Thicker Than Water Page 38

  From the comfort of Mark’s bedroom, I watched the world end. Or at least, that was how it felt. Melodramatic, I know, but it’s not easy to keep a sense of proportion when the wind gusts with the bitter reeks of burnt flesh and half-spent tear gas, and ignorant armies are clashing by night right in front of your sleep-deprived eyes.

  The riot cops had a hard time of it when they made their first charge. They got past the barricades at ground level and on the third-floor walkways, but they couldn’t penetrate on the eighth and twelfth floors - so the further they advanced, the tougher the going got. A plexiglass riot shield is a fine defence against a lobbed brick or a Molotov cocktail, but it’s not much use when an armchair drops on you out of the skies. They pulled back at last, leaving a few sprawled bodies - some in uniform, some civilians - behind them.

  The second time was better coordinated, and they seemed to have larger numbers on their side too. Using the towers at the north end of the estate as staging points, they swept the upper walkways first, blasting away the barricades and the opposition with water cannons before venturing out themselves. The top-to-bottom sweep meant they weren’t exposed to attack from above, and they made good headway, moving on past me towards the southern towers which they hadn’t been able to crack the first time around.

  But by then they themselves were visibly slowing as they felt the effects of the demon’s touch. One by one they started to take an interest in the broken glass on the walkways, jabbing shards of it experimentally into their own palms or seeking out rioters or former colleagues for impromptu knife fights.

  With so many wounds in which to root itself, so much sliced and broken flesh, the demon’s power was increasing exponentially. My own palms were itching almost unbearably, and the cutting kit that had been in Kenny’s wardrobe kept coming into the forefront of my mind. It would be a useful thing to have to hand, in case I felt the need to . . .

  No! I whistled the first few bars of the tune over and over again to keep the demon’s insidious tendrils from anchoring in my mind. And I tried not to think about blood. The blood that beats in the tell-tale heart of every one of us. The blood that’s thicker than water.

  I couldn’t collect my thoughts: couldn’t get my mind through the minefield of sick despair to the point where I could start thinking of a way out of this. There didn’t have to be one. Maybe I’d really hit the wall this time, because I couldn’t complete the exorcism and we were way past the point where nailing up a few wards over people’s doorways was going to have any effect.

  But it goes against the grain to give up just because you’re outnumbered, outgunned, painted into a corner and running a quarter of a tank past empty. I forced my numbed, sluggish brain to connect one thought to another, and I came up with three ideas which - together - made a kind of sense.

  Matty. Juliet. Gary Coldwood.

  Coldwood first. I fished my cellphone out of my pocket, tried vainly to remember his number before I finally found it in the calls-received list.

  It’s a wonderful and awe-inspiring facet of modern technology that you can call out from the heart of Armageddon to share the experience and chat with like-minded friends.

  Nothing the first time around: the phone rang for the best part of a minute before kicking me through to the voicemail service. No time to piss around with that: something told me it might be a while before Gary had a chance to catch up with his messages.

  I tried again. Hung up again. A third time . . .

  ‘Hello?’ Coldwood’s voice, with a babel of other voices, movements, sirens behind him. They were the same sirens I was hearing, away out there in the red night, but slightly out of phase because radio and sound waves don’t march in lockstep.

  ‘Hello, Gary.’

  ‘Castor? Bloody hell, where are you? Basquiat said you—’

  ‘Weston Block, flat 137,’ I said.

  ‘Jesus fucking wept! You’re still in there!’

  ‘And you’re somewhere out on the edge, yeah? New Kent Road?’

  ‘Other side. Henshaw Street. Listen, if you want a rescue, you can forget it. We can’t get close. The riot boys have taken over, and their OCO doesn’t play well with others. They’re making a right pig’s breakfast of it, but there isn’t a bastard thing we can do. He’s got us running escorts for the paramedics and evacuating people out of the north end.’

  ‘I don’t want a rescue, Gary. I want Matt. I need you to bring him here.’

  Silence at the other end of the line, apart from the sirens and shouted commands.

