Thicker Than Water

by Mike Carey

  ‘Well, how about that,’ I mused. ‘We’re up on a mountain top in South London, Gwillam, and you’re showing me all the kingdoms of the world. Now guess what I have to say to you?’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘Retro me, Satanas.’

  ‘I said—’

  ‘You’re serious. So am I. Get your hand out of my pants, you God-bothering bastard. I’m on your side for as long as this takes, but don’t think for a moment that I won’t beat the living shit out of you the next time I meet you without your muscle.’

  He touched his bruised cheek. ‘Well,’ he said calmly, ‘I had to try. Keep your friends close . . .’

  ‘You think disciples are the same thing as friends?’ I demanded. ‘Try asking Jesus.’

  The walkway ahead of us was eerily silent, but the rubble and broken glass that littered it made it clear that the silence was a relatively recent development. Dark, irregular splashes and streaks on the walkway’s cracked concrete showed black in the actinic glare of the police spotlights, but from closer up, I was willing to bet, would turn out to be the rust-brown of dried blood.

  Facing us was Boateng Tower, and beyond that was Weston. Maybe fifty yards, across no man’s land and into the valley of death.

  We’d had it easy up until now. Gwillam’s magic paper and the police escort it conjured up had got us up the stairs at Marston Tower and through the police barricade - passing along the way a very large number of tense young constables waiting for the riot squad to arrive and scared shitless that they were going to have to go back into the breach before that happened.

  But now here we were, on the front line. Behind the smashed windows overhead, vague shadows moved: and between us and Boateng, rearing up to precarious heights as though someone was trying to rebuild the Tower of Babel out of smashed furniture, was the rioters’ barricade. Nobody was manning it that I could see: but a couple of hours’ attrition would have removed the thrill-seekers who were prepared to stick their heads up for a look around and take a rubber bullet or a tear-gas canister in the chops. The ones who were left on the far side of the barricade would be the ones who had a bit more going on upstairs, and therefore by definition they’d be more dangerous.

  ‘You can leave us,’ Gwillam told the uniformed sergeant who’d been our escort up to this point. ‘My people can handle it from here.’ His people included flat-faced Feld, scarred but cuddly Speight, the man in black whose name I couldn’t even remember, and a couple more exorcists from the Anathemata typing pool - a very young man and an elderly woman - who nobody had bothered to introduce me to.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Do you have anything we can use as cover when we go out there? Mobile shields, that kind of thing?’

  The sergeant, who was in Kevlar and sweating like a horse, shook his head emphatically. ‘Not until the riot units get here,’ he said. ‘We’re expecting them inside of twenty minutes, but then they’ve got to deploy. And you’d have to talk to their chief about commandeering any of their gear. I wouldn’t hold my breath if I was you.’

  ‘We’ll handle it,’ Gwillam repeated, gesturing towards the stairs to indicate that the sergeant’s presence was no longer required. He gave us a sour nod and withdrew.

  ‘Feld,’ Gwillam said. ‘And Speight.’

  The big man appeared at his left shoulder, the scarred Father Christmas at his right. They both inclined their heads, awaiting orders.

  ‘I’m going to let you off the leash,’ Gwillam said. ‘I want you to clear us a path - ideally without killing anyone. This is a police operation, and we have to stay within their rules as far as possible.’

  ‘What about bones and soft tissue?’ Speight asked. Somehow the question sounded worse in his mild upper-crust voice than it would have done in Feld’s guttural growl.

  ‘All flesh is grass,’ Gwillam observed. ‘It withers, and its flower fades. Do what you need to do, my sons, and take my blessing with you.’

  Very matter-of-factly, Feld and Speight stepped out of their shoes and took off their coats. Then they removed the rest of their clothes, stacking them neatly at the foot of the wall.

  Father Gwillam bowed his own head as though in prayer, but the resemblance was only superficial. When Gwillam quotes from the Bible, his power flows through the words the same way mine does through music: he was performing an unbinding.

