by Mike Carey
‘Juliet, you can’t hunt tonight. I can’t let you.’
‘You can’t stop me,’ she said with dead finality.
‘I know,’ I acknowledged. ‘So give me a break, and don’t make me die trying. Go home to Sue. Have a quiet night in. Remind yourself what you’ve got to lose.’
‘Fuck you, Castor.’
‘Again?’ I made my tone astonished and outraged. ‘Are you insatiable, woman?’
In spite of herself, she laughed. But the feeble joke was a challenge too, and the word ‘woman’ gave her the benefit of the doubt.
‘I’ll go home,’ she agreed. ‘But tomorrow . . .’
‘Tomorrow we’ll figure something out.’
She nodded without conviction. Then she turned her back and walked away from me down the Strand. A staggering cluster of drunks on the opposite side of the street shouted out some sort of sleazy invitation to her, and I tensed, ready to intervene if necessary. But Juliet didn’t even seem to see them. Head down and shoulders squared, she marched on into the hot, breathless night.
Back in Turnpike Lane, paranoia still sitting like a monkey on my back, I reconnoitred thoroughly before approaching Pen’s door. Asmodeus had promised to leave me until last, but I knew exactly how much his word was worth.
I didn’t see or sense any sign of the demon’s presence, or any clue that he’d been there while I was away. In another way though, I felt myself surrounded and crowded by him. What he was doing wasn’t random - I knew that much. Behind the casual malevolence there was something much more calculating and purposeful, and much more threatening.
I let myself in quietly. I heard voices from downstairs, Pen’s basement sanctum, which surprised me, but only until I heard the laugh track. She’d fallen asleep in front of a repeat of some ancient sitcom, snoring away on the sofa while Reg Varney and Michael Robbins traded accusations of sexual dysfunction without ever using the word ‘penis’. I sat down next to her and stared at the screen while the flaccid shenanigans played themselves out. In a way it helped me to think, if only because thinking distracted me from On the Buses.
There was a way through this maze. It just meant figuring out where Asmodeus was going so I could get there first. Of course, I also had to get myself a secret weapon to use when I got there, because a tin whistle wasn’t going to do the job. It hadn’t even been enough to beat the Gader’el, which Juliet had dismissed as an animal.
The trouble was that you couldn’t get close enough to the Gader’el to perform an exorcism. I had its pattern clear in my mind now, but I knew damn well that as soon as I started to play, it would be on me hard enough and fast enough to knock the tune right out of my head. Close enough to play meant close enough to be attacked.
Inspiration came out of nowhere. No, it came out of thinking about Trudie, and the way she’d bootstrapped her own MO to create the meta-map of Asmodeus’ movements. The trick was seeing through the metaphor to the thing itself: distinguishing how your power actually worked from the interface you’d developed for it. It could be done. It could be done without risk even.
That solved Jenna-Jane’s problem. Now what about mine?
‘Fix.’ Pen stirred on the sofa beside me, rubbing her eyes. ‘What time is it?’
I didn’t bother to check my watch. ‘Later than you think,’ I said. ‘Like always. How was your day?’
She blinked and shook her head, restoring some shape to the incendiary mop of her hair. ‘Wonderful,’ she said, her voice husky and slurred with sleep. ‘Like one of your days. Alcohol, self-hatred, more alcohol and daytime TV.’
‘I don’t watch that much TV,’ I pointed out. ‘What do you hate yourself for?’
‘Just the obvious.’ She sat up, still groggy but gradually coming awake. ‘I can’t do this, Fix. I can’t sit here and wait for you to sort it out. I’m going to start looking for Rafi again tomorrow.’
‘You won’t find Rafi;’ I reminded her, my voice hard, ‘you’ll find Asmodeus.’
‘I don’t care. This isn’t any way to live.’
She was right. We were under siege, and it was affecting both of us in our different ways. The sense of pressure - the feeling of being stalked - was throwing me off my stride, so that I just kept running from one thing to the next instead of stopping to think about where I was going. Worse, I was letting Jenna-Jane set the agenda, when I should have been using her as she was using me: bouncing off her thick, impervious hide in the direction I most needed to go.
That was going to change.
