Vicious Circle Page 33

  She hesitated. Pen hates to judge anyone harshly. I could see her fighting against her instincts, and abruptly I felt sick with myself for trying to twist her arm.

  “It’s okay,” I said, hefting that negligible weight in my arms again. “I’ll take her someplace else.”

  But I was pissing in the wind. Back in the car again, driving into the center of town, I racked my brains for a somewhere else that would serve. Juliet was slumped across the backseat, exuding even in her unconscious state a sweet, rank smell that was trying to insinuate itself between my hindbrain and the more refined areas of gray matter, filling my mind with indelible, carnal imagery. Asleep or awake, she was still a venus flytrap. There was nowhere where she’d be safe.

  My brain more or less on automatic as I fought against that smell and against myself, I’d swung west again: not toward Acton but into Paddington. What I had to do there shouldn’t take too long; maybe if I just covered Juliet with my coat, she’d go unnoticed until I got back. I didn’t have too much choice, anyway. There were so many ticking clocks around, it was getting hard to hear yourself think. The thing in St. Michael’s Church was getting stronger; the parishioners were still out there in the night with heads full of poisonous shit; Basquiat was sorting through the red tape so she could arrest me for murder; and the Anathemata had given me my final warning. The only way out of the box canyon was to keep moving forward as the walls closed in on both sides. Find Dennis Peace, find Abbie Torrington’s ghost, and maybe it would all fall into place. Maybe. Otherwise we were all going to hell in an overcrowded handbasket.

  I parked as close as I could to Lancaster Gate station without hitting a double yellow; I didn’t want the car drawing any attention while I was gone, so it made sense to stay the right side of legal. I walked the rest of the way to Praed Street, and in through the ever-open gates of what used to be the genito-urinary clinic—the pox shop. For the past seven years, though, it had been given over to a more esoteric form of medicine: metamorphic ontology.

  Jenna-Jane Mulbridge had coined the term, and then given it currency by hammering on the same drum in about two dozen monographs and three full-length studies—one on the were, one on zombies, and one on ghosts pure and simple. In the end she created the climate she needed in which to thrive, forcing university hospitals up and down the country to open their minds to a set of phenomena that hadn’t seemed to be medical at all until she got her hands on them. After all, how can you cure the dead?

  How can you cure the dead? Jenna-Jane echoed back. Well, you can’t, of course. But if a dead soul is possessing a living host, then it becomes a condition that can be observed and treated. And if a dead soul returns to its own flesh, makes it move again and speak again and think again, then what definition of death are you using and how are you going to make it stick?

  As careerist blitzkriegs go, it had paid off in spades. Most of the big hospitals had opened up MO units, and the biggest and best, at Praed Street, went to Jenna-Jane by right of conquest. She knew what to do with it, too. She pulled in all the London exorcists as consultants right from the start, got them to teach her everything they knew, then took it apart and put it together again with such ruthless, incisive intelligence that pretty soon it was us who were learning from her. That was an incredible time: a time when the baseline concepts of a new branch of science were being laid down, at a velocity that prevented anyone from questioning the route map or even from jumping down safely once it got moving.

  Most of us started to have doubts about J.J. in the first year, but we stayed on board for quite a while after that. It still seemed like we were doing useful work, even if we were doing it for a self-obsessed, vainglorious fascist. Then, one by one, we began to do the moral sums and see how far they were from adding up. Whether it was for the advancement of science or just for the advancement of Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, some of the things that were being done at Praed Street fell well into the realms of the cruel and unusual, and awoke the scruples of even the most hard-bitten and determinedly unimaginative ghost-hunters.

  Rosie Crucis was the straw that crippled my personal camel. It had sounded harmless enough at first. Why were all the risen dead recent? Jenna-Jane had asked. Her own researches had yielded no ghosts whose date of death was earlier than 1935. Testimony from other exorcists could push that back at most another twenty years, to the middle year of the First World War. What of the millions upon millions of ghosts from ages past, who ought to fill the streets of London like an invisible tide?

  Once you get to asking questions like that, you start to feel like you need at least half an answer before you’ll get a decent night’s sleep again. And for Jenna-Jane, it was always a case of learning by doing. She got about a dozen of us together: me, Elaine Vincent, Nemo Praxides, and some other big names flown in from Edinburgh, Paris, Locarno, Christ knows where. She put us all together in a room with nothing except twelve chairs and a table on top of which there was a big cardboard box. When everyone had arrived, she locked the doors and opened the box.

  My best guess was a severed head, but it turned out to be a lot less dramatic than that. The box contained a lot of things that were very old without being particularly beautiful: an embroidered fan, on which the colors had bleached out with age to shades of fawn and gray; a handwritten prayer book; a tinted glass bottle that must once have contained perfume; a kerchief with the letter “A” picked out in overelaborate needlepoint; a single page from a letter, without greeting or subscript.

  “See what you can do,” Jenna-Jane said. And we went to work.

