by Mike Carey
‘It’s rusted shut!’
‘Try again!’
We braced ourselves against the tunnel floor, straightened our backs and strained against the unyielding cast-iron cover. The tunnel walls channelled a soft rhythmic sound to our unwilling ears: the sound of Asmodeus’s feet slapping the cobbles as he ran. It sounded like a barber stropping a razor.
My spine felt like it was breaking already, but I poured on the effort. Beside me, Pax growled low in her throat. The manhole cover didn’t budge by a fraction of an inch.
Pax moved away from me, and I heard her scrabbling around on the floor. Then I felt the vibration through the palms of my hands as she came upright again and drove something – one of the loose bricks that had been lying against the tunnel wall – repeatedly against the edge of the manhole cover. She was trying to dislodge the rust that had welded it into place, and it seemed to be working. It gave slightly, shifting against the pressure of my hands.
‘Push again!’ I grunted.
Trudie added her efforts to mine. With a squeal like a stuck pig, the manhole cover started to move. The light that rushed in was pale and washed out, but it was still startling. It showed the demon closing on us soundlessly in the dark, as fast as a torpedo.
With a booming clang, the manhole cover fell out onto the street. I grabbed Trudie before she even knew what I was doing, lifting her by her lower legs so that she had no choice but to grasp the rim of the hole and haul herself up. It was that or go over backwards into the dark.
Then I gathered myself and jumped, getting a grip on the edge and trying to pull myself up by my hands. My head cleared the rim of the hole, and I had a momentary, skewed vision of the road tunnel above: strip lights high overhead canted at a crazy angle, a soot-streaked crash barrier only a foot or so away, a car swerving around us and almost hitting the kerb. Trudie gripped my forearm and leaned back, using her weight to land me the way an angler lands a big fish. But something gripped my ankle hard and dragged me back into the dark. I clung desperately to Trudie’s arm, kicking out with my free foot but making contact with nothing more substantial than air. I went down heavily on my back, with a jarring impact that knocked the breath out of my body.
Asmodeus stood over me, grinning like the wicked land-lord in a melodrama. ‘It’s a mess down here,’ he said, conversationally. ‘You should have told me you were coming. I’d have made a bit of an effort.’
I scrabbled backwards, agonisingly aware that I was retreating not just from the demon but from the only exit. ‘You said . . . you’d save me for last,’ I reminded him, groping in the dark for something – anything – I could use as a weapon.
Asmodeus shook his head. ‘But you will keep putting yourself in harm’s way,’ he chided me gently. ‘What am I to do, Castor? I love our little talks, but I’ve got things to do and you keep tugging at my coat-tails like a kid who wants a lollipop. Anyway, I’m pretty much done here. Got all the ducks in a row. So I think I may go ahead and give you a spanking, just so you remember your place.’
His face went from light into shadow as he walked past the open manhole and out of the narrow, wan little spotlight it was casting down into the tunnel.
‘You know why the lion limps?’ he asked me, his voice a low, exultant growl.
I braced myself to rise as he bent forward and hit him with as much force as I could manage. He didn’t even seem to feel it.
At that moment, Trudie appeared in the hole behind and above him, head down. Dangling over the abyss, she flung her right arm out to its full extent, and there was a smacking sound as something hit the back of Asmodeus’ head. He grunted in surprise and faltered in his step. Then he raised a tentative hand to his head, which had sprouted – as if by magic – a vertical appendage. He turned his head slightly, and I saw that it was the shaft of a claw hammer, the business end of which was embedded several inches into his skull. So that was what Trudie had picked up in the dark: not a mere brick but a handy multi-purpose assault weapon.
I rolled to the side and jumped up. Asmodeus turned to keep me in his sights, but there was a drunken list to his body and a jerkiness to his movements. Still, he was between me and the manhole and there was no way I was getting up to ground level without going through him first.
I headed straight for him, then as he moved in to close me down I stopped suddenly and jabbed out with my left hand. Ordinarily the punch wouldn’t have had a chance of getting past the demon’s guard, but now it connected with his face, Asmodeus’ momentum adding to mine to give it some real heft.
