Thicker Than Water Read online

  For a packed and frantic minute I held my own: then an actual knife rather than a glass one, thrown through a gap between the nearest attackers, caught me in the left shoulder, close to the throat. It must have been wickedly sharp: the thick cloth of my paletot would have kept a dull blade from penetrating too deep. Or perhaps the demon’s magic worked like a blessing on knives and caltrops. In any case it went in hilt-deep, and I screamed with the shock and the pain.

  I threw another punch, right-handed, but being a southpaw I threw it without any real conviction. The plukey teenager I was facing took it squarely on the chin and then rushed me, his clutching fingers closing around my throat as he raised his jagged-edged shank to plunge it into my face.

  Someone hit him from behind, making him sprawl on top of me. I got a handful of his hair, levered his head up away from me and slammed my forehead into the bridge of his nose, giving him something else to think about. He jerked and went limp and I rolled him - with an awkward, one-handed heave - to the side.

  I barely glimpsed my rescuer as he jumped right over me and charged on towards Matt. I saw him dive on a guy who’d got past our little Horatio-at-the-bridge last stand and was about to slit Matt’s throat from behind. Further away, Juliet dipped and pirouetted in an elaborate ballet of carnage, inert and damaged bodies flying and falling away from her as her hands and feet wove their skein of graceful violence.

  Then I returned my attention to the last few stragglers who were still trying to gut Coldwood. A half-brick to the back of the neck discouraged two of them, even in my weaker hand, and Gary took out the last man with his knee and his elbow.

  We stared at each other, panting, taking a full three seconds to register the lull. It wouldn’t last. The demon had hurled the nearest tools it could find at us. It had a thousand more lying ready to hand, and it wouldn’t take more than a moment to hurl them into the breach. It could empty the whole estate on our heads. And then what? Even if we survived, what would we do when the damned thing started to look further afield?

  Juliet walked towards us, heedless of the bodies that she stepped on. She was staring at the newcomer, who was facing Matt head-on as Matt came slowly upright. They seemed unable to look away from each other.

  I knew this guy too, I realised without surprise. It was the dead man who I’d met here on the first day, and then again on the footbridge at Love Walk. The man who’d talked in a woman’s voice and apologised as he’d tried to throw me off the bridge to my death.

  I took a step towards him, and his gaze flicked momentarily to me. He nodded an acknowledgement, but his eyes narrowed as if the sight of me raised unpleasant memories.

  ‘I hope that makes us even,’ he said.

  That voice again: trompe l’oeil for the ear. The wrong sex, the wrong age, the wrong - what? The wrong end of the map, is what. London, instead of Liverpool. Now instead of then. Drowned instead of waving.

  ‘I wasn’t sure what you were going to do,’ he went on. ‘If you’d tried to do an exorcism - I was going to kill you.’ There was a knife in his hand - a heavy, brutal thing, double-edged, that looked as though you could use it to gut and skin rhinoceroses. He held it up by way of illustration. ‘I would have had to, Fix. I’d already made up my mind. I know what you are. What you can do. You told me all about it a long time ago. But - you didn’t try to hurt him. You talked to him.’

  His gaze went to Matt again. Slowly and hesitantly, his hand came out as though to touch Matt’s cheek, but he stopped short and then withdrew it again.

  ‘It didn’t work,’ Matt said. ‘He won’t answer me. But perhaps if we both try—?’

  The pale man drew in a breath. Or at least, his chest worked as though he was trying to draw in a breath. There was no accompanying sound, and for a moment he seemed unable to speak. His fists clenched, and his face twisted into something like a grimace. It took me a while to realise that he was trying to cry, as well as to breathe. Zombies can’t do either.

  Finally he nodded. But at the same time he turned to me.

  ‘Alone,’ he said. ‘The two of us. Fix, you can’t be in on this. You, especially, can’t be in on this.’

  I threw up my hands, palms out. ‘I’m good,’ I said, the raggedness of my voice betraying me. I was anything but good. I was exhausted and hurting. Blood from my shoulder had found its way down the inside of my sleeve and was now running the length of my fingers before pattering to the ground in a continuous drip-drip-drip that sounded unnaturally loud in the surrounding stillness. I felt the pressure of the demon’s attention, drawn by the blood. And then I felt its heavy, invisible gaze pass beyond me to the two figures at the centre of the walkway.

