Vicious Circle

2

I can drive, when I have to, but I don’t own a car. In London, owning a car doesn’t seem to help all that much, unless you want somewhere to sit and soak up the sun while you’re lazing on the M25. So it was going to take a long haul on the Underground to get me to where I was going – into town on one branch of the Northern Line, back out again on the other one.

It was the twilight zone between Saturday afternoon and Saturday night: the football crowds had already faded away like fairy gold, and it was too early yet for the clubbers and the theatregoers. I was able to sit for most of the way, even if the carriage did have a fugitive whiff of stale fat from someone’s illicitly consumed Big Mac.

The guy next to me was reading the Guardian, so I read it too in staccato glimpses over his shoulder as he turned the pages. The Tories were about to slice and dice their latest leader, which has always been my favourite blood sport; the Home Secretary was denying some spectacular abuse of office while refusing to relax an injunction that would have allowed the news media to describe exactly what it was; and the Post-Mortem Rights Bill was about to come back to the Commons for what was expected to be an eventful third reading.

That wasn’t what they were calling it, of course. I think the actual title of the proposed Act of Parliament was the Redefinition of Legal Status Extraordinary Powers Act – but the tabloids had resorted to various forms of shorthand, and Post-Mortem Rights was the one that had stuck. Personally, I tended to think of it as the Alive Until Proven Dead Act.

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 was 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 any more, and that people who refused to take the hint when their heart had stopped beating and their perishable parts were six feet under still had 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 A.M. 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 neighbours’ 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 afterwards seemed to vary according to who 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 behaviour 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 light bulb.

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: 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 humour so atrophied that he still thought the Goons were 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 towards 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 got out on 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 medieval 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 added 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 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 Ditko.

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 annexe protruding backwards 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 mezzuzah. 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 a pretty face on: 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 tannoy 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.

‘Mister 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 annexe. I sometimes think, with a certain bitterness, that Rafi’s room financed the new annexe, because it had cost a medium-sized 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 only 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 cringing 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, part-way 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 further wall with a solid, meaty sound before crashing to the carpeted floor. He was face up, so I was able to recognise 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 realised 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 hyper-manic 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 on Alzheimer’s sufferers if you used it in tiny doses: 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 faces. The fact that it had sedative side effects just added to the confusion.

Using it on Rafi was a spiky proposition in any case, though. He was no zombie: just an ordinary living man with a tenacious passenger. And if Asmodeus was in the ascendant, it would take a big hit even to slow him down, which would mean that the side effects would be that much more painful and extreme. Some of them might even be permanent.

‘Let me go in first,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe I can calm him down with some music.’

Webb huffed and puffed, but unlike the big bad wolf he was actually very keen to avoid having the house blown down. He was looking for a way out of this that caused the minimum damage to life and property – especially property – and he had enough sense to see that I was probably it. After all, this wasn’t the first time Rafi had played up: I’d proved my usefulness many times before this. ‘I’m not legally responsible for you,’ he reminded me. ‘You signed a waiver, and I’ve still got it on file. You go in there on your own recognisance, and if you’re hurt—’

‘You’ll deny all knowledge of my activities,’ I finished, nodding. ‘And you won’t put a penny in the collection box. Let’s just take that shit as read, shall we?’

I turned my back on him and took a step towards Rafi’s cell.

‘I’m coming with you,’ Pen yelled, and she pushed her way between the two nurses, who weren’t sure any more what their brief was. I put up my hand to block her. ‘Better not, Pen,’ I muttered. ‘Asmodeus needs me alive, and that’s the only thing I’ve got going for me here. Like you said, it’s not Rafi. He won’t hold back when he sees you: he may even take a smack at you out of pure spite.’

She hesitated, still not convinced. I left her there and went forward, hoping she’d see sense: there was really no time to argue about it while I could see Webb plutzing and quivering his way towards ordering a gas attack. I gave the door a shave-and-a-haircut knock as I went through. It would probably have been safer to take a peek round the edge of the doorway first, but I was going to have to go in anyway: this way I went in with a certain amount of panache, even if I came out again on my arse with my head flying separately.

