Thicker Than Water

by Mike Carey

  ‘Shit,’ Bic said, in a tone of simple, stunned disbelief.

  ‘You’re okay,’ I said, unnecessarily. ‘You were sleep-walking. ’ It wasn’t enough, but maybe it would cover the basics.

  ‘I’m—’ he began. ‘I’m - not - where am I? Who are you? You keep the fuck away from me or I’ll lamp you. What did you do to me?’

  ‘I stopped you from jumping,’ I said. It sounds a little brutal, put like that, but I’d just realised why Bic had looked at his hands - and where the muffled reports were coming from. He was bleeding: thick, sluggish liquid pooling in each palm, looking pure black in the leprous moonlight, before it overflowed and spattered down onto the concrete like oil from a leaky carburettor.

  ‘No way,’ Bic said, without conviction. ‘No - no way.’

  I got to my feet and walked across to where he sat, his back against the parapet and his frightened eyes raised to stare into mine. I took hold of his hand and turned it so I could see the wrist. It was unmarked: no wounds there, old or new. The blood was welling up from the centre of each palm, and it was falling like sticky red rain. He still had the bandages wrapped around his hands but they were already saturated, not even slowing the flow now.

  I unwrapped the bandage, since it was doing no good in any case. I figured that if I saw the wound I could maybe decide what ought to be done before the kid passed out from loss of blood. But mainly I was acting on instinct: the prickling in my own palms was a lot stronger now, as though I was holding a mobile phone, set to vibrate, in each hand.

  There was no wound in Bic’s hand: there was just blood, welling up from under the skin of his palm and wrist and fingers like water soaking and spreading through the fibres of a paper towel. I saw this in a split second, in the light from the lamp directly overhead: then he snatched his hand away and scrambled back from me, glaring.

  I swallowed hard, because the sight of the non-wound had shaken me. ‘How long has this been going on?’ I asked Bic, as gently as I could. He didn’t answer.

  ‘I’m going home,’ he muttered, looking away along the walkway. But he didn’t move, and actually he was looking in the wrong direction. Weston Block was behind us.

  ‘That sounds like a good idea,’ I said. ‘It’s right here. Come on.’

  ‘Okay,’ Bic said automatically. He was still looking off in the same direction. I followed his gaze and saw a group of people walking towards us, just coming out from under the shadow of the next tower along.

  There were seven or eight of them: still kids, technically, but a lot older and a lot bigger than Bic. Old enough to think of themselves as men. They were walking in a ragged line, spread out across the full width of the walkway. The one at front and centre was almost as skinny as Bic, but he was bracketed between two serious bruisers who might as well have had lapel badges reading ENFORCER. The rest of the gang kept a pace or two behind these three as they marched, knowing their place: it seemed like not much had changed since the days when I ran with the Arthur Street posse. Maybe some things never do.

  ‘What are you up to?’ the alpha puppy demanded, giving me a stone-faced stare. Then his glance went to Bic and his eyes widened in surprise. He bent down and hauled the younger boy to his feet, roughly enough that Bic staggered and almost fell again.

  ‘I’ve fucking told you!’ the bigger kid said severely. ‘You don’t go out after it gets dark. Why the fuck can you never do what you’re told?’

  So this was Mrs Daniels’s other son: her John, whom she’d described as an IOU. He reminded me more of one of the small bomblets from a cluster munition: they’re both promises, I suppose, but one’s more likely to be kept than the other.

  He turned his attention back to me again, and we played at staring each other out. He was dressed in a Ben Sherman I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-leather jacket, black jeans and the obligatory DMs, and his fists were clenching and unclenching as though he was itching to take a swing at me. His eyes didn’t track together, which I took to be a bad sign. Whatever he was on, if it was taking nibbles out of his nervous system it was bound to be having an effect on his mood, too.

  ‘Was this fucker copping a feel or something?’ he demanded.

  Bic shook his head emphatically, either in disagreement or just to clear it. ‘I was falling, Johnno,’ he said, ‘over—’ He finished the sentence with a graphic gesture, pointing out past the parapet wall. ‘He grabbed hold of me. Pulled me back. I think I was - walking in my sleep or something.’

