Vicious Circle

From what I can still recall of that conversation, he was already well on the way to becoming the surly, crazed recluse that everybody now remembers him as. He talked about the dead and the living as though they were two armies in the field, with himself as some kind of commander marshaling the forces of the warm-blooded. He looked the part, too, I have to admit: spirit-level straight, unyielding as stone, his gray hair cropped close to his scalp. And if he were a general, he seemed to feel that the exorcists were his crack troops: an elite commando unit trained to take anything the enemy could throw at us. The enemy? I hedged at first, sure that there was some subtlety I was missing, but there wasn’t. “The dead,” he said. “And the undead. The ones that want to supplant us, and take the world away from us.”

Even back then, when I was blasting unquiet spirits without qualm or question, I still couldn’t see the situation quite like that. Apart from anything else, it only seemed to lead in one direction, to a door marked “abandon hope.” Out of some halfhearted attempt to keep my half of the conversation up, I asked him how it was possible to fight a war where any casualty in your own forces became a recruit for the other side.

“What do you mean?” he demanded, frowning at me over a glass of champagne, which he was clutching tightly enough to make me nervous.

I made the best fist of it that I could, which wasn’t all that good because most of my concentration was tied up in looking round for an escape route: this was as big a disillusionment as finding out that the reason Father Christmas smells like Johnnie Walker is because he’s your dad in a fake beard and a red mac. “I mean we’re all going to die, Mr. Steiner. If the dead do hate the living, they don’t have to fight us: they only have to wait. In the end, everyone goes the same way, right? If life is an army, everyone deserts sooner or . . .”

His glare made me falter into silence. I knew damn well, looking into those mad, uncompromising baby blues, that if we had been in a war zone he’d have had me shot right there and then for bringing aid and comfort to the enemy. Since we were at a party, he didn’t have that option: he was visibly weighing up alternatives.

“Fuck off and kill yourself, then,” he growled at last. Then he turned and walked away, shouldering aside some of the great and good who’d gathered around so that they could be seen and photographed with him.

After that, the stages of his decline were charted with endless fascination by the ghost-hunting community. From seeing himself as general and commander in chief, he came more and more to see himself as a prominent target. If the ghosts—and their servants and satraps, the were-kin, the demons, and the zombies—were engaged in a war against the living, then sooner or later they were bound to try to strike at the people who were leading the campaign on the other side: the exorcists. He started to take elaborate precautions for his own safety, and the first—highly publicized—step he took was to buy a yacht. Since the dead can’t usually cross running water, Steiner had decided that he’d make sure he was surrounded by running water most of the time, and only step onto dry land when there was no way of avoiding it. He suggested in a couple of interviews that this might be the lifestyle of the future. He imagined itinerant populations, floating cities built on decommissioned aircraft carriers and oil tankers.

But crazy though he was, I guess he realized somewhere along the way that the idea of relocating whole urban populations onto houseboats would be a hard sell. Something else—some other measure, achievable but effective—was going to be needed, so that when the inevitable assault came and the evil dead overran the land the living would have somewhere to retreat to. A visionary to the last, he proposed a series of safe houses, ingeniously designed, which would stand “with hallowed ground to all four sides, behind elemental ramparts of earth and air and water.” Houses built on this design, he said, would blind the eyes and blunt the forces of the dead. The first design used actual moats: the later ones had double walls with the water flowing between them invisibly in plumbed-in metal tanks. The earth and air and fire parts I’m not so sure about. He sent the designs to the housing departments of all the London boroughs, and offered his services free as an adviser if they’d commit themselves to a building program.

As far as I know, none of the boroughs ever responded—not even with a po-faced “your letter has been received and taken under advisement.” Steiner raged impotently; even with his millions, there was no way he could do this on his own.