The Devil You Know

by Mike Carey

  “When I come—back—” Scrub was having to force the words out, his voice bubbling and fluting. He began to melt from the legs up, and he shrank in on himself spectacularly. But he wasn’t melting; that was just the way it looked from where I was sitting on the walkway. What was actually happening was a whole lot more disgusting.

  He turned into rats. The whole of that big, solid frame dissolved and separated, tore itself asunder, and a wave of brown, furry bodies struggled out of the folds of his greasy suit to sweep off along the walkway in a filthy tide, heading away from the water. If Scrub’s consciousness had still been animating them and welding them together, they could have eaten me alive, but Scrub—the mind and personality that used that name—was a ghost. When the music punched him out of the flesh that he’d wrapped around himself, the individual little rat minds all kicked back in and took up their own agendas again.

  I thought back to the time when I’d unlocked the door of my room and found Scrub sitting on the bed. Now I knew how he’d managed to get in through that barely open window. I gave a reflexive shudder at the thought. When he’d threatened to kill me, it wasn’t just farting in the wind. I hadn’t exorcised him, just broken his concentration and stolen his body out from under him. He could find another body, given time—could and probably would. Loup-garous are like weeds in that way; you think you’ve got rid of them, but they pop up again when you least expect it, kill off your prize geraniums, eat your dog, and crush your skull like an eggshell.

  But that was a thought to linger on during some warm summer evening yet to come. Right now I had other things to think about. Picking myself up off the planking, I retraced my steps along the walkway and retrieved the rest of my stuff: the lock picks, the bolt cutters, the cone-bore flute, the whole dodgy tool kit. Then I put my shoes back on, boarded the Mercedes again, and made a beeline for the cabin door.

  I gave it the once-over as I hauled out my lock picks. Bog-standard Yale, slightly sexy Chubb. Not the piece of cake that I was hoping for, but far from impossible. I got to work, occasionally looking over my shoulder back toward the harbor entrance to see if anyone was coming down the walkway in my direction. Nothing. I worked undisturbed, got the Yale inside of ten minutes, but then lost time on the Chubb. It was a real fucking boojum, with an impossibly narrow barrel and a double detainer. Bouncing the pick didn’t help at all, so I was reduced to working out the set pins laboriously, one by one, the skin on the back of my neck prickling the whole time. Then it was one pass for each pin, with the minutes ticking by.

  When the lock finally clicked and the door gave inward a fraction of an inch, I was taken by surprise and almost fell in with it. Recovering my balance, I stood up and stepped into the dark space inside the cabin.

  I stood still for a few moments, listening. Nothing. I didn’t really want to turn a light on, because if Damjohn came home suddenly, I wanted to be the surpriser rather than the surprisee. I ought to be able to hear footsteps and maybe voices as he came along the walkway toward the boat, but if he saw a light, he’d send the heavy mob in first, on tiptoe, and before I knew where I was, I’d be replaying Custer’s last stand with only a couple of vowels out of place.

  The faint movement of air on my face told me that the cabin or galley that I was in was fairly large, but it was impossible to see a thing. My nerves more or less screaming now, I forced myself to wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. The room built itself up around me, piecemeal, as the darkness separated out into discrete volumes.

  There was a table right in front of me—long, low, and really convenient to trip over. There were two couches built into the sides of the room and something in the middle distance that looked like a tall cabinet of some kind against the farther bulkhead wall, with a squat, blocky object standing off to one side of it. In between me and the cabinet there was a chair, and the more I squinted at the chair, the more convinced I was that someone was sitting in it.

  I stepped soundlessly to one side so that I wouldn’t be silhouetted against the open door behind me. It made no difference, of course—if anyone was sitting there, they’d already seen me and had plenty of chance to respond to my entrance. But the stillness and the silence persisted, and I reminded myself that taking things slowly wasn’t a luxury I could afford right then.

  So I skirted the table and advanced into the room. That brought me broadside on to the chair and confirmed my first impressions; it was definitely occupied by someone who was sitting stock-still in the dark, rigidly upright, facing front even though I’d moved a quarter-circle around to the left.

