by Mike Carey
I did, for about an hour or so, concentrating on the sort of things I knew she’d be interested in: politics, but only broad strokes and colourful intrigues; fads and fashions, the more extreme the better; stuff from my own life, luridly exaggerated. After a while she began to interrupt me with the occasional question, but they were questions I couldn’t answer. They bore on the big intangibles, the way London looked and felt these days. I did my best to describe the city as I saw it, but I’m no poet.
Finally Rosie gave a loud sigh, which I took to be a signal that I should shut up. ‘I can’t catch it,’ she lamented. ‘I can’t catch it, Felix.’
‘Can’t catch what, Rosie?’ I asked. Given my part in getting her into this mess, I figured the least I could do was play straight man to her.
‘It’s changing,’ she murmured. Her eyes were closed now, and her head was tilted to one side as if she was listening for something. ‘But so slowly. Like the light in a room when the sun comes up, or when it goes down. You don’t notice it until it’s happened.’
‘Are we still talking about London?’ I asked.
‘About the world.’ The silence that followed those three words lasted for so long I thought she’d gone to sleep, but when I stood up to leave she reached out and took my hand again. ‘Don’t get hurt,’ she said.
‘I never do,’ I said. ‘It all rolls off me, Rosie. You know that. It’s part of my ineffable charm.’
She ignored the invitation to banter. ‘It’s going to get hard to breathe,’ she said. ‘I really believe . . . yes . . . the changes will go on and on. Like water, rising over your head. Don’t drown, Fix. I’d be sad if you drowned. There’s a man here who hates you . . .’
‘Gil McClennan,’ I said. ‘It’s okay, Rosie. I had his number the first moment I saw him.’
She shook her head slowly, emphatically. ‘You think you . . .’ she began, but for some reason she didn’t finish the sentence. She shaped unspoken words with her mouth, but in the end only shook her head again. ‘Never mind,’ she sighed. ‘It all passes. It all passes. Perhaps you’ll be his . . . comeuppance, Fix. I know what a rogue you are. How hard to pin down. I hope you hurt him. I’d like to see that.’
She said it calmly enough, but I read some old pain in her face. It’s hard to hide your feelings when you’re relying on someone else’s muscles. I made a mental note to ask one of the others, most likely Sam, whether there was any bad blood he knew of between Gil McClennan and Rosie. Gil was her main link to the outside world now, in charge of selecting and briefing her volunteers - organising the meat train, as he put it - so he was in a position to do a lot of harm if he had a mind to. And he was a McClennan. That didn’t earn him the benefit of any doubts in my book.
‘Rosie,’ I said, ‘I need to move, but like I said, I’ll see you again soon. If Gil gives you any grief, you let me know.’
‘Assuredly, my knight in arms.’
‘Seriously. I’ll break his arm. I think Jenna-Jane would let me get away with that as long as he doesn’t take a sick day.’
I kissed her on the cheek, hoping the volunteer wouldn’t object to the liberty when he went through the tapes, and let myself out. She didn’t say goodbye; she was lying back with her eyes closed again, seemingly exhausted just by the conversation.
Walking back along the corridor, my head full of vague and unserviceable thoughts, I was hit full force by an atonal tidal wave of white noise, so suddenly and so painfully that it almost made me stagger. I hadn’t realised I’d gone the wrong way and was walking past the vault-like steel door that led down to the holding cells in the basement. I retraced my steps hurriedly, the cloying atmosphere of the place pressing in on me so that I felt like I was breathing through petrol-soaked rags.
My instinct was to get the hell out, but the mapping was still going on upstairs and I had to see how far they’d got. If Trudie Pax had a line on Asmodeus, I wanted to be the first to know. I went back up and found the room again. Trudie didn’t seem to have moved in the two hours I’d been gone: she was still standing at the table, the taut string linking her hand to the nail in the ceiling as she passed her hand over the map. Some things had changed though. The tables had been banked up at an angle somehow, their back legs precariously balanced on stacks of cardboard boxes, so that the centre of the composite map was only a few inches away from Trudie’s hand. She was holding a steel ruler, to the nether end of which a pencil had been attached with wads of Blu-Tack. This ramshackle apparatus allowed her to stab down onto the map and mark points on it. Victor Etheridge was scuttling around with a pencil and ruler of his own, joining the points up carefully with perfectly straight lines.
