Vicious Circle Read online

  It figured, of course. The Anathemata wouldn’t do anything so indiscriminate as to set fire to a hospital—but the judicious application of panic was well within their remit. If anyone actually died in the resulting stampede, I’m sure Gwillam would fill in the appropriate form and a mass would be said. One thing you can’t fault about Catholics is their organizational skills.

  But of course these were ex-Catholics: they’d been outlawed as an organization and excommunicated as individuals. What did that make them? The papacy’s equivalent of the Mission Impossible team, maybe. Fanatics, certainly; so convinced they were fighting the good fight that they’d ignored their own leaders’ orders to stop.

  That made what I was doing here more dangerous, and more uncertain. Fanatics are unpredictable, zigging when you think they’re going to zag; they don’t connect to the world at the same angle as the rest of us do, and you have to bear that in mind when you try to reason with them. Better yet, cut your losses and don’t bother to try.

  I’d only called Gwillam because I was out of other options, and because I didn’t know Basquiat well enough to trust her yet. Maybe she’d have enough sense to see the truth when it reared up and smacked her in the face, but maybe not. In any case, I wasn’t going to bet Pen’s life on it, or Abbie’s soul. Or my own arse, for that matter. A smart cop is still a cop, with all that that implies.

  We slowed down, abruptly, then speeded up again. That process was repeated several times over the next few minutes: even with the siren, and the emergency lights presumably flashing to beat the band, we could only push so far against the press of London traffic. At one point, as we were crawling along in some jam we couldn’t shift with our borrowed moral authority, Zucker suddenly tensed and Po emitted a sound that was halfway between a snarled curse and a cat’s yowl. I knew what that meant, and it gave me a rough indicator of how far we’d come. It also left me a little awestruck at how much punishment the two loup-garous were prepared to take in the line of duty. We were crossing the river. They had to be in agony: running water is like an intravenous acid bath to the were-kin, and they took it in their stride.

  Well, not quite in their stride: I noticed that Po’s claws were gouging into the plastic anti-slip slats on the floor, reducing them to ribboned ruin. His head was bowed, his breath coming in quick, barking grunts. Zucker was leaning against the gurney, his eyes clenched shut, a sheen of sweat on his pale face.

  This would have been a good time to launch a daring escape, but the guy who’d introduced himself as Sallis was just as aware of that as I was. He jabbed the gun in between my shoulder blades and held it there until Zucker got his groove back. Like it or not, I was along for the whole ride.

  A few moments later we dipped very sharply, with a harsh shudder as the suspension didn’t quite manage to take the strain, bumped over a series of badly fitted steel grids that shrieked under our wheels like a cageful of rats, and rolled to a halt. Zucker threw the doors open. He stepped down first, and the solid thud as his feet hit the ground outside had a strange echo to it. The darkness was impenetrable. Po gathered himself up and rolled out into the night with eerie, silent grace, then swiveled to stare back in at me. Sallis waved the gun, indicating that it was my turn next.

  I climbed down from the back of the ambulance, and looked around. I still didn’t have enough night vision to see what kind of somewhere I was standing in, but again there was that echo, from somewhere close at hand. Every scrape of foot on concrete, every pop and twang from the ambulance’s engine, cooling rapidly in the night chill, had its attentive twin rushing out of the dark to join it.

  A rectangle of grimy yellow light opened in front of us, and with its help I saw what I’d already guessed: we were inside, in a sepulchral space that was enormous in extent but as low-ceilinged as a church vault. White lines on the ground, parallel and evenly spaced, gave the game away still further; not a church, but an underground car park. “Get him inside,” said a cold voice, which was so dead and flat that it scarcely stirred the echoes at all. A hand—Sallis’s, presumably—gripped my shoulder from behind and I was pushed brusquely forward, Zucker and Po falling in on either side of me.

  We stepped through the doorway into a concrete stairwell. Father Gwillam closed the door, which was a fire door, and pushed the bar back into place with a small grunt of effort. Then he turned to me.

  “Good to see you again, Castor,” he murmured. “On the side of the angels at last.”

  “Color me undecided,” I suggested.

  He smiled—a brief flicker of expression that couldn’t take root in the affectless terrain of his face—and nodded. “Everything’s set up upstairs,” he said, to the company in general. It wasn’t a comment I liked very much, but my personal honor guard closed in on me as Gwillam led the way up the stairs, so I didn’t have much choice about whether or not I followed.

  I was looking for clues as to where we were. Close to the Thames, I knew, but where had we crossed? Not as far east as Rotherhithe, surely? In any case, I was pretty sure I’d have heard the engine noise change if we’d come through the tunnel. But maybe we’d gone west. There was no way to be sure: at a rough guess, we could be anywhere between Wapping and Kew.

