Pariah

by Donald Hounam

  There’s a lot of people who really don’t like that. So who better to take it out on than the kids themselves?

  The diener is making heavy weather of flicking through sheets of paper, his eyes rolling like a fairground ride. The little kid’s come over and he’s looking up at me, wide-eyed. He whispers, ‘Are you really a nekker?’

  I’d rather he didn’t call me that. ‘Nekker’ is short for necromancer, and raising the dead to get racing tips is one of the things the Society of Sorcerers definitely draws the line at.

  Think bonfires.

  ‘He’s in the autopsy room,’ says the diener.

  ‘Thank you.’ I close the door on the dead boy.

  The kid tucks his hands under his armpits and whispers enviously, ‘I wish I was a nekker.’

  ‘It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,’ I say.

  ‘Better’n this.’

  The diener steps up and whacks him round the head.

  The kid’s got a point.

  ‘Skinny little freak!’ the diener mutters as the cold draught shepherds me out through the door at the other end of the ice room.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Scarification

  SEVERAL CORRIDORS LATER, Marvo still hasn’t caught up with me. I push open the door to the autopsy room.

  It stinks of burning herbs. At the centre, half a dozen electric lights glare down on the body of a boy with a gold-embroidered, blue silk sheet pulled up to his neck. He’s lying on a silver slab: legs out straight, his arms by his sides. He’s maybe ten or eleven years old, but it’s hard to tell because his face is sunk in, like he’s been starved. Skin as white as ash. Eyes closed.

  Standing over him, a tall figure we’ve all come to know and love. Ferdia McKittrick has dark, perfectly tonsured hair. He’s dressed to slice and dice, in a pale blue rubber apron over black silk overalls and exorcised latex gloves. He’s got a small table covered with a white linen cloth; and a brazier on a tripod with a haze of smoke rising from it.

  He looks up at me, surprised. ‘I heard you’d left town.’

  ‘That’s what I heard too. Yet here I am.’

  Ferdia frowns and turns to open a drawer.

  There’s someone else in the room. The jacks are on the case, so of course there has to be a data elemental to remember everything. He’s standing against the wall with a sad smile on his face . . .

  I call him Mr Memory. He looks like Charlie Burgess. That’s because Charlie built him – like he builds data elementals for every major investigation. Always the same: a weary-looking little man with white, curly hair, wearing a crumpled dinner suit over a white shirt and a blue, food-stained bow tie.

  Ferdia’s back at the table with a small tray covered by a black silk cloth. The cold light glints on the instruments laid out on it: scalpels, shears, forceps, scissors, clamps, a saw . . .

  ‘Caxton know you’re back?’ he asks. That’s Marvo’s chief, the one she stopped to scry.

  ‘Nah. Marvell dragged me in.’ I look round. Still no sign of her. What’s she playing at?

  Ferdia picks up a hazel wand and waves it over the body. ‘In the name of Adonai the most high. In the name of Jehovah the most holy.’

  I hear the door open behind me; I assume it’s just Marvo rolling in at last and I say over my shoulder, ‘So did Caxton have anything useful to say?’ And when Marvo doesn’t say anything: ‘Didn’t think so.’

  Still no reply. I look round and of course it’s her: Detective Chief Inspector Beryl Caxton. She’s wearing an utterly hellish shiny grey jacket over navy trousers and brown shoes. Her spectacles dangle around her neck on a frayed cord. She’s got a much better bleach job on her hair than Marvo, but it’s not a pretty sight.

  She sticks a huge fist in her pocket, pulls out a silver amulet and kisses it. ‘Thought you’d gone,’ she says.

  ‘Join the club,’ Ferdia mutters.

  ‘I did,’ I say. ‘But I missed you.’

  ‘Smartarse!’ Caxton stuffs the amulet back in her pocket.

  Ferdia tosses a pinch of herbs into the brazier. ‘Adonai, Tetragrammaton, Jehovah, Tetragrammaton.’ There’s a bit of spitting and an almost invisibly thin thread of smoke drifts up.

  ‘Where’ve you been, anyway?’ Caxton asks.

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘Your lot were round, asking for you . . .’

  ‘The Society? When?’

