by Mike Carey
The Tube is a good place for me to think, usually. Very few people die on trains, and when you’re moving fast you don’t pick up emotional resonances from the landscape around you. Radio Death wasn’t broadcasting. I was alone with my thoughts. The trouble was, my thoughts were a sea of turbulent shit.
Asmodeus was still out there, and he was hunting. Not just me, but everyone who’d ever meant anything to Rafi at any point in his life. He’d decided to celebrate his independence with a murder spree, starting (I had to hope it was starting) with Ginny Parris, the woman who’d played midwife when he was born again into Rafi’s flesh, and with me, the one who’d welded him in good and tight once he was there.
In a way, it could work in my favour. If I had a plan, I could use myself as bait: bring the demon in close and then spring some kind of trap. But I didn’t have a plan and I had no idea what form that trap might take.
It was maddening. There was a tune out there somewhere that would do the job, I knew that. I’d even heard it once, when Asmodeus himself played it for me in Imelda’s parlour on the night she died. But then he’d done a number on me before I had a chance to get my whistle to my mouth. That space in my memory no longer existed. When I replayed the events of that night, there was just a hole where the tune ought to be, a wound in my mind that wouldn’t heal.
But even if I found the tune, or reconstructed it, how in hell would I ever get to use it? If I summoned Asmodeus or got in close enough for him to be bound by the music, he’d tear me into sticky confetti before I got to the end of the first bar. Maybe with Juliet to run interference for me I’d have a fighting chance, but somehow this didn’t seem like a good time to ask her.
That left Jenna-Jane’s offer. My mind did a handbrake turn and shot off down a side street into places no less dark.
What was eating Juliet? Over the past couple of years she’d perfected her ‘nobody here but us human beings’ act to the point where you could almost forget what she was and mistake her for just another unfeasibly beautiful woman whose very existence impugned your manhood and left you feeling hollow and worthless. But now she was as bad as when she first came up on the express elevator from Hell, maybe worse. She’d sworn never to take another soul, but tonight I’d felt about three heartbeats away from oblivion. And those eyes . . . This wasn’t the Juliet I knew. And I didn’t like the glow-in-the-dark model one bit.
I was meant to be heading home, that was what I was telling myself. But somehow, without ever making an actual decision, I found myself taking the Northern Line and getting out at Archway. Whittington’s Hospital is a short walk back up Highgate Hill, its new frontage looking cool and suave in white and blue.
Visiting hours must have wrapped up long ago, but nobody challenged me as I walked in off the street. Running the gauntlet of the restless dead for the second time in one day, I made my way to the coma ward. Once there though, I was faced with a locked door. Access to the ward was determined by a buzzer and intercom system - or in my case by waiting until an inattentive nurse came out and walked past me, then catching the door again before it swung closed.
Lisa Probert was in a side ward, by herself. A single bouquet of white lilies stood at the foot of the bed, in a plastic bucket serving as a makeshift vase. She looked worse than I remembered - she’d always been a big, loud-mouthed, sassy kid - unconscious, tied up with tubes and gauze, fed by drips and drained by catheters. She’d already lost enough body mass for it to show. She looked like a bird that had crashed into a kitchen window and fallen half-broken to the ground. On the dark skin below her eyes, which were only three-quarters closed, darker semicircles showed like bruises. Her lips glistened with gelatine, but the skin was dry and cracked just the same.
I sat beside her for a while, listening to her. I can do this with the living as well as the dead: open the doors of perception and catch the spoor of some immaterial essence, a soul or atman or whatever you want to call it, distilled into music. Lisa’s music was a riotous polyphonic jumble. Its strength didn’t depend on the strength of her body, and it didn’t correlate in any direct way with what she was like as a person. It was just there, propagating outward from her at an acute angle to the world we know.
When I had the music fixed in my head, I took out my whistle and started to play it. It sounds stupid, but it’s been known to work. I did it for Juliet once, when she was almost killed in a fight against the demon Moloch, and the tune had given her strength. It’s the summoning, essentially: the first part of an exorcism, when you raise the spirit up and make it attend you. I was calling Lisa back into herself, or trying to. But after ten or fifteen minutes of playing she hadn’t moved and there was no visible difference in her condition.
‘Could you please tell me what you’re doing here.’ The voice yanked me out of the half-trance I sink into when I play. I looked up to see a ruddy-faced man in a white doctor’s coat standing over me. The badge on his chest read DR SULLIVAN. He didn’t look happy.
‘The door was open,’ I lied. ‘I’m Felix Castor. I made the call to the emergency services the night Lisa was brought in here. I think you’ve got me down as next of kin.’
The doctor’s expression changed, but it didn’t soften. ‘Oh,’ he grunted. ‘That’s you, is it? We’ve tried to contact you a dozen times.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve been away.’ It was as good an explanation as any - as good as I felt like giving him, anyway. ‘I understand you want me to sign some permissions.’
