Dead Men's s Boots

2

Some apostle not noted for charm or tact once told an appreciative audience somewhere near the Sea of Galilee that the poor would always be with us. He could have said the same thing about the dead. Of course, back in Jesus’s time there were only maybe a hundred million people in the world, give or take, but even then they were heavily outnumbered by the part of the human race that was already lying in the ground. The exact ratio wobbles up and down as we ride the demographic roller coaster, but these days you could bet on twenty to one and probably not lose your money.

Twenty of them to one of us. Twenty ghosts for every man, woman and child living on this planet. But that was an empty statistic until just before the turn of the second millennium. Until then, most of the dead were content to stay where they’d been put: in the words of a million headstones, they were ‘only sleeping’. Then, not too long ago, the alarm clock went off and they all sat up.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Even now, a whole lot of people die and stay dead – trek off across the undiscovered country, or dissolve into thin air, or go and sit at God’s right hand in sinless white pyjamas, or whatever. But a whole lot more don’t: they wake up in the darkness of their own death, and they head back towards the light of the world they just left, which is the only direction they know. Most of the time they come back as a visual echo of their former selves, without substance, mass or weight, and then we call them ghosts. Sometimes they burrow back into their own dead flesh and make it move: then we call them zombies. Occasionally they invade an animal body, subdue the host mind by force majeure and redecorate the flesh and bone so it looks more like what they used to remember seeing in the mirror. Then we call them werewolves or loup-garous, and if we’re smart we keep the fuck out of their way.

But here’s the wonderful thing: for all the revenants’ many forms, there were people like me who shouldered the live man’s burden and came out fighting with the skill and the will to knock them back again. The exorcists. Probably we’d always been there too – a latent tendency in the human gene pool, as I’d said to Louise, waiting for its time to shine. Whatever it is that we do, it’s got sod-all to do with sanctity or holy writ: it’s just an innate ability, expressing itself through the other abilities that we pick up as we go through life. If you’re good with words, then you’ll bind the dead with some kind of incantation: if you’re an artist, you’ll use sketches and sigils. I met a gambler a while back – nice guy named Dennis Peace – who did it with card tricks.

And with me, it’s music.

I always had a good ear as a kid, but I never had the patience or the concentration to survive formal lessons. This was in Walton, Liverpool, you understand – and although the image of the godforsaken North that persists down here in the Smoke is a bit of a caricature, the mean streets I walked down would have been a damn sight meaner if I’d been walking down them with, say, a cello.

In the end I picked up the tin whistle because I found I could knock out a tune on it without really having to know what I was doing. Most of the little musical knowledge I’ve got I picked up along the way, either by jamming with better musicians or by not being ashamed to ask stupid questions whenever I was with someone who might be able to answer them. I learned to read music by watching a TV programme aimed at six-year-olds, painstakingly practising exercises set for me by a smiling animated treble clef.

And along the way, after discovering to my bitter chagrin that you couldn’t play tin whistle in a rock band, I stumbled across one application for music that I’d never dreamed of.

My first exorcism, though, didn’t involve any instrument except my own voice. I was six years old – just. And when my dead sister Katie came back from the grave and visited me after midnight in the bedroom we used to share back when she was alive, I sent her packing by singing the stupid taunts that kids use to make each other cry in the playground. I did it because it worked, found out much later why it worked, or rather how, and like many people I’ve met since turned a strange knack into an even stranger career.

The more I did it, the easier it got. I found that I had a sort of additional sense, more like hearing than anything else. When I was close to a ghost for long enough, I got a feeling for it – a feeling which translated readily into sound and usually into a tune, into music. When I played the tune on my whistle, the ghost would get tangled up in the sound: and when I stopped playing, the ghost would fade away on the last note like breath on a mirror. None of them ever came back, after that. Bizarre and inexplicable as it was, what I did to them was permanent.

But what seems stranger, now, as I look back on that time in my life, is that I did it all without ever once asking where the ghosts went when I played to them. Where did I send them to? Where did I send Katie to? Eternal reward, the world-soul, or just oblivion? Answers on a postcard: except that the undiscovered country has no postal service.

