by Mike Carey
I said she was into slave games. Shed been the slave the first time around. Now it was my turn, and she really went to town. If ever a man was made to eat shit, that man was me.
I opened my mouth to interject a question, then shut it again, better just to assume that that was a metaphor. I looked at my watch. It had been twenty minutes since I called Pen: I reckoned another ten or fifteen before Dylan got here.
Tell me about Abbie, I suggested to Peace. I was getting a little sick of hearing about his sex life. But I could tell from his expression that he wasnt drawing this out because of any misplaced sense of drama: there was a place in his past that he really didnt want to revisit, and we were almost there.
I thought Mel was just a sort of weird life-form that lived on sex and pain, he murmured. I never thought she had any agenda beyond what was happening right there, right then. But I underestimated her. I really did.
He took another tremulous breath. His voice was getting fainter, with a breathy hoarseness around the edges of it that I didnt like at all. Fanke used to talk about something called a sacrifice farm, he said. It was an idea hed put together for himself by reading between the lines in the medieval grimoires. Hed read them all in translation, and then hed gone back and read them all in the original languagesmostly Latin and high Germanand if there was one thing hed gotten hung up on, it was this idea of sacrifices. I know because I had to listen to it every time Mel had him and her other crazy friends over to play.
If youre going to make a sacrifice to a god, Fanke saidto any godthen the sacrifice has to be earmarked well in advance and treated differently. It has a special status, and it gets special treatment. It lives apart. Until the time comes.
He went on and on about this stuff, but I didnt listen. I didnt fucking listen.
Disconcertingly, Peace began to cry. I still couldnt see his eyes: the single candle cast deep shadows, and most of his face was in one of them. But the plane of his cheek was in the light, and I saw the tears following a single, wavering track across his pitted skin.
So one night, he said, Mel told me it was my turn to be on top again. And this one was going to be really special. Because this time we were going to make a baby, and we were going to do it in a brand-new way.
She used the word transgressive a lot. We were going to transgress: we were going to breach the laws of nature. That idea seemed to get her even more excited than having an audience, but when I asked her exactly what wed be doing, she got all shy.
There was a lot of crap: a lot of arcane paraphernalia, a lot of chanting. It built up and it built up and it built up, and it didnt seem to be going anywhere. I lost my hard-on somewhere along the way, and I almost dozed off, but she slapped me awake again. That was part of regular foreplay as far as our sex life was concerned. But then she went off-script. She stabbed herself in the stomach, with a poncy little silver dagger that had runes all up the blade, and then she got me to use the wound instead ofgoing in by the normal route.
I told her she couldnt get pregnant that way. It wasnt transgressive, it was just stupid and sick. And incredibly messy. She didnt care. She wanted it. She wanted it more than shed ever wanted anything.
And as soon as we were finished she staggered over to the door and opened it, and Fanke walked in along with a couple of guys in surgical whites. They hustled Mel away, and he told me I could leave. Just like that. Actually it was more like on your marks, get set, go. He said hed removed his protection from me. The cops would be looking for me as a bail defaulter, and Id better sod off out of the country or Id be finishing out my sentence at the maison darręt, without remission.
Peace held up his hand, on which the golden locket glinted dully. He checked the clasp: a nervous tic that I suddenly realized Id seen a couple of times before while he spoke.
So I went, he said flatly. How are we doing for time, Castor?
Weve still got a while. Peace, are you telling me that that was how Abbie?
I let the question hang. Slowly, he nodded his head.
I didnt know anything about it then. They fired the starting pistol and I was off. Im not kidding myself, though: Id have run even if Id known Mel was pregnant. Im not the nurturing type.
There was a hectic energy in his voice now, and his face was strained like canvas on a frame. It was alarming to watch, almost as though he were coming unraveled, using himself up in this cathartic information dump so that hed reach his own ending at the same time as he ended his story. I tried to call a halt againfor the last time.
Peace, I said, I can put the rest together for myself. Get some sleep now, and Ill wake you up when its time to take your medicine.
Dont flatter yourself, Castor, Peace muttered, with fierce heat. You dont know shit. You listen to me, and then you can talk, okay?
I held up my hands in surrender. Okay. But I havent been sitting on my hands, you know. Let me at least tell you what Ive got alreadyyou can save yourself some breath and use it elsewhere.
He rolled his eyes impatiently, but Id already started in. You found out somewhere along the line that you had a kid, I said. And maybe you got curious. You tracked Melanie down to New York, and you went out there to visit her. Abbie would have been about eight years old then. You met her, got to know her, andI went out on a limb, but it felt like a safe oneyou gave her a gift. That locket.
