by Mike Carey
Coldwood waited until Dennison was clear and then let himself back into the room.
‘How did that go?’ he asked.
‘Like a bastard picnic, Gary. Why wouldn’t it?’
He blew out his cheeks, shrugged. ‘His faith will be a comfort to him. And believe it or not, he does have a guardian angel.’
‘Meaning you?’
‘He lamped a copper. Priest or no priest, he would have had it a lot harder if I hadn’t put the tupp nicht out on him.’
He was right. I knew that. But I still couldn’t bring myself to thank him right then. ‘Drop you anywhere?’ he asked as we walked together up the badly lit stairs to the ground floor and the reception area.
‘I’ll walk,’ I said. Just bravado, of course, but I didn’t feel like taking Gary’s charity right then.
‘I’m not your enemy, Fix,’ he told me.
‘You said.’
‘And I’m still here if you need anything I’m in a position to give.’
I walked out into the night without bothering to answer.
There was no point going back to the hospital. I’d left a few bits and pieces there, but nothing I couldn’t pick up again on the move. My coat was on my back and my whistle was in my coat. The rest was just details, really. I knew where I had to go, and more or less what I’d do when I got there.
I took a cab back to Pen’s, found her still out on the town, so I borrowed an overnight bag from her wardrobe and left her a note. But while I was writing it, I thought of another piece of unfinished business that was hanging over me. And since I didn’t know how long I’d be away for, now seemed like the best - if not the only - time to do it.
I went down to the kitchen and found Pen’s car keys where she always left them, in the bowl of dusty imitation fruit on top of the Welsh dresser. Ten minutes later I was driving around the North Circular towards Wembley.
I called Juliet while I was en route to tell her where we were going, and who we’d see when we got there. She didn’t ask for any further details. ‘I’ll be ready,’ was all she said.
Juliet and Susan live in a minuscule terraced house in Royal Oak that had formerly belonged to Susan’s mother. It had been a tip in old Mrs Book’s day, but they’ve done it up really nicely now - although I suspect, without any evidence beyond the obvious, that all the nesting instincts are on Susan’s side. It’s hard to imagine Juliet with a paint roller in her hand. Someone’s still-beating heart is more her speed.
When I knocked on the door, Susan Book answered. Her face was a little troubled.
‘Jules is just coming, Felix,’ she said. ‘But are you sure you need her for this? It’s very late.’
I reflected for a moment on the implications of this: that succubi tend to prefer early bedtimes, possibly with a mug of cocoa, and might get peaky and over-tired if they stayed up past midnight. Of course, being the person who shared Juliet’s bed was bound to give you very strong opinions about how much time she spent in it.
‘It was kind of her call, Sue,’ I said. ‘I’m visiting an old acquaintance, and Juliet told me a while back that she wanted in.’
Susan still didn’t look altogether chipper about the whole deal, which made me wonder if she’d already quizzed Juliet about it and failed to get a straight answer.
‘It shouldn’t take us long,’ I promised. ‘I just want to deliver a message.’
Susan looked at me doubtfully. ‘But who to?’ she demanded.
‘Someone who isn’t going to want to sit still and listen. But there shouldn’t be any trouble. The someone in question won’t make too many waves because this will be at his own place, where he’s got to worry about keeping up appearances.’
‘I’m here,’ Juliet said, walking down the stairs at that exact moment. I was relieved, because any further questions were neatly forestalled.
Susan stood aside to let Juliet walk on by. A glance passed between them.
‘I’ll just be an hour,’ Juliet said. ‘Perhaps an hour and a half. If you’re still awake when I get back, I’ll massage your back.’
A series of mostly pornographic images flashed on my inner eye, but I strove manfully to censor them for decency and good taste.
Susan nodded and the two women kissed. It went on for long enough that I had to take an interest in the wallpaper so as not to feel like a voyeur.
‘Let’s go,’ Juliet said, when she had sole possession of her own lips again.
Susan squeezed her hand, gave her a slightly brittle smile. ‘See you later,’ she said.