  ‘Hast thou not read that which was spoken by God? He stirreth up the sea with His power, and by His understanding breaketh up the storm. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor my ways your ways. The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life . . .’

  As Gwillam spoke, something truly obnoxious and unsettling began to happen to the two men who flanked him. Feld’s shoulders broadened and his flat face folded down from the neck, so that - while still flat - it was angled forward, the eyes shifting to the front. Speight, already short, became shorter and dropped down onto all fours, his lower jaw elongating both across and down until it was as big as a bear trap. Hair sprouted on his back in ragged clumps that flowed and merged, while the hair on his head lengthened into a spiked mane that looked as though it would cut your hand like a razor if you touched it.

  Both men were loup-garous, as I’d more than half suspected already: human souls that had forced their way into animal flesh for a messy, compromised rebirth. I had no idea in this case, though, what animals had been party to the deal. There was something about the increased mass of Feld’s shoulders that suggested a gorilla, but his fanged face and clawed hands looked like someone had crossed a weasel with a leopard and fucked up the vertical hold in the process. Speight mostly looked like a big dog, but the quills of his mane recalled a porcupine - and surely that mouth had never been seen before on anything that walked, crawled or did the can-can.

  ‘Write in a book thyself,’ Gwillam intoned, ‘all the words that He hath spoken unto thee. The sun to rule by day, the moon and stars by night, for His mercy endures for ever.’ Feld stretched his elongated body full length on the ground and a ripple ran through his flesh, his spine arching like a bow. Speight’s terrifying jaws clashed, making a sound like a hundred spears on a hundred shields.

  Gwillam looked to the left, then to the right, and it seemed that he was satisfied. ‘Go,’ he said.

  Feld and Speight hit the ground running - so fast that they became liquescent blurs and you found yourself staring at their after-images without quite knowing how. Bricks and bottles and even steel window frames rained down around them as the watchers in the windows higher up reacted to the assault on the barricade, but the missiles landed where the two loup-garous had been, never where they were. In less than two seconds they were across the rubble-strewn walkway and swarming up the barricades.

  Then they were gone from our sight, and we could only track them by sound. For the most part, they were sounds I’d prefer to forget, if that were an option: the scuffles, the thuds and even the screams were innocuous enough, but there were more insinuating sounds in the mix, too: choked gurgles, liquid pops and splats, and in one case the shuddersome impact of what could only have been a skull on the unyielding and unforgiving concrete.

  A second later, Feld’s streamlined head appeared atop the barricade and he signalled to us with a hand whose scimitared claws were dark with blood.

  ‘After you,’ said Gwillam.

  We ran hell-for-leather, but the bombardment we received was both more sporadic and less accurate: the watchers in the windows were able to see what had happened on the far side of the barricade, and clearly shock and awe weren’t even the half of it.

  All the same, a lobbed brick came way too close to my head for comfort as I crested the top of the shifting, treacherous mound: and as I half-slid, half-fell down the other side, a flatscreen TV set hit the ground and shattered explosively two feet to my right, showering me with a million shards of high-impact plastic.

  But the door was open ahead of me, and on the far side of the door was a safe haven. Never mind what I was treading on, or what unfor
givable acts the two were-beasts were still committing up ahead of us as they cleared our path. I ran along in their wake, feeling something thump against my shoulder but without really hurting all that much. I realised why when I glanced down: it wasn’t a bottle or a piece of masonry but somebody’s severed thumb.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ I yelled involuntarily. Speight’s head snapped around and he bellowed, opening those horrendous jaws right in my face. The man in black - Eddings, that was his name - pushed me forward through the doors, interposing himself at the same time between me and the loup-garou . ‘No, Speight!’ he snapped out. ‘Leave him!’

  Touchy Catholic werewolves: you have to remember to watch your language around them.

  I slumped against the wall, getting my breath back. Speight and Feld were at our backs, facing the doors we’d just come through. Of course: the stairs were on the outside of the building, so nothing could come at us so long as the doors held.

  Unless they used the lift.

