by Mike Carey
Something of Pen’s, then, set down here to supplement the organic wards she normally used. It was straying a bit further into Dennis Wheatley territory than she normally liked to go - her magic being of the ‘Hello birds, hello sky, hello trees’ variety - and for a moment I thought about asking her what it was for. Second thoughts prevailed: given the mood she was in right then, it could wait.
In any case, there’s always more than one way to skin a cat, especially in the digital age. I took out my phone and used its crappy little built-in camera to take a picture of the stone, right up close, then put it back where I’d found it.
Willesden is within spitting distance of my walk-up office in Harlesden, but I try not to spend a lot of time over there in case someone tries to employ me. It’s been known to happen in the past, and it usually leads to unfortunate consquences.
I’d tried calling Sue Book to tell her I was coming, but I only got her voicemail. And at Willesden Green Library, what I got was short shrift. ‘She’s not in,’ the man at the desk told me. ‘She took the day off sick.’ He was a slim, vaguely Goth-looking twenty-something with a festive sprinkling of acne across his forehead and a Love Will Tear Us Apart T-shirt which I was willing to bet he’d bought on the strength of hearing the track once on YouTube. He looked me up and down with what he probably thought was withering scorn. But I’ve been withered by the best, and this kid left my foliage intact.
‘Is she okay?’ I asked him.
‘Depends what you mean by okay.’
‘Well let’s say I mean what everyone else means by okay. Is she sick? Unhappy? Has she been hurt in some way.’
‘You should probably ask her.’
I gave it up. The unfriendly vibe was puzzling: the kid was making some assumption about me, but I just didn’t have the leisure time to tease it out. I grabbed a 297 bus over to Wembley, where Sue and Juliet live together in the house Sue inherited from her mother and walked the last half-mile through the day’s uncompromising heat, feeling slightly out of place and disadvantaged in the sunshine as nocturnal creatures usually do.
There was no answer to my knock. The windows were closed in spite of the heat, and the curtains drawn. It didn’t look promising. I knocked again, then took a few steps back from the door, positioning myself so that if anyone looked out from behind the living-room or bedroom curtains they’d see me standing there.
I waited for about two minutes. It occurred to me to pick the lock and go inside - my misspent youth has left me with the best set of cat-burgling tools in the Home Counties and a relaxed attitude to using them - but what would I say if Sue was in there, laid up with flu, and I walked in on her in her smalls? It was the sort of thing that might be hard to explain to Juliet, even on the grounds of neighbourly concern.
But unless my night-adapted eyes deceived me, there was indeed a twitching at the corner of an upstairs curtain. And then, after another short interval, the scratching sound of a door chain being disengaged.
The door opened a crack, and Sue peered out at me, a fuzzy-edged silhouette in the twilight of her hall.
‘Felix,’ she said, in a slightly bewildered tone.
I walked back to the porch, giving her a reassuring wave. ‘You called,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ If anything, the crack got a little narrower. ‘But . . . it’s all right now. I’m fine. I just wanted to ask you something, but . . . it got sorted.’
To get a less convincing tone of voice, you’d have to go to the court recordings of Adolf Eichmann saying, ‘I was only following orders.’ Lying didn’t come easy to Sue. I suspected that very few things did. Timid, self-effacing, uncomplaining and with lower self-esteem than a readers’ wives centrefold, she’d spent most of her life being the sort of willing drudge that props up half the organisations in the UK, quietly holding the fort while their colleagues ascend the ziggurat. But then she’d met Juliet, and her life had veered off in a new and wondrous direction.
‘I’m fine,’ Sue said again, with even less conviction. ‘I shouldn’t have bothered you.’
‘Well that’s what friends are for,’ I pointed out. ‘Listen, it was a long walk over here, and I’m feeling permanently dehydrated right now because I spent most of the last three weeks pickling my internal organs in Johnnie Walker, so could I come in for a quick drink? Of water, I mean.’
There was an awkward pause. ‘Well . . .’ Sue faltered. ‘I’m not dressed, and . . . I’m off sick, Felix. I . . . I haven’t been . . .’