Stepping over the threshold meant going from carpeted floor to naked metal: an amalgam of steel and silver in the ratio of ten parts to one. It’s there behind the plasterboard of the walls, too, shining out in a few places where Rafi has punched his fist through in a temper. My feet boomed hollowly on the metal plate, announcing my arrival even more emphatically than the knock. But Rafi didn’t seem to notice me in any case: he was on the far side of the bare cell, kicking savagely at a sprawled form on the floor. Not the nurse, thank God: she was lying motionless just inside the door, a spidery trickle of blood on her forehead and her eyes closed. What Rafi was destroying was the meds trolley. Pills in a hundred party colours were strewn all over the floor and they crunched underfoot as I shifted my ground.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Pen was kneeling down to check the nurse’s pulse. I took my tin whistle out of my pocket and put it to my lips, but before I could play a note Rafi threw back his head and howled in what sounded like agony. He threw up his hands and pressed both clenched fists to his forehead, jerking spasmodically from side to side. Then, with a deep-throated groan, he drew his hands down his face from hairline to chin, digging his nails in deep so that he drew blood from eight parallel gashes.

I was going to have to put a spanner in this. I felt for the stops and blew an opening chord, as low as I could. Since Rafi had been completely ignoring me up to then, I was hoping to get a certain momentum going before he realised I was there: but at the first sound of the whistle he spun to face me. I hiccupped into unintended silence. Rafi’s pale, ascetically handsome face was strained, his thick black hair hanging in sweat-soaked ringlets: his eyes – pupils, whites and all – were a black so intense they seemed to suck all the light out of the room. I’d seen the effect before, but somehow this was worse than all the other times. It was as though the blackness was brimming there, behind Rafi’s eyes, ready to spill out and drown me.

‘CASTOR!’ he boomed, in a voice that was louder and harsher than a human throat should have been able to make: a voice like the shrieking intake of a jet engine. For a moment another face moved under his, almost surfacing through skull and muscle and red, stretched skin. ‘TOO SWEET! TOO FUCKING SWEET!’

If he hadn’t tensed before he jumped, that might have been the last sound I ever heard. As it was, I just about had time to drop down and to the side, out of the reach of his clutching fingers. At the same time I blew a screaming, modulated discord that I’d used before on Rafi, to good and usually immediate effect.

This time I might as well have been playing ‘God Save the Queen’ on my armpit. He turned in the air like a cat and caught me a glancing blow on the side of the head with his closed fist. There was a split-second where my visual field shifted into juddering black and white: the whistle flew out of my hand and clattered to the floor a long way away. Then Rafi had his feet back under him and he was advancing on me at a brisk walk, grinning a Cheshire-cat grin. Pen pressed herself against the wall, out of sight and out of mind, but she was watching everything that happened: looking for a chance to get that nurse out of the line of fire. Great plan: better than mine, anyway. Without my whistle, I was going to have my work cut out even staying alive here.

I threw a punch, which Rafi swatted aside without breaking stride. His response was devastating – his open hands, fingers as rigid as knitting needles, striking out so fast I heard the whiff of displaced air before I felt the agonising impact. I staggered backwards, trying to keep up some kind of a guard, but it was like being in front of a horizontal avalanche. I went sprawling back out into the corridor with Rafi on top of me, his hands now locking around my throat.

I was staring directly into those liquid black eyes, and I saw no mercy there. I broke his grip by punching outwards against his wrists, but that didn’t make as much difference as I was hoping for. Rafi strobed, his limbs seeming to be in too many places at once, and even though I’d knocked his hands away to left and right his grip on my throat didn’t slacken. I fought to suck in a breath: if I could breathe I could whistle, even without mechanical aids, but there was nothing doing. He squeezed tighter, and darkness bubbled up inside my head to match the two dark wells I was staring into.

Over Rafi’s shoulder I saw Pen running towards me. She got a hold on Rafi’s right arm, trying to dislodge it, but it slid through her hands somehow and dopplered, seeming once again to be in a lot of places at the same time. He shrugged and stiffened, his head snapping backwards and thumping hard into her chest so that she tumbled backwards. Then he got on with the serious business of throttling me.

I was probably two seconds or so from passing out, after which all bets would have been cancelled and, no doubt, so would I. But suddenly there was a bigger, stockier shape looming up behind Rafi, and a muscular black arm locked around his neck. It was Paul. He looked strained and pale, which was scarcely surprising, but his movements were methodical: he used his greater weight and leverage to bend Rafi backwards until his grip started to slacken on my throat. Rafi hissed voicelessly and threw up his hands to tear Paul’s grip free.

Weak and dazed as I was, I forced myself to move, because it didn’t look as though I’d be getting a second chance. I rolled hard, shifting my weight to throw Rafi further off his centre of gravity, and at the same time I punched him with as much force as I could on the point of the jaw. Caught off balance, he slid sideways out of Paul’s hands and we both scrambled clear.

