Vicious Circle Read online

  Zucker took a single step toward me. He didn’t take a second one, because with the strength of panic I grabbed the guy standing next to me—a young Turk from the city, to judge by his splendid suit—by the shoulders and pushed him off the train. He collided with Zucker, who tried to step around him and then, as he staggered and flailed, just flicked him out of the way, one-handed. They were only entangled for a second: then that gorgeous Alfieri homespun was down in the dirt and Zucker was stepping toward me, unencumbered.

  But that second had been worth buying. The doors slammed shut again in his face and the train pulled out. A second later the tunnel’s arch slid like a magician’s cloak across the scene, magicking it away.

  * * *

  I was hunter, and I was hunted. I was missing something. And if these guys were Catholics, I’d eat my tin whistle and fart the Hallelujah Chorus. To tell you the truth, the whole thing was starting to sour my mood.

  So did standing on the train all the way to Turnpike Lane. I felt bone weary by this time, and there was a sort of itchy heat behind my eyes that I usually associate with the start of a fever. My left shoulder was aching again, too, so that I had to grip the handrail with my right arm the whole way. By Caledonian Road it had started to cramp up on me. No doubt about it, I was a mess. I needed to go and lie down in a darkened room until my body decided to let me off the hook for the abuse I’d subjected it to over the past couple of days.

  Instead of which I was looking at a dinner date with Juliet followed by tea and biscuits with Rosie Crucis. I didn’t feel up to either one of them.

  As it turned out, though, I was worrying unnecessarily, because the evening was about to take a different turn in any case. I went back to Pen’s, found it empty, which was no surprise—she was probably out somewhere having a life. I took a shower to get rid of the sweat and aches, and to put on some clothes that were better suited to a social engagement with the sexiest, most debonaire hell-spawn in town. I went with a plain white shirt, a burgundy tie, and a pair of black cargo pants. Oh, and a new dressing on my shoulder wound, which had been weeping slightly: pus yellow with burgundy was a combination I didn’t think I could carry off.

  Then I finally remembered the phone call I’d gotten earlier on and checked my messages. There weren’t any, but the missed call alert gave me Pen’s mobile number. I called her back, got no answer, so I left her a message just saying that I’d called and that I was around for the next hour or so. Then the phone rang again about ten seconds later.

  “Fix, it’s me.” Pen’s voice, sounding just a whisker away from hysterical. “I’m at the Stanger. You’ve got to get over here. It’s Rafi, Fix. It’s Rafi!”

  “What’s wrong with Rafi?” I asked, my heart plummeting into my shoes.

  “Nothing!” she said. “Nothing!” And then tears choked out her words for a good couple of minutes.

  Nine

  RAFI CRIED FOR A GOOD LONG TIME, AND THAT WAS PAINful to watch—but his present calm was worse in a way. It had a flavor of shellshock to it.

  “Two years! Two fucking years! No, that’s not—that’s not even funny.” He shook his head, hitting that solid wall of incomprehension again—unable to make himself believe.

  Pen was beside him on the faded sofa: beside him, and entwined with him, and clinging to him as if he were a life jacket and she was adrift in stormy seas. She was crying, too, and repeating his name whenever she could get her breath in between the racking sobs. He looked at me over her head, a look of mute terror and appeal.

  “It feels like I just went to sleep, and then woke up,” he muttered. “I was in that sod-awful flat down Seven Sisters Road. You were there, Fix. I was talking to you, and for some reason I was . . . I guess, lying down, or something. Anyway, you were above me looking down. Then I closed my eyes, and . . . I had really bad dreams. The kind where if it was a movie you’d wake up screaming, but you try that and you find out you can’t.” A new thought occurred to him. “Ginny. Did Ginny see all this? Where is she? Is she outside?”

  “Was that the girl?” I asked, and he nodded. I remembered the white-blond, stick-thin apparition who’d worked beside me through the hours of that night, shoveling off-license ice packs into the bath where Rafi lay sprawled to stop the water that was keeping his temperature down from boiling away. Rafi was right, it had been a bit like a dream—and she was one of the things that faded with the daybreak. I’d never seen her again, and it turned out the flat was only in Rafi’s name so there was no way of contacting her. “I lost touch with her,” I murmured, which had the merit of being accurate without hitting him in the face with how quickly his lady had bailed out on him.

  He knew how to read between the lines, though, and two years of being Asmodeus’s finger puppet had left him a little deficient in the putting-a-brave-face-on-it department. I had to look away from the naked pain in his eyes.

  I was fervently grateful that this scene wasn’t being played out in Rafi’s cell. Dr. Webb—despite the lingering unpleasantness of Saturday’s punch-up—had allowed us to use one of the interview suites, only insisting that a male nurse stay in attendance and that we should all be locked in until we signaled that the visit was over. The nurse—a humorless Welshman named Kenneth, about the size and heft of a bulldozer—stood in the corner of the room watching Coronation Street without sound on the wall-mounted TV. It was as close to privacy as the Stanger offered.