  But as we came out of the stairwell onto a wide blue-carpeted corridor with a gentle incline, bells began to chime. I’d been here before, some time in the long-ago. I experienced a flash of déjŕ vu that included the insanely staring eyes of Nosferatu, and I almost had it. A cinema? Had the Anathemata found one of London’s decommissioned dream houses and moved in, as Nicky had done over in Walthamstow? That would be a pretty sick irony.

  But no. As it turned out, they’d gone one better than that. Gwillam threw a door open and flicked a light switch. Striplights flickered in sequence along a wall as long as a football field. A black wall, black floor, too, scarred with the scuff marks of innumerable feet. Up ahead of me, something that looked a little like a Tyrannosaurus rex made of glass and black steel reared itself up to about twice my height. But it wasn’t a T. rex: it was a Zeiss projector.

  “Son of a bitch!” I said, impressed in spite of myself as the penny dropped.

  “That’s the sort of language Po doesn’t appreciate all that much,” Gwillam murmured, raising the disturbing possibility that he might actually have a sense of humor.

  He walked around the Zeiss projector, and I followed: or rather, I was herded. The vast expanse of floor on the far side was mostly empty, except for a ghost pattern of unbleached areas on the carpet where other objects had once stood: display stands, partition walls, ancient cine cameras, life-size dioramas from great movies. The Anathemata had colonized one small area; there were a couple of guys working on laptop terminals at desks that were surrounded by thick, overlaid loops of electric cable like barbed wire entanglements. Another couple of guys were talking on cellphones, one of them tracing a line with his finger on an ops board—a huge map of London pinned to the wall, like I’d only ever seen in seventies cop shows. That was pretty much it: that, and a whole lot of empty space stretching away into the middle distance.

  “You should move somewhere smaller, now that the kids have grown up,” I commented, trying for a nonchalant tone that I think I missed by a mile or so. “You’re probably paying more rent than you need to.”

  Gwillam smiled thinly. He was watching my face, taking a clinical interest in my reaction. “Who mentioned rent? They left the key under the mat, and we let ourselves in. I’m assuming you know what this used to be, before it died?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I know.”

  But Gwillam wanted to give me the punch line, and he wasn’t going to be deterred. “It was the Museum of the Moving Image.”

  Just the words conjured up a little squall of memories. The museum was part of the South Bank complex, like the National Theatre and the Festival Hall—but it was added on after all the rest were built, because film was the scruffy little Johnny-come-lately of the art world and had to make space for itself at the table with its elbows. I’d only been here once before in my life—on a school o
uting when I was thirteen. All the way up from Liverpool on the train, with four stuffed pork roll sandwiches and a can of Vimto to see me through the day. I’d pretended to think it was shit, because that was what all my mates were saying, but secretly I reckoned the low-tech horror of the magic lantern shows was the dog’s bollocks, and I sneaked back to watch the X-wings versus TIE fighters battle sequence from Star Wars twice over.

  Now it was just an empty warehouse.

  “They closed the place down some time in the late nineties,” said Gwillam, absently. “Took the exhibition on the road. It’s meant to be opening again in three years or so. In the meantime . . . it’s really handy for the West End. Sit down, Castor.”

  I hadn’t even seen the chair. It was sitting in a patch of shadow just on the hither side of the ops board where two of the strip lights had failed to come on. A coil of rope and a doctor’s little black bag lay on the floor beside it. There was a table, too: a small, round coffee table with a stained Formica top that looked as though it had wandered in here from somewhere else. Gwillam swiveled the chair around to face me.

  “Please,” he said, in the same deadpan tone.

  “I’d rather stand.”

  Gwillam sighed, pursed his lips in a way that suggested he got a lot of this selfish and hurtful behavior, but never quite got used to it.

  “If you’re standing,” he pointed out patiently, “Zucker and Sallis can’t tie you to the chair.”

  “My point exactly,” I agreed.

  “And I want you to be tied to the chair because it makes some of the things I’m about to do to you that much easier.”

  “Look,” I began, “as a concerned citizen, I’m really happy to cooperate with any—” But Gwillam must have given some kind of signal to his team that I didn’t catch. Po’s massive, clawed hand closed around my throat and he hauled me unceremoniously over to the chair, slammed me down, and held me in position. Zucker and Sallis made busy with the ropes. They were enthusiastic amateurs where knots were concerned, but they made up in quantity what they lacked in real finesse.

  While they worked, Gwillam brought up another chair and placed it opposite me. Then, when they stood back respectfully from the finished job, he nodded them a curt acknowledgment. “Sallis,” he said, “you’re with me. Mr. Zucker, after your recent exertions you and Mr. Po might wish to avail yourselves of the chapel.”

  “Thank you, father,” Zucker said, and the two of them turned on their heel and walked away into the darkness. Po looked over his shoulder at me: bared way, way too many teeth. Sallis went over to the wall and sat down with his back to it, the gun not exactly pointed at me but still ready in his hand.

