Vicious Circle Read online

  Paul raised his eyebrows as he pondered this. “Cuts all over his face,” he mused. “Two broken fingers. Maybe a broken jaw. That shit on his chest looked like blisters—like he was catching fire from the inside.”

  “But you know I’m right. The fingers will reset themselves tonight. The jaw, too, if I actually broke it. The gouges and the burns will already have healed up: if you looked right now, there wouldn’t be a damn thing to see. Rafi’s got a very healthy immune system. I guess it’s all the good food and exercise.”

  Paul gave me a slightly fish-eyed stare, checking to see if any of that second-rate irony was at his expense. Then he shook his head again, giving it up. “That lady of yours,” he said, after taking another deep drag on the cigar, “she’s a class act, Castor. About as big as a high-heel shoe, but she just went for Rafael back there like it was a fair fight. Went for Dr. Webb, too.” He grinned wickedly. “That was the highlight of the fucking day. Truth.”

  “Yeah, Pen is one of a kind,” I agreed. “She’s not mine, though. I mean, she’s just a friend.” A whole lot of memories surged up from one of the less-frequented areas of my mind: I shoved them right back down again. “She’s—she and Rafi used to be—together. When we were all at university, they were”—I groped for a phrase that accurately defined Pen and Rafi’s relationship, but there wasn’t one—“an item,” I finished lamely. “But it didn’t last. Rafi was the flit-and-sip type.”

  We stood in silence for a few seconds.

  “He was my best friend,” I said, aware of how bizarre and unhealthy all this sounded. “Pen’s, too, both before and after the sweat-and-roses stuff. Everybody liked him. You’d like him, too, if you met him.”

  “If I met him?” Paul’s intonation was pained.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “I guess I do. Kind of. I’ve always wanted to ask you, though. What exactly is that thing inside him?”

  “Asmodeus. He’s a demon. A fucking big one, too. A lot of the literature on the subject says—”

  “The literature?” Paul shook his head, wondering. “What, like The Lancet? Scientific American?”

  “Not exactly, no. I’m talking about books written by carpet-chewing natural philosophers five hundred years ago. Grimoires. Magical textbooks. Anyway, they put Asmodeus close to the top of the infernal pecking order. Not someone you want to mess with. But Rafi did just that. He tried to summon Asmodeus about two years ago. I think he was looking to do some kind of Faust thing: buy a shitload of forbidden knowledge from before the world was made. It didn’t work out that way, though. Somehow Asmodeus got into him and started to burn him up from the inside.”

  The words, banal and deadpan as they were, stirred up a series of disconnected impressions in my mind—some of the component parts of a night I still couldn’t forget. Because of the way my mind works, it was mostly the sounds that stayed with me. Rafi’s breathing, harsh and shallow and with longer and longer gaps between the in breaths. The grating laughter that was coming from his throat, welling up like blood out of the night-black void that showed when his mouth gaped open. The endless mumble and hiss of boiling water: we’d dumped Rafi into a bathtub full of ice because patches of his skin were going from red to black, but after about a minute the ice was water and the water was bubbling like a witch’s cauldron.

  “You were there?” Paul asked, sounding—to put it politely—a little skeptical. It’s not just cops: everyone draws their lines in the sand, sooner or later, and once they’re drawn it takes a lot to shift them.

  “His girlfriend called me in the middle of the night. She heard him say my name, and it sounded like his own voice, not the voice of the thing inside him, so she found my number in the back of his diary. By the time I got there, it looked like I might already be too late, but I tried anyway.”

  “Tried what, exactly.”

  “I played him a tune.”

  He nodded. I’d already told him over a couple of beers what it is I do for a living, and how I do it. “You see,” I went on, reluctantly, “I was assuming it was a human spirit inside him. A ghost. I’d never even met a demon back then. So I listened for a human spirit, and when I found it I started to play it out of him. Then about ten minutes in, I realized that what I’d dredged up was Rafi’s own soul. I was dispossessing him from his body—finishing what Asmodeus had started.

  “I tried to undo the damage I’d already done. I switched keys in mid-tune, played the opposite of what my instincts were telling me to play, in the hope that I could pull Rafi back into his own flesh. And it sort of worked.”

  “Sort of?”

  I nodded bleakly. “Yeah, sort of. I stuck Rafi back together again—and at the same time I stuck Asmodeus to Rafi, which wasn’t part of the plan. They’ve been trapped in there together ever since. That’s why Asmodeus tends to leave me alone, most of the time—he knows he’s going to need me sooner or later if he’s ever going to get free again. He’s just waiting for me to figure out how to do it.” I scowled, fingering one of the bruises on my shoulder. “Don’t know what the hell went wrong tonight. He knew who I was, but for once he didn’t seem to give a fuck. In fact, he really seemed happy to be getting a crack at me. Like he hadn’t expected it.”

