by Mike Carey
Linus Dicks? What kind of a name was that to saddle a kid with? No wonder he’d become an over-muscled rent-a-cop; he’d started life with so much to prove.
‘I’m serious,’ Dicks pursued, his voice lowering to a growl. ‘Did you get anything worth having from that old fart? I’m supposed to ask you.’
‘Says who?’ I asked.
‘Says the professor.’
‘Well she told me to tell you to face front and shut up. Let’s wait till we see her, and then she can sort out the mix-up herself.’
The big man looked as though he had some further opinions to offer on the subject, but he was forestalled by a high-pitched beep-beep-beep like the sound a microwave oven uses to tell you that your food is ready. It was coming from me. I groped in my pocket and fished out the radio I’d taken from Gentle.
‘How does this thing work again?’ I asked DeJong. He made to take it from me and demonstrate, but I remembered what Gentle had told me and tapped the SEND button. ‘Castor,’ I said, and flicked over to RECEIVE.
The radios were good kit, worth every penny of what Jenna-Jane had spent on them. Without as much as a whisper of static, Gil McClennan’s voice came through loud and clear. Or rather soft and clear, because he seemed to be talking under his breath. ‘Don’t say a word just yet, Castor,’ he said. ‘Think of someone plausible I might be, and pretend that’s who you’re talking to. Do it now, before they get suspicious.’
‘How’d you get this frequency, Nicky?’ I improvised.
‘Good,’ McClennan said. ‘Is it just you and Dicks there, or did he bring some back-up? Say . . . I don’t know, say single if he’s alone.’
‘Double that,’ I said.
‘Shit. Okay, listen to me. They’re not bringing you home.’
‘What?’ I tried to keep my tone neutral, but it wasn’t easy. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘They’re not bringing you home. The professor wants you far away from what she’s doing here. She’s told them to hold you down there until—’
I missed the rest of the sentence because the car pulled off the road into a small lay-by at the same time as DeJong shoved the short, unlovely barrel of a handgun into my face.
‘Tell him you’ll get back to him later,’ he suggested, giving me a playful wink.
‘Sorry, Nicky,’ I said. ‘It’s hard for me to talk right now.’
‘The Mad Bishop and Bear, in Paddington station,’ McClennan said quickly. ‘I’ll wait for you. If you manage to get away from them, meet me here.’
He said something else, but Dicks pulled the radio from my grasp, tapped the OFF switch and stowed it away in the glove compartment. ‘Let’s go for a little walk,’ he suggested.
‘Fuck that,’ I counter-offered.
The pressure of the gun against my cheekbone increased perceptibly. ‘You get no penetrating power at all with nine-millimetre MagSafe,’ DeJong observed conversationally. ‘There’d be a lot of blood to clean up, but the bullet would stay inside your head. Spread out and make itself comfortable. ’
‘You’re going to kill me after you’ve both been seen with me?’ I demanded. ‘No offence, but you boys are something special in the way of stupid.’
‘Let’s go for a little walk,’ Dicks repeated, and DeJong thumbed off the safety on the gun. At least I assume that’s what he did: I’m far from an expert in these things. He moved his thumb, in any case, and the gun made a ratcheting sound that I didn’t like one bit.
I slid slowly over to the near-side door and opened it. DeJong kept me covered while Dicks got out of the driver’s door and came around to join me. He hauled me out of the car and pushed me away from it towards a small stand of trees. I glanced back at the road. We were still in plain sight, and if anything had happened to come rolling by just then I would have chanced my arm and made a break for it. But nothing did. That left total surrender or trying to overpower Dicks. There was a moment or two in which I could have tackled him, but he outweighed me by a good sixty pounds or so and it was all muscle. I was still weighing up my chances and coming up short when DeJong got out and joined us, making the point moot in any case.
I let myself be pushed and poked across the narrow strip of asphalt and in under the trees. The ground sloped away sharply here towards a drainage ditch about eight feet below us. Dicks looked back, decided we were still too visible and gave me another push in the direction of the ditch.
‘Down there,’ he said.
