Vicious Circle Read online

  Skirting the debris in the ground-floor arcade was a lot harder now that I was steering for two. As we headed for the corridor where the toilets were, I heard the loud slam of the main doors off to our left and the crunch of running, booted feet on the shattered glass. I went a little faster, risking a misstep that would send us both sprawling on our faces. We got into the corridor and the echoing steps ran straight on past. I was expecting a voice from behind us to shout, “Stop where you are. Put down the succubus—slowly!” But it didn’t happen.

  The loading bay was still empty. I got Juliet to the edge of the platform, set her down, then jumped to the ground myself and hauled her after me. Amazingly, exasperatingly, in spite of everything that had just happened and the sick horror that was throbbing inside my head, I was still responding physically to her closeness—still breathing hard and heavy, and feeling my prick stir inside my pants, as I inhaled her primal perfume.

  She couldn’t climb the wall: she could barely walk. But there was a gate at the far end of the yard, and it was only bolted rather than locked. I slid the bolts and we limped through, both of us torn and exhausted and blood-boltered, like the last contestants in a dance marathon in hell.

  I had to slow down once we got out onto the street. It was dark, so if we stayed away from the streetlights nobody would be likely to see our various wounds and blemishes, but the way we were staggering would draw attention anywhere. I pulled Juliet close to me and tried to pretend that we were lovers drunk on our own hormones—and, yeah, before you ask, that was an easy part to play. Every inch where our bodies touched was an inch I was painfully, achingly aware of.

  The road we were in led back around to the street where I’d parked, bringing us out again behind the rubbernecking crowd. There was a whole lot more going on now, and nobody had time to notice us. Police were pushing the lollygaggers back while officers with riot shields and impact armor ran across the road toward the mall’s front entrance. White-shirted ambulance crews brought up the rear. The assault had begun in earnest now, and we’d gotten clear with seconds to spare.

  I propped Juliet up against the car and got the passenger door open. She was starting to pull out of it now, or at least to recover some degree of control over her own movements, and she was able to lower herself into the seat without much help from me. I shut the door without slamming it, went around to the driver’s side, slid in, and started the engine.

  Since the road ahead was blocked I had to make a three-point turn in the road. Fortunately there was enough street theater going on that nobody spared us a glance. We drove back toward White City Stadium, where I pulled over because my hands were shaking so much that I wasn’t really safe to drive.

  Juliet’s breathing was shallow now, but even, and she was looking at me with something of her old, cold arrogance in her eyes.

  That stare made a lot of possible words die in my throat. Finally I said, “I’m sorry I dragged you into that.”

  “It’s all right,” she answered, her voice still a harsh rasp. “It was . . . interesting.”

  “No, I mean I’m really sorry you were there. You killed a man, and probably blinded another. If I’d known you were going to let out your inner demon—”

  She cut across me, remorseless. “One man was dead already. How many more do you think would have died if I hadn’t acted?”

  “We can’t know that.”

  “No,” she agreed, sounding almost contemptuous. “We can’t.”

  “Was it worth it?” I asked, still shellshocked. “Did you get any kind of a handle on what we’re dealing with here?”

  “Oh yes. Didn’t you?”

  “No,” I admitted. “Although—” I fell silent. There had been something familiar in the way that formless evil had presented itself to my sixth sense, but it had been mixed up with a lot that was purely alien. The gestalt effect hadn’t been something I’d been able to focus my mind on for very long—like trying to join the dots when they were spinning separately in a whirlpool. I didn’t finish the sentence: there didn’t seem to be any good way of explaining what I’d felt. “Go ahead,” I said. “Give me the starting prices.”

  “Soon,” said Juliet. “Not yet. And not here.” There was a long silence. Then she turned and stared at me. “Castor—” Her voice had a breathy echo to it that suggested she still hadn’t finished repairing the damage to her lung.

  “What?”

  “Is that how you dress for dinner?”

  Eleven

  THERE’S A THAI RESTAURANT UP BY OLD OAK COMMON where I’d eaten a few times before. It’s a perfect place for snacks and cocktails after work, or after summarily executing deranged riflemen in gutted malls—and since there’s no dress code, it doesn’t even matter if you’ve been shot through the chest and a massive exit wound has spoiled the line of your jacket.

  To be fair, by the time we got there Juliet was looking almost as fresh and fragrant as if she’d just stepped out of the shower—an image I had to rein in sternly before my imagination got out of hand. The blood that had saturated her shirt front had disappeared, and the line of bruising along her jaw had faded to near invisibility. I’d seen Asmodeus do something similar to Rafi’s body when it had taken some damage in one of his rampages, but this was more extreme and a whole lot quicker—I guess because Rafi’s body was still made of real flesh and blood at the end of the day, while Juliet’s was made of—something else. I never know how to ask.