  Praxides worked by going into a trance state, so he immediately closed his eyes and dropped off the map. Elaine Vincent used automatic writing: she took out her sketchbook and started to scribble. I took out my whistle; some other guy started to tap the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other, hitting out a faint, complex rhythm. We all did what we normally did when we wanted to raise and bind a ghost.

  And there was a ghost there, all right, but there was something odd about how it felt. The trace was both strong and impossibly faint at the same time. Like walking past a curry house and getting a faint whiff of fresh cardamom: you know that if you open the door your senses will be overwhelmed, and that it’s only the pungency of the raw spice that’s letting it reach you at all through double-skin brickwork and the olfactory static of the street.

  We worked on it for a couple of hours, our professional pride very much on the line. At first we couldn’t get it into focus, but then we brainstormed some tricks that we’d never have been able to try if we’d been working separately. The guy with the happy-clappy fingers worked up a counterpoint to my tune, and Elaine drew the patterns of sound that we were creating. We fed in and out of each other’s talents, creating a cat’s cradle of urgent, bullying concentration that opened out from the room in directions we didn’t even have concepts for, let alone names.

  It worked, too. The ghost rose sluggishly, aimlessly toward us, like a balloon whose string some kid wandering down in Hades had accidentally let slip. We trapped her, turned her round, nailed her down, and spread her out between us like a butterfly on a board of charged air.

  She couldn’t talk, at first: she learned that later. She’d been dead for so long, sleeping for so long in the gutted house of her own bones, she’d forgotten who she was. She mouthed at us, meaninglessly, terrified and angry in about equal parts. She pulled away, tightening the strings of our will around her so that every movement just tangled her up more irrevocably.

  She was so tiny. A grown woman—a mature woman, scarred by disease and more generally by life itself—the size of a ten-year-old girl. It’s ludicrous, I know. It was obvious already from the trigger materials J.J. had provided that we’d be dealing with a very old soul. But somehow actually seeing her brought me up against that harder and more painfully than I’d been expecting. I’m not big on religion, and never heard of a god whose company I’d be able to stomach for more than the first half of heaven’s cocktail hour, but all the same this felt like blas
phemy. Because she was so small and so frail, it also felt very much like torturing a child.

  But I couldn’t just stop playing. Stopping dead in the middle of a tune is like stepping out of a car that’s moving at seventy: a wide range of unpleasant consequences can be taken as a given. So I wound down as smoothly as I could, and everyone else was doing the same thing: landing the mad, terrified, struggling fish into which we’d all dug our separate, several hooks.

  Jenna-Jane was ecstatic. She hadn’t expected to get such spectacular results on the first try. Before we could sort out how we felt or discuss what we’d just done, she moved in with a second team: not exorcists but psychics and sensitives trawled up just as eclectically and nonjudgmentally as our lot had been. We were elbowed out, because our part of the job was done.

  I bailed out of the whole Praed Street project soon after that, and cold-shouldered J.J. when she tried to tempt me back for a repeat performance. Reading between the lines, a lot of the other exorcists who’d been there that day had the same uneasy feelings of guilt and shame afterward. She’d never been able to get that much raw talent together in the same room again, and Rosie Crucis remained a one-off.

  The name was J.J.’s private joke, and it played in some way off the real identity of the ghost we’d summoned—while at the same time preventing that identity from being revealed by a casual comment. That was important, because—to stick with the fishing metaphor—now that Rosie had been landed, J.J. had no intention of throwing her back.

  The plan was to allow—or maybe induce—Rosie to possess one of the sensitives, so that her ghost would remain anchored in the living world. J.J. had laid on as expansive a buffet of psychics as she could manage: both genders, every age and race, every school and belief from classical spiritualist to lunatic-fringe millenarian to ascetic Swedenborgian and foam-flecked Blavatskian.

  Rosie confounded expectation and went for J.J. herself—lived (for want of a better word) inside her for twenty days and twenty-one nights, by which time J.J. was half-dead from migraine and psychosomatic muscular aches. It was a sweet revenge, if that was what it was, but Rosie didn’t know back then who she had to thank for her much-delayed and unexpected resurrection, so it was probably coincidence.

  In any case, on the twenty-first day, Rosie allowed herself to be decanted into a young man from Cambridge named Donnie Collett, and that was the start of a running-on-the-spot relay race that still hasn’t ended. Volunteers from MO units up and down the country, as well as from philosophy and theology courses at universities who still haven’t sussed J.J. out for what she is, sign up for stints of up to a week at a time, channeling Rosie and providing her a fleshly receptacle so that the Praed Street ontologists can continue to push the envelope when it comes to our knowledge of life and death and the points where they hold hands across the wall.

