“Yes?”
“The exorcist?”
I considered lying, but since I’d confessed to my name, there wasn’t any point. Anyway, it was entirely my own fault. Nobody had made me pick up the frigging phone; I’d done it of my own free will, as a consenting adult.
And now I had a customer.
Two
THIS WAS TEN YEARS OR MORE AFTER THE DEAD first began to rise—I mean, to rise in sufficient numbers that it wasn’t an option anymore just to ignore them.
They’d always been there, I guess. Certainly as a kid I was seeing them on and off whenever I was in any place that was quiet or where the light was dim. An old man standing in the street, staring at nothing as the mothers pushed their strollers right through him and kept on walking; a little girl hovering irresolute by the swings in the local playground, through all the watches of the night, and never clambering on for a ride; a shadow in the deeper shadows of a narrow alley that didn’t move quite in sync when a car went by. It wasn’t ever much of a problem, though, even for people like me, who could actually see them; most ghosts keep themselves to themselves, and it’s not like you have to feed them or clean up after them. Ninety-nine out of a hundred will never give you any trouble at all. I learned not to mention them to anybody and not to look at them directly in case they cottoned on to me and started talking. It was only bad when they talked.
But something happened a few years before the page turned on the old millennium, as though some cosmic equivalent of a big, spiteful kid had come along and poked a stick into the graveyards of the world, just to see what would happen.
What happened was that the dead swarmed out like ants—the dead, and a few other things.
Nobody had any explanation for it, at least not unless you counted the many variations on “we are living in the last days, and these are the signs and wonders that were foretold.” That was an argument that played fairly well, up to a point. The Christians and the Jews had put their money on a bodily resurrection, and that was what some people seemed to be getting. But the Bible is strangely coy on the subject of the were-kind, hedges its bets on demons, and draws a big fat blank on ghosts, so the Christians and the Jews didn’t really seem to be any better placed than the rest of us to call the toss.
The theological arguments raged like brush fires, and under the smoke that they threw up, the world changed—not overnight, but with the slow, irrevocable progress of an eclipse, or ink soaking into blotting paper. The promised apocalypse didn’t come, but new testaments were written anyway, and new religions kick-started. New and exciting careers opened up for people like me. Even the map of London got redrawn, which as far as I was concerned was the hardest thing to believe and accept.
I was born elsewhere, you have to understand—up North, two hundred miles from the Smoke—and my view of London is an outsider’s view, assembled in easy pieces over the last twenty years. When I picture the city in my mind, I tend to see it in simplified, schematic terms—like the cageful of snakes, orange on green on blue, that you see on the inside cover of the A–Z. Where the biggest snake—the king python, the Thames—runs right through the middle, that’s the null zone. Ghosts can’t cross running water, and they don’t even like the sound of it all that much. Lesser demons and were-things will usually balk at it, too, although that’s not so widely known. So the river’s a good place to be, unless for any reason communing with the dead is something that you actually
Walk a few streets in any direction, though, until you can’t see the Thames at your back anymore, and you’re in a city that’s been a major population center ever since Gog and Magog sat down on their two hills some time around the middle of the Stone Age and put their feet up. Sacked by war, gutted by riot, razed by fire, and scoured by plague, it’s got a ratio of about twenty dead to every one living inhabitant, and that ratio is weighted most heavily in the center, where the city is oldest.
It’s not as bleak as it sounds, because not everyone you lay in the earth comes back; there are a whole lot who are content to sleep it out. And those who do come back will often stay in one place rather than wander around and inspire sphincter-loosening terror in the living. Most ghosts are tethered to the place where they died, with the place where they were buried coming in a close second (a fact that turned the blocks around inner-city cemeteries into instant slums). Zombies are just spirits even more tightly circumscribed than that, effectively haunting their own dead bodies, and as for the
I’m talking about the dead as if they had human emotions and human motivations. I apologize. It’s a common mistake, but any professional will give you a different point of view on the subject, whether you ask for it or not. Ghosts are reflections in fun-house mirrors—distorted echoes of past emotions, lingering on way past their sell-by date. Sometimes there’s a fragment of consciousness still there, directing them so that they can respond to you in crude and simple ways; more often not. The last thing you want to do is to make the mistake of thinking of them as people. That’s the bottom line, as the Ghostbusters count it. Sentimental anthropomorphisms aren’t exactly an asset in my line of business.
But sentient or not, a close encounter with a ghost can be an upsetting, not to say seat-wetting, experience. That’s where the exorcists come in—both the official church-sponsored ones, who are usually either idiots or fanatics, and the freelancers like me, who know what they’re doing.
My vocation had shown itself on the day after my sixth birthday, when I got tired of sharing my bed with my dead sister, Katie, who’d been run over by a truck the year before, and made her go away by screaming scatological playground rhymes at her. Yeah, I know. If ever there was a poisoned chalice that had a clearer Hazchem warning written down the side of it, it’s one I never came across.
But how many people do you know who actually get to choose what they do for a living? My careers teacher said I should go into hotel management, so exorcism it was.
Until now. Now I was on sabbatical. I’d had my fingers burned pretty badly about a year and a half before, and I was in no hurry to start playing with matches again. I told myself I’d retired. I made myself believe it for a good part of every day.
So now, as I listened to the voice of this solidly respectable citizen who was reaching out to me for help across the London night, the first thought that came into my mind was how the hell I was going to get rid of him. The second was that it was lucky he hadn’t called in person, because I was still dressed like a clown. On the other hand, the second would probably have helped with the first.
“Mr. Castor, we have a problem,” the voice announced in a convincing tone of anxiety and complaint. Was that the royal
“I’m sorry to hear it,” I offered. And since the best defense is a good offense, “My books are pretty much full at the moment. I don’t think I’ll be able to—”
He shot that one down well before it got to the bushes. “I find that hard to believe,” he snapped. “Very hard to believe. You never answer your phone. I’ve been calling you for four days now, and you’ve never picked up once. You don’t have an answerphone; you don’t even use a voice-mail service. So how would you be booking appointments?”
At any other time, this litany would have sounded like good news to me. A client who’s been calling for four days already has a lot invested in the deal, which makes him that much more likely to see it through.
At any other time.
Even now, as I considered my response, I felt the familiar quickening of my pulse; the familiar sensation of standing on the high diving board and looking down. Only this time I wasn’t going to let myself jump.
“I’m not taking on any new clients right now,” I repeated after slightly too long a pause. “If you tell me what your problem is, I can refer you to someone else who can help you, Mr. . . .”
“Peele. Jeffrey Peele. I’m the chief administrator at the Bonnington Archive. But I’m coming to you as the
