Free Mean Spirit by Phil Rickman Page B

here?
On every level of the question.
    She knew – because he’d said so several times – that Marcus firmly expected her, at some stage, to leave her rented cottage in the village of St Mary’s, on the border of Herefordshire and Monmouthshire, to take up a
real
career.
    She kept telling herself she wasn’t going to do this, at least until
The Vision
was making enough money for Marcus to hire another writer and maybe a sub-editor too.
    So perhaps she was destined to be there all her life.
    There should, of course, be a man. There always used to be a man. And yet she’d been faintly horrified when her old boyfriend, Lucas, the Greenwich Village art-dealer, had written to her saying he’d be over on a buying trip in the spring and maybe they could like
get together.
Cool, refined, Ferrari-driving Lucas, who talked all night about the need for an inner life and would just hate ever to have time for one.
    Lucas, Grayle decided, had his place in history and that era had been covered.
    It was hard to find a man with an inner life. Maybe this was what drew her back to Marcus. Not in
that
way, of course, but Marcus, even though he raged and threw things, was certainly the father she kind of wished she’d had.
    Grayle also thought sometimes about Bobby Maiden, the English cop. Who’d died in the hospital after a hit-and-run incident – and then been resuscitated and come out of it different. Events had tied them together. Losing loved ones to the same killer.
    It was Bobby – mercifully, not Grayle – who had been there when Ersula’s decaying body came to light.
    ‘Why do you say it’s shit?’ Grayle had asked eventually, when the candle was burning low in the pewter dish. ‘Why do you think you were feeding people shit?’
    And the woman had bowed her head, her tobacco hair falling forward.
    ‘It’s a gift. It
is
a gift. You can’t believe it yourself at first. Dead people out there, just queuing up to talk to you. So many of them that you have to appoint an agent over there to filter them.’
    ‘Agent?’
    ‘Spirit guide. I’ve had several. Even a Red Indian. A
Native
fucking
American.
I said, “Piss off, Mr Running Bear, whatever you call yourself, you want to completely ruin my credibility?” But he stuck around, the poor old sod. He was very friendly in his gruff way, I quite took to him. All the clichés – you get
all
the bloody clichés. Table-rapping – that works as well. I’m not saying scores of people didn’t fake it, but … it happens.’
    ‘Ectoplasm?’
    ‘Why not? Not in my experience, but there’s evidence for it. And it’s a word that sounds good, isn’t it? Sounds scientific. That was the big thing when all this started in the mid-nineteenth century. It had to be seen as another great scientific leap forward, like electricity and photography. All these huge developments were linked into spiritualism – it wasn’t religion, it was human scientific knowledge crossing the final frontier. Man was becoming so clever so fast that it was obvious we were going to solve the mystery of death, sooner rather than later.’
    ‘I did a piece on all that once,’ Grayle said, ‘but the evidence was that it was nearly all one big scam.’
    ‘No.’ Callard blinked balefully. ‘That’s not the scam. Or rather, much of it was, but it’s not the one I’m talking about. I haven’t produced ectoplasm, but I’ve had materialization. Visuals. Energy forms.’
    ‘Ghosts?’
    ‘You believe in ghosts, perhaps?’ Callard eyeing her thoughtfully.
    ‘I … think so.’
    ‘You’ve seen?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘You do know, Grayle. No-one who’s seen has any real doubts.’
    ‘So why is it shit?’
    Callard stretched her long neck. She was looking firmer now, less sick. OK, beautiful; no getting around that.
    ‘For a number of years, I’d go into trance and receive these clear, comprehensible messages from what I had every reason to believe were departed spirits. The fact that the