  There was a long silence. I could see how a lot of this must strike Paul as total bullshit, even after what he’d seen. It would have sounded ridiculous to me if I hadn’t lived through it, if I hadn’t lived through worse things since. All those things in heaven and earth that philosophy tries not to dream about.

  Eventually he opened his mouth to say something, but we were interrupted by the sound of high heels on wet asphalt. Pen came out from the shadow of the building and headed over to us. I looked a question at her and she managed a weak smile.

  “He’s sleeping like a baby,” she said.

  “Good,” I answered. “From past experience, he probably won’t surface until sometime late morning. Whenever Asmodeus takes over like that, Rafi burns up a hell of a lot of energy all at once. The best thing we can do now is to let him sleep it off in his own good time.”

  Pen nodded, but I could see from her face that she didn’t buy my “time heals all wounds” approach.

  “He never has,” she said, “taken over in quite that way. Asmodeus is cruel, and spiteful, and a little bit insane, but that—” She finished off the sentence with a shrug.

  She was right, too. The berserker fit was a new one in my experience, and I couldn’t see what the demon had to gain by it. In the past Asmodeus had told me he was playing a waiting game, in the knowledge that sooner or later I’d figure out a way to undo whatever it was I’d done and set him and Rafi free from each other. Tonight it seemed he’d run out of patience and out of whatever demons have instead of sanity.

  I tried to think of something vaguely reassuring to say, but Paul preempted me by throwing down his unfinished cigar, stamping it out, and stretching his shoulders like somebody warming up for a workout.

  “Gotta say good night to you people,” he said. “I’m on until two a.m., and that’s my break over. You take my advice, you should get some sleep yourselves. The both of you look wiped.” He gave us a nod and headed back into the building.

  “Thanks again,” I called to his retreating back.

  “No problem. I’ll send in a bill.”

  I turned to Pen. “That sounds like sense to me,” I said. “Unless you’re up for some chicken vindaloo? The exotic delights of East Finchley are on our doorstep.”

  Pen shook her head.

  “I’m meant to be going out,” she said. “With Dylan.”

  Dylan? Oh yeah, Dylan Forster—Dr. Feelgood. I’d sort of forgotten about him. The truth was, I kept on forgetting about him again every time Pen mentioned him. I’d long ago abandoned any thoughts of rekindling whatever the two of us had had, but on some level it still disturbed me to think of her going out with someone else. She was part of a triangle whose other two corners were me and Rafi. I knew how unfair that was, and I hated myself for having any reservations when Pen tried to scrape up a little happiness for herself, so whenever she mentioned her
affluent, passionate, druid-in-training, Lexus-driving, trust-me-I’m-a-doctor new boyfriend, I put a certain amount of effort into sounding more positive and enthusiastic than I felt.

  “Well, even better,” I said now. “Take your mind off this stuff for a few hours. Hope it’s something good.”

  “I don’t think he had anywhere particular in mind. He just said it was going to be a murderous day, and he absolutely had to see me at the end of it so there’d be something to balance out all the shitty stuff. I told him I was going to see Rafi, and he said he’d meet me afterwards.”

  She gave me a brief but fierce hug and climbed into the car.

  “Drop you somewhere?” she asked, holding the door open for a moment so we could go on talking.

  I mulled that one over, but not for very long. My mind was still crawling with the dread that I’d felt when I saw the nurse lying crumpled on the floor of Rafi’s cell like yesterday’s laundry. Right then I wanted to be out in the open for a little while, and by myself.

  I shook my head. “Thanks, but I think I need the walk,” I said.

  “Then I’ll see you tomorrow.” She slammed the door, revved up, and pulled away, the Mondeo rocking a little on its wheelbase because it was getting on a bit now and the suspension was more or less shot.

  The night was mine. Woot.

  * * *

  As it turned out, I needed more than just a walk. I spent the next few hours trying to shake off that sense of unease in a string of pubs and insomniac water holes from Finchley to King’s Cross and beyond. Somewhere along the way, chugalugging my fifth or sixth whisky on the rocks in some Irish-themed nowhere on Kentish Town Road, I realized that what I was feeling had nothing to do with what had happened at the Stanger. It was something in the air, hanging over the whole oblivious city like an ectoplasmic slagheap waiting to start its inexorable downhill slide.

  I got back home sometime after three a.m. Pen’s place is off Turnpike Lane. It’s big and old, built in a nameless fin de sičcle style that’s even heavier than High Victorian, and it’s on the side of a hill so that the basement, where Pen lives, becomes ground level at the back of the house and gives out directly onto the garden. I checked for lights, as I always do: if she’d still been up I’d have gone and split a bottle or at least a glass with her. But everything was dark and silent. She was probably staying over with Dylan at his flat out in Pinner—a sign of how besotted she must be, because the house was a lot more than just somewhere where she hung up her boots, it was also the seat of her own very personal religion, the place of her power, the cave where she was high priestess and sibyl in residence.

