Vicious Circle (59 page)

“Let me go!” she cried, in a thin voice that seemed to come across vast distances. “Let me go!”

I stopped whistling at last and paused a moment or two to get my breath back. It had been as hard work as any tune I’d ever played, except for one, and I wasn’t up to thinking about Rafi right then.

“That’s what I intend to do, Abbie,” I assured her. “But first I want to tell you how your dad died. What you missed. So you’ll understand.”

She was staring at me, her phantom fists clenched in tension and defiance. I told her how the ambush at the Oriflamme had played out, and how Dennis Peace had died defending her against her wicked stepfather. She didn’t look as though she believed me—but then the last two times she’d seen me it had been standing right alongside Fanke in circumstances that stank up to heaven.

Then I told her about the church, and why I’d put my hand into the fire. I showed her my burned fingers to prove my point, and I think perhaps she did believe me then. At any rate she forgot her hate and fear and grieved for her father, with dry eyes because ghosts can’t cry. Sometimes they can mimic tears they cried in life, but they have no moisture of their own.

“Perhaps you’ll see him again,” I told her, offering her the only crumb of consolation I could think of. “If there’s something after this life, and after this death, then I bet he’ll find you there if anybody can. He hasn’t let anything stop him so far.”

She didn’t respond. Turning slightly as though in a wind I couldn’t feel, she cast her eyes around the narrow confines of the cell. It wasn’t the first prison she’d seen in her brief, constricted life: with any luck, though, it would be the last.

I started to whistle again. Not the summoning this time, and not the exorcism, but the unbinding. I whistled the notes that would set her free from the lock of hair to go where she would, unmolested by the Fankes and Gwillams of this sublunary sinkhole.

But she didn’t leave. I guess there wasn’t anywhere she could think of to go, anywhere where she would have felt safe, or wanted. The only man who had ever loved her or tried to make her happy was dead. She could go back to the Oriflamme and wait for him there, but not everyone rises, and when they do you can’t always tell where they’ll go. It was a long shot. All that was left to her now was long shots.

I thought through the options. You don’t get to have a happy ending when you’re dead: this was just damage limitation, nothing more.

“Good-bye, Abbie,” I said, standing up and shifting my ground to face east. Not toward Mecca: toward somewhere else entirely, on the other side of the city. “Good-bye, and good luck. I hope it all works out for you.”

I whistled again, a tune I hadn’t played for a good long while now: “Henry Martin.” An electric prickle played down my arms to the tips of my fingers.

The Charles Stanger clinic was a good few miles away, but ghosts—when they travel at all—aren’t limited to light speed. All the same, I’d gotten through two complete renditions of the song and well into the third before I felt their presence stealing upon me, approaching on some vector that had nothing to do with north, south, east, or west. I didn’t look around. I felt, in some weird way, as though the dead girls might not take to Abbie if they saw me talking to her, as though the taint of the living might cling to her and make her seem alien to them.

There was a whispering of sound that had no words in it I could make out. Then there was silence, and the silence lengthened. The feeling of their nearness faded from me, leaving behind a more acute awareness of how cold the stone was under my stockinged feet, and how stale the air smelled.

When the last echoes of the tune had died from the air and from my mind, I turned around again.

I was alone in the cell—and more tired than I’d ever been.

B
ASQUIAT
WAS
AS
GOOD
AS
HER
WORD
.
THE
CHARGES
WERE
dropped and I was released back onto the street in the middle of Saturday afternoon. The clothes I’d left at the Whittington hadn’t turned up, though, so I was still stuck in the natty outfit I’d taken from Sallis. It was smelling even riper than when I inherited it.

The first thing I did was to go out to Walthamstow and check on Nicky, because I didn’t believe Fanke’s bland assurances that his cultists had left my favorite dead man in one piece. But Nicky was none the worse for wear, and even inclined to be a little smug—even though most of the cinema apart from his inner sanctum up in the projection booth had been comprehensively trashed.