On the A1081, as we breached the M25 ring and headed north towards St Albans, Juliet broke the silence that had fallen between us.
‘You’re making no progress,’ she said.
‘At the Salisbury? No, you’re right. I’m getting nowhere fast.’
‘And you blame me.’
I thought about that one. ‘I wish you’d picked another time to get strong and silent on me,’ I admitted. ‘This has turned into a fucking nightmare.’
‘But still you invited me to come with you tonight.’
‘Well, you asked. And to be honest, I might need the back-up. He’s a whimsical little sod, and he’s got it into his head that we’re playing on different teams.’
‘Is he wrong?’
‘Usually, no. But this time, I think I might be able to bring him round to my way of thinking.’
Juliet digested that statement for a moment or two, various emotions passing over her expressive face. The last time Juliet and Gwillam had crossed swords, he’d managed to get the drop on her with a Bible reading - the Good Book being to him what a tin whistle is to me. It had rankled with her for a long time afterwards, because it meant that she’d been in his power, however briefly. He might even have been able to banish her to wherever demons go after they’re exorcised, which is nowhere good: or possibly just nowhere, full stop.
‘I’m looking forward to seeing him again,’ she said at last. ‘It will be . . . interesting.’
‘But I don’t want any trouble unless he starts it,’ I clarified. ‘This is a public-information campaign, not a vendetta.’
Juliet looked at me with detached curiosity. ‘And why is that, Castor?’
‘Because he’s more use to me as an ally right now than as a corpse,’ I said bluntly.
‘And if he refuses to be an ally?’
‘Then we’ll have to see.’
Church Street turned out to be a very narrow road in the middle of a bewildering one-way system at the further end of St Albans High Street. I left Pen’s car illegally parked in front of some gates that led God knew where, and we looked for the Rosewell Ecumenical Trust. It was a modest-looking building that seemed to have been made by knocking two old workmen’s cottages into one structure. The sober, black-painted door looked fairly solid, but came equipped with both a bell and a knocker. I applied myself to both.
While we waited for an answer, Juliet examined the wards that were nailed to the doorposts and the stay-not painted on the wall. They were intended to deter the dead, and the undead, from entering this place.
‘Anything likely to slow you down?’ I asked.
She shook her head brusquely. ‘Not for a moment. They make my skin itch a little, but they won’t keep me out.’
There was a sound from inside of bolts being drawn. A very unecumenical face stared out at us: pug-ugly and brimming with surly suspicion, topped with black hair in a military-length razor cut.
‘Yes?’ it said.
‘We’re here to see Father Gwillam,’ I said, giving him a beaming smile.
He tried to shut the door in our faces, so Juliet slammed it back into his. Then she pushed him up against the wall of the narrow vestibule and I walked on in past him. He rallied, driving a punch into Juliet’s kidneys that actually made her frown slightly. She gripped his throat, slapped him across the face hard enough to make his head snap round a full ninety degrees, and then pitched him out into the street where he fetched up in a heap
against a parked car. Its sidelights started to flash and it wailed on a rising pitch as its alarm went off.
Juliet closed the door on the intrusive sound. I looked around me. The ground-floor layout of the place was what an estate agent would have described as deceptively spacious: we were in a hall with a tiled floor, from which three doors opened off. The decor was High Victorian, which in the Catholic Church almost passes for contemporary. The inadequate light came from uplighters high up on the walls and from a heavy and unlovely wrought-iron chandelier suspended from three evenly spaced chains.
I kicked open the first door, seeing a roomful of books beyond and smelling the contemplation-and-dust smell of a library or study. The second was a broom cupboard. I was going for the third when running footsteps sounded from our right: we turned to see two men coming down the stairs towards us. One of them was Gwillam, a book in his hand and a pair of reading glasses on his nose. The other was a slight, bald man in a plain black suit, whose teeth were bared in a subtle but permanent snarl.
