Vicious Circle (37 page)

The man lifted his head to stare at me through the one eye he had left. He grinned, too, although it was difficult to see through the tangled thickets of his beard. Yeah. I had him placed now: he was the guy at the mall, who’d shot Juliet through the chest and who she’d then kicked ass-backward through a plate-glass window. Judging by appearances, it hadn’t done him a bit of good.

“When will it come?” the man asked me. His voice was low, and it had a horrible, liquid undertow to it. He grinned, showing shattered teeth like a bamboo pit trap. “When will it be here?”

“Tell me what it is, I’ll give you an
ETA
,” I offered. “What is it you’re waiting for?”

A shudder went through him. “The thing that ate me,” he muttered, his head sagging again. After a long silence he added, as if to himself, “Got to finish . . . Got to finish the job. Can’t just . . . eat me and then spit me out.”

Torn between pity and nausea, I turned back toward the church door. That was when he came at me.

He was a big man, and he had the advantage over me in weight. He charged into me like a trolley car, ungainly and not even all that fast but pretty much ustoppable. As I fell he came down on top of me, clawing at me with the fingers of his one good hand, laughing deep in his throat as though the whole thing were a huge joke.

I brought my head up fast, ramming it into the bridge of his nose, and I heard the bone snap with a pulpy sound like rotten wood giving way. No blood flowed: he didn’t have a heart to pump it with, and it probably wasn’t liquid anymore in any case.

He got his fingers around my throat and started to squeeze. His head bowed toward me, his mouth working hard as if he wanted to devour me as well as kill me. The sour stench of his decaying flesh hit me, and my head reeled. Starting to panic now, I rolled to the side and swung a fist up into his stomach as hard as I could. He was too heavy to shift, and he didn’t react at all: no functioning nerves, either.

But he only had the one arm that still worked, so my hands were both free. Feeling like a bastard, I groped my way up his face even as my vision started to blur, and put his other eye out with my thumb.

He jerked his head away from me, flailing to fend me off now that it was too late. I brought my knees up to my chest and kicked outward with both legs, sending him flying backward against a gravestone, where he fell in an untidy heap. He clawed weakly at his face, mewling like an animal. Slow spasms passed through his body, and his legs moved alternately as if he thought he was upright and walking. He reminded me of a toy robot I’d had as a kid; a clockwork one, made in Hong Kong, that kept on striding along until it wound down, even if you kicked it over onto its side, even if it wasn’t going anywhere.

I got up and staggered toward him, resting my weight against the gravestone so I could lean forward and look at him. If the damage was bad enough, his ghost would let go its hold on his ruined flesh, but it might take a long time. And in the meantime he was trapped in there, blinded, terrified, his immortal spirit still shackled to his half-pulped brain and trying to make it work.

I didn’t have any choice. I took out my whistle, my hands shaking, and put it to my lips. Our little tussle among the tombstones had given me a reasonably strong sense of his essence, his “this-ness”: enough to get me started. The notes tumbled out into the darkening sky, feeble and tentative but enlivened by an unintentional vibrato. The dead man stared up at me with the sightless holes that had been his eyes. His mouth moved, made a string of incoherent sounds that rumbled beneath my playing as if he was trying to sing along. Then he stopped, and whatever spark was still animating him went out for good.

I went to put the whistle away, but then thought better of it. Holding it clutched in my two hands, ready to play, I crossed the grass toward the vestry door.

It was hanging on one hinge: without Susan Book to unlock it for her, Juliet must have just kicked it open. I stepped inside, the bitter chill closing over me as though I’d stepped through a hanging curtain, invisible but tangible.

The church was dark. Of course it was: light had a tough time of it in here. I hadn’t brought a flashlight, but I wasn’t sure how much use it would have been in any case.

The heartbeat was clearly audible now: a slowed down loop of sound, lapping insinuatingly against my ears like waves against a rock.

