Vicious Circle Read online

  She stared at the ground, remembering.

  “There’s a place in the cantate,” she murmured, “where the choir invite the sea and the earth to make a joyous noise . . .” I remembered it as she said it, thinking back without enthusiasm to my own confused religious education. It had never made a hell of a lot of sense to me. “Let the floods clap their hands.” How, exactly? “And let the hills be joyful.” Was there any way we’d be able to tell the difference?

  But Susan was still talking, and I reined in my jaundiced memories.

  When Canon Coombes got to “Let the sea make a noise,” there was a noise; from outside, in the street. A shriek of brakes, very loud, followed by the sound of an impact: metal crunching against metal, or against something else. The mood was broken. Even the choir faltered into silence, and every eye looked toward the door.

  Canon Coombes cleared his throat, and the congregation faced front again. He nodded to the choir, expecting them to take up where they’d left off. But though they opened their mouths to sing, no sound came out.

  “It got cold,” Susan said, her voice sounding a little ragged at the edges. “All at once, just . . . terribly, terribly cold. I heard people gasp, and everyone was looking at everyone else, or jumping to their feet. Shocked. Scared. Not understanding it, because it was so fast.

  “And then there was something a lot worse.”

  I waited, but she didn’t seem to want to say any more. She looked at Juliet, as if she needed to be told to come out with the rest of it. But Juliet just returned the stare with her own unreadable gaze, until eventually, abashed, Susan looked down at the ground.

  “Something laughed at us,” she said.

  It was so incongruous, I didn’t take it in. “Laughed at . . . ?”

  “Something laughed,” Susan repeated stubbornly, defensively. “It came from high up, near the roof, a long way over our heads. And it was loud. It was very, very loud. It filled the church.” She glanced across at me, her face set, as though she was certain in her own mind that I thought she was lying. “But I can’t describe the tone of it. I can’t make you understand what it felt like. People started to run. Or they just . . . fell down, where they were. Some of them seemed to be having fits, because their arms and legs were jerking and their mouths were wide open.

  “It was horrible! All I wanted to do was get away from that awful sound, but I couldn’t think. I started to run without even knowing where I was going. I bumped into Ben—Canon Coombes—and he didn’t even see me, but he’s so much bigger and heavier than me that I went flying. I grabbed hold of the altar rail to keep from falling, and then I couldn’t seem to let go of it. It was so cold—the cold going right through me, taking my strength away. You know you see skaters on an ice rink, clinging to the side because they’re scared to move out onto the ice? That’s what I must have looked like. I just leaned against the rail, with my head spinning, and people screaming and running all around me.

  “Then when I did manage to get moving again, I almost tripped over a woman who’d fallen down in the aisle right in front of me. Fainted, or perhaps just hit her head on something. I couldn’t leave her there. But she was too heavy for me to carry, so I dragged her towards the door, a few feet at a time, with rests in between. The laughter had stopped by then, but there was still a sort of sense of . . . of being stared at. I was scared to look up. It really felt as if something enormous—some giant ogre—had taken the roof off the church and was peering in at us.”

  She swallowed hard, shook her head. “I don’t remember getting to the door, but I must have done, because suddenly I was out on the street. The woman I’d been dragging along was still unconscious, lying on the pavement in front of me, and I realized that there was blood all over her white blouse. I thought she was dead, after all—that the laughing thing had managed to kill her somehow. But then I realized . . .”

  She held out her hands for us to see. There was scabbed skin on both palms, all the way across in a broad straight line, angry and red at the top and bottom edges.

  “It was my blood, not hers. It must have happened when I touched the altar rail. The metal was so cold that my skin just stuck to it. That was why it was so hard to let go.”

  It was a pretty eloquent demonstration. I listened in silence as she wrapped up her story. Everyone got out alive, although some crawled out on their hands and knees: incredibly, very few were even hurt, beyond bruised arms and cut foreheads. The ones who’d gone into fits seemed to recover quite quickly, except that they were still pale and shaking. Canon Coombes had locked up the church there and then, and told Susan to cancel the Sunday services. After which he’d fled, leaving her to call ambulances for the hurt and the traumatized (leaving red smears on the keys of her mobile phone) and to try to talk down those who were still hysterical.

  On Sunday he’d called her at home. He’d spoken to the diocese, he said, and they’d authorized him to engage an exorcist—so long as it was a church-approved one. He told Susan to pick someone out of the yellow pages.

  But Susan didn’t have a yellow pages, so she’d gone online instead, and Juliet’s Web site had been the first to come up. I wasn’t surprised. It was sometimes the first to come up when your search string was “Chinese restaurants” or “plumbers.” I was pretty sure she’d done something to Google that was both illegal and supernatural.