I turned around with my arms up, ready to defend myself against a renewed attack, but whatever was happening to Rafi now had made him forget all about me. He was still lying on the ground where he’d fallen, and another ululating howl of pain and desolation was pouring without pause out of his gaping mouth. It was as if my punch hadn’t registered with him at all: whatever was hurting him, I could see it had nothing to do with me.

Paul knelt down beside Rafi and felt his pulse. He rolled Rafi’s eyelids back and inspected his eyes, then extended the examination to gums and teeth – which was a risk I wouldn’t have taken myself. Rafi kept on howling, directly into Paul’s face: he seemed to have forgotten our existence.

Two more male nurses loomed over us, looking down at Rafi as if they were wondering where it might be safe to take a hold of him. Paul glanced up, saw them, and pointed into the cell. ‘Karen,’ he shouted over Rafi’s inhuman keening. ‘She’s still inside. Get her out of there.’ They snapped to attention like soldiers, turned around and went into the cell.

From where I was kneeling I had a good view through the doorway. I saw the two men kneel beside the fallen nurse, one of them touching a hand to her forehead. Then I saw her move, flinching away from the touch. She was hurt, maybe badly hurt, but she wasn’t dead. Caught between relief and delayed shock, I felt a sickly floating sensation rise inside me, filling me like sour gas: I doubled over and threw up copiously. It was a few moments before I could take notice of my surroundings again.

When I did, I realised that Rafi’s siren-sharp wail had died away into abrupt silence. Pen had him cradled in her arms, and Paul was kneeling beside her, his forefinger on Rafi’s bare wrist again and an abstracted frown on his face.

Doctor Webb approached us with a certain caution, eyeing the mess I’d just made on the carpet. Then his gaze traversed to Rafi whose head was in Pen’s lap as she murmured reassurances to him and smoothed his sweat-slicked hair off his forehead. Rafi seemed to be asleep now – a profound, exhausted sleep, his chest rising and falling slowly with his long, deep breaths. Still, Webb’s eyes kept flicking back to him continually as he snapped out orders to his staff to start putting the place back together.

I stood up, my legs shaky, and pulled my crushed shirt collar back into some kind of shape, wincing at the pain in my equally crushed throat. ‘What set this off?’ I asked Webb, my voice sounding hoarse and flat.

He gave a bleak snort. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all. Karen and Paul went in to give him his evening meds, and he took them. One moment he was fine, the next – well, you saw. He started screaming, and when Karen tried to calm him he lashed out at her. We’re lucky she wasn’t killed.’

I nodded dumbly at that. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Webb wasn’t expecting an answer, though. ‘Castor,’ he said, ‘this brings forward a discussion we were going to have to have in any case. When we took Ditko on, we did so in the belief that we could help him. We clearly can’t. He needs dedicated facilities of a kind that we can’t offer.’

I looked down at Pen. She wasn’t hearing this, fortunately. ‘There aren’t any dedicated facilities for what Rafi’s got,’ I pointed out, but that was bullshit and he knew it. There just weren’t any that I wanted to deliver him to.

‘There’s the MOU,’ Webb said.

‘Rafi’s not a lab rat.’

‘He’s not mentally ill, either. He doesn’t belong here.’

‘We’ve got a contract,’ I pointed out, playing my ace.

Webb trumped it. ‘Voidable where the welfare of staff or other inmates is at stake,’ he quoted from memory. ‘I don’t think there’s any argument about that.’

I shrugged. ‘We’ll talk.’

Webb shook his head. ‘No, we won’t. Make alternative arrangements, Castor. You have twenty-eight days.’

‘You’re all heart, Webb,’ I croaked. ‘You’ll have to toughen up or people will start taking advantage of you.’

He gave me an austere, contemptuous look. ‘Nobody can say you didn’t try,’ he said coldly.

Out in the grounds a sickle moon was up like a sword of white fire, turning everything into a mercurochrome photograph of itself. I took a turn through the rose garden, enjoying the peace and quiet. It was only relative: there were still some shouts and moans from inside the building, but after Rafi’s endless, agonising foghorn howl it sounded a lot like silence. Rafi was sleeping now, but Pen wouldn’t let anyone else touch him for the time being. I thought I’d give them half an hour, then go back inside and see if I was needed.

I leaned against the sundial and looked down a trellised avenue canopied with sweet-smelling blooms. It didn’t frame much of a view, though: just a high fence with an inward-tilting fringe of razor wire at the top, and beyond that the six lanes of the North Circular, where even at this hour a steady river of headlights flowed on by.