  ‘Couple of weeks ago. I told them I hadn’t seen you, and if they found you not to send you back to me.’

  ‘Did you put in for the new forcer?’

  There used to be two forcers – forensic sorcerers – in Doughnut City: Ferdia and me. But I pissed Caxton off once too often, so she gave me the boot. Last thing she told me, she was writing to the Society of Sorcerers for a replacement. Someone who wouldn’t ask awkward questions about her cases.

  I look around. ‘So where is he?’

  ‘Sorcerers don’t grow on trees.’

  ‘A bit like sharks, then.’

  Actually I’m worried about the shark. What if one of the cleaners manages to get into my robing room and comes over peckish? I need to rescue it and get it back to my place and start chopping and purifying—

  And talking of chopping and purifying, Ferdia has pulled away the blue sheet covering the body.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ I mutter.

  The left side of the dead boy’s chest is covered with magic symbols.

  It’s more than a year since I bounced out of Saint Cyprian’s Institute of Sorcery with instructions to go and be a forensic sorcerer; so it’s not like I haven’t played with quite a lot of dead bodies. But as I lean over the slab I realise that this kid’s spooking me out. He’s got this . . . it’s hard to describe, but it’s like he’s radiating some sort of frozen immobility.

  I’ve got my left hand up to my face as if I’m trying to shield my eyes from the glare of the lights, but who’s kidding who? I realise that I’m scared of getting a surprise. The kid feels . . . I dunno, like some sort of trap that could spring out at me.

  It takes an effort, but I manage to stop myself leaning away. ‘You didn’t tell me he was a sorcerer.’ And even as I say it, I realise I’m being stupid. The black signs right over the kid’s heart are nothing like the magical mark that every licensed sorcerer bears across his chest. I can see two concentric circles with symbols between them: planetary signs, the usual stuff. And this big, complicated symbol at the centre of the circles that’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

  ‘Tattoo?’

  But when I run my fingers over the ice-cold skin I realise it’s not a tattoo because the marks are slightly raised . . .

  ‘Scarification,’ says Ferdia. ‘Sharp knife, maybe a scalpel. Then they’ve rubbed herbs of some sort into the incisions to prevent healing.’

  Body magic. ‘Have you told the Society?’

  ‘Not yet. I want to see if I can find a cause of death first.’

  The boy is no more than a skeleton, as if someone got under his skin and sucked all the flesh off his bones. His hair is black, down to his shoulders. His fingernails are like talons.

  ‘Not often we get invited into the Hole,’ says Caxton. ‘People said there was something wrong—’

  ‘In the Hole?’

  She shrugs. ‘Everything’s relative. There were noises from the crypt of an old church, sometimes lights. The smell of incense. At first they thought it was haunted. Finally they opened it up.’ She turns to Mr Memory. ‘Show him.’

  The little man smiles and pushes himself off the wall. He raises both hands and makes a gesture like the outline of a square . . .

  And I’m looking through a hole that’s been knocked through a stone wall, into a small chamber. The light seeping in from behind me reveals the dead boy, lying naked on his back, mouth gaping.

  It’s like I’m really there. More of the wall crumbles in front of me, and as the dust settles and someone tosses a burning brand into the chamber, I can see symbols drawn all over the walls
and ceiling in red and black chalk.

  Magic.

  ‘What’s that wrapped around his arms and legs?’ I ask.

  The vision vanishes. The electric lights throw a merciless glare down at the body on the slab. Mr Memory is holding several lengths of rose briar. When I raise the boy’s arm, I see scratches from the thorns across the skin—

  ‘You shouldn’t be touching him,’ Ferdia points out. Correctly, by the way.

  The thing is, though, the boy’s skin may be ice cold, but it’s still firm to the touch.

  ‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ I ask.

  Ferdia snorts. ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘No signs of decomposition.’

  ‘He’s been on ice.’

  I put my finger to his throat: no pulse. Ferdia sighs and grabs a knife and puts the blade across his mouth; after a minute, there’s no sign of misting.

  ‘See?’

  But when I pull the boy’s eyelids back, the corneas haven’t clouded over. The pupils of his brown eyes have shrunk to pinpricks, when they should be dilated.