Asmodeus stopped in his tracks, his knees buckling slightly, and I did what felt natural and inevitable at that moment. I reached past him, grabbed the handle of the hammer and wrenched it down and to the side, turning the bifurcated claw inside his skull like a spoon inside the shell of a coconut. The hammer came free in my hand with a liquescent crunching sound, and Asmodeus crashed down onto his knees, then onto his knees and elbows.
He was trying to rise, but for the moment Rafi’s nervous system wasn’t cooperating. The switchboard was down, and there was no way of routing messages past the crimson ruin at the back of his skull to the still functioning limbs and torso.
I dropped the hammer – reluctantly, but I needed both hands – stepped onto the demon’s back and launched myself from it towards the manhole in a graceless lunge. Trudie got out of my way just in time to avoid being headbutted, then helped me to clamber up as I got my arms and then my upper body through the gap.
‘We did it!’ she gasped, her voice hoarse with disbelief.
‘Yeah,’ I agreed, ‘we did. Now run like fuck!’
Trudie looked towards the open manhole. Judging by her face, she thought the fight was over. A groping hand thrust over the rim made my point for me. We took off down the road tunnel like two sprinters vying for gold.
We were running against the traffic. Car after car braked and slewed to avoid hitting us, then accelerated past us with a blast on the horn or a bellowed curse from the driver-side window.
We put enough distance between ourselves and the demon for me to think we were free and clear. Younger and fitter than me, Trudie got an early lead and kept it, but then as she reached the steeper ramp at the tunnel entrance she turned like Orpheus at the doorsill of the Underworld to see if I was coming. Something whipped past me, something perfectly round, flashing a startling silver-grey with reflected light so that it looked for a moment like a lightning bolt caught in a bubble. It flashed past Trudie too, missing her head by a few lazy inches but bumping her shoulder and spinning her on her axis like a skater doing a sudden unplanned bracket turn. Her eyes widened in shock and she made a sound like a gasp broken in two.
I was level with her in a second and caught her before she could fall. There was a splintering crash from somewhere up ahead of us, where the manhole cover had ricocheted off the concrete wall of the tunnel and struck the wing of an articulated truck a glancing blow. The truck jackknifed, its trailer swinging round to form a wall-to-wall roadblock. For a moment it looked as though it was going to keel over on top of us, but it rocked back on its wheel base at the last moment and settled.
Trudie’s mouth was working, but no sound was coming out. A dark stain spread out and down from her shoulder across the front of her shirt. The manhole cover had barely seemed to tap her, but it must have weighed close on a hundred pounds, and it had whipped through the air like a discus. The damage was obviously a lot worse than I’d thought. She sagged in my arms, but I took the weight and kept her more or less on her feet.
‘Not yet, Pax,’ I yelled. ‘Not yet. Stay with me!’
I manhandled her on towards the truck, whose driver was now climbing down out of his cab with a look of anger and confusion on his face. He shouted something at me but I ignored him, heading for the narrow gap between the back of the trailer and the tunnel wall. There was just room for us to squeeze through.
Trudie was taking some of her own weight by this time, but her breathing was ragg
ed and shallow as we stumbled up the ramp. Even in the baleful light of the street lamps I could see her face was pale and glistening with sweat.
‘Can’t . . . move my arm,’ she muttered. Then she stopped dead in the road and was violently sick.
I looked back towards the mouth of the tunnel. A dozen or so cars were stopped there, and the trucker was having a loud argument with some of their drivers. At any moment I expected to see them flung aside as Asmodeus came storming through, but there was no sign of the demon. For some reason he’d given up the pursuit, maybe because flinging the manhole cover had taxed Rafi’s damaged body too far, and he’d had to stop and recuperate.
We still had to get out of there though, Pax to an A & E department and me to—Shit, what time was it? I looked at my watch, which showed 11.59. The Super-Self raid was about to start.
Trudie’s gaze met mine. ‘Go on,’ she said, teeth clenched on the pain. ‘I’ll flag down a car.’