Alternative arrangements. That was really easy for Webb to say, especially with the gods of the small print on his side. Not so easy to do, though: not unless I wanted to take the route that Webb had suggested and give Rafi over to the tender mercies of the Metamorphic Ontology Unit at Queen Mary’s in Paddington. But that was a last-ditch, desperation kind of thing, and I didn’t think we were quite there yet. Much as I respected my old sparring partner Jenna-Jane Mulbridge on an intellectual level, I knew better than anyone that she had some shortcomings where bedside manner was concerned. And that her heart and human feelings were in long-term storage underneath a crossroads somewhere.

While I was still propping up the sundial, making the place look untidy, three small figures loped out of the foliage about fifty yards away and flitted across the lawn in absolute silence. They were in a triangle formation, with the largest of the three in front, the other two flanking and following her. There were some trees on the far side of the lawn, but trees didn’t slow them down: they raced on unheeding, their slender bodies sliding through wood as though wood was air. When they got to the wall that separated the Stanger from Coldfall Wood, the girl in the lead – she was about thirteen, or rather had been that age when she died – stopped and looked across at me. She tossed back a full head of ash-blonde hair and gave me a wave. I waved back. Then she turned and walked on through the wall, where her two younger companions had already gone on before her.

These were the ghosts of three little girls whom the original Charles Stanger had murdered in the late 1940s – before being sent down for life and endowing the institution that now carries his name. They’d spent the next sixty years tied to the stones of the old cottages like dogs chained up in a yard. Most ghosts are tethered to a particular place, more often than not the place where they died: it was just a cruel irony that in this case it meant the girls had to rub shoulders with the criminally insane for the rest of eternity – or at least for as long as the Stanger stayed open. But about a year or so ago I’d given them a private concert: used my tin whistle to play a fragment of an exorcism to them in this same garden, so that although they weren’t banished from the place they were free to leave it. Since then I’d heard rumours of sightings as far afield as the Trocadero and Shadwell Stair, but they still seemed to use the Stanger as a base. I guess they were used to the place now: after half a century, it was as close to being home as anywhere they knew. I kept expecting them to move on – I mean, on to whatever else there is when this world has worn out its welcome – but obviously they still hadn’t taken that inevitable step.

I walked on through the gardens, eventually circling around to the far side of the building where they gave out at last onto the asphalt apron of the car park. It was after midnight now, so the place was deserted except for a few staff cars and Pen’s old Mondeo. Paul was leaning against the side of an ambulance in lonely splendour, smoking a fairly pungent cigarillo. He was looking glum.

‘How’s life?’ I asked, slowing to a halt.

He blew out smoke, shook his head in disgust. ‘You should’ve asked me when I fuckin’ had one, man,’ he said morosely. ‘My old lady keeps telling me to give this up, and fuck if she ain’t right. What do I need it for? My back feels like I did ten rounds with Tyson, my left eye’s closing over. Karen’s most likely got a concussion. And my man Rafael’s righteously fucked, poor bastard.’

I was impressed that he could still worry about Rafi when Rafi’s evil passenger had just nearly done for the both of us. I was reminded once again of how much there was going on under that tank-like exterior. ‘Well, I’m glad you put your retirement off until after tonight, anyway,’ I said, meaning it. ‘You probably saved my life.’

‘Yeah, you’re welcome.’

‘Your boss is an arsehole, though.’

‘Got that right.’

I leaned against the side of the ambulance next to him, but upwind of his cigar. ‘And Rafi will be okay. At least, he’ll be none the worse for anything that happened tonight.’

Paul raised his eyebrows as he pondered this. ‘Cuts all over his face,’ he mused. ‘Two broken fingers. Maybe a broken jaw. That shit on his chest looked like blisters – like he was catching fire from the inside.’

‘But you know I’m right. The fingers will reset themselves tonight. The jaw, too, if I actually broke it. The gouges and the burns will already have healed up: if you looked right now, there wouldn’t be a damn thing to see. Rafi’s got a very healthy immune system. I guess it’s all the good food and exercise.’

Paul gave me a slightly fish-eyed stare, checking to see if any of that second-rate irony was at his expense. Then he shook his head again, giving it up. ‘That lady of yours,’ he said, after taking another deep drag on the cigarillo, ‘she’s a class act, Castor. About as big as a high-heel shoe, but she just went for Rafael back there like it was a fair fight. Went for Doctor Webb, too.’ He grinned wickedly. ‘That was the highlight of the fucking day. Truth.’