Right now I was going to get some sleep. And in the morning, which was only two and a half hours away . . .
In the morning I was taking back the initiative.
13
‘Felix! Welcome back. Come and give us the benefit of your expertise.’
Jenna-Jane’s voice was courtesy itself: no snide cracks about broken alarm clocks, no sarcastic sallies of the ‘So good of you to join us’ variety. Then again, Gil McClennan, at her elbow, radiated enough resentment and disapproval to make anything she felt like doing in that line redundant.
I’d knocked on J-J’s door, found the office empty, then followed the sound of voices to the map room. Everyone was there, sitting or standing at the edges of the room, around the circumference of the sprawling map-sheets: Jenna-Jane and Gil, obviously, Trudie, with Etheridge hovering at her shoulder like Tinkerbell to her Peter Pan, Samir Devani, looking like he might have gone to bed even later than me, and a man and two women I hadn’t seen before - presumably exorcists on loan from other work teams.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said insincerely. ‘Keep talking. I’ll get up to speed.’
There was an awkward silence. ‘Actually,’ Trudie said, after glancing briefly but curiously at the flat brown-paper-wrapped package I held under my left arm, ‘I think we’d better recap, because this is important. Gil, would you mind telling Castor what you found?’
McClennan gave a show of impatience, but Jenna-Jane made an open-handed gesture, giving him the floor. He couldn’t very well say no after that.
‘I started off by looking at the clusters,’ he said, pointing to the map. ‘The points with the densest concentration of lines. One right where you live, Castor, in Turnpike Lane. One over here in Wembley - Pax says that’s Juliet Salazar, who helped you break up Asmodeus’ game last time he tried to get free, so maybe he’s out to settle old scores there too. Another cluster down here in south London. Peckham Rye.’
‘The Ice-Maker’s,’ I confirmed. ‘That’s where he was until he escaped.’
‘Right. And then a few more in the centre of the city, here, here and here.’ He pointed to King’s Cross, Holborn, Waterloo. ‘Maybe these are just hubs - not places he’s visiting, but places he has to go through to get to where he’s going. You’d expect to find some stuff like that.’ Gil paused, staring across at me. ‘You with me so far?’
I nodded wordlessly.
‘Okay, then look at this.’ He tapped the map, at a point where Trudie’s ink lines were so densely overlaid on each other it was almost impossible to see the streets beneath. Gil’s finger traced a line away from Turnpike Lane to the south, which was where most of the lines seemed to bleed off, Asmodeus either coming or going by the same route each time.
The lines weren’t exactly straight: they veered to left and right, while still heading broadly south into the centre of London. Some of them diverged at this point, heading west; others kept right on going.
‘Why the zigzags?’ Gil demanded in the tone of a man who already knew the answer.
I took a closer look, but it seemed like an easy one. ‘Because the streets don’t head exactly where he wants to go.’
‘Yeah.’ Gil nodded. ‘Exactly. He turns into Tollington Park here, and Stroud Green Road there. No straight lines. You can’t walk through London and go in straight lines, right? Maybe New York, but not London.’
Trudie made an impatient tutting sound, obviously wanting Gil to cut to the chase, but he was going to do this his way. �
�Now look here,’ he said, moving his finger down into the centre of the map - the centre of London.
The difference was obvious, but only because he’d told me what to look for.
‘Straight lines,’ I said.
‘Straight lines. Mostly around Holborn, which is one of our secondary clusters. See, he’s going either north or south here, but he doesn’t cut to the left to go into - whatever that is, Old Gloucester Street. He keeps right on going. Walking through walls. Making like the street grid doesn’t matter to him. Which it doesn’t.’
‘Because he’s underground,’ I finished.
Gil looked annoyed that I’d got to the punchline ahead of him, but all I was doing was joining the dots. It was still his insight, and I was impressed. Jenna-Jane was right: he was a good exorcist and nobody’s fuckwit.
‘Or flying,’ Trudie added scrupulously. ‘We didn’t want to rule out the possibility that he might be able to transform himself somehow.’
