by Mike Carey
Trudie was staring at me as though she was waiting for me to speak. ‘Thanks,’ I said awkwardly. ‘I did need to know about that stuff, and I appreciate you telling me.’
That seemed to exasperate her. ‘Oh you’re very fucking welcome,’ she said, throwing out her hands. The tourists looked across at us from their table, startled at her loud imprecation. When you’re having a cheap holiday in someone else’s death, you don’t expect to hear bad language. ‘Castor,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘whatever you think of me – of my opinions – you have to see that we’re on the same side in this one thing. We were both there. We both helped to set Asmodeus free because somebody else lied to us and tricked us.’
She leaned in closer to me, not for intimacy’s sake this time but because she’d realised she needed to lower her voice. ‘So you feel dirty? Compromised? Played? Well, snap. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I went straight from the Anathemata to the MOU – because there wasn’t anywhere else I could go, if I still wanted to be in this fight. I’m going to do what I came for, which is to put that monster back in its cage. And I’m doing that whether you help me or hinder me or blank me or sabotage me, or whatever the hell you choose to do. But I think if we trust each other we might get further.’
She didn’t wait for an answer this time: she was too angry and too full of the restless energy the memories had stirred up. She downed her second whisky in a single swallow, grabbed her bag and walked, leaving me to it.
She was right, of course. We were both enemy agents, in effect, in the monolithic structure of the MOU, and we’d be a lot more effective if we were prepared to at least watch each other’s backs.
It was a big if, though. It was a very big if.
10
Walthamstow High Street hosts the longest street market in Europe. It’s a proud boast, but it’s also one that’s worded with legalistic precision: it’s not the biggest market, just the longest. It’s a market shaped like a bootlace, in other words, stretching from Hoe Street in the east practically all the way down to Coppermill Lane in the west. By day it’s an ever-running river of people moving to the fractal music of a thousand shouted conversations.
At this time of night though, it was just me and the ghosts.
I’d had to take another cab – no choice, so long after the last train – but I’d asked the cabbie to drop me at Blackhorse Road Tube station so I could walk the last mile or so on foot and clear my head a little. It was a good idea in principle, but it didn’t work out all that well. The air was muggy, and heavy with a pre-thunderous load of unshed rain. There was a faint luminosity in the air, like the glow of a false dawn, although that was still a good few hours away. Around the railway bridge at the top of Vernon Street the ghosts of suicides clustered, a voiceless choir waiting for a cue that would never come. I felt like I was walking in the bulb at the bottom of a barometer: all those hundreds of miles of atmosphere, pressing down on me with a precisely calibrated intensity. One life, one load, one size fits all.
My bed was calling me, but Nicky – like rust – never sleeps, and we had a lot to talk about. This was a good time; I wasn’t going to let it slip just because I was tired. You can come out through the far end of tired into a productive if slightly dangerous place. I knew how that felt and I was consciously searching for it, even though it seldom comes when it’s looked for.
The street was twice as wide at night as it is by day, because none of the pitches are permanent. All the stall-holders pack their goods and their booths back up into a million white vans and depart with the setting sun, an east London caravanserai wending its way across the border into Essex, which for most of these wide boys is both physical and spiritual home.
But as I passed Manze’s pie and mash shop, I saw there was one stall still out, probably in violation of a hundred local by-laws. A few steps closer, and I recognised the stall-holder as Nicky. Only it was Nicky dressed as Del-Boy, in a herringbone jacket and a black shirt with a white yoke and collar.
He had a good pitch, as far as that went. Close to Sainsbury’s, which guarantees more passing trade than you can handle, and on a corner, which is always an advantage in terms of display space. What he didn’t have was any stock, or – this being four in the morning – any customers. He was showing off his bare trestle tables to me and the man in the moon.
‘Hey, Nicky,’ I said, as I drew level with him.
‘Hey, Castor.’ He didn’t look up from what he was doing, which was measuring the interior space of the stall and the dimensions of the three display tables with a tape measure.