‘I can’t leave you lying in the street,’ I protested.
She pushed away from me, stood swaying but unsupported. The whole of the front of her shirt was soaked in red so dark it looked black under the street lights. ‘I’m not lying anywhere,’ she snarled. ‘Go, Castor. I’m not dying; I’ve just got a broken arm. If you think your little toy will do the job, you have to get it over there before Gil sends the troops in and somebody dies.’
A car was coming towards us, slowing down as its driver saw the snarl-up ahead and realised that the tunnel entrance was blocked. Trudie finessed the argument by stepping into its path and forcing it to a sudden halt. The driver was a young guy in a Kings of Leon T-shirt, his windows wound down and his stereo banging out some Jamaican dance-hall number. He stared at Trudie’s blood-soaked shirt in almost comical horror.
‘I have to get to a hospital,’ she said.
‘Y-yeah,’ he stammered. ‘Okay. Jesus!’ He opened the car door and got out to let her into the back seat, although he cast a woeful glance at his light-tan upholstery. He looked almost as pale as Trudie did.
‘Go, Castor,’ Pax said again. ‘I’ll be fine.’
‘I’ve memorised your number plate,’ I muttered to the dance-hall fan as I passed him. ‘Get her to where she needs to go. Don’t leave her.’ Then I accelerated into a run as I headed on down Kingsway to the junction with Aldwych.
The Strand was close by, but I was winded and sore from my tussle with Asmodeus and from the earlier hundred-metre freestyle fleeing. I couldn’t keep up the pace, and by the time I got to the bottom of Exeter Street I was limping along in a slo-mo parody of a run.
The pavement outside Super-Self was deserted and the door wide open. Turning in off the street, I almost went sprawling as I tripped over a body lying right across the threshold.
It was a man, tall and well built, lying on his stomach. He was breathing like a bellows: quick and shuddering gulps of air that made his upper body rise and fall as though he was trying to do push-ups.
The Spiro Agnew wristwatch on his right hand told me who I was dealing with.
‘Samir,’ I said, and then when he didn’t answer, ‘Turk? What’s happening?’
There was a sound like the stuttering pop-gurgle-pop of a blocked pipe, but he didn’t answer. When I rolled him onto his back, I saw why.
The lower half of his face was a mask of blood. His mouth gaped open, and the stump of his tongue writhed like a snake as he tried to speak.
16
I could feel it long before I reached the stairs. The fear-thing was awake and feasting. It was almost like a taste in the air, a hot metal tang that stung the back of my throat and made my eyes start to water. More to the point, it made me want to run and hide. I had to force myself to keep walking into that solid wall of terror. Every step was like the moment when you launch yourself off a diving board for the first time as a kid – when you come to the edge and almost can’t make your body do something that stupid and hazardous.
I gripped the smooth-sided box in my pocket, reminding myself that I was armed and dangerous. I wasn’t the hunted here, I was the hunter, and this bloated spider, sitting in the dark in its invisible web, was going to learn that not all flies are created equal.
But all that macho talk flew out of my head when I got to the top of the stairs and saw two more of Gil McClennan’s exorcists trying to crawl up them to safety. The fly analogy came back into my head full force, because that was what they looked like: dying flies, crawling blindly, trying to escape the poison that was killing them and failing because it was already inside them.
I don’t know where the idea came from. I had slowed almost to a halt, fighting so hard against the instinct to turn on my heel and flee that my muscles were starting to lock. Walking down those stairs one at a time was going to be like climbing Everest without oxygen. So I just let my legs stop dead, which was what they wanted more than anything else to do, and leaned far out over that gulf of poisoned air.
There’s an art to falling without being hurt: you have to tuck your head and arms in, concentrate your weight, and lean into the fall so that it turns into a controlled roll. I didn’t do any of those things, because my mind was screaming and squalling inside my skull like a cat in a box as it got closer and closer to the epicentre of this psychic storm front.
At the bottom of the stairs, I climbed doggedly to my feet again. There were more bodies here, some of them moving, some of them not. I took one step forward, then another. Close enough. It would have to be close enough because a third step was beyond me.