Gwillam opened his mouth to speak, but he was too late because Baldy was already in the air, launching a flying kick towards Juliet’s face. Not a bad opening gambit, all things considered, but when his leading foot reached its intended destination, Juliet wasn’t there any more. She leaned sideways, her movements seeming almost lazy because they were so perfectly timed that there was no need for haste. Her right arm flicked out and flexed at the elbow, intersecting the bald man’s trajectory and punctuating his leap with a queasily suggestive impact sound. He jackknifed in mid-air, his forward momentum catastrophically sabotaged, and hit the floor in a rolling heap of limbs. He didn’t get up again.
Gwillam’s gaze was locked on Juliet’s face. He recognised her at once, on a level deeper than sight: he knew her for what she was. He began to intone as he descended the stairs towards us, his voice an octave lower than its normal register. ‘Would you tarry for them till they were full grown? They found a plain, in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there. The right hand of the Lord hath done—’
‘One more word,’ Juliet said, unconcerned but a little stern, ‘and you’ll die where you stand.’
Gwillam fell silent. He was good, and he was quick, but he knew he couldn’t complete an exorcism before Juliet reached him. He’d only managed to bind her last time because neither of us had seen his particular MO before.
But he lowered the book, allowing us to see that he was holding something else in his other hand. It was a handgun.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You won’t touch me.’
Juliet stared at the gun for a moment in silence. Then she laughed softly, richly. ‘Is that for me or for yourself, servant of Heaven?’ she murmured deep in her throat. ‘Either way, the distance between us is too small for it to matter. Perhaps if it were already pointed at your head, and your finger on the trigger, you could pulverise your own brain while your purpose still held. But see, you stand there listening to me, and seeing me, and smelling me, and it’s already too late. So now -’ her voice had sunk to an insinuating whisper, and her eyes narrowed as she spoke ‘- what will you do?’
Gwillam was staring at Juliet in fixed astonishment. His mouth had fallen open a little way, as though he’d been about to speak and then been struck by some insight that took his breath away. He made a strangled sound that had no consonants in it.
‘Come to me,’ Juliet said, raising her hand.
Gwillam came, stumbling down the stairs with a rocking gait. His movements were as stiff and uncoordinated as a zombie’s: so much of his mind was taken up with Juliet that there was barely enough left to handle basic motor functions. He walked right up to her, and then stopped when she raised a hand to signal that he’d come close enough.
She stood facing him, her breasts thrust forward, her head on one side in a parody of coquetry. They stared into each other’s eyes, and for a long time neither of them moved. A lazy, terrible smile spread slowly over Juliet’s face: Gwillam’s breathing became louder and more laboured with each gulp of air he took.
‘You may love God, Thomas,’ Juliet growled, ‘but now you’ve learned a different love. I hope you think of me often. And I know that whenever you think of me, God will be far from you.’
The joke was getting a little thin. I’d needed Juliet to get me in here, and I guess I’d known all along that she wasn’t going to let Gwillam go with a warning. Maybe I was looking for a little payback myself, for the hurt the good father had put on me already, but I wasn’t comfortable watching this sado-psycho-surgery.
‘Break it up,’ I told Juliet.
‘When I’m finished. Kneel, Thomas. Kneel and pray to me.’
Gwillam was about to comply when I punched him in the mouth and sent him sprawling. The gun flew out of his hand and clunked away end over end into a corner.
Juliet shot me a look of pure rage, which was actually something of a relief. I didn’t want to feel what she’d just made Gwillam feel: I’d been there, and seeing it happen to him had brought the whole thing back: the seismic, heart-stopping lust, the almost unbearable pleasure, and the black abyss of cold turkey afterwards.
‘Your point’s made,’ I said. ‘My turn. My show.’
Did you ever play cards for money? And if you did, can you remember a time at the end of a desperate night when you bet everything you had on a lousy hand, knowing the only way you could win was if everyone else bought the bluff?
That was me right then. Except that I knew Juliet wouldn’t buy it for a moment, because she could smell my fear the way dogs are supposed to be able to. So actually I was betting on something else, and the odds were pretty easy to calculate: two years on Earth, against fifteen millennia in Hell.
My number came up.
