Thicker Than Water Read online

  ‘Mister Castor,’ said the man in black. ‘I’m Eddings, and this -’ pointing to the fat man ‘- is Speight. He’ll brief you as we walk.’ He didn’t bother to introduce Feld: perhaps he knew that we’d already met.

  He turned and led the way across the concrete. Speight fell in beside me as I followed, and Feld brought up the rear. Nobody else was in sight, and the silence was more profound than ever. It wasn’t just that there was no noise from the towers nearby: the voices of the city itself, the noise of the traffic on the road only a few yards behind us, the rumble of trains and shouts of convivial drunks, were stilled as we walked forward. The curtains: we’d passed through them, and they’d fallen closed behind us.

  ‘Last night was very bad,’ the little man, Speight, was saying in a cultured voice with a slight Welsh lilt to it. ‘There were fights, last night.’ He pointed. ‘The police were called, but the fight spread to the walkways. A lot of people got hurt, some of them very badly. Even the ambulance crews, when they tried to treat the injured, were attacked.’

  ‘Tonight’s an improvement, then,’ I said, looking up at the hulking, menacing shapes of the towers: dark giants with asymmetrical eyes.

  Speight looked at me, as if he suspected me of trying to make a joke. ‘No,’ he said, lingering on the syllable. ‘Tonight is worse.’

  Gwillam was waiting for us at the foot of Weston Block, with a Bible in his hands and another small gaggle of multi-purpose zealots clustered around him. He watched us come, and Speight said nothing more: obviously it was the boss’s prerogative to fill me in on the rest of the big picture.

  Gwillam nodded to me, and I nodded back. There didn’t seem to be much point in small talk, given that I’d laid his face open the last time we’d met. He seemed to have recovered from that, although I couldn’t help wondering if he’d bounced back so easily from the more spiritual pummelling that Juliet had laid on him.

  ‘It’s a demon,’ he said flatly.

  I shrugged. Presumably he hadn’t dragged me all this way to tell me what I already knew.

  ‘It seems to have an affinity for wounds, as you said,’ Gwillam went on. ‘And its presence twists people’s perceptions - subtly, at first, but with more and more pervasive effect. I’ve got my people on two-hour shifts, rotating. But we’re barely containing it.’

  ‘You seem to be doing a good job,’ I said. I gestured at the stillness all around us. ‘No riots. No things going bump in the night.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean it isn’t trying,’ said a woman standing to Gwillam’s right. She was tall and well built, attractive in a Junoesque way. I registered that first: then the ponytail, and then the cat’s cradle of string that was wound around her hands. It was only then that I realised I already knew her. When I’d seen her standing out on the walkway it had been dark, and before that, when she’d been with Gwillam, I’d mistaken the tightly looped string on her hands for bandages. In fact it must be the way she focused her power. She was an exorcist, like me, and like Gwillam. So I turned to her, if only for a fresh perspective and an excuse not to look at Gwillam’s sour face any more.

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  She looked to Gwillam for permission and he gave it with a resigned wave of the hand.

  ‘We tried a straight exorcism,’ she said. ‘But it fights back. It tries to take you onto its own ground.’ Thinking about my own ham-fisted efforts at the hospital, and the black pit where I’d briefly faced this thing, I knew exactly what she meant. I nodded and she went on, her clipped, emotionless tones making a strange contrast with the horrors she was describing. ‘Peyer went in first, and then - he tried to put his own eyes out. He succeeded with one, but Feld managed to stop him before he got to the other. After that we used strength of numbers: one exorcist doing the binding, two or three others watching over him, weaving stay-nots around him so the thing can’t get close.’

  She held up her hands as if I could read their failure in the complexity of the woven threads that covered them.

  ‘It doesn’t work,’ she said flatly. ‘Because its focus isn’t really this place. It’s more - like it—’

  ‘Like it lives in the wounds,’ I finished.