Enough with the bullshit. I put a hand on the door and pushed it gently, not forcing my way in but forcing the point. Sue gave a sound that was almost a whimper and stepped away, averting her face, as the door swung open.
She was dressed in a slightly tatty blue silk dressing gown with a motif of ukiyo-e storks flying over the perfectly unruffled surface of a lake. She folded her arms across the front of it as if she was afraid it might fall open, even though it was tied with tassels at waist and hem.
With her head turned away from me, the side of her neck was fully exposed. There was a mark like a bruise there, wide and dark: a blue core surrounded by an irregular yellow halo.
‘Sue . . .’ I said.
Slowly, reluctantly, she raised her head and stared at me with wide, unhappy eyes.
‘She didn’t mean it,’ she said. ‘She just . . . I said something stupid and she got angry.’
The bruising continued up the left side of her face, an irregular archipelago of blue-black islets in malarial yellow waters. Her right eye was swollen closed.
‘Got angry?’ I repeated, incredulously. ‘Sue . . . I mean . . . fuck!’
‘It was me,’ Sue said flatly. ‘It was my fault.’
Juliet is a succubus, a demon whose specific modality is sex. That makes her one of the most perfectly adapted predators ever to emerge in any ecosystem. She makes men desire her - using a bag of tools that only starts with her stunning beauty and hypnotic scent - and then, when they’re at the highest pitch of sexual frenzy, vibrating like tuning forks, she devours them, body and soul.
I know all this because I was one of her victims. Gabriel McClennan, a fellow exorcist and part-time necromancer in the pay of an eastern European master-pimp named Lucasz Damjohn, had raised the demon Ajulutsikael and set her on my tail, figuring that a lethally close encounter with a demon would look like an occupational hazard for someone in my line of work. But I survived, against the odds. I managed to talk the succubus out of finishing me off (an experience which bore the same relationship to normal coitus interruptus as an exploding supernova does to a Bic lighter), and then she talked herself into sticking around on Earth. She changed her name to Juliet Salazar, met a nice girl, got married and settled down. A happy ending for everyone except me: part of my soul still has a hard-on for her that doesn’t look like dying down any time soon.
The phrase ‘drop-dead gorgeous’ gets bandied around a lot, with ‘drop-dead’ functioning as an over-intense intensifier. Juliet is drop-dead gorgeous in a very specific and literal sense. The bone-white skin, the black eyes that are almost entirely without whites - these things might seem too odd to be attractive if you met them anywhere else, but as soon as you see Juliet you want her. Her tall, generously curved body becomes the image of the ideal for you, the incarnation of desire. And if you get in close enough to inhale her perfume - her earthy natural musk - then you’re lost.
There was a time, back when she was just starting out in the business, when we used to share a lot of our cases. You could say that I showed her the ropes, or at least taught her some knots that she didn’t already know, but if I’m honest, what I was mainly doing was trying to domesticate a big, scary jungle predator into behaving like a house cat. It was a bumpy process, with a number of very memorable upsets along the way.
As I stared at Sue’s battered face, one of them flashed across my memory with sudden and unsettling vividness.
Juliet and I were mooching our way through a disused factory somewhere out past Gants
Hill. It had changed hands at a bankruptcy auction, and the new owners were concerned about the complaints they were getting from residents in the area. People had seen lights and heard noises in the dead of night when it wasn’t Christmas and they weren’t even drunk. So the outfit that had taken possession hired me to give the place a prayer and a sing-song, and I took Juliet in with me because at that point I was still pretending to be her sensei.
We’d been all through the building once and found nothing more suspicious than some obscene graffiti. It was half past one in the morning, nothing was moving, and we were pretty sure that we were in for a quiet night. So we sat down on a lathe, or maybe a steam press, and I started to rummage through my pockets for a hip-flask full of liquid sunshine which by rights ought to be there.
But Juliet caught the edge of a scent that shouldn’t be there, and before I could even get comfortable she was off - across two shop floors and a storage hangar the size of the Hatfield Galleria, out onto the yard and in among some prefab packing sheds at the far end of a desolate asphalt apron where a fleet of a hundred vans had once been parked.
