Silas knocks it out of my hands. ‘The only thing you need to worry about is that unless you repent of your evil ways—’
‘Gimme a break, will you?’ I’m kneeling on the floor, gathering the scattered photographs. ‘I lost my licence—’
‘But did you repent?’
‘Sure.’ This is all beginning to make sense. I just need to get out of here in one piece. ‘Where do I sign?’
Dinny has pulled another bottle out of the cupboard. He sticks it between his thighs and levers the cork out. Wine splashes into the chalice. ‘Silas,’ he says, ‘a year ago you tell me a story . . .’
‘What story?’
I’ve got a sudden sinking feeling that maybe we’re going a bottle too far.
‘Il s’agit d’un garçon—’ Dinny stretches out one hook, about four feet off the floor. ‘A boy. You tell me you see him . . . some men pull him out from a Ghost—’
Silas just looks blank.
‘Don’t you remember?’ I ask. ‘Out in the country somewhere. Right, Dinny?’
Dinny nods. Silas stares glassily at me.
‘Without repentance,’ he announces, ‘there can be no salvation.’
‘This is a year ago,’ says Dinny.
Silas twitches like a string’s been pulled. His eyes snap shut . . . then drift open. ‘Oh yes.’ He’s got this empty look on his face. ‘But it wasn’t out there . . .’
I realise what that blank look reminds me of: the way Marvo’s been acting. I wait for him to say more, but he falls back into the chair and just sits there looking dazed.
Finally, I get bored. ‘So where was it?’
‘In the city.’
‘Where exactly?’ I figure that’s the obvious question.
‘Somewhere.’ That’s nice and specific. ‘I remember telling you, Dinny . . . but the boy was run over by a van.’
Have you ever seen an automaton? Nobody makes them any more, because of elementals, but there’s a few still lying around in museums and the Society has a couple. These were machines, OK? Clockwork, pipes, metal, leather, paint . . . They looked like a human being or an animal and you wound them up and the cheap ones could do simple stuff like bang a drum or play a tin whistle, but the expensive ones could write letters and make tea.
My point is: Silas reminds me of an automaton. The way he tells the story, it’s like I can hear the cogs turning.
‘He was killed instantly,’ he says.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘Did the jacks come? The police—’
The cogs take a bit longer to turn. ‘He was run over by a van.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Stolen. Two boys, joy-riding.’
‘Are you sure it was a van?’
‘They had to shoot the horse . . .’
‘Are you sure it wasn’t a Ghost?’
The cogs jam. Silas just stops moving. The chalice falls out of his hand and rolls away across the floor. His mouth drops open and he sits there, dribbling wine down his cassock. His face has gone white.
I’m still thinking that this kind of reminds me of how Marvo’s been carrying on, when Dinny taps his shoulder. ‘Silas?’
It’s like someone’s pulled a lever. Silas twitches and topples out of the chair.
So I slip the photos back into Sean’s notebook and stick it back inside my jerkin. I grab Silas by the knees while Dinny gets him under the arms and we haul him up a narrow staircase into a smelly, low-ceilinged chamber.
‘That is not what he tell me,’ Dinny says as we drop him onto a narrow bed.
I’m looking around at hundreds of crucifixes: wood and metal, hanging from the walls and piled up in boxes. ‘So what’s going on?’
Dinny smiles. ‘Not my problem, Frank.’
‘Some sort of spell?’
‘I think he just drink too much.’
I don’t. I smell a rat: a huge bloody rat about the size of the horse that Silas said got put down.
Downstairs, I grab one of the empty bottles. Outside, Dinny steps on Preston who squeals, ‘Abyssinian truffle hound!’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Mouse
IT’S HALF-PAST ONE and we’re halfway up the hill towards Saint Martin’s church. I’m clutching the bottle in one hand and the photograph in the other. I’ve given up on thinking. It’s turned into a bad habit.
All I want to do is ditch Dinny. Unfortunately, he has a different priority: he’s got his hook in my collar and he’s reminding me, very forcibly, about the fifty quid I still owe him—
When we find ourselves surrounded by jacks, all waving guns.