  The site listed Juliet’s church accreditations—Anglican and Catholic—as pending. Susan thought that was good enough, and called her.

  “And now here you are,” she finished, brightly. “Two for the price of one.” She smiled her tentative smile at us both, turning her head to left and right to do it. It was the first time she’d acknowledged my presence since she started to tell her story.

  “Here we are,” I agreed. I stood up. “And I guess we’d better confer about the case. Could you excuse us for a moment?”

  “Of course,” said Susan, blushing a hectic red. “I have to lock up again, anyway.”

  She got up and bustled away, keys jangling. We retreated up the hill to the Rybandt vault, with full night coming on.

  “So you think it’s a demon, rather than a human soul?” I said, when I was sure we couldn’t be overheard.

  Juliet didn’t answer for a moment. When she did, I got the sense that she was measuring her words. “The scions of hell,” she said. “I know by their habits and by their spoor. It’s not likely that any of them could be this close to me without me knowing it. But it would take one of the older powers to do that on hallowed ground. Just as it takes all of my strength to enter a place like that and not be hurt by it. I have to prepare myself, put a guard up—and not stay there very long.”

  “Then what? What do you reckon it is?”

  She turned to face me, and I could see that she was troubled. Which meant that she was letting me see, because Juliet can control her body language in the same way that a fly-fisher can place a lure. “If it wasn’t for the cold,” she said, “and for the other signs, I’d swear that there was nothing here. Whatever it is, it has no smell. No body. No focus.” She sought for words, grimaced as if she didn’t like the ones she’d found. “Weight without presence.”

  “What have you tried?” I asked her, keeping it businesslike.

  “A number of things. A number of askings and tellings, any one of which ought to have made whatever is in those stones show its face to me. They all came up blank. I’m grabbing at smoke.”

  I remembered the roiling shadows I’d seen reflected in the bowl of water, and nodded. It was barely a metaphor.

  “And yet—” Juliet murmured, and hesitated. I’d never seen her be tentative about anything before: it was, to be honest, a bit unnerving, like seeing an avalanche swerve.

  “What?”

  “Occasionally I feel a very faint presence. Not in the stones themselves but close. Close, and moving, moving against itself, in fragments, like a cloud of gnats. Whatever it is, I think it’s linked to what’s inside the church—but as soon as I look towards it, it hides itself from me.”

  I remembered what I’d felt as I stood waiting by the
church’s front door. “Yeah,” I agreed, “I think maybe I got that, too. A scent, I mean, but not strong enough to pin down.”

  I glanced over at the lych-gate: Susan Book was waiting for us there, her pale face visible through the gathering gloom.

  “You want me to try?” I asked. The stuff Juliet was talking about was probably necromancy—black magic—most of which I tend to regard as a mountain of quackery and bullshit surrounding a few grains of truth. What I do is different: the expression of a talent that’s inside me, with no recitations or rituals and no steganographic mysteries. It was a sincere offer, but Juliet was shaking her head: she wasn’t asking me to do her job for her.

  “I want you to tell me if I’m missing anything,” she said. “You’ve been doing this a lot longer than I have.”

  That was true, as far as it went. Juliet was a good few millennia old, from what she’d told me, but she’d only been living on earth for a year and a half. There were things about the way the living, the dead, and the undead interacted on the mortal plane that she didn’t know or hadn’t thought about.

  But if this was a demon, then her experience counted for a fuck of a lot more than mine. What could I tell her about the hell-kin, when for her hell was the old neighborhood?

  I chewed it over. I liked it that she called on me when she was baffled—I liked it a lot—and I didn’t want to just turn my pockets out and show they were empty. But this wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before.

  “Let me think about it,” I temporized. “Ask a couple of friends. Right now I can’t think of any angle you’ve missed.”

  “Thank you, Castor. I’ll share the fee, of course—if this turns out to need our combined efforts.”

  “The twinkle in your eye is reward enough. Although actually, since I’m here, you can do me a favor in return.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “In your—um—professional capacity—”

  “This is my professional capacity now.”

  “Well, yeah. Obviously. But in the old days, when you were—hunting, hunting someone specific, I mean, and they knew you were coming and tried to hide. Did you—how did you—?” It was hard to find a delicate way of putting it, but Juliet was smiling, really amused. Demons have an odd sense of humor.

  “You mean, when I was raised from hell to feed on a human soul—yours, for example—how did I find you?”

  I nodded. “In a nutshell.”

  “I hunt by scent.”

