by Mike Carey
Or I would have been, if Todd hadn’t kept the gun in his pocket when he switched to the knife. He stepped back now, the gun once again in his hand. He looked annoyed.
‘What the fuck did that achieve?’ he demanded.
Was it a trick of the light or was something moving behind him, outside the window? I took a step towards the door and he moved in to block me, which conveniently blind-sided him as far as the window was concerned.
‘You’re not going to kill me,’ I said, playing for seconds.
‘No?’ Todd raised a mildly sceptical eyebrow. ‘How come?’
‘The noise,’ I said. ‘Someone will hear. And you’ll have a roomful of dead cats to explain as well as me.’
He aimed at my head, thought better of it, and lowered the gun to point it at my stomach: messier and more painful, but a safer shot.
‘Silencer,’ he explained, and pulled the trigger. I was watching his hand and I dropped as his index finger squeezed, but he would still have hit me. Even with gravity on my side I can’t outrace a bullet.
But the window exploded inwards, and a human figure danced in a blur out of the unfolding storm of broken glass, limbs scything so quickly that they left stroboscopic after-images on the air. There was a wet, insinuating crack, and Todd’s arm folded backwards at a point where the human body doesn’t actually have a moving joint. The figure landed and turned, without any sense of haste or even of intention. It was more like watching someone practise the steps of a dance than anything else. It kicked Todd in the stomach: the sound this time was more muffled, but the damage seemed just as profound. Todd slid sideways against the desk, crumpling inwards like a flower closing for the night, and then slowly sank down onto his knees.
Moloch straightened his cuffs like a dandy after a duel, staring down with cold amusement at the man he had just crippled. I gawped at him, confused and uncomprehending.
‘Not the saviour you were expecting?’ the demon demanded, giving me a glance of cold, sardonic amusement. Todd was curled up almost into a foetal crouch on the floor, absolutely silent, absolutely still. He could even have been dead: the kick to the stomach was easily hard enough to have ruptured some vital organ.
I struggled up on one knee again, but then took a breather, my legs trembling. ‘Not exactly,’ I admitted hoarsely. ‘You told me you’d had enough of saving my life. I think you said it was my turn to scratch your back, or something to that effect.’
‘Yes. That’s what I said. And that’s what you did, Castor. That sad wreckage downstairs –’ he kissed his fingers. ‘– perfectly aged. The spirit filleted and pared from the flesh with great delicacy. I can’t remember when I last ate so well.’
I fought the urge to throw up. Moloch had walked around behind me and was busying himself with the handcuffs. I heard the links part with a loud, grating clank of metal against metal. Flexing my arms, I discovered that they were now free to move, although the cuffs still hung around my wrists like bracelets – and my right shoulder throbbed agonisingly where Todd’s knife had stabbed into the fleshy part of it
I stood up, a little shakily. ‘Well, it’s all part of the service,’ I said. ‘At least, it is now. I didn’t plan it this way.’
‘No,’ Moloch agreed. ‘But I’ve found you to be worth following. Serendipity is your whore. And I thought you’d work a little harder if you felt you were working without a safety net.’
‘Pick him up,’ I said, pointing at Todd. ‘Put him in the chair.’ Moloch nodded amiably, bent down and hauled the lawyer to his feet. Todd wasn’t dead: he wasn’t even unconscious. But his face was deathly pale and he screamed when Moloch lifted him, flailing with his good arm as his bad one dangled loosely, at an impossible angle.
Moloch dropped him into the chair, then looked inquiringly at me. I’d crossed to the shattered window, and I was drinking in great gulps of the clean night air. I’d supped full with horrors, but it wasn’t even midnight yet and I had darker work still to do.
‘See if you can find some rope,’ I muttered, without looking round. ‘He probably won’t stay upright any other way.’
