Vicious Circle

We worked on it for a couple of hours, our professional pride very much on the line. At first we couldn’t get it into focus, but then we brainstormed some tricks that we’d never have been able to try if we’d been working separately. The guy with the happy-clappy fingers worked up a counterpoint to my tune, and Elaine drew the patterns of sound that we were creating. We fed in and out of each other’s talents, creating a cat’s cradle of urgent, bullying concentration that opened out from the room in directions we didn’t even have concepts for, let alone names.

It worked, too. The ghost rose sluggishly, aimlessly toward us, like a balloon whose string some kid wandering down in Hades had accidentally let slip. We trapped her, turned her round, nailed her down, and spread her out between us like a butterfly on a board of charged air.

She couldn’t talk, at first: she learned that later. She’d been dead for so long, sleeping for so long in the gutted house of her own bones, she’d forgotten who she was. She mouthed at us, meaninglessly, terrified and angry in about equal parts. She pulled away, tightening the strings of our will around her so that every movement just tangled her up more irrevocably.

She was so tiny. A grown woman—a mature woman, scarred by disease and more generally by life itself—the size of a ten-year-old girl. It’s ludicrous, I know. It was obvious already from the trigger materials J.J. had provided that we’d be dealing with a very old soul. But somehow actually seeing her brought me up against that harder and more painfully than I’d been expecting. I’m not big on religion, and never heard of a god whose company I’d be able to stomach for more than the first half of heaven’s cocktail hour, but all the same this felt like blasphemy. Because she was so small and so frail, it also felt very much like torturing a child.

But I couldn’t just stop playing. Stopping dead in the middle of a tune is like stepping out of a car that’s moving at seventy: a wide range of unpleasant consequences can be taken as a given. So I wound down as smoothly as I could, and everyone else was doing the same thing: landing the mad, terrified, struggling fish into which we’d all dug our separate, several hooks.

Jenna-Jane was ecstatic. She hadn’t expected to get such spectacular results on the first try. Before we could sort out how we felt or discuss what we’d just done, she moved in with a second team: not exorcists but psychics and sensitives trawled up just as eclectically and nonjudgmentally as our lot had been. We were elbowed out, because our part of the job was done.

I bailed out of the whole Praed Street project soon after that, and cold-shouldered J.J. when she tried to tempt me back for a repeat performance. Reading between the lines, a lot of the other exorcists who’d been there that day had the same uneasy feelings of guilt and shame afterward. She’d never been able to get that much raw talent together in the same room again, and Rosie Crucis remained a one-off.

The name was J.J.’s private joke, and it played in some way off the real identity of the ghost we’d summoned—while at the same time preventing that identity from being revealed by a casual comment. That was important, because—to stick with the fishing metaphor—now that Rosie had been landed, J.J. had no intention of throwing her back.

The plan was to allow—or maybe induce—Rosie to possess one of the sensitives, so that her ghost would remain anchored in the living world. J.J. had laid on as expansive a buffet of psychics as she could manage: both genders, every age and race, every school and belief from classical spiritualist to lunatic-fringe millenarian to ascetic Swedenborgian and foam-flecked Blavatskian.

Rosie confounded expectation and went for J.J. herself—lived (for want of a better word) inside her for twenty days and twenty-one nights, by which time J.J. was half-dead from migraine and psychosomatic muscular aches. It was a sweet revenge, if that was what it was, but Rosie didn’t know back then who she had to thank for her much-delayed and unexpected resurrection, so it was probably coincidence.

In any case, on the twenty-first day, Rosie allowed herself to be decanted into a young man from Cambridge named Donnie Collett, and that was the start of a running-on-the-spot relay race that still hasn’t ended. Volunteers from MO units up and down the country, as well as from philosophy and theology courses at universities who still haven’t sussed J.J. out for what she is, sign up for stints of up to a week at a time, channeling Rosie and providing her a fleshly receptacle so that the Praed Street ontologists can continue to push the envelope when it comes to our knowledge of life and death and the points where they hold hands across the wall.