Trudie had her eyes closed, but I caught Etheridge’s gaze from the doorway. He held up his hand in the universal stop sign and shook his head vigorously: don’t interrupt.
I wished I could pretend I hadn’t seen his high sign, because I wanted more than anything right then to breeze on in and find out where those marks were falling: where the demon might have pitched his tent. But clearly Trudie was getting into her stride now, and Etheridge was feeling protective of her. Equally clearly, from a purely logical point of view it wasn’t going to be any damn use knowing where Asmodeus was hanging out until we had a weapon that would actually work on him. Trying to take comfort in that thought, I gave Etheridge a nod and a wave and retreated again.
But the logical point of view was a long bus ride from where my head was at. I was seething with restlessness, with the feeling that I had to be doing something right then and there even if it turned out later to be the wrong thing.
So I called Juliet. It seemed to make a crazy kind of sense.
9
‘A hundred pounds?’ Juliet repeated. She sounded suspicious.
‘Yeah,’ I confirmed.
‘Per day?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Plus expenses?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Shit, no. What expenses are there likely to be, anyway? All I’m asking you to do is to watch Pen’s house and make sure Asmodeus doesn’t get near it. Pen’s already got the place hot and jumping with stay-nots, so the chances are you won’t have anything to do in any case. But if the wards go down, I want there to be another line of defence. That’s you.’
Juliet sipped her coffee, which was black and thick and treacle-sweet. The waiter, who had a hangdog look and a ridiculous bandito moustache, hovered nearby with the pot, hoping she’d hold up her cup for a refill. That way he’d have an excuse to get in close enough for another lungful of essence-of-succubus.
‘It sounds dull,’ she said, setting the cup down and dabbing her lips with the serviette. She left a smeared imprint of vivid red lipstick on the folded edge of it, like a streak of blood.
‘Oh, I think it will be a lot duller than it sounds. But it’s easy money, right?’ As in, ‘Easy come, easy go,’ I added mentally. It was everything I was getting from Jenna-Jane. I had very mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, it was kind of a relief to shunt J-J’s tainted favours directly onto a third party. On the other hand, you can’t eat air. If this thing didn’t wrap itself up quickly, I was going to be dining in the bins behind Pizza Hut.
‘I’m not interested,’ Juliet said.
‘What?’ I was dismayed. I’d started with my best offer, knowing from experience that you can’t drive a hard bargain with a woman who can smell your soul, so I had nowhere to go now but down. ‘At least think it over, Juliet. Please. It won’t be for very long, and you can always—’
‘I’m not interested in the money,’ Juliet clarified. ‘Give it to her.’
‘To her? Her who?’
‘The one who bruises so easily. My little friend.’
She spat the words out with searing contempt.
‘Susan?’
‘Exactly. She’s the one who needs clothes to wear and food to eat and toys to play with. Make her happy, if she’s capable of being happy. I’ll give you three days.’
I didn’t answer. To
tell the truth, I was still trying to digest ‘bruises so easily’, and it was sticking in my throat like a chicken bone. Juliet stared at me with an edge of challenge in her narrowed eyes.
‘She’s . . .’ I began tentatively. ‘That is . . . Sue has been a lot more to you than a friend.’
‘Has she? How would you know, Castor?’
Okay, that was an easy one. ‘Because you can get sex anywhere,’ I pointed out bluntly. ‘You can have anyone you want, on whatever terms you want, for as long as you want. So if you choose to live with one woman, and to stay faithful to her, then it has to be because—’
Juliet’s coarse laugh cut across me. ‘Faithful?’ she repeated. ‘Please. It’s only your species, Castor, that makes a virtue out of not following its instincts. If I’m hungry, I eat something. If I’m angry, I kill something. And if I feel lustful, I make someone satisfy me. Where does faithful come into the equation? It’s just a word you use to hobble someone you love. To tie them to you. It’s a weapon the weak use against the strong.’