  ‘Look, I’ve no idea what’s going on,’ says Ferdia.

  ‘But there’s some sort of magic in the boy – is that what you’re saying?’ Caxton is pulling out her notebook. ‘And that’s what’s keeping him from decomposing . . .?’ She sticks her glasses on her nose. I watch her leaf past page after page of block-capital notes until she finds a blank sheet. ‘What do you think?’ she says.

  ‘Who cares what he thinks?’ says Ferdia.

  ‘Yeah.’ It’s not often that Ferdia and I agree on anything. ‘I don’t work for you any more, remember?’

  ‘What are you doing here, then?’ Caxton asks.

  ‘Marvo invited me.’

  ‘So where is she?’

  ‘I thought she scried you.’

  ‘Ten minutes ago. Didn’t say anything, just closed the lid on me. Stupid bloody kids!’ Caxton seems to be trying to draw the scarifications, but she keeps having to squint madly and push her glasses up and down her nose as she struggles to shift her focus from the boy on the slab to her notebook and back. ‘Is it . . . I don’t know, human sacrifice, or something?’

  Unbelievably, Ferdia and I agree again: we’re both shaking our heads.

  We did human sacrifice when I was a novice at Saint Cyprian’s. Well, didn’t actually do it . . . got warned off. Any serious magic ritual demands some sort of offering, but demons seem perfectly happy with animals – particularly rats, which they like to swallow whole.

  Ferdia parrots what the books say: ‘Human sacrifice is so powerful that it can be performed with only a single aim: to summon Satan himself, who demands the heart of the victim as his fee.’

  ‘And as you can see . . .’ I point to the boy’s chest, which may have scars across it, but hasn’t got a gaping hole.

  ‘I read once, in a book’ – Caxton blushes and blinks down at her notebook. We all know she hasn’t read anything smaller than big capital letters in years – ‘about parasitic wasps. They lay their eggs in live caterpillars, which go into this kind of zombie state . . . still alive, but not moving or anything. Then when the eggs hatch out inside the body, the grubs eat their way out . . .’ She takes a step back, away from the slab. ‘What if the boy is the host to some – I don’t know, a demon or something?’

  ‘Nothing in the grimoires.’ But I remember the sense of some hidden threat that I got off the boy’s body.

  Caxton’s blinking furiously, labouring away at her drawing, painful to watch. I have to fight the urge to jump in and do it for her.

  The Blur. Presbyopia. She’s thirty-five, so even with her glasses, anything closer than a couple of yards away is pretty much a mystery to her. She’s digging the tip of her pencil into the paper, trying to fix a mistake.

  ‘You don’t have to do that.’ I point at Mr Memory. ‘Isn’t that what he’s for . . .?’

  Caxton goes red in the face.

  ‘Can I get on with this?’ Ferdia tosses herbs into the brazier.

  As they flare up, Caxton draws a decisive cross through her drawing. ‘Anyway, it’s nothing to do with you.’

  I’ve done what Marvo asked: I’ve seen the boy. I know what the inside of a body looks like, so I don’t particularly need to watch Ferdia open him up. And anyway, there’s lots of boring chanting to get through before Ferdia actually digs in. I’ve got a dead shark that isn’t getting any fresher. I head for the door.

  Caxton says, ‘Does the Society know you’re back?’ She pulls off her glasses. Without the magnifying effect of the lenses her eyes have this wavering, frightened look, like children lost in the forest.

  ‘Dunno,’ I say. ‘But please, Beryl, don’t tell them you saw me.’

  To my amazement, she nods.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Summoning

  MARVO DRAGGED ME over here, so she can bloody well drive me back to my place. The trouble is, I’ve no idea where she’s got to and I can’t call her: I’ve hidden my scryer away because I’m not sure the Society can’t listen in to them.

  I wander about the basement, looking for her. The kid in the ice room hasn’t seen her. So I flog upstairs, rescue the shark from my robing room and hunt around until I get bored.

  The shark’s getting deader and heavier by the second. Outside in the yard, I stagger across to the van and ask the driver to give me a ride; but he says he isn’t going anywhere except on Marvo’s say-so – especially not with that bleedin’ fish stinking the place out.