  A maître d’ whose suavity was a little dented by Juliet’s black-eyed gaze seated us in the window—no doubt seeing what kind of effect she was likely to have on the passing trade. As soon as he’d left, she reached into her pocket and took out a thick wad of paper, which she unfolded and put down on the table between us.

  “Patterson, Alfred,” she said, fanning them out. “Heffer, Laurence. Heffer, John. Jones, Kenneth. Montgomery, Lily.”

  It was a sheaf of photocopied pages, all in the same format. Each one had a passport-size photo in the top right-hand corner: mostly men, a few women, all ordinary to the point of banality. The faces stared up at me with the terrified solemnity you’d expect from people whose lives had just body-swerved away from them into insanity and despair.

  “These are police SIR sheets,” I said.

  Juliet nodded, looking at the menu.

  “How did you get hold of them?”

  “A nice young constable at Oldfield Lane ran them off for me.”

  I thought very carefully about the wording of the next question. “Did you bribe him, or—?”

  “I let him hold my hand.”

  A waiter had started to hover: he was barely more than a kid, with ginger curls and plump, freckled cheeks. He couldn’t take his eyes off Juliet. Of course, better men than me have fallen at that hurdle. I looked up, tapped the table with my fingertip. After a moment he turned with a slight effort to meet my gaze, as if he was unwilling to acknowledge that I was there. “Can I get you any drinks to start with?” he asked, in an artificially bright tone.

  “I’ll take a whisky,” I said. “A bourbon if you’ve got it.”

  “We’ve got Jack Daniel’s and Blanton’s.”

  “Blanton’s. Thanks. On the rocks.”

  “Bloody Mary,” said Juliet, predictably. The waiter tore himself away from us with difficulty and trotted off, looking back over his shoulder at her a couple of times before he disappeared from view.

  I went back to the incident forms. Some of them I vaguely recognized from the news articles I’d seen open on Nicky’s desktop last night. Alfred Patterson was charged with strangling a complete stranger with his own tie in an office off the Uxbridge Road where he used to work. The two Heffers, father and son, had apparently raped and murdered an eighty-year-old woman and then thrown her body into the Regent’s Canal. Some of them were new, though. Lily Montgomery had been arrested and remanded after police were called to a loud domestic: they found her sitting on the sofa quietly knitting next to her dead husband, who had choked to death on his own blood after his throat was perforated with two sharp objects entering from different sides. Her knitting needles were
oozing half-congealed blood all over the baby booties she was making for her niece, Samantha, aged eleven months, but she didn’t seem to have noticed.

  There were more. A couple of dozen, at least. After a while I just skimmed them, noting place and time while avoiding the noxious, heartbreaking details in the summary box.

  The waiter came back with our drinks. He almost spilled my bourbon in my lap because of the problem he was having with his eyes, which still kept being wrenched back to Juliet’s face and body whenever he let his concentration slip for more than half a second. We made our food orders, but it was kind of a triumph of hope over experience. The kid wasn’t writing anything down, and nothing was going to stick in his mind except the curve of Juliet’s breast where it showed through the ragged tear in her shirt.

  He hobbled away again, and I shook my head at her. “Can’t you let him off the hook?” I asked.

  She arched an eyebrow, mildly affronted. “He’s eighteen,” she said. “I’m not doing anything—that’s all natural.”

  “Oh. Well, could you maybe go into reverse or something? Pour some psychic ice water over him? It’ll only improve the service.”

  “ ‘Go into reverse.’ ” Juliet’s tone dripped with scorn. “You mean, suppress desire instead of arousing it?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “I’ll leave that to you.”

  “Ow.” I mimed a gun with my right hand, shot myself through the heart. That brutal directness, so easily mistaken for sadism, is one of the things I like best about Juliet. She’s a good corrective to my own natural sentimentality and trusting good nature.

  I turned my attention back to the SIR sheets, going through them a little more carefully this time.

  “Okay,” I said. “I get the point. They’re all local, and the odds against this many violent incidents in such a small—”

  I stopped because she was shaking her head very firmly.

  “Well what?”

  “This.” She tapped the bottom sheet, which I’d somehow managed to miss because it was in a different format and seemed to be just a list of names. I’d vaguely assumed it was an index of some kind, since some of the names were the same as the ones on the incident forms. Now I looked again, and the penny dropped. If the bourbon hadn’t already been exquisitely sour, it would have curdled in my stomach.

