Vicious Circle Read online

  “Why a church? Did you get religion?”

  Her head snapped up and she frowned at me, eyes narrowing to slits. I threw up my hands, palms out, in a meant-no-harm pantomime. Sometimes I go too far. She infallibly lets me know when that happens.

  As usual, once I’d started looking at her, the tricky thing was stopping. Juliet is absurdly, unfeasibly beautiful. Her skin is melanin-free, alabaster smooth, as white as any cliché you care to dredge up. If you go for the default option, snow, then think of her eyes as two deep fishing holes, as black as midnight. But if anyone’s fishing, it’s from the inside of those holes, and you won’t feel the hook until it’s way, way down in the back of your throat. Her hair is black, too: a waterfall of black that falls almost to the small of her back, texturelessly sheer. Her body . . . I won’t try to cover that. You could get lost there. People have: stronger people than you, and most of them never came back.

  Because the point—and I know I’ve said this already—is that Juliet isn’t human. She’s a demon: of the family of the succubi, whose preferred method of feeding depends on arousing you to the point where your nervous system starts to fuse into slag and then sucking your soul out through your flesh. Even tonight, dressed coyly in black slacks, boots, and a loose white shirt with a red rose embroidered up the left-hand side, you could never mistake her for anything other than what she was. The confidence, the strength that Susan Book had seen in her—that came from being the top carnivore in a food chain that no man or woman alive could even imagine. Except that “carnivore” wasn’t quite the right term: you needed something like “noumovore,” or “animovore.” And even more than that, you needed not to go there.

  Thank God she’s on our side, that’s all. And I’m saying that as an atheist.

  And taking another step, I came within range of her scent. It hit me in two waves, as it always does. With the first breath, you’re gulping in the rank foulness of fox, cloying and earthy; with the second, which you draw shallowly because of the sharpness of that first impression, you inhale a mélange of perfumes so achingly sweet and sensual your body goes on instant all-points alert. I’m used to it and I was braced for it, but even so I felt a wave of dizziness as all the blood in my head rushed down to my crotch in case it was needed there to bulk out my sudden, painful erection. Men limp around Juliet: limp, and go partially blind because taking your eyes off her suddenly seems like a waste of valuable time.

  Which is why it’s important never to forget what she is. That way, you can maintain a level of good, old-fashioned, pants-wetting terror as a bulwark against the desire. I’ve found that to be a healthy balance to keep, because obviously if I ever actually had sex with Juliet, my immortal soul would be the cigarette afterward; but still, it’s not easy to think logically when she’s right there in front of you. It’s not easy to think at all.

  She unfolded her legs and stepped down off the chunk of marble with unconscious grace. I realized that it was the cover of a family vault: Joseph and Caroline Rybandt, and a bunch of subsidiary Rybandts listed in a smaller font. Death is no more democratic than life is. I also realized that Juliet was carrying a gray plastic bowl half-full of water. It had been resting in her lap, and when I first saw her she must have been peering down into it.

  “So how’s tricks?” I asked her.

  “Good,” she said, neutrally. “On the whole.”

  “Meaning . . . ?”

  “It’s fine if I don’t think about the hunger. It’s been a year now since I actually fed. Fed fully on a human being, body and soul. It’s hard sometimes to keep the flavor, and the joy of it, out of my mind.”

  I groped around for a response, but nothing came. “Yeah,” I said after slightly too long a pause, “I thought you were looking slim. Think of it as a detox diet.”

  Juliet frowned, not getting the reference. Now didn’t seem like a good time to explain it.

  “So you’ve got a spook?” I said, to move things along. “A graveyard cling-on?” It was one of the commonest scenarios we came across in our profession: ghosts clinging to the place where their mortal remains still rested, anchored in their own flesh and unable to move on. Some of them got the hang of the wiring and rose again as zombies; most just stayed where they were, getting fainter and more wretched as the years went by.

  Juliet looked at me severely. “In this graveyard? There hasn’t been a burial here in centuries, Castor—look at the dates.”

  I did. Joseph had bitten the dust in 1782, and Caroline three years later. More to the point, all the stones were leaning at picturesque angles and most were green with moss. Some had even started to sink into the ground so that the lower parts of their eroded messages of grief and pious hope were hidden in the long grass.

  “There are no ghosts here,” Juliet said, stating the obvious.

  “What then?” I said, feeling a little embarrassed and annoyed to have been called on such a basic point by my own apprentice. Few ghosts hung around for more than a decade or so—almost none past fifty or sixty years. There was only one case on record of a soul surviving through more than a century, and she was currently residing a few miles east of us. Her name was Rosie, and she was sort of a friend of mine.

