Thicker Than Water

I whistled and examined my fingernails through the final bit of tacked-on action, with its tacked-on voice-over, waiting until Vangelis faded up and the credits rolled. Irritably, Nicky unlocked the spool from the projector mouth and fast-forwarded it into the can. Down below us, the auditorium went from black-shot-with-silver to pure, midnight black.

‘It just means the other detective - Eddie Olmos - has been inside his place,’ Nicky said, shrugging in exasperation. ‘Why do you have to build a whole thing on top of that?’

‘Because it’s the turning point of the movie,’ I explained patiently. ‘It throws everything up into the air - Batty’s death speech, “It’s a pity she won’t live”, the whole works - and then makes it come down again in a new pattern.’

‘Yeah, well, Rutger Hauer says you’re full of shit,’ Nicky pointed out, fitting the lid onto the can and carefully detaching it from the projector’s housing.

‘Fine actor - not the sharpest tool in the box,’ I summarised.

‘It’s left ambiguous.’

‘In this version it’s left ambiguous. In the director’s cut, the sequence where Deckard dreams about the unicorn nails it down tight.’

Nicky put the film canister into the steel cabinet at one end of the projection booth, closed the doors and double-locked them with painstaking care. ‘I prefer Deckard to be human,’ he said, tugging on the handles to make sure the doors were secure. There was a slight tension, both in his voice and in the set of his shoulders.

I let it go at that point. Maybe it’s a nostalgia thing, because Nicky used to be human once too. That was before he had a heart attack in his late thirties and joined the ranks of the existentially challenged. Some people come back in the spirit - as ghosts - and have an uneventful afterlife hanging around the places they remember from back when they had a pulse. Others take the low road, invading and possessing and reshaping animal flesh (the default option, if only because animal spirits are weak enough not to make a fight of it most of the time) into something broadly resembling the body they used to have. That’s how werewolves are made, although the term most often used these days is the polite, non-judgemental loup-garou.

Nicky is a stubborn bastard, in death as he was in life. He took the third option, generally considered to combine the drawbacks of the other two - the isolation of the ghost and the flesh-management problems of the werewolf. He came back in the body, as a zombie.

For most people it’s a short-term option: bodies rot, and once they pass a certain point all the will-power in the world won’t make them move any more. Nicky was holding that crisis at bay with an idiosyncratic mixture of home embalming, faith healing and careful refrigeration. And to be honest he looks pretty good for a dead guy: the artificial tan he buys in by the bucketload disguises the waxy sheen of his pickled flesh, and his Mediterranean good looks still make women take a second look unless they’re close enough to catch that subtle whiff of formaldehyde. And he’s a zombie of substance these days, with Ceseook an impressive property portfolio including the disused cinema where he lives, so who the hell am I to knock it? He’s ahead of the game, even if he’s playing posthumously.

‘So you bumped into this guy Gwillam,’ Nicky said, changing the subject as he pocketed the keys to the film cupboard. ‘The papal-backed motherfucker who tried to kill you over that Abbie Torrington business.’

‘Gwillam doesn’t have the blessing of the pope,’ I corrected him. ‘In fact his order - the Anathemata - were excommunicated by Benedict XVI in a job lot as soon as he sobered up from his launch party. They do their own thing now, and the Church tries to pretend they don’t exist.’

It was a half-truth, but it would do for now. The last time I’d met Gwillam, he’d hinted strongly that the excommunication was just a way of letting the Anathemata off the leash. They were kind of like the provisional wing of the Catholic Church now: a guerrilla army of religious fanatics with a scarily open-ended brief: save humankind from the dead and the undead, in God’s holy name. In the case of Abbie Torrington, that had included compounding the murder of a little girl by the extinguishing of her soul. Gwillam hadn’t been happy when - with Juliet’s help - I had managed to piss on that particular picnic.

Nicky didn’t seem happy either. ‘Don’t bury me alive in the fucking details, Castor,’ he said, making for the door. ‘It’s the same guy, right? The one who thinks people like me are the intro to Armageddon? Sees himself as God’s soldier in some fucking big holy war?’

‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘That’s him.’ I didn’t bother to point out that I’m the one who’s normally inclined to skip the details in favour of a simple-minded soundbite. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I leave the obsessive, anally retentive stuff to Nicky, because that’s where he really shines.