Vicious Circle

by Mike Carey

  The first thing that Bourbon Bryant had said to me when I asked him about Peace: Seems like he’s flavor of the month all of a sudden. Why the hell hadn’t I made the connection, and asked him who else had been sniffing around?

  “And he’s got more of a motive, because he and Peace had some kind of legal skirmish a few years back, and it turns out Peace has been chasing him all around Europe ever since. Something about parental visiting rights to a little girl named Abigail Jeffers. Was that—?”

  “Abigail Torrington. Yeah, it was.”

  “Thought so. Otherwise we’d have been talking about a hell of a lot of weird coincidences. So Fanke murdered Abbie, but Peace—what? I’m a little hazy on this part.”

  “The idea was to do more than just murder her, Basquiat. She was going to be used up, body and soul, to bring the demon Asmodeus onto the mortal plane. But Peace stepped in before Fanke could finish the ritual—broke the circle and took away Abbie’s ghost. Her spirit. That was what Fanke was looking for. And that was what he took away with him after he killed Peace.”

  “So last night’s gig at St. Michael’s was in the nature of an action replay?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “I did call it that, Castor. The question is, what would you call it?”

  “Well, since they both ended in violent fiascos and a lot of dead bodies, I guess ‘action replay’ is as good as anything.”

  Basquiat scowled, clearly not appreciating the beating about the bush. She opened her mouth, but I forestalled her. “Yeah, Fanke was trying to finish what he started. He had the locket with Abbie’s hair in it—the physical anchor for her ghost. He was going to burn it, inside another magic circle. That would have been enough.”

  “But it didn’t happen.”

  “No.”

  “Because—?”

  And that was about as far as I wanted to take it. “There was an interruption,” I said, deadpan. “An all-singing, all-dancing interruption, as I’m sure you know by now. A dozen or so men with machine guns, a couple of loup-garous in a really bad mood, and most of the cast from The Producers over on Drury Lane. I don’t know how many DOAs you ended up with—”

  “Forty-two,” Basquiat threw in quietly.

  “—but I’m sure there were enough to convince you that this wasn’t a one-man show.”

  Basquiat blew out her cheek reflectively. “All these show business metaphors. You got stars in your eyes?”

  “A guy can dream.” I was getting the impression from all this that the detective sergeant’s opinion of me had warmed somewhat. One way or another, she seemed to have decided—like Gwillam, although for very different reasons—that I was on the side of the angels after all.

  But she still had a job to do. She stood up from the edge of the table where she’d been leaning and threw a nod to Field. He flexed his muscles in a way that was frankly threatening for a moment, but all he did was to lift the tape recorder off the floor and set it down in the center of the table.

  “Body count of forty-two,” Basquiat said, sounding apologetic. “I’ve got to do this by the book. But unless you do something stupid like confess, you’ll be out of here sometime tomorrow.”

  Field pressed the record button, so all I could do in reply was nod.

  “Detective Sergeant Basquiat and Detective Constable Field,” Field intoned, “interviewing Felix Castor, Friday, May twelfth, 6:32 a.m.”

  And they did, for the better part of an hour, but on the whole it was friendly fire. A couple of times I almost nodded off. The only time it got edgy was when the talk turned to how I’d gotten out of the secure unit at the Whittington. Two cops had been badly injured in that fracas, and then there was the security guard that Po had taken down. Fortunately, Zucker had stepped in before that particular incident got out of hand. A memory of Po with a satanist’s head between his jaws intervened at this point, and once again I gave thanks to the god I don’t believe in. On top of that there was a lot of property damage and a whole lot of people got the shit scared out of them. But the commando-style operation that Gwillam had mounted at St. Michael’s inclined Basquiat to buy my story that the raid on the hospital had been a kidnapping rather than a rescue, so she wasn’t putting any of that directly down to me.

  When they’d talked me through the past seven days, and I’d unburdened myself of everything I was going to, Field turned off the tape recorder and took out the tape, which he labeled and pocketed. Basquiat headed for the door and hammered on it. She turned back to me as the key turned in the lock and the door opened.

  “Anything I can get you?” she asked.

  “My tin whistle, if you’ve still got it,” I said. “It would be with the stuff I had on me when you arrested me the first time.”

  She pulled a face and shrugged. “What with everything that went down over there, I don’t think it ever got claimed. It must still be there—along with your clothes and everything—but Christ knows where. I don’t have time to go looking for it right now, or anyone I can send.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I can work around it. Thanks for everything, detective sergeant.”

  “Including knocking you on your arse the first time I met you? You’re welcome, Castor. Have a good one.”