  “I was possessed,” said Rafi, sounding as though he were once again trying the concept on for size and finding that it didn’t even go over his shoulders. “Asmodeus took me over. Lived inside my body.”

  “Rafi, love,” said Pen, wiping her bleary eyes, “you shouldn’t keep going over this. You want to get well first. Then later on, when you’re . . .”

  She tailed off into silence because Rafi was shaking his head with slow, stern emphasis. “No,” he said. “I need to know where I’ve been. You can’t just sit up in bed, yawn, and stretch and get on with your life. Not after two years.”

  “It won’t be that easy in any case,” I said, feeling it my duty as bastard in residence to shoot his hopes down before they flew high enough to hurt themselves. “Getting on with your life, I mean. You’re not here on your own recognizance, Rafi. You were sectioned. Getting you out is going to take time. You’ll have to convince a whole lot of people you’re sane again.”

  Pen glared at me as if it was my decision to make. “He was never mad, Fix,” she said, her voice betraying her because all the crying had left it shaky and high. “You know that.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I do. But it doesn’t matter a good goddamn what I know, Pen. Rafi isn’t in here because anyone ever really thought he had a mental illness: he’s here because demonic possession isn’t legally definable—and because Asmodeus couldn’t be let out on the streets to amuse himself with the traditional demonic pastimes of torture, mutilation, and murder. We did what we had to do. And unfortunately, once it’s done, it’s not quick or easy to undo.”

  Pen stood up, her fists clenched, and faced me down. Just for that moment, it seemed, I was the enemy—the voice of all the unreason and all the hypocritical hedging that had put Rafi here in the first place and was happy now to leave him here until he rotted.

  “I think we’d like to be alone for a while,” she said pointedly. I threw out my hands in a placating gesture and headed for the door.

  “Wait, Fix.”

  When I turned, Rafi was looking at the ground—or maybe he had his eyes on the ground while he looked within himself for a script for what he was going to say next. That search seemed to absorb every ounce and inch of his attention.

  “What?” I asked, a little brusquely. I was with Pen on this one: I wanted out. Wanted to leave them alone to match velocities again after two years in which Pen had had a life and Rafi had had a padded room. And I particularly, fervently, needed to be somewhere else when the conversation got as far as Dylan.

  “It’s not . . . undone,” he said. There was a long, terrible silence. Then just as I opened my mouth to ask for a translation, he looked up and stared at me
with an intensity that shoved the words back down my throat. “I mean, Asmodeus is still here. A piece of him. It’s not like he just up and left. It’s more like—” his mouth moved for a moment in silence “—like he took his weight off me so that he could lean over sideways and do something else. But I can still feel him, and he can still feel me. We’re still joined.”

  “No,” Pen protested, in a tone that was almost a moan. Neither Rafi nor I responded to that poor, orphaned little syllable.

  “Maybe that gives you a window,” I offered, uneasily. “Maybe someone could do a full demon-ectomy on you now. If he’s loosened his hold . . .”

  “Someone,” said Rafi. “Not you?”

  “You don’t remember,” I told him, bleakly. “If you did, you wouldn’t ask me. I tried once, Rafi, and I fucked up—badly. That’s why his soul and yours are wrapped around each other in a lovers’ knot.”

  “That’s not the only reason. I invited him in to start with.”

  In spite of myself I felt a quickening of queasy interest. I’d always wondered what the hell Rafi had thought he was doing that night. “So it was Asmodeus you were fishing for?” I asked. “It wasn’t an accident?”

  Rafi laughed—a laugh with a crazed edge to it. “An accident? It was an accident that I let my guard down. But you can’t say it’s an accident if you light your cigarette with a blowtorch and you lose your eyebrows. Asmodeus was the one I was after, Fix. The books said he was one of the mightiest demons in hell. And one of the oldest. I didn’t see any sense in working my way up from the bottom: I wanted the goods, and I wanted them fast. So I don’t blame you for what happened, Fix. I blame myself. And I’ll take any help I can get right now.”

  I shook my head. “No. You need someone with a lighter touch. Or a steadier hand.” Call it cowardice or scruple or whatever the hell you like, but I wanted that cup to pass away from me. I’d ruined Rafi once: I didn’t think I could live with myself if I did it again.

  “You got someone in mind?”

  I thought of Juliet. “Maybe. I know someone who could come in and give us an opinion, anyway.”

  He smiled the most unconvincing smile I’ve ever seen. “Thanks, Fix. You’re a brick.”

  “One letter out,” I riposted, more feebly still.