  I backed away, one step at a time. Juliet and Coldwood came with me, Gary throwing a curious glance at the man who’d come out of nowhere to help us.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Was he part of the programme?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Pure serendipity. It has to work on our side every once in a while.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  I shook my head. It was a long story, I was ignorant of more than half of it, and I was too tired to explain the parts I did know.

  ‘The body belonged to a man named Roman,’ I said. ‘But that was a while back. I think he probably answers to Anita these days.’

  Coldwood blinked. ‘Anita, as in—?’

  ‘Yeah. As in Anita Yeats. Kenny’s - whatever you want to call it. She died, and she came back.’

  ‘And she’s what, cross-dressing?’ Gary sounded pained.

  ‘More or less. Ninety-nine times out a of a hundred, a zombie clings to their own flesh: Anita chose the flesh of the bloke she was knocking off. Maybe if you ask her she’ll tell you why.’

  I turned away from him to end the conversation, because it was scraping on a raw nerve right then. From behind us on the walkway, I heard Matt’s voice and then Anita’s. And then Matt’s again, broken as he spoke by what sounded like sobs. I needed to get further away. I might hear some of the words, and I didn’t feel strong enough for that. I pushed the swing doors open and stepped back into Weston Block. For a moment the floor under me seemed to lurch and shift. I slumped against the wall, waiting for the dizziness to pass. It intensified instead. It was costing me a lot of effort just to stay on my feet.

  ‘Christ,’ I muttered. ‘I need a Band-Aid and some TCP.’

  Gary inspected the knife that was still jutting out of my shoulder. ‘You need a hospital,’ he said. ‘If we take this out you’ll bleed like a stuck pig.’

  By way of answer, I held up my blood-boltered hand. Coldwood was unimpressed. ‘That’s nothing compared to the Niagara you’re going to see when that knife comes out,’ he said. ‘Stay there, Fix. Do not fucking move.’

  He got out his phone, dialled and started talking rapidly into it. But I couldn’t follow the words. Juliet was talking too, looking back the way we’d come, out onto the walkway. I turned my head - actually, turned my body because my neck didn’t seem able to move independently any more - and followed her gaze.

  Matt was talking to the sky. Anita in her borrowed flesh stood beside him with her hands clenched into fists, her neck craned right back, her pale flesh almost luminous in the surrounding darkness. Something blacker than the darkness hovered above them, almost close enough to touch. Its voice was a soundless pulse inside my head: diastole followed by systole, the tide of my own blood given voice. Anita raised her hands - Roman’s hands - above her head, not in surrender but as if she was trying to reach something that hung in the air above her, to lift it down. Matt had his hands on her shoulders now, offering her strength or comfort or maybe just clinging to her to keep from falling down onto his knees.

  I thought of the two of them in the nativity play: Come, Joseph. I am close to my time and we must reach Bethlehem before our baby is born. It was too much. I closed my eyes and looked away.

  But the darkness was still there, behind my eyes. It filled the space around me, so big and so vast that it became
to all intents and purposes the landscape in which I stood. And I remembered that I’d stood here before, in this selfsame black-on-black void: conversing with the genius loci, which had named itself and then asked me - pleaded with me - to stay. not leave this place.

  Which I’d read as a threat instead of what it was: the lost boy asking not to be left alone in the dark.

  The lightless immensity gathered itself and began to shrink: receded from me by concentrating its terrible essence into a smaller and smaller space. Soon it was almost invisible: a distant point of anti-light, impossibly small, painfully vivid. Then it winked out altogether, like the dot in the centre of the screen when you turn off an old CRT television set. What it left behind in the place where it had been was an absence, almost equally dark but empty of being, drained of purpose.

  A metallic clatter from somewhere nearby made my eyes snap open. The knife had fallen from my shoulder, and Coldwood, still on the phone, was staring at it with a bemused look on his face.