It took a lot to shake me out of that complacent tree. I was an exorcist for well over ten years, and in that time I must have played a thousand tunes. The world changed around me as the dead started to return in greater and greater numbers. They made the first tentative steps towards creating their own infrastructure – zombies in particular have some very specialised needs – and predictably the living responded by dividing into antagonistic camps, the Breath of Life movement calling for a recognition of dead rights, while groups like the Catholic Anathemata preached the imminent apocalypse and started stockpiling weapons for it. Meanwhile people in the ghost-busting trade started to talk about encountering other kinds of creatures that had never been either human or, strictly speaking, alive: creatures that seemed to fit the mugshots of the demons described in medieval grimoires. I even met a few myself – encounters that I still relive in dreams, and probably always will.

Two things eventually had to happen before I started to realise that tooting my whistle first and asking questions later was a flawed strategy. The first was me fucking up someone else’s life beyond all possible unfucking, and the second was having my own life saved and handed back to me by a dead woman I was trying to exorcise. These days I don’t do straight ghostbusting any more: if you look at the sign over my office door, you’ll see that it says I provide SPIRITUAL SERVICES. No, I don’t know what that means either, and it doesn’t do a hell of a lot to bring in the passing trade. But that suits me okay, in a lot of ways: the closest thing I’ve got to a philosophy is that I’ll do anything for a quiet life except work for it.

So what kind of a spiritual service was my old acquaintance John Gittings in need of? As I sidestepped out of the way of a broken-off chair leg that left a dent in the wall at the height of my crotch, I ran through some of the options – from the humane to the extreme. None of them looked good right then except slamming the door shut behind me and making a run for it.

Geist! It was like finding out that your best friend is a cannibal after he’s just offered you a chicken sandwich.

Well, maybe not quite like that: John had never been a friend, exactly. Including one memorable skirmish with a werewolf at Whipsnade Zoo, in which he’d modified our sketchy battle plan on the fly and almost gotten me eaten alive, I’d seen him maybe five times in the last three years.

It was still a shock, though, and I was having a hard time getting my head around it. Like I said, most ghosts are passive and harmless: it’s only the most disturbed souls who go geist after death, their tortured personalities subliming through some terrible metamorphosis into an unliving storm of anger and frustration.

But John Gittings? In the words of Denis Healey, it was like being savaged by a dead sheep.

I turned to Carla, realising what she’d been going through; why she’d asked me to come home with her, and what she’d tried and failed to say as we were driving back here.

I put a hand on her arm and gave her a firm push towards the door, seeing in her eyes that she was about to start crying again, and afraid that this time she might not be able to stop.

‘Wait in the car,’ I said.

She stared up at me, frightened and hopeful in about equal amounts – and some of what she was scared of was the same as what she was hoping for. ‘What are you going to do?’ she demanded.

‘What you asked me to do. Give him some peace.’

‘You won’t-?’

‘Exorcise him? Send him away for ever? No, Carla. I won’t. I promise. Wait in the car. It shouldn’t take longer than twenty minutes.’

She took one last look past me into the room, where an invisible entity was trailing some extension of itself through the broken glass on the carpet, making it bristle and shift. Then she nodded and backed out through the door, staring all the time, as if turning her back would have felt like a betrayal. I closed the door gently behind her, then knelt down and unshipped my whistle.

I keep it in a pocket I’d sewn into my coat myself, high up on the left-hand side. A paletot is handy like that – it’s so voluminous that you can carry a drawerful of cutlery, a samovar and a sub-machine gun around with you and it won’t even spoil the line. I generally just keep the whistle, a silver dagger, an antique goblet I’ve never yet had occasion to use and a bottle of whatever booze I’m currently flirting with.

