Vicious Circle

some coffee, then drank three cups of it while I flicked through Pen?s A?Z and worked out a route to Thamesmead. There was no sense driving?I?d have to go through the Blackwall Tunnel or take the Woolwich Ferry, both hassles that I can do without at the best of times. The smart option was to go to Waterloo and then take an overground train to Woolwich Dockyard. From there I could walk it.

A brisk wind had come up in the night and swept the thunderheads away to someplace else, so it was sunny but fresh as I walked to Turnpike Lane tube station, and my head started to feel a little clearer. I was glad of the change in the weather for another reason, too: shredded at seam and shoulder, and crusted brown with blood on the left-hand side of the collar, my paletot was hors de combat for the time being. I was wearing the only other coat I owned that had enough pockets for all my paraphernalia: a fawn trenchcoat with a button-down yoke that makes me feel like an exhibit in some museum installation about the evolution of the private detective.

Since I?d gotten such an early start on the day, I couldn?t get a Travelcard, so I just took a single. I didn?t know where I?d be going after I left the Collective. Maybe Paddington and Rosie Crucis: it depended on whether I found any leads I could actually use.

Bourbon said that Dennis Peace used to be a rubber duck. In trade jargon, that meant only one thing: an exorcist who chose for professional reasons to live on water rather than on dry land. It?s something we all try out, at some point, if only to get a decent night?s sleep: no ghosts can cross running water, and the morbid sensitivities that keep us in business are all anesthetized for once. Takes a certain kind of personality to live with it long term, though: I always end up feeling like I?m trussed up inside of a plastic bag, my own breath condensing on me as cold sweat.

The Collective is a floater community on the Thames. Everybody in my world knows it, everybody?s been there, but that doesn?t mean you can necessarily find it when you want to: like the Oriflamme, the Collective is a movable feast. Come to think of it, there?s another link between the two, although it?s an accidental and tendentious one along the lines of ?how many degrees of separation are you away from Kevin Bacon?? Only for Kevin Bacon read ?Peckham Steiner.?

Steiner is one of the few flamboyant legends of our reclusive and insular profession. He was an exorcist before the fashion really got going: by which I mean before the huge upsurge of apparitions and manifestations in the last decade of the old millennium turned people like me into a key industry. Specializing in spiritual eradications for the rich and famous, he garnered a certain amount of fame (or at least notoriety) for himself along the way?along with a shedload of money. An American heiress was in it somewhere, if I remember rightly. Her dead ex-husbands had been giving her all kinds of grief until Steiner sent them on to their last judgment, and out of gratitude she left him the bulk of her fortune when she died. Her kids from all three marriages sued, and the case dragged on for years, but as far as I know none of them ever managed to lay a legal finger on him. By that time, anyway, he had three books out, a movie deal for his life story, and a controlling share in ENSURE, a company that made ghost-breaking equipment and consumables. He retired at forty-six, richer than God.

Unfortunately, he was also crazier than a shithouse rat. Maybe the instability had always been there, or maybe it was the pressures of the job and then the explosive de-repression of having enough money to remake yourself and the world closer to your expectations. I mean, look what that did to Michael Jackson.

I met him once?Steiner, I mean, not Jacko?and it was a scary thing to see. By that time I?d already read a couple of his books, and I?d come to respect (although not actually to like) the cold, clever mind that was on show in them. But when I got to talk to him, it was as though that mind had deliquesced and then solidified again in a different, largely nonfunctional shape.

It was at some weird party or other in a London hotel that was hosting a conference on Perspectives on the After-Life. Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, an exorcist-turned-academic who?d taught me a lot of the tricks of the trade when I was still very wet behind the ears, had blagged a ticket for me and insisted that I come along: the chance of meeting Steiner had swung it.

From what I can still recall of that conversation, he was already well on the way to becoming the surly, crazed recluse that everybody now remembers him as. He talked about the dead and the living as though they were two armies in the field, with himself as some kind of commander marshaling the forces of the warm-blooded. He looked the part, too, I have to admit: spirit-level straight, unyielding as stone, his gray hair cropped close to his scalp. And if he were a general, he seemed to feel that the exorcists were his crack troops: an elite commando unit trained to take anything the enemy could throw at us. The enemy? I hedged at first, sure that there was some subtlety I was missing, but there wasn?t. ?The dead,? he said. ?And the undead. The ones that want to supplant us, and take the world away from us.?