  I thought again about turning on the light, came to the same conclusions. My flesh creeping a little, I closed in on the chair and its motionless occupant. I put out a hand and brought it down gently on the silent figure’s shoulder.

  Instantly it convulsed, its head snapping round in my direction, its back arching. It tried to twist away from me, but didn’t manage to get very far. The combination of squirming effort and more or less total failure to go anywhere left me mystified for about half a second. I realized that the figure was tied to the chair around about the same time that something hard and cold slammed into the back of my neck, dropping me to my knees. I didn’t stay there for long, though. The foot planted in my stomach sent me rolling and gasping, full length, on the floor.

  The lights clicked on, blinding my dark-adjusted eyes. It wasn’t as much of a handicap as you’d think; winded, dazed, and curled up in a fetal ball, I wouldn’t have been able to see a whole hell of a lot in any case.

  Damjohn’s unctuous tones intruded on my pain. “I have caller display, Mr. Castor,” he said with dripping scorn. “When Richard called me on Arnold’s phone—a phone that he’d previously lost to you in a brawl in a public house—what was I supposed to think?” He said a few other things as well—or at least he was still talking when I faded out.

  Twenty-two

  I WAS PROBABLY ONLY UNCONSCIOUS FOR A MINUTE OR so. As I bobbed my way painfully back up from the black well that Chandler used to get so lyrical about, I could still hear Damjohn’s voice. He was speaking in a clipped, commanding voice—giving orders, from the sound of it. Heavy footsteps moved across the cabin in response. Good. If he was talking to someone else, I could go back to sleep.

  But the someone else hauled me roughly upright and gave me a hard shake to dislodge the cobwebs—almost taking my head along with them. I blinked my eyes open, took in a scene that was skewed at a nauseating angle and had a very depressing effect on my spirits.

  Damjohn was sitting on one of the couches, at his ease, lighting a black cigarette. Behind him stood Gabe McClennan and Weasel-Face Arnold. Arnold’s battered face gave me a moment’s low satisfaction, but under the circumstances, it didn’t do a whole hell of a lot to warm the cockles. Two more bravoes to whom I hadn’t been introduced stood on either side of me, holding me up in the absence of any meaningful efforts from my rubbery legs.

  The woman tied to the chair had a gray Parcelforce bag tied around her head.

  “Mr. Castor,” said Damjohn with just a hint of paternal sternness. “At one point in this sad, complicated business, I paid you the compliment of trying to bribe you. I honestly wish you’d accepted.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” I suggested. “What you tried to do was seduce me, because that’s what you like to do best. Now you’re about ten minutes away from a lobster quadrille with the Vice Squad, so let’s cut a deal. You drop the Blofeld act, and I won’t ask for a martini.” I was chagrined at how quavery my voice sounded. That whack to the top of the spine had knocked a lot of the fight out of me. I was going to need to play for time; a couple of weeks would do nicely, so long as I got bed rest.

  Despite appearances, though, Damjohn hadn’t settled down for a nice long chat. He turned to glance over his shoulder at McClennan. “What are you waiting for?” he asked mildly. “A pay rise?”

  McClennan jerked to attention as sharply as a West Point graduate. He came around the couch and crossed
to stand in front of me.

  “You wouldn’t take a fucking hint, would you?” he asked, glowering at me. He pulled my coat open, snapping off a couple of the buttons in the process, then did the same thing with my shirt. He seemed to enjoy it. I wondered for a brief, unsettling moment if I’d misunderstood the situation—if I was going to be raped before I was murdered. But then Weasel-Face handed Gabe a tray full of implements I vaguely recognized, and Gabe got busy.

  There was a pot of henna, another half full of water, and a couple of brushes—one fat, one thin. Gabe dipped the bigger of the two brushes in the water, then in the henna, and painted a broad, messy circle on my chest. I gave an involuntary gasp; the water was cold. I began to get an inkling of what was about to happen, but if I let myself think about that and froze up with fear, I’d be dead for sure. In the absence of any better ideas, I continued to play the few paltry cards I had left.