‘Nah,’ I said. ‘This will do for me. Dicks, whatever Jenna-Jane told you, this is a really bad—’
The big man planted his hand against my chest, fingers spread, and pushed. I lost my footing and fell over backwards, rolling a few feet, but I managed to put the brakes on before I slid into the ditch. Dicks and DeJong fanned out slightly, blocking me to right and left in case I decided to run. They wanted me in the ditch, and they weren’t going to take no for an answer.
I stayed down, because another push like that would send me rolling down the slope arse over tip. In any case, I’d met my share of thugs and bully boys and knew this game of old. The ground was the only location from which they couldn’t knock you down again.
Dicks stared down at me with unmistakable satisfaction. ‘A stop-me-and-buy-one deal,’ he rumbled. ‘Very funny line. A bit smug though. I don’t like people getting smug with me. Now what the professor actually said was that I should let you meet the old fart, use up as much time as you wanted to, then drop you off in the middle of nowhere and leave you to find your own way home. But as I understand it, the longer it takes you to do that, the better. How far are we from the village back there, DeJong?’
The other man tapped his chin with the butt of the handgun - way too casually, in my opinion, considering I hadn’t heard him put the safety back on. ‘Maybe three miles,’ he hazarded. ‘Maybe a bit more.’
‘How long at a fast walk, would you say?’
‘Probably about an hour.’
Dicks showed his teeth. ‘And how long at a slow crawl?’
I saw the kick coming, and jackknifed at the waist to get some distance from it, but Dicks had a lot of weight to put into the manoeuvre. His foot slammed into my stomach like a freight train coming through, knocking all the breath out of me in an explosive bolus as it actually lifted me momentarily off the ground. I came down at the very lip of the ditch, staring down into it, my diaphragm spasming agonisingly as I tried without much success to suck in more air.
Dicks turned me over with his foot, then leaned down and dragged me to my feet, without apparent effort. I was still too busy with the quest for oxygen to offer any resistance. I hung from his fist, my heels scrabbling at the loose earth.
‘Oh, well, crawling, that’s different,’ DeJong allowed.
‘It is different,’ Dicks agreed. ‘I don’t think he’s going to make it.’
He punched me in the mouth. I spun like a top and hit the ground rolling. My own momentum tumbled me down the slope into the ditch, where I came to rest against the curve of a concrete culvert at its very bottom. Levering my face and upper chest off the ground, I spat out some of the blood that was welling into my mouth. A throbbing note like the buzz of a Black & Decker power drill on low speed filled my head, giving me the momentary hallucination that I was thirteen again and at the dentist’s, having a bad tooth hollowed out with just a gulp or two of gas by way of anaesthetic.
Dicks and DeJong strolled down to join me, in no particular hurry. DeJong circled round towards my head, but it was clear by now that this was Dicks’s show. He stood over me, a frown of concentration on his face. The ditch was his crucible, and I was an experiment he’d set aside the whole morning for. The sun was coming up behind him, giving him a halo he’d done nothing to deserve.
I tried one last time.
‘Drop it,’ I warned him, my voice slurred. ‘Drop it, you stupid lager-lout fuckwit, or I’ll make you wish you’d never left the SAP.’
Dicks drew back his foot for another kick. Th
ere was no way of avoiding this one and, truth to tell, I didn’t even want to. I just put my hands out in front of my chest, where I could see he was aiming.
I might have been able to break open the cheap plywood music box by myself, but this was economy of effort. Dicks’s size-12 boot smashed it into matchwood, but unfortunately spent very little of its velocity in doing so. It thudded into my ribs, and my world dissolved into abstract, incendiary gouts of agony.
It was a lot worse than I was expecting. I may even have passed out, but if I did it was only for a second or two. When the first wave of pain had finished ripping and ricocheting its way through me, I became suddenly aware of three things. The ground pressing against my hands and face, the pervasive smell of rotten leaf mould, and a continuous scream like the whooping note of a London fire engine.
I tried to sit up, found that my body had no interest in that idea. Something rose in my gut and I tried to be sick, lying there on my side, but I couldn’t even do that. My muscles weren’t in the right alignment to heave, and their abortive efforts just made me twitch and shudder like a half-landed fish.
