Vicious Circle Read Online Free PDF Page A

all comes down to the same thing. Most of us are in no position to get all holier-than-thou about it.
    So for a while, by the simple application of the laws of supply and demand, I was rolling in it: asking for top dollar and getting what I was asking for (in the positive rather than the ironic sense of that phrase). And if anyone ever posed the question, or if I allowed myself to wonder where the ghosts I dispelled actually went to, I had a flip answer in the breech ready to fire.
    It’s only in the Western tradition, I’d say, sounding like someone who’d actually finished out his degree, that ghosts are seen as being the actual spirits of dead people. Other cultures have them down as being something else. The Navajo think of ghosts as something that congeals out of the worst parts of your nature while the rest of you goes into the next world cleansed and fighting fit. In the Far East, they’re often treated as a sort of emotional pollutant whose appearance depends on who’s looking at them, and so on.
    Yeah, I know. Given that ghostbusting was my bread and butter, and given that I’d started with my own sister, it helped a hell of a lot if I could tell myself and anyone else who’d listen that ghosts were something different from the people they looked like. I was only talking my conscience to sleep, and while it was asleep I did some pretty bad things.
    One of them was Rafi.

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    The Charles Stanger Care Home stands just off the North Circular at Muswell Hill, on the smooth bow-bend of Coppetts Road. From the outside, and from a distance, it looks like what it used to be—a row of Victorian workmen’s cottages, turn-of-the-century poverty reinvented as tasteful nostalgia.
    Closer in, you see the bars over the windows, riveted directly into the original brickwork, and the looming bulk of the new annex protruding backward at an acute angle, dwarfing the cottages themselves. If you’re tuned in to stuff like that, maybe you also notice the magical prophylactics that they’ve put up beside the main door to discourage the dead: a sprig of myrtle for May, a necromantic circle bearing the words HOC FUGERE—flee this place—a crucifix, and an ornate blue enamel mezuzah. One way or another, you’re dumped out of the Victorian reverie into an uncomfortable present.
    I stepped in out of a night laden with a fresh freight of rain that had yet to fall onto thick carpet and the expertly canned smell of wild honeysuckle. But the Stanger has a hard time putting on a pretty face: as I pushed open the second set of doors and went on through into the lobby, I could already hear a huge commotion from somewhere further inside. Shouting voices, a woman—or maybe a man—crying, crashes of doors opening and closing. It all sat a little oddly with the soothing Vivaldi being played pianissimo over the speaker system. The nurse at the desk, Helen, was staring off down the corridor and looking like she wanted to bolt. She jerked her head around when she saw me, and I gave her a nod.
    “Mr. Castor!” she said, checking her start of alarm. “Felix—It’s him. Asmodeus. He’s—” She pointed, but seemed unable to get any more words out.
    “I heard,” I said, tersely. “I’ll go on through.”
    I broke into a trot as I went up the main corridor. This was my usual weekly visit: I still called it that, even though these days the interval between them had stretched out to a month or more. I was tied to this place by the loose elastic of ancient guilt, and every so often the pull became too insistent to ignore. But clearly tonight was going to be a departure from routine. There was something going on up ahead of me, and it was a violent, screaming kind of something. I didn’t want to be anywhere near it, but Rafi was my responsibility and this was absolutely my job to sort out.
    Rafi’s room is in the new annex. I sometimes think, with a certain bitterness, that Rafi’s room financed the new annex, because it had cost a