Vicious Circle

by Mike Carey

  That last house offered a possibility, though. It had a strip of garden to the side, bordering right up against the wall of the shopping center. I slipped in through the gate, trying to look like I owned the place, and trotted around to the side. There was a fence at the back that was low enough to vault over; then another strip of garden, helpfully shielded from the house it belonged to by a clothesline full of washing. Unfortunately there was a stout, hatchet-faced brunette in the midst of the washing, presumably evacuating it to the safety of the house. She had two or three clothes pegs in her mouth, but she gaped when she saw me and they fell out. Her shriek of surprise and protest pursued me across the narrow lawn to the higher brick wall on the far side. I took a flying jump and scrambled up using elbows and feet.

  I found I was looking down into a delivery bay where a dozen or so lorries in red and silver livery were parked. No sign of any police cars, or any rioters for that matter. Straight ahead of me there was a loading bay, and its corrugated steel rolling door was only three-quarters shut. That’s an open invitation to a thief. I jumped down lightly on the farther side, hearing a woman’s voice behind me yell, “There was a man, Arthur! There was a man in the yard!” and a male voice truculently reply “What effing man? I can’t see a man.”

  I glanced around to make sure there was nobody in sight, then crossed quickly to the loading bay. There was a lorry drawn up there, its back doors wide open and its loading ramp lowered. An overturned pallet nearby had spilled brown cardboard boxes across the concrete apron in front of the rolling door. Whoever had been working here had downed tools pretty abruptly; hopefully that meant they’d fled when the riot started, but it was also possible that they were among the hostages inside. I wondered belatedly what the hell I was getting myself into here, but it seemed a little late to start having second thoughts. Probably the trick is to rule out stunts like this at the first-thoughts stage.

  The rolling door would probably lift if I got my hands underneath it and pulled, but there was no way of telling how much noise it would make. Instead, I went down on hands and knees and went under it.

  If someone had been waiting on the other side of the door, I’d have been an easy target as I crawled through on all fours and scrambled to my feet again on the far side: this wasn’t exactly covert infiltration. But the room I found myself in, long and narrow, stacked from floor to ceiling on either side with boxes and crates, was thankfully devoid of bloodthirsty maniacs armed with broken pieces of furniture. I stood still for a moment or two, listening, but the silence was absolute. All the action was clearly happening somewhere else.

  But as I moved forward into the room, I started to become aware of a whole range of sounds almost at the limits of my hearing: dull thumps and muffled shouts, softened by the distance, so that if you closed your eyes you could almost convince yourself you were listening to a cricket match on the village green.

  There was no door at the farther end of the room—just a square arch that led out into a larger warehouse space. I threaded my way cautiously through this, the back of my neck prickling every time I passed a darkened aisle. I came across an elevator shaft big enough to take me and the Civic I’d rode in on, but the elevator itself was elsewhere: the gaping doors opened onto a vertical corridor of gray cinder blocks whose bottom I couldn’t see. I kept on going, until finally a pair of black rubberized swing doors let me out into a tiled corridor. The posters on the wall here, advertising designer jeans at less than half price and three hundred top-up minutes with every new phone, told me that I wasn’t backstage anymore: I was in the mall itself.

  I expected the corridor to bring me out into the central arcade, but I’d got myself turned around somehow and I ended up in a blunt cul-de-sac facing the toilets and an “I speak your weight” machine. The noises were fainter here, but as I turned around to go back the way I’d come my other sense—the one I use in my professional capacity—went haywire. Something was coming down the corridor toward me, and I didn’t need any pricking in my thumbs to tell me that it was wicked. It was dead, or it was undead, or it was something worse, and whatever it was, it was heading straight toward me. Another second would bring it around the bend in the corridor and right into my line of sight.

  Since there was nowhere else to go, I took a silent step backward, pushed open the door of the ladies’ toilet, and slid inside. If the thing was already on my trail, then it would certainly follow me inside—but at least now I had a few seconds to prepare a suitable reception.

  My own silver dagger is barely more than a fruit parer: I keep it, like the chalice, mainly for ritual occasions. But the knife that the loup-garou had dropped the night before was still in my outside pocket. I took it out and slid the cardboard sleeve off the wickedly sharp blade. Then I took up position behind the door and waited.

  Footsteps echoed hollowly on the tiling outside, coming toward me, and then stopped. There was a silence, which stretched agonizingly: I imagined the thing, whatever it was, standing in the corridor just on the other side of the door, its own senses straining as it tried to decide whether I’d gone for the gents or the distaff side.

  Then the door opened, and I tensed to lunge at whatever came into view when it swung closed again. The only thing that stopped me was a sigh, which sounded both long-suffering and a little disappointed.

