Vicious Circle

She went out, Field trailing along behind her like a broad-beamed freighter behind a tug. I listened to their footsteps retreat up the corridor, and then to the cell bock door being slid to on its runners.

Once I was certain they weren’t coming back, I leaned forward and put my hand down inside my sock. It was easy to find the little lock of hair because it had been itching the hell out of me ever since I’d put it down there. It was back in the church, around about the time when the bullets started flying. I threw myself down between the pews while the satanists and Gwillam’s holy crusaders got physical with each other, and I reasoned that this might be a good time for Abbie and the locket to part company. Empty, the locket might be as useful to me as a swinging watch is to a hypnotist: something pretty and shiny that the rubes can look at while you do what you need to do.

And when Gwillam made his play, I was proved right. I was just lucky that he hadn’t checked the goods before he left—probably because of the approaching sirens.

As I’ve already said, it’s always easier for me to do my little party trick if I’ve got a tin whistle in my hands. But the whistle is just a channel: the music comes from within me, and I can make it on my own if I have to. Particularly if, as now, I was dealing with a ghost I already knew pretty well.

Sitting on the edge of the bunk, I closed my eyes and whistled the tune that, for me, had become synonymous with Abbie. I started low and let the sound build as it seemed to want to, gradually but inexorably. The guy in the next cell yelled a protest, but he was outside the infolded loop of reality that joined me to the tune, so whatever he said fell on my ears like an abstract pattern, fell away again in unheeded fragments.

Abbie materialized in front of me, about a foot above the ground, and so slowly that at first she was like a trick of the light—like one of those accidental objects that can only be seen from one angle when the light falls just right. It wasn’t surprising: after all she’d been through in her life, and then in her death, I could understand her not wanting to be dragged up by her heels one more time. When she saw me, her reluctance became even greater. She fought against my call, fading out into near invisibility time after time, but coming back each time a little more sharply defined, a little more vivid and visible, as my sense of her straightened and I tied the knots of my calling around her soul.

“Let me go!” she cried, in a thin voice that seemed to come across vast distances. “Let me go!”

I stopped whistling at last and paused a moment or two to get my breath back. It had been as hard work as any tune I’d ever played, except for one, and I wasn’t up to thinking about Rafi right then.

“That’s what I intend to do, Abbie,” I assured her. “But first I want to tell you how your dad died. What you missed. So you’ll understand.”

She was staring at me, her phantom fists clenched in tension and defiance. I told her how the ambush at the Oriflamme had played out, and how Dennis Peace had died defending her against her wicked stepfather. She didn’t look as though she believed me—but then the last two times she’d seen me it had been standing right alongside Fanke in circumstances that stank up to heaven.

Then I told her about the church, and why I’d put my hand into the fire. I showed her my burned fingers to prove my point, and I think perhaps she did believe me then. At any rate she forgot her hate and fear and grieved for her father, with dry eyes because ghosts can’t cry. Sometimes they can mimic tears they cried in life, but they have no moisture of their own.

“Perhaps you’ll see him again,” I told her, offering her the only crumb of consolation I could think of. “If there’s something after this life, and after this death, then I bet he’ll find you there if anybody can. He hasn’t let anything stop him so far.”

She didn’t respond. Turning slightly as though in a wind I couldn’t feel, she cast her eyes around the narrow confines of the cell. It wasn’t the first prison she’d seen in her brief, constricted life: with any luck, though, it would be the last.

I started to whistle again. Not the summoning this time, and not the exorcism, but the unbinding. I whistled the notes that would set her free from the lock of hair to go where she would, unmolested by the Fankes and Gwillams of this sublunary sinkhole.

But she didn’t leave. I guess there wasn’t anywhere she could think of to go, anywhere where she would have felt safe, or wanted. The only man who had ever loved her or tried to make her happy was dead. She could go back to the Oriflamme and wait for him there, but not everyone rises, and when they do you can’t always tell where they’ll go. It was a long shot. All that was left to her now was long shots.

I thought through the options. You don’t get to have a happy ending when you’re dead: this was just damage limitation, nothing more.