Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

These ghosts, anyway, were mostly afraid and mostly confused. Their deaths were variations on a theme: arbitrary, painful, early, undeserved, uncomprehended, lingering, undignified, lonely, pointless. They were exactly the type — if you can talk about the psychology of the dead with a straight face — to retain the trace of their injuries and diseases in their risen forms. So I was looking at, and stepping through, a standing exhibition of all the horrible things that can go wrong with the human body both when it’s damaged from outside and when it rises against itself.

Some of them tried to talk to me, their voices thin and high and warped by a distance that wasn’t purely physical. I ignored them and kept on walking. There was nothing I could do for them, apart from playing them the short, sharp tune that would push them off the rim of oblivion — and I don’t do that kind of thing any more unless my back is really to the wall, for the simple reason that I don’t know where I’m sending them. I’m a Pied Piper who learned somewhere down the line to see the rats’ point of view.

Following the signs I climbed a stone staircase enclosing the wrought-iron gridwork of a Victorian elevator, coming out onto a wide landing whose quarry-stone tiles were ancient enough to be dished in the middle.

Unfortunately there were two intensive-care wards, one to each side at the head of the stairs — and each of them was behind a set of double doors that bore a chrome lozenge at chest height on the left-hand side: a digital combination lock, known among professional thieves as a yes-or-no.

The riddle of which ward Kenny had been admitted to was solved immediately by the uniformed constable standing guard on the door to my right. That just left the two obstacles — the lock and the copper. Maybe I could use the one to fend off the other, but only if I got the timing right.

I headed right on over to the door, trying to keep the air of brisk certainty up and running and facing down Mister Plod with a stare of cold superiority.

‘Evening,’ I said.

‘Evening, sir,’ he answered. His gravelly voice matched his shoe-leather skin and brick-shithouse build. He looked like someone who’d jumped a plane out of Zimbabwe just ahead of a bunch of pitchfork-wielding farm workers. He also looked as though he didn’t like me very much, based on first appearances, and was prepared to hate me on further acquaintance. If Basquiat had stationed him here, maybe he was one of her two ‘questionable use of force’ gents. I looked forward cordially to never finding out.

I only locked stares with him for a moment: then I turned my attention to the lock. It was a Baring Streamline-D, which meant it had a four-digit key and three factory defaults. And I used to know what they were, right off the top of my head, but that was back in my student days when stage magic and escapology were the only things I could get serious about. These days I have to rely on the mnemonic, invented by my sensei Tom Wilke, the Banbury Bandit:

Old fox speaks true.

‘Stuffed turkey never flew.’

So fuck this zoo.

Which if you take the initial letters of each word translates into 1563, 7294 and 6530 (the z standing for zero).

Digital locks are called yes-or-nos because unless you’re big on logic gates and home electronics, whether or not you can pick them comes down to a single question: did whoever put the lock in bother to change the factory default setting?

Trusting to the morally deficient saint or angel who watches over the affairs of exorcists and career criminals, I keyed in the first combination. I was already pulling on the door handle as I hit the fourth digit, and since it didn’t yield I belted into the second combination without a pause.

7294 did the trick. The door came free with a metallic quack. Giving the constable an amiable nod, I walked on in. He shot me a look, as though he was only an inch or two away from asking me who the fuck I was, but common sense dictated that if I had the combo I was someone who had a right to be there. I pulled the door to behind me before he could pull on that skein of logic far enough for it to unravel.

A quick glance around me showed an empty nurses’ station in a short well-lit hall with four doors leading off. The only room I could see into from where I was standing was definitely a ward, with at least one occupied bed. The incumbent was invisible except for a bony outcrop of shoulder sheathed in drab beige NHS pyjamas. The same kind, probably, that your grandad and mine wore in their dying hours.

There was a sink just beside the door, underneath a poster exhorting anyone who came in to wash their hands thoroughly with the disinfectant soap provided. I took the opportunity to have a good scrub-up, partly because it would look right if the cop was watching me through the reinforced glass but mainly because — like a surgeon — what I was hoping to do here did involve some physical contact. Kenny might have been a legendary shit when we were kids, but I didn’t want to polish him off with staphylococcus aureus after he’d survived having his throat cut.

Then I walked to the nearest door and peered inside. There were four beds, one of which had screens around it. From behind the screens a female voice, deep and vibrant, was conducting one half of a cheerful conversation: the other half consisted of silences of varying length.

‘That’s right, Malcolm. Hold your bum up off the covers, just for a second. Easy. Easy. Lovely, there you go. You can rest now. And we’re going to do the same on the other side, but I’ll let you get your breath back. Does it hurt? No? Good. If it hurts, you tell me . . .’

The other three beds were all occupied by silent, sleeping men, one of whom had his face wrapped in bandages from hairline to chin, with only a breathing tube protruding from where his mouth ought to be. The chart beside the door told me that he wasn’t a Seddon, and neither was anyone else in the room.

Or the next. Or the one after that.

It was the last room where I found Kenny, or at least his name on the door. It was there alongside another name — H. Piper — but at first glance only one bed seemed occupied. It was the nearest one, and there was no way that the man in it was Kenny. He was at least thirty years too old, for one thing, and for another he was black — as far as I could tell from the small areas of skin that were visible in between the bandages and the drip-feeds and the strips of micropore tape that were keeping all the dermal sensors in place.

I went back outside and read the list again in case either of the names had been crossed off. They hadn’t. Hurriedly, conscious that the nurse could appear at any moment, I scanned the room again. This time around I realised that the bed diagonally opposite me in the far corner of the room wasn’t empty at all: it was just that the guy lying in it was so skinny that he barely altered the line of the covers.

With one instinctive, pointless look over my shoulder, I slipped back inside and crossed the room. Looking down at the figure in the bed, I almost winced.

If this was Kenny Seddon, the years had kicked the living shit out of him. He’d been a big lad, and he’d grown into a big man — but right now the bigness was wrapped around nothing but skin and bone. The shape of his skull was unmistakably visible under the sallow skin of his face — one side of his face, anyway, because the other was mostly covered by a taped-on wound dressing — and where his badly fitting pyjamas lay indiscreetly open his ribs showed in a series of yellow-white knots like clenched knuckles. He looked like a tent that had collapsed in on itself when someone kicked the ridge pole away. And his laboured, irregular breathing suggested that someone was still working away from the inside to get the tent back up again, but making no headway.