I had some really nasty dreams, involving men who mewed like cats and jumped out at me from a variety of unexpected angles, and a little girl who was walking through a maze of grey stone with church bells ringing up ahead of her. Mercifully, the details didn’t stay with me when I woke up.
The headache did, though. It felt like a really bad hangover, but casting my mind back over the night before it didn’t seem to me like I’d over-indulged: I could only remember the whisky I’d swallowed to dull the edge of the pain while Pen scrubbed out my wound with TCP and lavender soap.
The wound. It felt uncomfortably hot, but not particularly painful. I prodded it gingerly, and flexed my arm in various directions to see how much traverse it had. There was a little bit of stiffness, but all things considered it didn’t feel nearly as bad as it had the night before. If I were a concert pianist, I’d probably have been worried: being the human wreck I am, I figured it would all come out in the wash.
It was about six in the morning, and Pen was still asleep: at least, there was no sound from the basement except for the occasional creaking and rattling as Edgar or Arthur stirred on his perch and shrugged his bony shoulders. Like rust, ravens never sleep. I went through into the kitchen and made some coffee, then drank three cups of it while I flicked through Pen’s A to Z and worked out a route to Thamesmead. There was no sense in driving – I’d have to go through the Blackwall Tunnel or take the Woolwich Ferry, both hassles that I can do without at the best of times. The smart option was to go to Waterloo and then take an overground train to Woolwich Dockyard. From there I could walk it.
A brisk wind had come up in the night and swept the thunderheads away to someplace else, so it was sunny but fresh as I walked to Turnpike Lane Tube station, and my head started to feel a little clearer. I was glad of the change in the weather for another reason, too: shredded at seam and shoulder, and crusted brown with blood on the left-hand side of the collar, my paletot was hors de combat for the time being. I was wearing the only other coat I owned that had enough pockets for all my paraphernalia: a fawn trenchcoat with a button-down yoke which makes me feel like an exhibit in some museum installation about the evolution of the private detective.
Since I’d got such an early start on the day, I couldn’t get a cheap Travelcard, so I just took a single. I didn’t know where I’d be going after I left the Collective. Maybe Paddington, and Rosie Crucis: it depended on whether I found any leads I could actually use.
Bourbon had said that Dennis Peace used to be a rubber duck. In trade jargon, that meant only one thing: an exorcist who chose for professional reasons to live on water rather than on dry land. It’s something we all try out, at some point, if only to get a decent night’s sleep: no ghosts can cross running water, and the morbid sensitivities that keep us in business are all anaesthetised for once. Takes a certain kind of personality to live with it long-term, though: I always end up feeling like I’m trussed up inside a plastic bag, my own breath condensing on me as cold sweat.
The Collective is a floater community on the Thames. Everybody in my world knows it, everybody’s been there, but that doesn’t mean you can necessarily find it when you want to: like the Oriflamme, the Collective is a movable feast. Come to think of it, there’s another link between the two, although it’s an accidental and tendentious one along the lines of ‘how many degrees of separation are you away from Kevin Bacon?’ Only for ‘Kevin Bacon’ read ‘Peckham Steiner’.
Steiner is one of the few flamboyant legends of our reclusive and insular profession. He was an exorcist before the fashion really got going: by which I mean before the huge upsurge of apparitions and manifestations in the last decade of the old millennium turned people like me into a key industry. Specialising in spiritual eradications for the rich and famous, Steiner garnered a certain amount of fame (or at least notoriety) for himself along the way – along with a shedload of money. An American heiress was in it somewhere, if I remember rightly: her dead ex-husbands had been giving her all kinds of grief until Steiner sent them on to their last judgement, and out of gratitude she left him the bulk of her fortune when she died. Her kids from all three marriages sued, and the case dragged on for years, but as far as I know none of them ever managed to lay a legal finger on him. By that time, anyway, he had three books out, a movie deal for his life story and a controlling share in ENSURETM, a company that made ghost-breaking equipment and consumables. He retired at forty-six, richer than God.
Unfortunately, he was also crazier than a shithouse rat. Maybe the instability had always been there, or maybe it was the pressures of the job and then the explosive derepression of having enough money to remake yourself and the world closer to your expectations. I mean, look what that did to Michael Jackson.
I met him once – Steiner, I mean, not Jacko – and it was a scary thing to see. By that time I’d already read a couple of his books, and I’d come to respect (although not actually to like) the cold, clever mind that was on show in them. But when I got to talk to him, it was as though that mind had deliquesced and then solidified again in a different, largely non-functional shape.
It was at some weird party or other in a London hotel that was hosting a conference on Perspectives on the Afterlife. Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, an exorcist-turned-academic who’d taught me a lot of the tricks of the trade when I was still very wet behind the ears, had blagged a ticket for me and insisted that I came along: the chance of meeting Steiner had swung it.
From what I can still recall of that conversation, he was already well on the way to becoming the surly, crazed recluse that everybody now remembers him as. He talked about the dead and the living as though they were two armies in the field, with himself as some kind of commander marshalling the forces of the warm-blooded. He looked the part, too, I have to admit: spirit-level straight, unyielding as stone, his grey hair cropped close to his scalp. And if Steiner was a general, he seemed to feel that the exorcists were his crack troops: an elite commando unit trained to take anything the enemy could throw at us. The enemy? I hedged at first, sure that there was some subtlety I was missing: but there wasn’t. ‘The dead,’ he said. ‘And the undead. The ones that want to supplant us and take the world away from us.’
Even back then, when I was blasting unquiet spirits without qualm or question, I still couldn’t see the situation quite like that. Apart from anything else, it only seemed to lead in one direction, to a door marked ‘Abandon hope’. Out of some half-hearted attempt to keep up my end of the conversation I asked Steiner how it was possible to fight a war where any casualty in your own forces became a recruit for the other side.
‘What do you mean?’ he demanded, frowning at me over a glass of champagne which he was clutching tightly enough to make me nervous.
I made the best fist of it that I could, which wasn’t all that good because most of my concentration was tied up in looking round for an escape route: this was as big a disillusionment as finding out that the reason Father Christmas smells like Johnny Walker is because he’s your dad in a fake beard and a red mac. ‘I mean we’re all going to die, Mister Steiner. If the dead do hate the living, they don’t have to fight us: they only have to wait. In the end, everyone goes the same way, right? If life is an army, everyone deserts sooner or . . .’
Steiner’s glare made me falter into silence. I knew damn well, looking into those mad, uncompromising baby blues, that if we had been in a war zone he’d have had me shot right there and then for bringing aid and comfort to the enemy. Since we were at a party, he didn’t have that option: he was visibly weighing up alternatives.