Seven of these sheds were empty. The eighth . . . well, that was empty too, but there was a trapdoor in the floor and Juliet made a beeline straight for it. It was locked, but it didn’t fit all that tightly. She got her fingers in around the edge on one side of the lock plate and started to pull. I went looking for a crowbar, and found one eventually. I also found some stuff I wished I hadn’t, including an inspection pit full of gnawed bones. I had a bit of an inkling now what it was that had been giving the neighbours disturbed nights.
I took the crowbar back to the trapdoor and started to use it to good effect on the opposite side from where Juliet was tugging, but I think she’d have got there without my help. After thirty or forty seconds the wood of the trap gave a series of gunshot-sharp cracks and she lifted two thirds of it free. The rest stayed attached to the hinges.
From the bottom of the lightless well we’d opened came a weak, despairing wail, and then another.
I’d brought a torch with me. I switched it on now and pointed it down into the dark. It lit up a small, terrified face - just for a second, before a hand came up to shield those wide eyes from the sudden, unaccustomed light. I moved the beam to right and left: wherever the spotlight fell, whimpering children ducked and scurried away from it.
We’d stumbled across a loup-garou’s larder.
We looked for a ladder or a rope, but found nothing. The kids, meanwhile, cried and shrieked at the bottom of the hole. I shouted a few reassurances down to them, but clearly this was a conditioned reflex: they knew by now that when the trapdoor opened, someone’s number was up.
After a terse parley, we agreed that Juliet would stay at the mouth of the pit and keep guard while I went and found some means of getting down into it. I headed for the door, but I was still a few steps short of it when two unsettlingly tall shapes filled it, blocking my path.
Not one loup-garou then; this was a team effort.
I eyed their muscular frames to get an inkling of what I’d be up against. They weren’t overly broad at the shoulder, but they were so tall that they easily outmassed me anyway. The one on the left looked unremarkable except that when he grinned - as he did then - his teeth showed as a spiked forest of razor-sharp incisors with not a molar in sight. The other had a face that was a mass of old scar tissue so deep and rucked that I could barely see his eyes. They were both dressed in blue overalls, presumably so that from a distance - or to a trusting or myopic observer - they’d look as though they had some reason to be here.
They came inside and closed the heavy steel door with an echoing clang.
I took a step back, reaching into my coat and unshipping my whistle. Then I changed my mind, let it slide back again and picked up a heavy cast-iron pulley block from a pile of packing cases instead. Werewolves, you’ve got to hate them. They’re mostly old souls because it’s a difficult trick to pull off, and to pry the spirit loose from the animal flesh that it’s shaped and sculpted . . . well, that’s even harder. In fact it’s like pulling buckshot out of a tiger’s hide while the tiger is trying to eat your head. Given the fact that the pair of them were going to be on me inside a second, I was probably going to have better luck with the pulley block than the whistle - a cat in Hell’s chance, say, rather than a snowball’s.
They moved forward in unconscious synchrony, and I swung with the block. I timed it right, catching the scar-faced one off balance as he moved in, but it made no difference: he was too damn fast. His arm flicked out and swatted the thing out of my hand before it could touch him. On the backswing he pounded his closed fist into the side of my head and I staggered back a step, seeing stars. Then I backed away again, quickly, out of instinct, and his extended claws whipped past so close that if I’d been wearing a tie it would have been reduced to comical confetti.
The two of them tensed to leap, and I went for my whistle again because it was all I had left. But then Juliet pushed me firmly aside and strode past. I caught my breath. I had to, because it was so thick with her pheromones it almost choked me. The two loup-garous stared at her as if she was a page of unholy writ.
‘Last man standing gets to kiss me on the lips,’ she said. And then, after a charged pause of about half a second, she added, ‘Dealer’s choice.’
The were-thing with the teeth made a clumsy lunge for her on the spot, which just left him open for a scything uppercut from his partner that almost floored him. He got his feet back under him though, and came back spitting and snarling, slamming scarface against the wall and pinning him there with his shoulder. As they wrestled, trying to get a grip with teeth and claws, I found myself stepping forward with my own fists tightly clenched. Juliet’s arm came out and blocked me, without effort.