The sheet music had taken a bit of damage when Scrub-slash-Leonard had taken that last wild swipe at my chest and almost laid my insides open to the world. Nothing that wouldn’t heal, though. I laid it out on the desk and smoothed it down with the flat of my hand. Todd watched me with a shell-shocked lack of curiosity, his injured arm lashed across his chest, the other tied behind him. It turned out that the room where Scrub had been stowed contained a builder’s drum of rope – about two hundred feet, unstarted. Moloch had used all of it to secure Todd to the chair, virtually weaving a cocoon around him and leaving very little of him still in view apart from his pale face.
I sat myself on the desk, more or less where Todd had been sitting during my interrogation. Moloch stood over by the window with his back to us, letting me make my play with no interruptions. Maybe he just wasn’t interested in this side of things.
‘You started a sentence earlier,’ I reminded Todd. ‘You were there when I something-or-other. How was that going to end?’
‘I forget,’ Todd said, with a sneer that sounded convincing despite the slight slur in his voice. He had to be in a lot of pain. And it was going to get worse before it got better.
‘Okay. Doesn’t matter,’ I reassured him. ‘Todd, I broke in here tonight to look through your files and get the lowdown on the Mount Grace posse. But since you’re here, in the flesh – even if it isn’t exactly your flesh – there’s another favour you can do me. It’s going to be ugly and it’s going to be messy and at the end of it I don’t know what kind of shape you’ll be in but it won’t be good. To tell you the truth, it makes me a little bit sick just thinking about it, but I’ll do it if I have to. Because if it works it could save my life later tonight. So I figure I’ll cut you a deal. Tell me about the set-up at the crematorium. About Inscription Night. How many people are going to be there. What sort of defences they’ll have laid on. When it will all get started, and when’s the best time to go in. Tell me what to expect, and I’ll leave it at that. I’ll walk out the door and the cleaners will find you in the morning.’
Todd glanced up at me again, from under half-lidded eyes. The pain of his injured arm seemed to have driven him into mild shock: either that or he was controlling it with some kind of meditation technique, because there was something other-worldly about his calm. He breathed out through his nostrils, conveying a world of contempt. ‘You bluff badly, Castor,’ he murmured. ‘I’m a dead man already, so death doesn’t scare me. And I’ve got powerful friends. Torture me and kill me, I’ll just come back.’
‘If you’re dead, I can send you on your way,’ I countered. ‘That’s what I do.’ Moloch perked up at that, and looked around at me with a feral smile. The idea of catching Todd’s soul on the wing seemed to be a turn-on for him.
‘You,’ I said, pointing a finger at him, ‘stay out of this, or our deal’s cancelled. Try to take this one soul now and you’ll lose your chance of eating all the others. You understand me?’
Moloch’s answer came from between bared teeth. ‘Yes.’
‘Okay then.’ I turned to Todd again. ‘You know what I’m talking about,’ I said, ‘don’t you? I’m an exorcist. I have power to bind and break you.’
This time he managed a faint, sickly smile. ‘Do you?’
‘Funny you should ask,’ I said, deadpan. ‘Normally if I’m this close to a ghost, no matter what it’s wearing, I get a ping on my radar. When I met you and Scrub – sorry, I mean Leonard – downstairs here, I got nothing. And every time I’ve seen you outside this building . . . nothing all over again. You’ve got good camouflage, I have to say. I’d love to know how it’s done. But then, I guess you’ve been in the game long enough to have figured out a lot of the angles.’
Todd didn’t answer, but there was a glint in his eye as he looked at me: a hint of challenge, or mockery. Looking down at the music, fixing the opening beats in my
mind, I slid my whistle out of my inside pocket again and shipped it into the operating position.
‘But here’s the bad news,’ I said. ‘John Gittings did manage to get a fix on you. I don’t know where he was standing, or what sort of tricks he used. He wasn’t a particularly smart guy, in my opinion, but he did it anyway. He nailed you and he got you down on paper.’ I cleared my throat and spat on the floor. ‘And that’s what I’m going to play for you this evening,’ I muttered, not looking at Todd.
I put the whistle to my lips, tried to find the sense: I took one deep breath, held it for a second, then another second, until the seconds became beats and the music invited me in.