  ‘In your sleep?’ The alpha puppy - Johnno - repeated, incredulous.

  ‘Yeah.’

  The answer didn’t seem to satisfy anyone. One of the rank-and-filers pulled Bic away out of the line of fire as the others closed in on me, following their leader. There was something wrong with all their eyes, now that I was looking for it: they were too wide, and when the light from the lamp caught their faces at the right angle I could see that their pupils were hugely dilated. Methamphetamine? Special K? Or maybe they were just high on life.

  That momentary lapse of attention took me past the point where I could have made a run for it. The gang had me enclosed in a hollow semicircle now, and a metallic snikt sound from waist height told me that at least one of these likely lads had a flick knife. That first insidious sound was followed by several more from the same stable, and I could see blades sliding into hands in glittering profusion. It was as if a switch had been pulled somewhere. This had just stopped being a general for-form’s-sake intimidation and become something else: something more ritualised and more inevitable. If I couldn’t talk these little sods down this was going to get really messy.

  ‘What are you doing on my soil, you fucking queer?’ Johnno demanded, but his voice was dreamy rather than aggressive.

  ‘This?’ I said, making a circular gesture with my raised index finger. ‘This is your soil?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Johnno nodded twice, slowly, almost like a genuflection.

  ‘How far?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How far is it yours? I mean, where does your soil begin and end?’

  Johnno raised his hand, letting me see the knife for the first time. The blade was long and slender, barely tapering at all towards the point because it was more or less an ice-pick to begin with. He tapped the point of it against my chin.

  ‘I own the fucking blocks.’

  ‘All of them?’ I asked.

  ‘Johnno!’ Bic’s voice, calling from the distant outskirts, where he was invisible behind the wall of his elders and biggers. ‘He didn’t touch me.’

  ‘Shut up, Bic. Yeah. All of them.’

  ‘So you’d be the one to ask about anything that was going down here?’

  The briefest of pauses. ‘You don’t ask anything, cunt,’ Johnno said, and again his mild tone was at odds with the words. ‘I ask, and you answer. You sneak around here in the middle of the night. Touch up my fucking brother—’

  He shoved me in the chest with his free hand to emphasise how pissed off this made him. My back was already to the parapet, so there was nowhere to go but down. Pity. Down was the one place where I was determined not to go.

  I tried one last time. ‘I was looking for some information, ’ I said. ‘But if you’d rather I came back another time . . .’

  Johnno laughed softly and suggestively. ‘Come back when they take the fucking stitches out,’ he suggested, and his hand drew back. In the gap between conception and execution I brought my head forward and nutted him on the bridge of the nose with all the force I could bring to it.

  The decapitation technique is meant to work well in a dictatorship, where a lack of orders from the top can paralyse a political or military organisation not used to acting on its own initiative. But the rules for a rumble are simple, and these boys had clearly been in a few. They were on me in a second, the lad on my left grabbing me around the throat and the one on my right landing a hard punch on my chin before Johnno had even finished falling to the ground. I got in a couple more punc
hes myself, but it was anybody’s guess where they landed. Then the sheer press of bodies made it impossible for me to do anything at all. My arms were caught and pinned: two fists gripped my hair and forced my head back.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Johnno climb to his feet, the lower half of his face masked in blood, like a red bandanna. He stared at me with impossibly wide eyes. At the same time, not breaking that gaze for a moment, he held out his hands, palms up. Someone put a knife into each of them. Oh great. I was about to be carved up by the two-blade kid.

  But as he stepped in towards me the eager crowd moved, reluctantly, to let someone else squirm through. It was the kid, Bic. He stepped hastily in front of me, blocking his brother’s path.

  ‘I’ll tell Mum,’ he said.

  ‘Fuck off, Bic,’ Johnno yelled, brandishing the two knives over his head like a picador.

  ‘I’ll tell Mum,’ Bic repeated, and collapsed at my feet. His head made a hollow sound as it hit the concrete.