Five minutes later nobody’s buying my suggestion that Preston is an Abyssinian truffle hound. Not that they care. They grab Dinny and handcuff him.
Marvo jumps down from a van. She’s got her shoulders up around her ears, and she’s doing her angry face. ‘You knew we wanted to talk to Dinny. Why didn’t you tell me—’
‘Because he’s got nothing to do with any of this.’
Dinny’s screaming over his shoulder, ‘I get you for this, Fronk!’
‘Not my fault,’ I yell as the jacks toss him into the van.
‘Are you pissed?’ Marvo grabs the bottle. She’s clever: she can read. ‘Châteauneuf du pape?’
‘Yeah, but look—’
She tosses the bottle back to me. I fumble and it smashes on the ground.
‘Prat.’ Marvo jumps into the van, which rattles off round the corner with Dinny still screaming threats at me.
Ever since I spotted Charlie’s Gift object, I’ve been worrying about my own. It’s not very deeply buried, so an animal could dig it up. Maybe the lid isn’t completely watertight . . .
It’s too far to walk, so I pull my woolly hat down hard over my ears, to hide my shaved head, and jump on an omnibus. I kick Preston into the luggage compartment under the stairs and get bounced along the lower deck as the driver whips up the horses.
Dinny took all the cash I had on me, so when the conductor looms over me I close my hand tight – and when I open it again, a white mouse is scurrying around my palm. The conductor pockets it happily.
I look around the deck. Nobody has noticed . . .
. . . except this little girl, five or six I guess. She’s pulling her mother’s sleeve. ‘Mummy, he gave him a mouse.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
The mother glances round at me. Does she suspect? Does she even want to think about it? The kid does—
‘But it was a mouse.’
‘Be quiet, Evadne.’
What sort of sadist calls a child Evadne?
‘But Mummy—’
‘That’s enough!’
The child’s mother glares at me. I smile and try to look like someone who wouldn’t hurt a fly or produce a white mouse from up his sleeve.
The bus rattles out along the Grandpont and turns into the Kennington Road. I’d feel more comfortable if I could draw a pentagram on the window, but a big bloke with cropped grey hair is staring at me over what looks like a book of poetry.
We did one poem when I was at Saint Cyprian’s, only it wasn’t really a poem. Just an incantation to summon an army of angels, written in rhyming couplets. Matthew said it didn’t work. I tried it out – natch; all I got was a shower of rose petals and the smell of tar.
As we come into Radley, Evadne’s mother hoists her out of her seat and pushes her into the aisle. She catches the conductor’s eye and he rings the bell. She’s got Evadne by the arm and she’s pushing her towards the platform at the back.
As she passes, Evadne stares at me suspiciously. I know I shouldn’t . . . but I can’t resist it. I hold out my hand, fist closed.
‘Do you want one?’ I whisper.
She glances up. Her mother is busy clutching the back of a seat, to stop herself being thrown down the bus. Evadne turns back to me and nods.
I open my fist. The mouse is pink this time. Evadne makes a grab for it, as if she suspec
ts it isn’t long for this world.
Her mother drags her off the bus and along the pavement. An old man is still struggling down the stairs from the upper deck, so the bus hasn’t moved. The mother is talking; I can’t hear, but I figure it’s, ‘What have you got there?’
Reluctantly, Evadne opens her hand. It’s empty. As her mother drags her off she sniffs at her palm and stares back at me with wide blue eyes that make me think of Kazia.
The conductor rings the bell. The bus jerks into motion. Evadne is trailing after her mother, down a side street of small wooden cottages.
I wonder if she’ll remember me, ten . . . fifteen years from now. A boy on a bus. Maybe just a conjuror; but maybe a real sorcerer. By then I’ll be post-peak and pissing about with elementals, like Charlie.
For a moment I’m close to crying.
The Black Bridge is along the railway tracks, about a mile from Radley station.
