Thicker Than Water (41 page)

Nothing was moving where I was, either. I’d taken a taxi from Kings Cross, but told the driver to stop on the overpass where Kenny had been attacked, now open to traffic again but not so busy at this time of night that we’d be in anyone’s way. I’d thought about calling in on Matt on the way, but I didn’t know how to frame the question I wanted to ask him. If I was wrong, it was the sort of thing that could wreck a sturdier relationship than ours.

So here I was: the Lone Ranger riding to the rescue with no six-guns. All I had was another piece of the puzzle, and the sour knowledge growing inside me that the price for anything better was going to be higher than the one that Faust paid.

With the taxi driver’s suspicious gaze on me every step of the way, I got out of the cab and®/di walked over to the edge of the parapet, staring out towards the Salisbury. I didn’t bother with the whistle because I really didn’t need it: I just focused my concentration on my death-sense, closing down my eyes and ears the better to see and hear what was in front of me.

It was seething. The miasma hadn’t widened, but it had deepened: it was an indelible skein of screaming wrongness impaled and spread out across that sector of the skyline. It hung in front of me like mouldering curtains, so vividly present that I felt I could reach out and touch it: part the veil and look into some other place entirely.

A penny for the peep-show.

‘Are we going anywhere, mate?’ the cabbie asked from behind me. Even on the meter, he clearly didn’t like his time being wasted. Which was a pity, because I would have been happy to draw this out a lot longer.

But there was nothing else I could do from a mile away, and it was more than time that was being wasted. I got back into the cab.

‘New Kent Road,’ I said. ‘The Salisbury Estate.’

We pulled back into the traffic, and I thought about what I had to do. Promises to break. Innocent people to lie to. Stupid, blind risks to take while I pretended that I knew what I was doing. Just another day at the office, really. Maybe I should have worked harder at giving the children’s-party entertaining a fair trial.

It took five or six minutes to get to the Salisbury, the air seeming to thicken and congeal around me with every yard we travelled. I paid off the cabbie and walked up the steps to the concrete apron, where I saw with little surprise a small posse of Gwillam’s merry men and un-men waiting to meet me. The flat-faced man – Feld – was there, but I didn’t know the others. There was a short swag-bellied man in a shabby suit who looked like he might be someone’s fat, jolly uncle, although the Father Christmas effect was slightly spoiled by a horrendous scar that ran diagonally down his face in a bend sinister of rucked and hardened flesh, and a hard case who was dressed entirely in black: ready for night ops, and maybe trying just a bit too hard. He had impressive muscles, though: but then, being around born-again Gwillam’s menagerie would obviously leave an ordinary baseline human feeling like he had something to live up to. Poor sod was probably at the gym all the hours God sent.

‘Mister Castor,’ said the man in black. ‘I’m Eddings, and this -‘ pointing to the fat man ‘- is Speight. He’ll brief you as we walk.’ He didn’t bother to introduce Feld: perhaps he knew that we’d already met.

He turned and led the way across the concrete. Speight fell in beside me as I followed, and Feld brought up the rear. Nobody else was in sight, and the silence was more profound than ever. It wasn’t just that there was no noise from the towers nearby: the voices of the city itself, the noise of the traffic on the road only a few yards behind us, the rumble of trains and shouts of convivial drunks, were stilled as we walked forward. The curtains: we’d passed through them, and they’d fallen closed behind us.

‘Last night was very bad,’ the little man, Speigh³tlehint, was saying in a cultured voice with a slight Welsh lilt to it. ‘There were fights, last night.’ He pointed. ‘The police were called, but the fight spread to the walkways. A lot of people got hurt, some of them very badly. Even the ambulance crews, when they tried to treat the injured, were attacked.’

‘Tonight’s an improvement, then,’ I said, looking up at the hulking, menacing shapes of the towers: dark giants with asymmetrical eyes.

Speight looked at me, as if he suspected me of trying to make a joke. ‘No,’ he said, lingering on the syllable. ‘Tonight is worse.’

Gwillam was waiting for us at the foot of Weston Block, with a Bible in his hands and another small gaggle of multi-purpose zealots clustered around him. He watched us come, and Speight said nothing more: obviously it was the boss’s prerogative to fill me in on the rest of the big picture.

