Thicker Than Water (49 page)

In spring we used to walk to the Seven Sisters – the bomb craters on the Walton Triangle that had turned into lakes – and go fishing for frogspawn. You’d bring it home in a jam jar, transfer it to a plastic bowl or bucket, stick it in a secluded part of the garden shed or, if you had a death wish or an indulgent mum, your bedroom, and wait for the little black dots at the heart of the translucent jelly to turn into tadpoles. Then the tadpoles would grow legs and turn over the space of weeks into microminiaturised frogs. It was enthralling in a way that cut right across more macho pursuits. You could watch it for hours and feel like you were plugged into some kind of primal magic.

I was thinking about that now as I looked from Juliet to Matt and then back again.

‘Do you Óze=I lwant to tell him?’ I asked her. ‘Or is this one down to me?’

Juliet arched an eyebrow. ‘This is your decision, Castor,’ she said. ‘What you’re about to say can’t make anyone who hears it any happier. If I’ve kept the secret this long, it’s not because I’m afraid of what you’ll do with the knowledge. It’s because it can’t do you – any of you – one iota of good.’

‘Mark was into self-harm,’ I told my brother, who was coming out of his foetal crouch and staring at me with aggressive unease. ‘He cut himself for pleasure. Mostly with razor blades, occasionally with other sharp objects that he picked up here and there and saved for the purpose.’

‘Why are you telling me this, Felix?’ Matt demanded.

‘Because you need to know. He saw the whole process as kind of erotic somehow. I’ve read some of his poetry, and that was pretty much all it was about. How beautiful wounds are: how they’re like flowers and fertile river valleys and mouths that speak in a language more eloquent than words. He never said they were like vaginas but it was sort of implied.

‘It was his upbringing, Matt. Kenny was a sadistic bastard – you knew that – and Anita had convinced herself that she was a worthless speck of dirt who deserved no better than the abuse she got. The only thing in all of this fucking mess that I don’t understand is how the strongest, most capable, most alive girl we ever knew turned into this . . . this
doormat
, but she did. Maybe because the one man she really loved got her up the stick and then walked away whistling “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam”. Or maybe it was something else. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

‘But however it played, Mark had this thing in his life that was halfway between a hobby and a love affair. Blades. Wounds. Blood. And then he died. And his soul stayed here like so many souls do – stuck in the mire, too wrapped up in all the unfinished business to let go. I’ve never thought about it before, but there should be more young ghosts than there are old ones. Dead at seventeen? How could you go gentle into that last sod-off? How could you think it was your time?’

Matt uttered an unlovely sound, compounded of grief and pain and protest. He didn’t want to hear any more. But I had to tell him. I had to make him understand what was coming next.

‘I thought he summoned the demon by accident, Matt. I was certain that was how it must have happened. Like, his obsession opened a door wide enough for a creature that loved and lived in wounds to enter by. Like he made a trail it could follow. Like his soul had a scent.

‘But I was kidding myself. First of all because the truth was too insane to be believed, and then because it was too hard. It hurt too much. Juliet refusing to tell me what was going on over here rang alarm bells, but I didn’t know what to make of it. Then I met Bic – the kid next door. The closest thing Mark had to a friend, and the first soul the demon chose to anchor itself in. For months that was all it did. It lodged there, in that one small soul, until it was strong enough to try its luck elsewhere. Why him? No scars on him anywhere, so he’s never cut himself. And the demon didn’t cut him either. It cut everyone else, or made them cut themÓe tck selves, but with Bic it was really gentle. It had to have the blood: couldn’t do without that. But it made Bic bleed without breaking his skin.’

Matt was looking at me in pure horror now, and Coldwood, two steps behind but catching on, swore obscenely.

‘Then I actually met the thing,’ I said. ‘And it spoke to me. Just the one word. “Mark”. I thought it was telling me who it was after, but it wasn’t.

‘No, Felix,’ Matt pleaded. ‘No.’

‘It was telling me its name. Mark didn’t summon the demon. Mark
is
the demon. That’s your son’s metastasised soul out there, feeding on innocents and driving them to their own destruction.’

Matt’s pleas turned into a wordless bellow of anguish and he started to hammer his head against the floor of the room. Coldwood and I lunged forward at the same time but Juliet’s lithe body isn’t subject to the same limitations as mere human flesh, and she got there almost before we started to move. She clasped Matt in her unbreakable grip and he slumped against her, moaning unintelligible syllables.

‘I think you’ve made your point,’ she said to me in a calm, detached tone.

‘Is this how all demons are made?’ I asked her, my mouth too dry to swallow. ‘Is this what you are?’

‘It’s none of your business what I am, Castor. If you pry into that subject again, I won’t take it kindly.’

‘I can’t believe I never saw it,’ I continued, because the words kept spilling out of me whether I wanted them to or not. It was as though none of this had been real until I said it, or until she confirmed it. Now I had to live with this knowledge and I didn’t think I could.
We have met the enemy and he is us.
The newest monster in town was my fucking nephew. ‘I mean, it ought to have been obvious. Zombies are people. Werewolves are people. Why shouldn’t demons be people too? It’s Occam’s fucking razor: it’s the one common factor that makes sense out of everything. But how can it be so big, Juliet? How can it be so fucking big and so fucking powerful if it’s -‘ the word had a sour, almost obscene taste to it as I shaped my mouth around it ‘- newborn?’

Juliet stared at me for long enough that I was sure she wasn’t going to answer. But then she made a gesture that conveyed very succinctly the impression that in talking to me about this she was trying to pour a major ocean into a pint pot. ‘Many of us start out . . . large and diffuse,’ she said. ‘Bodiless emotion. Pure power, but not concentrated. Like a vapour that fills any space it finds itself in. We condense gradually, over a long time. We find our form.’