I went forward one step at a time: slowly, slowly, letting my feet slide across the floor rather than lifting them, so I didn’t go arse over tip in the dark. The frigid air was absolutely still: the only thing that told me when I’d reached the end of the transept and stepped out into the larger gulf of the nave was a change in the timbre of the echoes my footsteps raised. My arm brushed heavily against something, and there was a reverberating din as the something fell over and unseen objects rolled away across the floor. The table where the votive candles stood. I ignored it and kept on going.

Maybe a dozen steps farther on, the tip of my foot touched something on the floor. I knelt down carefully, explored its outlines gingerly. It was a human body, completely unmoving.

I had to put the whistle away now, though I’d been clutching it like a diver clutches his lifeline. I got my hands underneath the body at shoulder and knee, and hefted it up. I suppose I’d expected Juliet to be heavy, because the impression she makes is so strong: because her physicality is denser and more vivid than anyone else’s by an order of magnitude. But then again, her body is made of something other than flesh. In the event, she seemed almost weightless.

As I lifted her, I felt the presence that was living in the stones of the church turn its massive attention toward me. There was no sound; no vibration of any kind in the still air. It acknowledged me without sound, and with a vast, vindictive amusement.

I staggered back the way I’d come, Juliet cradled in my arms. But I lost my way in the dark and walked into a wall. I had to follow the wall along, bumping my shoulder against it every few yards to keep my bearings, until I found the transept going off at right angles. I trod on one of the fallen candles and my foot twisted out from under me, so that I almost fell. The building was throwing everything it had at me, trying to keep me inside while the cold worked on me. My teeth were starting to chatter, and my chest hurt as though I were breathing in icicles.

But I made it to the door and staggered back out into the gathering night. It had felt cold on the way in: now it was like stepping out on a sunny day and feeling the warm breeze on your cheek.

I still didn’t feel exactly safe, though: not this close to those spirit-soaked stones. I staggered across the narrow gravel path and laid Juliet down carefully in the deep grass between two graves. I stood there, leaned against one of the gravestones with my head down, breathing raggedly, until the chill left my bones.

She looked different asleep. Still beautiful, but not dangerous. It was a kind of beauty that made me feel hollow and unmanned, as though it were a light shining on my own shabby inadequacy.

“Shit,” I muttered bleakly, to the night at large.

I’d finally put it all together, now that it was too late to be of any use. Why I felt like I recognized that fugitive presence I sensed the first time I came here—and then again when I met it in the poor possessed sods at the Whiteleaf mall. The only surprising thing was that I hadn’t nailed it down sooner when I was talking to Susan Book, because she was clearly as badly infected as anyone else who’d been in church last Saturday.

It was Asmodeus. This was why he’d suddenly let Rafi out from under, and this was where his other foot had come down.

Juliet had just picked a fight with one of the oldest and baddest bastards in hell. And she’d lost.

Where to now?

I
TOOK
JULIET
BACK
TO
PEN’S
AND
LAID
HER
DOWN
IN MY own bed; I sure as hell wasn’t likely to be using it myself for a while. But Pen wasn’t happy: she wasn’t happy at all.

She’d come back from Rafi’s assessment hearing so full of good feelings that she was in danger of overflowing—practically tap-dancing, because Rafi had stayed rational all the way through and made a really good impression on both of the independent doctors. They’d even given Webb a bit of a telling off for trying to delay proceedings.

But when she saw Juliet lying on my bed, death-white like a statue stolen from a mortuary, her mood took a downward plunge.

“That’s the thing that tried to kill you.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. I didn’t think Pen had gotten a good look at Juliet’s face, since at the time she’d been looking down the sights of a BB gun and firing filed-down rosary beads into her from behind—but I guess once you’ve seen Juliet, from any angle, the memory tends to stay etched on your brain.

“Fix, she’s evil.” There was a slight tremor to Pen’s voice, which I could well understand. “She’s so beautiful, but she . . . everything about her . . . She’s like a poisonous snake, that hypnotizes you so you’ll stand still while it bites.”

“That’s exactly what she is,” I agreed. “But she doesn’t bite anymore, Pen. We laid down some ground rules.”

