Thicker Than Water

By this time I would have been surprised to hear anything else. But those figures confirmed the sense that I’d been getting from Nicky’s printouts: the sense of a slow-building epidemic, cresting like a wave; of the Salisbury as a raft of lost souls in the path of some sundering flood that was going to get much, much worse before it got better. Assuming it ever did.

Once again, Bic’s was the face that came into my mind: the tiny human figure by which you measure the scale of something enormous.

‘What does it mean.’ I asked Petra, ‘when you put your head in the lion’s mouth and it doesn’t bite down?’

She shoved her lower lip out while she thought. ‘Is this a metaphor?’ she asked.

‘Yeah. For the lion, imagine that scary blonde who was in here just now. The one with the badge.’

‘Oh. Got you. You mean—’

‘She hates my guts, and she could have arrested me for - I don’t know. Something. Conspiracy, at least. Wasting police time. Consorting with known felons. Something would have stuck, and she knew it. So I’m wondering why she didn’t at least make the effort. It’s enough to make a man feel unloved.’

‘I’m sure you’ve got used to that by this stage in your life,’ said Nurse Ryall sweetly. And she was gone before I could think of a comeback.

The open ward didn’t seem like the right place to summon Kenny’s ghost, and ‹y’s>

In the end I locked myself into the disabled toilet on the corridor outside the ward, put the canula down on the floor in front of me and played while sitting on the toilet. I took it slowly, because the pain from the previous night’s musical exertions was still very fresh and very vivid.

It felt strange in a way, summoning a spirit that was already so familiar to me. Okay, it had been a long time since Kenny and I had met - at least, with both of us actually conscious - but most of the ghosts I raise are strangers and even after seventeen years Kenny was a long way from being that. Also, most ghosts don’t scare me: Kenny had been a monster to me back when I still believed in monsters, and locking myself in with his spirit was something that I did with a slight prickling of unease, even though I hated myself for that atavistic weakness.

The tune was slow in coming, and it was only partly because of my aching chest and shortness of breath. I had to overcome a powerful reluctance to open myself up to the music - to start the process that would bring Kenny’s wandering essence into focus in this place, at this time. It was as though a part of me was trying to back away and another part was holding me in place by the scruff of the neck. And the part that wanted to retreat was about twelve years old, which paradoxically gave it an edge against the adult, rational Castor that wanted to play the summoning: on the lost highways of the id, reason is a bike with no wheels.

But it happened in any case, the tune pulling me onwards in spite of myself: a fractally branching tail winding out through the disinfectant-soured air and wagging me like a dog. I closed my eyes, tried to keep my embouchure reasonably tight and let it happen.

Consequently I felt Kenny before I saw him. That’s how it works for me most of the time, of course: the death-sense drives the music and the music turns into a negative image, a sound-painting that describes the thing it wants and brings it by describing it.

He was close. Of course he was close: he’d died in this very building only a few hours before. The sense of him went from tenuous to vivid to claustrophobic within the space of maybe a dozen heartbeats.

I opened my eyes again. The air darkened in front of me and he began to appear, in separate splotches of deepening tone that spread and merged like blood from a shaving cut soaking through tissue paper. As soon as I thought that, I tried to banish the image from my mind, but that was what Kenny was like: a wound in the air that my skirling music had incised.

Some ghosts don’t know where or even who they are: they get lost in a memory or an emotion, replay a past moment like a ragged piece of vinyl being ceaselessly sampled by a demonic DJ. Kenny stared at me in silence, and I saw the recognition in his eyes. Unlike the living Kenny, he wore no bandages, which meant that his body was criss-crossed with wounds so dense and interconnected in places that they looked like words in some hieroglyphic script.

I lowered the whistle to my lap, and he didn’t fade.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘You called me. What did you want?’

The ghost looked down, turned its hands over to examine its ravaged wrists. Its lips moved, and although I didn’t hear the word it spoke I could read the shape of it.

‘Mark,’ I agreed. ‘What about him, Kenny? Is that what you wanted to tell me about? How he died? What’s been happening since?’

The ghost shook its head slowly from side to side, but I wasn’t sure whether it was in disagreement or just in bewilderment. This time when he spoke I heard the word as a tinny, baseless whisper in the air: the hum of a breathless mosquito.

‘Mark . . .’