  I put my finger in through the hole in the neck of my paletot, searching for the wound. It had gone. My skin was completely unbroken.

  The demon - my kinsman, my brother’s only son - had withdrawn itself from me, and this was the mark of its disfavour. A moment later, the rising sun peered out from behind Boateng Tower and - finding no substantial opposition - threw its radiant weight around the suddenly clear sky.

  Bethlehem. That’s where we’re all heading for. The rough beasts and the messiahs and the poor bloody infantry, all slouching along together to the place where we’ll finally be counted.

  24

  Anita started to deteriorate almost as soon as Mark’s spirit left us.

  I’d seen this before. It wasn’t physical decay: it was a more subtle and inexorable surrender, a failure of the motive force, the driving will-power that allows something as tenuous and fragile as a ghost to bludgeon something as solid as a body into submission. Her farewell to her son and her reconciliation with Matt had shifted some crucial point of balance within her, and her hold over her borrowed flesh was faltering moment by moment. She was slowing to a final halt.

  We sat with her amidst the rubble of the walkway, keeping her company while she died for the second time. She told us about the first time: about how Kenny had found her and Roman in flagrante, in the climactic phase of a hastily snatched knee-trembler in the flat’s poky kitchen.

  She’d been doing the ironing before the sex got under way, and it was the iron that Kenny used to kill her. She was still turning, trying to disengage herself from Roman’s embrace when it hit her, and that was the last she knew. But Kenny carried on hitting her for a long time after she was dead. She knew that because . . . well, because she’d seen the results. Later.

  She woke in the ground: a burning splinter of consciousness filled with fear and urgency, not knowing why it had no eyes to see with and no hands to claw its way free from the undefined place where it was caught.

  She did the zombie thing, but the zombie thing didn’t work. Her own body was mostly pulp, bones broken in so many places her insides were like the kids’ game of PickUp Sticks.

  But Roman’s body was right next to her, and Roman had been killed with a single stab wound to the neck. She didn’t know why Kenny had dropped the iron and used a knife: maybe it was a kitchen knife that Roman had picked up to defend himself and Kenny had turned against him. It didn’t matter, anyway. Roman’s spirit had gone on to its eternal reward, and his flesh was lying there with a TO LET, UNFURNISHED sign figuratively pinned to his chest.

  Anita moved in, and sat up. Kenny had buried them in his allotment, and he hadn’t troubled to bury them deep because he was the only one who ever went there. She carefully replaced the soil so there was no sign of what had happened, and went off to settle accounts with her bastard husband.

  But she wasn’t sure how exactly she should go about it. She didn’t feel she could go to the police because she had no way of proving who she was. She didn’t even know whether the born-again could give evidence in court, or whether she’d be allowed to walk free again once she’d brought herself to the authorities’ notice. Was taking Roman’s body actually a crime? Would she be dispossessed and kicked out into nothingness? She couldn’t let that happen.

  And she’d spent longer underground than she thought she had: almost a full year, in fact, which was why there was no change in the weather to warn her. When she got back to the Salisbury, it was to find Mark already dead. The shock and pain of it almost made her release her hold on life right then and there, but she held on by main force, determined to stay in the world long enough to see that Kenny got his come-uppance.

  So while Kenny stalked Matt, she stalked Kenny. And when Kenny finally baited his sick, over-elaborate little trap, she was watching from a little way off. She saw Matt keep the rendezvous. She saw him walk away. She saw Kenny cut his own arms, his own face, squeezing out enough blood so that he could write Matt’s name on his windshield. He was crazed, she said, revelling in it. There was no doubt at all that the wound-demon was inside him by this time, influencing his thoughts and actions. It wasn’t responsible for Kenny’s hatred of Matt: that had always been there, for as long as he’d known that Matt was Mark’s father. But it was certainly the demon that made Kenny’s revenge take the shape it did.

