Vicious Circle Page 26

  “ ‘Involved’?”

  “Complicated. Things fall out in a certain way, and accidents of the terrain give birth to rules of engagement. But in any case, that’s one form that possession can take—the most extreme form. The demon devours the human host and lives in its shell.”

  “Okay,” I conceded. “Go on.”

  “Number two is house arrest. It’s possible for a demon to overwhelm a soul without its consent and hold it captive. Again, that would allow it to use the host body as if it were its own, but the human soul would still be inside, witnessing its own actions and even experiencing them, but as a passenger rather than a driver.”

  “Fuck.” I let my laden chopsticks fall back into my pad thai. That was what Asmodeus did to Rafi: hijacked the bus and made him watch while he went on a joyride that was still going on two years later.

  “One and two have a lot in common,” Juliet said, ignoring my discomfort. “They both involve the demon literally invading the human host. But there are other ways in which human and demon can be grafted together. Other degrees and gradations, I suppose you could say. At the opposite extreme, a demon can gift a man or woman with a tiny part of its own essence.”

  “Gift?”

  “Infect, if you prefer. Impart. Impose. Don’t argue semantics with me, Castor. You can’t expect me to have the same moral perspective on this that you have.”

  “I guess not,” I acknowledged. “And yet, here you are.”

  Juliet shrugged with her eyebrows. “It’s a job.”

  “Right. Like if bubonic plague was a woman, and she signed on as a charge nurse in a hospital.”

  She actually laughed at that. “Yes. Exactly. Anyway, the point about gifting is that we can do it as many times as we like. It diminishes us a little, and that imposes a limit. A strong demon could gift a couple of hundred people at once, but it would be severely weakened afterwards. To get its full strength back, it would have to call all those pieces home eventually.”

  “But in the meantime—?”

  “In the meantime it would be as if each of those people had a tiny demon of their own, inside them—not controlling them, but encouraging them to see things from a more infernal perspective. And again, the stronger the demon, the more intense the persuasion. You might experience it just as a slight change in perceptions—so you’d suddenly be aware that if that traffic cop flags you down you could swerve just a little, hit him with your near-side wing, and give him something else to worry about. Or that if your girlfriend doesn’t want to kiss on a first date, drugging her and raping her is still an option.”

  “Can I get you anything else?” The waiter had appeared again, assiduous as ever, like a dog who has to have a stick thrown for him every so often to stop him from humping your leg. I asked him to bring me another whisky; Juliet passed.

  “Okay,” I said after he’d gone, “you’ve made your case. St. Michael’s was visited by a demon, and little pieces of this demon rained down on all the people who were there at the time. But the demon didn’t possess them fully: he’s still there, inside the church, in some form or other, which explains the cold and the slo-mo heartbeat and all of the rest of that shit.”

  “I didn’t say that,” said Juliet.

  “Just joining the dots. Isn’t that what you meant?”

  Juliet downed her Bloody Mary in a single swallow. “It’s a possibility,” she said. “But I was giving you an example, not an explanation. Something possessed the St. Michael congregation, yes. Something strong enough to leave a piece of itself in each and every one of them. That could be a demon, but it wouldn’t have to be. Human ghosts can possess living things, after all—you’ve met the were.”

  I nodded reluctantly, but I wasn’t sold on that explanation. “Yeah,” I agreed, “I have. And if there’s one thing I know about loup-garous, it’s that they go for animal hosts for a reason. Human minds are too hard—way too hard. You hear stories about that kind of possession, but I never came across a case yet where it’s been proved to have happened.”

  “Then I might be about to make history.”

  Her tone worried me. “I thought we were here to discuss strategy,” I said. “Looks like you’ve come up with a plan all by yourself.”

  “I’m going to go in,” she said.

  A whisky appeared at my elbow. I took it without even looking: right then, the sight of the waiter’s eager puppy face would just have screwed up my mood even further.

  “Go in where, exactly?” I asked, although I had a pretty good inkling already.

  “I’m going to treat St. Michael’s Church as if it were a living thing,” Juliet said, “and try to possess it. If there’s an invading spirit there, whether it’s a ghost or a demon, then it ought to be driven out by my arrival.”

  “You could do that?”

  “Yes. It’s not the way I normally work, but I was born and raised in hell, Castor. Of course I can do it.”

  I mulled the prospect over, unhappily. Something about it gave me a dull twinge of foreboding, but it took me a moment or two to isolate what it was. Then I saw the flaw. “You said it would take a fairly big player to do something like this,” I reminded her. “To possess so many people all at the same time. Whether it’s a demon or a ghost or whatever the hell it is, what do you do if it’s stronger than you? I mean, suppose you go into your trance or whatever, and you send your spirit out into the church . . . Do demons even have spirits?”

