by Mike Carey
Rosie flexed her fingers and gave a harsh, wincing moan.
‘I’ve broken my hand,’ she lamented.
‘It’s someone else’s hand,’ I reminded her. ‘And he had it coming.’
I stepped through onto the steel platform at the head of the stairs leading down into the abyss. It was hard, as it had been the first time around, to cross that threshold, to walk into the screaming turmoil my death-sense was picking up from below, a hundred times more strident and painful than the monotone clamour of the fire alarm. But hard as it was for me, it was a lot harder for Rosie. She stopped dead in the doorway as though there was a solid barrier there, as though the steel door was locked and bolted instead of standing wide open. The wards again, the wards written on the door to keep the dead and the undead from breaking out. It kept them from breaking in too - and an axe wouldn’t be much use against die-stamped steel.
‘I can’t come through here,’ Rosie said.
‘Then watch our backs,’ I suggested. ‘And wait for us.’
‘Don’t be long, Felix.’
‘We’ll either be quick or dead,’ I muttered grimly. ‘Give it ten minutes, Rosie. One way or another, it’ll be over by then.’
She nodded tersely and set her back to the open door, a dragon in the gateway, stopping any reinforcements from the building’s upper floors from crashing our party. Probably most of the rent-a-cops were in the basement already, but every little helps.
We ran down the metal stairs, the din of our booming footsteps drowned out by the general hubbub. Down here the fire alarm’s shrill warning had to struggle to make itself heard in a chorus of bellowing and shrieking voices, metallic booms and echoes, weeping and wailing and - I strongly suspected - gnashing of teeth. The inmates of the basement Gulag seemed to be collectively going crazy.
‘Any idea where she’ll be?’ I yelled to Gil. He couldn’t hear me so I shrugged and gestured to indicate that I didn’t know where to go.
He put his mouth close to my ear to answer. ‘There’s another lab down here. A big one. That’s the room the professor was prepping this morning, so that’s where she’ll be.’
I let him take the lead again as we walked between the squat cement cell blocks. This place was terrifying even when looking down on it from above like the eye of God; when you were in the middle of it, it was indescribable.
As I think I mentioned earlier, to an exorcist every place is soaked in the residue of past emotions like the smells of old cooking. This place was saturated with fear and despair, an effluvium as rich and deep as the leaf mould in an ancient forest. Out of that rich substrate, something even more hysterical and insensate rose like some exotic bloom. I found myself breathing in shallow gulps as though that would somehow keep the emotional tsunami from entering into me.
Another patrol of three men crossed an intersection ahead of us. We flattened ourselves against the wall and they missed us in the dark.
Something was scrabbling near my ear, unnoticed in the clamour until I got right up close to it. I turned my head and saw the Judas window of one of the cell doors right beside me. I didn’t have time for this. I was here for one thing and one thing only, and getting distracted could get a lot of people I cared about dead and worse than dead. But something moved me forward in spite of myself, and I pressed my eye to the hole.
The inside of the cell was even darker than it was out here: a single red emergency light in a far corner lit up the room no more brightly than a child’s night light. The cell’s inmate was clawing at the door, and the sound or maybe just the vibration had made it through the metal to me. He was a werewolf, a loup-garou. Wolves weren’t in his genome though, so the word was a misnomer in this case. He looked more like a were-hare, ears hanging down like broken radio masts over his elongated face. A single huge eye rolled in his face; the other eye had been removed, and bare muscle twitched around the empty socket, making it expand and contract in lockstep with its neighbour.
I wanted to back away, but I just stayed there for an endless moment, staring into that sightless eye. Gil shook my shoulder. ‘Come on,’ he yelled. ‘I think it’s clear.’
Like a man coming out of a trance, I took a step back from the door, but I didn’t move to follow him.
‘Come on,’ he said again. ‘Castor, it’s this way.’
‘How do the doors open?’ I asked him.
‘On keypads,’ he said pointing. ‘What’s that got to do with anything? The lab won’t be locked. The professor will be in there now, working on your friend.’
‘But there has to be a failsafe. Some way of opening all the doors in case the building catches fire or something.’
