Vicious Circle (56 page)

He looks a lot smaller in the medieval woodcuts, but I knew who it was that we were looking at: Asmodeus, coalescing out of the stone in answer to Fanke’s summons. The cold came with him, concentrating around us with such suddenness and intensity that I felt the skin on my face stretch taut.

Fanke held the locket up in his right hand, on a level with the candle flame.
“Phôkensepseu earektathou misonktaich,”
he said.
“Uesemmeigadôn Satana. Uesemmeigadôn Beelzebub. Uesemmeigadôn Asmode, Asmode atheresphilauô.”

He brought his hands together to let the locket meet the flame. Or at least he tried to, but it didn’t come. Abbie dug her heels into nothing and strained backward against him, and although his hand trembled like a struck lightning rod, for a moment it didn’t move. His right arm was the injured one—the one where Peace had shot him—and I’d seen before that his movements with that hand and arm were stiff and jerky. Maybe that gave the desperate ghost some hint of purchase. Whatever it was, Fanke was startled: he turned to glare at her, pulled harder. His wrist spasmed once, twice, and began to move again.

But before the locket and the flame could touch, I thrust out my own hand and put my ring finger into the candle’s corona. Rafi’s hair, which was still tied there in a tight loop knot, singed and sizzled.

“Amen,” I growled, gritting my teeth against the pain so it looked like I was enjoying a private joke.

The piano wire tightened around my throat, and the church exploded.

T
HE
NOISE
WAS
LIKE
NOTHING
I
CAN
DESCRIBE
. IF
YOU
could imagine a full brass band had packed their instruments with
TNT
and blown themselves to hell on the final bar of “The Floral Dance,” then you’d be off to a good start. But that was just background noise: the film canisters being ripped into red-hot gobbets that ricocheted off the walls and scythed over our heads as the ignited film spools gushed out a geyser of flame and gas that expanded too fast for them to get out of its way.

It was Asmodeus’s scream that really made the moment special.

Dennis Peace had tried to describe it to me when he told me about what had gone down at the meeting house, but he didn’t do it justice. It was as though you were hearing it through every inch of your skin, on a pitch that made your internal organs vibrate and scream in sympathy: as though you’d become a taut membrane on which broken glass was showering down, playing notes by tearing random holes in you.

I held my hand in the flame for a second or so longer, until the pain became too great to bear. Then I lurched back, which should have been the end of me—but the woman with the piano wire had lost the plot, too, slamming her hands unavailingly to her ears. The wooden chocks on either end of the wire fell free, and their weight made the wire bite a little more deeply into my throat, but the sensation was drowned out in the all-over-body migraine effect of Asmodeus’s bellowed pain and rage.

Fanke was still standing his ground on the far side of the circle, and his mouth was open as if he was yelling something. There was no sign of Abbie: I wasn’t sure exactly when she’d winked out, but she was no longer wrapped around his clenched fist. Everyone else was collapsing to their knees or trying to run on suddenly rubberized legs. A gout of oily black smoke erupted up the center aisle, creeping low along the ground at first but rising and opening out as though it was alive and hungry, flickers of flame winking on and off within it like eyes.

I looked up at Asmodeus—I mean, at the clotted shadow thing that was condensing over our heads. In a different way, I knew, the whole building was Asmodeus. The thing was spasming arrhythmically, the veinlike tendrils drawn in to the heart and then spat out again in whiplash curves, tightening on themselves with audible cracks. That meant my ears were working again, at least: in the initial shock after the movie canisters blew, I was afraid my eardrums had burst.

First things first. I shrugged off the piano wire, feeling it pull and then give, releasing a shower of blood droplets where it had been partially embedded in the flesh of my throat. Letting it fall, I leaned forward across the magic circle and hauled off with a punch that hit Fanke full in the face. It sent a thrill of agony through my burned fingers, but it also sent him flailing backward into the altar rail. Jumping over the circle, I followed up with a low blow that doubled him up and made him drop Abbie’s locket. Good enough. I snatched the little golden heart up off the flags, and as I straightened again I brought my knee up into the bridge of Fanke’s nose for good measure. That should give him plenty to think about while I took care of Pen and Juliet.

