With the door closed and locked and the phone disconnected at the wall, I threw off my coat and sat down at the desk. I put my whistle down on my right-hand side, but I wasn’t ready yet to start to play. First I had to remind myself of what I was fishing for.
I touched the doll gingerly, with the tips of my fingers, and pricked up the ears of my soul. Dead Abbie’s sorrow was there again: an endless looped tape of long-ago despair, trapped behind the painted-on smile and the oddly flattened shape that time and circumstances had given to the rag-stuffed body. This time I rode with it for a while longer, paying closer attention to the nuances and the expression. With my left hand, I picked up at the same time the cloisonné hair slide which looked to be of more recent vintage than the doll. It had a different resonance, but still in the same general key of inexpressible sorrow.
After five minutes or so, I set both things down, picked up my tin whistle and put it to my lips.
The opening note was low, and I held it for a long time. A second note followed, equally sustained, but then when you thought it might fade it opened out into a plangent trill that finally kicked the tune into gear. It wasn’t a tune I’d ever heard before, nor one that I was consciously composing as I played. My mind was as passive as I could make it, just resonating with the echoes of Abbie’s misery that were still in my head. I was turning her into music. Describing her in the medium I knew best. Putting out a psychic APB: have you seen this girl?
In spiritualist circles, this kind of thing usually gets called a summoning: but people in my business just call it the magic lasso. It’s the first phase of an exorcism. Before you can send a ghost away, you have to bind it; wrap your will around it like duct tape, although that’s actually a very unpleasant image and I wish I hadn’t thought of it. In any case, I was telling Abbie, wherever she was, that she had to dance to my tune now. I was telling her to come to heel.
There were two good reasons why this might not work. The first was that I just didn’t know her well enough. I’d never met her, in life or in death, and so the music was incomplete – just an unfinished sketch in sound, based on the emotions I’d sensed in the things she used to own. Those emotions were strong, but they were only a single piece from a huge jigsaw puzzle: what I was doing was analogous to trying to intuit the entire picture from that one piece, without the benefit of the box lid.
The second reason was that she could well be too far away in any case. No summoning is going to work if the ghost doesn’t hear it, and I’d never done this before for a ghost who wasn’t right there in the same space as me.
But the rules are different in all sorts of ways once you’re dead. What’s space? What’s distance? After a few moments, I felt a tremor of response – like a vibration on some strand of a web that I was spinning in the air, invisibly, all around me. I tried to keep my own emotions – satisfaction, excitement, unease – in check as I built that response into the tune, making my approximation of Abbie a little stronger; pulling her in, calling her to me. The vibration became infinitesimally more marked, more insistent.
And then, in an instant, it was gone.
Dead, blank, empty air surrounded me, like the moment after the fridge stops humming and you think the silence is a new sound.
I skipped a beat, swore under my breath, started up again. The music came more readily this time. I had a better grasp of it now, and so I was aiming better: pitching my tent where I knew she’d be.
Again, the most tenuous and hesitant of tugs on the web of sound – from over my left shoulder, which was away to the south-west somewhere. I guess direction isn’t any more meaningful than distance, but the sense of the pull coming from that physical quarter was very strong.
But again, when I reached for it, when I tried to move my mind or my soul out onto that part of the web, came the sudden, instantaneous collapse – followed by a great deal of nothing at all.
A suspicion was waking up in the back of my mind, like a hibernating bear roused too early and in a foul mood. But God forbid I should jump to any conclusions. I gave it a rest and filed some long-dead paperwork to get my mind back into neutral.
Half an hour later I tried again, building from first principles. I started with the doll just like before, bracing myself as I prepared to dip first my toe, and then the rest of me, into that cold ocean of unhappiness – but the tide was out. This time when I held the unlovely toy in my hands there was nothing there: no emotional trace at all. Amazed and disconcerted, I picked up a teddy bear, a pair of trainers, a book. Finally I buried my hands in the sprawl of teenage treasure trove, fingers spread wide, touching as many different things at once as I could manage. They were all cold and inert.
And now it was the conclusions that were jumping on me.
That just couldn’t happen. The residual emotions we leave in the things we touch aren’t like fingerprints: they can be overlaid with stronger, later impressions, but they can’t be wiped clean. Or at least, that’s what I’d always assumed. But somebody had just done it: killed the psychic trail, pulled the rug out from under me and left me sitting on my arse in the middle of nowhere. And once again I had to admit to myself that I didn’t have any idea how that could be done.
Kidnapping ghosts. Blind-siding the hunt. I was dealing with someone who was better than me at my own game. My professional pride was piqued, and slightly punctured. I had to see if I could reflate it.
Yeah, that shallow.
On bad days, I have to admit that I deserve everything I get.
4
The front door of Saint Michael’s church was massive: bivalved, with a lock on each side. Old wood four inches thick, set tight in a slightly narrow, low-arched narthex, and I could tell by the look of it that it had fossilised hard with age. It moved less than half an inch under my hand and I gave it up as a bad job. I could have picked the locks with nothing more than main strength and bloodymindedness, but there wouldn’t have been any point. From the feel of it, the doors were anchored at the bottom, too: there was a bolt on the inside.
There are churches that people will travel a thousand miles out of their way to see. Saint Michael’s wasn’t one of those. Don’t get me wrong – it was old, and impressive enough in its way. Early Gothic: very early, taking its shape from Abbé Suger’s original prescription. Which meant that it was straight up and down and plain as a pike: a colossal ecclesiastical doghouse on which the Holy Spirit could sleep like Snoopy until the Day of Judgement.
Some people would argue that he’d overslept.
This was where Juliet had told me to meet her, but she was nowhere in sight. All I could do was wait – and while I did, I became aware of a very faint presence somewhere close by: something immaterial and shifting, so faint that just the act of focusing my attention on it made it roll back out of reach as though my mind was a searchlight. Whatever it was, it had strongly negative overtones for me – like the psychic equivalent of some bitter medicine I’d taken long ago and never forgotten.
Curious, I laid my hands on the church door again, closed my eyes and listened with my extra sense.
Nothing at first – except for the discomfort of the cold wood against the palms of my hands. Maybe I’d been mistaken in the first place, and all I was feeling was the remains of that psychic hangover I’d had the day before. I considered taking out my whistle and seeing if I could refine the search a little, but just then a woman’s footsteps stirred a recursive symphony of echoes on the flags behind me. I turned with a witty and slightly obscene quip ready to launch. But it died before I could even open my mouth, because this wasn’t Juliet walking towards me. It was a young woman with bookish spectacles and shoulder-length white-blonde hair. She was slight and petite, pale-complexioned, and she walked with her shoulders hunched up as if against heavy rain. Except that the rain had rolled away westward: it was a fine night in late spring, and if it weren’t for the cold in under the shadow of the church I might even have been feeling overdressed in my heavy greatcoat. As it was, she clearly felt that her beige two-piece was too skimpy, even though the sleeves were full and the skirt was demurely calf-length: hands folded, she rubbed her upper arms nervously as she approached me.