  “Castor.”

  False-footed, I let the knife fall to my side. Juliet pulled the door back toward the closed position a little way, and stared at me around the edge of it. Under a floor-length coat of black leather she was dressed in bloodred silk: a rose in a gloved fist. In the medieval Romance of the Rose, floral metaphors were used as a way of smuggling smut past the vigilant eyes of the church. I thought of roses opening, and had to wrench my mind back brutally from pathways that would take up too much time, and leave me too far off balance.

  “I thought so,” Juliet said.

  As always when I feel like an idiot, I went on the offensive. “You thought so? What about that infallible sense of smell of yours? You should have seen me coming a mile off.”

  “Too many other smells about,” muttered Juliet, closing her eyes and inhaling deeply, as if to make the point. “There’s something else walking around in this building, and it’s a lot bigger and ranker than you are.”

  “I suppose I should take that as a compliment.”

  “Take it however you like.” I suddenly realized that she was rigidly tense: the muscles in her neck standing proud of her alabaster flesh like filigreed ropes, and her posture stiff with readiness. The last time I’d seen her like this, she was hunting me; whatever she was hunting now, I felt sorry both for it and for anyone else who got in the way.

  “So where are they?” I asked her. She shot a glance at me as if she was surprised to find that I was still there. “The hostages,” I clarified. “And the rioters?”

  Juliet glanced up at the ceiling. “Up there,” she said. “Almost directly above us.”

  “How do you want to play this? And what are you even doing here in the first place? Did you see Susan Book on the TV news?”

  She shook her head, frowning momentarily as if I’d accused her of something faintly indecent. “No,” she said tersely. “But if I had, it would have been that much clearer a confirmation. This is all connected to what happened at St. Michael’s. I’m certain of it. I’m getting the same sense here that I got there—the scent that faded when I tried to focus on it. This thing has broken cover. If I can get close to it, I’ll be able to see it for what it is.”

  I digested that statement with some difficulty, but I wasn’t going to argue with her. Having important conversations in the toilet is very much a girl thing.

  “Look,” I said, “we don’t really have the faintest idea what’s going on here.” She seemed about to interrupt, but I plowed on. “All we know is that there are some people up on the mezzanine tearing the place apart, and some other people who got in the way of that. You could be right: maybe there is something making that happen, and maybe it’s the same something that’s setting up house
over at the church. Doesn’t really matter in any case. Now that we’re here, the best thing we can do is pull our little playmate out of the line of fire and then get the hell out before the police start to lob in the tear gas.”

  Juliet shook her head irritably. “I’m only interested in finding the thing that brought me here. The thing I’m smelling. By all means rescue Book, if you want to. I can’t see how she’s relevant.”

  “She’s in love with you,” I told her.

  “What?”

  “Well, in lust, I mean. She’s got a bad dose of that stuff you dish out, anyway, and being as how she’s both devout and straight she doesn’t have any idea how to handle it. You mean to say you didn’t notice how she looks at you?”

  “I tune that information out,” Juliet said, but she looked a little disconcerted. “You’re not asking me to feel—whatever it’s called—guilt about this, are you?”

  “No.” It was my turn to be impatient. “But think about it. She might not have gotten herself into this if she hadn’t been wandering around in a moon-eyed daydream thinking improper thoughts about you. I just didn’t feel happy about leaving her in there.”

  “Her emotions are no business of yours—or of mine.”

  “Fine. I’m not asking you to feel guilty. I’m just saying that I feel a little bit responsible for her myself.”

  Juliet didn’t say anything to this, which was a pretty fair indication that I’d given her some food for thought. She’s taking this business of trying to be human very seriously. She still finds an awful lot of it completely unfathomable, but she is keen to get the details right and she does have the whole of eternity to work in.

  “Look,” I said, “I’ve got an idea that might get the both of us what we want. Let me show you something.”

  I stepped past her, pulled the door open, and went back out into the corridor. She followed me as I retraced my steps to the warehouse, and I showed her the open elevator shaft.

  “No use to me,” I said. “But I thought maybe you could . . .”

  “Yes,” said Juliet. “I could. But why should I?”

  “You want to look for your demon, and you don’t want to be watching your back all the time in case these nutcases stick a knife in it—especially not when the siege might turn into a firefight at any moment. So it makes sense if we clean up first and look around afterwards.”

  “Just tell me what you want me to do, Castor.”

  “You take the high road, and I’ll take the low road. While they’re watching me, you sneak up behind them and take them out with your usual mixture of elegance and brutality. Then we’ll look around and see what we can see.”

