Vicious Circle

Jenna-Jane Mulbridge had coined the term, and then given it currency by hammering on the same drum in about two dozen monographs and three full-length studies—one on the were, one on zombies, and one on ghosts pure and simple. In the end she created the climate she needed in which to thrive, forcing university hospitals up and down the country to open their minds to a set of phenomena that hadn’t seemed to be medical at all until she got her hands on them. After all, how can you cure the dead?

How can you cure the dead? Jenna-Jane echoed back. Well, you can’t, of course. But if a dead soul is possessing a living host, then it becomes a condition that can be observed and treated. And if a dead soul returns to its own flesh, makes it move again and speak again and think again, then what definition of death are you using and how are you going to make it stick?

As careerist blitzkriegs go, it had paid off in spades. Most of the big hospitals had opened up MO units, and the biggest and best, at Praed Street, went to Jenna-Jane by right of conquest. She knew what to do with it, too. She pulled in all the London exorcists as consultants right from the start, got them to teach her everything they knew, then took it apart and put it together again with such ruthless, incisive intelligence that pretty soon it was us who were learning from her. That was an incredible time: a time when the baseline concepts of a new branch of science were being laid down, at a velocity that prevented anyone from questioning the route map or even from jumping down safely once it got moving.

Most of us started to have doubts about J.J. in the first year, but we stayed on board for quite a while after that. It still seemed like we were doing useful work, even if we were doing it for a self-obsessed, vainglorious fascist. Then, one by one, we began to do the moral sums and see how far they were from adding up. Whether it was for the advancement of science or just for the advancement of Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, some of the things that were being done at Praed Street fell well into the realms of the cruel and unusual, and awoke the scruples of even the most hard-bitten and determinedly unimaginative ghost-hunters.

Rosie Crucis was the straw that crippled my personal camel. It had sounded harmless enough at first. Why were all the risen dead recent? Jenna-Jane had asked. Her own researches had yielded no ghosts whose date of death was earlier than 1935. Testimony from other exorcists could push that back at most another twenty years, to the middle year of the First World War. What of the millions upon millions of ghosts from ages past, who ought to fill the streets of London like an invisible tide?

Once you get to asking questions like that, you start to feel like you need at least half an answer before you’ll get a decent night’s sleep again. And for Jenna-Jane, it was always a case of learning by doing. She got about a dozen of us together: me, Elaine Vincent, Nemo Praxides, and some other big names flown in from Edinburgh, Paris, Locarno, Christ knows where. She put us all together in a room with nothing except twelve chairs and a table on top of which there was a big cardboard box. When everyone had arrived, she locked the doors and opened the box.

My best guess was a severed head, but it turned out to be a lot less dramatic than that. The box contained a lot of things that were very old without being particularly beautiful: an embroidered fan, on which the colors had bleached out with age to shades of fawn and gray; a handwritten prayer book; a tinted glass bottle that must once have contained perfume; a kerchief with the letter “A” picked out in overelaborate needlepoint; a single page from a letter, without greeting or subscript.

“See what you can do,” Jenna-Jane said. And we went to work.

Praxides worked by going into a trance state, so he immediately closed his eyes and dropped off the map. Elaine Vincent used automatic writing: she took out her sketchbook and started to scribble. I took out my whistle; some other guy started to tap the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other, hitting out a faint, complex rhythm. We all did what we normally did when we wanted to raise and bind a ghost.

And there was a ghost there, all right, but there was something odd about how it felt. The trace was both strong and impossibly faint at the same time. Like walking past a curry house and getting a faint whiff of fresh cardamom: you know that if you open the door your senses will be overwhelmed, and that it’s only the pungency of the raw spice that’s letting it reach you at all through double-skin brickwork and the olfactory static of the street.