  “No. Demons are spirit. If it’s stronger than me, it will lock me out. I’ll try to penetrate, and the church simply won’t let me in. I’ll find it solid and dense instead of porous. In any case there’ll be no risk to speak of. I’ll either succeed or I’ll fail. And if I succeed, it might help me with that dietary problem we were discussing.”

  “You could feed on this thing?”

  “I could absorb it. It wouldn’t be like feeding for me, because I feed when I fuck. It would be more like taking nourishment through a drip.”

  “Which is better than starving to death,” I allowed, without much enthusiasm. I tried to catch the waiter’s eye, failed, managed to snag the maître d’s instead. “But the same point applies. If you go head to head with this thing, and if it’s bigger and stronger than you to start with, then maybe it’s you that’ll end up on the menu.”

  “Yes,” agreed Juliet. “Maybe. Does that worry you, Castor?”

  I measured my words out with care.

  “It’s a job,” I reminded her. “You offered me part of the fee. If you get eaten by a church, I end up a little poorer.”

  She looked at me with wicked amusement. “Do you think that would be a waste?” she asked. “Me being eaten? Or do you want to volunteer for the job yourself?”

  I put my chin on my fist, pretended to consider. “I took the pledge,” I said at last. “I’ll never let another woman pass my lips.”

  “A man of principle. I despise that: it’s bad for business.”

  “When are you planning to do this?” I demanded, cutting through the banter. It was making me uncomfortable because the physical desire Juliet arouses is very real and very acute; and because, given that she is what she is, I know exactly where that desire leads. That fact makes jokes about oral sex ring a little hollowly.

  “Tomorrow,” she said. “Five minutes to midnight.”

  “Why so precise? What happens then?”

  “Moonrise—except that tomorrow is the dark of the moon. It’s a propitious time.”

  “I’d like to be there for it. As backup, in case something goes wrong.”

  She looked a little perplexed. “What could you do to help,” she demanded, “if something went wrong?”

  “Maybe nothing,” I said. “But that party at the mall gave me the thin end of a scent for this thing. Maybe I could run interference for you.” I half-lifted my tin whistle out of my coat pocket, let it slide back again.

  Juliet’s eyes narrowed slightly, which I could understand. Showing the whistle was a little bit like offering Superman a kryptonite sandwich. But her tone stayed cool, even slightly bored. “You know where I’ll be,” she said. “And when. If you want to come along and watch
, be my guest. Don’t bring the whistle, though. Or if you bring it, keep it in your pocket. Your aim isn’t as good as you think it is.”

  It was hard for me to argue with that, with Rafi chafing at the edges of my thoughts the way he was right then. That was certainly a demonstration of how dangerous friendly fire could be. I knew I was better now than I had been then, but I could see why Juliet wasn’t keen on the idea.

  I stood up, leaving the cash on the table.

  “My treat,” I said. “I came into some money.”

  “ ‘Mackie,’ ” Juliet quoted, “ ‘how much did you charge?’ ”

  “Funny. I always knew they’d play Bobby Darin in hell.”

  “Kurt Weill,” Juliet corrected.

  “Bless you,” I deadpanned.

  The waiter looked stricken to see us go. If Juliet ever came off that diet, she’d be sure of a good meal here.

  We said good-bye on the street without much in the way of small talk, and Juliet walked away with her usual ground-eating stride, not looking back. Showing her the whistle seemed to have spoiled the mood somehow: probably because it reminded her that I was the closest thing the human race had to an antibody against her kind. I’d have to remember that another time, and be more tactful.

  I was bone weary, but Nicky had said he had important news for me, and I’d agreed to meet him at the Ice-Maker’s place, south of the river. That was a fair old haul, but at least the roads would be clear now. I considered leaving Matty’s car where it was and taking the tube—since I didn’t have the “it’s an emergency” excuse to call on anymore—but that would mean getting back here somehow, probably after midnight, and then driving all the way back east again. I couldn’t quite face that.

  I drove south down Wood Lane, vaguely intending to cross the river at Battersea. But in the mood I was in, brooding about the various things I’d left undone or half-done, it wasn’t long before my thoughts came back around in a big, ragged circle to the Torringtons and Dennis Peace. I’d almost had him at the Collective, I thought with grim irritation—but that was a polite gloss on what had really happened. It would be fairer to say that he’d almost had me: certainly I’d been lucky to avoid his kamikaze airborne assault. And then Itchy and Scratchy had turned up and it was a whole different ball game—with Peace’s balls being the ones on the table, or so it seemed. Why? What did he have that these breakaway provisional-wing religious zealots wanted so badly that they’d hire werewolves to find it? The only thing I knew he had was Abbie Torrington’s ghost; that didn’t seem to fit the bill.

