In my earliest memories, there’s no real distinction: some people had laps you could sit on, hands you could hold, while with others you sort of fell right on through. You learned by trial and error who was which—and then later you learned not to talk about it, because grown-ups couldn’t always see or hear the silent woman in the freezer aisle at Sainsbury’s, the forlorn kid standing out in the middle of the road with the traffic roaring through him, the wild-eyed, cursing vagrant wandering through the living room wall.

  It wasn’t that much of a burden, really: more bewildering than traumatic. I found out that ghosts were meant to be scary when I heard other kids telling ghost stories, and as far as I can remember my reaction was just “Oh, so that’s what they’re called.”

  The first ghost that ever really rattled me was my sister Katie, and that was because I knew her from when she was alive. I’d even been there when my dad had brought her broken body back to the house, sobbing uncontrollably, fighting off the hands that tried to help him lay her down. She was skipping rope in what was nominally a “play street,” off-limits to cars (8:00 AM TO SUNSET, EXCEPT FOR ACCESS). A delivery van, going way too fast in the narrow street, hit her a glancing blow and threw her about ten feet through the air. As far as anyone could tell, she died instantly. The van, meanwhile, kept right on going. My dad spent a lot of time after that going round the neighbors’ houses asking people if they’d seen what kind of van it was: he was hoping to identify the driver and get to him before the police did. Fortunately for both of them, he got a whole range of different answers—Mother’s Pride, Jacob’s Biscuits, Metal Box Company Limited—and eventually had to give up.

  I was six years old. You don’t really grieve at that age, you just sit around trying to figure out what the hell is going on. I sort of got that Katie was dead, but I wasn’t all that clear yet on death itself: it was a transition, a change of state, but how permanent it was and where it left you afterward seemed to vary according to whom I asked.

  One thing was for sure: Katie wasn’t up in heaven with God. The day we buried her, she walked into my bedroom at five past midnight and tried to climb into bed with me—which was where she normally slept, there being only one room and two beds to share between us three kids. I was perturbed by the broad, bloody gash in her forehead, her pulped shoulder, her gravel-sculpted side, and she was upset by my screaming. It went downhill from there.

  My mum and dad were falling apart themselves at this stage, so they didn’t have much sympathy to spare. They took me to a doctor, who said nightmares were entirely normal after a trauma—especially a trauma like losing a sibling—and prescribed large doses of sweet bugger all. I was left to get on with it.

  And that was how I found out that I was an exorcist.

  After two weeks of Katie’s nightly visits, I started trying to make her go away, running through the whole gamut of gross and offensive behavior that six-year-old boys can come up with. Katie just kept on staring. But when I sang “Build a bonfire, build a bonfire, put your sister on the top,” the subdued little ghost made a whimpering sound and started to flicker like a dying lightbulb.

  Seeing that I’d made an impact at last, I pushed on through my small repertoire of songs. Katie tried to talk to me, but whatever she was saying I couldn’t hear it over my own raucous chanting. By the time my parents stormed in, their patience finally exhausted, she was gone.

  She was gone, and I celebrated. My bed was my own again. I was stronger than death, and I knew that whatever death actually turned out to be, I had the stick that would always bring it to heel: music. I became fascinated by the mechanics of the whole thing; I discovered by trial and error that whistling was better than singing, and playing a flute or tin whistle was best of all. It works differently for each of us, but music is the trigger that does the job for me.

  It was years before I really thought again about the shy, scrawny little girl who collected elastic bands for no fathomable reason, wrapping them around each other until they formed a huge, solid ball, and who let me share her lunch when I’d swapped my own crisps and sandwiches for Twilight Zone bubblegum cards: years before I even asked myself where she went when I made her go away.

  I grew up. So did my big brother, Matthew. We’d never had a lot in common, and as we grew we took off in totally opposite directions. He went straight from school to a Catholic seminary in Upholland—the same one that Johnny Vegas trained in, but Matthew stuck to his guns when Vegas ditched the priesthood to become a stand-up comedian. On the other hand Matthew would have been hampered in that job by having a sense of humor so atrophied that he still thought The Goons Show was funny.

  I went to Oxford to study English, but dropped out in my second year and by devious and twisted routes ended up going into exorcism. For six or seven years I made a living out of doing to other ghosts for money what I’d done to Katie out of pure, naked self-preservation.

