by Mike Carey
Whatever the answer was, one thing was now explained. This was why it had been so hard for me to get a fix on the ghost, even when I’d been so close to her. She was bound by this ward, and its strictures hemmed her in like a straitjacket—a straitjacket sewn onto her soul. The change in her behavior made sense now, too—the sudden flare into what had seemed like motiveless violence. She was responding to this necromantic assault.
The ward ought to have had no power over a living human being, but the psychic sensitivity I was born with had left me wide open to it. What I was suffering now was like snow blindness or like the deadened hearing that follows after an explosion. My voice would come back, but it could take minutes or even hours.
A feeling of claustrophobia crashed down on me and made my heart race. Even my breath was making no sound in my chest or in my mouth. A voiceless pall hung over and around me. I turned the other corners of the mattress over, not expecting to find anything. But at the far end, closest to the wall, there was a broad, dark brown stain on the underside. The color was pretty much unmistakable. So was the bitter almond smell of stale blood, which had been masked until I got this close by the sharper ammonial reek of the piss bucket.
I was conscious that anyone finding the upstairs door open could cross the room above me, see the light on down here, and lock me in with a single turn of the key—assuming that this was an anyone who had the key in his pocket. It wasn’t an idea I liked all that much. I retreated to the stairs, cast one more look around the grim place, and headed back up to street level.
The upper door had swung to. I opened it and stepped out into the first-floor room. Just the one step, then I stopped dead. The room was dark; the light from the basement cell barely made it up the stairwell, creating only a strip of fuzzy gray in front of me, sandwiched between broader areas of indelible black. While I was in the basement, someone had turned the upstairs light off.
All I had by way of a weapon was my dagger. It was intended for exorcisms, not for self-defense, and I didn’t bother to keep it sharp, but it might make someone think twice if I waved it around. Standing stock-still in the dark, and grateful now for the absolute silence of my breath, I slid it out of my pocket and held it down at waist height, ready.
Then I smelled her perfume—that terrible, polecat’s-arse musk that bullied its way into your brain and reprogrammed you so that you loved it.
And I heard her laugh—soft, mocking, utterly without mercy.
“It won’t help you,” Ajulutsikael murmured almost caressingly, and I knew she was right. She was faster than me, and stronger. She could see in the dark. She could take the knife out of my hand and pick her teeth with it before slamming it back into my guts, and there wouldn’t be a damn thing I could do about it.
Hoping to throw her off balance and maybe postpone the inevitable, I tossed the knife casually away into the dark and took out my whistle. It wouldn’t work; the aphthegtos ward would stop any sound at all from coming from my mouth. But such as it was, the pathetic bluff was all I had.
She wasn’t fooled. Either she could sense the magic of McClennan’s sigils hanging on me or she could just tell from my face that it was a bluff. I heard her heels click on the floor as she strolled unhurriedly toward me. She knew there was nothing to fear from the whistle this time.
“There was a woman chained here,” Ajulutsikael said. Her voice was the same throaty murmur, but it was from a lot closer this time. She was a couple of steps away from me and just right of center. If I ducked her first charge, I could fake left and make a run for the door. But there was no way I’d ever reach it. There was a moment of terrifying silence during which I tensed and got ready to move. Then she spoke again, from even closer. “Did you chain her?”
I shook my head.
“Did you keep her as your pet until you tired of her? Alone? In the dark? Was the stink of her fear sweet to you?”
All I could do was shake my head again, more urgently. Who rips my head off gets trash, more or less, or at least takes their own chances with the resale value—but dead or alive, I didn’t want to be associated with this hell-hole.
“A pity. It would have been more enjoyable then. But I’m going to eat you anyway.” A kind of anger came growling and graveling up from under the feline playfulness. “I’m going to make you pay, man, for the indignity of this summoning. For being made to dance on a chain at the whim of these stinking bags of meat. I’m going to take you slowly. You will love me as you die, and you will despair.”
I could actually see her now; my eyes had adjusted to the point where she showed as a darker splodge of shape against the background darkness. A fluid blur of black, as deep as midnight.
