Vicious Circle (55 page)

A single voice had risen up above the murmured responses of the acolytes: Fanke’s voice, low and thrilling and solemn. I was expecting some bit of late medieval guff about how Lucifer is a good old boy and he’d just love to reach out and touch you, but this sounded older—and my classical Greek gives out after “which way to the bathroom?” and “I want mine with retsina.”

“Aberamenthô oulerthexa n axethreluo ôthnemareba,”
Fanke boomed out, his voice rising now both in pitch and volume
. “Iaô Sabaôth Iaeô pakenpsôth pakenbraôth sabarbatiaôth sabarbatianę sabarbaphai. Satana. Beelzebub. Asmode.”

I couldn’t have picked a better time to make my entrance. Standing up in the cheap seats, I fired one shot at the ceiling, and it roared around the room like the voice of God. The satanists spun round with their mouths hanging open, and Fanke faltered in his recitation. I stepped out into the aisle, leveling the gun at his chest.

“Hey, Anton,” I said, strolling unhurriedly toward him. “Steve. Dylan. Whatever the fuck you call yourself on a Saturday. How’s it hanging? I know how this one ends, if you’re interested. The next words are ‘I surrender.’ And then you turn around, put your hands on the altar rail, and assume the position.”

The acolytes backed away from me on either side. The last time they’d faced a self-righteous nutcase with a gun they’d found themselves transformed from chorus line to moving targets, and that experience seemed to have left its mark. Fanke stood his ground, though, and the look on his face didn’t change, except to add an overlay of sneering contempt to the cold superiority that was already there. That got my goat a little.

“Step away from the circle,” I said, close enough now so that I didn’t have to raise my voice. I tried to keep the stooges in my peripheral vision in case they went through their pockets and found out where they’d left their balls, but the first bullet was for Fanke in any case: and the second, third, and fourth, if it came to that.

He didn’t move. He was standing a little stiffly, his left shoulder a little higher than his right. I remembered him giving that spastic jerk when Peace fired his second shot: Fanke had taken a bullet, either in the shoulder itself or high up on his right arm. But he was a trooper, and the show had to go on.

“Castor,” he said, with pitying condescension. “I gave you your life. True, I took away from you a great many other things, but still the overall balance, I thought, was maintained. Yet here you are. And perhaps, after all, it’s fitting that you should be here to welcome my lord Asmodeus when he comes.”

“He missed his train,” I snapped. “He said to send his love. Now step away from the fucking circle, Fanke, or I swear on my sainted mother’s grave I am putting enough holes through you so I can see the deposition of Christ in that central panel behind you.”

“No.” Fanke shook his head, lowering his gaze to the ground as if he were meditating on human folly. “You’re not. Patience?” I took this last word to be a piece of supercilious advice, until a woman’s voice from off to my left answered shakily “Yes, magister?”

“Tell Mr. Castor how many sacrifices we’ve got lined up for this evening.”

“Thr—three, magister. There are three.”

“And what’s the order of play?”

“First the chi—the spirit. The spirit already dedicated. Then the demon. Last the woman.”

Eyes left, just momentarily, and with my finger tense on the trigger so that if Fanke moved at all I could still cut loose at him. That quick glance was enough to confirm what I already more or less knew. The woman who was speaking was the woman who I’d met a week ago in my office—the woman with the badly bruised face, who’d been introduced to me as Melanie Torrington. Then I was looking at Fanke again, and he raised his eyes to meet my gaze.

He wasn’t smug, exactly. His expression said that he didn’t think it was any great feat to outthink me.

“I wanted to be sure this time,” he murmured. “The child’s spirit ought to complete the summoning, and free my dread lord from this . . . place. But just in case, I thought it would be best to have a hecateum—a three-way offering, covering living and dead, male and female, spirit and flesh.”

I took another step toward him and actually poked the barrel of the gun into his chest. This time he gave, slightly, and his back bumped against the altar rail. I was gratified to have gotten some kind of reaction out of him at last.

“Show me,” I suggested.

“No. Put the gun away.”

I held his gaze and said it again, with a very final emphasis. “Show me. Or you and me are both going to hell a little earlier than we expected.”

Fanke turned to glance across at the woman. “Bring them forward,” he said, the command sounding as negligent and world-weary as he could make it. He’d seen in my eyes that I was ready to shoot, and he’d changed his mind about bluffing me. That was something.