‘I don’t think so. That’s not the way the professor’s mind works.’
I shook my head to clear it, but that just made it hurt more. I knew I had to be right. This place might be a concentration camp, but it was a concentration camp built inside a hospital: the place had to be up to code, at least on the face of it. Somewhere there was a master switch that would open all these doors.
The fire alarm stopped ringing. The abrupt silence was a huge and shocking absence, a vacuum that extinguished all the other screams and yells and moans and bangs the way a wind tunnel sucks the flame from a candle. Soon there was just a single voice screaming, an inhuman ululation of pain and rage and madness.
A moment later the lights came on.
Gil gave me a frantic look, and I nodded, waving him on. In silence now, and more slowly, we rounded the corner of the cell block and found ourselves in yet another wide corridor. Ahead of us stood a pair of locked double doors labelled with NO ADMITTANCE notices that were both large and strident. Gil broke them down with the fire axe and we strode through.
Ten or maybe twenty yards ahead of us, there was one final door. This was where the screaming was coming from. Other sounds from within, voices and footfalls and the clattering of instruments, made it clear that there was a party in progress, and that it hadn’t stopped for the fire drill.
There was a guard on this door too, of course. He shouted out for us to halt, holding his sidewinder out in front of him in an en garde stance. I knocked it aside with a whirling parry, ducked and followed through, driving my own baton into his mouth with explosive force.
The poor sod went down like a sack of potatoes, his jaw in red ruin, and we walked over him into the room. For all I knew, he could have been poor bloody infantry - one of the newbies conscripted by J-J to fill the gaps in her ranks and keep anyone from bugging her while she dismantled Juliet. He might not know the first thing about the people who signed his pay cheque or what was going on a few feet behind him. On the other hand, he presumably wasn’t deaf.
Sometimes it pays to ask the hard questions.
The room we walked into looked more like an operating theatre than anything else. Half a dozen men and women in white coats stood around a very fancy piece of apparatus - a flat surface, eight feet by four, mounted on a series of nested gimbals so that it could be adjusted to any height and any angle. The naked form strapped to it was instantly recognisable as Juliet. Her bone-white skin - right down to the absence of aureoles - and ink-black hair, the catastrophe curves of her impossibly perfect breasts, had haunted my dreams for so long I wasn’t likely to mistake them when I saw them once again in the flesh.
At any other time, seeing Juliet naked would have fused my cerebral hemispheres into unusable slag and left me running on the default systems of animal lust. Now what I felt was very different.
She was twisting and writhing on the table. Tight leather restraints at neck and wrist and ankle held her in place, but from shoulder to coccyx her back rose and fell, filled out like a sail on winds of pure agony.
They were painting Asmodeus’ wards onto her body, but Jenna-Jane loves to push the envelope - to extend her researches into different modalities. They were incising the designs into her skin with scalpels too, and something like a Zeiss engine set up directly over the operating table was projecting
a light show of overlaid pentagrams directly onto her bare flesh.
The white-coated figures paused in their work and looked up as we entered, startled and affronted, but the projected images still slid over Juliet’s skin, merging and dividing, and the high, inhuman screaming went on. One of them - not Jenna-Jane - came forward to block our path, all bluster and outrage. He was a little man, about forty or so, with the craggy authority of a senior consultant.
‘This is a restricted area!’ he stormed. ‘You have no right to be here!’
‘Are you right-handed or left-handed?’ I asked him.
‘What?’ he blinked. ‘What do you—’
Odds favoured the right. I remembered reading somewhere that a survey in America didn’t find a single southpaw surgeon. I hit his right elbow with the sidewinder, using a figure-of-eight manoeuvre that Gary Coldwood had shown me once, the one that riot cops use when they want to do some real damage. There was an audible crack as the whip-thin wood connected. The little man gave a hoarse, choking cry. He staggered and fell, folding up around his now-useless arm.
‘Anyone else here interested in practising medicine one-handed? ’ I asked politely.
The white coats retreated from the operating table and from their grisly work in a scared gaggle, like snow geese. All but one: Jenna-Jane pulled down her surgical mask, an affectation I hadn’t even noticed until now, and skirted the table to stand right in front of me.