Gwillam nodded to me, and I nodded back. There didn’t seem to be much point in small talk, given that I’d laid his face open the last time we’d met. He seemed to have recovered from that, although I couldn’t help wondering if he’d bounced back so easily from the more spiritual pummelling that Juliet had laid on him.

‘It’s a demon,’ he said flatly.

I shrugged. Presumably he hadn’t dragged me all this way to tell me what I already knew.

‘It seems to have an affinity for wounds, as you said,’ Gwillam went on. ‘And its presence twists people’s perceptions – subtly, at first, but with more and more pervasive effect. I’ve got my people on two-hour shifts, rotating. But we’re barely containing it.’

‘You seem to be doing a good job,’ I said. I gestured at the stillness all around us. ‘No riots. No things going bump in the night.’

‘That doesn’t mean it isn’t trying,’ said a woman standing to Gwillam’s right. She was tall and well built, attractive in a Junoesque way. I registered that first: then the ponytail, and then the cat’s cradle of string that was wound around her hands. It was only then that I realised I already knew her. When I’d seen her standing out on the walkway it had been dark, and before that, when she’d been with Gwillam, I’d mistaken the tightly looped string on her hands for bandages. In fact it must be the way she focused her power. She was an exorcist, like me, and like Gwillam. So I turned to her, if only for a fresh perspective and an excuse not to look at Gwillam’s sour face any more.

‘Go on,’ I said.

She looked to Gwillam for permission and he gave it with a resigned wave of the hand.

‘We tried a straight exorcism,’ she said. ‘But it fights back. It tries to take you onto its own ground.’ Thinking about my own ham-fisted efforts at the hospital, and the black pit where I’d briefly faced this thing, I knew exactly what she meant. I nodded and she went on, her clipped, emotionless tones making a strange contrast with the horrors she was describing. ‘Peyer went in first, and then – he tried to put his own ey³ pun, es out. He succeeded with one, but Feld managed to stop him before he got to the other. After that we used strength of numbers: one exorcist doing the binding, two or three others watching over him, weaving stay-nots around him so the thing can’t get close.’

She held up her hands as if I could read their failure in the complexity of the woven threads that covered them.

‘It doesn’t work,’ she said flatly. ‘Because its focus isn’t really this place. It’s more – like it—’

‘Like it lives in the wounds,’ I finished.

She nodded. ‘And most of the people on the estate have got broken flesh of some kind by now. So it’s all around us. In a hundred or a thousand different places. You drive it out of one vessel and it goes. It retreats. Then it flows back as soon as you look away. We’ve been here all night, and the best we can say is that the thing is focused on us, so it’s not making any mischief anywhere else. But we can’t keep this up for ever. And if anything it seems to be getting stronger.’

That wasn’t surprising at all. If wounds were its joy and its sustenance, and if there were a thousand wounded people crammed into these few hundred square metres of space, then the demon’s cup must surely be running over. And if every man, woman or child who got hurt, who got cut, gave it a new anchor and a new home, then its growth could become something truly exponential and unstoppable.

‘So we feel we need a fresh approach,’ Gwillam summed up tersely, giving me a cold, expectant look. ‘And since you knew most of this before we did, we hoped you might be able to advise us on where we go from here.’

‘Sorry to disappoint you, father,’ I said, ‘but you’ve got further than I have. When I met it, I was lucky to get out with both balls and a soul.’

Out of the corner of the eye I saw the woman’s shoulders sag. Gwillam shook his head. ‘Then you’ve had a wasted journey,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry to have taken up your time. If you’ll excuse us, we’ll return to our labours, however futile they may ultimately turn out to be.’

‘There is one other thing we could try, though,’ I said. He was already turning his back on me, but he stopped and waited.

‘The boy,’ I said. ‘Bic.’

‘William Daniels,’ Gwillam translated.

‘Exactly. You thought he had Jesus as his co-pilot.’

‘Castor, I’ve already admitted that I was mistaken about what was happening here.’

