Vicious Circle

I put the whistle to my lips and blew G, C, A to tune myself in. I was aware that all the eyes in the room were focused on me now: Coldwood’s expressionless, most of the others bright with prurient interest—but one of the uniformed constables was definitely looking a little on the nervous side.

The trouble with what I was about to do was that it doesn’t always work: at best it’s fifty-fifty. There’s something about a rationalistic world view that arms you against seeing or hearing anything that would contradict it—like mermaids, say, or flying pigs or ghosts. Overall about two people in three can see at least some of the dead, but even then it depends a lot on mood and situation, and in certain professions that ratio drops to something very close to zero. Policemen and scientists cluster somewhere near the bottom of the league table.

I didn’t know what I was going to play until I blew the first notes. It might have been nothing much: just the skeleton of a melody, or an atonal riff with a rough-hewn kind of a pattern to it. It turned out to be a Micah Hinson number called “The Day Texas Sank to the Bottom of the Sea”—I’d seen Hinson perform at some café in Hammersmith, and I found something powerfully satisfying in the lilting harshness of his voice and the hammering, inescapable repetitions of his lyrics. But even without that, the song appealed to me for the title alone.

Nothing seemed to happen at first, but then from my point of view, nothing was going to. Hopefully the perspective from where Coldwood was standing was starting to look a bit different. Just before I hit the second chorus there was a gasp from one of the forensics officers over by the desk. Good. Then another one cried out aloud, and pointed, and I knew the plangent little tune had done the trick.

What they were pointing at was a man who was standing on nothing very much, in the exact center of the well that the trapdoor had covered. He’d always been there, perfectly visible to me from the moment I’d walked in, but Coldwood’s boys had been walking past him and through him without so much as a premonitory shudder and a muttered Hail Mary, so I’d felt safe in assuming that I was the only one who could see him.

But the music had changed all that. This tune—at this time, in this place, played in this tempo, and all the rest of it—was for me a description of the ghost. It’s a knack I’ve got: not just to see the dead, but to perceive them with a sense that’s nine-tenths hearing, one-tenth something I can only describe as else. I can catch the essence of a ghost in music, and once I’ve caught it there are other things I can do with it. One of them, which I’d discovered fairly recently and spectacularly, was to make other people see it, too.

So now the music was bringing this dead man inside the perceptual orbit of Coldwood and his coppers—which meant that they were seeing Sheehan’s ghost materialize out of that proverbially popular substance, thin air. The plods gaped, and the men in white coats visibly bridled and tensed as they saw this piece of superstition and unreason made manifest before their eyes. Coldwood has a more pragmatic cast of mind: he walked right up close to the ghost and began his examination. It stared at him with mournful, frightened eyes.

Lesley Sheehan clearly hadn’t been dead for very long, and he hadn’t had time yet to get used to the idea. He’d come here because this was a place he had strong associations to—or possibly he’d just stayed here because this was where he’d died—but in either case, now that he’d materialized that seemed to be the upper limit of his capabilities for the time being. He couldn’t reinsert himself into life because his phantasmal body couldn’t lift or move or touch any physical objects, and wouldn’t even reliably do what his phantasmal mind told it to. Some ghosts got trapped into reenacting their deaths for the whole of eternity; others just stood, as Sheehan was doing now, looking lost and frightened—defeated and broken down by the no-longer-avoidable fact of their own mortality. He was aware of us, on some level, and his eyes followed Coldwood as the sergeant squatted down on his haunches to get a better look at some detail that had caught his eye. But it was as if he were frozen to the spot: he couldn’t form the decision or the desire to move from where he was.

Coldwood pointed to the ligature around Sheehan’s bare forearm. “He was shooting up,” he said, sounding disgruntled. “Stupid bastard’s gone and jolted himself over. Why didn’t he do it on his own fucking time?”

“That was what I thought, too,” I agreed. “But if you take a look at the back view you’ll probably want to amend that diagnosis.”