Open with a hot trill like manic birdsong: but the bird’s a dive-bomber, and it crashes down hard through the scale to level out a full octave lower in a welter of hard, pugnacious chords. Bail out into C and hold it for a full four beats before dropping even further. It was all guesswork – and I was trying to cover both parts of John’s wacky notation, playing two voices on the same instrument. Todd looked at me with blank puzzlement, but beyond that he didn’t respond.
Change the key, change the time, start again. Still no reaction from Todd. When I got to the hard part, where Luke Pomfret had told me a third drummer was meant to come in, I started to tap my heel against the wood of the desk in crude counterpoint to the music. It was hard not to tap on the beat, but John’s music was quite clear that the new voice should be at odds with the rest of the rhythm. I kept it up until the weird lack of synchronisation made me stumble, lose my sense of direction and stop dead in the middle of a bar.
‘What’s the point of this?’ Moloch demanded.
‘Shut up,’ I said, trying to think my way through the sequence that had just tripped me.
Again, from the top, and faster now because the sense was growing inside me again: the sense that was my knack, my stock-in-trade, and that had started to kick in back at the National Gallery café when Pomfret was playing the cruet set for all he was worth. My fingers were finding the right stops now, almost without being told to, and the atonal skirl leaked out into the air like toxic waste.
Todd winced, which was encouraging. I had to hope it didn’t just mean he was a music lover.
I skated up to the crux again, started to kick with one heel and then with both. The wailing voice of the whistle and the hollow thudding rhythm clashed and fought. Moloch shook his head and scowled, but Todd was starting to look a little afraid.
‘Castor . . .’ he whispered. I couldn’t hear the next word under the music, but I saw his lips move and read it there. Another chord change brought a flicker of real pain, making him screw his eyes tight shut. John’s evil medicine was working. A symphony for drums, played blind and fumbling on a tin whistle. But if it works, don’t knock it.
‘Castor!’ Todd said again, louder. There was a catch in his voice, and his eyes rolled. I carried on playing: deep in the logic of the scribbled score, it would have been almost impossible to stop. I’d given him a choice, but now there were no choices left. A single phrase from the David Bowie song ‘Sound and Vision’ formed in the music and then dissolved, a surprise visitor from another dimension. Flying on autopilot, I was more surprised to see it there than anyone.
The music rushed to its climax, the backbeat limping along behind in a slow-quick-slow. Todd was yelling, tears coursing down his cheeks. ‘Ash! It’s the ash! The ash of our bodies! The ash is our physical focus and we feed it to the people we want to take. Then we all invade them together, subdue them together, and a single spirit stays inside. Please, Castor! That’s the truth. Inscription stops the host soul from reasserting itself. It’s still there but it’s too weak to fight us. We reinscribe once a month, to make sure- Don’t! Don’t!’
He carried on babbling, but the words were lost to me now in the drumming of my own blood. Drumming. Yes. This symphony needed percussion – demanded it. I jumped down off the desk and started stamping on the floor with my left foot. It turned into a clumsy dance. I was staggering around like a drunk, the sounds rising through me and making me move whichever way they needed me to move. Downstairs I’d played for my life, cold and focused, pulling every note out of my mind and out of the darkness by will alone. What was welling up inside me now was different, and will had very little part to play in it. The closing notes seemed almost to tear the back of my throat, and when they faded I found that I was down on my knees on the floor beside Todd’s chair.
Groggily, I straightened and stood. I stared down at the lawyer in his hemp cocoon. His head lolled at an angle, his glazed eyes staring at nothing. A string of spittle trailed from the corner of his mouth onto the collar of his shirt. I thought he was dead, but I realised after a few moments that his tongue was moving inside his mouth. He was trying to form words.
I bent down, put my ear to his mouth and listened. Nothing intelligible, although there was a faint rise and fall of sound like the half-heard voices in between radio stations that you can never focus into audibility.
‘You drove the possessing spirit out,’ Moloch said, at my elbow.
‘Yeah, I did,’ I said, the words hurting my tender throat. ‘And look – someone else is still home.’