I threw out my arms in a sort of shrug—the closest I could get to pleading for my life. Her hand fell on my shoulder, turned me round to face her. I hit out, and my fist was caught. I pulled away, and she drew me close—then threw me effortlessly across the room so that I slammed into the sofa, toppling it, and rolled over and over across the floor until I hit the base of the wall beyond.
“Let’s make ourselves comfortable,” she whispered.
I was winded and stunned, but I braced myself to make some kind of a fight of it. I got up on one knee, which was as much as I could manage.
What happened next I can only describe in sound, because that was all that I was aware of. There was a series of heavy impacts, as though a bunch of guys with hammers had hit the far wall on the same command, but slightly out of synch. Ajulutsikael grunted in surprise and pain, and the window shattered. Not just the window, in fact. With a loud, indiscreet crash, a corner of the plywood panel snapped clean away and tumbled out into the street. Yellow light from a streetlamp flooded into the room.
It showed Ajulutsikael in a defensive crouch, hands raised in front of her face. A bottle came whipping through the air toward her, and her right arm came across in a blur of motion. She smashed it out of the air in an explosion of glinting glass and incandescent drops. It didn’t help her. The jagged shards of glass slowed as they fell, turned and leapt back up at her, slicing at her flesh, stinging her like brittle bees. As I stared, trying to process what I was seeing into some kind of sense, a shard from the broken window, a triangular wedge about eight inches long, parted the air like a dart and buried itself in her back.
Spasmodically, only marginally under my conscious control, my head jerked around. The ghost was standing at the head of the stairs, the scarlet veils of her face billowing and rippling like sheets left out to dry in a stiff wind. She didn’t move, and her head was slightly bowed, but she faced Ajulutsikael full-on. Her head turned, and her gaze swept the room from left to right, right to left—and the storm of shattered glass danced in time.
Ajulutsikael had seen her, too. She moved toward the ghost, fingers curved into claws. But the storm of glass moved with her, arced around her, broke on her like a wave, only to bend and recurve almost instantly for another pass. Her clothes hung off her in shreds—her clothes and strips of her flesh. Black streaks of blood crisscrossed her face, and her eyes were wide and mad.
A feral growl began deep in her throat, built to an ear-hurting bellow in which consonants I couldn’t have reproduced even if I hadn’t been gagged by McClennan’s ward smashed against each other like calving icebergs. The ghost trembled and flickered. The glass fragments fell to the floor like prismatic rain.
Discretion is the better part of staying alive. I lurched to my feet, crunched and staggered through broken glass to the door, and fled into the night.
When I was a hundred yards down the street, my feet pumping like pistons, I heard a rending crash from behind me. I risked one glance over my shoulder. Ajulutsikael was out on the street, straddling the saw-edged wreckage of the hardwood door. Then she saw me and came after me at a dead run. With each loping stride, her stiletto heels struck sparks from the cold stones she ran on.
I came out onto Euston Road and tacked left. Traffic was still heavy and fast enough to form a serious bl
ockade, so getting across the road and losing myself in the alleys around Judd Street wasn’t going to be an option. She’d be on me before I found a gap. But up ahead there was a skip truck stopped at a red light, with a loaded skip on board.
I didn’t have time to make a conscious decision. If I had, I might have hesitated—it was chancing everything on one throw of the dice. And if I’d hesitated, she would have punched my heart out through my ribs as I ran.
As it was, I grabbed for a loop of chain that was hanging off the back of the skip and missed it as the light went green and the truck lurched forward. Hearing the rasp of the succubus’s heels behind me, like a knife on a strop, I forced myself into one last spurt of speed and snatched at the chain again. This time, I just managed to snag it as the truck’s gathering momentum made the trailing end of it snake out toward me. Dragged half off my feet, I staggered, righted myself, got one foot back under me, and jumped.
Ajulutsikael jumped, too, and something whipped past my trailing leg before I could pull it in. The sudden chill of its passing was followed instantly by a sudden wash of warmth. She’d drawn blood.
