Vicious Circle Page 4

  Using it on Rafi was a spiky proposition in any case, though. He was no zombie: just an ordinary living man with a tenacious passenger. And if Asmodeus was in the ascendant, it would take a big hit even to slow him down, which would mean that the side effects would be that much more painful and extreme. Some of them might even be permanent.

  “Let me go in first,” I suggested. “Maybe I can calm him down with some music.”

  Webb huffed and puffed, but unlike the big bad wolf he was actually very keen to avoid having the house blown down. He was looking for a way out of this that caused the minimum damage to life and property—especially property—and he had enough sense to see that I was probably it. After all, this wasn’t the first time Rafi had played up: I’d proved my usefulness many times before this. “I’m not legally responsible for you,” he reminded me. “You signed a waiver, and I’ve still got it on file. You go in there on your own recognizance, and if you’re hurt—”

  “You’ll deny all knowledge of my activities,” I finished, nodding. “And you won’t put a penny in the collection box. Let’s just take that shit as read, shall we?”

  I turned my back on him and took a step toward Rafi’s cell.

  “I’m coming with you,” Pen yelled, and she pushed her way between the two nurses, who weren’t sure anymore what their brief was. I put up my hand to block her. “Better not, Pen,” I muttered. “Asmodeus needs me alive, and that’s the only thing I’ve got going for me here. Like you said, it’s not Rafi. He won’t hold back when he sees you: he may even take a smack at you out of pure spite.”

  She hesitated, still not convinced. I left her there and went forward, hoping she’d see sense: there was really no time to argue about it while I could see Webb plutzing and quivering his way toward ordering a gas attack. I gave the door a shave-and-a-haircut knock as I went through. It would probably have been safer to take a peek round the edge of the doorway first, but I was going to have to go in anyway: this way I went in with a certain amount of panache, even if I came out again on my arse with my head flying separately.

  Stepping over the threshold meant going from carpeted floor to naked metal: an amalgam of steel and silver in the ratio of ten parts to one. It’s there behind the plasterboard of the walls, too, shining out in a few places where Rafi has punched his fist through in a temper. My feet boomed hollowly on the metal plate, announcing my arrival even more emphatically than the knock. But Rafi didn’t seem to notice me in any case: he was on the far side of the bare cell, kicking savagely at a sprawled form on the floor. Not the nurse, thank God: she was lying motionless just inside the door, a spidery trickle of blood on her forehead and her eyes closed. What Rafi was destroying was the meds trolley. Pills in a hundred party colors were strewn all over the floor and they crunched underfoot as I shifted my ground.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Pen was kneeling down to check the nurse’s pulse. I took my tin whistle out of my pocket and put it to my lips, but before I could play a note Rafi threw back his head and howled in what sounded like agony. He threw up his hands and pressed both clenched fists to his forehead, jerking spasmodically from side to side. Then with a deep-throated groan he drew his hands down his face from hairline to chin, digging his nails in deep so that he drew blood from eight parallel gashes.

  I was going to have to put a wrench in this. I felt for the stops and blew an opening chord, as low as I could. Since he’d been completely ignoring me up to then, I was hoping to get a certain momentum going before he realized I was there; but at the first sound of the whistle, he spun to face me. I hiccupped into unintended silence. Rafi’s pale, ascetically handsome face was strained, his thick black hair hanging in sweat-soaked ringlets, his eyes—pupils, whites, and all—were a black so intense they seemed to suck all the light out of the room. I’d seen the effect before, but somehow this was worse than all the other times. It was as though the blackness were brimming there, behind Rafi’s eyes, ready to spill out and drown me.

  “Castor!” he boomed, in a voice that was louder and harsher than a human throat should have been able to make: a voice like the shrieking intake of a jet engine. For a moment another face moved under his, almost surfacing through skull and muscle and red, stretched skin. “Too sweet! Too fucking sweet!”

  If he hadn’t tensed before he jumped, that might have been the last sound I ever heard. As it was, I just about had time to drop down and to the side, out of the reach of his clutching fingers. At the same time I blew a screaming, modulated discord that I’d used before on Rafi, to good and usually immediate effect.

  This time I might as well have been playing “God Save the Queen” with my armpit. He turned in the air like a cat and caught me a glancing blow on the side of the head with his closed fist. There was a split second where my visual field shifted into juddering black-and-white: the whistle flew out of my hand, clattered to the floor a long way away. Then Rafi had his feet back under him and he was advancing on me at a brisk walk, grinning a Cheshire cat grin. Pen pressed herself against the wall, out of sight and out of mind, but she was watching everything that happened, looking for a chance to get that nurse out of the line of fire. Great plan: better than mine, anyway. Without my whistle, I was going to have my work cut out even staying alive here.