‘Yeah, Pen is one of a kind,’ I agreed. ‘She’s not mine, though. I mean, she’s just a friend.’ A whole lot of memories surged up from one of the less-frequented areas of my mind: I shoved them right back down again. ‘She’s – she and Rafi used to be – together. When we were all at university, they were –’ I groped for a phrase that accurately defined Pen and Rafi’s relationship, but there wasn’t one ‘– an item,’ I finished lamely. ‘But it didn’t last. Rafi was the flit-and-sip type.’

We stood in silence for a few seconds.

‘He was my best friend,’ I said, aware of how bizarre and unhealthy all this sounded. ‘Pen’s, too, both before and after the sweat-and-roses stuff. Everybody liked him. You’d like him too, if you met him.’

‘If I met him?’ Paul’s intonation was pained.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yeah,’ he admitted. ‘I guess I do. Kind of. I’ve always wanted to ask you, though. What exactly is that thing inside him?’

‘Asmodeus. He’s a demon. A fucking big one, too. A lot of the literature on the subject says . . .’

‘The literature?’ Paul shook his head, wondering. ‘What, like The Lancet? Scientific American?’

‘Not exactly, no. I’m talking about books written by carpet-chewing natural philosophers five hundred years ago. Grimoires. Magical textbooks. Anyway, they put Asmodeus close to the top of the infernal pecking order. Not someone you want to mess with. But Rafi did just that. He tried to summon Asmodeus about two years ago. I think he was looking to do some kind of Faust thing: buy a shitload of forbidden knowledge from before the world was made. It didn’t work out that way, though. Somehow Asmodeus got into him and started to burn him up from the inside.’

The words, banal and deadpan as they were, stirred up a series of disconnected impressions in my mind – some of the component parts of a night I still couldn’t forget. Because of the way my mind works, it was mostly the sounds that stayed with me. Rafi’s breathing, harsh and shallow and with longer and longer gaps between the in-breaths. The grating laughter that was coming from his throat, welling up like blood out of the night-black void that showed when his mouth gaped open. The endless mumble and hiss of boiling water: we’d dumped Rafi into a bathtub full of ice because patches of his skin were going from red to black, but after about a minute the ice was water and the water was bubbling like a witch’s cauldron.

‘You were there?’ Paul asked, sounding – to put it politely – a little sceptical. It’s not just cops: everyone draws their lines in the sand, sooner or later, and once they’re drawn it takes a lot to shift them.

‘His girlfriend called me in the middle of the night. She heard him say my name; and it sounded like his own voice, not the voice of the thing inside him, so she found my number in the back of his diary. By the time I got there, it looked like I might already be too late, but I tried anyway.’

‘Tried what, exactly?’

‘I played him a tune.’

Paul nodded. I’d already told him over a couple of beers what it is I do for a living, and how I do it. ‘You see,’ I went on, reluctantly, ‘I was assuming it was a human spirit inside him. A ghost. I’d never even met a demon back then. So I listened for a human spirit, and when I found it I started to play it out of him. Then, about ten minutes in, I realised that what I’d dredged up was Rafi’s own soul. I was dispossessing him from his body – finishing what Asmodeus had started.

‘I tried to undo the damage I’d already done. I switched keys in mid-tune, played the opposite of what my instincts were telling me to play, in the hope that I could pull Rafi back into his own flesh. And it sort of worked.’

‘Sort of?’

I nodded bleakly. ‘Yeah, sort of. I stuck Rafi back together again – and at the same time I stuck Asmodeus to Rafi, which wasn’t part of the plan. They’ve been trapped in there together ever since. That’s why Asmodeus tends to leave me alone, most of the time – he knows he’s going to need me sooner or later if he’s ever going to get free again. He’s just waiting for me to figure out how to do it.’ I scowled, fingering one of the bruises on my shoulder. ‘Don’t know what the Hell went wrong tonight. He knew who I was, but for once he didn’t seem to give a fuck. In fact, he really seemed happy to be getting a crack at me. Like he hadn’t expected it.’

There was a long silence. I could see how a lot of this must strike Paul as total bullshit, even after what he’d seen. It would have sounded ridiculous to me, if I hadn’t lived through it: if I hadn’t lived through worse things since. All those things in Heaven and Earth that philosophy tries not to dream about.

Eventually he opened his mouth to say something, but we were interrupted by the sound of high heels on wet asphalt. Pen came out from the shadow of the building and headed over to us. I looked a question at her and she managed a weak smile.

‘He’s sleeping like a baby,’ she said.