For a moment I was braced by one foot against the back of the truck. Then it slipped, and I was just dangling on the chain like an overlarge air freshener whimsically hung up on the outside of the vehicle instead of in the cab. The chain whipped around on its pivot, unbalanced by my weight, so that I saw the road behind me in quick, dizzying glimpses. Ajulutsikael was still pounding along behind the truck tirelessly, not gaining but keeping pace with it. The next time we hit a light that was against us, I was dead meat.
With a desperate effort, I hauled myself up the chain until I could hook one hand over the rim of the skip. At the same time, my feet got a purchase on the edge of the truck’s bed, so my hands weren’t carrying my full weight by themselves anymore. That was as secure a perch as I could get, but it left me one hand free to grope around inside the skip. After a moment or two, I found and pulled free a jagged piece of white porcelain from a sink or a toilet. It was about the right weight and heft, but unless I chose my moment, Ajulutsikael would see it coming.
We got to an underpass, and we went down. The succubus’s view of me was momentarily eclipsed by the rising edge of the road’s surface. I counted down from three and lobbed the chunk of bathroom debris just as we took a sharp right turn.
It was perfect. The sudden angular momentum as we turned made my arm into a kind of slingshot. The porcelain payload hit the succubus squarely in the chest, and she went down in a skidding tangle of limbs. A human would have been killed outright. But then, a human wouldn’t have been able to hit that speed in the first place.
I kept staring back along the road as we bumped onward in case she reappeared, but there was no sign of her. After that, the ride felt almost luxurious. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to see split-second, disconnected glimpses of London while freezing half to death and fighting off clinical shock.
Of course, it was a long walk back from Brixton. But you can’t have everything.
It’s a logical inference that I made it home in one piece, because I can remember Pen cleaning the messy wound on my leg with antiseptic while Cheryl stood behind her, fist pressed to her mouth, saying “Shit” often enough for it to have become a meaningless sound.
“You stink,” Pen said severely.
“I’ll shower,” I said groggily. I didn’t know what I meant by it. It was just sounds, but it was still a novelty to be able to make sounds again after my brush with McClennan’s ward of silence. And Pen wasn’t listening anyway, so I was under no obligation to make any sense.
“It’s the same smell that was in your room after that thing ripped the window out,” she said. “You’ve seen her again, haven’t you?”
I winced involuntarily as I thought back to the dark room, the overpowering smell, the mocking voice from the deep shadows. “I didn’t see all that much of her, to be honest.”
“He’s always been attracted to the wrong kind of women,” Pen said acidly, over my head, to Cheryl.
“Yeah, I’m the same with blokes,” Cheryl answered morosely. “You think you know what you’re getting into, but you never do.”
They carried on talking, but my mind slipped onto another frequency, and I wasn’t really hearing them anymore. The ghost couldn’t talk. She’d been silenced—deliberately, sorcerously silenced by Gabe McClennan, presumably acting on orders from—Damjohn? Why? What could she have said that represented a danger to him? If he’d had her killed, if she could incriminate him in any way at all, then why not just exorcise her and have done with it?
And how was Damjohn linked to the archive? What blindingly obvious point was I missing? Did the pimp and sleaze-king have a sideline in stolen artifacts?
ICOE 7405 818. That was the only solid thing I had to go on. Someone at the Bonnington had the number of Damjohn’s club, Kissing the Pink, in his Rolodex, ready to hand in the event of—what? Was it just intended as a last resort? For regular briefings and progress reviews? To cover some unforeseen crisis, like an outsider nosing around in places where he wasn’t meant to?
I probably got a glimpse of it then. Not the who and certainly not the why, but the broad shape of what the answer had to be. I couldn’t articulate it yet, but I think I could have played the tune of it, as though it was a ghost I was going to raise and then render. Right then, that wasn’t much of a consolation.
