Thicker Than Water

The two of us threaded this maze, thinking our own separate thoughts. I knew what Pen’s were, more or less, because her walk was halfway to being a run by this time, and her hands kept clenching and unclenching from sheer nervous energy. Mine were focused on the question of whether we were being followed. By this time I was almost a hundred per cent certain that the answer was no: not because I hadn’t seen anyone - that didn’t mean a thing - but because I’d added enough loops and squiggles as we went from Pen’s place to the Salisbury to force any tail either to drop us or to show himself. I was satisfied that we were safe, but I remained in paranoid mode because it has its uses.

Imelda Probert’s place stands on a cul-de-sac that reminds you of the literal meaning of that term - the arse end of a bag. There was precious little beauty to be found here: just the ugly functionality of boarded-up windows, basement-level front lightwells turned into skips and shipwrecked cars lying dormant under birdshit-spattered tarpaulins.

We ignored the front door, which had been screwed immovably into its frame in aeons past, and went in via the side alley. That meant braving the yard, where weeds grew to the height of men and every clump of grass hid a broken bottle. Pen led the way with reckless speed: I followed more cautiously, knowing from previous visits how treacherous this terrain could be.

We walked up the stairs in the sullen twilight of a forty-watt bulb. On the second floor Pen’s eyes strayed to a door that was scrawled over and over with makeshift wards and sigils and had been closed with a heavy padlock. She slowed for a moment. This was the lodestone that had been drawing her, and it was hard for her to walk on past it. But she knew there was no way into that room except with me and Imelda to act as Virgils to her Dante.

Imelda is a faith healer for the dead. Most of her work comes from zombies, who find that a laying-on of hands from the Ice-Maker slows down the processes of organic decay for a month or so at a time. That’s a precious boon to zombies, whose biggest problems are the ones that arise from a limited shelf life. But Imelda’s motto is ‘come one, come all’: she’ll help loup-garous keep their animal side in check at the dark of the moon, arrange for bereaved spouses and parents to meet their lost loved ones, and probably do a lot of other things besides that she wouldn’t advertise to a practising exorcist like me.

We continued our ascent to the third floor, where we knocked politely and waited. No wards on this door: no sprigs of hazel or hawthorn or stay-nots in crude, dyspeptic Latin telling ghosts and the undead to shove off without passing GO. Imelda likes the undead and makes them welcome. She’s a lot less certain about me, though.

From inside the flat there came the sound of a great many bolts being drawn back, and then the heavy door creaked open to reveal the wary but curious face of Lisa, Imelda’s sixteen-year-old daughter. She grinned when she saw me.

‘Oh, look what the cat sicked up!’ she said, in gleeful imitation of her mother. She stood aside and we walked through into Imelda’s hallway, which was no better lit than kett gl the landing but a lot more spacious: her flat may be falling apart but it’s built on a grand scale. The floor under our feet was actually slightly concave, a sign of some deep malaise of the floorboards hidden from sight by the bilious green carpet.

‘You’re looking well,’ I said to Lisa. ‘Does that mean you’re pregnant again?’

She punched me in the arm, which I took as a fair riposte. In fact Lisa had never been pregnant in the usually accepted sense of the word, but the ghost of a dead baby had taken up lodgings in her once - a regrettable side effect of having no wards on your door - and Imelda had called me in to persuade it to go elsewhere: that had healed a rift between me and the Ice-Maker, and it had made it possible for me to approach her when I had a problem of my own that seemed to need the touch of her skilled hands.

‘Your mother in?’ I asked, rubbing my arm because Lisa packs a powerful punch for such a skinny little kid.

‘I dunno. I’ll go see,’ Lisa said, and then without moving from the spot she bawled ‘Mummmmmmm!’ at the top of her voice.

A door slammed open in the recesses of the flat and heavy footsteps sounded, heading towards us. The rest of the building is empty, so any time you move you raise echoes as hollow and resonant as if you’re walking on a drumhead. Imelda likes it that way, though: she never has to keep the noise down for fear of what the neighbours will say, and there’s nobody to object to the odd hours she keeps or to the inevitable stream of mostly posthumous late-night callers.