Thicker Than Water

I took it slowly, because the pain from the previous night’s musical exertions was still very fresh and very vivid.

It felt strange in a way, summoning a spirit that was already so familiar to me. Okay, it had been a long time since Kenny and I had met - at least, with both of us actually conscious - but most of the ghosts I raise are strangers and even after seventeen years Kenny was a long way from being that. Also, most ghosts don’t scare me: Kenny had been a monster to me back when I still believed in monsters, and locking myself in with his spirit was something that I did with a slight prickling of unease, even though I hated myself for that atavistic weakness.

The tune was slow in coming, and it was only partly because of my aching chest and shortness of breath. I had to overcome a powerful reluctance to open myself up to the music - to start the process that would bring Kenny’s wandering essence into focus in this place, at this time. It was as though a part of me was trying to back away and another part was holding me in place by the scruff of the neck. And the part that wanted to retreat was about twelve years old, which paradoxically gave it an edge against the adult, rational Castor that wanted to play the summoning: on the lost highways of the id, reason is a bike with no wheels.

But it happened in any case, the tune pulling me onwards in spite of myself: a fractally branching tail winding out through the disinfectant-soured air and wagging me like a dog. I closed my eyes, tried to keep my embouchure reasonably tight and let it happen.

Consequently I felt Kenny before I saw him. That’s how it works for me most of the time, of course: the death-sense drives the music and the music turns into a negative image, a sound-painting that describes the thing it wants and brings it by describing it.

He was close. Of course he was close: he’d died in this very building only a few hours before. The sense of him went from tenuous to vivid to claustrophobic within the space of maybe a dozen heartbeats.

I opened my eyes again. The air darkened in front of me and he began to appear, in separate splotches of deepening tone that spread and merged like blood from a shaving cut soaking through tissue paper. As soon as I thought that, I tried to banish the image from my mind, but that was what Kenny was like: a wound in the air that my skirling music had incised.

Some ghosts don’t know where or even who they are: they get lost in a memory or an emotion, replay a past moment like a ragged piece of vinyl being ceaselessly sampled by a demonic DJ. Kenny stared at me in silence, and I saw the recognition in his eyes. Unlike the living Kenny, he wore no bandages, which meant that his body was criss-crossed with wounds so dense and interconnected in places that they looked like words in some hieroglyphic script.

I lowered the whistle to my lap, and he didn’t fade.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘You called me. What did you want?’

The ghost looked down, turned its hands over to examine its ravaged wrists. Its lips moved, and although I didn’t hear the word it spoke I could read the shape of it.

‘Mark,’ I agreed. ‘What about him, Kenny? Is that what you wanted to tell me about? How he died? What’s been happening since?’

The ghost shook its head slowly from side to side, but I wasn’t sure whether it was in disagreement or just in bewilderment. This time when he spoke I heard the word as a tinny, baseless whisper in the air: the hum of a breathless mosquito.

‘Mark . . .’"

"‘Did he bring it? The thing that’s living in the Salisbury now, and making people cut themselves? Did he summon it, in some way? With his hurt-kit instead of a magic circle? Is that what happened?’

Kenny blinked, but he had no tear ducts now to wash the surface of those fleshless eyes. A grimace spread across his face in slow motion.

‘Angry,’ he whispered. ‘Because . . . an . . . an . . . an . . . an . . .’

After each repetition of that syllable, the pauses lengthened. Whatever he was trying to say, it was a gradient which his cooling consciousness refused to climb.

‘Who was angry?’ I asked. ‘Mark? Mark was angry?’

The ghost whimpered, bringing its hands up to chest height with the fingers curled like hooks. It looked as though it wanted to rend its own breast, but of course that wasn’t an option.

‘Cut,’ it said, very distinctly. ‘Again. And again. An . . . an . . . an . . .’

A ripple passed through it, so that for a moment it looked like a piece of washing hung out on a line. I was reminded, grotesquely, of how kids pretend to be ghosts by draping sheets over themselves.

‘Who killed you?’ I demanded, cutting to the chase. ‘Who was with you in the car?’

The ghost’s desolate gaze travelled along the length of its right arm, starting at the wrist and finishing at the shoulder; then on down its hacked and sliced torso.

‘Oh,’ it murmured brokenly.