‘But in that case,’ Gil broke in again, ‘we’d be seeing straight lines all over. We don’t. They’re just in the centre. So he’s got an underground route that takes him through just this stretch here.’ He indicated with a broad sweep of his hand an area that extended from the river up almost as far as Russell Square. ‘The next question is why does he use it? I mean maybe it’s quicker, but not by much. And he’s not afraid of bumping into people. If he’s got to go over-ground for most of the time, why use this one little stretch of tunnel that he’s found? And why keep going back to it?’
‘He’s got a base there,’ I said, playing straight man again. ‘This is where he hangs his hat.’
‘And that,’ said Jenna-Jane, taking charge of the proceedings again, ‘is the conclusion we’d reached just before you arrived. The puzzle that remains is to determine what tunnels he’s using. The London Underground network seemed the likeliest option, given the density and depth of the tunnels in the centre of the city, but there’s no obvious candidate.’
‘We got hold of some maps from the city engineers department,’ Samir said. ‘They give a pretty exact mapping of the tunnels onto the streets above. The Piccadilly Line goes up here, about a hundred yards east of this nexus of main roads. The demon’s path veers west, if anything, so it’s not that. Central Line’s too far down . . .’
‘He wouldn’t be likely to use tunnels that are actually in use in any case,’ I pointed out. ‘Too risky and too inconvenient. Do the inspection tunnels follow the same plan?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Trudie, ‘but they run parallel with the main line and they’re still too far out.’ She showed me some red lines traced on the map a long way from the black flecks that marked the demon’s comings and goings. ‘We thought of disused stations too,’ she added, forestalling my next question. ‘No joy. There was a lot of old digging around King’s Cross and the Angel, and some of those tunnels extended quite a long way to the south and west, but he’s not following the line of any of them that we can see.’
‘So now we’re working on sewers and sealed-off waterways, ’ Gil grunted. ‘Which could take us days, because there are literally hundreds of miles of them to cover, and the maps don’t always correlate to street level except at known access points.’
‘Any insights, Felix?’ Jenna-Jane coaxed.
I stared hard at the map: at the way the black flecks siphoned into High Holborn and Kingsway and then splurged outwards again at Waterloo Bridge. I tried to imagine myself walking that route, as I’d done a thousand times. Down Woburn Place, past Russell Square Gardens, into Southampton Row . . .
‘No?’ J-J seemed disappointed. ‘Well, then I suspect you work on two fronts, Gilbert. Keep someone here, adding the sewer and waterway information to the map grid, while the rest of your people go out and walk the ground. Assuming the demon has gone to ground for the day, we might get a current time fix on him just by being there.’
McClennan became brisk. ‘Teams of two,’ he said. ‘Cartwright and Powell. Greaves and Etheridge. Devani, you can come with me. That leaves you and Castor on the map, Pax. Let’s move.’
He probably thought that grounding me would piss me off. It probably would have too, if I intended to do as I was told. I wasn’t done with Gil yet though, and I stepped into his path as he headed for the door.
‘We need to talk about Super-Self before you go anywhere,’ I said.
He stared at me, deadpan. ‘That’s all in hand,’ he said. ‘If you’re looking to clock up some overtime, Castor, you can forget it. I don’t want you, and more to the point I don’t need you.’
‘You might want to know what you’re facing, all the same,’ I said. ‘And you might need this.’ I held up the key to the gym’s front door. McClennan recognised it at once, or maybe just guessed what it was. He took it out of my hand, looked at it thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded.
‘You’ve got your assignments,’ he said to the other exorcists in the room. ‘Get moving. Samir, wait for me downstairs.’
‘I’d rather make a start,’ said Samir.
Gil didn’t even look round; his eyes were locked on mine. ‘Make a start then,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you when I get over there.’
The room gradually emptied until it was just the four of us: Trudie, Jenna-Jane, McClennan and me. Gil looked at Trudie and motioned with his head towards the door. She didn’t move. ‘If it’s about Super-Self,’ she said, ‘I’d like to hear this. I’m part of that team too.’
‘If you need to hear it,’ Gil said with heavy emphasis, ‘I’ll brief you later, at the same time as everyone else. Right now this is private. Go make yourself a cup of coffee, Pax. Make me one too.’
