Thicker Than Water Read online

  This is the first stage of the exorcism ritual, known variously as the finding or the summoning. Sometimes it comes quickly, sometimes it’s agonisingly drawn-out, and sometimes it doesn’t come at all. Tonight it was slow but inexorable like the building of a huge wave that towered over me like a wall - a wall I was mirroring in sound, climbing the scale and letting the volume build at the same time.

  ‘Someone’s going to hear you,’ Nurse Ryall warned, but right then her voice was just another feature of the room that the music bounced off, briefly: a bubble in the flow.

  There was something there: behind the room, behind the merely physical space in which I sat and the two wounded men lay. Something was looking in at us from a direction so strange and so nebulous that I couldn’t turn around to meet its gaze. All I could do was keep playing, feeling its contours in the steady rise and rise and rise of the tune. It was coming towards me, and it was coming into focus: a tenuous presence that brought its own echo with it, a shadow with a darker shadow attached.

  Then the wave broke over me and the darkness was absolute. I was almost thrown by that - by the suddenness and the force of it, the black slamming down from above and wrapping itself round me with disturbing intimacy. I could still feel the chair underneath me, the cool metal of the whistle between my fingers, but I couldn’t hear anything now except the music I was playing - and rising behind the music the broken rhythm of the two men’s laboured breathing. The world had gone away. I was alone in the dark, the tune my only lifeline.

  So I carried on playing, my chest on fire now: there was no other choice.

  And as I played, the darkness revealed itself to me: it had within it variations of tone, anfractuosities of depth and texture. It wasn’t a curtain, it was a three-dimensional landscape executed in monotone: vertical and horizontal expanses that I could imagine as cliffs and fields, mountains and plains. I was looking at a black world on which a black sun shone, casting shadows of black on black.

  Something within that landscape was staring back at me.

  It had some kind of camouflage that didn’t depend on colour, so I couldn’t detect its outlines: only the pressure of its gaze, because an exorcist can always tell when one of the dead or the undead fixes its attention on him. It sat perfectly concealed, watching me without a sound.

  And all sound had died now: my fingers were still moving on the stops of the whistle, but the tune I was playing had fallen away on the far side of some shearing blade, leaving me here in this silent immensity.

  The hidden thing shifted, very slightly, and the sense of being watched and weighed shifted with it. Time passed, but there was no way for me to measure how much or how little.

  Mark? the thing said. Or rather didn’t say, because there was no sound here.

  I couldn’t answer. To answer I would have had to stop playing, and some instinct told me that if I did that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back out of this place.

  The thing that lived in the darkness growled soft and deep. It didn’t like being ignored. Mark, it said again, and this time it wasn’t a question.

  I don’t have him, I thought. He’s dead. He’s already dead.

  I was starting to lose the feeling in the tips of my fingers. I had no idea what stops I was pressing, what notes I was sounding. My chest felt impossibly constricted, as though it might shut down at any moment and stop the flow of air across the whistle’s mouthpiece.

  The thing moved towards me, leisurely but with a heavy weight of purpose.

  Not, it said.

  I tried to back away, but my body didn’t really exist here and it didn’t even try to respond to the nerveless impulse. I was just a double handful of stiff, arthritic fingers groping along the cold metal of an object whose purpose I was starting to forget: a halting bellows blowing air over a spark I couldn’t see.

  leave

  I took the tune out into a wild cadenza - or at least I tried to, but I’d lost the feeling for it now. Playing on autopilot is a lost cause, ultimately. And it looked like I was one, too.

  The unseen thing crouched to spring. How did I know, when I couldn’t fucking see it? Because I was tracking its voice through the muffled air - a diachronic line graph expressing an equation whose solution was my spilt intestines.

  this

  I blew a fingernails-on-blackboard discord - the last shot in my armoury. Sometimes it stops zombies and loup-garous undead in their tracks. Sometimes.

  place!

  Its hot, fetid breath was in my face, and there was a hideously suggestive sound - a sound like knives being stropped on a thick leather belt. I tried to flinch back, and couldn’t even do that.