  There was a real call for exorcists by this time. Something was happening as the old millennium bumped and creaked and trundled its way downhill toward its terminus. The dead were waking in greater and greater numbers, to the point where suddenly they were impossible to ignore. Most were benign, or at least passive, but some had clearly gotten out of the wrong side of the grave—and a few were downright antisocial. The immaterial ones were bad enough, but some of the dead returned in the flesh, as zombies, while other ghosts—known as loup-garous or were—were able to possess animal hosts and sculpt them into a more or less human shape. And in some cases, where you got a big concentration of the dead in one place, other things would appear there, too: things that seemed to correspond to what mediaeval grimoires called demons. It seemed like it was chucking-out time in hell, and the whole rowdy bunch had all come surging out onto the streets at the same time. Kind of like eleven o’clock on the Dock Road back home in Liverpool, but with brimstone.

  And equally suddenly, there were the exorcists. Or maybe we’d always been there, too; maybe it’s part of the genome or something, but it didn’t really come into its own until there was something out there worth exorcising. We’re a weird, unlikely lot: every one of us has got his own way of doing the job—which is to catch a ghost, tangle it up in something that it can’t get free from, and then dispel it.

  For me, obviously, that “something” is music. I play some sequence of notes on my tin whistle, which for me perfectly describes—models might be a better word—the ghost as I perceive it. And somehow the music adheres to the ghost, or becomes part of it, so that when the tune stops the ghost stops, too. I’m not unique, I have to admit: I’ve
met more than a few people who use drums in the same way, and some bat-shit guy I met once in Argentina taps out a rhythm on his own cheek. Other exorcists I’ve bumped into along the way have used pictures, words, dance, even the syncopation of their own breathing. The religious ones, of course, use prayer, but it all comes down to the same thing. Most of us are in no position to get all holier-than-thou about it.

  So for a while, by the simple application of the laws of supply and demand, I was rolling in it: asking for top dollar and getting what I was asking for (in the positive rather than the ironic sense of that phrase). And if anyone ever posed the question, or if I allowed myself to wonder where the ghosts I dispelled actually went to, I had a flip answer in the breech ready to fire.

  It’s only in the Western tradition, I’d say, sounding like someone who’d actually finished out his degree, that ghosts are seen as being the actual spirits of dead people. Other cultures have them down as being something else. The Navajo think of ghosts as something that congeals out of the worst parts of your nature while the rest of you goes into the next world cleansed and fighting fit. In the Far East, they’re often treated as a sort of emotional pollutant whose appearance depends on who’s looking at them, and so on.

  Yeah, I know. Given that ghostbusting was my bread and butter, and given that I’d started with my own sister, it helped a hell of a lot if I could tell myself and anyone else who’d listen that ghosts were something different from the people they looked like. I was only talking my conscience to sleep, and while it was asleep I did some pretty bad things.

  One of them was Rafi.

  * * *

  The Charles Stanger Care Home stands just off the North Circular at Muswell Hill, on the smooth bow-bend of Coppetts Road. From the outside, and from a distance, it looks like what it used to be—a row of Victorian workmen’s cottages, turn-of-the-century poverty reinvented as tasteful nostalgia.

  Closer in, you see the bars over the windows, riveted directly into the original brickwork, and the looming bulk of the new annex protruding backward at an acute angle, dwarfing the cottages themselves. If you’re tuned in to stuff like that, maybe you also notice the magical prophylactics that they’ve put up beside the main door to discourage the dead: a sprig of myrtle for May, a necromantic circle bearing the words HOC FUGERE—flee this place—a crucifix, and an ornate blue enamel mezuzah. One way or another, you’re dumped out of the Victorian reverie into an uncomfortable present.

  I stepped in out of a night laden with a fresh freight of rain that had yet to fall onto thick carpet and the expertly canned smell of wild honeysuckle. But the Stanger has a hard time putting on a pretty face: as I pushed open the second set of doors and went on through into the lobby, I could already hear a huge commotion from somewhere further inside. Shouting voices, a woman—or maybe a man—crying, crashes of doors opening and closing. It all sat a little oddly with the soothing Vivaldi being played pianissimo over the speaker system. The nurse at the desk, Helen, was staring off down the corridor and looking like she wanted to bolt. She jerked her head around when she saw me, and I gave her a nod.

  “Mr. Castor!” she said, checking her start of alarm. “Felix—It’s him. Asmodeus. He’s—” She pointed, but seemed unable to get any more words out.

  “I heard,” I said, tersely. “I’ll go on through.”

  I broke into a trot as I went up the main corridor. This was my usual weekly visit: I still called it that, even though these days the interval between them had stretched out to a month or more. I was tied to this place by the loose elastic of ancient guilt, and every so often the pull became too insistent to ignore. But clearly tonight was going to be a departure from routine. There was something going on up ahead of me, and it was a violent, screaming kind of something. I didn’t want to be anywhere near it, but Rafi was my responsibility and this was absolutely my job to sort out.

