by Mike Carey
Asmodeus snarled and stepped up to meet me - then stiffened, eyes wide, as Gil hit him from behind with the taser.
‘I’m going to be fuck-all use in all this,’ Gil commented sourly.
‘The one thing we’re not throwing against the sonofabitch is an actual exorcism.’
‘Can you climb a drainpipe?’ I asked him, producing Jenna-Jane’s M18 with a certain sense of occasion.
Fifty thousand volts isn’t a lot, when you come to think about it. That’s manufacturer’s spec, too, so you’re probably talking forty-eight thousand and some small change, if anyone bothered to check. A bolt of lightning can get you up into the millions, no trouble.
But Asmodeus was hurting already - in his dignity, as much as anywhere. He was pumping arterial blood, he had a razor-edged smiley face in his heart that was making him feel anything but happy, and his meticulously laid plans were turning into a Whitehall farce. So I’m willing to bet the effect in this case was out of all proportion to what it said on the label.
Again, it might have ended there. He could have folded up into nothing, and left Rafi in charge of a body that was leaking precious fluids faster than they could be replaced.
He didn’t. He grabbed hold of the taser’s conductive wire and hauled hard. Instinctively, Gil tightened his grip on the taser, so he was yanked forward, off balance. Asmodeus’ fist met him halfway, catching Gil at the junction of neck and shoulder, so that he fell to the ground as heavily as a bag of hammers. It had all happened so fast that the echoing boom reached me a second afterwards.
But as the echoes of that unlovely sound died, we both heard something new and worse coming in from the street, sickening the air. It was like the skirling call of an infernal ice cream van, playing at a hundred and some decibels, summoning ghosts and ghouls and damned souls to stop me and buy one.
‘We’ll need a way of playing this,’ I said, turning Nathan’s disc in my fingers with the gingerly care of the technologically challenged. ‘I mean . . . aloud.’
‘I think I can cut you a deal there,’ Nicky ruminated. ‘You remember the first mayoral elections? When Red Ken beat friendly Frank by a country mile? I know a guy who bought up some of the leftovers. Including one of those fucking trucks with all the loudspeakers that drives by at six in the morning and tells you that the candidate won’t come inside you . . .’
‘What do you know?’ I said, as I finally reached the upper landing. ‘They’re playing our tune.’
I drove my fist full into Asmodeus’ face. The satisfaction I took from that was tempered by the fact that the face actually belonged to Rafi, but it still felt pretty good, all things considered.
His head snapped back, but he didn’t lose his footing even for a second, and his riposte was swift and terrible. His arm swept round in an elliptical arc, the air cracked like a whip, and the world exploded.
There are two or three seconds here that I can’t account for. The next thing I was aware of was a pressure against my back, and a sensation around my mouth and chin as though someone was drinking from me through a straw of enormously wide bore.
Not knowing if I was standing on my feet or sprawling on my arse, I twitched my limbs in random combinations in the hope of getting good reports. But my eyes were definitely at floor level, and canted at ninety degrees.
The demon flickered in my blurred vision, getting closer and then receding. I steeled myself for the blow that would end everything, shut me down for good, but it didn’t come. I blinked furiously to clear my sight, and saw something I didn’t understand.
Asmodeus was dancing. Or at least that was what it looked like. The light from a street lamp, shining in through a window just off to our left, picked him out like a spotlight.
It was finally zero hour, and everything was kicking in. The bastard was writhing on an invisible cross as big as the world. But would that be big enough?
‘It’s not enough to hurt him,’ I said, with absolute certainty.
‘Not nearly enough. Moulson drove in fifteen hundred nails. He punctuated his body at microscopic intervals . . .’
‘You want something to pull him in a lot of different directions, ’ Gil said.
‘Yes.’
‘With your glass dagger pinned in his chest. So he’s stretched out taut and he can’t get away from the pain.’
‘Fuck! Yes! If you’ve got something, McClennan, spit it out.’
