by Mike Carey
Imelda is a faith healer for the dead. Most of her work comes from zombies, who find that a laying-on of hands from the Ice-Maker slows down the processes of organic decay for a month or so at a time. That’s a precious boon to zombies, whose biggest problems are the ones that arise from a limited shelf life. But Imelda’s motto is ‘come one, come all’: she’ll help loup-garous keep their animal side in check at the dark of the moon, arrange for bereaved spouses and parents to meet their lost loved ones, and probably do a lot of other things besides that she wouldn’t advertise to a practising exorcist like me.
We continued our ascent to the third floor, where we knocked politely and waited. No wards on this door: no sprigs of hazel or hawthorn or stay-nots in crude, dyspeptic Latin telling ghosts and the undead to shove off without passing GO. Imelda likes the undead and makes them welcome. She’s a lot less certain about me, though.
From inside the flat there came the sound of a great many bolts being drawn back, and then the heavy door creaked open to reveal the wary but curious face of Lisa, Imelda’s sixteen-year-old daughter. She grinned when she saw me.
‘Oh, look what the cat sicked up!’ she said, in gleeful imitation of her mother. She stood aside and we walked through into Imelda’s hallway, which was no better lit than the landing but a lot more spacious: her flat may be falling apart but it’s built on a grand scale. The floor under our feet was actually slightly concave, a sign of some deep malaise of the floorboards hidden from sight by the bilious green carpet.
‘You’re looking well,’ I said to Lisa. ‘Does that mean you’re pregnant again?’
She punched me in the arm, which I took as a fair riposte. In fact Lisa had never been pregnant in the usually accepted sense of the word, but the ghost of a dead baby had taken up lodgings in her once - a regrettable side effect of having no wards on your door - and Imelda had called me in to persuade it to go elsewhere: that had healed a rift between me and the Ice-Maker, and it had made it possible for me to approach her when I had a problem of my own that seemed to need the touch of her skilled hands.
‘Your mother in?’ I asked, rubbing my arm because Lisa packs a powerful punch for such a skinny little kid.
‘I dunno. I’ll go see,’ Lisa said, and then without moving from the spot she bawled ‘Mummmmmmm!’ at the top of her voice.
A door slammed open in the recesses of the flat and heavy footsteps sounded, heading towards us. The rest of the building is empty, so any time you move you raise echoes as hollow and resonant as if you’re walking on a drumhead. Imelda likes it that way, though: she never has to keep the noise down for fear of what the neighbours will say, and there’s nobody to object to the odd hours she keeps or to the inevitable stream of mostly posthumous late-night callers.
Pen and I both looked off left as the footsteps approached the other side of a door whose paint looked not so much chipped as partially boiled. It swung open and Imelda loomed into view, stepping out of a room that was completely unlit. She was a formidable black woman, in her late fifties now but as imposing as she’d been at thirty, with a hard, beautiful face like sculpted ebony and arms like a pair of late-autumn hams. She was dressed in a midnight blue Ashoke-style dress that flowed like churning water when she walked. The Met office would issue a storm warning as soon as they caught sight of her.
‘Hello, Felix,’ she said, civilly enough. Then she turned to Pen and beamed all over her face. ‘Pamela! He’s been asking after you, honey. Doing nothing but. And when he’s not asking after you he’s thinking after you. I can tell every time, because he gets a Pamela look on his face that I can’t mistake for anything else.’
Pen smiled weakly but gratefully. ‘Can I see him, Imelda?’ she asked, putting her hand on the older woman’s arm.
Imelda patted it reassuringly. ‘You mean private?’ she said. ‘Of course you can. Just as soon as me and Felix have gone in there and done the necessary.’ And then to me. ‘Felix, shall we make a start?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘But then I’m on again after Pen. I need to talk to Asmodeus.’
There was a moment when a pin dropping would have sounded like a steel band.
‘Now that wasn’t in the deal,’ Imelda said with dangerous mildness. ‘Not the way I remember it.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘We won’t be talking about the weather, Imelda. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important.’