  “Something bigger,” said Juliet.

  “Then holy water is probably just going to piss it off,” I said, nodding toward the bowl. She gave me a meaningful look and thrust the bowl into my hands. I took it by reflex, and to stop the contents slopping over my coat.

  “I never said it was holy,” said Juliet.

  “So you were washing your hair? You know, human women tend to do that in the privacy of—”

  “Turn around.” She pointed toward the church.

  “Widdershins or deasil?”

  “Just turn around.” She put her hands on my shoulders and did it for me, swiveling me 180 degrees without any effort at all. The touch sent a jarring, sensual charge through me and reminded me yet again, as if I needed it, that Juliet had physical strength in spades, as well as the spiritual kind that Susan Book had been talking about. I stared up at the looming bulk of St. Michael’s, which now blocked off the setting sun so that it was just a monolithic slab of ink-black shadow.

  “My kind have a gift for camouflage,” murmured Juliet, her throaty voice suddenly sinister rather than arousing. “We use it when we hunt. We make a false faces for ourselves, pretty or harmless seemings, and we flash them in the eyes of those who look at us.” She tapped the rim of the bowl and a ripple shot from edge to center of the water within, then from center back to edge in choppy, broken circles. “So the best way to see us is not to look at us at all.”

  I stared into the bowl as the ripples subsided. I was seeing the inverted image of St. Michael’s Church. It didn’t look any better upside down. In fact, it looked a whole lot worse: black smoke or steam was roiling off it in waves, downward into the inverted sky. It looked as though it was on fire—on fire without flames.

  Startled, I raised my eyes to the building itself. It stood silent and somber. No smoke, no fireworks.

  But back down in the bowl, when I looked again, the black steam rolled and eddied off the church’s reflection. St. Michael’s was the heart of a shadow inferno.

  I stared at Juliet, and she shrugged.

  “Anyone you know?” I asked, aiming for a flip, casual tone and missing it by about the length of an airport runway.

  “That’s a good question,” she acknowledged. “But for later. Come inside. You need to get the whole picture.”

  I felt like that was the last thing I needed, but I stayed with her as she set off down the small hill toward the church, taking the same direction in which Susan Book had gone.

  The verger was waiting for us at the door of the vestry, a much smaller stone doghouse attached to the wall of the church at the back. She’d already opened the door, but she hadn’t gone inside. She looked more nervous and unhappy than ever—and she looked to Juliet for instructions with the same sad hunger that I’d noticed before.

  “You can wait here,” Juliet told her, sounding almost gentle. “We’ll be fi
ve minutes. I just think it will be better if Castor sees for himself.”

  Susan shook her head. “I’ll come with you,” she said. “In case you’ve got any questions. The canon told me to give you any help I could.” She visibly steeled herself, and stepped inside first. Juliet nodded me forward, so I went next in line, with her bringing up the rear.

  The vestry was about the size of a large toilet, and it was empty apart from a cupboard for ecclesiastical vestments and half a dozen hooks screwed into the wall. We went on through, via a second, wide open door, into the west transept of the church, a low-roofed side tunnel looking toward the majestic main corridor of the nave. It was completely unlit, apart from the last red rays spilling through the stained-glass windows behind us. It made for a fairly forbidding prospect: it was hard to imagine anyone being inspired to devotion by it. Mind you, I wouldn’t say a paternoster if you put a gun to my head, so I’m probably not an unbiased witness there.

  I felt it before I’d taken three steps: the chill. It was more like December than May, and more like the High Andes than East Acton. It ate into the bone. No wonder I’d felt cold when I was trying the door outside: the chill must have been radiating out through the stone. I suppressed a shudder and moved on.

  But another few steps brought an even bigger surprise. I turned and shot a glance at Juliet, who looked keenly back at me. “Tell me what you’re feeling now,” she said.

  I wanted to confirm it first. I walked left, then right, then forward.

  “It changes,” I muttered. “Son of a bitch. It’s like—there are pockets of cold, in the air, not moving.”

  “Whatever happened here, it happened very quickly. I think that’s why it hasn’t—”

  She hesitated, looking for the right word.

  “Hasn’t what?”

  “Spread evenly.”

  My laugh was incredulous, and slightly pained.

  Susan Book was waiting for us at the end of the transept, and she was looking back toward us, not expectantly but with anxious intensity. She clearly wasn’t going to take a step farther without us. So we walked on and joined her.

  The shadows were deeper in the nave, because only the windows to the left-hand side were getting any light. The far side, to the east, was a dimensionless black void. The gray flagstones under our feet faded into the dark a scant three or four yards from where we were, as though we stood on a stone outcrop at the edge of a cliff face.

