I was starting to lose the feeling in the tips of my fingers. I had no idea what stops I was pressing, what notes I was sounding. My chest felt impossibly constricted, as though it might shut down at any moment and stop the flow of air across the whistle’s mouthpiece.
The thing moved towards me, leisurely but with a heavy weight of purpose.
I tried to back away, but my body didn’t really exist here and it didn’t even try to respond to the nerveless impulse. I was just a double handful of stiff, arthritic fingers groping along the cold metal of an object whose purpose I was starting to forget: a halting bellows blowing air over a spark I couldn’t see.
I took the tune out into a wild cadenza — or at least I tried to, but I’d lost the feeling for it now. Playing on autopilot is a lost cause, ultimately. And it looked like I was one, too.
The unseen thing crouched to spring. How did I know, when I couldn’t fucking see it? Because I was tracking its voice through the muffled air — a diachronic line graph expressing an equation whose solution was my spilt intestines.
I blew a fingernails-on-blackboard discord — the last shot in my armoury. Sometimes it stops zombies and
Its hot, fetid breath was in my face, and there was a hideously suggestive sound — a sound like knives being stropped on a thick leather belt. I tried to flinch back, and couldn’t even do that.
So I did something else. Since my hands were the only part of me that could still move, I punched straight forward with both of them, the whistle still gripped between them, and they made contact with something that was moving fast towards me. In fact, they did more than make contact: they sank, forearm-deep, into a rushing, blood-warm mass. A jolt of pure agony shot through me: a pain that was to the twinges of last night’s beating what crack cocaine is to Coca-Cola.
The thing’s own speed and strength carried me backwards. The darkness broke into bright staccato fragments of light and sound. There was a moment when I was weightless in a booming void, my thoughts spilling out of my head like blood as I turned towards a distant pinprick of light — attuned to its feeble radiance like a sunflower on Pluto.
Then I was falling out of the chair onto the ward’s tiled floor, with as much momentum as if I’d been pitched out of a moving car.
‘Castor!’
It was Nurse Ryall’s voice, and Nurse Ryall’s hands on my forehead, stopping me from smashing my brains out as I spasmed. Every muscle in my body was convulsing at once, and I could taste my own blood in my mouth. I was fighting for breath but the band of pain across my chest made breathing almost impossible. I was lapping air with my tongue, drinking it in agonising sips.
‘Castor, it’s all right! It’s all right!’
It was, eventually, although the violent tremors running through me felt like small electric shocks. As they subsided, they left behind an enormous lethargy and lack of volition: a feeling that the only way I was ever going to move again was if someone rolled me down a grassy bank into a ditch. Nurse Ryall took my pulse and said soothing things: I could tell that from the tone of her voice, although the words themselves were just sounds. She wiped the bloody froth off my face where I’d bitten deep into my tongue. She helped me into a sitting position when I seemed to be capable of dealing with it. And the first question she asked, although I could see she was brimming with a million others, was ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ She was waving just the one in front of my eyes to see how they tracked it.
‘One,’ I said thickly. ‘Index. Right. Dark pink nail varnish.’
‘Fuchsia. What day is it?’
‘Tuesday.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Currently? Felix Castor.’
Nurse Ryall smiled in spite of herself — but sadly she also disentangled her body from mine, correctly judging that mine was sufficiently recovered now to go solo. She stood up and brushed off her uniform. What is it about nurses’ uniforms that makes men fantasise about them? Mostly when you meet a nurse both your charisma and your libido are at their lowest ebb.
‘So did you get anywhere?’ she demanded, as I got up slowly and carefully on Slinky-spring legs. The footboard of Kenny’s bed was called into service.
‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘I got somewhere.’ But I didn’t make any attempt to say where. That night-black
‘And what is it? Is it . . . what you said? Some kind of shared possession?’ She had trouble getting the word out, but she did it anyway. I like a woman who doesn’t flinch from absolute madness.
I nodded slowly. I would have nodded vigorously but I was afraid my head would fall off. ‘I’m nearly certain,’ I said.
‘Then you can deal with it?’
And that brought us to the crunch. I made a noncommittal gesture.
‘I mean . . . that’s what you do, isn’t it? You said you were an exorcist.’
She had me there: I did say that. It’s even still true, up to a point. But there were a number of reasons why that didn’t immediately translate into ultra-macho demonslaying.
The first is that demons are mostly pretty damn hard to slay. Human ghosts are easy, most of the time. You get the sense of them, the measure of them, by staying in their proximity for a few minutes, hours or days — the precise time varied from job to job, and from one ghostbuster to another — and then you did whatever it was that you did: the peculiar schtick that channelled your power. With me it was music, but everyone’s got their thing. If you do it right, then when you’ve finished the ghost is gone: permanently, irrevocably gone, and nobody (despite what they may tell you) has any idea where to.
And demons — demons are different again, mostly because they know how to fight back. Demons are sensitised to exorcisms, to the point where even the preliminary rituals shrill out to them across enormous distances like a police siren. Probably there’s a Darwinian explanation for that: the demons that lacked this sensitivity were the ones that went under. The ones that are left, by contrast, have both a certain level of resistance to an exorcist’s patternings and a tendency to counter-attack: they’ve been known to back-navigate the psychic trail like a shark following a blood-spoor, until they find the exorcist and stop the spell in progress by, say, eating his brain.
But the other element in the mix here is the exorcist himself, and my feelings on the subject underwent a bit of a revision a while back. I started to wonder where it was the ghosts went to when we dispatched them so casually — a question I should maybe have been asking way back when I performed my first exorcism on my own sister. Belatedly, my itchy trigger finger got a little bit arthritic, and I made a decision not to perform exorcisms on demand. I take each case on its own merits these days, as you’ve maybe seen. If a ghost is genuinely dangerous, I’ll bind it or even banish it and pocket the cheque. For demons, excluding personal friends and acquaintances, my standards are even lower. But — call it a weakness, or an eccentricity — I like to know both who and what I’m dealing with these days before I get out the bell, book and candle. I don’t empty the whole clip into every room as I kick the door down: that’s for amateurs and idiots.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, by way of abridging all this angst and introspection into soluble form. ‘I need to find out more about what this thing is — and how it’s tied up with Kenny.’
Petra seemed to find this answer unsatisfactory. ‘Through the boy,’ she said, bluntly. ‘Mark. If that’s what