The Ice-Maker wasn’t impressed. ‘I got a kid here,’ she said, waving a hand towards exhibit one. ‘You think I want to be summoning up demons in my own house?’
‘I’m not a kid, Mum,’ Lisa protested, scenting excitement. ‘I’m sixteen, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Don’t use that kind of language!’ Imelda snapped.
‘I think the pair of us can handle him,’ I said. ‘And you know you can lock him away again when we’re done. He’d be within the wards and he’d be on the leash. The whole time.’
‘There isn’t a leash short enough for that kind.’
‘There are two of us and one of him.’
Imelda shook her head, not only unconvinced but angry. ‘We had an agreement,’ she said. ‘I said I’d let that sick man stay here, and I said I’d keep his fever down - but that’s all I swore to do. He stays in that room. I go in to him whenever he needs me. End of story. Now you’re asking me to raise the fever up instead, and that goes against the grain of me. The stink of a demon in my place - it will make everything I do harder. I’ll live with it for weeks, and I’ll feel like I’ve got the damn flu the whole time. And that’s the least of it. Calling him makes him stronger, you damn well know that. So why should I do it, Castor? What have you got to tell me that will make me think it’s worth it?’
That was a good question. I decided to duck it until I could think of a good answer. ‘Let’s go ahead and get Rafi ready to receive visitors first,’ I said. ‘Then we’ll see if we can cut a deal.’
With an expressive look at me, Imelda swept away. I followed, and Pen remained behind. At this stage of the game, her presence was a wild card that we surely didn’t need.
Down on the first floor, Imelda traced a line around the padlock with a stick of charcoal that she took from the blue-black folds of her gown. Then she spoke to it before she unlocked it and left it hanging on the hasp. There were two further locks on the door itself and they both got the same treatment. Then she stood back and I led the way into the room - the moment of greatest risk, reserved for me because this whole thing had been my stupid idea in the first place.
I’d taken a lot of pains setting the room up in the week or so before we made the raid on the Stanger, so it was a big improvement over Rafi’s cell back there. It had furniture in it, for one thing, and a bookshelf with books on it - including his precious Kerouacs, Corsos and Ginsbergs - and an icebox with a few cans of Fosters floating in cold water that had been ice the evening before. All the comforts of home, give or take: nothing electrical, no TV or fridge, because things of that nature interfere with Imelda’s wards. But back at the care home, Rafi lived in a bare silver box and was given nothing that Asmodeus might use to raise mischief. Even his clothes had to be free of buttons and zips. By contrast, this was one of the corner suites at Claridges.
Rafi was lying on the bed reading the previous day’s Guardian when we entered. He sat up and nodded to us both.
‘Hey, Wonder Woman. Hey, Fix. What’s new? Are we still good?’
‘Still fine, Rafi,’ I assured him. ‘No news is good news. Webb doesn’t seem to be missing you very much.’ I was watching Rafi as I spoke, alert for any trace of the demon Asmodeus in the way he moved or spoke. There was nothing. The Ice-Maker had touched him and he was still chilled.
All the same I played him a binding tune, and Imelda touched him some more on the head and face and shoulders, murmuring to herself in throaty Gabon French as she did so. It was the first time we’d worked in tag-team format like this, but we fell in with each other’s moves without needing to discuss it.
>
Rafi didn’t talk either, until we’d finished. Then he voiced the question that had been on his mind ever since we’d walked into the room. ‘Is Pen with you?’
‘Nah, she had to do her hair,’ I said, and then, before his face could register either dismay or disbelief, ‘She’s upstairs. She clocks on as soon as we clock off.’
‘Then don’t let me keep you,’ he said, waving us towards the door. ‘Oh, did you bring the whisky, Fix?’
‘I’ll drop it in later,’ I promised. ‘Before I leave, there’s something I want to talk to you about.’
While Pen got her conjugals, securely locked in with Rafi behind the barricade of wards, I explained to Imelda what I’d seen and felt on the Salisbury estate. She was about as impressed as I thought she’d be. ‘You need to drink a little less coffee, Castor,’ she told me stonily. ‘Your nerves are getting jumpy.’