‘The original owner of this flesh,’ Moloch confirmed. ‘He seems . . . disorientated.’
‘He seems pretty much catatonic,’ I muttered, looking away. ‘Did you catch Todd on the wing?’
‘This is Todd. The soul that animates this meat now. What fled is not Todd but someone else, who lived in his body and stole his name. But no, I didn’t eat it. You told me not to. I let it leave unmolested.’
I nodded. I had to sit down: that performance had left me feeling as hollow as a cored piece of fruit. A dull ache was starting inside my head. I stumbled across to a vacant chair and sank into it. My breath was coming as rough and ragged as if I’d just swum the Channel, and panic was settling on my mind like a physical weight.
The thing that had been Todd looked past me with its eyes focused on nothing very much.
‘What did he say?’ I asked the demon. ‘He was shouting, towards the end, but I couldn’t stop to listen or I would have lost the tune. Lost the sense of it.’
Moloch summarised with crisp precision, turning away from the shell of Maynard Todd as though it held no further interest for him. ‘That they use the ash of their cremation as a physical vessel for the possession of new host bodies. The host is tricked or forced into eating the ash. Then all the souls in this – cabal – invade the intended host at once, subduing his soul so that one of their number can possess his body.’
‘I caught that much,’ I said. ‘I thought there was more.’
Moloch nodded. ‘He said they tried to do this to you, when you went to Mount Grace to burn John Gittings. Todd gave you a drink of brandy from a hip flask. The ash was dispersed in the liquor. But the succubus came before they could complete the possession, and they had to stop.’
I remembered the sudden, terrible sickness that had come over me as John’s casket rolled through the furnace doors. Not like me at all, and now I knew why. It wasn’t me at all.
‘He also said that the procedure – the possession – is only temporary. The soul of the possessed tries to reassert itself – tries to break free from their control. It gets stronger again over time, however hard they whip it into submission. They have to meet at Mount Grace once a month to repeat the ritual, for want of a better word, and reassert their control. They do this at the dark of the moon, and they call it—’
‘Inscription.’
‘Yes.’ He stared at me with a hungry intensity. ‘Castor, he answered your question, finally, when he was desperate and trying to make you spare him. But in any case you’d only have to look out of the window. The dark of the moon is tonight.’
‘I know.’
‘We have them. We can take them all.’
I nodded slowly. ‘Yeah.’
Maybe the feeling of foreboding I was experiencing was just paranoia. I’
d just performed a full exorcism – or something that felt like one. The ghost that had flown out from this room should either have vanished into the ether or else it should be heading for Hell at a good cruising speed. That was where the smart money was lying.
But what was the worst-case scenario? That the tough old soul had been cast out but had had the strength to resist utter dissolution. That it knew where it was going and had the strength to get there. Sure, the thing inside John Gittings had needed to be taken to Mount Grace and burned there again – but then, John’s house had more wards and fendings on it than Pentonville had bars. They were designed to keep the dead out, but they cut both ways: that was why the mad, desperate ghost had gone geist. But here at Todd’s offices, as I’d noticed when I first came in, there wasn’t anything to keep the evil dead from coming and going as they pleased.
So I’d had my rehearsal for the big show, and that was good: but it was more than possible I’d just told the bastards I was coming. They’d have all the time in the world to prepare us a really nasty welcome.
‘We’ve got to go now,’ I said.
Moloch gave me a look of ruthless, detached appraisal.
‘You think you can walk?’ he asked.
I nodded again. ‘Yeah,’ I said, from out of a fog of exhaustion and pain. ‘Just getting my second wind.’
‘We can’t go now,’ he reminded me, in the same cold tone. ‘We need the lady,’
I climbed unwillingly to my feet. ‘I know,’ I muttered.
‘Can you find her?’
I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know. There was only one place I’d thought of that was worth looking in, and I knew for a fact I wasn’t going to be welcome there. I trudged down the stairs: I couldn’t hear Moloch’s footfalls, but the prickle on the back of my neck told me that he was following me.
The night loomed ahead of us like a mountain. Only idiots climb mountains in the dark.
