Part of the problem was that the law was still running to catch up with the way the world had changed. Vast edifices of legislation had been carved out over centuries to protect the rights of the living. Now we had the dead and the undead to worry about too, and the courts were barely scratching the surface of what that meant. If you died and then came back, either in the flesh or as a ghost, who owned your house, your money, your CD collection? Were you still married to the wife or husband you’d had before? Did you have the right to expect them to welcome you with open arms when you didn’t have a pulse any more? Could you give evidence in court? Maybe finger the guy who’d murdered you, or sue the doctor who’d botched your heart op?
The test cases were being brought, and the questions were being asked in the parliaments of the world. In a few years’ time, there might be all sorts of legal restraints on what someone like Jenna-Jane could get away with. For now, a
We descended to the ground floor. ‘This is mostly therapy and interview suites,’ Gil said.
‘Interrogation rooms,’ I translated.
‘If you like.’
I didn’t. But as we walked along the main drag, my death-sense picked up the faint echo of a familiar tune.
‘We take security pretty seriously,’ Gil was saying. ‘Especially here and in the basement levels. There are alarm pulls in every room and every twenty feet along the corridors. The CCTV hook-ups have a hundred-per-cent overlap, and they’re monitored in real time by a team of three. Or they will be, once we’re up and running. There are weapons lockers on this floor and the one above, equipped with Mace and tasers and pepper sprays.’
‘Who provides the muscle?’ I asked. ‘Does J-J order in? They look like Nazi stormtroopers.’
‘They’re not regular hospital security, if that’s what you mean,’ Gil grunted. ‘Use your sense, Castor. You know what we get coming through here. How long do you think the average retired store detective would last against a
He had a point, but again I was aware of what he wasn’t saying: that the nature of Jenna-Jane’s work called for more serious and more unscrupulous muscle than a regular security firm would be likely to countenance. Judging from the look of the guys I’d seen at the front desk, they straddled the bruised and tender line that separates private cops from mercenaries.
Gil was still talking – something about the locks and the pass codes – but his words were drowned out as that elusive sense became stronger with each step. Finally I stopped in front of a heavy windowless door with a keypad lock. A sign on the door read NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS, and another, below that, WITH ESCORT ONLY.
Gil walked on, then looked back at me impatiently. ‘What?’ he said.
I pointed at the door. ‘I was thinking I might pop in and say hello,’ I said.
‘To who?’
‘To Rosie Crucis. This is where you’ve got her stashed, isn’t it?’
By way of answer, Gil walked back to join me and tapped the NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS sign with the knuckle of his index finger.
‘So authorise me,’ I suggested.
‘Eat me,’ Gil counter-offered. That sounded like an impasse to me.
We walked on, rounded a few corners and found ourselves in a wider corridor. But the main drag ended in a huge vault-like metal door which at first glance seemed to have more hazchem warnings on it than the staff canteen at Sellafield. At second glance it was obvious that they weren’t hazchem warnings at all; they were wards of the pentagram variety, stamped onto steel, painted in high-contrast colours and riveted to the metal of the door. They were all stay-nots, carrying in a dozen dead languages their many playful variations on the theme ‘One more step and you’re deader than you already were.’
The door had a whole lot of locks too – a keypad like Rosie’s door, a card-scan lock and two high-end ASSA Abloys. Gil unlocked them one by one, then turned to me with his hand on the bare steel pull-bar that the door had by way of a handle.
‘Smell anything?’ he asked me, with a nasty smile on his face.
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘Well, you were so spot on with Rosie,’ he said, ‘I thought you were going to say something.’ He swung the door open, and it hit me. Not a smell; that was just Gil’s way of saying we were in the presence of the dead, and the undead. From the dark space beyond the door a cacophony the like of which I’d never heard before rose up to assault my death-sense.
I took an involuntary step back, and then another, raising a hand in front of my face as though to ward off a physical assault. After the second step, the corridor wall jostled me in the back and there was nowhere else to go. Swallowing hard, I tried to cope with the madness, while Gil watched me with a certain satisfaction.
‘It takes you that way the first time,’ he said. ‘The second time too. Come and take a look.’
He walked ahead of me into the dark, not bothering to look back to see if I was following. It was a taunt, and a challenge. It cost me a real effort to walk into that space behind him, a bigger effort not to clap my hands to my ears in a futile attempt to block out the sounds that weren’t coming in via my ears at all.
We stood on a metal platform, our footsteps echoing like the thudding of a drum in a space much, much larger than a normal room. It was pitch black until Gil threw a lever on the wall just beside the door, and then a couple of dozen spots came up, stabbing down from above us to illuminate a vast cement-grey bunker.
Gil crossed to a railing, leaned against it nonchalantly and looked out. I followed after a couple of seconds, my head still so full of thunderous dissonance that I could barely isolate Gil’s voice – the only real sound in the psychic tumult.
‘This is all new,’ he said.
Below us was a space like the floor of a vast warehouse, sub-divided not by shelves or storage bins but by multi-storey structures like sturdier versions of the temporary offices that spring up on building sites. These weren’t portakabins though: they were breeze-block ramparts with steel doors but no windows – and the doors were close enough together to give some sense of what the spaces behind them might look like: there’d just about be room to swing a cat, so long as you kept the arc really tight.
Steel steps and walkways connected the blocks, and the spaces in between them – broad corridors with steel-grille floors – were interrupted about every ten feet by chain-link barriers with gates inset. Nobody seemed to be manning these checkpoints, and all the gates were currently open: presumably they slammed shut automatically if one of the cell doors was compromised, to ensure that any occupant who got out of its tomb-with-a-view wouldn’t be able to wander too far.
‘Two hundred and forty cells,’ Gil said, ‘in case you were trying to count. But some of them are two and three-berth. And every single one of them is silver-lined – three hundred thousand square feet of silver sheeting in a one-to-three steel laminate mix that Professor Mulbridge designed personally. You know what that does to the undead and the Hell-kin. This space is actually as large as the entire building. And it didn’t even exist until we acquired the building. That’s how much we’ve got rolling for us now, Castor. You walked out of this operation just as it was getting big.’
The jagged power chords of the dead and undead in their cells below us were still scraping against my nervous system, and my throat dried out in the space of three abortive swallows as I surveyed the bargain- basement Alcatraz. ‘Yeah,’ I croaked. ‘I’m kicking myself.’
Gil turned to look at me with his lip curled.
‘My God,’ he said, ‘why are you still in this business?’
There was no sense wasting any breath answering him.
‘You want to see what we’ve got,’ he asked, ‘or shall we go back upstairs so Professor Mulbridge can fan your face with a damp flannel?’
‘I’m good,’ I said. I turned my back on the screaming room and walked back out through the bunker door into the main corridor. But Gil didn’t follow me, and with the door still open the virtual uproar didn’t stop.
This is the downside of being an exorcist. Our dark-adapted senses let us see an upside-down rainbow where the doubting Thomases see undifferentiated black; but we can’t turn them off. Closing your eyes and covering your ears just doesn’t cut it.
Gil was enjoying my discomfort. He leaned against the doorframe, arms folded, and watched me sweat.