‘But you thought that for a reason, right?’ Gwillam stared at me, waiting for me to go on. Everyone else had their gaze on me, too, and I could feel the quickening of interest behind every pair of weary eyes: they made such a lovely audience I would have loved to take them home with me. If home was Guantánamo Bay. ‘He was the first,’ I said, impatiently. ‘The first ³ly.y mby a long way, I’m guessing. This thing found him long before it did anything to anyone else. He’s a sensitive: he’s got some sort of gift that lets him pick up what you’re thinking and feeling. Most exorcists have got a touch of it, too, but he’s got more than most. He’s like a radio satellite pointing into inner space. And he picked up the wound demon.’

‘Is that why it came?’ the little man, Speight, demanded in his lisping voice.

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘It came because of another boy. Mark Blainey, who died here a year ago. He was a self-harmer. He found wounds, or the inflicting of wounds – I don’t know, exciting, I guess. Appealing. He thought about them a lot. He obsessed on them. He cut himself in a lot of different ways, with different kinds of objects. And somehow, somewhere along the way, this thing noticed him. It came looking for him. I heard it speak his name, when I met it in that place where it lives. It came looking for Mark, but it stayed because it found Bic. And now it’s expanded its friendship group. That’s what I think happened, anyway.’

Gwillam considered, and all eyes now shifted to him because he was the authority, the giver of truth. That’s the trouble with the Church: it’s a top-down hierarchy where everyone does what they’re told by the guy on the next rung up. Which would be fine, I suppose, if it was me on the top rung instead of God.

‘We learned about Mark Blainey in our researches here,’ Gwillam conceded. ‘We thought him an early symptom.’

‘So did I, at first,’ I agreed. ‘But a nurse at the Royal London put me straight on that one. He’s not a symptom, Gwillam. His death sticks out like a bishop in a brothel, saving your presence. No puncture wounds involved: no blades, no points or edges. He just jumped right off the walkway. So it’s a fair bet that this demon wasn’t what drove him to his death. He didn’t die from it: he brought it, and then died of something else.’

And I probably know what the something else was, I added inside my own head.
He may square himself with God, but he’ll never square himself with me
, Richie had said. No, I reckoned Matt was going to be in trouble on the God front, too: there was no getting away from sin on this scale.

‘So you think if we attempt an exorcism on William Daniels—’ Gwillam began.

‘No,’ I cut in impatiently. ‘I already tried that. That might have worked back when he was the only one affected, but it’s not going to work any more. Like you said, the thing has got its hooks into too many people now. It can just shift its ground and come back at you from a different angle.’

‘Then what?’ Gwillam asked impatiently.

So I told him what I had in mind.

I hadn’t expected the next part to be easy, but even so I’d underestimated Gwillam’s sheer, unremitting stubbornness in the face of something he didn’t trust and couldn’t control.

He was appalled at what I was planning to do, a³annt cnd he dug his heels in fast and hard. He wanted names and addresses, just for starters. He also wanted to take charge of the operation and leave me here as a hostage with his people to ensure the cooperation of the other parties I wanted to involve. And he wanted to keep his options wide open with regard to other sanctions – up to and including exorcising or otherwise destroying any non-humans who ended up playing a part in the operation.

I told him, in a certain amount of detail, exactly what positions he might use when he fucked himself.

We argued it backwards and forwards for half an hour before finally reaching an impasse. Gwillam had the entire place sewn up, with at least one of his people on every walkway, and he flat-out refused to let me take Bic off the estate even if his parents consented – unless he got to come along in force and run the show. I told him that couldn’t work, and that he was condemning the residents of the Salisbury to the death of a thousand cuts, and he said – in effect – that their suffering was part of God’s great plan.

I gave up in the end and left them to it. At least they didn’t stop me from going up to the eighth floor of Weston Block to look in on Bic and his family, which might have been interesting because he had serious muscle and I was in a black enough mood to have pushed it. But as it was I walked on across the forecourt and in through the double doors while Gwillam was still deep in murmured confab with his minions.

But the lifts were out, so I went around to the external staircase and started my trek into the sky, not looking round in case I locked eyes with Gwillam and he called me back. But while I was trudging up the stairs I heard hurried footsteps clattering behind me. I turned and waited, so that at least I’d be meeting whoever it was head-on: in this place, it was best to take nothing for granted.

It was the tall woman with the cat’s cradles wound around her hands.