I wander around at the foot of the embankment, looking for the right tree. I’ve got quite a few to choose from, but I finally find it and start scrabbling in the earth at its foot. A couple of broken fingernails later, I pull out a small, rusting tin.
Preston backs away nervously. ‘What’s that, boss?’
‘Nothing to worry about.’
I stick the tin in my pocket, then I shoo Preston up the embankment. The bridge has been under repair for years, so I sit down on a pile of broken sleepers and hug my knees while I wait for a slow train to come along.
I’m thinking about the Crypt Boy, lying in the mortuary with those symbols cut into his body. When I was at Saint Cyprian’s, they taught us that any human sacrifice can only be to Satan himself, and you’d only take that risk in order to secure something rather more important than women in their underwear or a luxury flat in Woodstock. Something like vast earthly power, infinite knowledge, or immortality.
The masters warned us off, so naturally I looked it up. The ritual involved slicing into the victim’s body to create the symbols from their own flowing blood. Then cutting their heart out and offering it.
The week before they kicked us out into the big wide world, the masters got all the final year together for this big talk. There was a lot of stuff about faith and responsibility and how much we owed the Society. And then they gave us these three cardinal rules:
Don’t get a girl up the duff.
Never wear brown shoes with a blue suit.
Don’t mess with Satan.
Ever since I realised Kazia was doing magic and that people were winding up dead as a result, I’ve told myself that she had a rough childhood, what with her mum getting burned as a witch and all, and that she was being exploited by Matthew. Now, though, it seems like she’s just the girl you call in if you want somebody rubbed out. And the messier the better.
Marvo always said she was trouble. That’s Marvo’s problem: she has this nasty habit of being right.
An hour later, a goods train slows down to a crawl as it crosses the bridge. I kick Preston aboard one of the flat wagons and we don’t roll off until we’re coming into Doughnut City.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Butterflies
PERCHED ON TOP of the wall at the back of the termite nest, I gaze across at rags of dirty pink cloud tearing across the sun as it disappears behind the chapel roof.
I’m starving. Nobody in sight. I drop down and head off across the vegetable garden towards the kitchen.
The beds are beginning to look neglected, with leaves gathering in drifts and weeds poking through the black earth. My fault: the cloaking spell has the termites tripping over their own spades.
I tell Preston to wait, and slip through a door, down a dark passage and into the monastery kitchen. I have the place to myself. There’s some stale bread in a wooden bin, and a few slices of ham in the ice box . . .
It’s creepy this evening, this place. Utterly silent. Not a bump, not a cough, not a fart. It’s as if all the termites got drawn up into heaven like Enoch or Elijah . . .
Anyway, at least I’m not hungry any more; and hopefully the sharp pain in my stomach is due to wolfing the grub down too fast, and not food poisoning. Out in the passage, I push open a few doors into the cells. They’re all the same: bed, chair, table, crucifix, Bible.
And still not a termite in sight.
I step out into the cloister and hear this strange noise. It’s like the rustling of bare tree branches and it’s definitely creepy.
I open the chapel door silently and sneak in. Up at the front, the termites are flat on their faces on the floor, in a semi-circle round a statue of their patron, Saint Cornelius Agrippa. He’s looking down at them like, what the hell is this? Arms out wide, habits spread out: twenty grey butterflies. They’re making this sinister muttering noise that sounds less like praying than . . . I dunno, but they sound really angry.
I know I’m wrecked, but I’m in a very weird mood, even by my standards. I tiptoe towards the front and kneel silently, then lie out flat. Arms wide. The stone floor cold against my cheek.
What am I after? Do I want God to forgive me? Do I expect the saint to step down from the plinth, pat me on the shoulder and tell me it’s all right? Do I need to be part of something, even if it’s just the termites feeling pissed off with life? Yeah, that sounds about right.
I find myself praying. I’m asking God to give Marvo a break and make it so her brother isn’t really dead after all. I’m asking him to save Kazia from whatever she’s involved in. I’m asking him to tell me what to do about Matthew . . .
