Vicious Circle (12 page)

“It changes,” I muttered. “Son of a bitch. It’s like—there are pockets of cold, in the air, not moving.”

“Whatever happened here, it happened very quickly. I think that’s why it hasn’t—”

She hesitated, looking for the right word.

“Hasn’t what?”

“Spread evenly.”

My laugh was incredulous, and slightly pained.

Susan Book was waiting for us at the end of the transept, and she was looking back toward us, not expectantly but with anxious intensity. She clearly wasn’t going to take a step farther without us. So we walked on and joined her.

The shadows were deeper in the nave, because only the windows to the left-hand side were getting any light. The far side, to the east, was a dimensionless black void. The gray flagstones under our feet faded into the dark a scant three or four yards from where we were, as though we stood on a stone outcrop at the edge of a cliff face.

Now that none of us was moving, I was suddenly aware of a sound. It was very low, both in volume and in pitch: very different from the susurration of echoes our footsteps had raised. It rose and fell, rose and fell again over the space of several seconds, dying away so slowly I was left wondering whether I’d imagined it.

Before I could resolve that question, Juliet was on the move again. She crossed the nave into the featureless dark, and came back a few moments later carrying a candle. How she’d even been able to see what she was aiming for was beyond me.

The candle was plain and white, about eight inches long and with a slight taper at the wick end. Susan looked at it with solemn unhappiness. Juliet took a lighter from her pocket and held it over the wick. “That’s a votive candle,” Susan said, a little plaintively. “You’re meant to light it when you say a prayer.”

“Then say one,” Juliet suggested.

She touched the wick to the lighter flame, and after a moment it flared and caught.

I thought she was going to lead us on up the nave toward the altar, but she just waited, one hand cupped around the candle flame to shield it from any drafts that might gust in from the open door behind us. But the air was as still as the air inside a coffin must be. The flame rose straight and flicker-free, giving off a single wisp of smoke as the wick burned in.

Then it guttered and almost went out. It shriveled, if a flame can be said to shrivel, and it shrank in on itself. It was as though the darkness and the cold were feeding on it, suckling on the tiny pinpoint of warmth and light and in the process killing it. As the flame surrendered and gave ground, the shadows came back deeper and more opaque than before, and the cold seemed to become a little more intense. In the dead silence, I heard that sound again: the double-spiked, deep-throated murmur at the limit of hearing.

“You were expecting that?” I asked Juliet, my eyes on the beleaguered candle flame.

“It was the first thing I tried. And that was the second.” She was pointing to the wall over to my right. Glancing in that direction, I saw a row of six squat shapes that resolved themselves, when I took a step toward them, into black plastic plant pots.

Each pot had something dead in it. Leafless stems; sagging, frost-burned blossoms; desiccated corms.

“The cold will do that,” I pointed out. “You don’t need anything supernatural.”

“True,” Juliet agreed. “But not in the space of five minutes. Look at your hand. The skin on your wrist.”

I did. It was already starting to pucker and dry: when I ran a finger across it, there was a dull ache.

“The longer you stay in here, the worse it will get. If you lingered long enough, I suppose—” Juliet’s gaze flicked across the plant pots with their freeze-dried, gray-green cargoes. She didn’t need to finish the sentence. Again, in the hush after she spoke, a bass rumble in the air or in the stone or in the darkness itself rose and peaked and fell, rose and peaked and died away into silence.

“What the hell is that?” I asked. “That noise?”

Juliet seemed surprised. “You mean you don’t recognize it?”

“Not so far.”

“It’ll come to you.”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, a little piqued. “But probably not before my leaves start to fall off.”

I blew out the candle flame, just before it died of its own accord, and headed for the exit.

It had happened during the evensong service, Susan Book said, the night before last.

St. Michael’s didn’t have a resident priest, and there were no services there during the week. It was only open on Saturdays and Sundays, when Canon Ben Coombes came across from Hammersmith to lead the services for a congregation that was only half as big as it was even ten years ago. The rest of the time, Susan looked after the place along with a sexton named Patricks, who mainly tended the graves but could occasionally be prevailed on to clean graffiti off the walls.