  Now that none of us was moving, I was suddenly aware of a sound. It was very low, both in volume and in pitch: very different from the susurration of echoes our footsteps had raised. It rose and fell, rose and fell again over the space of several seconds, dying away so slowly I was left wondering whether I’d imagined it.

  Before I could resolve that question, Juliet was on the move again. She crossed the nave into the featureless dark, and came back a few moments later carrying a candle. How she’d even been able to see what she was aiming for was beyond me.

  The candle was plain and white, about eight inches long and with a slight taper at the wick end. Susan looked at it with solemn unhappiness. Juliet took a lighter from her pocket and held it over the wick. “That’s a votive candle,” Susan said, a little plaintively. “You’re meant to light it when you say a prayer.”

  “Then say one,” Juliet suggested.

  She touched the wick to the lighter flame, and after a moment it flared and caught.

  I thought she was going to lead us on up the nave toward the altar, but she just waited, one hand cupped around the candle flame to shield it from any drafts that might gust in from the open door behind us. But the air was as still as the air inside a coffin must be. The flame rose straight and flicker-free, giving off a single wisp of smoke as the wick burned in.

  Then it guttered and almost went out. It shriveled, if a flame can be said to shrivel, and it shrank in on itself. It was as though the darkness and the cold were feeding on it, suckling on the tiny pinpoint of warmth and light and in the process killing it. As the flame surrendered and gave ground, the shadows came back deeper and more opaque than before, and the cold seemed to become a little more intense. In the dead silence, I heard that sound again: the double-spiked, deep-throated murmur at the limit of hearing.

  “You were expecting that?” I asked Juliet, my eyes on the beleaguered candle flame.

  “It was the first thing I tried. And that was the second.” She was pointing to the wall over to my right. Glancing in that direction, I saw a row of six squat shapes that resolved themselves, when I took a step toward them, into black plastic plant pots.

  Each pot had something dead in it. Leafless stems; sagging, frost-burned blossoms; desiccated corms.

  “The cold will do that,” I pointed out. “You don’t need anything supernatural.”

  “True,” Juliet agreed. “But not in the space of five minutes. Look at your hand. The skin on your wrist.”

  I did. It was already starting to pucker and dry: when I ran a finger across it, there was a dull ache.

  “The longer you stay in here, the worse it will get. If you lingered long enough, I suppose—” Juliet’s gaze flicked across the plant pots with their freeze-dried, gray-green cargoes. She didn’t need to finish the sentence. Again, in the hush after she spoke, a bass rumble in the air or in the stone or in the darkness itself rose and peaked and fell, rose and peaked and died away into silence.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked. “That noise?”

  Juliet seemed surprised. “You mean you don’t recognize it?”

  “Not so far.”

  “It’ll come to you.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, a little piqued. “But probably not before my leaves start to fall off.”

  I blew out the candle flame, just before it died of its own accord, and headed for the exit.

  * * *

  It had happened during the evensong service, Susan Book said, the night before last.

  St. Michael’s didn’t have a resident priest, and there were no services there during the week. It was only open on Saturdays and Sundays, when Canon Ben Coombes came across from Hammersmith to lead the services for a congregation that was only half as big as it was even ten years ago. The rest of the time, Susan looked after the place along with a sexton named Patricks, who mainly tended the graves but could occasionally be prevailed on to clean graffiti off the walls.

  Evensong was her favorite service. She liked the hymns, which always started with “Lead us, heavenly father, lead us,” and the canticles that sometimes made her cry, they were so beautiful. And she liked the lighting of the candles—especially around this time of year, when they seemed to take up the work of the sun as the sun failed. Like the light of the spirit, picking up the slack for the fallible and beleaguered flesh.

  We were out among the gravestones again, warming ourselves on the last red rays of sunset after the midnight chill of the church. I was reclining at my ease, more or less, on MICHAEL MACLEAN GREATLY MISSED HUSBAND AND FATHER. Juliet was perched elegantly on the headstone of ELAINE FARRAH-BEAUMONT, TAKEN FROM US MUCH TOO SOON, and Susan was sitting on the grass between us, unwilling to disturb the rest of the dearly departed. Under the circumstances, I didn’t take that as empty sentimentality. Nor did I take it personally that her eyes never wavered from Juliet’s face.

  There were about eighty people in the church, she went on: a good house, the canon had said jocularly as Susan helped him into his vestments, so we’d better give them a good show. He’d led the responses and read a psalm—just as he did every week. They were into the first of the two canticles, which was the cantate domino: “Oh sing unto the Lord a new song, for he hath done marvelous things . . .”