‘Interesting choice of words,’ I commented, looking studiously at the dregs in my own cup.
‘Weapon? What would you call it?’
‘Not that word,’ I said. ‘The other one. Love. There was a time when you would have said desire or want. Two years on Earth has changed you more than you know, Juliet. I bet Baphomet wouldn’t even know his kid sister if he saw her now.’
I met her gaze again, and the silence stretched. It’s a high-risk strategy, needling a succubus. Normally I’d have been pretty sure where the line lay and when to stop, but this was a Juliet I didn’t recognise, and I tensed under her stare like a small rodent under a stooping buzzard.
Then she laughed, and I relaxed.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I have changed.’ She put down the cup and gave the waiter a tenth of a second’s glance - enough to make him come scampering over and give her the refill. He was happy to be of service, happy to be in the vicinity of this amazing woman, who for the moment was filling his mind to the exclusion of his wife, his kids, his other customers, his mortgage, the entirety of his past and the entirety of his future. He filled the cup and then made to raise the pot. Juliet rested a finger lightly on his hand, and he kept on pouring. Hot coffee splashed over the edge of the cup to soak into the tablecloth in a spreading brown stain.
‘Maybe I’ve changed too much,’ Juliet said. ‘Maybe I’ve lost something. A lot of what I’m doing right now bores me.’
The waiter made a small, helpless sound, a half-swallowed moan of dismay. Juliet wasn’t pressing down on his hand; she was holding him in place with the strength of her will, not with any physical force. The coffee had saturated the tablecloth now and was spattering down onto the floor and onto the waiter’s well-shined shoes.
‘Then maybe you need a new challenge,’ I suggested. ‘I mean, as opposed to the same old same old, like making guys have wet dreams while they’re awake. Too easy, surely?’
Juliet lifted her finger. The waiter took an involuntary step back as the skin-to-skin contact was broken, gasping like a landed fish.
‘Everything is too easy,’ Juliet said with heavy emphasis. ‘As I said, I’ll watch your woman for three days. If Asmodeus is really hunting her, that might be a fight - or a fuck - worth having. But three days is my limit. If he hasn’t come by then, he isn’t coming.’
‘Pen isn’t my woman,’ I pointed out scrupulously.
‘Then I’m even less interested. Let’s make it two days.’
Juliet stood up, leaving the refilled cup untouched in the centre of the swamped table. The waiter was staring at her with huge, hapless eyes, haunted by his own unrequitable desire. A lot of other people were staring too, but Juliet’s well used to that. It never bothers her.
We walked back to Sue’s house in silence. Juliet stopped me with a firm push to the chest as I made to walk in through the gate.
‘As you were, Castor.’
I stared at her in surprise. ‘I just wanted to say hi to Susan,’ I said. ‘Since I’m in the neighbourhood.’
Juliet smiled mockingly. ‘I’m sure you did,’ she agreed. ‘But she belongs to me, and I get to say who she talks to. I make sure she stays faithful. Go home. Tell your landlady she’s got a guardian angel. For two days, I think we said. After that, she’ll have to make her own arrangements.’
She walked to the door, let herself in and slammed it behind her.
As I stood there at the gate, my death-sense unexpectedly pricked up its metaphorical ears. I might have noticed it sooner, but Juliet’s emphatic presence tends to elbow almost everything else right out of my perceptual field.
This was a tiny ping on my metaphysical radar, but it was very close - and I didn’t see any ghosts or zombies abroad in the bright sunlight who could have been responsible for it. There was something familiar about it too, and whatever the association was, it had a negative feel to it. Negative. Recent. Necromantic. Out on the street in broad daylight . . .
I had it. This was what I’d felt when I held the stone I’d found in Pen’s garden: the invocation to Tlallik, whoever or whatever that sonofabitch might be.
Okay. So since I was here already and wasn’t invited in to tea, I might as well give the place the once-over at least. Hoping fervently that Juliet wasn’t watching out of the window, I hopped over the low wooden fence into Sue Book’s front garden - if that isn’t too grandiose a term for a lawn the size of an Oyster card, a dead-and-alive privet hedge and three beds of geraniums.