‘Good,’ I answered. ‘From past experience, he probably won’t surface until sometime late morning. Whenever Asmodeus takes over like that, Rafi burns up a hell of a lot of energy all at once. The best thing we can do now is to let him sleep it off in his own good time.’

Pen nodded, but I could see from her face that she didn’t buy my ‘time heals all wounds’ approach.

‘He never has,’ she said. ‘Taken over in quite that way. Asmodeus is cruel, and spiteful, and a little bit insane, but that—’ She finished off the sentence with a shrug.

She was right, too. The berserker fit was a new one in my experience, and I couldn’t see what the demon had to gain by it. In the past Asmodeus had told me he was playing a waiting game, in the knowledge that sooner or later I’d figure out a way to undo whatever it was I’d done and set him and Rafi free from each other. Tonight it seemed he’d run out of patience and out of whatever demons have instead of sanity.

I tried to think of something vaguely reassuring to say, but Paul pre-empted me by throwing down his unfinished cigarillo, stamping it out, and stretching his shoulders like somebody warming up for a workout.

‘Gotta say goodnight to you people,’ he said. ‘I’m on until two a.m., and that’s my break over. You take my advice, you should get some sleep yourselves. The both of you look wiped.’ He gave us a nod and headed back into the building.

‘Thanks again,’ I called to his retreating back.

‘No problem. I’ll send in a bill.’

I turned to Pen. ‘That sounds like sense to me,’ I said. ‘Unless you’re up for some chicken vindaloo? The exotic delights of East Finchley are on our doorstep.’

Pen shook her head.

‘I’m meant to be going out,’ she said. ‘With Dylan.’

Dylan? Oh yeah, Dylan Forster – Doctor Feelgood. I’d sort of forgotten about him. The truth was, I kept on forgetting about him again every time Pen mentioned him. I’d long ago abandoned any thoughts of rekindling whatever the two of us had had, but on some level it still disturbed me to think of her going out with someone else. She was part of a triangle whose other two corners were me and Rafi. I knew how unfair that was, and I hated myself for having any reservations when Pen tried to scrape up a little happiness for herself: so whenever she mentioned her affluent, passionate, druid-in-training, Lexus-driving, trust-me-I’m-a-doctor new boyfriend, I put a certain amount of effort into sounding more positive and enthusiastic than I felt.

‘Well, even better,’ I said now. ‘Take your mind off this stuff for a few hours. Hope it’s something good.’

‘I don’t think he had anywhere particular in mind. He just said it was going to be a murderous day, and he absolutely had to see me at the end of it so there’d be something to balance out all the shitty stuff. I told him I was going to see Rafi, and he said he’d meet me afterwards.’

She gave me a brief but fierce hug and climbed into the car.

‘Drop you somewhere?’ she asked, holding the door open for a moment so we could go on talking.

I mulled that one over, but not for very long. My mind was still crawling with the dread that I’d felt when I saw the nurse lying crumpled on the floor of Rafi’s cell like yesterday’s laundry. Right then I wanted to be out in the open for a little while, and by myself.

I shook my head. ‘Thanks, but I think I need the walk,’ I said.

‘Then I’ll see you tomorrow.’ She slammed the door, revved up and pulled away, the Mondeo rocking a little on its wheelbase because it was getting on a bit now and the suspension was more or less shot.

The night was mine. Woot.

As it turned out, I needed more than just a walk. I spent the next few hours trying to shake off that sense of unease in a string of pubs and insomniac waterholes from Finchley to King’s Cross and beyond. Somewhere along the way, chugalugging my fifth or sixth whisky on the rocks in some Irish-themed nowhere on Kentish Town Road, I realised that what I was feeling had nothing to do with what had happened at the Stanger. It was something in the air; hanging over the whole oblivious city like an ectoplasmic slag heap waiting to start its inexorable downhill slide.

I got back home some time after three a.m. Pen’s place is off Turnpike Lane. It’s big and old, built in a nameless fin-de-siècle style that’s even heavier than High Victorian, and it’s on the side of a hill so that the basement, where Pen lives, becomes ground level at the back of the house and gives out directly onto the garden. I checked for lights, as I always do: if she’d still been up I’d have gone and split a bottle or at least a glass with her. But everything was dark and silent. She was probably staying over with Dylan at his flat out in Pinner – a sign of how besotted she must be, because the house was a lot more than just somewhere where she hung up her boots: it was also the seat of her own very personal religion, the place of her power, the cave where she was high priestess and sibyl in residence.