  I threw a punch, which Rafi swatted aside without breaking stride. His response was devastating—his open hands, fingers as rigid as knitting needles, striking out so fast I heard the whiff of displaced air before I felt the agonizing impact. I staggered backward, trying to keep up some kind of a guard, but it was like being in front of a horizontal avalanche. I went sprawling back out into the corridor with Rafi on top of me, his hands now locking around my throat.

  I was staring directly into those liquid black eyes, and I saw no mercy there. I broke his grip by punching outward against his wrists, but that didn’t make as much difference as I was hoping for. Rafi strobed, his limbs seeming to be in too many places at once, and even though I’d knocked his hands away to left and right, his grip on my throat didn’t slacken. I fought to suck in a breath: if I could breathe I could whistle, even without mechanical aids, but there was nothing doing. He squeezed tighter, and darkness bubbled up inside my head to match the two dark wells I was staring into.

  Over Rafi’s shoulder I saw Pen running toward me. She got a hold on Rafi’s right arm, trying to dislodge it, but it slid through her hands somehow, dopplered, seeming once again to be in a lot of places at the same time. Then he shrugged and stiffened, his head snapping backward and thumping hard into her chest so that she tumbled backward, and got on with the serious business of throttling me.

  I was probably two seconds or so from passing out, after which all bets would have been canceled and, no doubt, so would I. But suddenly there was a bigger, stockier shape looming up behind Rafi, and a muscular black arm locked around his neck. It was Paul. He looked strained and pale, which was scarcely surprising, but his movements were methodical: he used his greater weight and leverage to bend Rafi backward until his grip started to slacken on my throat. Rafi hissed voicelessly and threw up his hands to tear Paul’s grip free.

  Weak and dazed as I was, I forced myself to move, because it didn’t look as though I’d be getting a second chance. I rolled hard, shifting my weight to throw Rafi further off his center of gravity, and at the same time I punched him with as much force as I could on the point of the jaw. Caught off balance, he slid sideways out of Paul’s hands and we both scrambled clear.

  I turned around with my arms up ready to defend myself against a renewed attack, but whatever was happening to Rafi now had made him forget all about me. He was still lying on the ground where he’d fallen, and another ululating howl of pain and desolation was pouring without pause out of his gaping mouth. It was as if my punch hadn’t registered with him at all: whatever was hurting him, I could see it had nothing to do with me.

  Paul knelt down beside Rafi and felt his pulse. He rolled Rafi’s eyelids back and inspected his eyes, then extended the examination to gums and teeth, which was
a risk I wouldn’t have taken myself. Rafi kept on howling, directly into Paul’s face: he seemed to have forgotten our existence.

  Two more male nurses loomed over us, looking down at Rafi as if they were wondering where it might be safe to take ahold of him. Paul glanced up, saw them, and pointed into the cell. “Karen,” he shouted over Rafi’s inhuman keening. “She’s still inside. Get her out of there.” They snapped to attention like soldiers, turned around and went into the cell.

  From where I was kneeling I had a good view through the doorway. I saw the two men kneel beside the fallen nurse, one of them touching a hand to her forehead. Then I saw her move, flinching away from the touch. She was hurt, maybe badly hurt, but she wasn’t dead. Caught between relief and delayed shock, I felt a sickly floating sensation rise inside me, filling me like sour gas: I doubled over and threw up copiously. It was a few moments before I could take notice of my surroundings again.

  When I did, I realized that Rafi’s siren-sharp wail had died away into abrupt silence. Pen had him cradled in her arms, and Paul was kneeling beside her, his forefinger on Rafi’s bare wrist again and an abstracted frown on his face.

  Dr. Webb approached us with a certain caution, eyeing the mess I’d just made on the carpet. Then his gaze traversed to Rafi, his head in Pen’s lap as she murmured reassurances to him and smoothed his sweat-slicked hair off his forehead. Rafi seemed to be asleep now—a profound, exhausted sleep, his chest rising and falling slowly with his long, deep breaths. Still, Webb’s eyes continually kept flicking back to him as he snapped out orders to his staff to start putting the place back together.

  I stood up, my legs shaky, and pulled my crushed shirt collar back into some kind of shape, wincing at the pain in my equally crushed throat. “What set this off?” I asked Webb, my voice sounding hoarse and flat.

  He gave a bleak snort. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all. Karen and Paul went in to give him his evening meds, and he took them. One moment he was fine, the next—well, you saw. He started screaming, and when Karen tried to calm him he lashed out at her. We’re lucky she wasn’t killed.”

  I nodded dumbly at that. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Webb wasn’t expecting an answer, though. “Castor,” he said, “this brings forward a discussion we were going to have to have in any case. When we took Ditko on, we did so in the belief that we could help him. We clearly can’t. He needs dedicated facilities of a kind that we can’t offer.”

  I looked down at Pen. She wasn’t hearing this, fortunately. “There aren’t any dedicated facilities for what Rafi’s got,” I pointed out, but that was bullshit and he knew it. There just weren’t any that I wanted to deliver him to.

  “There’s the MOU,” Webb said.

  “Rafi’s not a lab rat.”