‘I’m serious, Imelda,’ I said, not rising to the bait. ‘This is real, and it’s nasty.’
‘Then go do that thing you do.’ She said this with a contemptuous edge in her voice: like I said, to the Ice-Maker the dead are friends and clients. Consequently she doesn’t have a whole lot of time for exorcists.
‘I intend to,’ I said, flatly. ‘But I’d like to know how the land lies. You don’t defuse a bomb by picking it up and shaking it to see what rattles. You check what kind of trigger it’s got.’
‘What in God’s name do you know about defusing bombs?’
‘About as much as I know about freestyle tap-dance,’ I admitted. ‘But I do know about frying the undead - saving your presence - and I know I’ve got a better chance of coming out of this on my own two feet if I get some decent intel.’
We argued it backwards and forwards a little without getting anywhere. And when it was clear that Imelda wasn’t going to concede the point, I shifted my ground.
‘What if Asmodeus gets out anyway?’ I asked her. ‘We’ve got him under control at the moment, but that might not last. Wouldn’t you like to test the strength of those wards on the door while you’ve got me around as back-up?’
By way of answer, Imelda stood up and beckoned me to follow her. We went across the barren space, smelling slightly of decay, that she calls her waiting room to a doorway, on the far side of which Lisa was reading Hello! magazine by the light of a stub of candle.
‘So say we test the wards, and they fail,’ Imelda said. ‘That’s my sweet girl there, Castor. The only thing I’ll leave behind me when I’m gone to show I was ever here. I stretched a point already, letting you bring an âme raché into my house. I stretched it as far as it’s going to go. Do I want to test the wards? Hell, if that thing gets out of him, all the wards in the goddamn world aren’t going to slow it down for the time it takes you to fart, Castor. I’m relying on the strength of my hands. They’ve never failed me yet.’
I threw up my hands in a gesture of surrender. I could see I wasn’t going to carry the point. By this time Pen’s hour was up and we were getting into overtime. We went downstairs, letting our feet fall heavily to announce us. When Imelda was finally done with the locks and bolts, Pen and Rafi were sitting demurely on the bed together, just holding hands.
I held out the whisky and Rafi let go of Pen’s hand to take it.
‘Jameson’s,’ he said without much enthusiasm. ‘I asked for single malt.’
‘You get single malt when I get a paying gig,’ I told him, and he grunted in disapproval. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I guess we’d better hit the road.’
‘I thought you had something you wanted to say to me.’
I shrugged. There was nothing else I could do. ‘It’ll keep,’ I said. ‘Pen, whenever you’re ready.’
They embraced, long and lingering: in the end I made a throat-clearing noise and they peeled apart reluctantly. Don’t think I was just being an arsehole here, by the way: we’d learned by trial and error that the heightened arousal Rafi gets from being around Pen tends to undo the effect of Imelda’s benediction and my playing. An hour is safe. An hour and a half is usually okay. Two hours or more is asking for trouble.
‘You’re working on the Tune, right?’ Rafi asked me. When he says it that way, with the capital letter, it only ever means one thing: the music of unbinding, the tune that will sunder him from Asmodeus and leave him once again as sole tenant in his own skin.
‘Always,’ I told him, which was as good as saying ‘No news since the last time you asked.’
He nodded slowly, staring me in the eyes the whole time. He knows the only leverage he has on me is my guilt and so he plays it up, afraid that I might one day forget who carries the lion’s share of the blame for what he is. He doesn’t have to worry on that score, but you can understand why he doesn’t take it for granted. I broke that ancient-mariner stare and turned to leave, my hand already on the handle of the door.
The whisky bottle hit the wall right next to my head and shattered spectacularly.
I turned with my mouth open on an oath, but the look on Rafi’s face silenced me. He was staring in shock and horror at his own left hand, which was rotating on his wrist as though he was flexing before some strenuous exercise. I saw the truth in his eyes. Then the hand and arm lifted, against Rafi’s straining efforts, and beckoned me to return.
I didn’t: not straight away. First I went upstairs to get pen and paper.