  Pen was still looking daggers, flails, and chainsaws at me: the two of them still had a lot of ground to cover, so my turn would have to come later. I let myself out into the corridor, where Webb was hovering expressly to catch me as I exited. Another male nurse waited in the background—presumably in case I turned violent and had to be sedated.

  “You’re looking a little tense,” I told Webb. “Is something on your mind?”

  “I need to know what I’m dealing with here, Castor,” he snapped back, my solicitous tone doing nothing to improve his mood.

  “A miraculous recovery?”

  “Is that what you think it is?”

  “I don’t know,” I hedged. “Why, what do you think?”

  “I think Ditko—or the thing inside him—is playing a new game. It wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve called Professor Mulbridge.”

  Those words affected me like intravenous ice cubes. “You had no right—” I began, but Webb wasn’t about to be stopped when he’d barely started.

  “I have every right to consult with a colleague,” he interrupted. “Professor Mulbridge is an acknowledged expert in the field.”

  “What field?” I demanded, pinning him to it.

  He hesitated, trying to sniff out the trap before he fell into it.

  “What field?” I repeated. “Metamorphic ontology? Because your diagnosis of Rafi is schizophrenia. Are you saying you’ve changed that assessment?”

  “We both know—”

  “What we both know,” I said, shouting over his already raised voice, “is that you’re so desperate to get rid of Rafi, you’ll try anything. And right now, saying that he needs specialized facilities elsewhere looks like a much quicker option than going through MHA screening and getting him independently assessed.”

  “He does need specialized facilities,” Webb yelled back. “He’s a danger to everyone he comes into contact with.”

  “That was last week, I said, in a tone that was just barely short of a snarl. “And believe me, Webb—if you start flirting with Jenna-Jane, you’re going to be explaining in court exactly when your professional opinion of Rafi Ditko’s condition changed—and why you didn’t see fit to tell any of his friends or family about it.”

  Webb flushed a very fetching shade of brick red that set off his pale yellow shirt nicely. “Castor, you’re chopping logic,” he hissed, “and I won’t be intimidated by you. I have to do what’s best for the whole of this therapeutic community, and I believe my actions will stand the scrutiny of—”

  I walked away, leaving him yelling apoplectically after me. I needed to get clear of him before I hit him, handing him the moral and legal high ground on a plate.

  Also I needed answers, and I wasn’t in the mood to wait until I knew what the questions were.

  * * *

  “It’s good to see you again, Felix,” my brother Matt said, as I squeezed into the booth opposite him. “You’re in my prayers a lot.”

  “I’d feel happier about that if I knew what you were praying for,” I countered with a cold smile. Letting him get away with a line like that would get the conversation off to a bad start.

  We were in a little coffeehouse just off Muswell Hill Broadway, with questionable decor in the general neighborhood of art nouveau—or maybe a few blocks down. Figure paintings by Mucha and Hodler lined the walls, and square-edged Tiffany-style lampshades hung down dangerously low over each table. Upbeat twenties jazz was playing softly in the background to make the point that this was all a period quote—but incongruously there was also a TV playing in the background with the volume turned all the way down. Currently, it showed a reporter standing in front of a row of shops, talking soundlessly to the camera with an earnest face. From where I was sitting, the reporter stood on Matt’s right-hand shoulder like his conscience.

  He’d already ordered, which was fine with me: what I felt like drinking right then wasn’t on the menu here. When I passed this way, I preferred to drink at the O’Neill’s pub on the Broadway, which is built into the shell of a deconsecrated church. But Matty doesn’t share my sense of humor and I wanted to establish a convivial atmosphere, so we’d settled on the coffeehouse.

  I’d called Matt from the Stanger and asked him to meet me. When he asked why, I said it was for the good of my soul and hung up. He knew I was most likely kidding, but he never quite allows himself to despair of me seeing the light. Pretty much any light will do.

  He was in civvies, by which I mean he wasn’t wearing his collar. Looking at him, you’d just see a slim-built, slightly bookish man on the cusp of forty, in a dark sweater and jeans that looked old without being shabby, with thinning mid-brown hair and very hard blue-gray eyes. Everything about Matty is hard: he’s got a weakness for moral certainties. He’s also got a good eye for detail, and he looked me up and down searchingly.

  “You don’t look well,” he said. “There’s something hectic about your complexion. And your lip is swollen. Did you have an accident?”

  “I was mugged,” I said.

  “In the line of duty?” His lips pursed. He really doesn’t approve of how I earn my living.

  “You could say that. How’s Mum?”

  “She’s well. She had a bad chest infection a few weeks back, but they gave her antibiotics and she’s fine now. They’ve put her on an inhaler, too.” He frowned. “She won’t stop smoking, in spite of the emphysema, so keeping her airways open is the main priority. I thought you said you were going to go up and visit?”

  “I am,” I said. “I’ve got a couple of things to clear first, that’s all.”