‘So, may I politely enquire what the fuck?’ I asked him.
‘Give me a minute,’ Nicky said distractedly.
I waited while he paced up and down, applying the tape measure to every straight line available. He wasn’t writing anything down, but I knew he didn’t need to. Death hadn’t done anything to impair Nicky’s scarily efficient memory; if anything it had cleared his mind of a lot of distractions.
Finally he wound the tape measure around his hand – making me think momentarily of Trudie and her cat’s cradles – and slid it into his pocket. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’m done here. You want to help me pack all this stuff up?’ He pointed to a large, battered Bedford van standing with its doors open on the other side of the road.
‘You don’t think it’s worth hanging on for a few more minutes?’ I asked. ‘Trade’s bound to pick up once the word-of-mouth starts working.’
Nicky gave me a tired look. ‘Trial run,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see how much space these things give you.’
‘Why?’
‘Why the hell do you think, Castor?’ He started to fold up the tables as he spoke. ‘I’m going into business.’
I stared at him blankly. It was actually about the least likely explanation I could think of for this nocturnal ramble. ‘Selling what?’ I demanded.
‘DVDs. VHS tapes. Videodiscs. Actual film prints. Hard-to-get stuff in a variety of formats. In fact that’s probably going to be the name of the stall: Hard-to-Get.’
He was starting to fold down the stall’s marquee, which is a two-man job. Mechanically I stepped in to help. ‘But Nicky,’ I pointed out as tactfully as I could, ‘the market’s only open during the day.’
‘I know that.’
‘Whereas you’re kind of a nocturnal life form, give or take. Plus you just flat-out hate people. You think two’s a crowd.’
‘Thanks, Castor. Believe it or not, these things had not slipped my mind.’
‘Fine. Just checking.’
Nicky laid a bundle of scaffolding legs in a canvas bag, one at a time, where a living man might just have thrown them all in at once and taken a chance on the odd ricochet. You didn’t last long as a zombie if you were cavalier with your mortal remains – and when it came to longevity, Nicky intended to break all known records. ‘I’m buying a lot of stuff,’ he said, ‘and sometimes to get the stuff I want I have to buy a lot of shit I can’t use.’
‘So wouldn’t A Lot of Shit I Can’t Use be a more accurate name for the stall?’
He didn’t rise to the bait. ‘Maybe. We’ll see how it pans out. Anyway, the point is, selling this stuff helps me finance my own hobby. It cost a lot to get the Gaumont up and running again. Defraying the expense seemed like a good idea.’
‘Seriously, Nicky, how are you going to get around the going bad and stinking problem? You keep yourself chilled for a reason.’
He stuffed some canvas in on top of the ironmongery. He’d folded it quickly and expertly to the dimensions of the bag, which zipped shut with military precision. I had the sudden suspicion that he’d practised erecting and dismantling the stall in the auditorium at the Gaumont before bringing it out onto the street. ‘I thought about it,’ he said. ‘A lot. The truth is, Castor, unless I can find someone who can do for me what the Ice-Maker was doing, I’m gonna start falling apart sooner rather than later.’
‘You said there’s a guy in the Midlands somewh
ere . . .’
‘Yeah. There was, when I said it. Now there’s a pile of ashes in the garden of rest at Walsall Crematorium. He got cancer. Died last month. And he seems to have decided against bodily resurrection as an option for his own future.’
I hefted one of the bags. ‘So?’ I prompted. ‘Doesn’t that mean it’s even more of a bad idea for you to spend any time at room temperature?’
Nicky gave me a stony look. ‘Actually, what it means is that I’m just prolonging the inevitable. Which is probably what I was doing anyway, with or without the Ice-Maker. This just brought it home to me. Yeah, I can stay in the deep freeze the whole time, last another six months, maybe a year. Then take my chances when I hit the wall.
‘Or alternatively I can try coming at the problem from a different angle. Like I said, I’ve been thinking about it. The way I look at it, life is like matter and energy: it can’t be destroyed, it can only be transformed. So my working plan right now is that I’m going to see this body out and then maybe rethink my options.’