“See, Castor,” he said, “I got everything here insured eight ways from Sunday, and I already put in the claims—through proxy companies, naturally; got to keep that footprint small. Anyway, I’m gonna build it up again ten times better. I mean, fuck air-conditioning. I’ve got a freezer on order from a place in Germany that fits out hospital morgues. You’re not gonna know this place.”

I looked at the outside of the projection booth’s door. The wood had been split with axes or crowbars—but all that had done was to reveal the metal underneath.

“It must have been a hell of a siege,” I said.

Nicky shrugged, some of his good mood evaporating. “Yeah, it was fucking scary, all right. I had to watch while they smashed everything up. Then they spotted the cameras and took them out, so I couldn’t even do that. It was . . . I dunno . . . like having scabies, or something, like watching little insects crawling around under your fucking skin.

“Hey, I’m sorry about your friend. You know that, right? If there’d been anything I could’ve done, then I would’ve done it. They brought fucking blowtorches in, for Christ’s sake. Nothing to stop them, once they had me shut in up here. I tried to call you again when they took her, but by that time they’d brought one of those phone jammers in, so all I got was static.”

He hesitated, as if realizing belatedly that he should have covered this part of the conversation first. “So is she okay?”

“Juliet?”

“Ajulutsikael. Don’t anthropomorphize her. That’ll get you in trouble somewhere down the line.”

“Doesn’t the use of a female pronoun already anthropomorphize her?” I asked.

Nicky scowled. “Anyone who can give a dead man an erection has earned that pronoun, Castor. Consider it an honorific.”

“She’s fine, Nicky. Thanks for asking. Back to her old self by this time, I’m sure.”

“And my payment? You know, the five questions?” He looked at me hopefully.

I shrugged. “All I can do is ask her. The deal was that you’d keep her safe, Nicky. She may take the view that you’re in breach of contract.”

“Breach of—?” He flared up. “Hey, I was invaded, Castor. I kept my part of the deal, ten times over.”

He had a point. I said I’d get back to him, and left him choosing thermostatic valves out of a catalog. They’ve got some really nice ones these days.

At Pen’s, to my far from huge surprise, I found all my worldly goods stacked up out in the driveway. I tried my key in the lock and it didn’t fit. Quick work, under the circumstances.

I rang the bell, and Pen’s sister Antoinette answered. She folded her arms in a
no pasaran
stance, which she does pretty well despite being only an inch or so taller than Pen. She’s got Pen’s coloring, too, but she went into politics, stood for local councillor, lost three times, and got herself a hatchet face that never cracks a smile.

“Hey, Tony,” I said. “Can I talk to her?”

“If she wanted to talk to you, Castor, she wouldn’t have changed the locks.”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“Because I don’t want to have to talk her down from another round of hysterics. Why don’t you e-mail her?”

“No computer.”

“Heliograph, then.”

I looked up at the heavy overcast sky. Antoinette did, too.

“Looks like you’re fucked,” she observed, and closed the door.

Over at the Stanger, Rafi was under deep sedation after smashing his head against the door of his cell until he left half of his face on it. He’d recover, of course: Asmodeus was back in residence, so he once again had a strong interest in making sure his home away from home was kept in good order.

But under the circumstances, the follow-up hearing to determine whether or not Rafi’s sectioning should remain in force had been postponed sine die.

“That means ‘watch this space,’ ” Dr. Webb translated helpfully. “You now have twenty-one days, Castor. If you don’t come up with anything within that time, I’m going to consult with Professor Mulbridge with a view to signing Ditko over into the care of the
MOU
at Paddington.”

“Watch your back,” I suggested.

Missing my point, he swiveled to look behind him. We were standing in the main corridor of the Stanger, just outside Rafi’s cell, and the corridor was clear. Webb turned back to me, slightly annoyed, as if I’d just played a silly practical joke.

“I meant,” I explained patiently, “watch your back if you throw Rafi to Jenna-Jane. Because if you do that I’m definitely going to break both of your arms and both of your legs.”

Almost in disbelief, Webb looked at the two male nurses who were flanking him to either side—his usual tragic chorus. “I have witnesses,” he said, “who heard you make that threat.”

