‘Meta-conspiracy thrillers,’ I repeated, deadpan, inviting him to hit me with the punchline.
‘They’re all movies where the conspiracy is part of a bigger conspiracy,’ he said. ‘Where you think you’ve worked it out, but all you did was tear away the first layer of wallpaper. Like those dreams where you wake up sweating but, hey, you’re still asleep and it’s just another dream.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I get it. Is that how you see the world, Nicky?’
‘That’s how the world
is
, Castor. You just didn’t figure out yet who’s dreaming you. Maybe it’s Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, because the psycho-bitch-queen certainly seems to have a soft spot in her heart for you.’
I grunted non-commitally. That wound was still a little raw. But Nicky seemed happy to stick with the subject.
‘So what did you tell her?’ he demanded. ‘Did you use adjectives? Gestures? I want a slow-motion action replay.’
‘I just walked out,’ I said, which was the truth. I hadn’t trusted myself to answer Jenna-Jane without going for her throat, which would have brought her pet Nazis down on me in all their goose-stepping fury. So I just turned round and headed for the door, walking past Gil McClennan, whose face as he stared at me was full of contemptuous amusement. J-J let me go without a word. At least when demons try to steal your soul they snarl and slaver and make a show out of it.
Nicky was looking disappointed. He was clearly hoping for something more in the way of dramatic byplay. To forestall any further questions I held up my phone, which was displaying the chunk of grey stone I’d found in Pen’s front garden, with the red pentagram flaring on its upper face. Nicky squinted at it for a second, then waved it away. ‘My eyes don’t resolve down that far,’ he said. ‘You got anything bigger?’
‘I’ve just got this,’ I said. ‘Can’t you scale it up?’
Nicky returned his attention to the film, which he was threading through the projector’s complex series of spools and rollers. ‘Probably,’ he admitted grudgingly. ‘Send it on to my phone. I’ll see what I can do.’
While he was still working on the film, I composed a message with the photo as an attachment and forwarded it to Nicky’s mobile. It took a long time, because I’m far from slick with technology, but finally his phone buzzed and he reached into his back pocket to turn it off. Then I had to wait until he threw the mains power switch and turned on the projector to let it warm up. He leaves that to the last moment for reasons already given: warm isn’t good in Nicky’s world.
He didn’t bother to look at the display on his own phone, because the screen-size problem would still apply; he just relayed it on to one of his computers by means of some wireless skullduggery and opened it there.
‘Summoning,’ he said at once, seemingly without even reading the words in the ward.
‘How do you know?’ I demanded. I was supposed to be the practising exorcist here, so it pissed me off a little that Nicky was able to lecture me on my own craft. But then I’d never been big on the grimoire tradition, which boasts a common-sense-to-bullshit ratio somewhere in the region of one to a thousand.
‘Disposition of the runes between the inner and outer circles,’ Nicky rattled off absently. ‘Presence of outwardly radiating fan lines in the five negative spaces defined by the five arms of the pentangle. Use of aleph sigils to stand in for candles, as in the Gottenburg ritual.’
‘Okay,’ I said, giving up the point. ‘It’s a summoning. What’s being summoned?’
‘Not sure,’ Nicky admitted. ‘Let me check.’
He tapped at the keyboard, opening up some more files. At least one was a table of Aramaic letters. Another seemed to be a set of scanned pages from a very old book - probably one of the bat-shit grimoires aforementioned. As Nicky browsed and muttered to himself, I went to the window at the front of the projection booth, leaned on its sill and stared down into the auditorium below. It was silent and empty: most of the time Nicky plays his movies for an audience of one.
Not completely empty though. A single figure sat in the exact centre of the front row, barely visible as a silhouette against the diffused light bouncing back off the screen. Someone was watching the opening credits of
The Usual Suspects
, silent and motionless.
‘Tlullik,’ Nicky said from behind me. ‘Or maybe Tlallik. It depends whether this diacritical mark here is meant to have a curve or an angle.’
‘So who’s Tlullik?’
Nicky looked round at me and gave an expansive shrug. ‘Never heard of him,’ he said. ‘Her. It. Them. Probably a demon, judging from the name, but it can’t be a big one or else I’d have come across it elsewhere. The major heavies leave big footprints.’