My room is up in the eaves, as far away from all that Earth-mother stuff as I can get, which suits me fine. Apart from anything else, that’s a lot of stairs for anyone to climb if they want to come and find me, and I’ll usually hear them coming.

I barely managed to shrug out of my clothes: then I hit the bed and was asleep before I bounced.

I don’t know about Rafi, but I sure as hell didn’t see a lot of Sunday morning. I woke up at the lag end of lunchtime, bright sunlight cutting through the gap in my curtains like a maniac with a chainsaw. I had a furry mouth and a hangover that was as much psychological as physical. Or animistic, maybe: a hangover of the spirit. How the hell do you cure that? A hair of the god that bit you?

Still no sign of Pen. I breakfasted alone in the sun-bleached kitchen, feeling a slight sense of unreality. The night had seemed so dark, the weight of foreboding so real, it was odd and even a little aggravating that nothing had happened. I felt as though reality was impugning my gut instincts.

But if there was some severing sword suspended over London, it was pretty firmly attached, and probably conformed to all relevant EU safety standards. I prowled about the house all day like a hermit with haemorrhoids, waiting for that doom-drenched feeling to revisit me. But it didn’t, and disaster didn’t strike. In the end I was reduced to watching old episodes of Fawlty Towers on some cable channel, and I kept forgetting to laugh.

Pen rolled home early in the evening to find me in the basement, feeding strips of fresh sheep’s liver to her two ravens, Edgar and Arthur. She was touched.

‘You didn’t need to do that, Fix,’ she said, squeezing my hand – a mistake, since it was dripping with blood and oozy bits of tissue. ‘They don’t mind if I’m a bit late. But thanks.’

‘I’m always afraid that if I don’t keep them happy I’m going to be set meal B,’ I groused. ‘They’re getting to be the size of bloody vultures.’

Pen seemed tired, and not all that happy: normally she came back from dates with Doctor Feelgood walking on air, so I was solicitous – and maybe a little curious.

‘How was your night?’ I asked, waggling my eyebrows suggestively.

She shrugged, gave a faint smile. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘It was . . . yeah. It was okay.’

I waited for clarification, and after meeting my gaze in silence for a moment or two she shrugged again. ‘Dylan was really tired,’ she said. ‘He’d had an awful shift, clearing up other people’s messes. He wasn’t supposed to be on duty today, but he said he had to, just for an hour or so – to check up on some of the work he did yesterday. He didn’t trust the doctor who was supposed to take over from him. So I went shopping, over at Camden Market, and he joined me there for a late lunch.’

‘Did you check in on Rafi?’

‘Yeah. We went over there this afternoon. But he was still asleep.’

‘Told you. He’ll wake up right as rain.’

Pen nodded glumly – then visibly brightened as another thought struck her. ‘Dylan says he might be able to prescribe some stuff that will keep Asmodeus under for more of the time. He wants me to have a word with Webb about letting him in to give Rafi some tests.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘Worth a try,’ I said. ‘I thought you said he was a rag-and-bone man.’

‘Bones and joints,’ she corrected, looking at me severely. ‘But he interned in endocrinology.’

Pen followed me as I walked through into her cramped, pie-slice-shaped bathroom and washed my bloody hands in the sink. I was trying to get away from another lecture about how wonderful Dylan was – Pen’s favourite theme for the past few weeks – but it wasn’t going to be that easy.

‘He’s really sweet,’ she said. ‘You’d think he’d want to stay well away from Rafi, considering – you know – what he means to me. But he just wants to make me happy.’

‘Ask him for a blank prescription pad before it wears off,’ I suggested. She punched me in the shoulder and I took it like a man.

I’d already learned the hard way that sarcastic comments about Doctor Feelgood met with terrible retribution. He was an odd guy for Pen to be dating, in some ways: she wasn’t drawn to material things, and affluence normally struck her as a sign of spiritual malaise rather than anything to aspire to. But Dylan’s wealth and success and smoked-silver Lexus were counterbalanced by the fact that he was an ovate – a sort of junior officer in some druidical training system, learning to be one of nature’s high priests. That was how she’d met him – at some solstice-related knees-up on a windswept hill in Pembrokeshire. Pen’s own flavour of paganism didn’t have ranks and hierarchies, but she liked it a lot that this well-to-do young doctor was groping towards spiritual truth rather than just worrying about his backswing. And he understood about Rafi, which most people flat-out don’t.

Yeah, the guy was clearly a saint. It was probably just as well I’d never met him: if opposites attract we’d probably have fallen head over heels in love with each other and left Pen out in the cold.