I blew a random sequence of notes to tune it in – except that even then, even on this first approach, it wasn’t quite random. There was an element of echolocation in it: of throwing out sounds to see how they’d come back to me again – to see which the ghost absorbed and which bounced off and rolled away into the ether. These are just metaphors, you understand: but everything I do is a kind of metaphor. You choose the tools that work, or maybe they choose you.

And sometimes it comes hard and slow, sometimes quick and easy. This ghost was so big, so angry that the sense of it filled the room: notes ran from my gut up into my chest and lungs, through the bore of the whistle past my flickering fingers and out into the air without me even needing to think about it. They built like a wave, and broke like a wave, and the thing that had been John Gittings met them in full flood.

For a handful of moments the force of that meeting threw me out: I faltered in the middle of a phrase, pieced it out awkward and staccato, then found the flow again and began the laborious crescendo for a second time.

This was the binding: the systolic beat, usually and inexorably followed by the diastole, which is the banishing. But not this time. By this point in my life I’d had plenty of experience of a different kind of tune, with a different, more insidious purpose. I let a new phrase sneak in now, on a minor key – something I’d designed for my best friend Rafi, after I’d lost the plot and let one of the most powerful demons in Hell weld itself to his spirit. What I was playing now was something few exorcists ever bother with, because for most of them it doesn’t really pay its way in the standard repertoire.

This was a lullaby.

Gradually I let the second phrase ride in over the first, run through it and colonise it. Then I played the tune out until there was nothing left of it except three descending notes, each held for as long as my breath lasted.

The silence afterwards was like a roomful of applause. Nothing moved in the pillaged room. The ghost was still there, but the oppressive weight of it had lifted and faded. The sense I was left with was a dull, distant echo, not the roaring dissonance I’d walked in on.

I went out and down the stairs, back to the road. Carla was leaning against the car, smoking a cigarette. The dog-end of another lay stubbed out between her feet. She stared at me – a wordless question.

‘He’s fine,’ I said, for want of any halfway-adequate way of putting it. ‘I sent him to sleep, the same way I do Asmodeus when he’s getting too frisky. Carla, how long has this been happening?’

She shook her head, looked away. ‘Since the day John died, Fix. Six days ago. It was almost immediate. It started maybe two or three minutes after I heard the shot.’

I exhaled heavily. ‘Jesus!’

‘It was how I knew he was dead. He’d locked himself in the bathroom, and I couldn’t get in. I was hammering on the door, shouting his name. And then something- I can’t describe it. Something went down the stairs, behind me. I could hear each footstep. The boards creaking, all the way down, as though – whatever it was, it was a massive weight. And I knew. I thought “That’s John. That’s my husband, going away from me. He’s dead.” Only he didn’t go away. He stayed. He stayed and—’

Seeing the trembling start in her shoulders, I looked at the ground. ‘You should have called-’ I began. Called who? Me? That was a hypocritical bridge too far, while I was standing there longing to be out of this. ‘One of us,’ I went on.

‘I didn’t know what to say.’ Carla’s voice was thick and choked. ‘Fix, what am I going to do? I can’t live like this.’

‘You don’t have to. Have you got somewhere else to stay?’

She took a step back from me as though I’d pushed her, and her eyes as she looked up at me registered shock and hurt.

‘Leave him alone? How can I do that to him?’

I threw out my arms, groping for words. ‘Carla, you said yourself that John wasn’t himself before he died. That you were scared he was losing his mind. I think that’s why this is happening. It’s best if you think of John as the man you used to know, and that thing in there as—’

‘No. No, Fix.’ She raised her arms defensively, as if I’d just made an indecent proposal. ‘It’s still him. Even if he doesn’t know that himself, that’s all that’s left of him. I’m not going to just lock the doors and run and hide. I’m staying here with him, whatever happens.’

I stared into Carla’s eyes. She meant it: in spades and with no room for argument.

‘Okay,’ I said at last, cursing myself for not having the balls to just shake hands and walk away. You’ve got to have the courage of your lack of commitment: otherwise you just keep getting dragged into the shit that other people leave in their wake. But the ghost of a one-night stand that had never happened was clouding my judgement. ‘Coffee-maker still work?’