‘Felix,’ she said, more in sorrow than in anger. ‘And Gilbert too. You’ve both gone mad. The succubus has no rights in law; the man you’ve just assaulted most definitely does. You’ll both go to prison for this.’
‘I’m not looking that far ahead, Professor,’ McClennan said glumly. ‘I don’t think either of us is. You can take this as my letter of resignation, by the way.’
‘One of you untie those restraints,’ I called over Jenna-Jane’s shoulder to the gaggle. ‘Now.’
‘The police!’ The man I’d crippled moaned from the floor. ‘Somebody call the police!’
Jenna-Jane shook her head in bewilderment. ‘How can you even imagine you’re going to get away with this?’ she asked, in the same grieving tone. ‘You’re committing professional suicide. There’ll be no coming back, I promise you that.’
‘Swap?’ I said to Gil. I held out the sidewinder. He took it and gave me the fire axe.
‘Untie her,’ I said again to the room at large, ‘and turn that fucking projector off, or people are going to start losing large body parts. If you think I’m kidding, feel free to call my bluff.’
One of the geese hastily bent and flicked a switch low down on the wall. The luminous pentagrams sliding over Juliet’s body faded to nothing over the space of about three seconds. She slumped against the table, her screams dying away to shuddering, panting breaths. Two more geese broke away from their comrades and started to loosen the leather straps that held Juliet down, shooting me wide-eyed looks from time to time as if they were afraid they hadn’t shown willing enough.
Jenna-Jane tried again. ‘Felix, this is the most significant breakthrough we’ve had in ten years of dealing with her kind. The implications are bigger than you can comprehend. ’
‘Don’t worry, J-J,’ I assured her. ‘I think I’ve got the implications pretty much taped.’
Jenna-Jane’s eyes narrowed, and she breathed out heavily through her nose. She made to walk past me, out into the corridor, and I held out my free hand to push her back. She touched my hand with her own, and a jolt of white lightning went through me. Suddenly I was down on the floor of the room, my elbows and knees stinging from where they’d hit the tiles, my head full of ringing after-tones as though somebody had decked me with a glockenspiel.
Jenna-Jane stood over me. The thing in her hand looked like a Stanley knife, black steel overlaid with yellow warning strips. She had it aimed squarely at Gil McClennan’s chest. ‘Please drop the baton, Gilbert,’ she said, ‘and then go and sit next to Felix on the floor. This is an M18 taser. It shoots a shock-charge of fifty thousand volts, and I can assure you that it’s a great deal more pleasant to give than to receive.’
Gil weighed up his chances, which at that range were pretty much non-existent. He let the sidewinder drop to the floor, where it bounced once and then rolled in a half-circle around the fulcrum of its own weighted end, coming to rest a good six or seven feet out of my reach.
Gil sat down.
‘Now, if somebody would be good enough to call a security team,’ Jenna-Jane said in her most schoolmarmish voice, ‘perhaps we can proceed.’
Perhaps she expected a docile chorus of ‘Yes, Professor Mulbridge’ from the gaggle. Instead, the sound that met her pious request was a strangled wail from the white-coated woman who’d been untying Juliet’s wrists. My gaze flicked in that direction, just as everyone else’s did.
Juliet was on her feet. Admittedly she was leaning against the table for support, but her feet were planted firmly on the tiles. Vivid rivulets of blood marked her perfect, pigmentless skin in meandering lines, as though a butcher had marked her up for filleting. She had her hand on the throat of the lady doctor, her arm fully extended so that the other woman had to lean back from the waist. They were staring at each other, the lady doctor in abject terror, Juliet with the pained wonder of someone who’s just scratched their pubes and come up with something small and wriggling.
‘No,’ she said very distinctly. ‘Not you. Where? Where is she?’
Jenna-Jane swung the taser round, but she didn’t have a clear line of fire. The moment that she hesitated was long enough for Gil to kick her legs out from under her.