  ‘Did you hear me, Gary?’

  ‘No. I’m not sure I did. I thought you said you wanted me to bring your brother in to you.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s right.’

  The next sound I heard was an incredulous laugh. ‘Did you fall on your head at some point, Fix? I told you, I can’t get in. And your brother’s on remand for fucking murder.’

  ‘Which he didn’t do. But that’s beside the point. He’s the only person alive who can stop this.’

  ‘Why?’ Coldwood’s voice was strained. ‘Explain the logic. No, on second thoughts don’t bother because this is not fucking happening.’

  He hung up on me. I dialled again. There was nothing else to do except keep hitting at the one point and hope that something gave way. If it didn’t, I was going to sit here until the demon crept past my defences: and then I was probably going to do pretty much what everyone else was doing.

  ‘Fix, piss off out of it,’ Gary yelled down the phone.

  ‘I’d love to, Gary. Sincerely. But if I do, a lot more people are going to die tonight - including a lot of your people, unless you pull back and let every man, woman and child who lives on the Salisbury cut themselves to ribbons. I mean it. Get Matt and we can do something.’

  There was another silence, but I took it to be a positive sign. I was still hearing the background noises, so he hadn’t hung up.

  ‘Give me a reason,’ Coldwood said. But I didn’t feel I could do that. Not yet.

  ‘I’m giving you all I can,’ I said. ‘Matt’s the key to this. What does it cost you to get him out of his cell and bring him in here? You can handcuff yourself to him if you’re worried. Or you can sit back and watch while half of South London goes to hell.’

  ‘It’s not half of South London. It’s one estate. A thousand people.’

  ‘For now,’ I agreed. ‘For now that’s all it is.’

  ‘Fuck!’ Gary exploded. ‘Even if I wanted to get him in there, how would I do it?’

  ‘You want an escort, you call an escort service,’ I told him.

  ‘Is that meant to be clever?’

  ‘Juliet.’

  Gary laughed again, even less convincingly than before. ‘Juliet. Right. Because what this situation needs is another demon.’

  ‘Juliet will meet you at the station,’ I said. ‘She’ll bring Matt here. You can come too, if you want to.’

  ‘And then what? You wave your magic wand?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted. ‘This probably isn’t going to do a blind bit of good. But it’s a racing certainty that nothing else will. You want to end this, Gary, you get my fucking brother up here. We’ll talk about sin, because priests are experts at that stuff, and he’ll lead us in a few prayers. And maybe we’ll all still be alive when the sun comes up. Or alternatively, make sure you’ve got enough body bags.’

  I waited to see if he was going to come back with any more smart-ass questions. When he didn’t, I hung up and called Juliet.

  ‘Felix,’ she said, with a warning rumble in back of the usual cat’s-purr roughness of her voice. ‘I’m busy.’

  ‘Doing what?’ I asked.

  ‘Making love.’

  ‘Well, call me back when you get to the cigarette stage. I hate to be a gooseberry, but this won’t wait while you get your rocks off.’

  ‘I’m coming now, Castor. Succubi can sustain an orgasm for days. It’s our tempers that are short. Tell me what you want.’

  ‘I figured
it out,’ I told her. ‘About the thing at the Salisbury, and why you got so coy all of a sudden. It’s kind of a revelation, Juliet - that there are things that make a sex-demon blush.’

  She didn’t bother with fencing or denials. ‘Do you really know what’s happening,’ she demanded, ‘or are you just bluffing me to see what I let fall by accident?’ So I told her the truth, as I saw it, in three bald sentences. I managed to keep my voice steady, but my hand was trembling as though I was in the last stages of malaria.

  ‘Very well,’ Juliet said. ‘What now?’

  ‘Just tell me - is that it? Is that how it happened?’

  ‘Yes. I think so. In broad terms, it must be. Why are you calling me, Castor?’

  ‘Because you said you’d tried to exorcise this thing. Was that just bullshit, Juliet, or do you really want to help?’