‘Not you, Castor,’ she said with clinical calm. ‘This one is by invitation only.’
She watched as they took each other apart. I’m not normally squeamish but I looked away before the end, because the loup-garous couldn’t stop fighting even when they were bleeding to death and their entrails were spilling out on the floor. They lost their hold on their human forms as they weakened, the fluid flesh sliding back into half-remembered configurations. Even then they snapped at each other feebly with misshapen snouts, looking like nothing that had ever lived or moved on the face of the Earth.
Juliet breathed in and then out, savouring the tang of blood on the air - or more likely some other spoor that I couldn’t even detect.
‘Go and look for that rope,’ she suggested, her voice thick.
It was hard to walk away from her - like walking uphill with a bag of rocks on my back. The attraction she exerted was that strong: as strong as gravity.
I took my time poking around the storeroom for a suitable coil of rope. The hormonal stranglehold on my mind had loosened by this time, and I was aware that the petrified little kids had been stuck at the bottom of the pit all this time, hearing the roars and snarls and howls of agony from above them. I was aware of it, but I truly didn’t want to go back too soon and catch a glimpse of Juliet feeding.
By the time I did step back into the shed, she was sitting in the open space left by the shattered trapdoor, her legs dangling over the edge, entertaining the children with her own version of Little Red Riding Hood. Of the two loup-garous there was no trace, whether flesh or bone or sinew or greasy stain. I dumped the rope down next to her and listened to the end of the story, resigned to sleeping with the light on for the foreseeable future.
‘It was my fault,’ Sue repeated, more defiantly this time - as if warning me that any criticism of Juliet was off-limits. In the one eye that was still functional, tears brimmed but didn’t fall.
With more tact than I can usually muster, I closed the street door. At the same time, Sue remembered my face-saving lie about needing a drink and fled to the kitchen, mumbling that she’d bring me a glass of water. I went through into the lounge and waited for her there. I knew her well enou
gh to be sure she wouldn’t want an audience for her weeping.
As I waited, sitting on a black leather sofa that squeaked whenever I breathed, the surly assistant at the library came back into my mind. I thought I could see now why he’d been so truculent with me. Sue kept her private life to herself and presumably hadn’t introduced any of her work colleagues to Juliet, so the guy had put two and two together and got the square root of one, pegging me for an abusive boyfriend.
‘Water,’ Sue said, coming in with a tray. ‘And some biscuits. Just ginger thins - that’s all we’ve got. I haven’t . . . I didn’t do my weekly shop at the weekend.’
She set the tray down and retreated to a chair opposite me, angling her body so that the damaged side of her face was mostly out of my line of sight. She’d brought a glass of water for herself too, because a good hostess doesn’t let her guest drink alone. She held it in both hands but didn’t raise it to her lips.
‘Can you tell me what happened?’ I asked. Any small talk would have sounded grotesque in these circumstances, so I just cut to the chase.
Sue’s shoulders twitched, a subliminal suggestion of a shrug.
‘We had an argument,’ she said, her voice slightly tremulous. ‘It was the usual thing, really. Jules doesn’t like it that I go out to work. She’d rather I stayed here and just . . . well, just . . .’ I nodded emphatically to get her over the bump. I knew exactly what she meant. It wasn’t that Juliet saw Sue just as a sex object; she saw her as the provider of many pleasures and diversions, with sex at the top of the list. But there was no getting round the fact that Juliet wanted Sue to be a stay-at-home housewife, servicing her needs uncomplainingly whenever they arose. Maybe feminism hasn’t reached Hell yet, or maybe one woman subordinating another is a special case. In any event, the question of Sue having a life apart from Juliet had been a snake in their Eden before now.
But it had never come to blows. Juliet tended to treat Sue as something precious and fragile that might break if carelessly handled, which is actually true of anyone in Juliet’s hands, because her strength is as the strength of ten, even if her heart is only about as pure as New York snow.