‘We did,’ Doctor Sullivan corrected me. ‘But we decided we couldn’t wait any longer. Since Lisa has no living relatives, we were able to have her declared a ward of court. It went through yesterday, in your absence since you didn’t respond to the court summons.’ I remembered the large brown envelope on Pen’s hall table. ‘So there’s nothing more we need from you now, Mr Castor, and your visiting rights are at my discretion. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’
‘I’d prefer to stay a while,’ I said. ‘I’ll stop playing, if that will make a difference.’ What I meant was that I’d hum under my breath. The tin whistle is a conduit for the power and helps to keep it focused, but it’s not an essential part of the process.
‘It won’t,’ said Doctor Sullivan. ‘I’m asking you to leave right now. If you refuse, I’ll call security.’
I weighed up the pros and cons, found that there weren’t any pros. If I pissed this guy off, he could shut me out of here altogether. I had to be meek and mild now if I wanted to come back another time and try this stunt again.
‘Visiting hours,’ I said. ‘When would they be?’
‘Two o’clock until eight o’clock, seven days a week.’ He remained in the doorway of the room, staring in at me. He obviously wasn’t going to leave before I did. He didn’t seem to trust me to find my own way out.
I gave it up, and let him escort me to the door. ‘Is she responding at all?’ I asked him on the way. ‘Has there been any change in her condition?’
‘None,’ he said bluntly.
‘And . . . the prognosis . . . ?’
‘It’s too early to say. There are lots of different physical and psychological mechanisms that can induce this kind of extreme fugue. Until we understand the aetiology of Lisa’s condition, we can only treat the symptoms.’
‘The aetiology? She saw her mother murdered . . .’
‘And that was certainly a factor. Probably the dominant factor. But we can’t assume it’s the only one, and we’re not in the habit of prescribing treatment on the basis of unsupported opinion.’ He went on talking about brain chemistry and traumatic shock, but I’d stopped listening because something had begun niggling at the back of my mind. Since Lisa has no living relatives . . .
I stopped dead in my tracks. ‘Who left the flowers?’ I demanded.
‘What?’ Doctor Sullivan looked mystified.
‘The lilies!’ I didn’t wait for an answer. I was already striding back down the corridor and into the small room where Lisa lay. ‘M
r Castor!’ the doctor yelled at my back. ‘I’m calling security! I’m doing it right now.’
There was a note with the flowers, in a white envelope about three inches square, but since Lisa couldn’t read it, nobody had bothered to open it. It was still tucked into the white ribbon that bound the stems of the flowers together. Lilies. White lilies for the dead.
The card inside the envelope bore a bloody thumbprint and ten words written in a tortured, angular hand so large that they filled the available space and in places overlapped each other.
I haven’t forgotten her. All things in their place.
A
7
I remember a game we used to play as kids at school, a conceptual game which consisted of endless variations on the same question. If it was a choice between doing X or dying, which would you do? X might be buggering a dog, or killing your mum, or pissing in the communion wine. Usually the game started with stuff like that and then veered slowly but inexorably into even more fantastical waters. If it was a choice between having a third eyeball or dying, which would you do? If you were stuck on a tiny rock in the middle of outer space and it was a choice between eating a bucket of cockroaches or starving to death, which would you do? The fun part was comparing answers and picking holes in each other’s code of ethics. We all knew that some things were so bad that dying was preferable, but we didn’t always agree on what they were. You’d be amazed, for example, how many people found the cockroach diet a sticking point. I always said I’d tuck right in. I suspect that when it comes to the crunch, if I can put it that way, most people would.
But here I was, standing on the lonely heights of my own personal moral watershed. And I was frozen like a rabbit in headlights, dazzled by the appalling vista that presented itself on either hand.
Asmodeus had made it clear that he wasn’t going to stop until everyone who knew Rafi was dead. The Anathemata could stop him, I was pretty sure, but they’d kill Rafi in the process - then go to confession, have their sins washed away and go out on the razzle.
Somewhere in the middle was Jenna-Jane Mulbridge. The devil at the crossroads.
The phone rang three times. The static on the line sounded like claws scratching at the bottom of a door: something scrabbling to be let in, or out.
Jenna-Jane picked up on the fourth ring. ‘Hello?’
‘I’m calling your bluff,’ I said.
‘Felix!’ That same tone of simple and sincere delight that she always used whenever I was dragged kicking and thrashing back into her life. ‘You left so suddenly this afternoon, I was afraid I’d offended you.’
It was a tempting phrase, just hanging there in the crackling void. But there was no point taking the cheap shots, not if I was dining from the à la carte menu. ‘You’ve been after Asmodeus for years,’ I said. ‘We do it my way, and I promise you, you’ll get him. Yes or no. Which is it going to be?’
‘That’s not something you can guarantee, Felix,’ Jenna-Jane chided me, using another tone I knew well from times past - the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger one. ‘From my point of view, you’re asking me to divert a lot of the resources of my department into a hunt that might not bear any fruit at all. I’m asking you, in return, to shore up those resources by offering me your own professional services - not in the longer term, but just while this operation is in progress. Just until we have Asmodeus under restraint.’
I laughed in spite of myself. ‘You make that sound so reasonable!’ I said. ‘My professional services. Who do you want me to entrap, Jenna-Jane? Who do you want me to destroy? I mean, give it a name. Let me know exactly how much I’m going to hate myself in the morning.’