  She went out, Field trailing along behind her like a broad-beamed freighter behind a tug. I listened to their footsteps retreat up the corridor, and then to the cell bock door being slid to on its runners.

  Once I was certain they weren’t coming back, I leaned forward and put my hand down inside my sock. It was easy to find the little lock of hair because it had been itching the hell out of me ever since I’d put it down there. It was back in the church, around about the time when the bullets started flying. I threw myself down between the pews while the satanists and Gwillam’s holy crusaders got physical with each other, and I reasoned that this might be a good time for Abbie and the locket to part company. Empty, the locket might be as useful to me as a swinging watch is to a hypnotist: something pretty and shiny that the rubes can look at while you do what you need to do.

  And when Gwillam made his play, I was proved right. I was just lucky that he hadn’t checked the goods before he left—probably because of the approaching sirens.

  As I’ve already said, it’s always easier for me to do my little party trick if I’ve got a tin whistle in my hands. But the whistle is just a channel: the music comes from within me, and I can make it on my own if I have to. Particularly if, as now, I was dealing with a ghost I already knew pretty well.

  Sitting on the edge of the bunk, I closed my eyes and whistled the tune that, for me, had become synonymous with Abbie. I started low and let the sound build as it seemed to want to, gradually but inexorably. The guy in the next cell yelled a protest, but he was outside the infolded loop of reality that joined me to the tune, so whatever he said fell on my ears like an abstract pattern, fell away again in unheeded fragments.

  Abbie materialized in front of me, about a foot above the ground, and so slowly that at first she was like a trick of the light—like one of those accidental objects that can only be seen from one angle when the light falls just right. It wasn’t surprising: after all she’d been through in her life, and then in her death, I could understand her not wanting to be dragged up by her heels one more time. When she saw me, her reluctance became even greater. She fought against my call, fading out into near invisibility time after time, but coming back each time a little more sharply defined, a little more vivid and visible, as my sense of her straightened and I tied the knots of my calling around her soul.

  “Let me go!” she cried, in a thin voice that seemed to come across vast distances. “Let me go!”

  I stopped whistling at last and paused a moment or two to get my breath back. It had been as hard work as any tune I’d ever played, except for one, and I wasn’t up to thinking about Rafi right then.

  “That’s what I intend to do, Abbie,” I assured her. “But first I want to tell you how your dad died. What you missed. So you’ll understand.”

  She was staring at me, her phantom fists clenched in te
nsion and defiance. I told her how the ambush at the Oriflamme had played out, and how Dennis Peace had died defending her against her wicked stepfather. She didn’t look as though she believed me—but then the last two times she’d seen me it had been standing right alongside Fanke in circumstances that stank up to heaven.

  Then I told her about the church, and why I’d put my hand into the fire. I showed her my burned fingers to prove my point, and I think perhaps she did believe me then. At any rate she forgot her hate and fear and grieved for her father, with dry eyes because ghosts can’t cry. Sometimes they can mimic tears they cried in life, but they have no moisture of their own.

  “Perhaps you’ll see him again,” I told her, offering her the only crumb of consolation I could think of. “If there’s something after this life, and after this death, then I bet he’ll find you there if anybody can. He hasn’t let anything stop him so far.”

  She didn’t respond. Turning slightly as though in a wind I couldn’t feel, she cast her eyes around the narrow confines of the cell. It wasn’t the first prison she’d seen in her brief, constricted life: with any luck, though, it would be the last.

  I started to whistle again. Not the summoning this time, and not the exorcism, but the unbinding. I whistled the notes that would set her free from the lock of hair to go where she would, unmolested by the Fankes and Gwillams of this sublunary sinkhole.

  But she didn’t leave. I guess there wasn’t anywhere she could think of to go, anywhere where she would have felt safe, or wanted. The only man who had ever loved her or tried to make her happy was dead. She could go back to the Oriflamme and wait for him there, but not everyone rises, and when they do you can’t always tell where they’ll go. It was a long shot. All that was left to her now was long shots.

  I thought through the options. You don’t get to have a happy ending when you’re dead: this was just damage limitation, nothing more.

  “Good-bye, Abbie,” I said, standing up and shifting my ground to face east. Not toward Mecca: toward somewhere else entirely, on the other side of the city. “Good-bye, and good luck. I hope it all works out for you.”

  I whistled again, a tune I hadn’t played for a good long while now: “Henry Martin.” An electric prickle played down my arms to the tips of my fingers.

