Nurse Ryall looked unconvinced, but she nodded.
I turned the chair beside Kenny’s bed to face me and sat down on it the wrong way round: there was no telling how long this would take, and if it dragged on it would be useful to have something to rest my elbows on.
Nurse Ryall watched me with uneasy fascination. ‘You’re going to do an exorcism?’ she asked.
‘I’m going to try,’ I said. Then I shut her out of my mind.
I started to play, random notes shaping themselves quickly into a sort of loose, aimless proto-tune. It was hard at first. It was only the lining of my lung that had been damaged, not the lung itself, but still the sharp pain whenever my chest muscles worked meant that everything cost me more effort than usual.
This part of the gig is like what bats and dolphins do: you throw out a sound and you wait for it to come back to you, subtly changed as it bounces off the world’s various bumps and hollows. And from those changes you work out what the place you’re in looks like: whether it’s high up or low down; what natural hazards there might be; what sort of company you’re keeping.
My death-sense rides the music as a wolf spider rides the wind, trailing a single thread of silk across a thousand miles of ocean. It doesn’t have any volition or direction — not at first — but the music takes it where it needs to go, and in return it shapes the music until the feedback loop that runs through my ears to my brain and on down to my fingers and my pumping lungs narrows and refines the formless feeling into something patterned, perfect, vivid — like hearing your own name softly spoken in a roomful of bellowed arguments.
This is the first stage of the exorcism ritual, known variously as the finding or the summoning. Sometimes it comes quickly, sometimes it’s agonisingly drawn-out, and sometimes it doesn’t come at all. Tonight it was slow but inexorable like the building of a huge wave that towered over me like a wall — a wall I was mirroring in sound, climbing the scale and letting the volume build at the same time.
‘Someone’s going to hear you,’ Nurse Ryall warned, but right then her voice was just another feature of the room that the music bounced off, briefly: a bubble in the flow.
There was something there: behind the room, behind the merely physical space in which I sat and the two wounded men lay. Something was looking in at us from a direction so strange and so nebulous that I couldn’t turn around to meet its gaze. All I could do was keep playing, feeling its contours in the steady rise and rise and rise of the tune. It was coming towards me, and it was coming into focus: a tenuous presence that brought its own echo with it, a shadow with a darker shadow attached.
Then the wave broke over me and the darkness was absolute. I was almost thrown by that — by the suddenness and the force of it, the black slamming down from above and wrapping itself round me with disturbing intimacy. I could still feel the chair underneath me, the cool metal of the whistle between my fingers, but I couldn’t hear anything now except the music I was playing — and rising behind the music the broken rhythm of the two men’s laboured breathing. The world had gone away. I was alone in the dark, the tune my only lifeline.
So I carried on playing, my chest on fire now: there was no other choice.
And as I played, the darkness revealed itself to me: it had within it variations of tone, anfractuosities of depth and texture. It wasn’t a curtain, it was a three-dimensional landscape executed in monotone: vertical and horizontal expanses that I could imagine as cliffs and fields, mountains and plains. I was looking at a black world on which a black sun shone, casting shadows of black on black.
Something within that landscape was staring back at me.
It had some kind of camouflage that didn’t depend on colour, so I couldn’t detect its outlines: only the pressure of its gaze, because an exorcist can always tell when one of the dead or the undead fixes its attention on him. It sat perfectly concealed, watching me without a sound.
And all sound had died now: my fingers were still moving on the stops of the whistle, but the tune I was playing had fallen away on the far side of some shearing blade, leaving me here in this silent immensity.
The hidden thing shifted, very slightly, and the sense of being watched and weighed shifted with it. Time passed, but there was no way for me to measure how much or how little.
Mark? the thing said. Or rather didn’t say, because there was no sound here.
I couldn’t answer. To answer I would have had to stop playing, and some instinct told me that if I did that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back out of this place.
The thing that lived in the darkness growled soft and deep. It didn’t like being ignored. Mark, it said again, and this time it wasn’t a question.
I don’t have him, I thought. He’s dead. He’s already dead.
I was starting to lose the feeling in the tips of my fingers. I had no idea what stops I was pressing, what notes I was sounding. My chest felt impossibly constricted, as though it might shut down at any moment and stop the flow of air across the whistle’s mouthpiece.
The thing moved towards me, leisurely but with a heavy weight of purpose.
Not, it said.
I tried to back away, but my body didn’t really exist here and it didn’t even try to respond to the nerveless impulse. I was just a double handful of stiff, arthritic fingers groping along the cold metal of an object whose purpose I was starting to forget: a halting bellows blowing air over a spark I couldn’t see.
leave
I took the tune out into a wild cadenza — or at least I tried to, but I’d lost the feeling for it now. Playing on autopilot is a lost cause, ultimately. And it looked like I was one, too.
The unseen thing crouched to spring. How did I know, when I couldn’t fucking see it? Because I was tracking its voice through the muffled air — a diachronic line graph expressing an equation whose solution was my spilt intestines.
this
I blew a fingernails-on-blackboard discord — the last shot in my armoury. Sometimes it stops zombies and loup-garous undead in their tracks. Sometimes.
place!
Its hot, fetid breath was in my face, and there was a hideously suggestive sound — a sound like knives being stropped on a thick leather belt. I tried to flinch back, and couldn’t even do that.
So I did something else. Since my hands were the only part of me that could still move, I punched straight forward with both of them, the whistle still gripped between them, and they made contact with something that was moving fast towards me. In fact, they did more than make contact: they sank, forearm-deep, into a rushing, blood-warm mass. A jolt of pure agony shot through me: a pain that was to the twinges of last night’s beating what crack cocaine is to Coca-Cola.
The thing’s own speed and strength carried me backwards. The darkness broke into bright staccato fragments of light and sound. There was a moment when I was weightless in a booming void, my thoughts spilling out of my head like blood as I turned towards a distant pinprick of light — attuned to its feeble radiance like a sunflower on Pluto.
Then I was falling out of the chair onto the ward’s tiled floor, with as much momentum as if I’d been pitched out of a moving car.
‘Castor!’
It was Nurse Ryall’s voice, and Nurse Ryall’s hands on my forehead, stopping me from smashing my brains out as I spasmed. Every muscle in my body was convulsing at once, and I could taste my own blood in my mouth. I was fighting for breath but the band of pain across my chest made breathing almost impossible. I was lapping air with my tongue, drinking it in agonising sips.