Seventeen
BACK IN HAMPSTEAD WAY BEFORE I WAS READY TO be. Hauling off on that lion-head knocker again in the bright stillness of a very early Saturday morning. I’d taken Friday off to recover, but I was still stiff and aching and feeling like I might shed limbs if I moved too fast. I asked myself bleakly if I was living right. The answer came when the door opened, letting out a sweet smell of sandalwood and revealing Barbara Dodson in jeans and tight T-shirt.
“He’s in the study,” she said, standing back to let me walk past her. “You can go straight through.”
I stepped inside. “How’s Sebastian?” I asked.
She gave me a long, thoughtful look. “Sebastian’s on great form. Happier than he’s been since we moved in here. Peter’s been feeling a little sorry for himself, though. We can’t get a word out of him.”
“Probably a phase he’s going through,” I suggested.
She nodded slowly. “Probably.”
I walked on down the hall into the study, limping only slightly.
Supercop James was standing just inside the door, steeling himself to tackle me as soon as I came in. He went straight for the jugular, predictably enough. “I’m assuming you came over to apologize,” he snarled. “For your sake, I hope that’s why you’re here.”
I was too tired for games. “No,” I told him, “you’re not assuming that at all. You’re assuming I came here to blackmail you. You’re hoping you can buy me off cheap or scare me into changing my mind.”
His eyes widened by an infinitesimal fraction, and his lips parted to show his clenched teeth. He was wound up very tight indeed—tight enough so that he might even break, without careful handling. But I didn’t know him well enough to tailor my approach to his tender sensibilities, so I gave it to him straight.
“You’re right,” I told him. “This is a shakedown. But contrary to everything you’ve ever been told about blackmailers, if you give me what I want, I’ll go away and leave you alone. And it’s not money, it’s just information. I want you to pull some police records for me. Three, to be precise. Do you think you can do that?”
Dodson gave a short laugh that sounded like it must have hurt coming out.
“Just information? You want me to steal files from the Met? Go against everything my job is about? Can you think of a single good reason why I shouldn’t punch you in the mouth for resisting arrest, and then arrest you?”
I nodded stonily. “Yeah,” I said. “Just the one. Davey Simmons. According to all the newspaper reports I could get my hands on, he asphyxiated after inhaling a cockt
ail of superglue and antifreeze from a plastic ASDA bag. Not a nice way to go.”
The color drained out of Dodson’s face, leaving it gray and slightly glistening, like wet cement. He sat down in the black leather office chair. I could tell he was staring death in the face. Not his own death—he looked as though he could probably have coped with that a fair bit better—but someone else’s. “Davey Simmons was a human train wreck,” he said without conviction.
“Yeah. I read that, too. Broken home, in and out of trouble, psychiatric problems, couple of convictions. But the police thought it was a bloody odd setup, all the same. Did any of your mates ever talk over the finer points of it with you?”
Dodson shot me a look full of hate. “No,” he said tightly. “They didn’t.”
“You see, there was glue in his hair. And on his right cheek. It was as though the bag had been held over his whole head, rather than just over his mouth and nose—which I believe is the preferred mode of delivery for fans of recreational Bostick. The bruises on his wrists got them thinking, too. Could someone have held him down and shoved a bag over his head, then held it there until he died? That’d be a pretty shitty thing to do to someone, wouldn’t it?”
There was a long silence, tense at first, but becoming slacker as Dodson’s fury surrendered to despair. “It was a joke,” he muttered, almost too low to hear.
“Yeah?” I said unsympathetically. “What’s the punch line?”
Dodson didn’t seem to hear. “Peter and his friends found . . . Simmons . . . in a toilet cubicle. He’d mixed the stuff up in the bag, and he was already inhaling it. They wanted to scare him. For a joke. Maybe teach him a lesson.”
I let the silence lie for a bit longer this time. Then I put the little sheaf of paper I’d got from Nicky down on the desk in front of him. He stared at it dully.
“These three,” I said, pointing. “The ones I’ve gone over in highlighter. They’re the only ones I’m interested in. I want autopsy reports, witness statements, and anything else you can lay your hands on. By tonight.”