Pen wasn’t reassured; it wasn’t her physical safety she was mainly worrying about. “She shouldn’t be here. This house is a shrine, Fix. You know that. I’ve worked really hard to make it into a place that chthonic powers will be attracted to. Powers of nature and light. If she stays here, they’ll feel the taint. They’ll leave, and I may never be able to bring them back.”

She was almost in tears. “The powers seem to cope with me okay,” I said, getting a little desperate now. “They can’t be all that fastidious, can they?”

“They weighed you,” Pen said. “You came out all right.”

“Well, can they weigh Juliet?”

She hesitated. Pen hates to judge anyone harshly. I could see her fighting against her instincts, and abruptly I felt sick with myself for trying to twist her arm.

“It’s okay,” I said, hefting that negligible weight in my arms again. “I’ll take her someplace else.”

But I was pissing in the wind. Back in the car again, driving into the center of town, I racked my brains for a somewhere else that would serve. Juliet was slumped across the backseat, exuding even in her unconscious state a sweet, rank smell that was trying to insinuate itself between my hindbrain and the more refined areas of gray matter, filling my mind with indelible, carnal imagery. Asleep or awake, she was still a venus flytrap. There was nowhere where she’d be safe.

My brain more or less on automatic as I fought against that smell and against myself, I’d swung west again: not toward Acton but into Paddington. What I had to do there shouldn’t take too long; maybe if I just covered Juliet with my coat, she’d go unnoticed until I got back. I didn’t have too much choice, anyway. There were so many ticking clocks around, it was getting hard to hear yourself think. The thing in St. Michael’s Church was getting stronger; the parishioners were still out there in the night with heads full of poisonous shit; Basquiat was sorting through the red tape so she could arrest me for murder; and the Anathemata had given me my final warning. The only way out of the box canyon was to keep moving forward as the walls closed in on both sides. Find Dennis Peace, find Abbie Torrington’s ghost, and maybe it would all fall into place. Maybe. Otherwise we were all going to hell in an overcrowded handbasket.

I parked as close as I could to Lancaster Gate station without hitting a double yellow; I didn’t want the car drawing any attention while I was gone, so it made sense to stay the right side of legal. I walked the rest of the way to Praed Street, and in through the ever-open gates of what used to be the genito-urinary clinic—the pox shop. For the past seven years, though, it had been given over to a more esoteric form of medicine: metamorphic ontology.

Jenna-Jane Mulbridge had coined the term, and then given it currency by hammering on the same drum in about two dozen monographs and three full-length studies—one on the were, one on zombies, and one on ghosts pure and simple. In the end she created the climate she needed in which to thrive, forcing university hospitals up and down the country to open their minds to a set of phenomena that hadn’t seemed to be medical at all until she got her hands on them. After all, how can you cure the dead?

How can you cure the dead? Jenna-Jane echoed back. Well, you can’t, of course. But if a dead soul is possessing a living host, then it becomes a condition that can be observed and treated. And if a dead soul returns to its own flesh, makes it move again and speak again and think again, then what definition of death are you using and how are you going to make it stick?

As careerist blitzkriegs go, it had paid off in spades. Most of the big hospitals had opened up MO units, and the biggest and best, at Praed Street, went to Jenna-Jane by right of conquest. She knew what to do with it, too. She pulled in all the London exorcists as consultants right from the start, got them to teach her everything they knew, then took it apart and put it together again with such ruthless, incisive intelligence that pretty soon it was us who were learning from her. That was an incredible time: a time when the baseline concepts of a new branch of science were being laid down, at a velocity that prevented anyone from questioning the route map or even from jumping down safely once it got moving.

Most of us started to have doubts about J.J. in the first year, but we stayed on board for quite a while after that. It still seemed like we were doing useful work, even if we were doing it for a self-obsessed, vainglorious fascist. Then, one by one, we began to do the moral sums and see how far they were from adding up. Whether it was for the advancement of science or just for the advancement of Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, some of the things that were being done at Praed Street fell well into the realms of the cruel and unusual, and awoke the scruples of even the most hard-bitten and determinedly unimaginative ghost-hunters.