  Rafi’s room is in the new annex. I sometimes think, with a certain bitterness, that Rafi’s room financed the new annex, because it had cost a medium-size fortune to have the walls, floor, and ceiling lined with silver. I went up past the low-security wards, hearing sobs and shouts and swearing from inside each one as I passed: every loud noise at the Stanger stirs up a host of echoes. As I rounded the corner at a jog, I saw a whole crowd of people clustered about ten feet away from Rafi’s door, which seemed to be open. I was looking for Pen, and so I saw her first: she was tussling with two nurses, a man and a woman, and cursing like a longshoreman. Looking at Pen head-on, you always get the impression that she’s taller than she is; the vividness of her green eyes and red-auburn hair somehow translates into a sense of imposing height, but in fact she stands a little over five feet tall. The two nurses weren’t actually holding on to her, they were just blocking her way to the door and moving with her whenever she tried to slide around them—a very effective human wall.

  The rest of the scene was like a bar fight taking place under local rules I wasn’t familiar with. Webb, the director of the Stanger Home, sweating and red-faced, was trying to lay hands on Pen to pull her away from the door, but at the same time he was fighting shy of doing anything that might be construed as assault—and any time he got close she just smacked him away. The resulting ballet of twittery hand gestures and involuntary cringeing was strange in the extreme. Half a dozen nurses of both sexes jostled around them, none of them relishing a possibly actionable rumble with someone who wasn’t an inmate and might have the money to sue. Two other Stanger staffers were down on the floor, apparently wrestling with each other.

  I could hear the voices now—some of them, anyway, raised above the background babble.

  “You’ll kill him! You’re going to kill him.” This was Pen, shrill and urgent.

  “—have a responsibility to the public, and to the other residents of the home, and I’m not going to be intimidated into—” Webb, partway through a sentence that had clearly been going on for a while and wasn’t going to end any time soon.

  But just as I pushed through the edges of the group, it was ended for him as a body came sailing through the open doorway and hit the corridor’s farther wall with a solid, meaty sound before crashing to the carpeted floor. He was faceup, so I was able to recognize him as Paul, another male nurse, and probably the guy I liked best on the Stanger’s staff. He was unconscious, his face flushed purple, and the hypodermic syringe that rolled from his hand was sheared off short as if by a samurai sword, clear liquid weeping from the cleanly sliced edge of the plastic ampoule.

  Everyone stared at him with varying degrees of awe and alarm, but nobody made a move to help him or assess the damage. I took the opportunity to thread my way through the onlookers, heading for the empty stretch of corridor around the open door—no-man’s-land. One of the two nurses who was blocking Pen—the male one—immediately turned his attention to me, clamping a heavy hand on my shoulder.

  “Nobody’s allowed through here,” he told me, brusquely.

  “Leave him!” Webb snapped. “That’s Castor.”

  “Oh thank God!” said Pen, seeing me for the first time. She threw herself into my arms, and I gave her a reassuring hug. At the same time I looked down and realized that the two men on the ground weren’t wrestling after all: the conscious one was hauling the unconscious one away from the door, leaving a feathery-edged smear of blood on the carpeted floor from some wound I couldn’t see.

  Pen’s eyes were glistening with tears as she turned them pleadingly on me. “Fix, don’t let them hurt him! It’s not Rafi, it’s Asmodeus. He can’t help himself!”

  “I know that. It’s okay, Pen.” I put as much conviction into those words as I could muster. “I’m here now. I’ll sort this.”

  “One of my staff is still in there,” Webb told me, cutting across Pen as she started to speak again. “We think she may be dead, but we can’t get in to find out. Ditko is . . . frenzied, in a hypermanic state. And as you can see he’s violent. I think I’m going to have to gas him.”

  Pen wailed at the word, and I wasn’t surprised. The gas Webb was talking about is a mild nerve
toxin—a tabun derivative called OPG, developed at Porton Down for military use but now illegal on any battlefield in the world. Ironically it had turned out to have therapeutic effects if you used it in tiny doses on Alzheimer’s sufferers: it blocks the breakdown of acetylcholine in the brain, slowing memory loss. Then someone found out that zombies could use it in much larger doses to do more or less the same thing—slow down the inevitable breakdown of their minds as the processes of butyric decay turned complex electrochemical gradients into rancid sludge. So now the gas was legal in psychotherapeutic contexts, and actively recommended for the dead and undead—a loophole that still had half the civil rights lawyers in the world yelling in each other’s face. The fact that it had sedative side effects just added to the confusion.