It’s only in the Western tradition, I’d say, sounding like someone who’d actually finished his degree, that ghosts are seen as being the actual spirits of dead people. Other cultures have them down as being something else. The Navajo think of ghosts as something that congeals out of the worst parts of your nature while the rest of you goes into the next world cleansed and fighting fit. In the Far East they’re often treated as a sort of emotional pollutant whose appearance depends on who’s looking at them. And so on.
Yeah, I know. Given that ghostbusting was my bread and butter, and given that I’d started with my own sister, it helped a hell of a lot if I could tell myself and anyone else who’d listen that ghosts were something different from the people they looked like. I was only talking my conscience to sleep; and while it was asleep I did some pretty bad things.
One of them was Rafi Ditko.
The Charles Stanger Care Home stands just off the North Circular at Muswell Hill, on the smooth bow-bend of Coppetts Road. From the outside, and from a distance, it looks like what it used to be – a row of Victorian workmen’s cottages: turn-of-the-century poverty reinvented as tasteful nostalgia.
Closer in, you see the bars over the windows, riveted directly into the original brickwork, and the looming bulk of the new annexe protruding backwards at an acute angle, dwarfing the cottages themselves. If you’re tuned in to stuff like that, maybe you also notice the magical prophylactics that they’ve put up beside the main door to discourage the dead: a sprig of myrtle for May, a necromantic circle bearing the words hoc fugere – flee this place – a crucifix and an ornate blue enamel mezzuzah. One way or another, you’re dumped out of the Victorian reverie into an uncomfortable present.
I stepped in out of a night laden with a fresh freight of rain that had yet to fall, onto thick carpet and the expertly canned smell of wild honeysuckle. But the Stanger has a hard time putting a pretty face on: as I pushed open the second set of doors and went on through into the lobby, I could already hear a huge commotion from somewhere further inside. Shouting voices, a woman – or maybe a man – crying, crashes of doors opening and closing. It all sat a little oddly with the soothing Vivaldi being played pianissimo over the tannoy system. The nurse at the desk, Helen, was staring off down the corridor and looking like she wanted to bolt. She jerked her head around when she saw me, and I gave her a nod.
‘Mister Castor!’ she said, checking her start of alarm. ‘Felix – it’s him. Asmodeus. He’s—’ She pointed, but seemed unable to get any more words out.
‘I heard,’ I said, tersely. ‘I’ll go on through.’
I broke into a trot as I went up the main corridor. This was my usual weekly visit: I still called it that, even though these days the interval between them had stretched out to a month or more. I was tied to this place by the loose elastic of ancient guilt, and every so often the pull became too insistent to ignore. But clearly tonight was going to be a departure from routine. There was something going on up ahead of me, and it was a violent, screaming kind of something. I didn’t want to be anywhere near it, but Rafi was my responsibility and this was absolutely my job to sort out.
Rafi’s room is in the new annexe. I sometimes think, with a certain bitterness, that Rafi’s room financed the new annexe, because it had cost a medium-sized fortune to have the walls, floor and ceiling lined with silver. I went up past the low-security wards, hearing sobs and shouts and swearing from inside each one as I passed: every loud noise at the Stanger stirs up a host of echoes. As I rounded the corner at a jog, I saw a whole crowd of people clustered about ten feet away from Rafi’s door, which seemed to be open. I was looking for Pen, and so I saw her first: she was tussling with two nurses, a man and a woman, and cursing like a longshoreman. Looking at Pen head-on, you always get the impression that she’s taller than she is: the vividness of her green eyes and red-auburn hair somehow translates into a sense of imposing height, but in fact she stands only a little over five feet tall. The two nurses weren’t actually holding on to her, they were just blocking her way to the door and moving with her whenever she tried to slide around them – a very effective human wall.
The rest of the scene was like a bar fight taking place under local rules I wasn’t familiar with. Webb, the director of the Stanger Home, sweating and red-faced, was trying to lay hands on Pen to pull her away from the door, but at the same time he was fighting shy of doing anything that might be construed as assault – and any time he got close she just smacked him away. The resulting ballet of twittery hand gestures and involuntary cringing was strange in the extreme. Half a dozen nurses of both sexes jostled around them, none of them relishing a possibly actionable rumble with someone who wasn’t an inmate and might have the money to sue. Two other Stanger staffers were down on the floor, apparently wrestling with each other.
I could hear the voices now – some of them, anyway, raised above the background babble.
‘You’ll kill him! You’re going to kill him.’ This was Pen, shrill and urgent.
‘– have a responsibility to the public, and to the other residents of the home, and I’m not going to be intimidated into—’ Webb, part-way through a sentence that had clearly been going on for a while and wasn’t going to end any time soon.
But just as I pushed through the edges of the group, it was ended for him as a body came sailing through the open doorway and hit the corridor’s further wall with a solid, meaty sound before crashing to the carpeted floor. He was face up, so I was able to recognise him as Pauclass="underline" another male nurse, and probably the guy I liked best on the Stanger’s staff. He was unconscious, his face flushed purple, and the hypodermic syringe that rolled from his hand was sheared off short as if by a samurai sword, clear liquid weeping from the cleanly sliced edge of the plastic ampoule.
Everyone stared at him with varying degrees of awe and alarm, but nobody made a move to help him or assess the damage. I took the opportunity to thread my way through the onlookers, heading for the empty stretch of corridor around the open door – no man’s land. One of the two nurses who was blocking Pen – the male one – immediately turned his attention to me, clamping a heavy hand on my shoulder.
‘Nobody’s allowed through here,’ he told me brusquely.
‘Leave him!’ Webb snapped. ‘That’s Castor.’
‘Oh, thank God!’ said Pen, seeing me for the first time. She threw herself into my arms, and I gave her a reassuring hug. At the same time I looked down and realised that the two men on the ground weren’t wrestling after alclass="underline" the conscious one was hauling the unconscious one away from the door, leaving a feathery-edged smear of blood on the carpeted floor from some wound I couldn’t see.
Pen’s eyes were glistening with tears as she turned them pleadingly on me. ‘Fix, don’t let them hurt him! It’s not Rafi, it’s Asmodeus. He can’t help himself!’
‘I know that. It’s okay, Pen.’ I put as much conviction into those words as I could muster. ‘I’m here now. I’ll sort this.’
‘One of my staff is still in there,’ Webb told me, cutting across Pen as she started to speak again. ‘We think she may be dead, but we can’t get in to find out. Ditko is . . . frenzied, in a hyper-manic state. And as you can see he’s violent. I think I’m going to have to gas him.’
Pen wailed at the word, and I wasn’t surprised. The gas Webb was talking about is a mild nerve toxin – a Tabun derivative called OPG, developed at Porton Down for military use but now illegal on any battlefield in the world. Ironically it had turned out to have therapeutic effects on Alzheimer’s sufferers if you used it in tiny doses: it blocks the breakdown of acetylcholine in the brain, slowing memory loss. Then someone found out that zombies could use it in much larger doses to do more or less the same thing – slow down the inevitable breakdown of their minds as the processes of butyric decay turned complex electrochemical gradients into rancid sludge. So now the gas was legal in psychotherapeutic contexts, and actively recommended for the dead and undead – a loophole that still had half the civil-rights lawyers in the world yelling in each other’s faces. The fact that it had sedative side effects just added to the confusion.