  So I did something else. Since my hands were the only part of me that could still move, I punched straight forward with both of them, the whistle still gripped between them, and they made contact with something that was moving fast towards me. In fact, they did more than make contact: they sank, forearm-deep, into a rushing, blood-warm mass. A jolt of pure agony shot through me: a pain that was to the twinges of last night’s beating what crack cocaine is to Coca-Cola.

  The thing’s own speed and strength carried me backwards. The darkness broke into bright staccato fragments of light and sound. There was a moment when I was weightless in a booming void, my thoughts spilling out of my head like blood as I turned towards a distant pinprick of light - attuned to its feeble radiance like a sunflower on Pluto.

  Then I was falling out of the chair onto the ward’s tiled floor, with as much momentum as if I’d been pitched out of a moving car.

  ‘Castor!’

  It was Nurse Ryall’s voice, and Nurse Ryall’s hands on my forehead, stopping me from smashing my brains out as I spasmed. Every muscle in my body was convulsing at once, and I could taste my own blood in my mouth. I was fighting for breath but the band of pain across my chest made breathing almost impossible. I was lapping air with my tongue, drinking it in agonising sips.

  ‘Castor, it’s all right! It’s all right!’

  It was, eventually, although the violent tremors running through me felt like small electric shocks. As they subsided, they left behind an enormous lethargy and lack of volition: a feeling that the only way I was ever going to move again was if someone rolled me down a grassy bank into a ditch. Nurse Ryall took my pulse and said soothing things: I could tell that from the tone of her voice, although the words themselves were just sounds. She wiped the bloody froth off my face where I’d bitten deep into my tongue. She helped me into a sitting position when I seemed to be capable of dealing with it. And the first question she asked, although I could see she was brimming with a million others, was ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ She was waving just the one in front of my eyes to see how they tracked it.

  ‘One,’ I said thickly. ‘Index. Right. Dark pink nail varnish.’

  ‘Fuchsia. What day is it?’

  ‘Tuesday.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Currently? Felix Castor.’

  Nurse Ryall smiled in spite of herself - but sadly she also disentangled her body from mine, correctly judging that mine was sufficiently recovered now to go solo. She stood up and brushed off her uniform. What is it about nurses’ uniforms that makes men fantasise about them? Mostly when you meet a nurse both your charisma and your libido are at their lowest ebb.

  ‘So did you get anywhere?’ she demanded, as I got up slowly and carefully on Slinky-spring legs. The footboard of Kenny’s bed was called into service.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘I got somewhere.’ But I didn’t make any attempt to say where. That night-black terra incognita was beyond my power to describe.

  ‘And what is it? Is it . . . what you said? Some kind of shared possession?’ She had trouble getting the word out, but she did it anyway. I like a woman who doesn’t flinch from absolute madness.

  I nodded slowly. I would have nodded vigorously but I was afraid my head would fall off. ‘I’m nearly certain,’ I said.

  ‘Then you
can deal with it?’

  And that brought us to the crunch. I made a noncommittal gesture.

  ‘I mean . . . that’s what you do, isn’t it? You said you were an exorcist.’

  She had me there: I did say that. It’s even still true, up to a point. But there were a number of reasons why that didn’t immediately translate into ultra-macho demonslaying.

  The first is that demons are mostly pretty damn hard to slay. Human ghosts are easy, most of the time. You get the sense of them, the measure of them, by staying in their proximity for a few minutes, hours or days - the precise time varied from job to job, and from one ghostbuster to another - and then you did whatever it was that you did: the peculiar schtick that channelled your power. With me it was music, but everyone’s got their thing. If you do it right, then when you’ve finished the ghost is gone: permanently, irrevocably gone, and nobody (despite what they may tell you) has any idea where to.

  Loup-garous are a bit more complicated. When you’ve got a human spirit anchored in animal flesh - which is all a werewolf is at the end of the day - you can drive it out easily enough. You just set up an interference between the spirit and its host, so that the body expels the invading ghost and becomes its normal, animal self again. This isn’t the same as a straight exorcism, although we still call it that: the ghost isn’t permanently banished, it’s just temporarily evicted. If that sounds like a pussyfooting distinction, look at it this way: it’s the difference between what an assassin does and what a bailiff does. Who would you prefer to get a visit from?