  “I knew that. What I was trying to ask was which scent? Was it the soul or the body that you tracked?”

  “Both.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. “Okay,” I said. “So did you ever come across a situation where your—”

  “Prey?”

  “I was going to go with ‘target,’ but yeah. Where your prey knew you were coming, and managed to brush over his trail in some way. So you couldn’t smell him anymore?”

  She thought about this for a moment or two, visibly turning it over in her mind.

  “There are things that disguise the body’s scent,” she said. “Lots of things. For the soul—a few. Running water would hide both.”

  I nodded. That much I did know. “But did you ever have a situation where you were following a trail, and the scent was strong, and then suddenly it just went cold. Completely died on you.”

  She shook her head without a moment’s hesitation. “No. That couldn’t happen.”

  “Somebody did it to me earlier on today.”

  “No,” she said again. “That may have been how it felt to you, but it was something else that was happening.”

  Good enough. And food for thought. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll stop by again tomorrow, see how you’re getting on.”

  “Come in the evening,” she suggested. “We can have dinner.”

  That was a very appealing prospect. “On you?”

  “On me.”

  “You’re on. Where do you want to meet?”

  “Here, I suppose. We’ll find somewhere close by—perhaps around White City. I’ll see you at eight thirty.”

  I turned to leave, but then I remembered something that had slipped my mind. That twin-peaked sound: surge and fall, surge and die, like waves of some curdled liquid crawling up an unimaginable shore. I turned back.

  “It didn’t come to me,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The noise in there. You said it would come to me, but it didn’t. You think you know what it is?”

  “Oh.” Juliet gave me a slightly disappointed look, as if I were asking her for the answers on a test that was too easy to need thinking about. I shrugged, partly in mock apology, mainly just asking that she cut to the chase.

  “It’s a heartbeat,” she said. “Beating about once a minute.”

  Five

  I WENT BACK TO THE CAR, WHICH I’D PARKED IN THE BACK lot of a wine warehouse that closed early on Mondays. It was Pen’s Mondeo, which she lets me use whenever she doesn’t need it herself. With Dylan’s Lexus currently handling most of her transport needs, I had it on semipermanent loan.

  I let myself in, locked the doors behind me just in case because my attention was going to be elsewhere for a few minutes. In a Sainsbury’s bag in the front passenger seat of the car was Abbie’s doll. I took it out, held it in both hands, and closed my eyes.

  And shuddered. There it was again: the fathomless ache of Abbie’s long-ago and long-sustained unhappiness, brimming behind the frail ramparts of rag-stuffed muslin. Got you, you bastard, I thought with cold satisfaction. You can throw me off the trail, but only when you know I’m on it. You can’t be on silent running all the goddamn time.

  Laying the doll down on the steering wheel like a tiny Ixion, I took out my whistle and launched into the opening notes of the Abbie tune, which was still fresh in my mind.

  Within seconds I got the same response as before; the same sense of something touching the music from outside, as though it was a physical skein that I was throwing over West London. Except that it was stronger this time. I was barely a quarter of a mile to the west of my office in Harlesden, but I was a good mile and a half farther south. And yes, the orientation was different—the faint tug on the web of sound coming not from over my left shoulder now but from straight ahead, from where the sun had set not long before. That made it easier to shift my attention, my focus, into that one quarter. The touch was faint, vanishingly faint, but I opened myself up to it, shutting out all distractions, tautly listening in on that one channel even as I was creating it, sustaining it, with the soft, drawn-out complaint of the tin whistle. She seemed to recede. I held a single note, almost too low to hear, the barest breath into the mouthpiece, and slowly, by infinitesimal degrees—

  Suddenly a shrieking discord bit into my mind like a deftly wielded Black & Decker power drill. It came out of nowhere, slicing through my nerves, sundering thought and feeling and music so that their writhing, severed ends leaked chaos and agony. I screamed aloud, my back arcing so that my head slammed back into the headrest of the driver’s seat and my feet jammed down on the pedals as if I were trying to bring the already stationary car to a dead halt.

  It only lasted for a second: less than that, maybe. Even while I was screaming, the pain was subsiding from its lunatic peak and I was slumping forward again, a puppet with its strings cut, my forehead thumping against the body of the doll that was still lying on the steering wheel in front of me.

  I lay there weak and dazed for a few seconds, static fizzing and stinging through my nervous system, trying to remember where I was and why I was drooling bloody spittle onto a stuffed toy. My tongue throbbed in time to my heart, seeming too big for my mouth: I’d bitten deeply into it, and that bitter tang was my own blood. I wiped it away with the back of my hand, pulled myself together; a job that I had to tackle in easy stages.