  My room is up in the eaves, as far away from all that earth-mother stuff as I can get, which suits me fine. Apart from anything else, that’s a lot of stairs for anyone to climb if they want to come and find me, and I’ll usually hear them coming.

  I barely managed to shrug out of my clothes, then I hit the bed and was asleep before I bounced.

  I don’t know about Rafi, but I sure as hell didn’t see a lot of Sunday morning. I woke up at the lag end of lunchtime, bright sunlight cutting through the gap in my curtains like a maniac with a chainsaw. I had a furry mouth and a hangover that was as much psychological as physical. Or animistic, maybe: a hangover of the spirit. How the hell do you cure that? A hair of the god that bit you?

  Still no sign of Pen. I breakfasted alone in the sun-bleached kitchen, feeling a slight sense of unreality. The night had seemed so dark, the weight of foreboding so real, it was odd and even a little aggravating that nothing had happened. I felt as though reality was impugning my gut instincts.

  But if there was some severing sword suspended over London, it was pretty firmly attached, and probably conformed to all relevant EU safety standards. I prowled about the house all day like a hermit with hemorrhoids, waiting for that doom-drenched feeling to revisit me. But it didn’t, and disaster didn’t strike. In the end I was reduced to watching old episodes of Fawlty Towers on some cable channel, and I kept forgetting to laugh.

  Pen rolled home early in the evening to find me in the basement, feeding strips of fresh sheep’s liver to her two ravens, Edgar and Arthur. She was touched.

  “You didn’t need to do that, Fix,” she said, squeezing my hand—a mistake, since it was dripping with blood and oozy bits of tissue. “They don’t mind if I’m a bit late. But thanks.”

  “I’m always afraid that if I don’t keep them happy I’m going to be set meal B,” I groused. “They’re getting to be the size of bloody vultures.”

  She seemed tired, and not all that happy: normally she came back from dates with Dr. Feelgood walking on air, so I was solicitous—and maybe a little curious.

  “How was your night?” I asked, waggling my eyebrows suggestively.

  She shrugged, gave a faint smile. “Okay,” she said. “It was . . . yeah. It was okay.”

  I waited for clarification, and after meeting my eyes in silence for a moment or two she shrugged again. “Dylan was really tired,” she said. “He’d had an awful shift, clearing up other people’s messes. He wasn’t supposed to be on duty today, but he said he had to, just for an hour or so—to check up on some of the work he did yesterday. He didn’t trust the doctor who was supposed to take over from him. So I went shopping, over at Camden Market, and he joined me there for a late lunch.”

  “Did you check in on Rafi?”

  “Yeah. We went over there this afternoon. But he was still asleep.”

  “Told you. He’ll wake up right as rain.”

  She nodded glumly—then visibly brightened as another thought struck her. “Dylan says he might be able to prescribe some stuff that will keep Asmodeus under for more of the time. He wants me to have a word with Webb about letting him in to give Rafi some tests.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Worth a try,” I said. “I thought you said he was a rag and bone man.”

  “Bones and joints,” she corrected, looking at me severely. “But he interned in endocrinology.”

  She followed me as I walked through into her cramped, pie-slice-shaped bathroom and washed my bloody hands in the sink. I was trying to get away from another lecture about how wonderful Dylan is—Pen’s favorite theme for the past few weeks—but it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  “He’s really sweet,” she said. “You’d think he’d want to stay well away from Rafi, considering—you know—what he means to me. But he just wants to make me happy.”

  “Ask him for a blank prescription pad before it wears off,” I suggested. She punched me in the shoulder and I took it like a man.

  I’d already learned the hard way that sarcastic comments about Dr. Feelgood met with terrible retribution. He was an odd guy for Pen to be dating, in some ways; she wasn’t drawn to material things, and affluence normally struck her as a sign of spiritual malaise rather than anything to aspire to. But Dylan’s wealth and success and smoked silver Lexus were counterbalanced by the fact that he was an ovate—a sort of junior officer in some druidical training system, learning to be one of nature’s high priests. That was how she’d met him—at some solstice-related knees-up on a windswept hill in Pembrokeshire. Pen’s own flavor of paganism didn’t have ranks and hierarchies, but she liked it a lot that this well-to-do young doctor was groping toward spiritual truth rather than just worrying about his backswing. And he understood about Rafi, which most people flat-out don’t.

  Yeah, the guy was clearly a saint. It was probably just as well I’d never met him: if opposites attract we’d probably fall head over heels in love with each other and leave Pen out in the cold.

  “Are you feeling a sense of choking terror that you can’t pin down to anything in particular?” I asked her.

  It might have seemed like an odd question in some circumstances, but coming from me Pen knows it’s like a doctor asking you if you’ve been off your food. She searched her mind. It’s both capacious and somewhat idiosyncratically arranged, so it took a while. “No,” she said at last. “Just the usual choking terrors, and I can pretty much account for those. Why, Fix?”