Thicker Than Water (43 page)

‘Can she breathe?’ I asked.

‘Course she can breathe,’ Cheadle snapped. ‘She just can’t effing see, is all. The kid goes there.’

He pointed to a bare and maculate mattress thrown down diagonally across the floor of the van. I leaned forward and laid Bic down on it carefully. He was still twitching and muttering, but he never even came close to waking. I wished I’d remembered to bring a blanket. Cheadle was right, the night was warm enough to make blankets unnecessary: it would just have made this feel less like a kidnapping.

Cheadle slammed the door shut and I went round to the passenger side.

‘Trudie is in your safe keeping, Castor,’ Gwillam reminded me. ‘No less than the boy.’

I nodded, acknowledging the point. ‘We should be back inside of an hour,’ I said. ‘One way or another. Be ready for us. I want to get this over with. And Gwillam – if we’re followed, we stop. No second chances.’

I climbed into the passenger seat and there was a solid metallic chunking sound as Cheadle reached down to lock the doors from his side.

‘You got a mobile on you?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,’ I admitted.

‘Turn it off. They might not know your number, but if they do you might just as well be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. Better put it in there, for the duration.’ He pointed down to a box at my feet. I’d taken it to be a toolbox but when I opened it, it proved to have thicker sides than that, the interior space small and cluttered. Cluttered with telecommunications gear, mainly: esoteric stuff whose purposes I didn’t know and didn’t care to guess: there were even some naked circuit boards.

‘Right,’ said Cheadle, ‘we’re off.’

He backed down the steps again, bumpity bumpity bump, and reversed out onto the road.

‘Is Trudie going to be okay back there?’ I asked.

He threw the briefest of glances towards the back of the van. ‘Should be,’ he said. ‘So long as she hadn’t got any inner-ear problems.’ There was an observation window which presumably opened into the van’s rear space, but when I went to open it Cheadle put his hand on mine and shook his head.

‘No no no. The magical mystery tour is waiting to take her away. This is a full professional service, satisfaction guaranteed, and we put the blanket over the top of the cage so the little birdie can sleep. You» ca he got my money?’

I handed over the notes that Gwillam had magicked up from somewhere. Cheadle fanned them out and nodded, apparently satisfied.

We drove around South London for forty minutes, taking every alley and back crack that Cheadle could find. He turned the radio on, but only a dull bass-line thudding came out of it.

‘Your speakers are bust,’ I said.

‘Nope,’ Cheadle replied. ‘They work all right – but they’re mounted in the back of the van. If her indoors is trying to figure out where we’re going by the sounds of the city, she’ll have her work cut out for her. As for you and me, well, we’ll have to make do with witty repartee, won’t we?’

That turned out to mean dead silence. I sat back and watched him work.

It wasn’t just a case of randomly tacking across the city. He was checking for tails, too, his eyes on the rear-view mirror for so much of the time that I was really afraid we were going to hit something. At one point he stopped, took his own phone out of the reinforced box, turned it on and made a call. He didn’t speak but he listened for half a minute, then turned it off and replaced it.

‘You do this sort of thing a lot?’ I asked, as we drove down Camberwell Church Street.

Cheadle made a tutting sound. ‘I do what I’m paid to do.’

‘Nicky said you’d worked for him before,’ I observed.

‘I don’t know any Nicky,’ Cheadle said shortly, in a tone that made it clear that further questions would not be welcomed.

We rolled up to Imelda’s place just as the moon rose, so I guess I’d put the time at about one in the morning. Cheadle waited at the back of the van, leaning against the doors, while I went around the back and up the stairs to talk to Imelda.

She wouldn’t have been happy to see me even if my knocking hadn’t got her out of bed. She wrapped her tent-like floral-patterned nightgown around her and stared me down with a face like a volley of small-arms fire.

‘We had this conversation, Castor,’ she growled.

‘We did,’ I admitted. ‘But the situation has changed, Imelda. A kid’s life is at stake. You have to let me do this.’

It was – I admit it – a cheap shot. But it was the obvious cheap shot, and I’m way too cheap not to take it when it offers. Imelda is a mother herself, and Lisa is the one thing in her life that she can’t be hard-bitten and cynical about.

So I told her about Bic, and I let her make the call. That’s how big a bastard I am.