There was a bustle of activity as robed figures ran to do his bidding. If I were going to join a cult, I’d want to go in at officer level: there’s fuck all job satisfaction at the bottom of the tree.

I followed the proceedings out of the corner of my eye. Pen and Juliet weren’t even in another room, they were just in the shadows under the pulpit, laid side by side on the ground. Juliet was still in her coma/trance/whatever state, and didn’t react at all as she was carried forward and laid down just behind and to the right of Fanke. Pen was bound, gagged, conscious, and mad as hell. She managed to kick one satanist in a part he’d probably already consecrated to the dark lord: he doubled up with an unmanly yelp and dropped her legs. Two other men stepped in and completed the task of hauling her out for my inspection. They laid her down to Fanke’s left-hand side, so that from my point of view he was bookended by comely hostages.

Then, with a consummate sense of theater, he held out his clenched fist to me as if in salute, before opening it wide to show Peace’s locket—on a new chain—dangling from his index finger.
“Veni, puella,”
he murmured. Abbie’s ghost materialized around his hand, very abruptly, looking startled and terrified. She cast her eyes from side to side, from face to face, taking in the massed ranks of the satanists surrounding her, and me facing her across the magic circle. On me her eyes rested for longest, big and wide and full of hate.

“I don’t lie for effect, Castor,” Fanke said, speaking to me through her translucent body. “I lie to achieve specific goals. In this case, as you can see, I’ve told the truth. Now put the gun down—unless you think that my death is a fair exchange for Pamela’s. Because my death is all you can hope to achieve: the ceremony will go on, and will be completed, in any case.”

“Where’s your male?” I demanded, still buying seconds.

Fanke actually smiled. “I don’t have one,” he admitted. “I’d decided to use your zombie friend—Nicholas Heath. Yes, I know about him. I know everything there is to know about your life: I’ve been close to you for a long time, after all. But when my people went to fetch the zombie, they found this other creature, and I yielded to temptation. My lord doesn’t favor the succubi. There’s something appropriate about feeding one of that kindred to the flame to set him free.”

His eyes stared into mine, mocking and malevolent: the eyes of a man who was damn sure he was holding all the cards.

“A male would still be useful,” he said, “for the sake of balance. But it’s up to you. You can play out this film noir pantomime, if you like. Or you can take Pamela Bruckner’s place and die inside our circle. I’ll allow that. If you put the gun down right now, and aplogize to me for your disrespect.”

I hesitated. He was lying, of course, but then time was what I was playing for here on a lot of different levels.

“Where’s Nicky now?” I demanded, buying a few more seconds. I guess the wax on that candle was thicker than I thought; I guess Basquiat hadn’t called in to check her messages; I guess my luck was running pretty much true to form, after all.

Fanke frowned. “Your dead friend, I believe, is still extant,” he said. “But the details get a little abstruse. He locked himself into a room on the first floor of the cinema. When my people tried to open the door—” He stopped, seeing I was grinning. “Well, perhaps you already know about his security arrangements. In any case, the succubus made a more than acceptable substitute. Hiring you was the best decision I ever made, Castor. At the time I thought I was just keeping things in the family—but it brought so many incidental benefits. But now we’re delaying proceedings, and they’ve been delayed too long already. Please—your decision.”

Fanke was looking at me expectantly, and I could see in his eyes that—unlike me—he hadn’t had to bluff at all. He was going to see this through, even if it meant me rearranging his innards with the aid of hollow-point ammunition. One way or another, the show was going to go on.

Trying to ignore Abbie, whose dead gaze still skewered me, I nodded.

“All right,” I said. “Let Pen go, give her five minutes to get clear, and then I’ll hand over the gun.”

“No,” said Fanke, tersely. “You hand over the gun now, and you accept my word that she won’t be harmed. No more procrastinations. Decide.”

I waited in vain for an explosion from the back pews, or for a hammering on the knocker and “This is the police!” from the church’s main doors. The silence, in which Asmodeus’s hostile attention was like a raw overlay of subliminal hypersonics, remained unbroken.

After a long pause, and just as Fanke opened his mouth to speak again—to his subordinates, not to me, because his head snapped round to face them—I turned the gun in my hand and held it out to him, butt first. He gave a nod, quietly satisfied, and took it. Then he passed it on to a tall, cadaverous acolyte who appeared at his shoulder.