  8

  As though a voice had yelled ‘Cut!’ from the darkness beyond the street light, everyone instantly lost volition and direction. The hands holding me fell away. Johnno blinked three times, each slower than the last, as he stared down at his brother’s sprawled body. His bloodthirsty cohorts looked at a loss, almost embarrassed, unable even to hold each other’s gaze. I knew how they felt: some tremor had passed over and through us, and this was the pained lull between the quake and the aftershock.

  I knelt down and lifted Bic up, gently, in my arms.

  ‘Open the door,’ I said to the nearest bravo, hooking my head to point. He moved to obey, and as I stepped forward the ranks of Johnno’s gang parted. One burly acned teen put his knife-hand behind his back with incongruous shyness, as though he’d been caught flicking ink pellets at school.

  I walked into Weston Block, past Kenny’s door - it was still standing open, as I feared - and on to the door at the end where Jean Daniels and her family lived. I didn’t look behind me, but I knew I had an entourage. I decided not to chance my luck with another direct order, though. The spell could break at any moment. Or had it already broken? Was it the earlier drug-hazed bloodlust that was the enchantment? In any event, I kicked the door three times with my foot.

  After a few moments there was the sound of someone fumbling with lock. The gang scattered like cockroaches when you turn the light on, so when the door opened I was alone.

  A stocky middle-aged man with an inelegant comb-over stared out at me, backlit by the hall light so that I couldn’t see his face.

  ‘What the fucking hell do you call this?’ he asked, sounding despite the words more mystified than heated. Then his gaze fell to what I carried. ‘Oh God! Oh bloody hell!’

  He scooped Bic out of my arms and turned on his heel, stumble-running back into the flat. ‘Jeanie!’ he bellowed as he went, heedless of the late hour and the neighbours’ slumbers. ‘Jean!’

  I followed more slowly, into an infinitesimal hallway the exact same size and shape as Kenny’s, - it smelled faintly of fried fish - and through into a living room that was completely dark apart from the light spilling in from the hall. The man - Tom Daniels, I had to assume - laid his son down very carefully on the sofa of a three-piece suite that was too big for the room. Then the light clicked on behind us and we both turned to look at Mrs Daniels, who ignored us completely as she saw Bic laid out on the sofa.

  In that first moment, maybe inevitably, the worst possible conclusion was the one that jumped out and ambushed her. She gave a wail like the first note of an ambulance siren, when it’s still climbing towards its ear-hurting peak, and I stepped aside hastily as she strode past us to the sofa. She went down on her knees and put her hands to Bic’s face, huge sobs shaking her thin frame the way a hurricane shakes scaffolding.

  ‘Billy—’ she moaned. ‘Oh my baby!’

  Tom Daniels turned to me, his eyes wide with surmise and his fists clenched.

  I stood my ground. My blood was still up from the fight outside and I had to struggle against an urge to raise my own fists in response. What was it with this place? ‘He’s not dead,’ I said, from between gritted teeth. But Jean had discovered this for herself by this time.

  ‘He’s all right,’ she wailed, still on the same painful, rising note: her relief sounded very much like her grief. ‘Oh thank God, he’s all right.’

  Speaking personally, I wouldn’t have gone that far. Bic had just tried to throw himself off the walkway in what seemed to be a full-blown trance state. He was back in that state now, with the possibility of a concussion to add spice to the mix.

  ‘Mrs Daniels,’ I said, still watching her husband for sudden moves. ‘Jean. I don’t think he’s all right at all. I think he’s very, very unwell. Even in danger.’

  She raised her head to look at me, her face tear-stained and hectic. ‘What do you mean?’ she demanded. ‘Tom, ask him what he means.’

  ‘Answer her,’ Tom Daniels ordered me belligerently. ‘What happened to our Billy? Where did you find him?’

  I followed my instincts and went for the truth again. Lies hadn’t worked all that well on Jean the first time I’d met her. ‘Right outside,’ I said, nodding towards the window. ‘On the walkway. I’m thinking he must have walked in his sleep. At any rate, he was up on the parapet and about to jump off. I got to him just in time.’