It took a while to get the room to rights. I did the heavy lifting and Carla went around behind me, putting the few intact ornaments back where they belonged, sweeping up the broken glass, throwing out what couldn’t be mended or lived with. After we’d finished, the room still looked like a hurricane had been through, but it looked like it had stayed for tea and genteel conversation. You could tell that an effort had been made, anyway: it was the best we could do with the raw materials.

The kitchen was completely unscathed, though, which was a huge relief. I eyed the knife rack and wondered what it would have been like to meet the contents of that as I walked through the door. Memorable, anyway: like something out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon, but without the perky soundtrack.

‘Does he mainly stay in the living room?’ I asked Carla as she heaped coffee into the Cona machine. She was scraping the bottom of the packet. When she’d finished I took the empty packet from her and dumped it in the bin. Along the way I accidentally kicked over a red plastic bowl on the floor: dry pet food spilled out onto the tiles.

‘Living room. Stairwell. Bathroom,’ she said, tightly. It was obvious that there was a whole catalogue of horrors behind that terse list. ‘I’m safe in the bedroom, and the hall outside the bedroom, and here.’ She switched the machine on, turned to face me, her face strained and earnest. ‘I said that wrong. Safe. He’s never hurt me. He throws things around the room, but nothing’s ever hit me. He’s still my John, Fix. He’s scared, and because he’s scared he’s angry – but he’d never dream of harming me.’

I mulled that over and found nothing to say to it. The stuff I’d dodged on the doormat had certainly come a bit too close to comfort. But then, John knew what I was, and what I could do to him: he had good reason to want me to keep my distance. And if Carla had been living with this for six days and not taken so much as a scratch, it was hard to argue with her conclusions. Geists had been known to topple wardrobes on people’s heads and push them out of windows: clearly what was left of John Gittings was pulling its punches – at least as far as his widow was concerned.

I scooped the pet food back into the bowl and used it to change the subject. ‘I thought you hated animals,’ I said.

‘Stray cat,’ Carla muttered, distracted. She tapped the Cona machine with a fingernail as it started to make slupslup-slup noises. ‘It came in through the window one day, and John fed it some tuna. Then it wouldn’t stop coming. I asked him not to encourage it but he wouldn’t listen. Haven’t seen it in a few days, though. Maybe it’s true that they know when someone doesn’t like them.’

Over coffee, she came back to the question of options.

‘I’m going to have to let them do it, aren’t I?’ she asked me glumly, staring at the cream swirling on the surface of her drink. ‘Dig him up again, and burn him?’

I thought about that. ‘If the will’s as specific as you say it is . . . Your only chance would be to prove that John wasn’t in his right mind when he wrote it.’ I hesitated at that point, thinking about where I was going to be the following morning, and what a tangled thicket the whole question of sanity now was. In your right mind? Sure. But sometimes it all depended on who was in there with you.

‘How do you prove something like that?’ Carla asked, echoing my thoughts.

I took a swig of my coffee. I’d topped up both of the mugs heavily with what was left of the brandy, and it had a very pleasant afterburn. But the bitterness was there too, and I let it seep through me. ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Usually it comes down to expert opinions. In my experience you can find an expert who’s willing to say more or less anything, but it costs money. And since John wasn’t getting any kind of medical help before his death, it’ll be harder to make something like that stick.’ I paused for a few moments and raised the next point very tentatively. ‘How important is it to you that he stays where he is?’

Carla sighed and made a vague, helpless gesture. ‘I thought it was what he wanted,’ she said, her voice a throaty murmur. ‘Underneath it all, I thought – this thing and this thing and this thing, that’s all the disease. And these other things, they’re still him. They’re what’s real. I couldn’t believe he didn’t still want to lie next to Hailey, because he’d told me so many times-’ She faltered and glanced off in the direction of the pillaged living room. ‘But now that there’s all this, I don’t know. Maybe I got it wrong, Fix. And maybe that’s why he’s so angry with me.’