Gil gave us a guileless look. ‘Vote early,’ he said, ‘and vote often. Heath, how many friends have you got on all your conspiracy-of-the-month websites?’
‘A million,’ Nicky said. ‘Give or take. Why?’
‘How many of them can do a summoning?’
Asmodeus staggered, fell, scrambled to his feet. He baulked, and blood spurted between his clenched teeth in a pressurised stream.
His searchlight gaze found me across the width of the landing. His eyes narrowed.
‘Very clever,’ he bubbled. ‘Castor, I love you. I never expected for a moment that you’d make a fight of this.’
He slumped against the wall, his eyelids flickering like those of an epileptic in the grip of a grand mal seizure. He was on the ropes. The very mechanism he’d chosen for his escape - using Juliet’s guaranteed fatal attraction to separate out the human from the the demonic parts of the amalgam he’d become - gave us our window of opportunity. If there was ever a time when Asmodeus’ grip on Rafi’s soul could be prized free, it was now. The demon had done the groundwork for me. All I had to do was to bring it home.
As though God loved me, I found my whistle ready to hand. It had fallen only a few feet away, and it hadn’t broken. I took it in my hands and raised it, my fingers finding the stops by automatic reflex. I pursed my lips.
Where were my lips?
I couldn’t even feel the mouthpiece where it pressed against my mouth. I tried to blow a note, and red froth sprayed the metal. The tingling, sucking absence in the lower part of my face made sudden, sickening sense, and I moaned aloud.
Reeling like a drunk, Asmodeus wheeled about.
‘But everything’s relative,’ he growled. ‘Isn’t it? You feel like playing me another of your lazy little ’tudes? No?’ He kicked something across the floor at me - something red and wet that looked as though it belonged in the little plastic bag you find up a chicken’s arse and throw away before you cook it. Part of my jawbone; I could tell by the fact that it still had three teeth embedded in it.
‘Then let’s shut that fucking PA up,’ Asmodeus slurred. He crouched low on his haunches and leaped into the stairwell.
There’s a moment in the execution of any plan when you realise that you’re just not as good as you think you are, that you’ve done everything you could and it isn’t enough. You got the angle right, and you gunned the engine like a maniac, but your bike isn’t going to make it to the other side of the canyon.
That moment fell on my shoulders now. I struggled to my feet, trying it on for size. It felt like it belonged, like I’d been wearing it, more or less, ever since the night when I sat down in Rafi’s cramped bathroom and performed the one, crappy piece of improv that was destined to encapsulate my life.
I flexed my legs to see if they were going to give. Then I charged the window and kicked it out of its rotten frame in one piece. It fell and shattered on the pavement below me with a crash that could be heard even above the screaming discords of the demon lullaby. Climbing up onto the ragged ledge of splintered plasterboard where the window had been, I launched myself after it into the street.
Two storeys isn’t even twenty feet, but it’s enough to snap your legs like a couple of twigs unless you’re either a professional stuntman or very lucky. I’m not either of those things, but I was aiming for the Ducato, which stands eight feet high on its wheelbase. My feet staved in the roof and part of the near-side panel, turning Frank Dobson’s slick smile into a leering grimace, and no doubt taking Trudie to the brink of a heart attack.
A second later the front door o
f the building was ripped off its hinges from the inside and tossed negligently away through the air.
Asmodeus stepped out into the night, shaking his head the way a dog shakes itself off after diving into ice-cold water. His gaze tracked from side to side, seeming to miss the van first time round even though it was right in front of him, but then catching it on the next pass.
He walked towards us, the glass dagger protruding obscenely from his chest. Fresh blood gouted from it with each step.
I banged on the roof of the van to get Trudie’s attention. ‘Give me the gun,’ I shouted, but what she would have heard was ‘WUFF-uffa-FUH!’ I didn’t really have a working vocal apparatus any more, and in a wistful, just-about-togo-into-shock kind of way, I was starting to miss it.
