As I got to the door, though, I felt her stare on my back. I turned around, and we looked a question at each other across the room. Well, I looked a question, she looked an accusation, but it was the same thing going both ways.
“You saw her,” I said.
Alice started to speak and then didn’t. After a long moment’s silence, she nodded.
“I was playing her in instead of out.” I groped for words. “The tune was the tune that described her for me. The one I’d normally wrap around her if I was doing an exorcism, until she couldn’t get away again and had to fade when the music died. I think—I guess—the tune described her for you, too, so that you could see her this time. You won’t see her again, though. I can promise you she won’t be back.”
For whatever reason, that didn’t seem to help very much, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I consoled myself that Alice was a lady who would always get by.
On my way out, I stopped by the workroom, where Cheryl was toiling alone. She looked up from her keyboard, gave me a nod and a half smile.
“Thanks for everything,” I said.
“You’re welcome.”
“I’m really sorry about your mum’s wedding.”
“Yeah. You said.”
A pause. I walked over to her, but she held out her hand quickly, emphatically, palm out, before I could touch her. I did as I was told and kept my distance.
It took her a long time to find the words. “I’m glad you did what you did,” she said. “I think it was cool. There’s got to be someone who’ll stand up for people like Sylvie—Snezhna, I mean—and make sure they get their justice. After all, there’s a million people out there protecting the living against the dead. Someone’s got to protect the dead against the living. There’s gotta be that balance, right? And I don’t think you even knew yourself, up until now, that that was what you were for.”
Cheryl blinked a few times, quickly, as if she might be about to cry. I could have been imagining that, though; it didn’t show in her voice, and she had no trouble looking me in the eye. “The thing is, Fix,” she said mournfully, “you lie too easily. You lied to yourself, all that time, about how ghosts were just things, not people. So you didn’t have to feel guilty about screwing them over. And then you lied to me when you didn’t even have to. When I would’ve helped you anyway, if you’d told me the truth. That’s a shitty basis for a relationship.”
“Relationship?” I said. “Hey, it was a good bang, and I like you and everything . . .”
She recognized her own words and laughed. But she got serious again.
“We can still be friends,” she said. “I’d like that. But I can’t—you know. I can’t open up to a man I don’t trust. It just doesn’t work for me.”
She let me kiss her once, very lightly, on the lips.
“Well, now you’ve tried it,” I said. “So you’ve got every right to say that you don’t like it.”
Just like with Alice. It was all I had, and I knew it wasn’t enough. The sound of Cheryl’s typing accompanied me down the corridor, but was lost in the vast coldness of the place as I descended the stairs.
Twenty-five
YOU MOVE ON. YOU MOVE BACK. ON BECAUSE YOU’RE always getting older, back because there’s always a set of habits and routines to catch you and suck you back in when your guard is down.
Before that happened, or before it finished happening, I borrowed Pen’s car and drove over to the Charles Stanger Care Facility in the early hours of a Sunday morning. I parked up, skirted the front door, and walked on around into the formal gardens. The place was as quiet as it ever gets, at least from this perspective. No screams or weeping to be heard; no rushes, charges, or scuffles. Just the flowers waving in the moonlight, the furious barking of a distant dog, and an occasional moth trying unsuccessfully to immolate itself on a twenty-five-watt solar-powered garden light.
I chose a bench and sat down. Then, for a while, I just waited, letting the mood sink into me, and finding the closest approximation to it in the key of D. When I thought I knew what I was doing, I took out my whistle and started to play.
It was another Clarke that I held in my hands, but not an Original. For whimsical reasons connected with turning over a new leaf, I’d gone for a green Sweetone. I hadn’t trained my mouth to it yet, though, and I was also still stiff from the wound I’d taken to the shoulder when Juliet sank her claws into me on the
When I did finally look up, they were there—the three little ghosts with their pale, solemn faces, the oldest about thirteen, the youngest not more than ten. Two of them were neat and clean in 1940s school uniforms, berets and all. The third wore a torn blouse and rumpled skirt with stains like leaf moss across the front.
Now that I had their attention, I played a different tune, a quicker one with a jauntier and more complex rhythm. It wasn’t a tune that had a name, particularly, or one that I’d ever heard before. It was a musical incision into reality, at a slightly different angle to the tunes I usually played. They listened silently and attentively.
When it was done, they exchanged a glance that cut me out entirely, as it cut out all the living. Then, all at the same time, as if at some signal I couldn’t hear, they ran. Across the gardens, through the boles of trees, through the distant wire mesh of the fence, over the eight lanes of the North Circular, and on out of sight.
I couldn’t do for them what Rosa had done for Snezhna because I didn’t know what it was, besides the fear and indignity of their deaths, that kept them tied to the Earth. But I could set them free to this extent, so that now they could at least choose what place they haunted.
Fuck knows, it was little enough.
And later still, I was back in Harlesden, sorting through the mail again—which, since it was a solstice thing, meant that about half a year had passed. Quiet outside, because it was after midnight. The breath of cherry blossom coming in through the open window, like news from another world. I was sitting with my feet up on the dwarf filing cabinet, a glass of whisky at my elbow, and a sense in my heart of what passes with me for peace.
The immediate trigger for that feeling wasn’t the whisky. It was a letter from Rosa Alanovich, now back in Oktyabrskiy and apparently doing very well for herself as the proprietor of a small grocery store. The payout she’d got from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board had been insultingly small, but only by British standards. In the wilds of Primorsk, it was serious stake money—and Rosa had hit the ground running.
So I was miles away, and my guard was so far down it was nonexistent. Then in an instant, the freshness of the cherry was cut wide open by a hot, miasmic stink of fox, which in another instant was refracted into a thousand shades of unbearable sweetness. My head came up, and my feet crashed down as though a celestial puppet master leaning forward out of the sky had tugged hard and sharp on my strings.
She stood beside the open window, her hair lifted slightly by a cool spring breeze. She was naked and, as before, her terrible beauty stirred me and cowed me in equal measure. For a long time we regarded each other in silence. The smell faded instead of building, which gave me hope she wasn’t hunting that night; but just in case, I didn’t move. Succubi react to a running man as cats do to a running mouse.
“I was summoned for a specific task,” Juliet said at last, her incredible shot-silk voice caressing me like the flat of a razor blade.
I nodded. I knew damn well what that task was.
“And I can’t go back home until I finish it.”
There was no way I’d get to the door before she got to me, and the only thing at hand that would be any use as a weapon was the whisky bottle. I let my hand fall on it, as casually as I could.
The moment stretched.
“It never occurred to me before,” Juliet said, “that failure would bring such extensive benefits. But then— while I wore the chain, failure wasn’t an option. I really ought to thank you for that.”
I shook my head. It was meant to indicate that unbinding demons was all part of the Castor service, and that