Peace grunted. Fucking amazing, Holmes. What was I wearing?
Im guessing that was the first gig you ever walked into that you found it harder to walk out of, I said. You ended up fighting for Abbie in the courts. You wanted to be her father, and not just on her birth certificate.
I stopped because he was waving his hand backward and forward in an impatient stop right there gesture. I told you you didnt know shit, he said, thickly. The court case, that was another scam. Mel was still with Fanke, and Fanke was a big wheel by this time. Fucking multimillionaire. Hed set up the First Satanist Church of the Americasbecome a guru, like the Maharishi, with tax breaks and limos and all that garbage. And theres him and Mel living together like husband and wife, and bringing up Abbie like shes theirs. I bumped into an old crony somewhere in Rio and got the whole story, and I thought it had to be worth trying to shake them down for some hard cash. Thats all she was to me, Castor: a fucking lottery ticket.
Until you met her.
Until I met her. Yeah. I didnt realize, but taking out the lawsuit let me in for all kinds of stuff that I couldnt get out of. Depositions, procedural submissions, Christ knows. If Id seen how much time it was going to eat up Id never have started it.
But anyway, as part of all that there had to be meetings. Documented meetings, because youve got to go through the conciliation shit before you can go to court. And there she was, you know? Mel did all the talking, just like always, and Abbie was just sitting there, looking so sad and lost. Looking like she was waiting for a bus on a dark street, and that was where shed been all her fucking life.
He was staring at me with haunted eyes. No wonder hed been so flip about the sins of his youth: this was what he really had on his conscience, and it must have almost eaten him alive.
I started talking to her. Partly because I wanted to see if I could cheer her up, partly because it seemed to piss Mel off. I bought her the locket, and a couple of other things, and I told her some bullshit stories about what I did for a living.
And I started to wonderif Mel was so fucking cold to her, and if she wasnt even Fankes kid, then why did they keep her around? Was it just that whole transgression thing? That Mel had managed to turn making a baby into something obscene and sick? Was Abbie aa trophy? It didnt make any sense.
And there I was in a strange city, stuck there because of this stupid court case that I didnt even want to winthat Id only swo
rn out in the first place so that Fanke would pay me to make me go away. And I had all the time in the world, and fuck all to do with it. So I started to do some digging.
The Satanist Church is huge over there. Theyve got their own Web site, their own bookshops, sodding T-shirts, car stickers, the works. HONK IF YOUVE SEEN THE LIGHTBRINGER. Fucking morons. There was a lot there, but none of it was hard to find.
The Web site had links to articles that Fanke had written. Speeches hed made. It was all in public domainhe wasnt hiding it. He was still going on about sacrifice farms, and the grimoire tradition, and why the medieval alchemists got it all wrong. Oh sure, he said, theyd managed to open up some lines of communication with demons, and the demons were giving them everything they needed to turn that first contact into serious, regular trade. Only they kept getting all the details wrong. It was a communication breakdown, according to Fanke. Demons can speak all the languages that human beings ever spoke, or ever will speak, but notyou knowfluently. So they were giving out all this sales talk: you can bring the big boys up from hell, you can be top dogs in a new world order, and all the rest of it. They were giving fucking dictation, for Gods sake. But these medieval badassesthese Fauststhey were mostly managing to miss the point.
They got it all wrong, Fanke said. All the stuff that really mattered, anyway. And the thing they fucked up worst of allthe most important thing, the engine that the whole thing ran onwas the sacrifice. Albertus Magnus raved on about rams being without blemish, and Brunos got a whole goddamn chapter on whether you carry the beast in or lead it on a rope, and what color its fleece should be, and what it should have eaten and what you do with its shit if it shits during the ceremony, and on and on like some kind of instruction manual translated from Japanese into Latin by a fucking Dutchman. And all the sense of itall the meatthat just got lost in translation.
So this is the gospel according to Fanke, which he posted on the Internet because Mt. Ararats a fucking long way away. To raise a major demon, you need a sacrifice thats been dedicated from birth to the powers of darkness. From before birth. Itsheitsgot to be linked to hell even in the way it was conceived. Spiritually, and physicallyprepareddesigned He groped for words.
Abbie.
What do you fucking think? His voice rose in a snarl, but then it turned into a cough and he folded in on himself, trying to ride out the spasms in his throat without moving his diaphragm. Yes, Abbie, he said when he could speak again, glaring at me with unfocused hatred. The bastards brought her into the world just so they could kill herat the right time, in the right place, with the right fucking weapon that Fanke and his mates had said a fucking blessing over and anointed with holy water and horse piss. He coughed again, and this time he had to shove his hand against his mouth to keep whatever it was from coming up.