Asmodeus was maybe three strides away from us when Juliet plunged through the doorway behind him and tackled him from behind. They went down together and rolled almost under the van’s wheels. Juliet’s hands were locked around Asmodeus’ throat, but he had his own hands - which looked much bigger than Rafi’s right then, the muscles in his forearms standing out like ropes - clamped to either side of her head. He forced her head further and further back, trying to snap her spine.
I dropped off the roof of the van, falling on all fours but scrambling to my feet again quickly. Trudie was fumbling with the shotgun, but she only had one hand and she couldn’t seem to find the safety. Nicky had only demonstrated it once, and things can slip your mind in the heat of the moment. Right then, the moment felt hot enough to scald.
She blanched when she saw me, and almost dropped the gun. ‘Oh shit!’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, Castor!’ I held out my hand, and she put the shotgun into it without a word. Probably just as well. The conversation was likely to be pretty one-sided in any case.
Asmodeus had rolled over on top of Juliet. He drove her face hard into the pavement and lurched to his feet. He turned to face me, his agonised features rippling like water.
‘Now . . .’ he snarled.
‘Fifteen hundred nails,’ I’d said. Actually, they were tiny metal discs, which sounds a lot less dramatic, but that doesn’t lessen what Moulson did. Inch by inch, he had waterproofed the house of his own flesh against the bad weather coming from Hell, and when it was all over the house was still standing. Fifteen hundred surgically precise incisions. Fifteen hundred grinding ordeals as he forced the metal deep enough for it to stay. He said it had taken most of a day.
A shotgun doesn’t score quite as high on accuracy, but it’s a fuck of a lot faster.
I fired the first barrel.
Glass. Glass ground up as fine as birdshot. It was such a light load that at twenty yards or so it probably wouldn’t even sting. But this was six feet.
Asmodeus’ jacket and shirt were flecked, ripped, stripped away by the multiple, stinging impacts. The demon flinched, drawing in a harsh, astonished breath, and then he bellowed in agony as our purpose-built payload started to work on him.
We’d selected three pieces of glass from Rafi’s photograph for Juliet to use as knives: we thought overkill was advisable under the circumstances. That still left a whole lot of fragments that were too small to have any viable use in hand-to-hand combat. A little bit of Rafi’s arm here, the other half of his face there. It seemed a shame to let them go to waste. Nicky carefully unpacked the shot he normally kept in the gun, looking thoughtfully at the little pile of glass shards. Then he went away from the table and came back with a hammer.
Asmodeus stared at his hands with a sort of numb fascination. Blood from a dozen lacerations welled out onto his palms, between his fingers, down over his wrists.
‘Fuck,’ he said distantly.
With terrible deliberation, he focused his will on his raised hand, trying to exert the same authority over that tortured flesh that he had enjoyed by right of conquest from the night when he moved in right up until now.
The flesh didn’t obey. Didn’t even answer. Asmodeus started towards me. Anger and consternation crossed his face, but what finally stood out there was fear.
‘When you die,’ he grated hoarsely. ‘When you die, Castor . . .’
That was as far as he got. He fell a few feet away from me, twitching. I followed him maybe a second later, unable to hold myself upright any more. I was staring directly into his eyes, so I saw when they filmed over, and then cleared again.
‘Fix . . .’ Rafi whispered.
The street was alive with noise suddenly, as black cars and vans and at least one eight-wheeled truck rolled into the small cul-de-sac and screeched to a precipitous halt that left the asphalt streaked with burned-rubber spoor. Doors slammed open, men and woman in black stealth gear jumped down and deployed themselves in blunt wedge formations, looking in all directions for an enemy who wasn’t there.
Thomas Gwillam stepped out of one of the cars and surveyed the carnage. His cold, appraising gaze started up high, at the broken window, and ended with the bodies on the pavement, lingering on Rafi before finally coming to rest on me.
‘I came as soon as you called,’ he said. ‘But of course you didn’t call until you could be sure I’d arrive late. I warned you against false pride, Castor. What good is back-up that arrives when the battle’s over?’