I’d been thinking the same thing, but I was relieved she’d got that far by herself. ‘Yeah,’ I allowed. ‘That’s a possibility. When did he change his mind, exactly – about being buried, I mean?’

‘I told you. End of last year. Before Christmas, sometime. I don’t remember exactly.’

‘Did he ever talk it over with you? Give you any reasons?’

She shook her head. ‘Fix-’ she said, and then there was a long pause. I saw the outline of what was coming, which helped: I kept my face deadpan and waited. ‘I don’t think I can bring myself to talk to that man. Todd. I don’t think I can do it without screaming at him.’

‘Well, with lawyers you always want to be sure your shots are up to date.’

Another pause. I guess Carla was hoping I’d take the hint without being asked: it can’t be easy to beg favours from your dead husband’s friends. But I was feeling like my humanitarian impulses had led me far enough astray today already. I drank off what was left of my coffee, put down the mug and stood.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘try to tell yourself that he’s only doing his job. It’s the truth, more or less. Thanks for the coffee, Carla. If you change your mind, call Pen. She’s got a room free and she’d love the company.’

Carla nodded, with only the very faintest sign of hurt in her eyes. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ she said, sabotaging my got-to-be-moving-along routine when it was just getting into second gear. Since I didn’t have any other choice, I stopped and waited while she got up from the table and started to rummage through the drawers of the big Welsh dresser behind her. At last she found what she was looking for and brought it back to the table.

What she had in her hands was an antique half-hunter watch, Savonnette style, with a silver case and a silver chain, tarnished but still very beautiful. There was delicate filigree work on the case, and the silver bar that was meant to attach the watch to a waistcoat was not a bar at all but a tiny figure of the crucified Christ, his outstretched arms providing the necessary perpendicular line. It was an amazing piece of work: pair-cased, too, I discovered, as I automatically opened the front and discovered the actual watch nestling inside its bivalved shell. It had to be two hundred years old, and it had to be worth a small fortune.

I looked at Carla. ‘I can’t take this,’ I said.

‘It belonged to his dad, and he wanted you to have it,’ she answered, in a tone that brooked no argument. ‘It was one of the last things he said to me before – when he was still thinking straight. “If anything happens to me, give this to Fix.” So it’s not up to me, or you. It’s yours.’

I put it into one of the inside pockets of the paletot, bowing to the inevitable. ‘Thanks,’ I said lamely. ‘I’ll – well, I’ll think of John every time I look at it.’ Unpalatable though that prospect was right now.

‘Thanks for driving me home,’ Carla said.

‘It was my pleasure.’

And then the twist of the knife. ‘Fix, I hate to do this. You’ve been so kind already. But if John’s going to be dug up and then cremated, I’ve got to know where and when. And I hate that man so much. If it’s not too much to ask—’

And there it was. No good deed goes unpunished. Come to think of it, probably most of the people you see lying rolled and robbed on the side of the road are good Samaritans who stopped like idiots because they saw someone wringing their hands and looking helpless.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Sure. I can check the details with him. Let you know.’ It was the minimum commitment that the situation seemed to call for. I tried not to sound too grudging as I gave it.

‘Oh, Fix. I’d be so grateful. You’re a sweet man. Thank you.’

She kissed me on the cheek and we hugged again, even more awkwardly than before.

As she walked me back through the living room I paused briefly, unfocused my eyes and strained my senses for the ghost. It was still there, a faint, unmoving presence like a stain on the air. Dormant. Dreaming.

‘The music should keep John quiet for a couple of days at least,’ I told Carla. ‘After that – well, see how you go. If he’s unhappy because you ignored his last request, then maybe after Todd’s done what he needs to do—’

‘Why does Pen have a room free?’ Carla demanded, derailing my thoughts.

‘Uh – because we had a bit of a falling out,’ I admitted.

‘You two? What could make you two row with each other?’

‘Rafi,’ I said, and she let the subject drop. Everybody always does. Conversationally, that one word is the ace of trumps.