  I looked across at Rosa—assuming that it was Rosa trussed up like a parcel over there. The ragged rise and fall of her chest was a hopeful sign, anyway.

  “You should quit while you’re ahead,” I told Damjohn, slurring my words only slightly. “If you let her go, all you’re going to get is accessory to murder and wrongful imprisonment. Kill her, and you’ll do life. But not here. They’ll deport you back to Zagreb. You fancy twenty years in a Croatian prison? I reckon the time off for good behavior would arrive at the sharp end of an ice pick.”

  Damjohn just smiled, as if I’d made an unfunny joke that he was going to be magnanimously polite about.

  “I’m not going to kill Rosa,” he reassured me. “Not while she’s still a saleable asset. Eventually, if drugs and disease and distempered clients don’t get her first, it will be necessary to draw a line under her. For the time being, though, she’s fine. She’s young, she’s healthy, and she’s earning her keep. I’m actually quite fond of her. Don’t worry about Rosa, Castor.”

  “Then why have you got her tied to a chair?” I asked. It seemed like a reasonable question, but Damjohn waved it away.

  “I needed to make sure she didn’t speak to you. In the short term, I arranged that by keeping her here. But it was only ever an interim measure. You really should have just exorcised the ghost at the archive and taken your pay. Or, conversely, accepted my foolishly generous offer. You’ve got no one to blame for this but yourself.”

  “Let me see that she’s all right,” I said, sounding for all the world like someone who still had a bargaining position to maintain.

  Damjohn put his head on one side, frowned at me either in puzzlement at the request or in annoyance that I’d presumed to give him an order. Whatever went through his mind, he finally made a gesture to Weasel-Face, who walked over to Rosa and pulled the mail sack off her head. Underneath it she was gagged with a plug of cloth and a few loops of rope, and her right eye was swollen closed. Her other eye was open, though, and her expression as she stared at me, though terrified, was alert. It seemed as though she might get out of this with her life after all. On the other hand, from what Damjohn was saying, that would just be a suspended sentence.

  “There,” said Damjohn, smiling at me almost mischievously. “I’m a man of my word, when I care to be.” I wondered whether that was really why he’d shown her to me—whether it was because after a lifetime of lying and betraying and raping and murdering, he felt on some level as though he was left with something to prove.

  Gabe had switched to the thinner of the brushes and was painstakingly dabbing at my midriff. An unpleasant tingle was building in my stomach. The two men on either side of me were holding my arms so tightly that they were in danger of cutting off the circulation. Even if I wasn’t still weak and sick from the skull massage I’d got earlier, I could never have fought my way free.

  “This is a pretty roundabout way of killing me,” I observed.

  “But it has the right look to it,” Damjohn countered. “You’re an exorcist. You bit off a little more than you could comfortably chew. That must happen all the time.”

  I wondered briefly about what had happened to my flute. Then I saw it on the floor at Damjohn’s feet, incredibly still intact. He followed my gaze and saw it, too. He snapped his fingers and pointed, and Weasel-Face played fetch.

  “This isn’t what you used at the club,” Damjohn mused, turning the instrument over in his hands. “What is it? It’s not a flute.”

  “It’s a cone-bore flute,” I said. “Earlier version of the same instrument. When Boehm invented the modern valve system, this went in the dustbin.”

  Damjohn looked at me and nodded. “Which is where you’re going,” he acknowledged. “Arnold, I’ll need those bolt cutters, too.”

  He pointed to the cutters, which had fallen half under the farther couch. Arnold harkened to his master’s voice again, picked them up, and handed them over. Very deliberately, Damjohn got to his feet and crossed over to me. In the narrow cabin, it only took him three steps. He held the flute up in front of my face, put the blades of the cutters around its midpoint, and squeezed. The wood of the flute splintered and then gave, shattering into fragments, enamel flaking off like red-brown dandruff. Damjohn wiped the flakes off on his sleeve and let both the bolt cutters and the remains of the flute fall to the floor again with a heavy clatter.

  “In case you were hoping to pull off a last-minute miracle,” he said.