  ‘I don’t have time for bullshit,’ she reminded me with some asperity. ‘So please, stick to the point. I’m in the process of satisfying my lover - my other vocation. But this is a bad thing, and the forerunner of things a whole lot worse, so yes, I’ll help if I can.’

  ‘Just not with information.’

  ‘You know why I was silent, Castor. And I still have to decide whether I can trust your discretion. Tell me what you want from me.’

  ‘When you’re sure that Susan is fully satisfied, go to the Uxbridge Road nick and pick up my brother. Gary Coldwood will hand him over to you. Or he may want to come along too. Either way you’ll have to get Matt in here, through Hell and high water and maybe the occasional Catholic werewolf.’

  ‘Here being—?’

  ‘The Salisbury. Flat 137, Weston Block.’

  ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  ‘Juliet—’

  A pause. ‘Yes, Castor?’

  ‘Nicky said you’re the youngest in your family. ‘She is of Baphomet the sister and the youngest of her line, yada yada.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So who did you . . . ?’ I let the question linger, because I had no idea how to finish it.

  ‘It was a long time ago, Castor,’ Juliet said coldly. ‘I don’t remember.’ She hung up on me.

  Nothing to do now but wait. And watch the show.

  23

  It took them close on two hours, but under the circumstances I think that was pretty impressive. Then again, the cross-London cop-demon-and-priest six-legged race is never going to become an Olympic event, so I don’t have anything to base a comparison on.

  Now that I’d put my head back together again at least partially after the botched exorcism, I’d come to the realisation that I wasn’t completely helpless. Whistle in hand, I stood at the window and played - the first part of the exorcism ritual, the summoning: drawing the demon in towards me again and again, and then letting it off the hook at the last moment.

  It was draining, and in the long run it wasn’t going to get me anywhere. It did tie up some of the monster’s psychic resources, though, so that the riot police mostly woke up from their trance, wiped the blood off their hands and retreated at a stumbling, undignified run. Only a few remained: presumably those in whom the demon had been able to embed itself most deeply and most quickly. Maybe they were guys who already had a tendency towards self-harm, or at any rate a fetish thing about wounds and pain.

  Inside the flats of the estate, though, nothing moved. There was no general exodus: no chorus of screams as people woke up to the full horror of what they’d done during the night. The demon’s hold was unbreakable there because he had too much of a head start on me. Some of them were never going to wake up at all.

  The sky off to the left, behind Guy’s Hospital, had started to lighten just a little but then stalled: the sun stayed stubbornly below the horizon and the zenith was as black as a lecher’s heart. Maybe sunrise had been cancelled.

  Then a commotion below me told me that the riot police were back. Only a small contingent of them, coming in from the north in a packed huddle that was vaguely reminiscent of the ancient Roman ‘tortoise’ manoeuvre.

  There was a stirring on the barricades and behind the windows. The demon gathered itself - a single entity looking out through a thousand eyes. I put the whistle to my lips and played again, but I was weak and spacey from lack of sleep and my fingers kept fumbling on the stops. I’m not sure if I made any difference at all.

  Missiles started to sail down and crash onto the concrete around the tight cluster of Kevlar-clad cops. A couple of bottles and something bigger and heavier found their mark, hitting raised riot shields with thunderous reports that echoed through the eerie silence enveloping the rest of the estate. One of the bottles was a Molotov cocktail, and spilled flame spread across the topmost shields in neon traceries.

  One of the riot cops who’d stayed behind when the rest had left appeared now from somewhere and sprinted across towards his colleagues. I thought - and they probably thought, too - that he was trying to rejoin them: but then his hand came up with something jagged clutched in it and he uttered a scream that was more like a torture victim’s dying agonies than like a battle cry. A rubber bullet felled him at about ten yards out from the tortoise: his legs shot out from under him and he went down hard. He lay twitching, trying to rise, his hands fluttering like dying birds.

  More bricks and bottles came down, but the tortoise headed on, straight towards me - then passed out of my sight under the walkways directly beneath my window. I had to judge what was happening now from the percussive sounds that came up to my ears. More screams, and a couple more rounds discharged. The smashing and rending of something heavy being moved.