  The list, which had been produced on a manual typewriter with the help of a small lake of Tipp-Ex, was headed with the single word “Congregants.”

  “Holy shit,” I murmured.

  “No, Castor. Unholy shit. That’s the point.”

  “These people all go to church at St. Michael’s?”

  Juliet nodded.

  “And now they’ve all turned into homicidal maniacs.”

  “That’s a question of semantics.”

  “Is it?”

  “If you call it insanity, you assume they’ve lost the ability to make moral judgments.”

  “Raping pensioners? Knit one, pearl one, puncture windpipe? What do you think they’ve lost?”

  “Their conscience. Whatever evil was inside them already has been given free rein. Whatever desires they feel, they satisfy by the simplest and most direct means they can find. If it’s lust, they rape; if it’s anger, they murder; if it’s greed, they pillage a shopping mall.”

  “So you think those people at the Whiteleaf—?”

  “I don’t think. I checked.”

  She reached into the same bottomless pocket, brought out a small clutch of wallets and billfolds and let them fall onto the table. I suddenly remembered her on her knees next to one of the men she’d felled: I thought she was checking him for a pulse, but obviously she was frisking him.

  “Jason Mills,” she said. “Howard Loughbridge. Ellen Roederer.”

  I checked the list, but I already knew what I’d find there.

  “And Susan Book,” I added, just to show that I was keeping up.

  “And Susan Book. Of course.”

  Our food arrived. The waiter drew the process out as long as he could, his eyes all over Juliet from every angle he could decently manage. I sat on my impatience until he’d gone.

  “So what are you saying?” I asked. “All of these people were in church on Saturday, when . . . whatever it was that happened, happened? And it somehow turned off all of their inhibitions? All of their civilized scruples? Made them into puppets that can only respond to their own desires?”

  Helping herself to some mee goreng that she hadn’t ordered, Juliet nodded curtly. “They’re possessed,” she said.

  “What, all of them?”

  “All of them. Do you read the Bible much, Castor?”

  “Not when there’s anything good on the TV.”

  “Commentaries and concordances? Textual exegesis?”

  “To date, never.”

  “So do you know what the Jewish position on Christ is?”

  I shrugged impatiently, really not wanting to sit through what looked like it might be a very circuitous analogy. “I dunno,” I said. “They probably think he got in with the wrong crowd.”

  “I mean, what exactly do they think he was? What kind of being?”

  “I give up. Tell me.”

  “They think he was a prophet. Like Elijah, or Moses. No more, no less. One in a long line. Someone who’d been touched by God, and could speak with God’s authority, but not God’s son.”

  “So?”

  “But Christians think that the indwelling of God in Christ was different in kind from his indwelling in the prophets.”

  I took a long slug on the whisky, as an alternative to playing straight man. Presumably she’d get to the point without any prompting from me.

  “As in heaven, so in hell,” she said. “When demons enter human souls, they can do it in a lot of different ways.” There was a pause while she ate, which she did with single-minded, almost feral enthusiasm. Then she fastidiously licked the corner of her mouth with a long, lithe, double-tipped tongue. That had made me shit a brick the first time I’d seen it. Nowadays I just wondered what else she could do with it besides personal grooming.

  She held up an elegant hand, counted off on her fingers. Her fingernails shone with copper-colored varnish; or, possibly, just happened to be made of copper tonight. “First, and easiest, there’s full possession, in which the human host soul is overwhelmed and devoured, and the body becomes merely a vessel for the demon as long as it chooses to use it. That’s commoner than you’d think, but usually it can only be done with consent.”

  “You mean people ask to have their souls swallowed?”

  “Essentially, yes. They agree to a bargain of some kind. They accept the terms, and the terms include forfeiting their soul. Obviously they may have an imperfect understanding of what that means. An eternity of suffering in hell, or separation from God, or whatever the current orthodoxy is. But for us, it only ever means the one thing. It’s open season. We can eat them.”

  Strong-stomached though I am, I was in danger of losing my appetite. She was enjoying this too damn much for my comfort.

  “Who lays down the rules?” I demanded. “Open season implies someone dealing out the hunting licenses. Is that—?”

  “There are some things I’m not prepared to tell you,” Juliet interrupted, making a pass through the air with her hand like someone waving away a paparazzo’s camera. “That’s one of them. But if you were going to say ‘Is that God?’ then the answer is no. It’s more . . . involved than that.”