Okay, I said, gentlyalthough the anger seeping out of him like tar from a smokers sweat was making my skin prickle. And then theres another part I can fill in for myself. You lost the case. He nodded, his face still buried in his hands. And you lost a shedload of money, because Fanke countersued.
Only to make me back off, Peace wheezed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. A trail of spittle hung down from his chin but he seemed not to have noticed it. His voice was a little slurred now. He was telling me to go away. Behind the scenes his lawyers offered me a hundred grand if I signed a waiver saying I gave up any claim to be considered as Abbies father. I thought about signing it, too, and then using some of it to have him bumped off. But multimillionaires make hard targets. And if I toughed it out, I got one big advantage that they couldnt take away from me without another long, hard fight.
Visiting rights, Castor. I got visiting rights.
It felt different now. I wanted to spend some time with her. I wanted to make it up to her, because it was my fault she was in this fucking mess. Id planted the seed, and then Id just gone riding off into the sunset like the Lone bloody Ranger and left her to it. It was wrong. And even if it was too late to do any good, I had to at least try. Try to put it right again as far as I could.
I stayed in New York for nearly two years, and I saw her every other weekend courtesy of the U.S. Court of Appeals, second circuit, Judge Harmony Gilpin presiding. They couldnt stop me. They bankrupted me, not that that was hard, dragged me in and out of court on a new docket twice a fucking month, got the cops to roll me on some bullshit harassment charge and bust up my place. But they couldnt stop me.
I got to know her, and Ishe was a good kid. A really good kid. Shed grown up like an animal in a cage. Never even been to school. She was meant to be having private tutors, but it never happened except on paper. There were plenty of grade-school teachers in the Satanist Church, and they were happy to sign anything that Fanke put in front of them. Yes, I see this girl three times a week, and I teach her history, brain surgery, and domestic science. Yes, I tutor her in beach volleyball. I tried to get the whole outfit audited, but the lawyer I had was no good. He was the best my money could buy, but my money was chicken shit. What I could pick up doing one-shot exorcisms on the black market.
Fanke had so many lawyers he had to hire a bus. He could have stonewalled me foreveror just arranged with a few friends to have me turned into landfill. But I think he got unhappy about all the publicity. Anyway he just upped sticks one night and pissed off to Europe.
There was nothing I could do to stop him. Abbie wasnt a ward of the court or anything. In theory I still had my visiting rights, but they werent worth a whole hell of a lot when I couldnt find out where he was.
I came back to London, stony broke. The Thames Collective took me in, so I had a roof over my head, and then I started building up a stake. Hired a detective to run Fanke to ground and get me his address. He was in Liechtenstein. Hed rented a castle and moved in with the limousines and the flunkies and the whole circus. I went out there, but they wouldnt let me through the door. And before I could get anything legal rolling, they moved again.
That became a pattern. They never settled anywhere for long enough to let me get a foothold, and after a while they got better at keeping their heads down so it was harder for me to figure out where they were. I kept the channels open, though. Kept the feelers out. And then just after the New Yearmaybe four months ago nowthey came to London.
Id been doing my homework, Castor. I knew why they hadnt killed her. And I knew why theyd come here. It was all coming together, and I was shit-scared that I wouldnt be able to stop it.
They had to wait until she had her first period. That was part of Fankes prescription: out of the grimoires again. She will be pure, she will be stained. She will be whole, she will be wounded. She will be woman, she will be child. That was what he said it meant.
And London? Even as I asked the question, the answer hit me. And the only reason I hadnt seen it before was because I was sitting so close to it.
London was where he was. The demon they wanted to raise. Except that he was half-raised already, because some other shithead had tried it two years back and gotten it wrong, the way Fanke said amateurs always do.
Asmodeus. Peace didnt even need to say it. The last few pieces fell into place as I finally made the connection that my subconscious mind had made two days ago. Yeah, something else did happen on Saturday night. Rafi had his episode, as Asmodeus clawed his way up out of the oubliette, yawned, and stretched.
An image came into my mind: of Rafi screaming in agony, his head thrown back, oblivious of everything except whatever it was that was tormenting him.
You sabotaged them, I said. You broke the ritual before they finished it.
Only just, growled Peace, bitterly. It took me a long time to find out where they were keeping her. And by the time I got to the house it was too latetheyd already taken her. But I caught Mel and some piece of piss who was fronting as h
er husband. And I got the drop on them.
Stephen Torrington, I said. The real Stephen Torrington. He was the guy who owned the house, right? Some English satanist who Fanke was using as a cover?