  Then the tortoise retreated the way it had come, moving at the same sluggish pace as before because of the need to keep the shields locked together.

  Like I said, my mind wasn’t working all that well by this point. It took me a while to realise what payload the tortoise had delivered. I went out of the bedroom, up the stairs, and eased my way cautiously through Kenny’s boarded-up door out into the hallway.

  The stairwell below me was in heaving commotion. Presumably the cops had lost their hold on the third-floor walkways and the blood-crazed trancers had ventured north to reclaim the territory. Now they were wishing they hadn’t, because Juliet was passing through them in much the same way that a scythe passes through corn.

  I didn’t go down to join them: moving as slowly and clumsily as I was now, I could only have got in the way and most likely ended up with a bottle broken over my head or a knife in my ribs. But I played the summoning again, drawing some of the demon’s attention my way in the hope that it might have to loosen its hold momentarily on its possessed servants.

  The mismatched threesome came fully into view now, Coldwood coming first with Matt right behind him casting terrified glances to left and right; Juliet bringing up the rear and polishing off a last few attackers without haste or passion: she saved her passion for other things. One man stabbed her in the shoulder: she grasped his arm in an unbreakable grip, removed the blade from her own flesh and gave it back to him, hilt-first. He slumped against the wall, blood gouting from his broken nose. I was amazed - and grateful - that she hadn’t killed him. One of the hardest lessons for Ajulutsikael to learn, when she made the decision to live among men and so became Juliet, was to pull her punches.

  ‘In here,’ I shouted. Gary looked up and saw me. A few moments later, he and Matt were making their way up the last few steps. I led the way into Kenny’s flat and down to his gutted living room.

  ‘That was bloody blue murder,’ Gary complained. I ignored him and looked at Matt. He’d sustained a certain amount of damage in getting to this point - a bruised cheek, and a jagged cut on the back of one hand - but clearly he hadn’t been seriously wounded.

  Yet.

  ‘Why am I here?’ he asked me, looking around in something like terror. ‘Why have you brought me here, Felix? Is this where—?’

  ‘This is where he lived,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Sit down, Matt. Pull up a broken-off bit of furnitu
re and park your arse on it, because you’re not getting out of here until you’ve heard the truth.’

  Juliet entered the room, rubbing her hands together.

  ‘It’s worse than I would have expected,’ she said.

  I shrugged. ‘Well, you’d know,’ I said.

  ‘Get to the point,’ Coldwood suggested. He was leaning against the wall just next to the door, arms folded. His lip was thickened and his voice was slightly slurred, but he too seemed to have got away lightly. Juliet’s flawless white skin, by contrast, was criss-crossed with new wounds, none of which would last: she healed fast, and she would have deliberately put herself between the others and the worst of the violence.

  ‘The point,’ I said. ‘Right. Matt, you didn’t sit down yet.’

  ‘I don’t want to sit down,’ Matt said. ‘Not in this place.’ He looked around him with a mixture of fear and hatred.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Then stand. Okay, we’ll start with the obvious. You have a son. Or at least you did have one. He’s dead now. And there - right there - is our fucking problem.’

  Matt made a strangled noise and staggered backwards, one step and then a second. Slowly he sank down onto his knees. Probably it sounds as though I was being unnecessarily brutal: but there was so much worse to come, there seemed no point in beating about the bush with the relatively straightforward stuff.

  ‘Oh God!’ Matt whimpered. ‘Oh God!’

  ‘But you knew that,’ I said. ‘You had to know that. I mean, Anita didn’t want to be too obvious, but she named him after the next evangelist along. And how else could Kenny have got you to come out here and meet him, Matt?’

  ‘He said - but I wasn’t—’ Matt looked up at me with horrified, pleading eyes. ‘I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t - I didn’t want it to be true. If it was true, then—’

  ‘Then you left your kid to be brought up by a psychopathic bully,’ I finished. ‘I did wonder about that one. Working backwards from Mark’s age, it must have been when you came back from the seminary. Before you went to your first ministry. Is that right?’