I squatted down and pushed aside the lower leaves of the hedge, looking for any evidence that someone had been there before me. At first, everything seemed to be kosher, but as I cast my gaze to left and right I caught a glimpse of red. In among the flowers, half-buried in the friable soil, was a second stone: grey like the first, and once again bearing a circular ward, crudely but legibly painted in bright red. It was fresher, so this time I could tell from the smell what the red was. It was nail varnish.
I photographed it, as I had the first, and put it back in place. It was clearly different from the first one I’d seen: not in the general design, which was identical, but in the collection of Aramaic symbols at the centre. Only two symbols this time. If the stones were summonings, and I saw no reason to doubt Nicky’s accuracy on that score, then they were summoning two different beings. Spirits of mischief, rage and paranoia, whistled up to drive Juliet off her head? No, that made no sense. One demon couldn’t possess another demon, and Juliet would know in a second if anyone tried to pull shit like that on her. Her succubus-sense would tingle, she’d follow the magic spoor to its source, and some unhappy necromancer would be trying to put his internal organs back with one hand while he wanked with the other. And in any case, the first pentagram I’d found had been at Pen’s house: Pen was still Pen, and as far as I knew, I was still me, not afflicted by any unusual mood swings or sudden bursts of indiscriminate rage.
Something else then. But what? And why? I’d promised Sue I’d sort out Juliet’s scary abreactions. My record with promises is a little patchy, but I was determined to keep this one. I couldn’t let Juliet be Somebody Else’s Problem, any more than I could do that with Rafi. On some things your room for manoeuvre is effectively zero.
I killed the rest of the day in various unproductive ways. I went to Bunhill Fields cemetery and sat among the old graves - old enough now to be completely ghost-free - to think about Rafi, and Asmodeus, and magic bullets. Normally I get good value for money out of that place. Something about the silence, or maybe the proximity to William Blake’s hallowed bones, makes my mind work at about 150 per cent efficiency when I’m there. Not this time though. I sat and watched the darkness come on, chasing the same few thoughts around in smaller and smaller circles. It would be hard enough to bring Asmodeus down, even with the gloves off and using every low blow in the book; doing it without killing Rafi seemed impossible.
I called Nicky Heath at odd intervals, got him on about the third or
fourth time. He’d been down in the main auditorium of the Gaumont, fucking around with the seating layout yet again. I refrained from asking what the point of that was, given that he was the only one who ever got to sit there. Instead, I asked him if he had any news for me.
‘Yeah,’ Nicky said, ‘I do. On the Ditko front, quite a lot of stuff - but it’s more quantity than quality, if you get my drift. Anyway, there’s too much to go over on the phone. Come and pick it up whenever you’re free.’
‘Anything on that ward I picked up at Pen’s place?’
‘Not so far. I did the grimoires, came up with a big zero. Now I’m feeding Tlallik and Tlullik into some weird-arsed meta-search engines, and trailing them across my favourite necromantic noticeboards, but if anyone’s ever heard of them, they sure as fuck didn’t write it down anywhere.’
‘I’ve got another one for you,’ I said. ‘Same pentagram, different payload.’
‘Shoot it on over. The more the merrier.’
Nicky’s funereal tone belied his words, but I took the invitation anyway. Then I checked my watch.
‘I’ve got to be somewhere at midnight,’ I said. ‘Is it okay if I come over after that?’
‘I don’t sleep, Castor. Night and day’s all the same to me, except at night I can take a walk round the block without going rotten.’
‘Not in this weather,’ I pointed out.
He snorted. ‘Yeah, you got that right. Come over whenever you like. My door’s always open.’
‘Your door is booby-trapped, Nicky.’
‘Well, that too.’ I was about to hang up when he spoke again. ‘Oh, wait. I won’t be here. I’ll be over in Hoe Street. Hoe Street Market.’
‘In the early hours of the morning?’ I demanded.
‘Yeah.’
‘Okay. Which end?’
‘You’ll find me, Castor. The crowds will have thinned out by then.’
So I was looking at a night on the town with Gil McClennan, followed by a visit to a dead man in a deserted street market. You can see why people don’t go into exorcism for the glamour.