‘Nicky, this was painted on a rock shoved under Pen’s rhododendrons,’ I told him. ‘I thought she’d put it there herself, but she doesn’t mess with necromancy. You think Asmodeus could be trying to get at her in some way?’
Nicky nodded, but he didn’t look convinced. ‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘A guy wants to drive you crazy, he can summon a minor Hell-spawn to crawl inside your head and fuck you over. It’s becoming kind of a fashion statement in gangster circles - if you don’t pack demon heat these days, you’re nobody.
‘But if Asmodeus is behind this, he’s using two very different MOs. He ran Ginny Parris through with the sharp end of a broken chair leg, according to the police report. There’s kind of a mismatch between that and hiding in the bushes with a permanent marker.’
He was right, of course. But if not Asmodeus, then who? If it was aimed at me rather than Pen, it could be almost anyone. There’s no shortage of people sufficiently pissed off with me to traffic with Hell if it would give me some grief. ‘Can you find out what this Tlullik is?’ I asked Nicky.
‘I can try,’ he said. ‘Are we done now?’
‘One more thing.’
Nicky rolled his eyes, conveying how much faith he had in the number ‘one’ in that sentence.
‘Could you find out if Rafi Ditko has any living family or friends, besides the ones I know from Oxford?’
‘That’s a pretty open-ended search, Castor. What’s it worth?’
‘At the moment,’ I admitted, ‘more than I can pay. But I know a man who knows a woman who knows a goatherd in the Yemen who can get me a line on a 1940s Lester Young jam session.’
Nicky feels about early jazz the way heroin addicts feel about heroin, but he did his best to look unimpressed. He huffed out air, which he had to inhale specially for the purpose. ‘Jam tomorrow . . .’ he said sardonically.
‘The jam’s seventy years old,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s not going to spoil in a day. It’s an interesting item, I heard. On lacquer, with some kind of note from Shad Collins scribbled on the sleeve.’
‘I’ll see what I can do, Castor.’
‘All I can ask for, Nicky.’
‘Is it?’ Nicky examined his thumbnail, rubbing at the cuticle with the little finger of his other hand. ‘You surprise me. I was sort of expecting you to say, “How do you get a demon out of a close friend?” Something of that nature.’
The slight smirk that marred his studiously casual expression made me want to walk out without asking the question. Well, that and the fact that we’d been down this road a hundred times when Rafi was at the Stanger without finding a damn thing that would stick. But even when hope doesn’t triumph over experience, it can still make you go through the motions.
‘Are you onto something, Nicky?’ I asked him.
‘Something,’ he admitted. ‘I’m still trying to put it together. Ask me about it next time you come over.’
I was about to leave, but I had to pass the window on the way to the door and I looked down into the auditorium again. The silhouette was still there; it didn’t seem to have moved at all. There was something very familiar about it.
‘Nicky,’ I said. ‘Your guest . . .’
I turned to look at him. He was wearing the expression of a man who had been waiting for the penny to drop for a long, long time, and was both surprised and saddened at how long it had taken.
‘She’s been waiting for you for three hours,’ he said. ‘And she’s in a shit-awful mood. If I were you I wouldn’t make her come up and get me.’
Juliet was staring at the screen with unblinking eyes, watching Kevin Spacey’s tribulations with no sign of empathy or engagement.
At first I thought that Nicky had exaggerated. She didn’t look angry or agitated; in fact she was preternaturally still, like one of Antony Gormley’s iron men who’d wandered in off the street for a breather.
But as I opened my mouth to speak her name, she turned to look at me, and her eyes shone in the dark with a red light, self-luminous like the eyes of a cat.
‘Castor,’ she said. Her voice was a bass chord that started sympathetic vibrations in my guts and loins.
‘Hey,’ I said lightly, dropping into a seat three along from her. That meant I could look at the screen instead of those eyes. It wasn’t that glowing red eyes were unusual accoutrements for a demon; it was just that Juliet had never had them before, and they scared the living shit out of me. ‘Rosebud was his sledge.’
Juliet didn’t get the joke, and didn’t bother to ask me to explain it. I felt a wash of psychosomatic heat spill across my cheek. She was still staring at me through the intervening dark, which hid me from her about as effectively as a throw rug hides a rhinoceros.
