Thicker Than Water

‘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.