  “He’s not mentally ill, either. He doesn’t belong here.”

  “We’ve got a contract,” I pointed out, playing my ace.

  Webb trumped it. “ ‘Voidable where the welfare of staff or other inmates is at stake,’ ” he quoted from memory. “I don’t think there’s any argument about that.”

  I shrugged. “We’ll talk.”

  Webb shook his head. “No, we won’t. Make alternative arrangements, Castor. You have twenty-eight days.”

  “You’re all heart, Webb,” I croaked. “You’ll have to toughen up or people will start taking advantage of you.”

  He gave me an austere, contemptuous look. “Nobody can say you didn’t try,” he said coldly.

  * * *

  Out in the grounds the moon was up, full and huge, turning everything into a Mercurochrome photograph of itself. I took a turn through the rose garden, enjoying the peace and quiet. It was only relative: there were still some shouts and moans from inside the building, but after Rafi’s endless, agonizing foghorn howl it sounded a lot like silence. Rafi was sleeping now, but Pen wouldn’t let anyone else touch him for the time being. I thought I’d give them half an hour, then go back inside and see if I was needed.

  I leaned against the sundial and looked down a trellised avenue canopied with sweet-smelling blooms. It didn’t frame much of a view, though: just a high fence with an inward-tilting fringe of razor wire at the top, and beyond that the six lanes of the North Circular, where even at this hour a steady river of headlights flowed on by.

  Alternative arrangements. That was really easy for Webb to say, especially with the gods of the small print on his side. Not so easy to do, though: not unless I wanted to take the route that Webb had suggested, and give Rafi over to the tender mercies of the Metamorphic Ontology Unit at Queen Mary’s in Paddington. But that was a last-ditch, desperation kind of thing, and I didn’t think we were quite there yet. Much as I respected my old sparring partner Jenna-Jane Mulbridge on an intellectual level, I knew better than anyone that she had some shortcomings where bedside manner was concerned. And that her heart and human feelings were in long-term storage underneath a crossroads somewhere.

  While I was still propping up the sundial, making the place look untidy, three small figures loped out of the foliage about fifty yards away and flitted across the lawn in absolute silence. They were in a triangle formation, with the largest of the three in front, the other two flanking and following her. There were some trees on the far side of the lawn, but trees didn’t slow them down: they raced on unheeding, their slender bodies sliding through wood as though wood were air. When they got to the wall that separated the Stanger from Coldfall Wood, the girl in the lead—she was about thirteen, or rather had been that age when she died—stopped and looked across at me. She tossed back a full head of ash-blond hair and gave me a wave. I waved back. Then she turned and walked on through the wall, where her two younger companions had already gone on before her.

  These were the ghosts of three little girls whom the original Charles Stanger had murdered in the late forties—before being sent down for life and endowing the institution that now carries his name. They’d spent the next fifty years tied to the stones of the old cottages like dogs chained up in a yard. Most ghosts are tethered to a particular place, more often than not the place where they died. It was just a cruel irony that in this case it meant the girls had to rub shoulders with the criminally insane for the rest of eternity—or at least, for as long as the Stanger stayed open. But about a year or so ago I’d given them a private concert: used my tin whistle to play a fragment of an exorcism to them in this same garden, so that although they weren’t banished from the place they were free to leave it. Since then I’d heard rumors of sightings as far afield as the Trocadero and Shadwell Stair, but they still seemed to use the Stanger as a base. I guess they were used to the place now: after half a century, it was as close to being home as anywhere they knew. I kept expecting them to move on—I mean, on to whatever else there is when this world has worn out its welcome—but obviously they still hadn’t taken that inevitable step.

  I walked on through the gardens, eventually circling around to the far side of the building where they gave out at last onto the asphalt apron of the car park. It was after midnight now, so the place was deserted except for a few staff cars and Pen’s old Mondeo. Paul was leaning against the side of an ambulance in lonely splendor, smoking a fairly pungent cigarillo. He was looking glum.

  “How’s life?” I asked, slowing to a halt.

  He blew out smoke, shook his head in disgust. “You should’ve asked me when I fuckin’ had one, man,” he said morosely. “My old lady keeps telling me to give this up, and fuck if she ain’t right. What do I need it for? My back feels like I did ten rounds with Tyson, my left eye’s closing over. Karen’s most likely got a concussion. And my man Rafael’s righteously fucked, poor bastard.”

  I was impressed that he could still worry about Rafi when Rafi’s evil passenger had just nearly done for the both of us. I was reminded once again of how much there was going on under that tanklike exterior. “Well I’m glad you put your retirement off until after tonight, anyway,” I said, meaning it. “You probably saved my life.”

  “Yeah, you’re welcome.”

  “Your boss is an arsehole, though.”


  “Got that right.”

  I leaned against the side of the ambulance next to him, but upwind of his cigar. “And Rafi will be okay. At least, he’ll be none the worse for anything that happened tonight.”