‘You talked to Sue,’ she said, in the same low, burry voice.
‘Yeah.’ I nodded. ‘She’s . . . worried about you. So am I. Is there something I should know?’
‘You should know not to talk to her behind my back,’ Juliet growled.
That made me turn to meet her gaze again. ‘Behind your back?’ I said. ‘Juliet, you hurt her. You hurt her and you terrified her. You think it’s wrong that she should want to talk about that?’
Juliet stood, so I did too. It wasn’t that I had any more of a chance against her on my feet than I did sitting down, but that old fight or flight reflex dies hard. Looking at her grim face, I wondered if I was about to do the same.
‘What’s mine is mine, Castor,’ Juliet said. ‘You know what I can do to you, so I’m telling you to leave her alone.’
Oh man. We were really on slippery ground now. But I’ve never let that stop me from trying to tap-dance. ‘Juliet,’ I said, ‘she doesn’t belong to you. We talked about this way back in the day, when the two of you were . . .’ I hesitated. ‘Going out together’ is the default phrase, but the way I remembered it, Juliet and Sue spent most of the first month of their relationship indoors, barely surfacing for long enough to put out the empty milk bottles and feed the cat. If you start a romance with a succubus, you have to be prepared to clock up some serious hours in the bedroom - and probably on the sofa, the carpet, the kitchen table and the top of the bookcase. I settled for ‘. . . getting to know one another,’ and pressed on quickly so the pause wouldn’t show. ‘Sue isn’t your pet or a conveniently warm and cuddly sex toy; she’s a human being. I know that doesn’t mean the same thing to you that it does to me, but for the love of Christ! You can’t pick her up and put her down whenever you want to; you can’t dictate who she does and doesn’t talk to; and you can’t beat the shit out of her when she doesn’t come up to scratch. Understand?’
Juliet laughed. It had a chilling ring to it. ‘Who tells me that I can’t do these things?’ she asked, her voice caressing me roughly like the tongue of a cat. She has minute control over those harmonics, and she knows what she’s doing. She knew, right then, that she was bringing me to a painfully intense erection: a casual show of force intended to remind me of what else she could do to me if she had a mind to. ‘You, Castor? You’re giving me commands? I might be inclined to take that personally if your words were backed by anything besides insolence.’ She took a step towards me, those luminous eyes flashing like beacons in the dark. Another step and she was right in front of me, her head leaning in towards my throat. ‘But they’re not,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘Are they?’
She brushed past me, allowing the curve of her breast to press briefly against my arm in passing. The small area of my skin that had felt the contact tingled as she walked away, as though an electric charge had passed through me.
On the screen above and behind me Spacey opined that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making people believe he didn’t exist.
My heart was hammering. My nostrils were filled with her sex smell and my mind with pornographic imagery. Something inside me was still rising, still opening, ready to meet her halfway as she feasted on me and threw me away, but the crisis was over. Juliet was just making a point, not actually moving in for the kill.
I sat down again - then slithered down onto my knees - as the crash hit me: all those homeless hormones, crashing against the walls of my veins and arteries like miniature tidal waves, my mind afloat on the flood like a pathetic Noah’s Ark preserving my last two functional brain cells.
When I was able to take stock of my surroundings again, I looked up and saw Juliet standing in the aisle at the end of the row, as motionless as she’d been sitting earlier. Her back was to me, her head tilted slightly down.
‘I don’t know what happened,’ she said, her voice suddenly flat and dead.
‘You mean you lost control?’ I translated.
‘I mean I don’t know what happened. I was hitting her. Hurting her. There didn’t seem to be any conscious decision involved. Or rather . . . the moment of decision was elided. The action seemed to take the place of the decision.’
I climbed to my feet again, partly to see if I could and partly because I felt a little stupid taking the moral high ground from so close to ground level. Juliet still hadn’t turned to face me. ‘Suppose you saw a man beating his wife or his lover,’ I said, ‘and he gave you that bullshit by way of an explanation?’
Juliet sighed, an odd and disconcerting sound. ‘It is bullshit,’ she agreed. ‘But it’s true all the same. I was like that when I was younger: I rode the impulse, because impulse comes faster than thought, and then afterwards I thought about what it meant.’