Reluctantly, Trudie headed for the door. As soon as it closed behind her, McClennan turned to Jenna-Jane, holding the key up in his hand. ‘He stole this from a secure cupboard,’ he said. ‘That’s where the rest are. I signed them back in yesterday morning, as soon as I got here. You think he stopped at the keys? He’s probably raided med cabinets, equipment, case files . . .’
‘I took it off the ring while I was talking to you, Gil,’ I told him. ‘Sleight of hand, not breaking and entering. Not that I’ve got anything against petty larceny, you understand; it’s just more effort.’
‘I want him off my team,’ McClennan said to J-J as if I hadn’t spoken.
‘Gilbert . . .’ she said, sounding as though this rift between her little lambs distressed her beyond bearing.
‘It’s not as if he brings us anything. It’s not as if we need him.’
Jenna-Jane turned to me. ‘What do you bring us, Felix?’ she asked in a colder and more businesslike tone.
‘The rickety twins,’ I told her.
She made an open-handed gesture. ‘Go on.’
‘Between the Strand and Wych Street,’ I said, ‘from the middle of the nineteenth century right up until they levelled the whole area to build the Aldwych in 1901, there were two theatres: the Opera Comique and the Globe. They were mostly underground. In fact the Opera Comique was reached through tunnels; it didn’t even have a street-level entrance.’
‘I’ve heard of the Opera Comique,’ Jenna-Jane said musingly. ‘Some of the early Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were performed there - before D’Oyly Carte built the Savoy.’
I shrugged. ‘If you say so, Jenna-Jane. I’m not big on Victorian theatre. I can tell you though, courtesy of the London Metropolitan Archive, that there was a really nasty incident there in 1879. The theatre had fallen into debt, and some bailiffs tried to repossess the sets and props. They got into a stand-up fight with the cast in the middle of a performance. Then someone knocked over a lantern and the set caught fire. Four hundred people in the audience, all trying to get out of a burning basement through the same three tunnels. Mostly in the dark . . .’
‘Why is this relevant?’ Gil demanded angrily. ‘What has the fucking nineteenth century got to do with—?’
‘Hasn’t the penny dropped yet?’ I yelled back at him. ‘The ghosts in the swimming p
ool are actors. They’re not from Roman Britain; they’re from the cast of some crappy play. I saw one of them last night blowing her nose on a lace fucking handkerchief. And she was wearing button-up boots!’
That shut him up for a moment, so I pressed on, determined to get to the point that really mattered.
‘So the ghosts are about a century old,’ I said, addressing myself to Jenna-Jane. ‘That’s still unusual, but it’s not impossible. It’s just right at the end of the bell-shaped curve. What is unusual is the thing that’s in there with them.’
McClennan opened his mouth to bandy some more words with me, but J-J held up an imperious hand for silence. ‘What thing?’ she asked.
‘My source calls it a Gader’el,’ I said. ‘It’s demonic, but it’s something we haven’t met before. It feeds on fear. Probably the fear still attaching to that site was what brought it there in the first place. It’s like an angler fish, J-J. It sits down there in the dark, dangling those old ghosts like a lure. When living people come in close to look, it gets its hooks into them. It amplifies any fear they’re already feeling, turns it into blind terror, and somehow it takes nourishment from that.’
I turned to look at Gil now, seeing only resentment and suspicion on his face. ‘The point is,’ I told him, ‘you can’t destroy it with a frontal attack. It’s not like the demons we’ve met before; it’s . . . I don’t know, a lower life form. More primitive. More instinctive. Trying to exorcise it just makes it hit out harder. That’s why Etheridge got damaged the way he did, and why your other man - Franklin - ran under a car.’
McClennan shook his head, but slowly and without much conviction. He was thinking, and thinking was taking some of the momentum out of his anger. It was hard for him to listen to the message when he wanted so badly to kill the messenger, but I could see that I was getting through to him.
‘So what are you saying, Felix?’ Jenna-Jane asked.
‘I’m saying you need to wait,’ I said. ‘There’s probably a way to drive this thing out without facing it head on. I had an idea last night: sort of a time bomb. A way of giving this thing some grief from a safe distance. I don’t know if it will work, but I want to try it. It will take a while to set up, that’s all. A day or two. Maybe longer.’