Vicious Circle

by Mike Carey

  “What happened to you?” I asked.

  “What you said. The were-fucks caught up with me again a couple of miles further on—pardon my French, Abbie. I got one of them with a knife: clever little gadget I bought in Algiers, with a chasing of silver up the blade. He won’t be doing any ballroom dancing for a while. But I had to get in close to do it, and he—” Peace gestured at his ruined face.

  “Is that the worst of it?” I asked.

  “No,” he muttered. “This is the worst of it. Look away, Abbie.”

  The ghost of Abbie Torrington shook her head, but it was a protest rather than a refusal. She turned her back on us, her movements once again unaccompanied by the slightest sound. As soon as she was facing the wall, Peace pulled the blanket aside. It was hard, at first, to make out what I was looking at: it looked for a moment like a seventies tank top with a complicated pattern on it. Then I realized that it was his bare flesh; not so bare as all that, though, because his torso was rucked and rutted with half-healed cuts and flaking scabs. The predominant color was furious red, but there was yellow in there, too: some of the wounds had gone massively septic.

  “Christ!” I muttered involuntarily.

  “Yeah, by all means say a blessing over it. Might even help.”

  That was wishful thinking, though. Religious nostrums do have some degree of power over demons and the undead, but only when they’re wielded by someone who actually believes in them. A prayer from me would be about as much use as one of those little stamps with Jesus on them that they used to give out at Sunday school: the royal mail doesn’t accept them, so the message never gets delivered.

  “You don’t need a blessing,” I told Peace. “You need a doctor.”

  Peace twisted his head away from me to stare at his daughter’s ghost. “Abbie,” he growled sternly, “don’t you be trying to take a peek—it’s not a game we’re playing here.”

  Then he looked back at me. “No doctors,” he said vehemently, trying to sit up and not quite managing it. “You don’t know who you’re up against. Any 999 call gets logged—any call to a GP surgery likewise. Even if you could get someone to come out here and ask no questions, he’d still get to know about it and he’d be down on me before you could fill the fucking prescription.” There was a brief pause, and then he added as he let his head back down heavily onto the rolled-up jacket “Pardon my French, Abbie.”

  He pulled the blanket back up to cover the horrific landscape of his wounds. “You can turn round again now, sweetheart,” he muttered, but Abbie seemed not to have heard. Her insubstantial figure, barely edged in the darkness, remained staring away from us into the corner of the room where the shadows were deepest. I didn’t want to speculate about what she was seeing there.

  I thought about my own infection. That had come from a single cut, and it had laid me out like ten quid’s worth of loose change in a sock. It was a miracle that Peace was still conscious at all. It also occurred to me to wonder how it was that the loup-garous hadn’t been able to follow his scent the way they’d followed mine. Maybe the faint smell of incense had something to do with that, but I was willing to bet that Peace had ways of blindsiding them just as he’d done to me. He was a foxy bastard, no doubt about it, but now he had his leg in the trap and his options were running out.

  “Peace,” I said, “you’re right about the call-logging, but take it from me that this is going to get worse, not better. I think you’ll most likely die if you won’t let anyone treat you.”

  He absorbed that in silence, thinking it through.

  “Carla,” he muttered at last. “Go and see Carla. Get me some more speed. I’ll ride the bastard out.” He closed his eyes, and for a moment it looked as though he was sinking into a doze, but then he bared his teeth in a grimace, letting out a long, ragged breath. “No,” he said, “I won’t, will I?” The eyes snapped open again, fixed me with a fierce glare. “I can’t die, Castor. I can’t. If I die, then they’ll . . .” He hesitated, his gaze flicking to Abbie and then back to me. “I can’t leave her alone.”

  I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “I might be able to get you what you need without going through a hospital or a practice. Can I use my mobile?”

  “To call who?” I saw his fists clench: even without the gun, and even in the ravaged state he was in now, he was still a force to be reckoned with. I didn’t want to have to argue with him.

  “A friend,” I said. “A very old friend. My landlady, in fact. Who by a very happy coincidence is currently doing the nasty with a doctor. She’s also got healing hands on her own account. Holistic medicine, kind of thing. So this is a two-for-one deal.” That phrase made me think of Susan Book—she’d said something similar about Juliet and me—and for a moment I felt a premonitory qualm.

  Peace, on the other hand, relaxed slightly as he saw a way of squaring the circle.

  “And she can be trusted?”

  “Absolutely. She’s not even capable of telling a lie. It’s against her religion.”

  “God-botherer?” Peace’s lip curled back in distaste, and he waved a hand over his midriff to indicate what the blanket now hid. “Those fucking Catholics did this to me.”