“And the apology?” he asked, looking round at me again like a coaxing schoolmaster who doesn’t want to have to resort to the cane.

“You’ll have to whistle for that,” I said. “You know how to whistle, don’t you? If not, I can teach you.”

He gave me the coldest smile I’ve ever seen.

“Grip, keep the gun trained on Mr. Castor,” he said, “and bring him to the circle. In fact, have someone pass a loop of piano wire around his throat, too, to make sure he stays exactly where he’s put. He has the look of a man who wants to go back on his word.”

The robed minions closed in on all sides, finding their courage all of a sudden, and a great many hands were laid on me. I was manhandled to the edge of the circle, which I saw clearly now for the first time. It seemed to be identical to the ruined one I’d seen in the Quaker hall, but complete, uninterrupted by any chewed-up arc of pulped floorboards. In fact, this one was drawn on stone—and drawn with the tip of a knife blade, rather than in paint or chalk. Various half-formed schemes that had been forming in the forefront of my mind got discouraged and left.

The man Fanke had called Grip shoved the gun into the small of my back more emphatically than was necessary, and kept it there while another robed figure—a tall, heavyset woman—passed a loop of piano wire very carefully around my neck. The care was for her own fingers; as soon as it was in place she pulled it tight, and I felt it bite into the flesh below my Adam’s apple. The two loose ends of the wire had been tied around wooden blocks: she held one in each hand, like a paramedic with the charged plates of a defibrillator, but what she was actually holding, in effect, was the drawstring of a guillotine. If I moved from this spot, my head was going to stay right where it was while my body did its best to make shift without it.

Fanke walked around the circle to stand opposite me. Abbie went with him, dangling weightlessly in the air, his clenched fist wrapped around where her heart would be if she were alive and still had one. Her confusion and fear were terrible to see.

The robed acolytes—except for Grip and the woman with the piano wire—took their stations with solemn faces all around in a wider circle that extended from the altar rail to the ragged heap of displaced pews, and to the aisle on either side. There were more of them than I’d thought: at least forty. Some of them must have come in through the main doors after the rest had set up shop and opened up for them, which explained why I hadn’t seen Pen and Juliet being brought in. One of them was the little doctor with the Scottish accent who’d given me my tetanus shots after I passed out in Pen’s hallway.

The crucified Christ stared down at us, looking dubious about the whole proceeding.

“I’d prefer to start with you,” Fanke said, without animosity. “Like Pamela, you’re a little out of place here. In many ways, beneath the dignity of the occasion. But the child’s spirit must be sundered. That won’t wait. To attempt any other sacrifice before the one that raised my lord is concluded would be unwise. So you’ll have to wait your turn, Castor. And you’ll have to watch your efforts and machinations come to nothing before you’re allowed to slink away into death. This isn’t cruelty on my part, you understand. Just . . . logistics.”

“Well if it’s just logistics, I don’t mind,” I said. “I was starting to think you didn’t like me.” The wire tightened fractionally around my throat.

“Marmarauôth marmarachtha marmarachthaa amarda maribeôth,”
Fanke said, in a singsong voice. The acolytes came in on the chorus[_. “Satana! Beelzebub! Asmode!” _]They threw out their hands, then drew them in and clasped them together in what was clearly a ritual gesture.

“Iattheoun iatreoun salbiouth aôth aôth sabathiouth iattherath Adônaiai isar suria bibibe bibiouth nattho Sabaoth aianapha amourachthę. Satana. Beelzebub. Asmode.”
More hand-wringing. An acolyte at Fanke’s left hand held out a candle, and one on his right lit it with a taper. Fanke took it in his left hand without dropping a syllable.
“Ablanathanalba, aeęiouô, iaeôbaphrenemoun. Aberamenthô oulerthexa n axethreluo ôthnemareba.”
Even though most of the room was already steeped in darkness, the area around us seemed to be getting darker still. I made the mistake of looking up, as though the church had some internal sun that was being eclipsed. Something hung above us in the gloom—something like black smoke, except that it was shot through with branching filaments of deeper dark like veins and capillaries. It was spreading out from a point directly above Fanke’s head, and it was descending toward us. Or rather toward Abbie, who saw it coming and struggled like a fly in a web, her thrashing movements buying her no headway at all. “Please!” she whispered. “Oh please!”