Evensong was her favorite service. She liked the hymns, which always started with “Lead us, heavenly father, lead us,” and the canticles that sometimes made her cry, they were so beautiful. And she liked the lighting of the candles—especially around this time of year, when they seemed to take up the work of the sun as the sun failed. Like the light of the spirit, picking up the slack for the fallible and beleaguered flesh.

We were out among the gravestones again, warming ourselves on the last red rays of sunset after the midnight chill of the church. I was reclining at my ease, more or less, on
MICHAEL
MACLEAN
GREATLY
MISSED
HUSBAND
AND
FATHER
. Juliet was perched elegantly on the headstone of
ELAINE
FARRAH-BEAUMONT
,
TAKEN
FROM
US
MUCH
TOO
SOON
, and Susan was sitting on the grass between us, unwilling to disturb the rest of the dearly departed. Under the circumstances, I didn’t take that as empty sentimentality. Nor did I take it personally that her eyes never wavered from Juliet’s face.

There were about eighty people in the church, she went on: a good house, the canon had said jocularly as Susan helped him into his vestments, so we’d better give them a good show. He’d led the responses and read a psalm—just as he did every week. They were into the first of the two canticles, which was the
cantate domino:
“Oh sing unto the Lord a new song, for he hath done marvelous things . . .”

She stared at the ground, remembering.

“There’s a place in the
cantate,
” she murmured, “where the choir invite the sea and the earth to make a joyous noise . . .” I remembered it as she said it, thinking back without enthusiasm to my own confused religious education. It had never made a hell of a lot of sense to me. “Let the floods clap their hands.” How, exactly? “And let the hills be joyful.” Was there any way we’d be able to tell the difference?

But Susan was still talking, and I reined in my jaundiced memories.

When Canon Coombes got to “Let the sea make a noise,” there
was
a noise; from outside, in the street. A shriek of brakes, very loud, followed by the sound of an impact: metal crunching against metal, or against something else. The mood was broken. Even the choir faltered into silence, and every eye looked toward the door.

Canon Coombes cleared his throat, and the congregation faced front again. He nodded to the choir, expecting them to take up where they’d left off. But though they opened their mouths to sing, no sound came out.

“It got cold,” Susan said, her voice sounding a little ragged at the edges. “All at once, just . . . terribly, terribly cold. I heard people gasp, and everyone was looking at everyone else, or jumping to their feet. Shocked. Scared. Not understanding it, because it was so fast.

“And then there was something a lot worse.”

I waited, but she didn’t seem to want to say any more. She looked at Juliet, as if she needed to be told to come out with the rest of it. But Juliet just returned the stare with her own unreadable gaze, until eventually, abashed, Susan looked down at the ground.

“Something laughed at us,” she said.

It was so incongruous, I didn’t take it in. “Laughed at . . . ?”

“Something laughed,” Susan repeated stubbornly, defensively. “It came from high up, near the roof, a long way over our heads. And it was loud. It was very, very loud. It filled the church.” She glanced across at me, her face set, as though she was certain in her own mind that I thought she was lying. “But I can’t describe the tone of it. I can’t make you understand what it felt like. People started to run. Or they just . . . fell down, where they were. Some of them seemed to be having fits, because their arms and legs were jerking and their mouths were wide open.

“It was horrible! All I wanted to do was get away from that awful sound, but I couldn’t think. I started to run without even knowing where I was going. I bumped into Ben—Canon Coombes—and he didn’t even see me, but he’s so much bigger and heavier than me that I went flying. I grabbed hold of the altar rail to keep from falling, and then I couldn’t seem to let go of it. It was so cold—the cold going right through me, taking my strength away. You know you see skaters on an ice rink, clinging to the side because they’re scared to move out onto the ice? That’s what I must have looked like. I just leaned against the rail, with my head spinning, and people screaming and running all around me.