  “No, Pen’s sort of a religion of one these days,” I said. “Believe me, she’s not going to shop you to the Anathemata.”

  He gave a very faint nod, surrendering the point as though he was too weak to hammer it out anymore. “All right,” he said, “call her. But tell her to make sure nobody follows her. If she’s that close to you, they could be watching her, too.”

  I called Pen at home. The phone rang six times, and then the answering machine kicked in. “Hi, this is Pamela Bruckner. I can’t come to the phone right now . . .” Pen picked up as the message was still playing, to my great relief. “Hello?” she said, her voice sounding fuzzy with sleep.

  “Pen, it’s me. Sorry to wake you, but this is a bit of an emergency.”

  “Fix? Where are you? It’s—”

  “Two in the morning. I know, I know. Listen, you remember the state I was in when you found me on the doorstep? Well, I’m with someone else who’s had a bigger dose of the same thing, and he’s in a really bad way. Did that little Scottish guy leave any of those antibiotics lying around?”

  “I don’t think so. But I can call Dylan. Where are you?”

  “Way out west. Call him now and then call me back, okay.”

  “Okay.”

  She hung up. Pen gets the point quickly, bless her, and she doesn’t waste words. I turned back to Peace. “Do you want me to meet her somewhere else?” I asked. “She can pass the drugs on to me without finding out where you and Abbie are.”

  “You said she might be able to do some good herself,” he reminded me.

  “Yeah, I did say that.”

  “Then let her come.”

  He closed his eyes again, his breath coming quick and shallow now. He’d been holding on by pure willpower, and it was starting to falter now that he’d put himself in my hands. Not good: not good at all.

  I felt a sensation like the epidermal prickling you get with pins and needles, and glanced up to find Abbie’s wraithlike form hovering beside me.

  “Will my dad be okay?” she asked, her voice touching my ear without stirring the still air.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “He’s in a bad way. It’s not so much the wounds, it’s the infection.”

  “Make him better,” Abbie whispered, sounding younger than her fourteen years. She’d never be older now.

  “I’ll do my best,” I said, my own voice barely louder than hers.

  The phone rang, smacking me out of unpleasant thoughts. It was Pen. I turned away from Abbie and Peace to take the call.

  “Dylan said he’d come himself,” she told me. “He’s at home—in Pinner. He says he’s got some vancomycin there, but he’s not giving it away without seeing the patient. So if you tell me where you are, I can tell him and he can come and meet you.”

  Chinese Whispers is a lousy game at the best of times. Peace had said it was okay to tell Pen: he hadn’t given me permission to bring in any third parties.

  I glanced around, saw that Pe
ace still had his eyes closed.

  “Peace,” I called. He didn’t respond. I called again, but he seemed to be sleeping. At any rate, his eyes were still closed.

  I thought it through, and decided that I didn’t have a choice. Without antibiotics, he wasn’t going to see the night out. I put the phone back to my ear.

  “Okay,” I said. “Do you know Castlebar Hill?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe Dylan does. It’s almost local for him. Tell him to go to the top of the Uxbridge Road and take a right. Just before you get up to the golf course there’s a roundabout. I’m on it.”

  “On the roundabout?”

  “Yeah. It’s a big one. You have to park up on one of the side streets and walk in. There’s a building—the remains of a building. It burned down a few years back.”

  “And that’s where you are? At two in the morning?”

  “Don’t start.”

  “Okay. I’ve told him it’s an emergency. He’ll get there as quick as he can.”

  “We’re not going anywhere. Thanks, Pen.”

  “You can pay me back by telling me the whole story.”

  “If I survive it, I will.”

  She hung up again and I pocketed the phone. I sat down on the floor beside Peace, with nothing to do now but wait. The dead girl walked across to stand over me, her feet not quite touching the ground. For ghosts, most things come down to memory and routine. They behave as though they still have flesh but all they’ve really got is habits. She stared down at her father, himself more dead than alive, and the expression on her face was hard to bear.

  “Help’s on the way,” I said.

  Abbie nodded. “I don’t want him to die,” she whispered. “I don’t want anything to hurt him.”

  All I could do was nod in my turn.

  Peace stirred and woke from his shallow sleep, looked up at me in momentary dislocation. Almost he reached for his gun: then he seemed to remember who I was and what was going on. “There’s coffee,” he muttered thickly, pointing to a small stash of packets and jars up against the wall near the gas burner. “And bottled water.”