  “Actually, I had it in mind to” I began, but I wasn’t destined to finish that sentence, and I can’t even remember what merry quip was on my lips. Pain flowered in my throat, cut off my breath, left me gasping soundlessly as my knees once again buckled under me.

  Gabe backed away from me, rubbing his henna-covered fingertips together.

  “Your trouble is that you talk too much, Castor,” he said with a nasty grin. “Or at least you did. But I just took care of that.”

  It took a few seconds for the agony to subside. When it had, I spat out a few choice swear words at him, but my jaws were working in stealth mode; not the slightest sound came out of my mouth. I knew then, as I guess I’d known all along, what sigil Gabe had painted on my chest. SILENCE. He’d taken my voice again.

  “Now take care of the rest of it,” Damjohn said, standing up. “I have other places to be.”

  Gabe pulled himself up to his full height and became almost comically solemn. He began to declaim in barnstorming style—Latin, of course, but the medieval stuff where the word order is all to fuck and you can’t follow a damn word of it. Trying to pick sounds out of the flow, I caught the word pretium, which means “price;” imploramus, which means “buddy, can you spare me a dime;” and damnatio, which is self-explanatory.

  It was a summoning, the first I’d ever seen, because I tend to steer clear of black magic on the perfectly reasonable grounds that it’s a pile of arse. Well, 99 percent of it is. Unfortunately, it looked as though Gabe had latched onto at least one spell that did what it said on the box.

  His words rolled around the small cabin, raising an echo that seemed somehow displaced, as if it belonged to a vast, cavernous space a long way from chic and cheerful Chelsea. Gabe was looking strained and uncomfortable, sweat running down his pale face as he forced the words out like some kind of human die-stamp machine punching measured indentations into the air we breathed. Looking at the twinges of pain crossing his face, I realized why he’d looked so wrecked when I called on him in his office—and why he’d swallowed those black bombers like they were Smarties. That was a few scant hours after my first close encounter with the demon. He must still have been in the deep pits of a psychic hangover.

  Arnold and the two other heavies took the whole procedure in their stride at first, staring at Gabe with a kind of amused contempt. But they got very tense as the temperature climbed a few perceptible degrees. Then, when the pungent smell hit them, they started to sweat. I’d been there, too, and I knew it had sod all to do with the heat. Rosa moaned around her gag, her one visible eye rolling in her head, and even Damjohn lost something of his sangfr
oid.

  I missed Ajulutsikael’s entrance. Demons are like that; you think they’re all about big, showstopping numbers, but they come up on you as softly as the dawn. Maybe the darkness behind Damjohn deepened for a moment, and then again maybe it didn’t. My gaze passed over the place, jerked back, and she was there.

  Damjohn moved hastily aside as she stepped forward, and every man in the room drew in his breath with an audible, almost painful catch. Every man except me, that is. I couldn’t make a sound if my life depended on it. Sorry, that should have read “even though.”

  What caused that communal swallowing of tonsils was the fact that Juliet was naked—and if that conjures up an image in your mind, forget it. She wasn’t naked like that. Oh, I suppose it was no more sensational a body than Helen of Troy’s, say. On a ship-launching scale, maybe a straight thousand, give or take. But with the raw stench of her pheromones supersaturating the air, she looked like every woman you ever loved or dreamed about loving, miraculously combined, miraculously open and willing, like a solid sign of God’s mercy.

  Damjohn’s muscle boys were staring at her slack-jawed. Weasel-Face had a spreading puddle on the floor at his feet. The man to the left of me groaned in despair or spontaneous orgasm, and Rosa made a muffled, balking sound. But they had one advantage over me—Juliet wasn’t looking at them.

  Her stare held me like a vice—the kind of vice you give way to in the dark behind a locked door, your hot blood ashamed and quickening. She advanced on me with the unhurried grace of a panther. Just for a minute, that predator’s stalk let me see through the veil of her scent and recognize her for what she was—the top carnivore in an ecosystem that offered no challenge to her, her long legs shaped for the chase, her exquisite curves only adaptive camouflage. There was a very faint music that I’d heard before, like wind chimes.

  “Do him slowly,” said McClennan’s voice, strained but clear. “He’s fucking earned it.”