Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

‘See what you can do,’ Jenna-Jane said. And we went to work.

Praxides worked by going into a trance state, so he immediately closed his eyes and dropped off the map. Elaine Vincent used automatic writing: she took out her sketchbook and started to scribble. I took out my whistle, some other guy started to tap the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other, hitting out a faint, complex rhythm. We all did what we normally did when we wanted to raise and bind a ghost.

And there was a ghost there, all right; but there was something odd about how it felt. The trace was both strong and impossibly faint at the same time. Like walking past a curry house and getting a faint whiff of fresh cardamon: you know that if you open the door your senses will be overwhelmed, and that it’s only the pungency of the raw spice that’s letting it reach you at all through double-skin brickwork and the olfactory static of the street.

We worked on it for a couple of hours, our professional pride very much on the line. At first we couldn’t get it into focus, but then we brainstormed some tricks that we’d never have been able to try if we’d been working separately. The guy with the happy-clappy fingers worked up a counterpoint to my tune, and Elaine drew the patterns of sound that we were creating. We fed in and out of each other’s talents, creating a cat’s cradle of urgent, bullying concentration that opened out from the room in directions we didn’t even have concepts for, let alone names.

It worked, too. The ghost rose sluggishly, aimlessly towards us, like a balloon whose string some kid wandering around down in Hades had accidentally let slip. We trapped her, turned her round, nailed her down and spread her out between us like a butterfly on a board of charged air.

She couldn’t talk, at first: she learned that later. She’d been dead for so long, sleeping for so long in the gutted house of her own bones, she’d forgotten who she was. She mouthed at us meaninglessly, terrified and angry in about equal parts. She pulled away, tightening the strings of our will around her so that every movement just tangled her up more irrevocably.

She was so tiny. A grown woman – a mature woman, scarred by disease and more generally by life itself – the size of a ten-year-old girl. It’s ludicrous, I know: it was obvious already from the trigger materials J-J had provided that we’d be dealing with a very old soul. But somehow actually seeing her brought me up against that harder and more painfully than I’d been expecting. I’m not big on religion, and I’ve never heard of a god whose company I’d be able to stomach for more than the first half of Heaven’s cocktail hour, but all the same this felt like blasphemy. Because she was so small and so frail, it also felt very much like torturing a child.

But I couldn’t just stop playing. Stopping dead in the middle of a tune is like stepping out of a car that’s moving at seventy: a wide range of unpleasant consequences can be taken as a given. So I wound down as smoothly as I could, and everyone else was doing the same thing: landing the mad, terrified, struggling fish into which we’d all dug our separate, several hooks.

Jenna-Jane was ecstatic. She hadn’t expected to get such spectacular results on the first try. Before we could sort out how we felt or discuss what we’d just done, she moved in with a second team: not exorcists but psychics and sensitives trawled up just as eclectically and non-judgementally as our lot had been. We were elbowed out, because our part of the job was done.

I bailed out of the whole Praed Street project soon after that, and cold-shouldered J-J when she tried to tempt me back for a repeat performance. Reading between the lines, a lot of the other exorcists who’d been there that day had the same uneasy feelings of guilt and shame afterwards. She’d never been able to get that much raw talent together in the same room again, and Rosie Crucis remained a one-off.

The name was J-J’s private joke, and it played in some way off the real identity of the ghost we’d summoned – while at the same time preventing that identity from being revealed by a casual comment. That was important, because – to stick with the fishing metaphor – now that Rosie had been landed, J-J had no intention of throwing her back.

The plan was to allow – or maybe induce – Rosie to possess one of the sensitives, so that her ghost would remain anchored in the living world. J-J had laid on as expansive a buffet of psychics as she could manage: both genders, every age and race, every school and belief from classical spiritualist to lunatic-fringe millenarian to ascetic Swedenborgian and foam-flecked Blavatskian.

Rosie confounded expectation and went for J-J herself – lived (for want of a better word) inside her for twenty days and twenty-one nights, by which time J-J was half-dead from migraine and psychosomatic muscular aches. It was a sweet revenge, if that was what it was: but Rosie didn’t know back then who she had to thank for her much-delayed and unexpected resurrection, so it was probably coincidence.

In any case, on the twenty-first day Rosie allowed herself to be decanted into a young man from Cambridge named Donnie Collett, and that was the start of a running-on the-spot relay race that still hasn’t ended. Volunteers from MO units up and down the country, as well as from Philosophy and Theology courses at universities who still haven’t sussed J-J out for what she is, sign up for stints of up to a week at a time, channelling Rosie and providing her a fleshly receptacle so that the Praed Street ontologists can continue to push the envelope when it comes to our knowledge of life and death and the points where they hold hands across the wall.

And then there’s an entirely different support group: the people who come in to talk to Rosie and keep her mind engaged. Being dead, she can’t sleep: the person who’s hosting her sleeps, and typically wakes up feeling as refreshed and energised as if they’ve had a week at a health spa. Rosie herself needs more or less constant mental stimulation: and since J-J has categorically refused to allow her out of the unit that stimulation all has to be provided on-site. She watches a lot of DVDs (there’s an embargo on live TV), reads a lot of books, and talks endlessly to anyone who’ll listen – with a digital recorder on permanent RECORD in the background.

I’ve been part of that support group, off and on, for a good few years now. Maybe I felt like I needed to apologise for my part in bringing Rosie back up from the dark without asking first: but I also enjoyed her company, and sometimes she made a useful sounding board. Whoever she’d been in life (she claimed not to remember) she’d had a mind like a straight-edge razor. Death had done nothing except rot away the sheath.

But I’d always timed my visits for when Jenna-Jane was away from the unit on one of her lecture tours, or scaring up funds from charities with loosely worded charters. Tonight, I knew from my moles on the inside, she was on-site; so tonight the only way to get to Rosie was to go through J-J.

And the first problem was getting to see her. The place was looking more like a fortress than ever, with an actual guard post now on the main doors where I had to state my business and then wait for authorisation to come down from on high. Then, as I walked along the hallways with their familiar smell of long-departed urine, I noticed that there were alarm buttons labelled with short alphanumeric strings. A notice alongside each one reminded all passersby that a failure to observe containment protocols would result in immediate dismissal, and that in the event of a containment breach floating security staff should converge on the site where the alarm was given while all other personnel went directly to their assigned assembly points. It all sounded like the worst of my memories of Butlin’s Skegness, only with slightly less razor wire.