  She nodded. ‘And most of the people on the estate have got broken flesh of some kind by now. So it’s all around us. In a hundred or a thousand different places. You drive it out of one vessel and it goes. It retreats. Then it flows back as soon as you look away. We’ve been here all night, and the best we can say is that the thing is focused on us, so it’s not making any mischief anywhere else. But we can’t keep this up for ever. And if anything it seems to be getting stronger.’

  That wasn’t surprising at all. If wounds were its joy and its sustenance, and if there were a thousand wounded people crammed into these few hundred square metres of space, then the demon’s cup must surely be running over. And if every man, woman or child who got hurt, who got cut, gave it a new anchor and a new home, then its growth could become something truly exponential and unstoppable.

  ‘So we feel we need a fresh approach,’ Gwillam summed up tersely, giving me a cold, expectant look. ‘And since you knew most of this before we did, we hoped you might be able to advise us on where we go from here.’

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you, father,’ I said, ‘but you’ve got further than I have. When I met it, I was lucky to get out with both balls and a soul.’

  Out of the corner of the eye I saw the woman’s shoulders sag. Gwillam shook his head. ‘Then you’ve had a wasted journey,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry to have taken up your time. If you’ll excuse us, we’ll return to our labours, however futile they may ultimately turn out to be.’

  ‘There is one other thing we could try, though,’ I said. He was already turning his back on me, but he stopped and waited.

  ‘The boy,’ I said. ‘Bic.’

  ‘William Daniels,’ Gwillam translated.

  ‘Exactly. You thought he had Jesus as his co-pilot.’

  ‘Castor, I’ve already admitted that I was mistaken about what was happening here.’

  ‘But you thought that for a reason, right?’ Gwillam stared at me, waiting for me to go on. Everyone else had their gaze on me, too, and I could feel the quickening of interest behind every pair of weary eyes: they made such a lovely audience I would have loved to take them home with me. If home was Guantánamo Bay. ‘He was the first,’ I said, impatiently. ‘The first by a long way, I’m guessing. This thing found him long before it did anything to anyone else. He’s a sensitive: he’s got some sort of gift that lets him pick up what you’re thinking and feeling. Most exorcists have got a touch of it, too, but he’s got more than most. He’s like a radio satellite pointing into inner space. And he picked up the wound demon.’

  ‘Is that why it came?’ the little man, Speight, demanded in his lisping voice.

  ‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘It came because of another boy. Mark Blainey, who died here a year ago. He was a self-harmer. He found wounds, or the inflicting of wounds - I don’t know, exciting, I guess. Appealing. He thought about them a lot. He obsessed on them. He cut himself in a lot of different ways, with different kinds of objects. And somehow, somewhere along the way, this thing noticed him. It came looking for him. I heard it speak his name, when I met it in that place where it lives. It came looking for Mark, but it stayed because it found Bic. And now it’s expanded its friendship group. That’s what I think happened, anyway.’

  Gwillam considered, and all eyes now shifted to him because he was the authority, the giver of truth. That’s the trouble with the Church: it’s a top-down hierarchy where everyone does what they’re told by the guy on the next rung up. Which would be fine, I suppose, if it was me on the top rung instead of God.

  ‘We learned about Mark Blainey in our researches here,’ Gwillam conceded. ‘We thought him an early symptom.’

  ‘So did I, at first,’ I agreed. ‘But a nurse at the Royal London put me straight on that one. He’s not a symptom, Gwillam. His death sticks
out like a bishop in a brothel, saving your presence. No puncture wounds involved: no blades, no points or edges. He just jumped right off the walkway. So it’s a fair bet that this demon wasn’t what drove him to his death. He didn’t die from it: he brought it, and then died of something else.’

  And I probably know what the something else was, I added inside my own head. He may square himself with God, but he’ll never square himself with me, Richie had said. No, I reckoned Matt was going to be in trouble on the God front, too: there was no getting away from sin on this scale.

  ‘So you think if we attempt an exorcism on William Daniels—’ Gwillam began.