  It pinged at that moment, with perfect ironic timing. Eddings turned to stare at it. The illuminated displays above the three lift doors weren’t working, so there was no way of telling which lift was in operation or whether it was heading for our floor. I chose the middle one and stood squarely in front of it, waiting to see what would emerge, but Eddings touched my shoulder and shook his head sharply.

  ‘Go inside,’ he said tersely, pointing to Kenny’s door. ‘You complete the exorcism, this all stops. Until then, we’re just racking up the body count.’

  ‘What about Gwillam?’ I asked. ‘Don’t we wait for him?’

  Eddings looked out towards the barricade we’d just scaled. I did too. There was no sign of movement out there now. ‘No,’ Eddings said. ‘Father Gwillam will join us when he can. The three of you should be enough to make a fist of it. If not - get word out to me and I’ll send Speight in to you.’

  I looked at the hideous thing hunkered down by the right-hand lift doors, like Frankenstein’s cat at the world’s biggest mousehole. ‘Speight?’ I echoed.

  ‘He’s an exorcist,’ Eddings reminded me. ‘When he’s in human form. Go. We’ll deal with whatever comes through here.’

  To put the matter beyond argument, he kicked in the boarded-up door of Kenny’s flat. It wasn’t hard: the council do that sort of job in the perfect knowledge that it’s not going to last more than a day or two.

  I went inside and down Kenny’s stairs, followed by the woman and the boy. I heard Eddings levering the particle board back into place behind us, sealing us in as best he could.

  The living room was a shambles, which I was more or less expecting. The most likely reason for the place being boarded up was because it had already been broken into: a familiar pattern that almost made me nostalgic for the Walton of my youth. Our feet crunched over fractured photo frames and shards of porcelain.

  Mark’s bedroom, though, hadn’t been touched: possibly because there hadn’t been anything there to steal or despoil. I settled myself on the edge of the bed and gestured to the other two to take up their stations. ‘You got names?’ I demanded.

  ‘Star of Renewed Being Phillips,’ said the old woman.

  ‘Caryl Langford,’ said the boy. ‘With a ‘y’. Like Caryl Chessman.’

  Well, that was a fucking great omen. I took my whistle out and shrugged off my coat. It was feeling oppressively hot, all of a sudden. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Caryl. Ms Phillips. If this was a firing squad, you’d both be shooting blanks today. I’m the one who’s going to kill this thing. All I want you to do is to weave stay-nots around me so it can’t tear my soul into confetti while I’m working.’

  The woman nodded but Caryl with a ‘y’ didn’t look too happy. ‘What if it turns on us?’ he asked.

  ‘It won’t,’ I promised. ‘Once I start playing, it’ll only have eyes for me. Okay, get your kit out and get ready.’

  I watched them with half an eye as I went over in my mind the tune Asmodeus had given me, like a tailor poring over a swatch of cloth before starting to cut. It had to be good quality, and it had to be all of a piece. If there was a dropped stitch somewhere, we were all going to die in this room, probably with most of our insides on the outside.

  Star of Renewed Being’s method of performing an exorcism seemed to rely on jacks - the children’s game in which you throw knuckle-bones up in the air and catch them again in more and more complicated ways. Of course, most kids these days use little plastic nubbins with six rounded points, whose resemblance to knuckle-bones is purely accidental. The old lady had the real thing: ten of them, well worn and shiny, off-white with brown flecks like the colour of clotted cream that’s been allowed to grow a proper crust.

  The boy had a book, and I assumed for a moment that he’d learned his craft from Gwillam - that this would be another bloody Bible-reading. But the pages of the book were blank, and he took a stick of charcoal from his trouser pocket, choosing a page and smoothing it flat with nervous fingers.

  There was no point prolonging the agony. This would either work or it wouldn’t. I started in to play, with none of my usual exploratory tuning-up because the tune was present in my head already, a finished thing. It started high and fast but plummeted precipitately into a doleful decelerando: abandon hope, all ye who riff on this one.

  Nothing much seemed to happen at first. Because I was playing quite low, I was able to hear from outside the sounds - shouted order, shouted response, boots in lockstep - of serious men moving into position. The riot squad were here, and incredibly things were about to get even uglier than they already were.