“Then when I did manage to get moving again, I almost tripped over a woman who’d fallen down in the aisle right in front of me. Fainted, or perhaps just hit her head on something. I couldn’t leave her there. But she was too heavy for me to carry, so I dragged her towards the door, a few feet at a time, with rests in between. The laughter had stopped by then, but there was still a sort of sense of . . . of being
stared
at. I was scared to look up. It really felt as if something enormous—some giant ogre—had taken the roof off the church and was peering in at us.”

She swallowed hard, shook her head. “I don’t remember getting to the door, but I must have done, because suddenly I was out on the street. The woman I’d been dragging along was still unconscious, lying on the pavement in front of me, and I realized that there was blood all over her white blouse. I thought she was dead, after all—that the laughing thing had managed to kill her somehow. But then I realized . . .”

She held out her hands for us to see. There was scabbed skin on both palms, all the way across in a broad straight line, angry and red at the top and bottom edges.

“It was
my
blood, not hers. It must have happened when I touched the altar rail. The metal was so cold that my skin just stuck to it. That was why it was so hard to let go.”

It was a pretty eloquent demonstration. I listened in silence as she wrapped up her story. Everyone got out alive, although some crawled out on their hands and knees: incredibly, very few were even hurt, beyond bruised arms and cut foreheads. The ones who’d gone into fits seemed to recover quite quickly, except that they were still pale and shaking. Canon Coombes had locked up the church there and then, and told Susan to cancel the Sunday services. After which he’d fled, leaving her to call ambulances for the hurt and the traumatized (leaving red smears on the keys of her mobile phone) and to try to talk down those who were still hysterical.

On Sunday he’d called her at home. He’d spoken to the diocese, he said, and they’d authorized him to engage an exorcist—so long as it was a church-approved one. He told Susan to pick someone out of the yellow pages.

But Susan didn’t have a yellow pages, so she’d gone online instead, and Juliet’s Web site had been the first to come up. I wasn’t surprised. It was sometimes the first to come up when your search string was “Chinese restaurants” or “plumbers.” I was pretty sure she’d done something to Google that was both illegal and supernatural.

The site listed Juliet’s church accreditations—Anglican and Catholic—as pending. Susan thought that was good enough, and called her.

“And now here you are,” she finished, brightly. “Two for the price of one.” She smiled her tentative smile at us both, turning her head to left and right to do it. It was the first time she’d acknowledged my presence since she started to tell her story.

“Here we are,” I agreed. I stood up. “And I guess we’d better confer about the case. Could you excuse us for a moment?”

“Of course,” said Susan, blushing a hectic red. “I have to lock up again, anyway.”

She got up and bustled away, keys jangling. We retreated up the hill to the Rybandt vault, with full night coming on.

“So you think it’s a demon, rather than a human soul?” I said, when I was sure we couldn’t be overheard.

Juliet didn’t answer for a moment. When she did, I got the sense that she was measuring her words. “The scions of hell,” she said. “I know by their habits and by their spoor. It’s not likely that any of them could be this close to me without me knowing it. But it would take one of the older powers to do that on hallowed ground. Just as it takes all of my strength to enter a place like that and not be hurt by it. I have to prepare myself, put a guard up—and not stay there very long.”

“Then what? What do you reckon it is?”

She turned to face me, and I could see that she was troubled. Which meant that she was letting me see, because Juliet can control her body language in the same way that a fly-fisher can place a lure. “If it wasn’t for the cold,” she said, “and for the other signs, I’d swear that there was nothing here. Whatever it is, it has no smell. No body. No focus.” She sought for words, grimaced as if she didn’t like the ones she’d found. “Weight without presence.”

“What have you tried?” I asked her, keeping it businesslike.

“A number of things. A number of askings and tellings, any one of which ought to have made whatever is in those stones show its face to me. They all came up blank. I’m grabbing at smoke.”

I remembered the roiling shadows I’d seen reflected in the bowl of water, and nodded. It was barely a metaphor.

“And yet—” Juliet murmured, and hesitated. I’d never seen her be tentative about anything before: it was, to be honest, a bit unnerving, like seeing an avalanche swerve.