  I was really impressed with my own performance: my voice didn’t shake in the slightest. You’d have thought I waded into the middle of riots every day of the week—whereas, in fact, since my student days ended I’ve more or less kicked the habit.

  I’d expected more opposition from Juliet, but she made a one-handed gesture that suggested she was sick of the subject. She shucked her coat and let it fall to the ground. Roses opening. “All right,” she said. “I’ll climb the lift shaft. And you’ll—?”

  “I’ll use the escalator. I want to stop in at Top Man.”

  I walked away before she could change her mind, still trying not to think about roses.

  The other end of the corridor opened directly onto the main concourse, which was looking as though a hurricane had hit it while it was pulling itself together after an earthquake. The floor was a carpet of broken glass from storefront windows, in which display dummies lay sprawled like placeholders for the dead. Someone had trodden down hard on the head of one of them, shattering it into powdery shards. For some reason I thought of Abbie’s porcelain doll, and shuddered in a kind of premonitory unease. Dress rails that had been used as battering rams lay half-in and half-out of the window frames they’d shattered, and up against one wall a gutted till leaked copper coins like congealed blood. This didn’t look like looting, though. Not that looters have any higher standards of respect for the retail environment, but the crunching debris under my feet included wristwatches and shiny gold bracelets from a jeweler’s carousel that I’d already had to step over. At some point, the sheer fun of destruction had taken over from any purely mercenary considerations here. That told me a little bit more about what I was dealing with—in fact, at that precise moment, more than I wanted to know.

  The escalators were right out in the center of the lower piazza, which meant that as I approached them I had plenty of time to look up at the galleries on the second and third floors. The second floor seemed to be deserted, but up on the top level three men were struggling with a fourth in what I took at first to be a good-natured scrum. Then I realized that I’d misread the situation: it only seemed friendly because three of the men were laughing. The fourth wasn’t making any sound at all, because they’d gagged him before slipping the noose around his neck. Now they were tying the other end of the rope around the railings; it wasn’t hard to guess what the next item on the agenda was.

  Okay, it was definitely time to make an entrance. I stepped onto the escalator, which wasn’t moving, and put my whistle to my lips. Walking slowly up the steps, and almost stumbling because of their uneven height, I played a shrieking, nasal blast like the scream of a lovesick bagpipe. The mall had pretty good acoustics, at least when it was relatively empty like this. Up above me the crazies paused in their recreations to look around and find out who was killing the cat.

  They separated and stood up, allowing me to get a better look at them. They looked scarily ordinary: one in late middle age, bespectacled and balding, dressed in shirtsleeves and suit trousers; the other two much younger—one of them maybe no more than a student—and in casuals. You couldn’t imagine them carrying out a murder together. You couldn’t even imagine them standing in the same bus queue.

  But this wasn’t the time to speculate about how they’d met and discovered a common interest in death by hanging. No, this was show time. Theater was going to be all important here. I wanted them to keep watching me rather than getting back to the business at hand. I started to scuff my feet on each step, Riverdance style, to get a rhythm going in counterpoint to the skirling notes I was pushing out of the whistle. Left foot and then right, raising my knees high and swaying my upper body from side to side like some kind of deranged snake charmer trying to go it alone after his cobra had left him.

  All of which combined to produce the desired effect. The three men abandoned their hog-tied victim and crowded to the railings to watch me walking up toward them. Then a whole lot of other faces appeared behind theirs, men and women both, clustering at the railings to peer past them with varying expressions of alarm, eagerness, and incomprehension. I hadn’t seen these people before because they’d been standing away at the back of the upper gallery, presumably in a tight, attentive cluster.

  My skin crawled. Somehow the intended execution was made infinitely worse by the fact that it would have had an audience. If I’d had any doubts before as to whether I was in Kansas or the merry, merry land of Oz, I ditched them now: whatever was going on here, it wasn’t natural.

  I stepped off the first escalator, turned, and crossed the short expanse of tiling that separated it from the second. That meant presenting my back to the crazies, which I didn’t welcome at all, but on the credit side it meant the escalator was going to bring me out on the opposite side of the upper gallery from where they were. Something big and heavy crashed to the floor right in front of me, showering me with shards of glass and plastic. It had been a sound system of some kind, speakers not included, and one of the fragments close to my foot bore the OLU of a BANG & OLUFSEN logo: not a missile you see used all that often. I stepped over it, and kept on going.

  There were howls and jeers now from the gallery above me, followed by a rain of smaller objects that I didn’t bother to acknowledge. One of them thumped me in the back, but it wasn’t sharp, or heavy enough to break bone. Maybe I hiccupped on a note, but it’s not like I was playing Beethoven’s Ninth to start with. It was just noise, lo
ud and discordant and impossible to ignore.