Книга Dead Men's s Boots — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

Two thingsay m"">Two eventually had to happen before I started to realise that tooting my whistle first and asking questions later was a flawed strategy. The first was me fucking up someone else’s life beyond all possible unfucking, and the second was having my own life saved and handed back to me by a dead woman I was trying to exorcise. These days I don’t do straight ghostbusting any more: if you look at the sign over my office door, you’ll see that it says I provide SPIRITUAL SERVICES. No, I don’t know what that means either, and it doesn’t do a hell of a lot to bring in the passing trade.

So what kind of a spiritual service was my old acquaintance John Gittings in need of? As I sidestepped out of the way of a broken-off chair leg that left a dent in the wall at the height of my crotch, I ran through some of the options – from the humane to the extreme.

Geist! It was like finding out that your best friend is a cannibal after he’s just offered you a chicken sandwich.

Well, maybe not quite like that: John had never been a friend, exactly. Including one memorable skirmish with a werewolf at Whipsnade Zoo, in which he’d modified our sketchy battle plan on the fly and almost gotten me eaten alive, I’d seen him maybe five times in the last three years.

It was still a shock, though, and I was having a hard time getting my head around it. Like I said, most ghosts are passive and harmless: it’s only the most disturbed souls who go geist after death, their tortured personalities subliming through some terrible metamorphosis into an unliving storm of anger and frustration.

But John Gittings? In the words of Denis Healey, it was like being savaged by a dead sheep.

I turned to Carla, realising what she’d been going through; why she’d asked me to come home with her, and what she’d tried and failed to say as we were driving back here.

I put a hand on her arm and gave her a firm push towards the door, seeing in her eyes that she was about to start crying again, and afraid that this time she might not be able to stop.

‘Wait in the car,’ I said.

She stared up at me, frightened and hopeful in about equal amounts – and some of what she was scared of was the same as what she was hoping for.