Vicious Circle

In spiritualist circles, this kind of thing usually gets called a summoning, but people in my business just call it the magic lasso. It’s the first phase of an exorcism. Before you can send a ghost away, you have to bind it; wrap your will around it like duct tape, although that’s actually a very unpleasant image and I wish I hadn’t thought of it. In any case, I was telling Abbie, wherever she was, that she had to dance to my tune now. I was telling her to come to heel.

There were two good reasons why this might not work. The first was that I just didn’t know her well enough. I’d never met her, in life or in death, and so the music was incomplete—just an unfinished sketch in sound, based on the emotions I’d sensed in the things she used to own. Those emotions were strong, but they were only a single piece from a huge jigsaw puzzle; what I was doing was analogous to trying to intuit the entire picture from that one piece, without the benefit of the box lid.

The second reason was that she could well be too far away in any case. No summoning is going to work if the ghost doesn’t hear it, and I’d never done this before for a ghost who wasn’t right there in the same space as me.

But the rules are different in all sorts of ways once you’re dead. What’s space? What’s distance? After a few moments, I felt a tremor of response—like a vibration on some strand of a web that I was spinning in the air, invisibly, all around me. I tried to keep my own emotions—satisfaction, excitement, unease—in check as I built that response into the tune, making my approximation of Abbie a little stronger, pulling her in, calling her to me. The vibration became infinitesimally more marked, more insistent.

And then, in an instant, it was gone.

Dead, blank, empty air surrounded me, like the moment after the fridge stops humming and you think the silence is a new sound.

I skipped a beat, swore under my breath, started up again. The music came more readily this time. I had a better grasp of it now, and so I was aiming better: pitching my tent where I knew she’d be.

Again, the most tenuous and hesitant of tugs on the web of sound—from over my left shoulder, which was away to the southwest somewhere. I guess direction isn’t any more meaningful than distance, but the sense of the pull coming from that physical quarter was very strong.

But again, when I reached for it, when I tried to move my mind or my soul out onto that part of the web, the sudden, instantaneous collapse—followed by a great deal of nothing at all.

A suspicion was waking up in the back of my mind, like a hibernating bear roused too early and in a foul mood. But God forbid I should jump to any conclusions. I gave it a rest, filed some long-dead paperwork to get my mind back into neutral.

Half an hour later I tried again, building from first principles. I started with the doll just like before, bracing myself as I prepared to dip first my toe, and then the rest of me, into that cold ocean of unhappiness—but the tide was out. This time when I held the unlovely toy in my hands there was nothing there: no emotional trace at all. Amazed and disconcerted, I picked up a teddy bear, a pair of trainers, a book. Finally I buried my hands in the sprawl of teenage treasure trove, fingers spread wide, touching as many different things at once as I could manage. They were all cold and inert.

And now it was the conclusions that were jumping on me.

That just couldn’t happen. The residual emotions we leave in the things we touch aren’t like fingerprints; they can be overlaid with stronger, later impressions, but they can’t be wiped clean. Or at least, that’s what I’d always assumed. But somebody had just done it: killed the psychic trail, pulled the rug out from under me and left me sitting on my arse in the middle of nowhere. And once again I had to admit to myself that I didn’t have any idea how that could be done.

Kidnapping ghosts. Blindsiding the hunt. I was dealing with someone who was better than me at my own game. My professional pride was piqued, and slightly punctured. I had to see if I could reflate it.

Yeah, that shallow.

On bad days, I have to admit that I deserve everything I get.

Four

THE FRONT DOOR OF ST. MICHAEL’S CHURCH WAS MASSIVE: bivalved, with a lock on each side. Old wood four inches thick, set tight in a slightly narrow, low-arched narthex, and I could tell by the look of it that it had fossilized hard with age. It moved less than half an inch under my hand, and I gave it up as a bad job. I could pick the locks with nothing more than brute force and bloody-mindedness, but there wouldn’t be any point. From the feel of it, the doors were anchored at the bottom, too: there was a bolt on the inside.