“I’m sure their testimony will be invaluable,” I agreed. “But you’ll still be quadriplegic.”

Maybe that was a tactless thing to say, but in many ways it was seeming like a long and fairly stressful day. And there was still the question of where I was going to sleep that night.

Juliet and I met up in the evening at a pavement café close to the refuge where she lives. She arrived late, without apology. One of the other residents had a problem with an abusive husband, she told me, and this guy had turned up out of the blue and tried to make his wife leave with him. “So I had to step in and help.”

“What, you mean you ate him?” I asked.

“In front of everybody? No, of course not. I have to go on living there, Felix.”

“What, then?”

She drank her espresso in a single swallow, wiped her lips with her hand. “I showed the other women how to do it.”

“How to—?”

“Impose their will on a man.”

“Ah.” I fished for more, starting with what Juliet was best at. “By employing their feminine wiles?”

“By employing their boots, mostly. And I think an empty bottle was used at one point.”

“Right, right.” Violence, of course. The
other
thing that Juliet was best at.

There was something on her mind, I could see: something she found hard to say. I tried to make it easier for her.

“Thanks for getting that werewolf off my back,” I said. “It always puts a crimp in my day if someone rips my spine out through my throat.”

“It was my pleasure,” said Juliet, meaning it. “I . . .” She hesitated, feeling her way around social niceties that had no meaning for her. “I should thank you, too. The thought that I rendered myself helpless—that I placed myself so entirely within Asmodeus’s power—is very hard to bear. But you kept me safe, as far as you could. And you brought me back.”

“Brilliant improvisation,” I said modestly. “Include me in your memoirs. And in your will.”

“And in my vagina?”

A large mouthful of café latte went the wrong way in best Hollywood comedy fashion: refusing to endorse the cliché by coughing and spluttering, I went red in the face and waited for the scalding stuff to go down.

“Would I still have my soul afterwards?” I asked her wheezily once the attack had subsided.

Juliet looked thoughtful. “Probably,” she said slowly. “That depends, really, on how much self-control I could muster. At the very least it would have bite marks on it.”

What’s life about if it’s not about taking risks? I opened my mouth to say yes, but Juliet was still speaking.

“We’ll need to wait a while, though,” she said. “Tonight I’m trying something new.”

“Something new?” I repeated, struggling to keep the chagrin and frustration out of my voice. “You’re way past your seventeen thousandth birthday, Juliet. Is there anything new?”

She grinned. “For most of that time,” she reminded me, “I came to earth only at the hest of magicians powerful enough or stupid enough to summon me. They used me either to satiate their own desires—in which case they died, whatever protections they tried to deploy—or to destroy their enemies, in which case other men died. But if the intention was to destroy a woman, then it was my cousins, the incubi, who were called upon. In all that time I was never sent against a woman. Or raised by one.”

I suddenly saw where this was going.

“Well, it’s mostly the same hormones in different concentrations,” I said offhandedly. The bored tone took a supreme effort, though: I was getting a sinking feeling that started in my stomach, gathered momentum in my crotch, and kept on heading due south.

“For me,” Juliet said, “it’s different. Or at least, I think it might be different. To enjoy lust—pure lust—without the impulse to hunt and kill and eat intervening . . .”

“How do you know it won’t intervene?” I asked, looking at my fingernails as if I were worried about how dirty they were.

“I don’t. But I think I’d like to try.”

“All right, so try,” I said desperately, “but does it have to be right this very—”

“What a lovely place,” said a voice from behind me. As I turned, biting my tongue, Susan Book took a chair from one of the other tables and set it down in between the two of us. “It’s so nice to be able to eat right out on the street. So continental. Is there anything you like better, Mr. Castor?”

I told her, insincerely, that there was nothing I liked better than eating on the street. I didn’t add that I was probably going to be sleeping there, too.

She looked very much her old self again: shy and diffident and apologetic about a whole bunch of things that weren’t her fault. She told us about how her case was going, and how her solicitor thought he could get her sentence very substantially commuted on a plea of temporary insanity. It had been a riot, after all. Most of the people there were solid citizens who had no previous history.