But her expression was unhappy, and it was noticeable that she wasn’t telling me that I was a rabid dog who ought to be put down for the good of humanity. I waited her out, and at last she spoke.
‘Can you walk?’ she asked, very quietly.
‘Normally, I’m proficient,’ I said. ‘Tonight, I don’t know, but I’m prepared to give it a shot. What do you fancy? A movie? A Brick Lane curry?’
She didn’t seem to hear the lame joke. ‘Get your dressing gown on, then,’ she instructed me. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’
I threw the covers aside and swung my legs off the bed. Taking my weight on my hands, I touched down on the frigid tiles like Neil Armstrong making his one small step. But then Neil Armstrong was certified drug-free by NASA, and he was only contending with low gravity, whereas gravity seemed to be pulling me in a whole lot of random directions.
‘We haven’t got all night,’ Nurse Ryall said testily.
I stood up with barely a stagger, which I thought deserved at least a short round of applause. My paletot was in the bedside locker. I shrugged it on, to Nurse Ryall’s pained surprise.
‘You’re wearing that?’
‘It’s in right now,’ I muttered, concentrating on my vertical hold. ‘Rat-shit brown is the new black.’
She shook her head in disapproval, turned and strode off without a word towards the door. I followed her, assuming that she was leading the way rather than just giving up on me.
We went along a short corridor lit by fluorescent tubes that seemed agonisingly bright after the subdued lighting in the ward. There were backless benches along one wall where patients sat in some forlorn limbo, either waiting to be seen or just taking a breather somewhere on their personal roads to Calvary. Some of them looked hopefully at Nurse Ryall, as though they thought she might be their guide for the next stage of that journey: but not tonight.
We went out into the open air, across a courtyard where a few vans and a single ambulance were parked, and then back into a different part of the main building. It was darker and older here, and I started to recognise this or that turn in the corridor, this or that loitering spirit. We came to the main staircase: Nurse Ryall looked back once to see if I was following her, then went up. We were going to Kenny’s ward.
The cop on the landing — fortunately not the one I’d met two days ago — gave us a questioning glance as we approached the forbidden door. Nurse Ryall nodded to him, showed her ID and said nothing about me. She entered the code and pulled, but the door stuck for a moment as the lock’s old and cranky wards failed to pull back all the way. The cop took the edge of the jamb and added his own heft to hers: she thanked him politely.
I knew where we were going, but I didn’t know why, so I let Nurse Ryall keep the lead as we crossed the narrow space to the door of Kenny’s ward. There were still just the two beds occupied, Kenny and his roomie both asleep and breathing heavily. Nurse Ryall turned to me with an expectant look on her face.
I hesitated for a moment, glancing around the room. She said she’d show me something, but there was nothing to be seen.
‘What?’ I said.
She made an impatient gesture. ‘Listen.’
I did. Nothing but the rough-edged breathing of the two men that would have been snores if there’d been more strength in their chests to push them out. I was about to say ‘What?’ again, for lack of any better ideas, but then the two men stirred in their sleep and spoke.
It was just the usual half-formed mumble of a dreamer almost but not quite breaching the surface of consciousness. The kind of sound in which you can perceive the melted outlines of words without being able to separate them out or decode them. They ended in a subdued, lip-smacking swallow, a slightly tremulous sigh.
Both men. Together. The same sounds, in perfect synchrony.
13
I swore, very softly, and Nurse Ryall nodded.
But she’d asked me to listen before the men spoke, and now I realised why. I could see it as well as hear it: Kenny’s chest and the other man’s rising and falling in unison, their in-breaths and out-breaths coming at exactly the same time.
With a slight sense of unreality, I looked at the nurse and she looked back at me. There was a strained inquiry in her expression: What does this mean?
‘When did you notice?’ I asked her, ducking the issue just for the moment.
‘Two nights ago.’ Nurse Ryall’s voice was tight, unhappy. ‘You can listen to it for ages and not hear it. Then it just . . . hits you.’
‘Do you have any other patients in here from the Salisbury?’
‘From the what?’
‘From the same postcode. The Salisbury Estate in Walworth.’
She consulted her memory, shook her head doubtfully. ‘I don’t think so. I’d have to look in the admissions book.’
‘Is that up here or somewhere else?’
‘In the shift room. Listen, Mister — sorry, what was your real name again?’
‘Castor. Felix.’
‘What could make them do that? It’s not even possible!’
I crossed the room and picked up the black man’s chart. ‘Women living in the same house will synchronise their periods,’ I said. ‘Not right away, but after a while. Their bodies respond to each other’s hormones. Maybe this is like that — something autonomic that only kicks in after a while.’
‘That explains the breathing. It doesn’t explain the talking in their sleep.’
I looked up at her. ‘Do they do that a lot?’ I asked.
‘What’s a lot? They’ve done it before. Just like that, in chorus. But none of the other duty nurses has heard them do it. I know because I asked every last one of them.’
‘Anything you could make out?’
‘One word, sometimes. It sounds like “more” or “ma”. The rest is just gibberish.’
More? Ma?
‘Mark,’ I suggested.
Nurse Ryall nodded. ‘It could be that. Why?’
‘Because Kenny here –’ I pointed to the other bed ‘had a stepson named Mark who died last year. Fell or jumped off a high building. And it hit Kenny hard — at least, according to some.’
Which explained nothing. I needed more than I had: needed a thread to follow through the maze, but Nurse Ryall had given me all she had. And she was well aware that I hadn’t returned the favour.
‘What is it?’ she demanded. ‘What is it really?’
‘Demonic possession,’ I said, deciding not to beat about the bush.
She gave a pained, incredulous laugh. ‘What, and you’d know?’
‘I’d know. I’ve seen it before.’
‘With two people? Two people at the same time –’ she groped for a phrase ‘hooked up to each other like this?’
‘No,’ I admitted.
‘Well, then–’
‘Last time it was two hundred. The entire congregation of a church in West London. They all caught a dose of the same demon, and they all went out into the night to do unspeakable things to each other and to anyone else they met. I know about this shit, Charge Nurse Petra Ryall, because this shit is what I do for what I satirically call a living. They’re both possessed, and it’s one entity that’s possessing them. I don’t know what, and I don’t know why, but I might have a way of finding out. Is anyone else likely to come in here?’
She stared at me, her face a menagerie of misgivings. ‘At twelve. When the shift changes.’
‘Okay.’ I slid my hand into one of the paletot’s many inside pockets and took out my tin whistle. ‘Watch the door. If that cop makes a move, even if it’s just to scratch his arse, or if anyone else comes along, let me know. You’ll probably need to shake me or punch me in the shoulder or something. I may not hear you if you just whisper. Or even if you shout out.’