  I was expecting another wail from Jean, but instead she gave a strangled sob and buried her face in Bic’s narrow chest, where there was scarcely room for it. Tom Daniels swore and shook his head, but then came back onto the attack.

  ‘Did anyone see all this?’ he demanded, glaring at me again.

  ‘Your other son and his friends came along right afterwards, ’ I said. ‘They didn’t exactly see it, but Bic told John—’

  I stopped because John himself had come into the room - or at least, into the doorway. He stood there uncertainly, like a vampire who hasn’t been invited in yet and so can’t cross the threshold. I stared at him, slightly baffled. He was the same kid I’d met outside on the walkway, very obviously, but he was also different in some not-so-subtle ways. Calmer, for one thing, and with less of an edge to him: less of a narcotic turbo-tilt to the movements of his eyes.

  ‘Stevie Rawlings saw,’ he mumbled. ‘He was over by Sandford, on three, and he said . . . what this bloke said. Bic climbed up on the ledge, and he just stood there. Stevie shouted to him, but Bic didn’t answer or anything. Then he leaned forward, like he was gonna jump off, and this bloke caught him in the air, kind of thing. Pulled him back, before he could go over. That’s what Bic said, too, before he fainted.’

  The mood in the room changed, as I went from potential enemy to something less easily definable.

  ‘I’m calling 999,’ Tom Daniels muttered, crossing to the phone.

  Jean stroked her son’s cheek again, and then stood up on legs that seemed understandably shaken. She wiped her bleary eyes with the heel of her hand.

  ‘You were here before,’ she said, giving me a wary, searching look. ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘To see Kenny Seddon,’ I confirmed.

  ‘He’s in the hospital. He was mugged.’

  I let that word slide, although it seemed pathetically inadequate to describe the frenzied industry of Kenny’s attacker; the threshing of his flesh with a straight razor until the floor of his car filled up like a well with his blood. ‘I know,’ I admitted.

  ‘And you’re . . . nothing to do with the church, are you?’

  ‘No. I’m an exorcist.’

  She nodded as though that answer confirmed something she’d already guessed. She started to say something, but that was when her husband got through to the emergency services, and his clipped answers to the standard questions cut her off short. ‘This place is sick,’ was all she said, and then she returned her attention to her unconscious son.

  There wasn’t much she could do for him, but such as it was, she did it. She got John to go and get a cold flannel to drape over
Bic’s forehead, although the heat of the day had faded by this time and the room actually felt a little chilly. Hedging her bets, she brought a blanket in from one of the bedrooms and covered him with it. She fetched some pillows, too, but then seemed to have second thoughts about whether or not his head should be raised, so she made John take them back again and bring a glass of water so she could wet Bic’s lips.

  By this time Tom Daniels was finished on the phone. ‘They said there’ll be an ambulance along inside of half an hour,’ he said to his wife.

  ‘He could be bloody well dead by then,’ she said bitterly. ‘God forbid.’

  ‘He’s breathing steadily,’ I pointed out. ‘And you can see his eyes moving under the lids. I don’t think he’s in any immediate danger.’

  Jean picked up on the apparent contradiction, staring up at me hard from where she knelt at Bic’s head.

  ‘Then what did you mean before?’ she said. ‘When you said he was.’

  I hesitated. On the one hand, I didn’t want to worry these people and add to the problems they already had on their plate - particularly given how little I really knew about what was going on here. On the other, I didn’t want to fob them off with some bullshit when their kid was lying comatose on the sofa - and had been an inch away from killing himself a moment before for reasons that seemed more geographical than psychological.

  ‘You said this place is sick,’ I said. ‘I think I know what you mean. And I think that Bic - Billy - has caught the same sickness. He didn’t seem to know what he was doing. He was in a trance state of some kind.’ I looked from her to Tom, and then to the older boy, John, who was back loitering in the doorway again. I could have added that John had seemed pretty out of it too, in a different but equally scary way, but I suspected that it would derail the discussion into a pointless argument. I appealed to him as a witness instead. ‘Bic told us that, didn’t he? That he wasn’t sure what he was doing there, or how he got there.’