  ‘No,’ I cut in impatiently. ‘I already tried that. That might have worked back when he was the only one affected, but it’s not going to work any more. Like you said, the thing has got its hooks into too many people now. It can just shift its ground and come back at you from a different angle.’

  ‘Then what?’ Gwillam asked impatiently.

  So I told him what I had in mind.

  I hadn’t expected the next part to be easy, but even so I’d underestimated Gwillam’s sheer, unremitting stubbornness in the face of something he didn’t trust and couldn’t control.

  He was appalled at what I was planning to do, and he dug his heels in fast and hard. He wanted names and addresses, just for starters. He also wanted to take charge of the operation and leave me here as a hostage with his people to ensure the cooperation of the other parties I wanted to involve. And he wanted to keep his options wide open with regard to other sanctions - up to and including exorcising or otherwise destroying any non-humans who ended up playing a part in the operation.

  I told him, in a certain amount of detail, exactly what positions he might use when he fucked himself.

  We argued it backwards and forwards for half an hour before finally reaching an impasse. Gwillam had the entire place sewn up, with at least one of his people on every walkway, and he flat-out refused to let me take Bic off the estate even if his parents consented - unless he got to come along in force and run the show. I told him that couldn’t work, and that he was condemning the residents of the Salisbury to the death of a thousand cuts, and he said - in effect - that their suffering was part of God’s great plan.

  I gave up in the end and left them to it. At least they didn’t stop me from going up to the eighth floor of Weston Block to look in on Bic and his family, which might have been interesting because he had serious muscle and I was in a black enough mood to have pushed it. But as it was I walked on across the forecourt and in through the double doors while Gwillam was still deep in murmured confab with his minions.

  But the lifts were out, so I went around to the external staircase and started my trek into the sky, not looking round in case I locked eyes with Gwillam and he called me back. But while I was trudging up the stairs I heard hurried footsteps clattering behind me. I turned and waited, so that at least I’d be meeting whoever it was head-on: in this place, it was best to take nothing for granted.

  It was the tall woman with the cat’s cradles wound around her hands.

  ‘Father Gwillam changed his mind,’ she said, simply, stopping three steps below me. I noticed, impressed, that she wasn’t out of breath after her sprint up the stairs. A childhood infatuation with Ellen Ripley stirred in the depths of my hindbrain and reminded me of the space where once it had sat enthroned in my libido.

  ‘About what?’ I asked.

  ‘About the boy. He said if you let one of us come with you, to make sure nothing goes wrong, you can do it.’

  ‘I already told you—’ I began. But she lifted a school-marmish finger to shut me up.

  ‘Double blind. Whoever goes with you doesn’t get to know the address, and you do whatever you need to do to make sure they don’t get a clear look at the route.’ She looked at me expectantly. ‘We’re meeting you halfway, Castor. It’s up to you to figure it out now. One of us has to come, but it can be on your terms. Okay?’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said, but it was only for form’s sake. I wasn’t going to get a better offer, and we didn’t have any other choices left. Rather than let her see how emphatically and irrevocably up against the wall I felt, I turned and started walking again.

  She fell in behind me, keeping a respectful three paces’ distance until we got to the eighth floor.

  ‘I don’t need an escort,’ I said over my shoulder.

  ‘No? Still get it for free, do you?’

  It wasn’t the kind of comeback I expected from a woman who was big in the Church - even if we were talking about the Church’s black-ops division. Then again, Sue Book had been a verger when I’d first met her and now she was in a more than civil partnership with a demon. You never can tell with these mission dolls.

  ‘I’m celibate,’ I said shortly. ‘Only the pure in heart can seek the Holy Grail.’

  Walking past Kenny’s door, which was now nailed shut and sporting police-incident tape, made my skin tingle as though I was showering in battery acid. I was nearly certain it wasn’t psychosomatic, although by now I had a vivid enough sense of the horrors that must have been enacted behind that door that I didn’t have to go reaching for supernatural explanations. Did the wound demon have a physical locus after all? Would an exorcism undertaken in Mark Blainey’s bedroom have a better chance of succeeding?