That was when the terror kicked in. But the intense pain I was in acted like a kind of neural Kevlar, protecting me from the worst of the impact. I was able to hold the nauseating dread at one remove; watch it writhing in the air like a clutch of tapeworms. Dicks and DeJong weren’t so lucky. The fear-thing had been rudely awakened, and it was pissed off. The two men were down, Dicks on his back and DeJong on his knees, both of them flailing and swatting at the air. It was DeJong who was screaming, although it had turned into a sort of high-pitched mewling sound now, like the protest of a hungry kitten.
Things might have gone pretty badly for me, because right then I was too far gone to move, but the fear-thing didn’t seem inclined to stick around. Perhaps it was because it didn’t have an anchor here. It had made itself a nice nest at Super-Self but it had been evicted, and the peaceful Surrey countryside didn’t have the same appeal. Or maybe it was scared itself, because it had been taken once before and didn’t know whether or not I had another shot left in my locker.
For whatever reason, the sense of panic lifted by slow degrees as the entity took to its metaphysical heels. After a couple of minutes, I was able to get back up on my feet, despite the stiffness in my chest and the fierce pain in my bruised guts.
Dicks and DeJong were slower coming out of it, but then this was their first time on the merry-go-round. I had all the time in the world to pick up DeJong’s gun from where it had fallen. Not knowing how to put the safety back on, I just fired the damn thing into the air until it stopped going bang and started going click. Then I gave each man a couple of hard whacks on the back of the head, sending them into dreamland before they could get control of their limbs again. Those are my kind of odds.
Dicks had the car keys in his pocket. He also had a wallet with a clutch of credit cards and two hundred and some quid in cash. Christmas in July.
I pocketed the cash, threw the cards into the culvert. Since they brought in chip and pin, plastic has never been worth the trouble.
Dicks was already stirring again, and trying to talk as he stared myopically up at me. He must have one hell of a hard head.
I climbed up the bank, wincing with every step. There were two bands of pain, one around my chest and one around my stomach. Moving without setting them off was like keeping two hula hoops on the go in very, very slow motion. The jagged fuzz filling my head didn’t help a bit.
By the time I got to the car, Dicks was at the lip of the ditch and crawling towards me, dragging one leg in a way that didn’t look good at all. I got inside the car and locked the doors.
Automatic. Deadlock on the key fob. No trouble.
Dicks was fumbling with the door handle, bellowing at me through the glass. His eyes were rolling in his head and there was foam or saliva on his lips.
I pulled round in a tight arc and fed him some dust.
18
Jenna-Jane is good at a whole lot of things. One of them is logical deduction; another is thinking on her feet.
She’d already decided from things I’d said earlier that the rumours were all true: that the succubus Ajulutsikael was living on Earth and passing for a human woman. When I took out my mobile and tried to call her, with that one move I put Juliet within her reach - and from then on she was working towards that one goal. It wasn’t that she forgot about Asmodeus; it was just that she rearranged her priorities and relegated him to number two.
This was the story I heard from Gil McClennan in the inelegantly named Mad Bishop and Bear pub on the main concourse at Paddington. We were so hemmed in by other people’s luggage, I felt like a First World War Tommy sitting in a trench between bombardments. The comparison held in other ways too. My ribs felt like broken splints, lacerating my internal organs whenever I moved; my split upper lip had swollen to the size of a ruby grapefruit segment; and half the dirt and unnameable shit from the bottom of that Surrey ditch had come with me when I left it.
‘I don’t get it,’ I told Gil, shifting my weight to see if I could find a position that didn’t hurt so much. ‘I mean, with Asmodeus there’s a clear and present danger. Juliet’s not - fuck! - not going anywhere, is she?’
‘You know that proverb?’ Gil said by way of answer. ‘Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish—’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I know it. How does it apply?’