  And demons - demons are different again, mostly because they know how to fight back. Demons are sensitised to exorcisms, to the point where even the preliminary rituals shrill out to them across enormous distances like a police siren. Probably there’s a Darwinian explanation for that: the demons that lacked this sensitivity were the ones that went under. The ones that are left, by contrast, have both a certain level of resistance to an exorcist’s patternings and a tendency to counter-attack: they’ve been known to back-navigate the psychic trail like a shark following a blood-spoor, until they find the exorcist and stop the spell in progress by, say, eating his brain.

  But the other element in the mix here is the exorcist himself, and my feelings on the subject underwent a bit of a revision a while back. I started to wonder where it was the ghosts went to when we dispatched them so casually - a question I should maybe have been asking way back when I performed my first exorcism on my own sister. Belatedly, my itchy trigger finger got a little bit arthritic, and I made a decision not to perform exorcisms on demand. I take each case on its own merits these days, as you’ve maybe seen. If a ghost is genuinely dangerous, I’ll bind it or even banish it and pocket the cheque. For demons, excluding personal friends and acquaintances, my standards are even lower. But - call it a weakness, or an eccentricity - I like to know both who and what I’m dealing with these days before I get out the bell, book and candle. I don’t empty the whole clip into every room as I kick the door down: that’s for amateurs and idiots.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, by way of abridging all this angst and introspection into soluble form. ‘I need to find out more about what this thing is - and how it’s tied up with Kenny.’

  Petra seemed to find this answer unsatisfactory. ‘Through the boy,’ she said, bluntly. ‘Mark. If that’s what they’re both saying in their sleep—’

  ‘If,’ I repeated, cutting across her. ‘And even granting that that’s true, we still don’t know why, or how. Mark is dead. Did someone raise the demon to get vengeance for him? Is it looking for Mark’s spirit for some reason? Did Mark himself bring it to the Salisbury - whether he meant to or not - by something he did? There are just too many ways it could all fit together, and if I go in without knowing the answers, I’m probably going to last as long as a marshmallow in a microwave.’

  Petra stared at me.

  ‘You’re afraid of this thing,’ she said. It wasn’t a taunt - just an observation.

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  She looked at the two fitfully sleeping men, then back at me. ‘But you’re - awake. Healthy. It can’t hurt you, can it?’

  ‘When I fell over just now, it was about a heartbeat away from doing something to me that the English language doesn’t even have a verb for.’

  Nurse Ryall nodded uncertainly, visibly rearranging the furniture in her conceptual space. ‘Okay. So what should we do?’

  I noted the ‘we’, and I was impressed. Scared as she was, she wasn’t just writing this off as somebody else’s problem. ‘Right now,’ I said, ‘we should get out of here. There’s nothing more I can do until I get some of my facts straight.’

  We left the same way we came in, under the bored eyes of the duty cop who didn’t even ask us what the music was all about. Maybe he thought a late-night serenade was something that NICE had approved for general therapeutic use.

  Back on my own ward, I stowed my paletot thoughtfully while Nurse Ryall picked up Nicky’s printouts and flicked through them with unashamed curiosity.

  ‘Are these the facts you were talking about?’ she asked.

  ‘Some of them,’ I allowed. ‘The rest I’m going to have to pick up on the ground.’

  I thought she’d just make a desultory pass through the frankly soul-deadening bulk of Nicky’s transcripts and then put them down again. But half an hour later she was still reading, while the kid with the headphones communed with his inner ears and the fat man woke, looked around in surprise and suspicion, dozed off again. I let her read, covertly admiring the furrow of her brow, her lower lip unselfconsciously thrust out in deep concentration. I like intelligent women. It’s a pity they’re mostly too smart to get involved with me.

  After a while she looked up at me, turning the sheaf of documents so that the top sheet faced me.