  “Is that a euphemism of some kind?” I asked Gwillam.

  He shot me a look of genuine surprise.

  “No,” he said. “We have a field chapel wherever we set up, Castor. Our faith is very important to us.”

  “Your former faith.”

  Gwillam quirked one eyebrow. He didn’t look upset, though; the barb didn’t have quite as much sting as I’d expected it to.

  “Do you know how many Catholics there are in the world, Castor?” he asked me.

  “Before you and your pals got their marching orders, or afterwards?”

  “There are more than a billion. Seventeen percent of the world’s population. Five hundred million in the Americas alone.

  “So the Holy Father must of necessity be a statesman as well as a religious leader. He has to play the games of men, and of nations. And sometimes that means he has to balance small injustices against larger gains.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The Anathemata Curialis was given a massive appropriation of funds just before the death of John Paul II. Then his successor, Benedict XVI, ordered us to disband or face excommunication. The two actions are best seen as the diastolic and systolic beats of a heart. The church has disowned us, but it has not ceased to wish us well.”

  “Even though you use werewolves as field agents? How broad is your brief, Gwillam? I’m just curious.”

  He knelt down, picked up the black bag and put it up on the coffee table. He snapped it open and rummaged inside. I hadn’t forgotten the bag: in fact, it was fair to say that it was preying on my mind a little.

  “Our brief,” Gwillam said, “is narrow and exact. We fight the last war. We’re heaven’s skirmishers, sent into the enemy’s heartlands to gauge his strength and harry his forces as he attempts to deploy them.”

  “The enemy being . . .?”

  “Hell, of course.”

  He took from the bag, one by one, a disposable hypodermic, a bubble pack with a small vial of some straw-yellow substance, a larger bottle of clear liquid, and an unopened pack of surgical swabs. “The rising of the dead,” he said, looking me full in the eyes with the deadly calm of the fanatic, “was the opening of hostilities. Hell is on the move against heaven, in every sphere, in every nation of earth. It was foretold, and it was foreseen. We were not taken by surprise. But there were those in the church who wouldn’t accept the evidence of their own eyes.”

  He smiled bleakly. I got the impression that he was remembering specific conversations; specific clashes of will and words. “They forgot their duty of stewardship,” he said gently. “They became too ensconced in the comforts of the world, and forgot that the world must always and ever be a forge. You do not sit comfortably by God’s fire: you are plunged into it, and shaped and made by it.

  “You seem to think, Castor, that there’s some contradiction between the battle we wage and the tools we use. There isn’t. We fight against the demons who are Satan’s generals in the field—and we avail ourselves of whatever weapons God places in our hands. If faithful Catholics return from the dead not because they conspired with the Adversary but because the rules of engagement have changed, then we will not turn our backs on them. Po and Zucker have suffered much, and they have turned their suffering to good account. I number them among my most trusted officers.”

  He counted off the items on the chair, pointing at each with his index finger, as if to satisfy himself that he had everything he needed. Then he nodded, satisfied, and stared at me again.

  “Where is Abbie Torrington?” he asked me.

  “In a police morgue in Hendon.”

  Gwillam blinked, once, twice. “I don’t mean her shell,” he said, with the closest thing to heat I’d ever seen from him. “I mean her true self. Her spirit. As you of all people must appreciate.”

  Me of all people? I let that one pass.

  “Her soul is in a locket,” I said. “Made of gold. Shaped like a heart. Her father took it from her neck just after she died. I think it has a lock of her hair inside it, and I think that that’s what she’s clinging to. And Fanke has it now: he took it from Peace’s body after he killed him at the Oriflamme on Castlebar Hill.”

  “And where is Fanke?”

  “I don’t know. Gwillam, if you can see that Abbie’s ghost is the same thing as her soul, then how in fuck’s name can you talk about destroying it?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Isn’t that what we do?” he asked. “Isn’t that exactly the power that was given to us?”

  “ ‘We’?” I don’t know why that came as a shock: it was pretty much on the cards, given that he was the one the Anathemata had chosen to head up this mission. “You’re an exorcist?”

  He nodded curtly. “That was how I knew that God had chosen me to fight in His cause.”

  “Funny,” I said. “That was how I knew I’d never have to work on a building site. What do you use? A fragment of the true cross?”

  Gwillam looked at me reflectively. His hand slid into his breast pocket, and it came out holding a small book bound in black leather.

  “The Bible,” he said. “This Bible. I read aloud—words and phrases taken at random from different verses. The words of God make a cage for the souls of sinners—as you would expect.” He put the book away. “I told you, Castor. I’m a soldier. If I could save the child, then I would save her, but I can’t and won’t allow her soul to become the mechanism through which hell’s mightiest general is unleashed upon th
e world. The ritual that was used here requires the sacrifice of body and soul; therefore without the girl’s soul, it can’t be completed. Now, I ask you again, for the second time: Where is Fanke?”