Of course, how I was going to carry two women out of a burning building was a question that I hadn’t really thought through to any firm conclusions. But turning around with the locket clasped in my injured left hand, I discovered that it was unlikely to become an issue. In spite of the flames billowing up toward the ceiling at the back of the church, and the filaments of smoke crawling forward along the aisles, Fanke’s followers had rallied and were running to the defense of their master. The first reached me just as I turned, throwing a clumsy punch that I clumsily blocked. I caught him on the rebound with a head butt that he didn’t see coming. The second had a knife, and he stepped in around his injured colleague so that he could use it. But a couple of other robed figures surging up behind him knocked him off balance, and I was able to do a step-and-roll over the altar rail and back away from the charge.

They scrambled after me, fanning out along the length of the rail so that there was nowhere I could run to. This was the last place any of us wanted to be if the fire spread to cut us off from the main doors, but Fanke’s acolytes obviously cared more about completing the ritual than they did about their own safety. That’s what I’ve never been able to get about religion: that charmless combination of altruism and insanity. Give me a cynical, self-interested bastard any day of the week; at least you can play chicken with him and know he’ll stick to the rules.

I sprinted for the altar, but only because there was nowhere else to sprint. It was a lousy place for a last stand, as the crucified Christ had already discovered. I tried to vault up onto it, but since my left hand was out of action I had to use my right, which as a southpaw I’m a lot less handy with. I didn’t quite clear the marble top of the altar, which projected out about six inches from the base all around: instead I caught it with my knee, slipped, and fell back to the floor in a sprawling heap.

The satanists converged on me, too many to fight and too damn stupid to scare. Then, amazingly, instead of trampling me down and tearing me apart in the time-honored way of religious zealots everywhere, they hesitated and came to a stumbling halt, staring past me across the altar. I saw why a moment later, as something scratched and skittered along its upper surface, and a set of long, slender talons gripped the stone rim just above my head.

Then the thing that was up there jumped into the midst of the satanists. It looked like a greyhound at first—but that was because the two overriding impressions were of gray fur and emaciated slenderness. It was nothing like a greyhound in the way it moved: it arced like a striking snake, mewled like a cat, swiping out to left and right with hands from which claws bristled like racks of scalpels lovingly ranged by size. One of the satanists screamed, but the scream was cut short as blood plumed from his severed throat. Another staggered back clutching both hands to his face, purple gouts welling up between his splayed fingers. A third had a gun already in his hand, and fired, but the shot went wide and broke one arm off the Christ above the altar. It crashed down behind me, unheeded.

The satanists broke to either side, the gray thing dancing like a dervish between them. I saw its face, and that was a horror with its own special resonance, even in the midst of this symphony of horrors: partly because of the misshapen snout forced into an insane grin by canines too large for it to contain, but mainly because it was Zucker’s face, and I saw the man within the beast.

I tightened my grip on the locket, but my charred fingers wouldn’t close all the way, and the loup-garou’s eyes had already been drawn to the flash of incongruous gold from my blackened hand. He tensed to jump, but then the man with the gun fired again, and one of the beast’s legs gave way under it. Zucker made a squalling shriek, turning to face the new threat. It had already been dealt with, as Po—in human form—strode forward out of the smoke, took the gunman’s head in both of his hands and twisted it until it faced the wrong way on his neck.

I followed the example of most of the surviving satanists and ran for it. Unfortunately, we were running into a storm: Fanke’s followers fell like threshed wheat as the sound of gunfire spread across the church. They seemed to prefer gunfire to what was behind them; several of them drew guns of their own and fired back. Dimly, through the spreading smoke, I saw black-robed figures moving up from the back of the church, skirting around the ceiling-high pyre in the center where the film cans had exploded. Then a bullet whanged past on my left-hand side, knocking a fist-size hole in the back of a pew, and I hit the deck.