  So I’m back inside again, peering around the lobby and getting some very funny looks, when I remember that Marvo once found her way down to the summoning room in the sub-basement. I can’t imagine why she’d wander down there, but it’s worth a try . . .

  There’s no lift from the lobby, but there’s a door at the back and a narrow staircase where I have to go down sideways to avoid banging the shark’s head on the brickwork. At the bottom I stumble around a maze of dim corridors.

  That’s when I hear a noise, like the rumble of thunder. It’s coming from the summoning room.

  It can’t be Ferdia. He’s too far post-peak to risk invoking a Presence. And anyway, it’s only ten minutes since I left him standing over the Crypt Boy with a scalpel: nowhere near long enough to get a summoning going.

  I turn a corner, past the lift that comes down from the autopsy room. Up ahead of me there’s a set of double doors, glowing white. There’s an alcove to my right, with cupboards and sinks. Whoever’s messing about in the summoning room, they’ve left a mess behind them: knives, wands, sachets of herbs and spices, lumps of charcoal, sticks of chalk, scattered all over the place.

  Someone’s in a hurry.

  I ditch the shark again, on the floor inside the alcove. A crash of thunder shakes the floor as I step up to the double doors. I hold out my hand. My security ring flickers. Nothing happens. I put my hand on the surface of one of the doors and I can tell at once: it’s not happy. In fact, it’s scared.

  I’ve been through these doors maybe four or five times since I started as a forcer at the mortuary. The summoning room has only one purpose: it’s where you go if you want to summon a dangerous Presence. The room is buried deep beneath the mortuary and embedded in blocks of granite. There’s even a thick layer of silk behind the black marble walls. Partly to contain anything that manifests. Partly to prevent the outside world getting wind of what’s going on down here.

  These doors have seen it all – except, apparently, whatever’s going on right now. I put both hands to them. ‘In the name of he by whom all things are made . . .’

  The doors whimper and open.

  I know I’ve stepped into a perfect cube, thirty yards each way, but I can’t see a thing. It’s pitch-dark, apart from the dim red glow of a brazier and the pinpoint flames of four flickering candles that cast no light over anything. When I look over my shoulder, it’s as if an impenetrable black fog has descended, smothering the light from the corridor. I smell burned herbs and spices. I hea
r a voice, but I can’t make out a word it’s saying until it starts wheeling out names of God—

  ‘El, Elohim, Elohi, Ehyeh.’ A girl’s voice. Which is odd, because, according to the Society, girls can’t do magic.

  My eyes are adjusting to the darkness and I can just make out a figure in a white linen robe, with a thatch of close-cropped blonde hair, standing with its back to me, arms out wide . . .

  ‘Marvo?’

  Here’s the scary thing. Normally the summoning room has an echo that bounces back at you like a tennis ball. But right now, the space is utterly dead. My voice is sucked away like water into sand.

  And I realise the hair’s wrong: Marvo’s bleach job is growing out. But the girl I can see dimly now – the girl in the crumpled linen robe decorated with symbols, with two knives tucked through her belt and a sword balanced across her toes . . .

  It isn’t Marvo, is it? It’s Kazia – the girl Matthew was needling me about. The girl that the shark was supposed to help me find.

  Two things about her: she’s a sorcerer, and she used to be the girl of my dreams . . . until I noticed that once she’d got a wand in her hand, people tended to wind up smeared across the walls.

  Right now, I don’t have time to stop and ask her who’s in line for a good smearing. I can hear a distant cawing, like a huge flock of birds. I’ve got a feeling like ants crawling all over my skin. We’re minutes from a manifestation, and for all I know I’m standing in the way.

  Outside, in the alcove, I tip scraps of paper and wood shavings into a small brazier. I grab a black-handled knife, a hazel wand, a piece of chalk, a box of matches. I shove sachets of herbs into my pocket. I dig a three-foot length of cord out of a drawer.

  My hands are trembling. I stop. Breathe. I tie a loop in one end of the cord and drape it round my neck.

  Back in the summoning room, I can’t see a thing. Kazia is almost at the point. The candle flames have vanished into the darkness. The room stinks of sewer gas and rotting flesh.