It was only incomprehension that saved me from falling myself. It took a couple of seconds for the movement below me to resolve itself into coherent shapes, and a couple of seconds more for my mind to process those shapes into meaning.
There were people moving around at the bottom of the pool, lots of them. They were visible by their own faint light, like so many Chinese lanterns burning under the water. Some wore armour. Others wore long, pale gowns that left their arms bare. All had sandals on their feet. One carried a short staff like a badge of office, which he brandished emphatically as he talked. And he was talking a lot: to the armoured soldiers, to another man dressed almost identically, to a woman whose long black hair was held back by a comb. They listened respectfully, all eyes on him as he gestured, turned, gestured again.
It was a convocation of ghosts – a caucus, a parliament of the dead – and it was impossible on a great many levels. But why did the sight of it fill me with such dread? Why was it suddenly impossible to draw a breath?
Trudie struggled free from my grip and backed away from the water’s edge, throwing up her hands as though to protect herself against some physical attack. I would have been happy to do the same thing, but I couldn’t move. Darkness was seeping in again from the edges of my vision, bringing with it an incandescent panic that swept away thought, deactivated muscles.
It was coming from above, I realised suddenly. It was hanging in the air over my head, and it was descending: falling around and over me like sand pouring into the lower half of an hourglass, burying me a grain at a time.
I tried to think through the fear, and then I tried to listen through it, which was even harder. This thing, whatever it might be, was dead, and it had an imprint, an essence that I could hear with my death-sense. It was almost drowned out by the screaming of my nerves, but it was there: the suggestion of pattern, of coherent form. If I had my whistle in my hands, I could start to play it. I’d have the beginnings of an exorcism.
Forcing my hands to move, I groped inside my coat, found my whistle on the third try and hauled it out. It slipped from my half-paralysed fingers, but I groped, flailed, caught it again before it fell. I pressed it to my lips and blew a note – a random, forlorn, pointless note, but it was something just to have made a sound. My fingers moved on the stops, and the next note crept a little closer to a place that meant something. I elided it into a phrase, unlovely and shrill.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Trudie’s hands move. Then she raised them in front of her face and the spider’s web of lines stretched out between them was dimly visible in the faint light from the pool. A cat’s cradle. She was working with me, bolstering my patterning with her own. It gave me strength, and the strength became music, still ham-fisted and painful to hear, but elbowing at the fear and pushing it away on one side and then the other. It became possible to think.
‘Castor!’ Trudie panted.
‘I’m with you,’ I snapped, taking my mouth away from the whistle as briefly as I could. ‘Move!’
We backed towards the arch, like two unwary picnickers who’d blundered into a minefield. Trudie wove her hands through forms that looked as though they had names like the two-headed cow and how to sever your thumb, and I supplied the music. I got one last glimpse of the ghosts at the bottom of the pool. Ignoring us, ignoring the pall of dread, they continued their lofty and animated discussion.
With each step we took, the fear lifted a little more. When we reached the archway, the feeling had diluted to the point where it was only a knot in my bowels where previously the knot had taken in my entire body. Trudie shuddered – an involuntary shrug of her whole body, like a dog shaking itself dry after climbing out of a river – then she turned and fled for the stairs. I was a negligible fraction of a second behind her.
But some wordless communication passed between us in the reception area, and we forced ourselves to slow down to walking pace. When we reached the turn of the stairs and ascended back into Gil McClennan’s field of vision, we were walking at something like normal strolling speed. Gil’s face fell. He was obviously hoping for something a lot more dramatic and demeaning. It was a real pleasure to disappoint him.
‘So,’ Gil said. ‘That was Super-Self.’
Perhaps because we hadn’t come screaming back up the stairs with our nerve broken and our trousers fouled, he seemed to feel the need to play it as cool as he possibly could. Leaning against one of the arches at the westernmost end of Covent Garden Market, which was where we’d retreated to, he rolled a cigarette one-handed, stuck it into the corner of his mouth and carried on talking around it as he lit up.
‘It’s a new operation. Just opened last year. The building was offices, previously. And before that it was a haberdasher’s or something, back to when it was first built in around 1901. Nothing out of the ordinary. No ghost stories or unsolved crimes. Nobody died on the premises, as far as we know.’
He exhaled smoke that smelled of menthol and wet socks. Trudie leaned a little back, away from the primary impact area.
‘Some time around the end of May,’ Gil went on, not deigning to notice, ‘the current owners contacted Professor Mulbridge, looking to get the building disinfected. They’d opened six months before that and hit the wall pretty fast. Reasonable volume of sign-ups, but everybody cancelled as soon as they could. No returns, almost no new business. The atmosphere, people said. The place had a really bad vibe.’
‘So?’ Trudie demanded. Our close encounter with the thing in the swimming pool had left her somewhat short on patience.
‘So the professor sent one of her ghost-breakers over. David Franklin. She had better people available, but this didn’t seem like anything particularly difficult or dangerous. The only odd thing about it was that nobody had seen an actual ghost. They just didn’t like the place. It made them feel uneasy.’
‘There are ghosts,’ I pointed out. ‘And uneasy doesn’t come close to describing what we felt down there.’
‘Yeah,’ Gil agreed in a detached tone. ‘It’s getting stronger. Franklin didn’t see any ghosts either, but he felt something, so he did a standard exorcism. Old school
‘The ghosts,’ I said. ‘When did they turn up?’
Gil scratched his chin. ‘Couple of weeks later. We’d made two more attempts to exorcise it, and they’d both been fiascos. The third man up was Etheridge, and he had to be carried out on a stretcher. You’ve seen what he’s like, right? Well, that’s all new. Before he went down into that basement, he was pretty solid.’
‘Why didn’t you warn us?’ Trudie demanded grimly.
Gil looked away, shrugged, then met Trudie’s gaze again with cool indifference. ‘I was interested in your first impressions, ’ he said. ‘If I’d briefed you, then you’d have seen what I told you to see. This way . . . you saw it cold. With your own eyes. Got a lot more out of it.’
Trudie’s shoulders were tensed and her eyes were narrowed to slits. She still hadn’t come down from the terror-rush, and Gil’s bullshit was rubbing her up all the wrong ways. ‘You lying sonofabitch,’ she snarled. ‘If you were interested in our impressions, you would have fucking asked.’
Gil dropped his half-smoked cigarette and stubbed it out with his heel. ‘So,’ he said, ‘Ms Pax, what were your impressions?’
She actually looked as though she was going to take a swing at him. Fun though that would have been to see, I stepped in to take the heat. For better or worse, I still needed the help that Jenna-Jane’s team could offer me. If they were at each other’s throats, they’d be able to offer me a whole lot less.
‘My impression is that we’re dealing with two separate phenomena,’ I said, steamrollering over whatever Trudie was starting to say. ‘The big scary one, which is invisible, and the ghosts.’
‘Crap,’ said Gil simply. ‘They’re two aspects of the same thing.’
‘Then why weren’t the ghosts in the mix to start with?’
‘Obviously they were. But there are no rules about this stuff. A lot of people can walk right through a ghost without seeing it. We’re dealing with imperfect observers who may or may not be sensitive across the full range.’
‘Yeah, but also we’re dealing with at least three exorcists. You’re telling me an exorcist could walk into a roomful of ghosts and miss them?’
