Thicker Than Water

I was lapping air with my tongue, drinking it in agonising sips.

‘Castor, it’s all right! It’s all right!’

It was, eventually, although the violent tremors running through me felt like small electric shocks. As they subsided, they left behind an enormous lethargy and lack of volition: a feeling that the only way I was ever going to move again was if someone rolled me down a grassy bank into a ditch. Nurse Ryall took my pulse and said soothing things: I could tell that from the tone of her voice, although the words themselves were just sounds. She wiped the bloody froth off my face where I’d bitten deep into my tongue. She helped me into a sitting position when I seemed to be capable of dealing with it. And the first question she asked, although I could see she was brimming with a million others, was ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ She was waving just the one in front of my eyes to see how they tracked it.

‘One,’ I said thickly. ‘Index. Right. Dark pink nail varnish.’

‘Fuchsia. What day is it?’

‘Tuesday.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Currently? Fƒ"">‘""juelix Castor.’

Nurse Ryall smiled in spite of herself - but sadly she also disentangled her body from mine, correctly judging that mine was sufficiently recovered now to go solo. She stood up and brushed off her uniform. What is it about nurses’ uniforms that makes men fantasise about them? Mostly when you meet a nurse both your charisma and your libido are at their lowest ebb.

‘So did you get anywhere?’ she demanded, as I got up slowly and carefully on Slinky-spring legs. The footboard of Kenny’s bed was called into service.

‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘I got somewhere.’ But I didn’t make any attempt to say where. That night-black terra incognita was beyond my power to describe."

"‘And what is it? Is it . . . what you said? Some kind of shared possession?’ She had trouble getting the word out, but she did it anyway. I like a woman who doesn’t flinch from absolute madness.

I nodded slowly. I would have nodded vigorously but I was afraid my head would fall off. ‘I’m nearly certain,’ I said.

‘Then you can deal with it?’

And that brought us to the crunch. I made a noncommittal gesture.

‘I mean . . . that’s what you do, isn’t it? You said you were an exorcist.’

She had me there: I did say that. It’s even still true, up to a point. But there were a number of reasons why that didn’t immediately translate into ultra-macho demonslaying.

The first is that demons are mostly pretty damn hard to slay. Human ghosts are easy, most of the time. You get the sense of them, the measure of them, by staying in their proximity for a few minutes, hours or days - the precise time varied from job to job, and from one ghostbuster to another - and then you did whatever it was that you did: the peculiar schtick that channelled your power. With me it was music, but everyone’s got their thing. If you do it right, then when you’ve finished the ghost is gone: permanently, irrevocably gone, and nobody (despite what they may tell you) has any idea where to.

Loup-garous are a bit more complicated. When you’ve got a human spirit anchored in animal flesh - which is all a werewolf is at the end of the day - you can drive it out easily enough. You just set up an interference between the spirit and its host, so that the body expels the invading ghost and becomes its normal, animal self again. This isn’t the same as a straight exorcism, although we still call it that: the ghost isn’t permanently banished, it’s just temporarily evicted. If that sounds like a pussyfooting distinction, look at it this way: it’s the difference between what an assassin does and what a bailiff does. Who would you prefer to get a visit from?

And demons - demons are different again, mostly because they know how to fight back. Demons are sensitised to exorcisms, to the point where even the preliminary rituals shrill out to them across enormous distances like a police siren. Probably there’s a Darwinian explanation for that: the deƒor eremons that lacked this sensitivity were the ones that went under. The ones that are left, by contrast, have both a certain level of resistance to an exorcist’s patternings and a tendency to counter-attack: they’ve been known to back-navigate the psychic trail like a shark following a blood-spoor, until they find the exorcist and stop the spell in progress by, say, eating his brain.

But the other element in the mix here is the exorcist himself, and my feelings on the subject underwent a bit of a revision a while back. I started to wonder where it was the ghosts went to when we dispatched them so casually - a question I should maybe have been asking way back when I performed my first exorcism on my own sister. Belatedly, my itchy trigger finger got a little bit arthritic, and I made a decision not to perform exorcisms on demand.