  And then there’s an entirely different support group: the people who come in to talk to Rosie and keep her mind engaged. Being dead, she can’t sleep. The person who’s hosting her sleeps, and typically wakes up feeling as refreshed and energized as if they’ve had a week at a health spa. Rosie herself needs more or less constant mental stimulation; and since J.J. has categorically refused to allow her out of the unit, that stimulation all has to be provided on-site. She watches a lot of DVDs (there’s an embargo on live TV), reads a lot of books, and talks endlessly to anyone who’ll listen—with a digital recorder on permanent record in the background.

  I’ve been part of that support group, off and on, for a good few years now. Maybe I felt like I needed to apologize for my part in bringing her back up from the dark without asking first, but I also enjoyed her company, and sometimes she made a useful sounding board. Whoever she’d been in life (she claimed not to remember) she’d had a mind like a straight-edge razor. Death had done nothing except rot away the sheath.

  But I’d always timed my visits for when Jenna-Jane was away from the unit on one of her lecture tours, or scaring up funds from charities with loosely worded charters. Tonight, I knew from my moles on the inside, she was on-site; so tonight the only way to get to Rosie was to go through J.J.

  And the first problem was getting to see her. The place was looking more like a fortress than ever, with an actual guard post now on the main doors where I had to state my business and then wait for authorization to come down from on high. Then as I walked along the hallways, with their familiar smell of long-departed urine, I noticed that there were alarm buttons labeled with short alphanumeric strings. A notice alongside each one reminded all passers-by that a failure to observe containment protocols would result in immediate dismissal, and that in the event of a containment breach floating security staff should converge on the site where the alarm was given while all other personnel went directly to their assigned assembly points. It all sounded like the worst of my memories of holidays at Butlins. Even the razor wire was kind of in keeping.

  Jenna-Jane was in the smaller of her two offices—the one that overlooked the open-plan work area of the unit the way a signalman’s hut overlooks the engine sidings.

  As I walked up here, I’d been mulling over how to phrase my request. Not too long ago, I’d just have been able to drop in on Rosie and say hi without any palaver: but then J.J. had caught one of the visitors carrying out messages for Rosie, and she’d tightened up the whole operation by a couple of notches. She had a lot of other prize-winning acts in her freak show now, but Rosie was the first and still the jewel in the crown: a ghost still extant on earth after more than five hundred years. So J.J. watched over all of Rosie’s inputs and outputs with a jealous eye that, like Rosie’s, never closed.

  I knocked on the door, and J.J. looked up from a thick sheaf of papers that she was working through. She gave me a smile—a dazzling, meaningless smile that said she was beside herself with delight to see me. It said that, but it lied through its all too visible teeth.

  “Felix,” she said warmly, and she stood up and came around the desk. I tried to avoid the pressing of flesh but she wasn’t having any of that. She kissed me on the right cheek, and then on the left for good measure, continental style. That meant I got a momentary glimpse through my sixth sense of the snake pit of her mind. It was something I could really have done without right then.

  Someone had told me once that her real name was Müller rather than Mulbridge and that she’d been born in the ruins of Essen while the Third Reich was still thrashing itself to pieces in its death throes. If that was true, she had the best imitation of a tweedily harmless, upper-middle-drawer-decayed-minor-aristocracy-but-let’s-not-talk-about-it English accent I’d ever heard. Like most things about Jenna-Jane, it was a feint that was designed to bring you in close enough for knife work.

  She hadn’t changed by a micrometer: still petite, and neat, and agelessly sweet. She had to be about sixty now, but her body seemed to have decided that midforties was a good look for her, and it had held on to it. Her hair was gray, but then it always had been: and on her it seemed less a sign of age than what you see when you scrape the paint off the side of a battleship. And like a battleship, her surface was bland and smooth and impenetrable. She affected a surgical white coat, but underneath it I saw jeans and a plaid shirt. J.J. knew how to stand on ceremony when there was something to be gained from it: the rest of the time she was just good plain folks.

  “You never come to see us anymore,” she went on, gently reproachful. “It must be two years!”

  She sat me down, in a way that was impossible to resist, and then went and sat back down again herself on the other side of the desk. She handled nuance like a ninja: the greeting had been friendly and personal, but once I was sitting down this was a formal visit, too, and she could appeal to the book—regretfully, full of apologies—whenever she had to.

  “I’ve dropped in a few times,” I said, “but you’re never around.”

  She nodded, still smiling. “Yes, I heard. I was beginning to wonder if you were avoiding me on purpose. But here you are.”

  Yeah. Here I was.

  “So how’s
it all going?” I asked, on the grounds that “I need to talk to Rosie, so hello and good-bye” might have seemed a little on the abrupt side.

  Jenna-Jane shrugged modestly. “The unit’s still growing,” she said. “We’ve got a fine faculty now. A lot of genuine highfliers who’ve graduated from the European schools and come here to find out how it’s really done. I don’t think you’d recognize the names, because you’ve never been all that interested in the literature, but believe me when I say there are university proctors in Germany and America who spit when they hear my name.”

  “I believe you, J.J.,” I assured her, meaning it.

  She made a sour face.