Who am I kidding? It’s not like the man upstairs gives a monkey’s. I mean, I know the termites say he made the world, but is that really true? Maybe he just tripped over it, like a kid lost in the woods falling over an ants’ nest. And now maybe he’s having fun poking it with a stick and seeing what scuttles out.
That happened to a crowd of us novices in my first year at Saint Cyprian’s. Woods. Ants’ nest. After a bit we got bored and just piled twigs over it and set them on fire.
The muttering noise echoes around the chapel, and makes me think of the wind rustling through the tattered clothes of a dead man hanging from a gibbet. There’s a waft of incense that smells of rotting flesh. The light outside is fading fast. It’s cold in here . . .
So I know I’m asleep because I’m having this dream. I’m in the autopsy room in the mortuary, and it’s my dad lying on the slab with a black cardinal’s skullcap on his head. He’s dead – except his eyes are open so he can watch me. There’s a river flowing through the room too, with barges drifting along it. I know where they’re going: downstream, to London.
I’m all dressed up in my sorcerer’s party outfit – hat, robe, belt, slippers and all the instruments – and I’m doing this spell to bring my dad back from the dead. I’ve got the incantation written on a piece of paper, but I’ve come over all Blurry, I can’t find my glasses, and I can’t read what I’ve written.
But I think I can remember some of it. I say, ‘Marvo,’ but nothing happens.
So I say it again and still nothing happens.
I say it again: ‘Marvo . . .’
And I’m awake, flat on my face on the cold floor of the monastery chapel.
I sit up. The termites are just lying there, silent, not moving. I get this panic that they’ve all gone and died on me. So I reach across to the one next to me and shake his shoulder.
Brother Thomas rolls over and his eyes flutter wide, wide open. His face is as white as a shroud and he’s staring right up at me . . . but he isn’t seeing me.
He starts to shake. Correction: judder.
They’re all juddering, like herbs sizzling on charcoal. Their sandals drum on the stone.
A voice: ‘Brother!’
I almost jump out of my skin. Brother Andrew is standing over me with this angry look on his face.
I’m on my feet. ‘Yeah, I know.’
It’s brilliant work, my cloaking spell, even if I say so myself. But it isn’t fair. As Andrew closes th
e door silently behind us, the angry muttering has started up again.
‘That other girl,’ says Andrew.
‘Marvo?’
‘She’s waiting in your studio.’
‘OK. Thanks.’
I wait for him to go away, but he doesn’t.
‘How do you do it, Brother?’ he says.
‘Do what?’
‘You know, girls.’
I shrug. ‘I guess I’m a sucker for proximate occasions of sin.’
He does this sharp intake of breath. ‘Do you want to go to hell?’
‘Can’t be worse than this.’
He gives me this reproachful look.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
I let him trail after me and Preston, across the garden and into my studio, where we find Marvo sitting in my surviving chair, beside the unlit fire. She’s still doing the black look: beret, coat, trousers and shoes. In the gloom, all I can see is her face, pale like the moon.
‘Visitors always welcome.’ I pull the tin out of my pocket and break the wax seal round the lid.
‘What’s that?’ says Marvo.
‘Guess.’
I hand her the tin. As she brushes her fingers across the lid, a few fragments of dirt fall away. ‘It’s been buried.’ She closes her eyes. ‘You buried it . . . when you made like you’d left town.’
‘Is that the best you can do?’
‘So open it,’ says Andrew.
I grab the tin and prise the lid off. In the dim light filtering in through the window, I can just make out a piece of paper, rolled up inside. I stick in a finger and rustle the edges.
‘It’s money,’ says Andrew. But he’s cheating because he’s leaning over my shoulder.
Marvo’s got her face screwed up tight, like she’s in pain. ‘More to it than that . . .’
‘No.’ Andrew makes a grab for it. ‘Just a ten-pound note.’
‘Something that matters to you,’ Marvo says, as I shove Andrew away. ‘Can I see?’
‘Sorry.’
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