  Another missed opportunity, I was willing to bet; like Bic. Although with Bic we still had one final chance to make good. If ‘good’ was the right word.

  Jean Daniels answered to my knock, looking like a woman who was self-medicating in order to perform open-heart surgery on her own ventricles, and had been called away in the middle of the procedure. She stared at me with hollow eyes, seeming to take several seconds to register who I was.

  ‘Mister Castor,’ she mumbled. ‘You’re back. I called you a few times, and left messages, but you didn’t . . .’

  ‘I haven’t been home, Jean,’ I said, ‘so I wouldn’t have got them. I’m really sorry. Can we come in?’

  She nodded brusquely, stepping aside to let me in: then she realised I wasn’t alone.

  ‘This is—’ I said, pointing towards the cat’s-cradle woman. ‘Well, actually, who the hell are you?’

  ‘Trudie Pax,’ she said, holding out her hand to Jean. ‘I’m with Father Gwillam.’

  Jean took a step back, as though Trudie’s hand was contaminated in some way. ‘We’ve already told Father Gwillam that we’ve got nothing more to say to him,’ she said coldly.

  ‘And we’ve accepted that,’ Trudie said sweetly. ‘In any case, Mrs Daniels, we don’t believe any more that your son has been touched by God. The way things have gone over the past few days has proved us wrong. But Castor has thought of something that might improve William’s condition, and we’re here to help in any way we can.’

  Tom had come from somewhere to stand behind his wife, so he was hearing this too. He looked almost as wrecked as Jean, and pugnacious with it, but Jean had locked onto the salient point in Trudie’s little recitation. Her face as she looked at me lit up with something like hope.

  ‘You can help him?’ she said.

  ‘Let me look at him,’ I said, by way of a non-answer.

  Jean led us through, not to the living room where I’d been before but to a bedroom that led off the hall to the left. Walking through the doorway gave me a premonitory shudder, but it was because of the room itself: because the floor plan was the same as that of Kenny’s flat, and Bic’s room occupied the identical space in the layout to Mark’s.

  Lost boys, sharing the same existential billet. But Bic, at least, was loved and looked for: and he wouldn’t fall off the edge of the world the way that Mark had done. Not if there was anything I could do to stop it.

  He was lying on his bed, on top of the covers, in the Spiderman PJs again. A rumpled blanket lying beside him had presumably been laid over him at some previous point, but I could see why it hadn’t stayed there. He was twitching and shaking, his hea
d and limbs moving constantly, and his wide-open eyes darted from side to side, scanning from one corner of the room to another as though he was trying to locate the source of some troubling sound.

  He was muttering under his breath, and when I sat down at the foot of the bed I was close enough to hear some of the words.

  ‘Flowering like flowers like it’s there because I lost I lost I lost it until I nailed it down. Saves my life every hour, every day. Sewing. Sewing myself with a needle, stitching up the holes but you only see the scars and you don’t hear when all these mouths all these red mouths talk talk talk’

  I felt his forehead, but as Jean had said the last time I’d been here there was no fever. Bic’s skin was cold to the touch.

  ‘Has he been back to the hospital?’ I asked.

  Tom looked at Jean and Jean, after a moment’s pause and a hunted look at Trudie, shook her head. ‘What would they do at the hospital?’ she demanded. ‘Put him on drugs? Cut him open? The only thing that calms him down a bit is me holding his hand and talking to him. It . . . brings him back, for a few minutes at a time. We told the school he had gastric flu, so they wouldn’t send anyone round. I’m scared of them taking him. They might think he wasn’t right in the head. Might take him somewhere and not let him out again.’ She raised a warning finger in Trudie’s face. ‘You get anyone in here,’ she said, ‘and I’ll split you.’