He had a point. Astutely, I lost consciousness before I could be made to admit that. Glad to be out of it, to tell you the truth. My jaw was starting to sting like a bastard.
21
There’s a lot to be said for fainting dead away at the awkward moment when the action is over and done with and the cleaning up has to start. Other people can bear your wounded body from the field and take care of all the messy stuff, while you cavort with pastel-coloured bunny rabbits in a magic garden where marshmallows and bottles of single malt whisky hang like fruit among the trees.
In this case though, the ancillary staff weren’t up to the job. Gwillam and his people were only interested in Rafi, and apart from them the only one who was even capable of standing on her own two feet was Trudie Pax. The first thing she did - since she knew a thing or two about clinical shock - was to slap me awake again.
That was something of a blow, to be honest. I would have preferred to wake up in a hospital bed, with all my missing parts sewn back into place and a gentle novocaine high percolating through my body. Instead I found myself still on the pavement, aching in every limb, joint and organ, and with some sort of agonising neural fireworks display going off in what was left of the lower part of my face.
Trudie had torn off my shirt and wadded it up under my chin to staunch the worst of the bleeding. That was as much as she could do, right then. She’d called 999 and an ambulance was on its way; in the meantime, there were a lot of other people to check in on.
Rafi seemed to be alive. At least, Gwillam reported, he had a pulse, although it was weak and irregular. The wound in his chest had all but stopped bleeding, so Trudie saw no point trying to pack it. The shotgun wounds were too many and too small for her to do anything about them.
Juliet didn’t have a pulse and she wasn’t breathing, but when Trudie muttered a blessing over her, she sat up and swore in some guttural language whose inhuman consonants made Trudie’s eyes water. Leaving Gwillam conferring with his chiefs of staff, the three of us went into the building together to get the final count and find out whether we’d won or lost that night.
Gil seemed the least damaged of all of us, but he was only stirring into consciousness when we arrived on the second-floor landing. He climbed groggily to his feet, only to sit back down again hurriedly. The left side of his face was a single bruise, the eye swollen shut. He stared in fascinated horror at my bemonstered face, then made a thumb-up, thumb-down gesture: a question.
I shrugged: jury still out.
Juliet led the way because Juliet could find them by smell alone. She went into a room next to the one where we’d kept Rafi confined after we took him from the Stanger, less than two months before. The only piece of furniture in the room was a tall free-standing wardrobe.
Juliet tried the doors, found them locked.
I offered the stock of the shotgun, but Juliet broke the lock with her bare hands and threw the door open.
Pen and Sue were standing side by side in the wardrobe, their hands and legs tied, kept on their feet by crude nooses slung around the clothes rail above their heads. If they’d fallen asleep or stumbled, they would have hanged themselves.
They hadn’t been touched. Not a wound, not a bruise. Even now, that’s the part I find hardest to understand. Asmodeus needed them alive because he needed to be sure that Juliet would come to him. But he wanted her angry, and what would drive her more berserk than the broken body of her lover, waved in her face?
It’s possible that he’d promised himself their degradation and death after all this was over, that he put it off as an epicure might put off a fine meal, sharpening the pleasure by prolonging the anticipation. But that kind of logic only gets you so far with a demon; mostly they just take what they want when they want it, and in this case our reactions - meaning mine and Juliet’s - would have been a big part of the fun for him.
So I’m wondering, crazy as it sounds, whether it might have been Rafi who spared them rather than Asmodeus. Maybe he saved his strength for one final rebellion, and fought down the demon’s hands whenever they tried to consummate that part of the plan.
The bottom line is that I don’t know. And there’s nobody I can ask.
Rafi doesn’t remember one damned thing after the night he drew that fucking magic circle and said, ‘Surgat mihi Asmodeus.’
22
About a month after the dust settled on all this, I went back to the Whittington one last time. I slipped in quietly, late in the evening.