Even back then, when I was blasting unquiet spirits without qualm or question, I still couldn?t see the situation quite like that. Apart from anything else, it only seemed to lead in one direction, to a door marked ?abandon hope.? Out of some halfhearted attempt to keep my half of the conversation up, I asked him how it was possible to fight a war where any casualty in your own forces became a recruit for the other side.

?What do you mean?? he demanded, frowning at me over a glass of champagne, which he was clutching tightly enough to make me nervous.

I made the best fist of it that I could, which wasn?t all that good because most of my concentration was tied up in looking round for an escape route: this was as big a disillusionment as finding out that the reason Father Christmas smells like Johnnie Walker is because he?s your dad in a fake beard and a red mac. ?I mean we?re all going to die, Mr. Steiner. If the dead do hate the living, they don?t have to fight us: they only have to wait. In the end, everyone goes the same way, right? If life is an army, everyone deserts sooner or . . .?

His glare made me falter into silence. I knew damn well, looking into those mad, uncompromising baby blues, that if we had been in a war zone he?d have had me shot right there and then for bringing aid and comfort to the enemy. Since we were at a party, he didn?t have that option: he was visibly weighing up alternatives.

?Fuck off and kill yourself, then,? he growled at last. Then he turned and walked away, shouldering aside some of the great and good who?d gathered around so that they could be seen and photographed with him.

After that, the stages of his decline were charted with endless fascination by the ghost- hunting community. From seeing himself as general and commander in chief, he came more and more to see himself as a prominent target. If the ghosts?and their servants and satraps, the were-kin, the demons, and the zombies?were engaged in a war against the living, then sooner or later they were bound to try to strike at the people who were leading the campaign on the other side: the exorcists. He started to take elaborate precautions for his own safety, and the first?highly publicized?step he took was to buy a yacht. Since the dead can?t usually cross running water, Steiner had decided that he?d make sure he was surrounded by running water most of the time, and only step onto dry land when there was no way of avoiding it. He suggested in a couple of interviews that this might be the lifestyle of the future. He imagined itinerant populations, floating cities built on decommissioned aircraft carriers and oil tankers.

But crazy though he was, I guess he realized somewhere along the way that the idea of relocating whole urban populations onto houseboats would be a hard sell. Something else?some other measure, achievable but effective?was going to be needed, so that when the inevitable assault came and the evil dead overran the land the living would have somewhere to retreat to. A visionary to the last, he proposed a series of safe houses, ingeniously designed, which would stand ?with hallowed ground to all four sides, behind elemental ramparts of earth and air and water.? Houses built on this design, he said, would blind the eyes and blunt the forces of the dead. The first design used actual moats: the later ones had double walls with the water flowing between them invisibly in plumbed-in metal tanks. The earth and air and fire parts I?m not so sure about. He sent the designs to the housing departments of all the London boroughs, and offered his services free as an adviser if they?d commit themselves to a building program.

As far as I know, none of the boroughs ever responded?not even with a po-faced ?your letter has been received and taken under advisement.? Steiner raged impotently; even with his millions, there was no way he could do this on his own.

There was an upside to his madness, though: he still saw the exorcists?especially the London exorcists?as his boys, his special charges. He gave Bourbon Bryant the premises that became the Oriflamme, because he loved the idea of ghostbusters meeting up and sharing ideas (he was probably also working on the principle that there?s strength in numbers). And when he died, he left his yacht to a trust with Bryant as the first president, changing its name in his will to the Thames Collective. Money from his estate would be diverted to keeping it seaworthy and in a reasonable state of repair, and any London exorcist would have the right to live there at need for as long as they liked, with berths being strictly rotated if too many people took up the offer at the same time.

To begin with, it looked like that might actually be a problem: a whole lot of people liked the idea of living for free in a luxury yacht. But the Collective wasn?t as luxurious as all that: to increase the number of berths, Steiner had