Juliet unfolded her legs and stepped down off the chunk of marble with unconscious grace. I realised that it was the cover of a family vault: Joseph and Caroline Rybandt, and a bunch of subsidiary Rybandts listed in a smaller font. Death is no more democratic than life is. I also realised that Juliet was carrying a grey plastic bowl half-full of water: it had been resting in her lap, and when I first saw her she must have been peering down into it.
‘So how’s tricks?’ I asked her.
‘Good,’ she said, neutrally. ‘On the whole.’
‘Meaning . . . ?’
‘It’s fine if I don’t think about the hunger. It’s been a year now since I actually fed. Fed fully on a human being, body and soul. It’s hard sometimes to keep the flavour, and the joy of it, out of my mind.’
I groped around for a response, but nothing came. ‘Yeah,’ I said after slightly too long a pause, ‘I thought you were looking slim. Think of it as a detox diet.’
Juliet frowned, not getting the reference. Now didn’t seem like a good time to explain it.
‘So you’ve got a spook?’ I said, to move things along. ‘A graveyard cling-on?’ It was one of the commonest scenarios we came across in our profession: ghosts battening fast to the place where their mortal remains still rested, anchored in their own flesh and unable to move on. Some of them got the hang of the wiring and rose again as zombies: most just stayed where they were, getting fainter and more wretched as the years went by.
Juliet looked at me severely. ‘In this graveyard? There hasn’t been a burial here in centuries, Castor – look at the dates.’
I did. Joseph had bitten the dust in 1782, and Caroline three years later. More to the point, all the stones were leaning at picturesque angles and most were green with moss. Some had even started to sink into the ground so that the lower parts of their eroded messages of grief and pious hope were hidden in the long grass.
‘There are no ghosts here,’ Juliet said, stating the obvious.
‘What, then?’ I said, feeling a little embarrassed and annoyed to have been called on such a basic point by my own apprentice. Few ghosts hang around for more than a decade or so – almost none past fifty or sixty years. There was only one case on record of a soul surviving through more than a century, and she was currently residing a few miles east of us. Her name was Rosie, and she was sort of a friend of mine.
‘Something bigger,’ said Juliet.
‘Then holy water is probably just going to piss it off,’ I said, nodding towards the bowl. She gave me a meaningful look and thrust the bowl into my hands. I took it by reflex, and to stop the contents slopping over my coat.
‘I never said it was holy,’ said Juliet.
‘So you were washing your hair? You know, human women tend to do that in the privacy of—’
‘Turn around.’ She pointed towards the church.
‘Widdershins or deasil?’
‘Just turn around.’ Juliet put her hands on my shoulders and did it for me, swivelling me a hundred and eighty degrees without any effort at all. The touch sent a jarring, sensual charge through me and reminded me yet again, as if I needed it, that Juliet had physical strength in spades, as well as the spiritual kind that Susan Book had been talking about. I stared up at the looming bulk of Saint Michael’s, which now blocked off the setting sun so that the church was just a monolithic slab of ink-black shadow.
‘My kind have a gift for camouflage,’ murmured Juliet, her throaty voice suddenly sinister rather than arousing. ‘We use it when we hunt. We make false faces for ourselves, pretty or harmless seeming, and we flash them in the eyes of those who look at us.’ She tapped the rim of the bowl and a ripple shot from edge to centre of the water within, then from centre back to edge in choppy, broken circles. ‘So the best way to see us is not to look at us at all.’
I stared into the bowl as the ripples subsided. I was seeing the inverted image of Saint Michael’s church. It didn’t look any better upside down. In fact, it looked a whole lot worse: black smoke or steam was roiling off it in waves, downwards into the inverted sky. It looked as though it was on fire – on fire without flames.
Startled, I raised my eyes to the building itself. It stood silent and sombre. No smoke, no fireworks.
But back down in the bowl, when I looked again, the black steam rolled and eddied off the church’s reflection. Saint Michael’s was the heart of a shadow inferno.
I stared at Juliet, and she shrugged.
‘Anyone you know?’ I asked, aiming for a flip, casual tone and missing it by about the length of an airport runway.
‘That’s a good question,’ she acknowledged. ‘But for later. Come inside. You need to get the whole picture.’
I felt like that was the last thing I needed. But I stayed with her as she set off down the small hill towards the church, taking the same direction in which Susan Book had gone.
The verger was waiting for us at the door of the vestry, a much smaller stone doghouse attached to the wall of the church at the back. She’d already opened the door, but she hadn’t gone inside. She looked more nervous and unhappy than ever – and she looked to Juliet for instructions with the same sad hunger that I’d noticed before.
‘You can wait here,’ Juliet told her, sounding almost gentle. ‘We’ll be five minutes. I just think it will be better if Castor sees for himself.’
Susan shook her head. ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘In case you’ve got any questions. The canon told me to give you any help I could.’ She visibly steeled herself, and stepped inside first. Juliet nodded me forward, so I went next in line, with her bringing up the rear.
The vestry was about the size of a large toilet, and it was empty apart from a cupboard for ecclesiastical vestments and half a dozen hooks screwed into the wall. We went on through, via a second, wide-open door, into the north transept of the church, a low-roofed side tunnel looking towards the majestic main corridor of the nave. It was completely unlit, apart from the last red rays spilling through the stained-glass windows to our left. It made for a fairly forbidding prospect: it was hard to imagine anyone being inspired to devotion by it. Mind you, I wouldn’t say a paternoster if you put a gun to my head, so I’m probably not an unbiased witness there.
I felt it before I’d taken three steps: the chill. It was more like December than May, and more like the High Andes than East Acton. It ate into the bone. No wonder I’d felt cold when I was trying the door outside: the chill must have been radiating out through the stone. I suppressed a shudder and moved on.
But another few steps brought an even bigger surprise. I turned and shot a glance at Juliet, who looked keenly back at me. ‘Tell me what you’re feeling now,’ she said.
I wanted to confirm it first. I walked left, then right, then forwards.
‘It changes,’ I muttered. ‘Son of a bitch. It’s like – there are pockets of cold, in the air, not moving.’
‘Whatever happened here, it happened very quickly. I think that’s why it hasn’t—’
She hesitated, looking for the right word.
‘Hasn’t what?’
‘Spread evenly.’
My laugh was incredulous, and slightly pained.
Susan Book was waiting for us at the end of the transept, and she was looking back towards us, not expectantly but with anxious intensity. She clearly wasn’t going to take a step further without us. So we walked on and joined her.
The shadows were deeper in the nave, because only the windows at the farther end were getting any light. The rest of the cavernous space was a dimensionless black void. The grey flagstones under our feet faded into the dark a scant three or four yards from where we were, as though we stood on a stone outcrop at the edge of a cliff face.