There was a scramble for the taser. The doctor with the broken arm won it, but I’d gone for the fire axe. I took a wild swipe and knocked the weapon out of his hand with the flat of the axe blade, making him yelp in anguish. The way I was feeling right then, he was lucky he didn’t get the sharp end.
As I lurched to my feet, the echoing tramp of booted feet in the corridor outside announced some late arrivals to the party. The security guards we’d passed among the cell blocks - or maybe a different group altogether - came charging through the door, only to come to a dead halt when they found that I had the axe blade pressed to Jenna-Jane’s throat. I was still shaking violently from the taser zap, and it was all I could do to hold it steady, but I did my best to look like a man you wouldn’t want to cross.
‘Better think about this,’ I advised the rent-a-cops, my voice a little more tremulous than I would have liked. ‘If she dies, who’s going to give you your Christmas bonus?’
‘His name is Castor,’ Jenna-Jane said quickly. ‘Felix Castor. The other man on the floor there is Gilbert McClennan. Radio to someone outside the building and give out those names.’
‘You don’t want to do this, son,’ one of the goons said, holding out his hand for the axe. Son? He was probably younger than me.
‘Actually, Dad,’ I told him, ‘it would make my entire year. I’m aching for a little uncomplicated good news, you know?’
The man hesitated. A lot of thoughts were probably going through his mind, and I suspected it wasn’t used to handling that volume of traffic. Axe blades are generally kept blunt, but you don’t have to break skin to snap someone’s throat, especially someone like Jenna-Jane, who was past the first flush of youth. Did I look like the sort of man who’d commit cold-blooded murder in front of a dozen witnesses? Did his desire to make me eat the fire axe offset the trouble he could get into if Jenna-Jane died and the company he worked for had to pay damages to the MOU? How would it play on the ten o’clock news?
I don’t know exactly which argument swung the vote but finally the guy stepped aside. So did the men behind him, but they parted to both sides of the door so that I’d have to have my back to at least one of them as I went through.
‘Over there, numb-nuts,’ I said to the guy in charge, nodding toward the far corner of the room. ‘Go play doctors and nurses with the doctors and nurses.’ I returned my atten
tion to Jenna-Jane. ‘There was a note,’ I said, ‘at the house. A note from Asmodeus. Do you have it on you? Think carefully before you lie to me, J-J, because I’m a desperate man already. You wouldn’t want to send me over the edge.’
‘It’s in my pocket,’ Jenna-Jane said. ‘On the left-hand side. There’s no need for melodrama, Felix. I always intended to show it to you when you came back from Surrey.’
Holding the axe in place one-handed, I dipped into her pocket. There was a slip of paper there, folded into four. I took it out and glanced at it. All I could see were a few words, at random and upside down: ‘only possible place’. It looked like the real deal though. Asmodeus formed his letters in a style that was almost pointillist, from myriads of straight lines no bigger than ink flecks. It would take a lot of effort to forge, and I couldn’t see why she would have bothered. Despite that bland assurance, I was never meant to see this. I stuffed the note into my own pocket.
‘McClennan,’ I said, ‘we’re leaving. Bring Juliet.’
Juliet had been holding the throat of the lady doctor all this time, but she released her grip as Gil approached her. The woman staggered back from Juliet, her hands going to her bruised neck. That meant she backed into Gil, who steadied her with his hands around her shoulders.
‘Take off your coat,’ he told her, ‘and give it to me.’
The woman did as she was told without argument. She’d stared into Juliet’s black-on-black eyes at point-blank range. Juliet’s inner fires were at a low ebb right then, but even so that had to have left her shaken to her psychosexual core. There was no fight left in her.
Gil draped the coat over Juliet’s shoulders, very tentatively, being careful not to touch her. She stared at him with a feral intensity.
‘We have to go,’ he said.
For a few moments she seemed not to have understood, but finally she nodded and pushed herself away from the table. Her legs folded under her immediately and Gil caught her as she fell. His eyes widened. He must have been surprised, as I was when I carried her out of the Mount Grace crematorium, by how little she weighed. But it was more than that. He stared across the room at me, tense and alarmed. ‘She’s like ice,’ he said, ‘and she’s barely breathing.’