  I made coffee, just for something to do. While the water came slowly to the boil, I went and retrieved my coat from the floor. It wasn’t a cold night, but I always prefer to have my whistle where I can get to it in a hurry. Absently, I checked the contents of the pockets, finding everything where it should be—and one anomalous item, which I didn’t recognize until I pulled it out into the light: the porcelain head of Abbie’s doll, slightly chipped but miraculously still in one piece. I slid it back into the pocket hastily. I didn’t know what memories it might provoke for her, and I didn’t want to find out right then.

  The coffee was instant, of course, but I poured a slug from my hip flask into each of the mugs to sweeten the pill. I brought one over to Peace and put it down on the floor next to him. He nodded a thank-you.

  “So what’s the story?” I said, sitting down on the suitcase that was the closest thing to a chair I could see.

  Peace sighed and shook his head. “No story. Stories make some kind of fucking sense. My life is just . . . things. Things happening. I never knew where I was going.” He looked tired and old, although I guessed he only had a couple of years on me.

  “I meant about Abbie,” I said, bluntly. “She calls you dad. Is that just a figure of speech, or did you really have a part to play in making her?”

  He gave me a bleak stare. “What do you think?” he asked, at last.

  “I think there’s a birth certificate on file in Burkina Faso that shows you fathered a child there. But the record shows that the girl who died last Saturday night in Hendon was the daughter of a man named Stephen Torrington.”

  “Yeah? Well you should go ask Stephen Torrington about that. You’ll need your whistle, though: he’s likely to want a little coaxing before he talks.”

  “And her mother was a woman named Melanie—but after that it’s pick a card any card, because she seems to change her surname the way other people change their underwear.”

  “When I met her it was Melanie Jeffers.”

  I was going to let the subject drop, but it might do him good to talk, and it would certainly do me good to listen. “Peace,” I said, gently, “I’ve just spent three days living in a Whitehall farce where every cupboard had a cop, a Catholic, or a lunatic cultist inside it. I could get ten years just for knowing Abbie was dead when the police still thought she was alive. So could you find it in your heart to be a little less terse?”

  “It’s my life, Castor.”

  “Mine, too.”

  We stared at each other again: this time he broke first.

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “Why not? Give me another shot of that metaxa, first. I hate going back over this shit. I hate the fucker I was when I did this shit.”

  He seemed to have lost his reservations about swearing in front of Abbie—and she seemed not to have noticed, so maybe it wasn’t the first time. I handed him the flask, thinking he was going to top up his coffee. Instead he upended it and drank it dry, then handed it back to me with an appreciative grimace.

  “That was rough,” he said.

  “Didn’t seem to slow you down much.”

  “Rough is what I need right now. Abbie?”

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “This is your story, too, and you’ve got a right to hear it. But not all of it. There’s a bit in the middle that I’m going to send you to sleep for, because—because it’s not the sort of thing a girl your age should be exposed to. Okay?”

  The ghost nodded silently. Send her to sleep? I was going to watch that one with keen interest: if Peace could whistle ghosts down as well as up, and do it without risk of exorcising them altogether, he had more control of the fine-tuning than I’d ever had. I remembered the psychic smack down he’d given me the second time I tried to get a fix on Abbie. I might learn something here—assuming he lived long enough to teach me.

  “You’ve probably heard a lot about me by now,” Peace said, “and you can take it for granted that most of it’s true. There’s worse, too: things that never made it into the legend because I was careful who I talked to. I’m not going into detail, but you know the sort of thing I mean. I was big for my age—bigger at fifteen than most grown men—so I came to a lot of things early and learned a lot of bad habits.

  “I’m not making any excuses for myself. I did bad things because I was stupid and immature and I didn’t care all that much. Saying I was too young to know any better doesn’t make a gram of difference in my book and I don’t see why it should in yours.”

  Peace hesitated, as if he was poised at the brink of a revelation he wasn’t quite ready for yet. “I’m not a saint,” I told him, by way of speeding things along. “And I’m not your confessor, either.”

  He nodded, but the silence stretched a little further before he spoke again. “It was like—I went into everything just wanting to know what I could get out of it. Screwed people over in all kinds of ways and never thought about it, because people who can’t look out for themselves deserve to get taken. That’s just the way the world works.

  “I must have been about twelve when I found out I had the gift. For exorcism, I mean. I’d always gambled: horses, dogs, slot machines—but my favorite game was poker and no one could beat me at it. I’d be sitting at a table with four or five other blokes, and I could look at each one of them in turn, and think—yeah, that’s what you’ve got. You’re sitting on a pair of eights, aren’t you, betting on another one in the flop. He’s got a king high, he’s got jacks over threes, and Mr. Cool over there has got sod all so I can win this.