‘So let’s be absolutely clear,’ I said, looking not into Rafi’s eyes but at his twitching left hand. A black biro was loosely propped between his thumb and forefinger, and a page from the newspaper was spread across the table between us. ‘Asmodeus?’
The moving biro wrote, and having writ moved on. A single word. Yes.
‘Son of a bitch,’ Imelda murmured in her throat. Pen just gave a forlorn moan.
‘How?’ I demanded.
Rafi wrote: The usual way.
‘So you’re building up an immunity to Imelda’s treatment. Very kind of you to let us know. We’ll try harder next time.’
The hand twitched and scribbled, the pen held at a crazy angle, the letters produced gradually by what seemed at first to be random strokes and slashes. You’ll be civil. If you want answers.
I tried to keep a poker face: Asmodeus had the left hand, and clearly he could hear me, too. Safest to assume he was also looking out through Rafi’s eyes. ‘You’ve got some answers for me?’
Ask me a question.
Might as well go for broke. ‘What’s happening on the Salisbury estate?’
A door opening, Rafi wrote. An eggshell breaking across. Call it metamorphosis. Call it transformation.
Great. Who’s up for a game of twenty questions? ‘So what’s changing into what?’ I demanded. ‘Or are you getting writer’s cramp?’
Rafi’s hand laid down the pen, flexed and unflexed, then picked it up again. You’ll laugh when I tell you. It’s a huge joke, mostly on you. But there are two sides to every deal, Castor. You haven’t asked me what my consultation fee is.
And here we were, at the top of the slippery slope. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘How about this? You tell me what I need to know, and I’ll keep doing whatever’s necessary to make sure Jenna-Jane doesn’t get to add you to her zoo.’
But you do that for your friend, not for me. I need
The sheet of paper was now completely filled with angular scrawl. I flipped it over - Rafi’s hand twitching all the while as though the flow of nerve impulses couldn’t be stopped or slowed - and Asmodeus went on as though there’d been no interruption. something else.
‘Like what?’
Entertainment. Delectation. Tasty morsels to gladden my jaded heart.
Despite the situation, I almost laughed. The images conjured up by the words were too grotesque to take seriously. ‘How about an Indian takeaway and a belly dance?’ I suggested.
My tastes run otherwise.
‘Be specific. I’m no way signing you a blank cheque.’
You feed me. And I’ll feed you.
‘Meaning?’
Bring me to it. This thing you want to kill. Set me free, so I can carve off a little piece of it for myself, and enjoy it at my leisure. When I’ve eaten my fill, I’ll tell you how to deal with whatever’s left.
I sat irresolute. I looked into Rafi’s eyes but Rafi only shrugged brusquely, his shoulders hunched and his mouth set in a grimace. This was nothing to do with him, and he obviously wasn’t enjoying the experience.
Imelda saw my hesitation. ‘No deal,’ she said, a warning note in her voice. And I knew damn well she was right.
‘Tell me a way to do this that doesn’t leave you loose in the world when it’s over,’ I said to the invisible presence. ‘Meet me halfway, Asmodeus. If this is something you really want, make it possible for me to say yes.’
The hand stopped its restless movement and lay still for a few moments on the paper. Then Rafi, with a wince, lifted it to head height and massaged the wrist with his other hand.
‘That fucking hurt,’ he said.
Pen was at his side in a moment, embracing him fiercely. Imelda turned to me, her face hard. ‘What did we miss?’ she demanded. ‘What trick did we miss?’
I shrugged. ‘We didn’t miss a thing. I think he’s been building up to that. Keeping a piece of Rafi under his control so he could pull a little coup when the right time came.’ And why would that be now? I wondered but didn’t say. Why had he shown his hand?
Because he felt pretty damn sure that I’d be taking him up on his offer, either now or later.
Rafi disentangled himself from Pen’s consoling arms and stood.
‘You’ve got some more work to do,’ he said to me and Imelda, a tremor in his voice.
‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘You’re right.’ I took out my whistle and blew a low, sustained note while Imelda clamped her strong hands to either side of Rafi’s skull. We got busy.
Again.