Five minutes later she was unlocking Rafi’s »locbasdoor, having previously removed the wards from it. Trudie was with us: Cheadle had freed her hands, but she still wore the helmet and mask. Rafi stared at us in blank amazement as we trooped into the room: me first, with Bic in my arms: then Cheadle, steering Trudie by her shoulders; and Imelda last of all, her expression somewhere close to hangdog.

More explanations, while Trudie sat like a slightly kinky version of Blind Justice on a chair in a corner of the room, and Bic lay moaning and murmuring on the couch. Rafi was unhappy, and scared. Since he’d moved in here, he’d got used to being the only inhabitant of his own brain, and I was proposing to wake up the sleeping sub-letter with a vengeance.

‘Is there no other way of doing this?’ he asked.

‘None that I can think of,’ I said. ‘But believe me, Rafi, I’m open to suggestions.’

Rafi looked to Imelda in mute appeal, and Imelda shook her head: the rock, crying out
no hiding place
. ‘If you’re asking me if this is safe,’ she said sternly, ‘then, honey, I’m going to have to tell you I don’t know. Castor and me have been up to the job so far, more or less – kept that nasty little thing under his rock most of the time. But this is different. We’re waking him up and we’re letting him off the leash. Whether we can put him down again afterwards is a blue-breezing blind guess, and anyone who’d tell you any different would be lying.’

‘But it’s not just the two of us this time,’ I pointed out.

Imelda looked at Trudie, who was missing all the finer points here because of the
BDSM
harness.

‘Can you let her out of that thing now?’ Imelda asked Cheadle.

‘No,’ Cheadle answered shortly. ‘But you can. I don’t mind what you do here in this room, so long as she’s all wrapped up in the ribbons and bows again when we come to leave. I’ll be waiting at the bottom of the stairs. And you can tell madam that if she comes down them with her eyes open, I’ll bounce five pounds of loose change off the back of her neck. She might survive the experience, but she won’t appreciate it.’

He left without further ceremony. Imelda helped me to undo the straps and we removed the mask from Trudie’s flushed, sweating face. ‘Thank God!’ she said. ‘I thought I was going to suffocate in—’ She broke off, staring hard at Rafi. After a moment or two, she crossed herself: four short, decisive jabs of her right hand, which she then clenched into a fist.

‘The abomination,’ she said.

‘I go by Rafi,’ Rafi answered bleakly.

Trudie nodded. ‘I know. You’re only the vessel. I’ve heard of you, of course. We have . . . briefing materials on you. At one time there was talk of killing you, but the prevailing opinion in the society was that Asmodeus would survive, and then he’d be free to choose another vessel. So we left you as you were.’

In the charged silence that followed»e teft this pronouncement, she looked from face to face.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘That was tactless, right? I’m sorry. I’ll shut up until I’m spoken to.’

‘We’re about to wake – the abomination,’ I told her. ‘And we want to make sure we can keep him contained. Not to mention putting him back to sleep again afterwards. Any ideas?’

‘Intravenous silver oxide,’ she said, without a moment’s hesitation.

I patted my coat pockets theatrically, searched a couple randomly and shrugged, coming up empty.

‘Well, you did insist I change out of my regular clothes,’ Trudie said, in a slightly truculent tone. ‘Wards, then. Lots of them. On the doors and on the walls and probably on his flesh, too.’

‘Wards keep him down if he
starts
from down,’ Imelda objected. ‘They’re not going to slow him much once he’s up and running. He’s too old and he’s too sly. Let you nail a thousand signs to him, he’s still going to find a way to slip in between them and come for you.’

‘A pentagram, then,’ Trudie said.

We all stared at her.

‘You can draw a pentagram?’ I demanded.

She seemed surprised at my surprise. ‘Of course.’ ‘With all the whistles and bells?’

She nodded. ‘Yes. Why not?’

‘You’ve had a slightly more catholic education than I would have expected,’ I said. ‘Small c.’

‘We use whatever methods work.’ Trudie’s tone was cold, as though I’d accused her of sleeping with the enemy. ‘We’re soldiers, Castor, not pastors or contemplatives. We’ve got a different brief.’

‘Evidently.’ I looked at Imelda, who nodded curtly, and Rafi, who gave a resigned and helpless shrug.

‘Black magic is how I got into this fucking mess in the first place,’ he said, with a touch of bitterness. ‘Don’t ask me for an opinion.’ He paused, swallowed, shrugged again. ‘I don’t want the kid to die any more than you do. If this is what it takes, then go for it. But if Asmodeus rips your throats out, try not to bleed on my Kerouacs.’

‘A magic circle it is, then. Let’s go.’