‘The circles - the ones with Ajulutsikael’s old names on them - they’re something totally new. A weapon that one demon used to attack another. It’s got applications that go way outside this one situation. That was the first thing she saw - that if you got a handle on this, you could have something that would spike any demon, anywhere. Better than silver, better than holy water. She couldn’t pass it up, Castor. And she couldn’t let you get in the way of it.’
Over two untasted pints of London Pride, he filled me in on how the whole thing had gone down.
As soon as I hung up after trying to call Juliet from Pen’s house, Jenna-Jane put her own plans - freshly minted - into action. Transferring her mobile from her handbag to her pocket, she waited a minute or two and then made it ring by thumbing through the menus until she got to the one where you set the ringtone. She did that blind, from memory, which tells you something about the way her mind works.
Then she took the non-existent call and pretended to get all excited about finally turning up a lead on Martin Moulson. In fact, she’d already run Moulson to ground two days earlier, while I was in Macedonia, and sent Gil down to talk to him. Gil had got nothing worth having because Moulson hadn’t let him through the door, but that explained the old man’s references to ‘you people’ and the receptionist’s story of a journalist trying to get an interview.
The next priority was to get my phone away from me, because my phone had Juliet’s number on it. Jenna-Jane had done that with insolent ease by means of the ‘Will you trade your worn-out mobile for this state-of-the-art radio?’ gag, and then while Gentle - who probably wasn’t in on any of this - stalled me with an instant tutorial, she went outside to give Dicks his instructions.
As soon as she waved me off she called the switchboard at the MOU, both to tell DeJong he was needed for back-up and to start the ball rolling for the real order of business, which was trapping Juliet.
This was the most dangerous part of the exercise, and McClennan said she approached it with a meticulous eye for detail. In the weapons lockers at the unit she had plentiful supplies of the semi-legal neurotoxin OPG and a lot of other anti-demon specifics that could be relied on to take Juliet down if she came on them unawares. But Jenna-Jane was canny enough to realise that any demon who’d been in my circle of acquaintance would know better than to walk into the MOU in the first place.
So she laid her trap somewhere else and moved her people in. Then she called Juliet, and kept on calling until she got an answer. She told her the truth, at least for starters, knowing that
the truth would do the job better than any lie: Asmodeus has your girlfriend and God only knows what he means to do with her.
Where? Juliet had demanded. Where is he? Where is the monster now?
The last place anyone would think of looking for him, Jenna-Jane told her. He’s gone to ground in his old cell at the Charles Stanger. The staff have evacuated the place. The police have been called, but what can the police do? Castor said I should tell you, because you’re the only one who might stand a chance . . .
Juliet bought it straight out. If she’d been in her right mind, she would have smelled a whole nest of rats, but she wasn’t. For whatever reason, Asmodeus had maddened and confused her and raised the ghosts of her young, reckless self inside her over a period of days or weeks. By this time she didn’t know which way was up. She was acting like a green kid with only a couple of centuries under her belt.
The Stanger had been cleared, as per Jenna-Jane’s orders. Juliet brought her wasp-yellow Maserati Spyder to a screaming, skidding halt in the car park, leaving twin teardrops of burned rubber on the asphalt, and sprinted for the door. It was wide open.
Nobody in the foyer or at the reception desk. Nobody to challenge or question her as she strode along the broad main corridor and through into the annexe where Rafi’s purpose-built cell had been installed. Probably just as well. She was in no mood to listen to reason, and anyone who’d got in her way long enough to ask her who she was visiting would probably have fallen under her stiletto heels a second later.
The cell door was closed but not locked. She turned the handle and wrenched it open. Doing that set off three canisters of OPG that Jenna-Jane’s suspiciously experienced munitions team had set immediately inside the door, all of them more or less at head height. Juliet got a lungful of the stuff before she even knew what it was.
OPG is a leaner, meaner version of the Tabun nerve gas invented by Gerhard Schrader back in the 1930s - the first of the ever-popular cyanophosphides. There’s a UN resolution specifically outlawing its use, but only in a battlefield context. Used therapeutically, in minuscule doses, it reverses some of the effects of senile dementia. That loophole allows institutions like the Charles Stanger and the MOU to stock it in industrial quantities and call it medicine.