That proposition stopped me in my tracks. Nicky hadn’t got to be the longest-lived zombie in the known world by taking unnecessary risks; he’d done it by clinging stubbornly to what he had and what he knew, and advancing into the void one tentative, begrudged step at a time. This sort of thinking was way out of character for him.
‘What options, exactly?’ I demanded.
Nicky fiddled with the zip fastener on one of the bags, his expression turning a little shifty. ‘I’ve been out,’ he said.
‘Out?’ I echoed, but I already knew what he meant.
‘Out of the flesh. I tried it a few times right after I died, and got nowhere. Now . . . it isn’t even hard. I decide to do it, and it’s done. Suddenly I’m looking at the back of my own head or more usually looking down from on top like my body’s an actor in a show and the real me is up in the dress circle, watching. I guess it’s a skill you just pick up as you go along.’
Or else, I thought, this was another piece of evidence that the world’s coefficients were shifting, tumbling us all – whether we liked it or not – out of our comfort zones into the infinite.
‘So yeah,’ Nicky summarised. ‘I know the ejector seat’s working, after all. That makes me feel a little bit more relaxed about letting the bodywork get all messed up. I’m gonna survive, Castor. Whatever the Hell happens to this meat. Knowing that changes the way you look at things.’
I didn’t answer because I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound either banal or apocalyptic. We carried the dismantled stall over to the van. Such was Nicky’s precision that it only took two trips. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Okay, I got some stuff for you. You want it here or back at the movie house?’
Neither alternative seemed all that attractive. The night was a curdled bowl, but the Gaumont would be as frigid as a tomb. I went for the bird-in-the-hand option. ‘I’ll take it now,’ I said, ‘unless you need help unpacking at the other end.’
‘It can stay in the van. Okay, you asked me whether Ditko had any living relatives. The answer is one, and counting.’
He fished in the pocket of his jacket and handed me a folded sheet of paper. I took it and opened it up, but the light from the street lamps wasn’t good enough to read Nicky’s crabbed handwriting.
‘A brother,’ he summarised. ‘Name of Jovan.’
Tell my father . . . and Jovan . . . tell them I’m sorry. Do that for me. Please.
‘So where is he?’ I asked.
‘In FYROM.’
‘In what?’
‘The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. It’s a place. In Europe. You’ve just got the address there, no phone number or email. That’s all she wrote. Apart from Rafael, this is the last Ditko in the known universe. And if you want to talk to him, I suggest you move fast.’
‘Why’s that, Nicky?’
He flicked a corner of the paper with his thumbnail. ‘Because the address is death row, Irdrizovo Prison. He killed a guy, the cops caught him, and now he’s all out of appeals. Near as I can tell, the execution is going to be the day after tomorrow unless there’s a last-minute pardon.’
I carried on looking at him expectantly. He shrugged, deadpan. ‘What?’
‘It’s just a little barebones for you,’ I said. ‘It’s not that I’m not grateful. It just seems like . . . maybe . . . you left a stone unturned for once in your life.’
‘Yeah? Like what, for instance?’
‘Like “He killed a guy”?’
‘Well there’s more, but it’s ugly and would it help you to know? Irdrizovo is one fucking big oubliette. They’re not gonna let you see him. And they’re not gonna pardon him. That’s not the way the system works. But if you insist on wading in, there’s another name on there, and a telephone number. Jovan’s defence lawyer. Maybe you could get some questions to him somehow. Have to be fast, though.’
I slipped the paper into my pocket. ‘Thanks, Nicky. What else?’
Nicky feigned surprise. ‘That isn’t enough? Too bad. On the magic circle front, things are not going so well. The other one you sent me – you found it close to the first?’
‘Nowhere near,’ I said. ‘The first was at Pen’s place, the second was at Juliet’s.’
Nicky grimaced. ‘Would it surprise you to know that there was a third?’ he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he delved into his pocket, came up with a flat stone very like the two I’d already found. He flicked it into the air and I caught it at the height of its arc.