  ‘Incised wounds,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is that what this is about? Incised wounds?’

  I was momentarily at a loss. ‘There are a lot of woundings in there, Nurse Ryall,’ I acknowledged. ‘But as you can see, there’s no pattern. We’ve got every weapon under the sun, including some that came as news to me, and every variation on murder, suicide, self-harm and lethal ambush. It’s hard to think of a kind of wound that isn’t in there.’

  She stared at me wide-eyed. ‘Are you serious?’ she demanded at last.

  ‘I thought I was.’

  ‘Then you really needed to ask an expert.’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘The ones that aren’t in there? Blunt-instrument trauma. Crush and impact trauma. Abraded wounds. Gunshot wounds. Not to mention, if you widen the field a bit, burns, fractures, dislocations, concussions and sprains, strangulation, suffocation—’

  I held up my hands, partly in surrender and partly to rein her in a little. ‘Okay, fine. What does that leave?’

  ‘I told you,’ Nurse Ryall said, with slightly exaggerated patience. ‘Incised and puncture wounds - and you’ve got one of each of them up in that ward. Almost all these cases fall into one of those two basic types: the damage was done either with a point or with an edge - or sometimes both. Stabbing and hacking, basically. Hurting people with things that are sharp.’

  ‘You must be a lot of fun at playtime,’ I said sardonically. It was either that or break into full applause, and I didn’t want her to get too cocky at this early stage in our relationship.

  ‘Nursing diploma - BSc equivalent. I’m studying four nights a week.’ She said, stiffly on her dignity. ‘So I don’t get much playtime, Felix Castor. But I do get to know everything there is to know about wounds. Or did you think that was just prurient curiosity?’

  ‘Fix,’ I said.

  She bridled. ‘What is?’

  ‘My name. It’s Fix. Short for Felix.’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked only slightly mollified. She stood up, briskly, as if she was suddenly conscious of other things she ought to be doing. Her break must have ended long ago. ‘Well, you can carry on calling me Nurse Ryall. I
t shows respect.’

  ‘Good enough,’ I agreed. ‘And since you’re the expert, can you do me one other favour?’

  ‘Possibly.’ Her tone was cold. The playtime remark had gone badly awry. ‘Depends what it is.’

  I gave Nurse Ryall another one of my rare and precious business cards, having palmed one from the pocket of the paletot earlier. ‘Keep an eye on Kenny for me,’ I said. ‘And an ear. If he says anything else that you can make out, or if anything else happens that strikes you as weird, or even if he just gets better or worse, will you keep me clued in?’

  She took the card, but she looked disapproving. ‘Why?’ she demanded.

  ‘Because it’ll be another fact,’ I said. ‘And I’m collecting them.’

  ‘Wide range of wounds,’ she scoffed. I took that as a positive sign: she wasn’t saying no.

  ‘So sue me,’ I said, with a comic shrug. ‘I bet you don’t know anything about medieval grimoires.’

  ‘I can see what’s in front of my face, though.’

  Her breasts were on a level with my eyes. ‘Me too,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t push it, Castor.’ She dropped Nicky’s printouts onto my tray table with an audible thud. The top sheets sloughed off in a loose concertina.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, sincerely.

  ‘You’re welcome. And thank you too, I suppose. At least now I know that I’m not going mad. You should get some sleep.’

  ‘Yes, nurse.’

  ‘And I should get over to casualty, or I’m going to be on report.’ She started to walk away, got halfway to the door and then turned back.

  ‘You didn’t pick me up on the almost,’ she said.

  ‘Almost what?’ I asked.

  ‘I said almost all the cases on your printout were incised or puncture wounds,’ she said. ‘But the odd one out is a big one.’ She clearly wanted me to ask, so I obliged - mainly to make up for the earlier off-colour innuendo.

  ‘Big in what way?’

  ‘It’s Mark,’ Nurse Ryall said. ‘Mark thingumajig. Mister Seddon’s stepson. You said he fell, didn’t you? From high up. So that’s a crush injury.’