‘Are you feeling a sense of choking terror that you can’t pin down to anything in particular?’ I asked her.

It might have seemed like an odd question in some circumstances, but coming from me Pen knew it was like a doctor asking you if you’d been off your food. She searched her mind. It’s both capacious and somewhat idiosyncratically arranged, so it took a while. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘Just the usual choking terrors, and I can pretty much account for those. Why, Fix?’

I dried my hands and went back out into the living room. Arthur was clashing his beak and shrugging his wings open and shut – his way of begging for more, but I was all out of goodies. I skirted around him, keeping my distance in case he decided to search me to make sure. Pen leaned in the doorway, arms folded, looking at me with some concern.

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Something coming in on Channel Death. Or maybe nothing. You know how these things go.’

Just by reading her face I could see her decide to change the subject. ‘Grambas called,’ she said. ‘Some men tried to deliver something at the office yesterday, but you weren’t there. He’s got it in the lock-up behind the shop.’

I grimaced. A pilgrimage out to Harlesden first thing on a Monday morning wasn’t a thrilling prospect. On the other hand, that was meant to be my place of work, and since I owe Pen so much back rent that she could probably legally impound both my kidneys and sell them in Hong Kong, she feels fairly strongly that I should spend more time over there than I do.

But she sympathised with my raw mood, and as usual her sympathy took a concrete form. She cleared the table – by tipping all the newspapers, magazines, coasters and unopened mail off onto the floor – and went to get her tarot deck.

‘Pen,’ I said, regretting that I’d said anything, ‘you know I don’t hold with this stuff.’

‘It never hurts to get a second opinion,’ she said.

‘From who? Whose opinion are we getting? Pieces of laminated cardboard don’t know jack shit about what’s going down in the world, Pen. Nobody ever tells them anything.’

‘It’s not the cards, Fix. It’s you, and it’s me, and it’s the Weltgeist – the world-spirit.’

I winced and waved her quiet. The world-spirit. Right, because there’s a consciousness behind the universe and it loves all its children: we get daily evidence of that in terms of famine, plague and flood. I don’t buy the tarot for the same reason that I don’t buy religion: the hopes and fears of ordinary people stick up out of the miracles like bones out of a spavined horse. My universe doesn’t work like that, and the only spirits in it are the ones that are my stock-in-trade.

Pen gave me the cards to shuffle. I considered palming Death and top-decking him while she wasn’t looking, but she hates it when I do that so I played fair.

She dealt out a Triskele spread – three cards in a triangle, two more crossed in the centre. Ordinarily she’d have done a full ten-card spread, but she knows my limits so she was keeping it short and sweet.

She turned over the cover and the cross – the two cards in the middle. They were an inverted ace of wands and the Hanged Man. Pen blinked, clearly surprised and a little unsettled by the conjunction.

‘That’s really weird,’ she said.

‘Tall dark stranger?’ I hazarded.

‘Don’t be stupid, Fix. It’s just that those two cards, together like that . . . they mean exactly what you just said. Spiritual energy – negative spiritual energy – in a kind of suspension. Blocked. Frozen. Penned up.’

I made no comment, but she didn’t expect any. She turned over the root card at lower left: the page of swords, again inverted. ‘A message,’ Pen interpreted. ‘News. All the page cards mean something dawning, something being announced. I think . . . because it’s upside down . . . a problem that doesn’t get solved, or that gets solved in the wrong way. Fix, if someone asks for your help with something, go in carefully. One step at a time.’

The bud card at lower right was old Death himself, which as we all know doesn’t mean death at all. Pen started to make her speech about change and flux, and I made the ‘wrap it up’ gesture that TV floor managers use. ‘It’s another bad combination,’ she said stubbornly, refusing to be bullied. ‘The page of wands, and Death. Forget what I said about being careful: you’re going to trip up, and fall on your face. But it’s only the bud, it’s not the flower.’

The flower is the apex of the triangle. Pen turned it over, and we both looked at it. Justice. I never look at those scales without thinking of Hamlet. ‘Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?’ I don’t want justice: I want to cop a plea.

Pen gave me a look, and I shook my head – but the querent doesn’t get to have the last word, even if it’s only a gesture.

‘Things will balance out,’ she said. ‘Actions will have the consequences they were always going to have. For better or worse.’

‘Which?’ I asked. ‘Better, or worse?’

‘We won’t know until it happens.’

‘Christ, I hate these little bastards.’

Pen gave up on spirituality and got the whisky out. On some things, at least, we still see eye to eye.