My arms jerking and twitching like the detached legs of one of Signor Galvani’s frogs, I fought to get the box out of my pocket. This was my sheet anchor, my ace in the hole, my grail. This would show the thing in the darkness who was boss.
I pressed the tiny toggle switch, and threw the box end over end towards the gaping doors that led to the changing rooms and the swimming pool beyond. It rolled, clattered, came to a halt.
And nothing happened.
Caldessa hadn’t wound the keys.
I made a mewling sound in the back of my throat. I’d thrown the box a good ten feet. To get it back, I’d have to walk ten feet toward the pool, ten feet into that storm of terror.
But looking on the bright side, my trip-hammering heart would probably explode before I’d covered half that distance.
I tried the falling down thing again, but this time it didn’t work. I just sank to my knees without moving an inch further forward. I couldn’t even throw myself flat on the ground. My body was rebelling one joint at a time, closing shop.
Ironically, it was Juliet who gave me the strength to move. The image of her rose suddenly in my mind, as she’d looked when we’d stood here the night before. Perhaps it was because this overmastering, hectoring, screaming fear was like the equally devastating, hectoring lust that she inspired. I used the one as a bulwark against the other, raising my libido as a battered sleazy shield against the slings and arrows of outrageous, pants-wetting, heart-stopping dread.
On hands and knees I shuffled inch by inch towards the box, across the no-man’s-land of my own fractured personality. When my fingers closed on it, it felt like the climax to a lifetime’s questing. And then the closing of the switch was like another lifetime, and the winding of the keys an etiolated eternity of running in a lonely place.
The last, tiny, desolate nub of Felix Castor thought, Now eat this, you little fucker, as I threw the switch again.
The mechanism inside the box whirred and clicked into action, and a tinny, hollow tune filled the room. Actually, to call it a tune was far too generous; it was a wayward sequence of notes that bounced and bucked and sprawled gracelessly out onto the tainted air. But, my God, what a dying fall it had. And how perfectly, how suddenly, the fear-thing stopped its own game to listen to mine.
The summoning is only the first part of an exorcism, but it’s the most important. Shut up and listen to me, it says. Heel, Fido, and don’t move another fucking inch until I tell you to. It was
the part I’d never managed to get right for Asmodeus, despite all the years of trying. For this monster, by contrast, it had come almost at once. The trick was getting the tune out there when my own frozen heart was faltering in my chest and the lights were going out all over Europe.
Like all music boxes, this one mangled the tune, turning it into a stylised, flattened parody of itself. That didn’t seem to matter though. Like Noël Coward said, it’s amazing how potent cheap music can be. The pressure in the air lifted, and my heart came down from DEFCON 2 to something more sustainable. I drew in a tremulous breath, feeling as though vast curtains of rotting muslin were being hauled up on all sides of me.
The fear-thing was in trouble, which was gratifying to know. What’s harder to explain is how I knew it. There was nothing to see, and less and less to feel. The sense of it – the way the invisible monstrosity impinged on the radar of my death-sense – turned on some notional ectoplasmic axis, and diminished as it turned.
It turned to face the music box. As the notes of the summoning tumbled out into the dark, the fear-thing’s own attack faltered and died. It obeyed the summons. Overlaid and gathered in on itself in pleats and rucks of dimensionless emotion, it was pulled into the box like the endless scarves and ribbons that a conjuror folds into the palm of his hand before spreading his fingers to show that the hand is empty.
After a minute or so, I found I was able to stand. I closed the switch on the music box, killing the tune in the middle of a phrase. I waited, tense, for a moment or two, in case the fear-thing broke free again now that the music had stopped. What I’d played hadn’t been a full exorcism, only a summoning. But the orders seemed to stand. As in the game of musical chairs, the entity was staying where it had been when the music stopped, its focus swapped from the swimming pool to the box. More importantly, cut off from the ghosts in the pool and the skein of old emotions it had woven there, it seemed to be quiescent now – dormant, at least for the time being.