  The Charles Stanger clinic was a good few miles away, but ghosts—when they travel at all—aren’t limited to light speed. All the same, I’d gotten through two complete renditions of the song and well into the third before I felt their presence stealing upon me, approaching on some vector that had nothing to do with north, south, east, or west. I didn’t look around. I felt, in some weird way, as though the dead girls might not take to Abbie if they saw me talking to her, as though the taint of the living might cling to her and make her seem alien to them.

  There was a whispering of sound that had no words in it I could make out. Then there was silence, and the silence lengthened. The feeling of their nearness faded from me, leaving behind a more acute awareness of how cold the stone was under my stockinged feet, and how stale the air smelled.

  When the last echoes of the tune had died from the air and from my mind, I turned around again.

  I was alone in the cell—and more tired than I’d ever been.

  Twenty-four

  BASQUIAT WAS AS GOOD AS HER WORD. THE CHARGES WERE dropped and I was released back onto the street in the middle of Saturday afternoon. The clothes I’d left at the Whittington hadn’t turned up, though, so I was still stuck in the natty outfit I’d taken from Sallis. It was smelling even riper than when I inherited it.

  The first thing I did was to go out to Walthamstow and check on Nicky, because I didn’t believe Fanke’s bland assurances that his cultists had left my favorite dead man in one piece. But Nicky was none the worse for wear, and even inclined to be a little smug—even though most of the cinema apart from his inner sanctum up in the projection booth had been comprehensively trashed.

  “See, Castor,” he said, “I got everything here insured eight ways from Sunday, and I already put in the claims—through proxy companies, naturally; got to keep that footprint small. Anyway, I’m gonna build it up again ten times better. I mean, fuck air-conditioning. I’ve got a freezer on order from a place in Germany that fits out hospital morgues. You’re not gonna know this place.”

  I looked at the outside of the projection booth’s door. The wood had been split with axes or crowbars—but all that had done was to reveal the metal underneath.

  “It must have been a hell of a siege,” I said.

  Nicky shrugged, some of his good mood evaporating. “Yeah, it was fucking scary, all right. I had to watch while they smashed everything up. Then they spotted the cameras and took them out, so I couldn’t even do that. It was . . . I dunno . . . like having scabies, or something, like watching little insects crawling around under your fucking skin.

  “Hey, I’m sorry about your friend. You know that, right? If there’d been anything I could’ve done, then I would’ve done it. They brought fucking blowtorches in, for Christ’s sake. Nothing to stop them, once they had me shut in up here. I tried to call you again when they took her, but by that time they’d brought one of those phone jammers in, so all I got was static.”

  He hesitated, as if realizing belatedly that he should have covered this part of the conversation first. “So is she okay?”

  “Juliet?”

  “Ajulutsikael. Don’t anthropomorphize her. That’ll get you in trouble somewhere down the line.”

  “Doesn’t the use of a female pronoun already anthropomorphize her?” I asked.

  Nicky scowled. “Anyone who can give a dead man an erection has earned that pronoun, Castor. Consider it an honorific.”

  “She’s fine, Nicky. Thanks for asking. Back to her old self by this time, I’m sure.”

  “And my payment? You know, the five questions?” He looked at me hopefully.

  I shrugged. “All I can do is ask her. The deal was that you’d keep her safe, Nicky. She may take the view that you’re in breach of contract.”

  “Breach of—?” He flared up. “Hey, I was invaded, Castor. I kept my part of the deal, ten times over.”

  He had a point. I said I’d get back to him, and left him choosing thermostatic valves out of a catalog. They’ve got some really nice ones these days.

  * * *

  At Pen’s, to my far from huge surprise, I found all my worldly goods stacked up out in the driveway. I tried my key in the lock and it didn’t fit. Quick work, under the circumstances.

  I rang the bell, and Pen’s sister Antoinette answered. She folded her arms in a no pasaran stance, which she does pretty well despite being only an inch or so taller than Pen. She’s got Pen’s coloring, too, but she went into politics, stood for local councillor, lost three times, and got herself a hatchet face that never cracks a smile.

  “Hey, Tony,” I said. “Can I talk to her?”

  “If she wanted to talk to you, Castor, she wouldn’t have changed the locks.”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “Because I don’t want to have to talk her down from another round of hysterics. Why don’t you e-mail her?”

  “No computer.”

  “Heliograph, then.”

  I looked up at the heavy overcast sky. Antoinette did, too.

  “Looks like you’re fucked,” she observed, and closed the door.

  * * *

  Over at the Stanger, Rafi was under deep sedation after smashing his head against the door of his cell until he left half of his face on it. He’d recover, of course: Asmodeus was back in residence, so he once again had a strong interest in making sure his home away from home was kept in good order.