I considered the merits of staying there until the whole thing played itself out. Fanke couldn’t do anything without the locket, and that was still safe in my fire-blackened hand. But Gwillam’s church commandos were after the same thing, and if they got it they’d exorcise Abbie without a second thought. I didn’t want to give them that chance. Admittedly, it was my fault they were here at all: the note I’d left stuffed into Sallis’s pants back at the South Bank Centre had invited them to join me here for an informal chat and a little light jihad. I’d hoped that their arrival—or Basquiat’s—might come at a point where I needed a diversion. The age-old game of “let’s you and him fight” is one I’ve always liked.

But this was getting too hot for my liking—in the literal sense as well as the other. Pen and Juliet were still out in the open, where a stray bullet could hit them at any moment, and even without that, the thickening smoke suggested that the fire was taking hold and spreading. Whatever happened, I didn’t have the luxury of just staying put.

At least the smoke would give me a little cover: it was also choking me, making my eyes water and my lungs ache and spasm with each breath, but you can’t have everything. I crawled on hands and knees to the end of the pew and then sprinted across to the outer aisle, where a line of pillars provided something more solid to hide behind. I snaked forward from one to the next, making for the open area in front of the altar rail where Pen and Juliet were lying.

The smoke was thick enough now so that I didn’t have to worry too much about hiding: gunfire was still echoing and re-echoing through the church, but if a bullet hit me it would only be by accident. Nobody could target through this, even by night-sight: on a night scope, the church would be one large splodge of undifferentiated red, like spilled blood.

I found Pen first. She was unconscious, which didn’t surprise me. Hooking my hands under her shoulders, I hauled her toward where I remembered the doors were. I was out by a few yards, but there was a clear corridor right up against the outer wall, caused by some freakish thermocline, so once I got there I could see where I was going. I dragged her along to the narthex—a lobby area barely ten feet across—and inside, relaxing in spite of myself to be in such a relatively small space after the terrible exposure of the church proper.

If I’d been thinking about it, of course, I’d have realized that someone on Gwillam’s team had to be watching the doors. It would be out of character for him to miss a trick like that. As I laid Pen down with her head right up against the doors, where clean, breathable air was filtering in from outside, Po lumbered out of the roiling blackness, backlit by the fires of hell, effectively barring my way back into the nave. He was no longer even remotely human: He was the hyena thing that I’d seen at the Thames Collective and then again at the Whittington, his front limbs twice as long as his back ones so that he stood almost like an ape.

He loped toward me, grinning. It wasn’t a grin of amusement: it was more a question of unsheathing his main weaponry, which jutted from his jaws like steak knives. I watched him closely, tensing to jump when he did, but there wasn’t enough room in the narrow narthex to do much more than duck. Wherever I went, there wasn’t anywhere that was out of his reach.

Then a second figure appeared at his shoulder, walking unhurriedly toward him out of the growing inferno. She looked—well, right then she looked so good I would have cried, if I hadn’t already been crying because of the smoke.

“You should have woken me, Castor,” Juliet said reproachfully, a harsh rasp in back of her voice. “I almost missed this.”

Po turned and jumped in one movement, giving out a terrifying roar. He hit Juliet like a fanged and clawed meteorite, his muscular back limbs raking up from below to disembowel her even as his jaws fastened around her head.

That was the plan, anyway. She bent under him, sinuous and graceful, caught him on her hands, and threw him, using his own momentum, into the nearest row of pews. He was up again in an instant, but Juliet was quicker. As he advanced on her again she lifted up one of the pews, judging the balance perfectly and completely untroubled by the weight. She brought it down across his head and shoulders so fast it blurred.

Amazingly, there was still some fight in him: I suspect there might have been more, if it hadn’t been for what he was breathing. He closed with her and they both went down together as a gust of smoke and flame hid them from my sight.

I left Juliet to look after herself, knowing that she could. With the collapse of the ritual, Asmodeus seemed to have loosed whatever hold he had on her. I suspected there was nothing left of him in the church at all now. If there was, he certainly wasn’t on fighting form right then.