  But we had our window, and within it we made music. I did, anyway: the old woman threw bones and the boy sketched obsessive angular lines, turning the paper into a fractal landscape.

  The air thickened and roiled. Something huge and diffuse turned its attention towards us.

  Darkness fell like a curtain, but it was darkness shot through with light: a curtain flapping in a strong wind, allowing me to glimpse through its folds a silver, saturated light like the luminosity of a coming storm. Everything was working beautifully: Star of Renewed Being and Caryl with a ‘y’ had my back, and the demon couldn’t drag me down into its black-on-black Hell the way it had at the Royal London. It could only bring a piece of that Hell along with it as it came into the room; as it coalesced around us like gritty shadows, angry and confused.

  Got you now, you bastard. Your turf, but my rules. Now let’s put you on the griddle and see what colour your juices run.

  I shifted my fingers on the stops and pushed the tune into a higher gear, raising the volume because the volume was the delivery system for the pain: and the demon was hurting now. Its rush on me had got it nowhere, because charcoal and knuckle-bones encompassed me like the arms of the Lord. Now it tried to withdraw, but it was too late for that. It was in a barbed-wire entanglement of music, a thicket of thorns like the devil’s briar patch. Unable to advance, unable to retreat, it thrashed and gored itself on the tune.

  And I saw it.

  Only for a moment, but I saw it. It stared at me through the shredded layers of its own protective darkness, as it had stared at me in the lightless abyss when I had met it by Kenny’s hospital bed. Not that our eyes met, exactly: in this synaesthetic maelstrom, seeing and hearing were metaphors for something else.

  Say, I knew it.

  It was just one synapse closing in my mind: making the last link in a chain of connections that I’d probably assembled subconsciously but not allowed myself to see until now.

  A door opening, Asmodeus had said. An eggshell breaking across. Call it metamorphosis. Call it transformation.

  Juliet, reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar: the little caterpillar pushed his nose out of the cocoon, and looked around in wonder . . .

  Kenny’s ghost, wailing, ‘He’s too big now, and he made me—’

  One note, one beat, one breath away from the mercy stroke, and I knew the demonic presence for what it was. Knew, what’s more, Asmodeus’s t
reachery and the depth of his hatred for me. How perfectly he’d set me up and how many layers of perverse sadism his little plan had wrapped up in it.

  The whistle fell from my hands. It scattered the old lady’s knuckle-bones and she yelled in alarm and fear, but she was a second behind the times because the sudden silence had opened a hole in the net: the demon rushed through it and was gone, too intent on its own survival even to hit out at us as it left.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Caryl screamed.

  ‘Shut up.’ My voice was so thick that he probably couldn’t even make out the words. I lurched to my feet, made it as far as the door before my legs buckled under me. My knees hit the floor first, my hands a second later. I could hardly breathe. My chest was heaving but no oxygen was making its way through to my brain.

  ‘Mister Castor.’ Something cold touched my throat: the barrel of a tiny pistol. A Jesus gun. The old lady had a Jesus gun, hidden up her sleeve. How funny was that? ‘Finish the exorcism.’

  ‘Go - fuck - yourself!’ I panted.

  ‘Finish the exorcism, or I’ll have to shoot you. A bullet this small probably won’t kill you, but if I aim it straight at your spine I can almost guarantee it will leave you quadriplegic. ’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘It’s your call, Mister Castor. What do you want me to do?’ There was cold steel in the old lady’s voice. She’d have made a good nun: might even have been one, at some point, before she’d heard Gwillam’s call.

  ‘Pray,’ I suggested, with a bitter, choking laugh. ‘Pray for him.’

  The gun stayed where it was for a moment longer, then withdrew.

  The next time I looked up, I was alone. But not really: you’re never really alone in a big city. The screams and scuffles and the sounds of ruinous impact as the riot squad met the people of the Salisbury Estate right outside my window were more than enough to drive that fact well and truly home.

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