Vicious Circle

And then there’s an entirely different support group: the people who come in to talk to Rosie and keep her mind engaged. Being dead, she can’t sleep. The person who’s hosting her sleeps, and typically wakes up feeling as refreshed and energized as if they’ve had a week at a health spa. Rosie herself needs more or less constant mental stimulation; and since J.J. has categorically refused to allow her out of the unit, that stimulation all has to be provided on-site. She watches a lot of DVDs (there’s an embargo on live TV), reads a lot of books, and talks endlessly to anyone who’ll listen—with a digital recorder on permanent record in the background.

I’ve been part of that support group, off and on, for a good few years now. Maybe I felt like I needed to apologize for my part in bringing her back up from the dark without asking first, but I also enjoyed her company, and sometimes she made a useful sounding board. Whoever she’d been in life (she claimed not to remember) she’d had a mind like a straight-edge razor. Death had done nothing except rot away the sheath.

But I’d always timed my visits for when Jenna-Jane was away from the unit on one of her lecture tours, or scaring up funds from charities with loosely worded charters. Tonight, I knew from my moles on the inside, she was on-site; so tonight the only way to get to Rosie was to go through J.J.

And the first problem was getting to see her. The place was looking more like a fortress than ever, with an actual guard post now on the main doors where I had to state my business and then wait for authorization to come down from on high. Then as I walked along the hallways, with their familiar smell of long-departed urine, I noticed that there were alarm buttons labeled with short alphanumeric strings. A notice alongside each one reminded all passers-by that a failure to observe containment protocols would result in immediate dismissal, and that in the event of a containment breach floating security staff should converge on the site where the alarm was given while all other personnel went directly to their assigned assembly points. It all sounded like the worst of my memories of holidays at Butlins. Even the razor wire was kind of in keeping.

Jenna-Jane was in the smaller of her two offices—the one that overlooked the open-plan work area of the unit the way a signalman’s hut overlooks the engine sidings.

As I walked up here, I’d been mulling over how to phrase my request. Not too long ago, I’d just have been able to drop in on Rosie and say hi without any palaver: but then J.J. had caught one of the visitors carrying out messages for Rosie, and she’d tightened up the whole operation by a couple of notches. She had a lot of other prize-winning acts in her freak show now, but Rosie was the first and still the jewel in the crown: a ghost still extant on earth after more than five hundred years. So J.J. watched over all of Rosie’s inputs and outputs with a jealous eye that, like Rosie’s, never closed.

I knocked on the door, and J.J. looked up from a thick sheaf of papers that she was working through. She gave me a smile—a dazzling, meaningless smile that said she was beside herself with delight to see me. It said that, but it lied through its all too visible teeth.

“Felix,” she said warmly, and she stood up and came around the desk. I tried to avoid the pressing of flesh but she wasn’t having any of that. She kissed me on the right cheek, and then on the left for good measure, continental style. That meant I got a momentary glimpse through my sixth sense of the snake pit of her mind. It was something I could really have done without right then.

Someone had told me once that her real name was Müller rather than Mulbridge and that she’d been born in the ruins of Essen while the Third Reich was still thrashing itself to pieces in its death throes. If that was true, she had the best imitation of a tweedily harmless, upper-middle-drawer-decayed-minor-aristocracy-but-let’s-not-talk-about-it English accent I’d ever heard. Like most things about Jenna-Jane, it was a feint that was designed to bring you in close enough for knife work.

She hadn’t changed by a micrometer: still petite, and neat, and agelessly sweet. She had to be about sixty now, but her body seemed to have decided that midforties was a good look for her, and it had held on to it. Her hair was gray, but then it always had been: and on her it seemed less a sign of age than what you see when you scrape the paint off the side of a battleship. And like a battleship, her surface was bland and smooth and impenetrable. She affected a surgical white coat, but underneath it I saw jeans and a plaid shirt. J.J. knew how to stand on ceremony when there was something to be gained from it: the rest of the time she was just good plain folks.

“You never come to see us anymore,” she went on, gently reproachful. “It must be two years!”