  No, I was still seven miles from nowhere here, much as it hurt me to admit it. Okay, I had Rosie Crucis as an ace in the hole, but given her legendary flakiness, and the unappetizing prospect of having to go through Jenna-Jane Mulbridge to get to her, maybe now was a good time to go back to plan A—making contact with Abbie’s spirit directly. I still had the doll’s head with me, and a vivid memory of the tune that it had inspired.

  What the hell, it was worth a try. I pulled the car over onto a broad ribbon of freshly laid asphalt on the steeply canted foothills of the Hammersmith overpass, and got out. It wasn’t that the reception would be any better outside the car: I just felt that I needed the touch of the cool night air.

  I strolled across to a crash barrier that offered a scenic view of the westbound carriageway, and leaned against it, just taking in the sights for a moment while I got myself into the mood. It had turned into a crazy day, and an even crazier evening. I ought to be curled up around a half-empty bottle of whisky right about now, but here I was with miles to go and promises to keep. The dull ache in my head and neck had come back, too, and there was a hot, itchy feeling behind my eyes. I was definitely coming down with something, and I wished I knew what the hell it was.

  There was a faint smell of wood smoke on the wind, as though someone was burning a bonfire in one of the gardens nearby—kind of an odd thing to do in May, though, and just for a moment it gave me an odd, dizzying sense of rushing forward through time. Like I’d only been here five minutes and already it was autumn.

  I fished the doll’s head out of my pocket. Tentatively, I traced the line of the cheek with the tip of my little finger, feeling the tiny roughnesses where the glaze was starting to crack. It was a miracle it was still in one piece, given the kind of day I’d had. As soon as I touched it, Abbie’s unhappiness welled up and overflowed, traveled up my hand and arm by some sort of psychic capillary action until it filled my head. That was all I needed, really: just a top-up, so I knew exactly what I was aiming for.

  I stowed the doll’s head again and took out my whistle. The contrapuntal lines of yellow and red headlights were a little distracting, so I closed my eyes, found the stops by feel and let the first note unfold itself into the night.

  For a long time, nothing: just the slow, sad sequence of sounds endlessly descending like a staircase in an M.C. Escher drawing that never really gets to where it’s going.

  Then Abbie answered me. Just like the two previous times, I felt her distant presence stir at the limits of my perceptions—a tropism, a blind turning to the music that was herself. Maybe because my eyes were closed I felt it more strongly this time; or maybe ghosts have tidal rhythms that move them like the moon moves the sea. She was there: a long way away, in the dark, but separated from me by nothing except that distance. It was as though I could reach out, pull the city aside to left and right like curtains, and bring her through.

  The cutoff, when it came, was instantaneous, but I was ready for it this time, and going by some instinct I couldn’t have explained I banked the music up into a crescendo the instant the contact failed. I can’t say whether or not that made a difference, but it felt like throwing a spear after the fish has broken your line. The sense of direction I’d already got crystallized into something almost painfully precise. Abbie and me, hunter and hunted, caught on opposite ends of the same rigid splinter of sound.

  For a long time after I stopped playing, I kept my eyes tight shut and listened to the echoes in my mind. They were still strong. I’d come very close this time, and I had no doubt at all that Abbie had not only heard me but seen me, too. Across the night, across the city, we’d stared into each other’s eyes.

  “I’m coming for you,” I murmured. “Don’t be afraid. Whatever you’ve been through, little girl, it’s almost over now. I’m coming to find you.”

  “Lovely,” said a man’s voice right beside me. “Can I quote you on that?” My head jerked around so fast it almost came off my shoulders—or at least, that was how it felt; the ache seemed to have become both sharper and deeper.

  The man leaning on the crash barrier next to me had a slender, hawk-beaked face, black hair as slick as an otter’s arse, and the sour, what’s-this-stink-under-my-nose expression of a hanging judge faced with a drunken football hooligan at a Saturday night remand hearing. He had the kind of build that people call wiry—skinny, but the overall impression was of a stick that’s been sharpened for a purpose, not something that’s just wilting for lack of sustenance. His white raincoat was pristine, and it contrasted so boldly with the black suit underneath it that I found myself thinking of a priest’s robes. Yeah, that was it: not a judge, a priest taking confession. Your sins will be taken down and may be used in evidence against you.

  “Felix Castor,” he said. His voice was soft and cultured, and so empty of emotion it reminded me for a moment of the programmed voice of Stephen Hawking’s vocoder.

  “Hey, me, too,” I answered, holding out my hand. “What are the odds on that?”

  He looked at my outstretched hand for a moment, then studiedly looked away. Pity. Skin contact might have told me a lot, and I could have done with some crib notes right about then.

  “Playing it for laughs,” he observed. “Well, why not? The gift of laughter enriches life. No, you can call me Gwillam, if you want to call me anything. And my sense of humor mostly turns on things that would make you weep.”