After maybe five or six seconds - long enough for most of the late 1980s to flash before my eyes - Juliet relaxed and shrugged. She shot Gwillam one last glance, where he lay at the foot of the stairs, and he gave a ragged moan as her gaze swept over him, as though he’d just been lashed raw and her stare was a splash of vinegar on his open wounds. ‘I’ll wait in the car,’ she said, and walked away, stepping over Baldy’s sprawled unconscious body.
I got Gwillam into a sitting position. His breathing was still uneven and his eyes wouldn’t focus at first. I half-led and half-carried him through into the study, dumped him into a chair that looked like an eighteenth-century antique, and while I was doing that I noticed a decanter of brandy standing on a dresser. I poured a shot, which I managed to get down Gwillam’s throat after three tries: I took one myself, too, purely for medicinal purposes.
Slowly the good father came back to himself, anger and hatred filling the void left by his recently discovered passion.
‘You consort with demons, Castor,’ he sobbed, his voice breaking. ‘This one, this succubus, and even worse. You think we don’t know that you took Asmodeus from his cell? You profane this place and imperil your soul.’
‘My soul?’ I touched the dressing on my cheek, made a half-shrug with just the one hand. ‘Well, I’m gambling on a deathbed conversion, so I’m hoping I’ve got a bit of leeway yet.’
Gwillam had been staring at the empty brandy glass. Now he looked up at me, his pale face streaked with sweat. ‘Without sincere repentance,’ he said, ‘I can promise you, God won’t listen to your apologies. Some sins are mortal.’
I leaned down to bring my face in close to his.
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘They are. And being as stupid as a hatful of arseholes is one of them. You screwed up, you sanctimonious fuckwit. I thought I’d stop by and tell you that before things at the Salisbury get even worse than they are. Because I’ve got other places to be and this was your mess before it was mine.’
From somewhere, Gwillam found the strength to stand. He thrust his face into mine, his eyes wide and his face white with rage. ‘You persist in thinking that, don’t you, Castor? That the whole world is full of the waste products of other people’s mistakes? That your role in life is to clean them u
p, and take the thanks for it? But Asmodeus alone is proof enough to refute that.’
‘I’m all that’s keeping Asmodeus locked down,’ I pointed out, wiping a little spittle from my face.
Gwillam’s eyes narrowed. ‘You took that monster from a place where he was safely contained,’ he said. ‘Under control. Who knows what you’ve started? Or what we’ll have to do to stop it if it gets away from you. Because it will be us, Castor. It will be the soldiers of God - the ones with an actual vocation - who clear up after your mistakes. Just as it has been through the world, down through the ages. We watch, we weigh, we decide, and then we act. You simply cut out the first three stages of that process!’
As he spoke, something clicked into place. Watch? Weigh?
‘You had a tail on me,’ I said.
Gwillam gave a choking laugh. ‘Is that meant to be an accusation? Yes, we followed you - as soon as the Mulbridge woman deigned to alert us to what you’d done. If she’d called us at once - but there’s no point in repining after the fact. God works in his own way - and although you didn’t lead us to Rafael Ditko, you did lead us to the Salisbury, and to William Daniels. We don’t trawl the sink estates of the world looking for miracles. God made you an instrument of his light and truth. He does that, whether you like it or not.’
Gwillam smiled coldly. His composure was coming back to him at a steady trickle, bringing with it the unshakeable sense of his own rectitude.
‘The situation at the Salisbury,’ he said, ‘is one that a faithless man like you can’t understand. So there’s nothing to be gained by discussing it.’
By way of answer, I held up my right hand, fingers spread. The red, inflamed flesh in the centre of my palm was clearly visible. Gwillam’s eyes widened as he stared at it.
‘And that’s after only a few hours on the estate,’ I said. ‘How holy do you think I’ll be if I rent a flat there?’
Gwillam started to speak, but I rode right over him. ‘You should have been like your namesake, Father Thomas, and looked for a little more proof before you threw up your hands and started singing hosannas. You find a boy with wounds in his hands and you think he’s a saint in waiting, right?’