  Anita watched the parked car for more than an hour. When she was certain that Kenny had passed out from blood loss, she moved in and finished the job with Roman’s Swiss army penknife. It had just come to her, as she stared down at him, that she was never going to have a better chance: that her zombie body was too slow and uncoordinated for her to fight him when he was awake and alert. The temptation had grown in her, and suddenly she’d had the knife in her hand and she was working it backwards and forwards in Kenny’s neck. The wound-demon again, maybe, although God knows she had reason enough on her own account to want Kenny dead. ‘Cutting that bastard’s throat was the best thing I ever did,’ she said, through lips that were now a cyanotic blue. ‘I just wish - I’d done it back when we were all - kids. I wish—’

  She shook her head, unable to put the waste and the wistfulness into words.

  ‘The penknife,’ Coldwood said, ever the consummate cop. ‘The one you used to finish Seddon off. Is there any chance you—’

  ‘It was in my jacket,’ Anita said. ‘The pocket of my jacket. And the jacket was covered in blood. I couldn’t bear the feel of it on my skin. I took it off and I - I threw it away. I don’t know where.’

  ‘I do,’ I said to Coldwood. ‘There’s a car park underneath that underpass. I looked over the edge when you first called me to the crime scene, and I saw a jacket there behind some wheelie bins. You probably can’t see it at all from the ground, so it may still be there.’

  Coldwood went away to make another phone call, and Anita lapsed into silence. Then another thought occurred to her, and she cast her gaze around until she saw me.

  ‘Fix,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m sorry I hurt you. I knew - I knew by then what Mark had turned into, and I thought you’d come to send him away. I was so scared, when I first saw you - I wasn’t thinking straight. I wasn’t - myself.’ Her eyes rolled weakly as she saw the ironic sense of the words.

  ‘Nobody on the Salisbury was, by that time,’ I reminded her. ‘It’s okay, Anita. In a bizarre way you actually helped me. It was while I was in hospital that I saw Mark for the first time, and started fitting the pieces together.’

  ‘Nita,’ Matt said, his voice cracking, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I left you. If you’d told me - if I’d known that you were pregnant—’

  Anita stared at him, perplexed. ‘I knew you would have come,’ she murmured. ‘But - I didn’t want to make you come, Matty. Not like that. What would it have meant - if you married me because I blackmailed you? And if you gave up - everything else you wanted - to be with me? You would have - hated me.’

  He shook his head in denial or protest, sobbing aloud now. Anita put a hand up to touch
his face.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to see you cry. You ought to bless me. Now that you’ve heard my confession.’

  Matt didn’t bless her. I think I understood why he couldn’t do that, even though he knew the words would have comforted her. To say a blessing would have been to turn back into a priest: it was too big a jump from where he was, and in a direction that he simply couldn’t take right then.

  He kissed her instead. The lips were rotting, because this was a body two years dead, and they weren’t even hers in the first place. But then, this was a kiss that had been pending for a lot longer than two years: it probably didn’t matter as much as you’d think.

  Tired of waiting for me to get the hint on my own, Juliet grabbed my lapels and hauled me away, off the walkway into the ruins of Weston Block. It’s coming to something when I have to take lessons in tact from a pit-spawned monster.

  Although, it suddenly struck me, that was a phrase that needed to be scanned.

  ‘Juliet,’ I said tentatively.

  ‘Yes, Castor?’

  I picked my words carefully. ‘I’ve always had - some fixed ideas about Hell. They seemed to make sense, in terms of the available evidence. It’s kind of a point on a moral compass. It’s where bad people go when they die, and the demons that live there have to be bad too, or they wouldn’t be there in the first place.’

  Juliet stared at me, deadpan. ‘Yes. So?’

  ‘So - how much of that is bullshit?’

  There was a silence during which we could hear Coldwood on the floor below us chewing out one of his subordinates. ‘Well, whichever corner is closest to the bloody underpass. Are you seeing wheelie bins? Well, right fucking there, then. Look behind them. I don’t care how much fucking mess there is—’

  ‘How many demons, Castor,’ Juliet asked me, in a tone of long-suffering patience, ‘have been summoned by how many necromancers and mages and scholars and hobbyists and enthusiastic imbeciles? Down the centuries, from the Middle Ages when the first grimoires were written, to the present day when the grimoires are almost irrelevant because you can raise a hell-hound with an incautious word? How many, would you say?’