Jenna-Jane sighed a little theatrically. ‘I can accommodate your scruples, Felix,’ she said, like a waitress confirming that the restaurant did indeed have a vegetarian option. ‘You wouldn’t be required to do anything that made you feel uneasy or compromised.’
‘What, you want me to sweep the floors? Make the coffee?’
‘I want you to investigate a situation and then advise on it.’
‘What kind of situation?’ I felt like I was sniffing around the outline of a bear trap only half-hidden among the leaves on the forest floor.
‘A haunting.’
‘You’ve already got exorcists, Jenna-Jane. You’ve got an army of exorcists. Why not get one of them to advise you?’
‘I’ve put several of them onto this case already. None of them has been able to account for it or eradicate it.’
‘I don’t do eradications any more.’
‘So I’ve heard. But you do offer spiritual services.’ She said the words with a slightly ironic emphasis. It was what the sign on my office door said: FELIX CASTOR, SPIRITUAL SERVICES. I felt it covered enough sins to give me a running start.
‘Question stands,’ I said. ‘Why me?’
‘Because we’ve hit a stone wall, frankly. And this is a new phenomenon, in some ways. It’s something I want to have explained to me, Felix, and that’s what you’d be offering me: an explanation.’
‘And you’d be offering me . . . ?’
‘You know the answer to that. That’s why you came to me in the first place. Oh, we’d pay you, of course. Initially you’d be on a probationary contract. The term for that is usually a week or a month, but given our past history, perhaps we should review your progress after the first three days. Your stipend for those three days would be at an emergency rate of a hundred pounds a day, after tax. But that isn’t the issue, is it? I have an equipment and skills base uniquely suited to finding and capturing Asmodeus. Alive. Intact. With a minimum of damage to the host body he’s currently using. I can get you your friend back, in other words. I can bring Rafael Ditko back into some kind of secure and stable environment. I may even be able to excise the thing that’s living in him.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.
If it was a choice between working for Jenna-Jane Mulbridge or eating a bucket of cockroaches, which would you do?
I wasn’t kidding anyone but myself. I called her back about two hours later, which at least gave me the satisfaction of waking her up after she’d gone to bed, and spat out the two words that would make everything else happen, for good or bad.
‘I’m in.’
‘Excellent,’ said Jenna-Jane briskly. ‘So happy to have you back, Felix. ‘It’s like old times.’
I could only cross my fingers and hope that she was wrong.
Pen had already retired to bed when I let myself in, or at least all the lights were out, and there was no sound either from the basement or from her first-floor bedroom. I trudged up the remaining two flights of stairs, lay down on the bed with good intentions about getting undressed and getting under the covers, and was dragged down immediately into an exhausted sleep.
There were dreams, but they were of the kind you always get when you’re so tired you’re almost sick with it: fragmentary, repetitive, meaningless, anchored more in formless feelings than in comprehensible images. The dominant feeling was urgency - the sense of something important that I’d forgotten and still needed to do. I stumbled from one half-imagined scenario into another, locking and bolting doors, looking for car keys, turning off gas rings, but the feeling persisted. If anything, it got worse. Music was playing somewhere: a tune I knew and really didn’t like at all. It sounded something like a waltz played backwards, the notes of the violins sucking themselves up into a dimensionless point and disappearing into themselves instead of expanding and reverberating. A waltz from Hell. I knew bad things would happen if I danced to it.
I woke an hour or maybe two hours later, in pitch dark. The music was still there, playing not in the air but in my mind. Something dead or unborn was nearby, and I knew its pattern as well as I knew my own face in the mirror.
I got out of bed, crossed to the window and looked out.
He was standing at the bottom of the drive, his gaze fixed on the front door of the house. Absolutely motionless, his arms at his sides, he was a dar
ker stain on the fabric of the night.
‘Asmodeus,’ I murmured.
As though he’d heard me, he raised his head and looked up at my window. I couldn’t see his eyes but I could feel his stare like a physical pressure against the surface of my skin.
I kicked off my shoes, shrugged my greatcoat on and walked back down to the front hall, taking care to make no sound as I passed Pen’s room. I unlocked the street door, feeling the skin between my shoulder blades prickle even though I knew rationally that the door - as a physical barrier - made no difference to whether or not Asmodeus could enter the house. It was Pen’s wards that were keeping him out, and nothing else.
Asmodeus was still standing in the same place, and he was still staring up at the window under the eaves where I’d been standing a minute before.
Mindful of what Pen had said about seeding the garden with stay-nots, I took a calculated risk and walked out onto the front step - two paces away from the house, then three. Asmodeus still didn’t move, but I didn’t take my eyes off him for a second. If he did attack, I wanted to be sure I could put the door - which Pen had blessed and anointed and talked to and generally strengthened with her own will every day for the past six or seven years - between us before he got in close enough to do me any damage.
‘The three stars in a row,’ I said, ‘that’s Orion’s belt.’
Asmodeus turned slightly to look at the constellation, which was right above us. He nodded.
‘Really?’ he demanded, in a grating, metal-on-metal voice.
‘Really.’
‘Well you know what that means, Castor.’