A brief silence.
‘Your great-nephew. Yes.’
Another pause. I tensed, opening my mouth to get my explanation in as soon as she hit the panic button.
She put the phone down and gave me a polite smile.
‘I’ll show you the way,’ she said.
With a slight feeling of unreality, I followed her as she left her post and led the way down a short corridor to a flight of stairs. ‘Room 17,’ she said, pointing. ‘First floor. It’s not locked. Can I bring you up a cup of tea, Mr Castor?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No thanks. I’ll be fine.’
I went on up, passing a very old woman who was also climbing the stairs, at a more deliberate pace. She did it by assembling both feet on each step before launching an attempt on the next one. I was going to offer her a hand, but she was muttering under her breath, and when I got close enough to hear the words, I realised she was swearing to herself. ‘Fuck. Shit. Bastard. Cunt. Fuck . . .’ I didn’t want to break her concentration, which was scarily intense, so I squeezed round her and kept going. When I got to the top, she was still swearing and still climbing.
I knocked on the door of room 17, then opened it and went on in. The door opened onto a hall the size of a toilet cubicle, with a mirrored wall on the left and a row of three coat hooks on the right. The only door was facing me. It was half-open, but I couldn’t see anything beyond it because the room was completely dark. The institutional smell of boiled cabbage and floral disinfectant was strong, but something that was sharper, nastier and not so easy to identify lay under it, half-submerged like an alligator in a mud wallow.
‘Mr Moulson?’ I said in a conversational tone. The space was so confined, there didn’t seem to be any need to raise my voice.
‘Tell me why you’re here, you snot-nosed little fuck,’ someone said in the darkened room. The voice was slow and quavering, with a brittle click behind the words, a harmless-little-old-man voice that conjured up an image of the ageing, amiably bumbling Albert Einstein. The dislocation between the voice and the words – or for that matter between the voice and the grim, deadpan threat of the tone – was absolute. ‘And you’d better not bullshit me. I’ve got my hand on the emergency cord, but that’s the least of your worries. The first time you lie to me, you’ll be crying blood, you understand?’
‘My name is Castor,’ I said. ‘I’m—’
‘I already know your fucking name. Think I’m senile? She told me your name on the phone, didn’t she? London boy. Did some good work six or seven years back, but from what I heard you were never as good as you thought you were. Why can’t you people leave me alone? What, you get yourself in over your head or something? Figure you’ll pick my brains? Fuck off back to Babylon, baby boy.’
My brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders right then, but at that point the starter motor caught and the engine at least turned over. ‘You’re an exorcist,’ I said.
‘You’re telling me you didn’t know that?’ Moulson snarled. ‘So what, you’re just out here on a frigging day trip or something? Talk sense. I mean, right now. Talk some fucking sense, or else close the door behind you.’
I drew a deep breath. ‘I heard about what happened to you,’ I said slowly. The truth seemed to be the only option, because I didn’t know what Moulson’s agenda was, what would tickle his fancy, and what would be like a flicked towel to his wrinkled arse. ‘The same thing happened to my friend Rafael Ditko. He picked up a passenger. I want to know how you got yourself clean, because I’m hoping maybe the same trick will work with him.’
There was a long, pregnant silence from the darkness beyond the door.
‘Tell me its name,’ Moulson said at last, his voice barely a whisper. ‘Who’s he got?’
‘Asmodeus,’ I said.
Moulson laughed – a harsh, unlovely sound. ‘He doesn’t have a chance,’ he said. ‘Go on home, ghost-breaker. You came here on a fool’s errand.’
‘So what you did,’ I persisted, ‘it can’t be applied to a major demon? It only works with small fry?’ I put a mocking edge in my voice. If I couldn’t reason with the old bastard, maybe I could at least goad him into giving something away. ‘Here I thought you’d done something unique, and it turns out you just swatted a fly. Okay. Maybe I am wasting my time at that.’
There was another dry laugh, like twigs breaking underfoot, then Moulson’s voice came out of the shadows again. ‘That’s what I said, isn’t it? I’ve got nothing to give you. But . . . a fly? I was possessed by Zohruen, son. Look him up when you leave here.’ A new tone had entered the voice now, a note of anger, or defiance. ‘His element is earth. I was rotting, breaking down into mulch. You think I had it easy? What I did, I did with fingers that were peeling away to the bone. I did with my teeth falling out of my jaw. So don’t you fucking tell me I had it easy.’
‘Then why won’t you let someone else get the benefit of your expertise?’ I demanded. ‘You want to sit there in the dark congratulating yourself because you got away clean, while someone else goes through what you went through, and maybe goes down under it? You made a living out of this, Moulson. Are you angling for me to pay you, is that it? You looking to get a consultancy fee?’
‘I don’t want your money.’ I hadn’t realised I was shouting until he yelled back at me. The effort cost him. He broke into a spasm of dry coughing that lasted for the best part of a minute. ‘Fuck you . . . and your money . . .’ he spluttered out when he could speak again. ‘I want to be left in peace, that’s all. I want all of you people to just tear my name out of your fucking books and stay away from me. I’ve got nothing to give you. What I did wasn’t even worth the fucking effort. I should have died back there, and got it over with. Turn on the light, you smug little prick. It won’t even cost you a penny to see this freak show.’
The skin on the back of my neck prickled, but I stepped forward over the threshold. My hand groped for the light switch at the left of the door, found a cord dangling there instead. I tugged it and the light came on: a single bare bulb, painfully bright, hanging without a shade in the centre of the room.
With the heavy curtains closed, the room seemed claustrophobically small, just a cubicle really, with a bed and a table and a single chair. I thought of Jovan Ditko’s cell back at Irdrizovo. Moulson at least had a carpet, although its red and orange exploding-sun pattern recalled the worst excesses of the 1970s.
The chair had a wing back and was upholstered in brick-red leatherette, darkened here and there by the sweat-and-scuff smear marks of a couple of difficult decades. Moulson was sitting in the chair, his head slumped sideways against one of the wings, his hands resting limply on its arms. He was in shirt and trousers, his feet bare. The shirt hung open all the way down, I guess because it was a little early in the day to worry about that level of fine detail.
He was in the same colour range as the chair, more or less, his skin flushed an unhealthy red that darkened locally to brown and even black. His face was like a Maori mask that had been tossed off quickly for the tourist trade, with no real feel for what a face ought to look like. Gnarled little bosses stood out from his flesh like rivets on a cast-iron bucket, stretching in two lines from his temples to the bridge of his nose, then flaring out again across his cheeks and down under his chin. There were similar bumps on the backs of his hands where they gripped the chair arm – straight lines of them radiating from wrist to knuckles. His chest, sunken in on his ribs like the sails of a becalmed ship, bore a horizontal line of swellings across the collar bone and two diagonals sweeping in towards the nipples on either side. There was also a little cluster of them to the left of his chest, where his heart would be.
Every one of the swollen bumps rose out of a nest of old scar tissue, which was what gave his skin its piebald look. There was scarcely an inch of his body that didn’t bear the asymmetrical spoor of old, unimaginable excavations.