Imelda went and got some chalk while Rafi, Trudie and

I moved the furniture and rolled the carpets back. Bic roused a little when we rolled the couch to the wall, staring at us with slightly more focused eyes.

‘The red sea,’ he said, more or less distinctly. ‘Blood is salt water. That’s all.’

‘Lisa is asleep upstairs,’ Imelda reminded us as she came back in with the chalk. ‘Let’s do this quietly.’

‘We can do the invocation quietly,’ Trudie said. ‘But we can’t be sure that we can control everything the demon does once he rises.’

Imelda closed the door, firmly. ‘Thank you for the reminder,’ she said, shooting me a look that would have knocked me back ten feet or so if I hadn’t already been up against the wall. The room was feeling a little crowded now, since we couldn’t walk in the cleared space at the centre where Trudie was about to draw the circle, and the margins of the room were full of displaced furniture.

‘I’m going to use the Baphomet sigil, inscribed with the ordinals of Leviathan,’ Trudie told us as she started to sketch in the first line. ‘Stanislas de Guaita, not LaVey’s Hell’s Kitchen Baphomet. Mister Ditko, you’d better be inside the circle before I close it.’

‘What about Bic?’ I asked her. She looked at me, thinking it through.

‘Outside,’ she said at last. ‘If we frame the conjuration right, Asmodeus won’t need to cross the circle to touch the boy on the psychic level. And this way there are four of us in total, which is a strong number. Should I perform the conjuration, Mister Castor, or would you prefer to do that yourself? You know this demon better than I do.’

‘I’d like to see you work,’ I said, which fell squarely into the ‘truth as far as it goes’ category. I was curious as to how she’d approach this – and I also wanted to keep my own powder dry in case Asmodeus cut up rough somewhere down the line. My chest was still weak from my injuries, and this was going to be the kind of balancing act I wouldn’t normally attempt even when I was at full strength. If I’d had a single other option left in the world, I wouldn’t have been trying it.

We placed Bic at the southernmost point of the pentacle

- Trudie complaining once again that I’d made her come without her kit so she couldn’t check the alignment with a compass – and took our own places more or less at the other three cardinal points, with Trudie as east because this was a Satanic rite and the east is Satan’s appointed sphere. Rafi stepped into the circle and sat cross-legged in the middle. ‘I’m going to get chalk all over my arse,’ he complained. It was probably meant as a joke, but none of us were in the mood for laughing.

Trudie unwound the string from her hands, flexed her fingers, and started to weave a new cat’s cradle. She chanted a rhyme at the same time, but it wasn’t anything that a practising Satanist – or a practising Christian, for that matter – would have expected. It was a playground rhyme, starting with the familiar sequence ‘Apple, peach, pear, plum,’ but mostly muttered so fast and so low in her throat that it couldn’t be followed.

I caught a whiff of a sour, slightly unnerving smell – like the curdled tang of formic acid when you burn an ant with a magnifying glass. In the centre of the circle, Rafi shuddered suddenly, his shoulders tensed.

»v hcid

‘Johnny broke a bottle,’ Trudie chanted, ‘and blamed it on me. I told ma, ma told pa—’ Her fingers flickered in and out between the strings like the shuttles of a tiny loom. The pattern emerged, one line at a time.

The air in the room seemed to thicken. A cat yowled in the alley behind us and Rafi moaned, both at the same time. It was probably pure coincidence, but it felt as though the power that Trudie was putting out in Rafi’s direction was hitting random targets on the same vector.

Her movements quickened, reached a crescendo. She held up her two hands, joined by the cat’s cradle, then tugged twice and the string magically fell free, dangling from the index finger of her right hand while her left described an arabesque in the tainted air.

Rafi sagged and then stiffened, his limbs shifting suddenly into a new configuration as his sleeping passenger woke and stretched. I watched the demon surface within the man’s flesh. From one point of view, nothing much actually changed: it was more like one of those
trompe l’oeil
drawings where the same sketched outline, seen from two different angles, can be either a woman with a parasol or a charging rhino. The same thing had happened here: Rafi didn’t look any different, but he had turned into something else.

I was trying to stay calm and detached, but powerful emotions flooded through me: indignation, that my friend should have to endure this; repugnance at having to wake this thing again against all my instincts and Imelda’s arguments; and, bubbling under, the sickening sense of guilt that every contact with Asmodeus brought me – because if I’d been a better exorcist, he wouldn’t even have been here.