I opened my fist and examined it. It looked identical to the others, except that once more there was a different set of symbols at the heart of the pentagram. Four again, as with the stone I’d found at Pen’s.
‘Where’d you get it?’ I demanded.
‘Where do you think?’ Nicky countered. It was a fair question: it wasn’t as though he had a jet-setting lifestyle.
‘At your place.’
‘Up on the roof. So what’s the common denominator?’
I didn’t bother to ask him what he was doing up on the roof. Nicky is the kind of paranoiac who other paranoiacs feel should lighten up a little. I didn’t bother to answer his question, either, because it was clearly meant to be rhetorical.
‘They’re all in London,’ I mused.
Nicky rolled his eyes. ‘Yeah, right. Well done. What are you waiting for? Until you find one shoved up your arse? They’re aimed at you, Castor.’
‘Maybe,’ I allowed. ‘Maybe not. But yeah, so far I’m the common denominator.’
‘The first one was in Pen’s drive?’ Nicky demanded.
‘Yeah,’ I confirmed. And what was it that was scratching at the back door of my mind as I said that, begging to be let in? Whatever it was, it was playing games with me, because when I opened the door there was nothing there.
‘Second?’
‘Sue Book’s garden.’
‘And the third was tucked in behind my satellite dish. So whoever it was didn’t come inside any at any point. Suggesting maybe they couldn’t, because they’re dead or undead and don’t like to get tangled up in whatever wards are on the buildings. Anyway, they’re all summonings, and they’re all done in the same style. I was right about that much.’
‘All petitioning the same entity? This Tlallik?’
‘No. As I’m sure you noticed, all three of them carry different names. So now, in addition to Tlallik we’ve got demons named Ket and Jetaniul. And I can’t find word one about any of them.’
‘Nothing?’ I was both amazed and disconcerted.
‘Almost nothing,’ Nicky qualified. ‘There’s a passage in Foivel Grazimir’s Enaxeteleuton that includes Tlallik, but the context makes it completely useless. Crazy Foivel is talking about demons that are worth dealing with as opposed to demons that aren’t. I could do it from memory, but here.’
He’d taken a second, much larger sheet of paper from the same pocket, which he unfolded now before handing it to me with a ceremonial flourish.
‘You can transliterate though, right? Look.’ He ran his finger down the right-hand side of the page. ‘Agathonou. Dyspex. Idionel. Tlallik.’
‘Yeah, but what is that? Grazimir’s Christmas card list?’
‘Probably not, Castor. He was Jewish. I can give you the rough sense of it. He’s been saying “bespeak this name for wealth” and “this demon can set you up with some female company for the weekend”. Then he goes “but you must know from lore, or else learn it by hard experiment, that some names thought to be potent don’t do Jack shit” – I’m paraphrasing, you understand – “so call not on these, for though they be of great renown and great power, they don’t pick up when you call”.’
I pondered this, looking down the list for some other names I recognised. There weren’t any.
‘Grazimir is writing when?’ I asked.
‘Thirteenth century. About the same time as Honorius and Ghayat al-Hakim.’
‘So, way early?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And he’s got Tlallik pegged as a has-been.’
‘Exactly. And as far as I can tell, none of the high medievals mention him at all. Whoever drew those circles, Castor, they’re either dipping into some very old magic or else they’re so far behind the curve they’re staring up their own arseholes.’
I breathed out heavily – almost a sigh – and tucked the list into my pocket along with Jovan Ditko’s contact details. ‘Thanks again,’ I said. ‘Feel like adding another chore to the list?’
‘Not so much.’
‘It’s an easy one.’
‘Then try me. But don’t be surprised if I tell you to go fuck yourself. I’ve got a new line of business now; I don’t have to worry so much about pissing you off.’
‘Like you ever did. I need some information about a place. An area of London.’ I told him about Super-Self, and what I’d seen there. He listened in silence until I got to the part with the ghosts in the swimming pool.