‘But you come from souls?’ This from Matt, who was staring at her in utter horror. ‘From human souls?’

Juliet made another gesture: something close to a shrug.

‘Dear God!’ Matt whispered. ‘Oh dear God!’

‘Tell me if I’m missing something,’ Coldwood growled, ‘but fascinating as all this is from a religious standpoint, is it not also totally fucking irrelevant? Either you can sort this out or you can’t, Fix. Which is it?’

‘The first ghost I ever exorcised was my own sister, Gary,’ I answered, shaking my head with ferocious emphasis. ‘I’m not going back there. Today it’s Matt’s turn.’

‘Mine?’ Matt’s voice trembled as he raised his red, tear-stained face to stare at me.

‘I think it’s our only chance,’ I said. ‘He’s kin to you and he’ll feel the connection. He may listen to you where he wouldn’t listen to anyone else. Most ghosts – they hang around because they can’t get it into their heads that their life is over. They’re tied to all the stuff they didn’t do, or wish they hadn’t done. You have to tell him it’s okay. Make your peace with him. You have to ask him to leave, of his own free will. It’s the only way.’

At least, I added mentally, it’s the only way that doesn’t involve me doing an encore for
my
biggest sin. For Katie. And I marvelled again at how big a bastard Asmodeus was: how nearly perfectly he’d led me to this massacre of the innocents. Because that’s what Mark was, however deadly his infatuation with wounds had become. His real father literally didn’t know he was alive, his stepfather was a vicious sadist and his mother was probably already broken before he was born. His cards had been well and truly marked. And then when he did finally break out of the ghetto, by metamorphosing into something big and powerful and scary, along came Uncle Felix with his magic equaliser.

No. Sorry. We are not at home to Mister Kin-slayer. Not today, at any rate.

‘They’ve never met,’ Juliet pointed out. ‘There’s no reason why the demon should recognise Matthew as its father.’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘That could be just wishful thinking on my part. But it’s the only shot we’ve got left in the locker, because I’m telling you I can’t do this. I’m empty.’

Matt got himself under some kind of control and climbed to his feet. Amazingly, Juliet’s embrace didn’t seem to have left him aroused at all: maybe it was because of the welter of other emotions running through him – or maybe she put out different pheromones when she was being maternal.

‘I’ll do it,’ Matt said, bleakly but calmly. ‘I—Obviously. Yes. I have to do it. I can see why it has to be me.’

He looked at me, trying to keep the fear out of his face. Fear of going up against a demon, or fear of meeting his son for the first time in these less than auspicious circumstances? Maybe it was a little of both. ‘So what happens?’ he asked. ‘You play your whistle and I . . . call his name?’

‘The whistle’s the last thing we need,’ I said. ‘I play that tune, it’s like I put his arm up behind his back and jam his face into a wall. And he’s had a lot of that tonight already. No, I think we need a different approach.’

I went through into the other bedroom. Like the living room it had seen a bit of ransacking, but it didn’t seem to have been very thorough in this case. Some drawers pulled out, a few clothes strewn around, but that was about the extent of it. Whoever the looters were, they hadn’t put their backs into it: and by providential chance, they’d run out of steam before they’d got to the wardrobe.

I went back through into Mark’s room, holding his cutting kit in my hands. Once again, just from holding the box, I felt the deep, insistent pulse of long-gone feelings that Mark had left there: the echo of his excitement and his joy. I put it down on the floor in the centre of the room where everyone could see it.

‘If Mark had an emotional focus, it was this,’ I said. ‘What is it?’ Juliet asked.

‘His works. A box full of razor blades, essentially, with a few more sharp objects for the sake of variety, and a bit of disinfectant. This is what he used to cut himself.’ Matt winced, but he seemed to know what was expected of him. He knelt down and touched his hand to the lid of the box. Closing his eyes he spoke Mark’s name.

Nothing happened. With my psychic antenna fully extended, I listened to the eerie silence beyond the windows. It was still dark out there. I looked at my watch and it was way past seven o’clock. There ought to be some light in the sky by now.

Matt called again, a little louder. Still nothing. No sense of movement, either on the psychic plane or in the world of brute, inarguable flesh.

A minute or two passed like this, with Matt calling Mark’s name and nobody answering.

‘Okay,’ I said at last. ‘It seemed like a good idea. Sorry to waste your time.’

‘Where did he die?’ Juliet asked. We all looked at her. ‘The boy,’ she clarified unnecessarily. ‘Where did he die? Was it in this room?’

‘No,’ Coldwood said, pointing. ‘It was out there. He threw himself off the walkway.’

‘Then that’s where we should be.’

It was clutching at straws, but it was worth a shot. I nodded and went to retrieve the cutting kit from the floor, but Matt had already picked it up and seemed unwilling to hand it over.

‘Let’s go,’ I said.

The hallway was completely still. We pulled open the swing doors – with some difficulty because of the broken glass and débris littering the floor – and stepped out into the darkness. Automatically I looked towards the east. The sliver of light I’d seen there before had gone now: the sky was unrelieved black from horizon to zenith. Except that there wasn’t any horizon, to speak of. The nearer towers loomed out of the dark like black cliff faces, pitted with darker holes like caves where the broken windows stared down at us. Beyond that, there was nothing.

Matt wÓsiz stas in the lead as we spread out across the walkway. He cleared a space with his foot, knelt and set the cutting kit down between his knees. He looked up into the blind, black sky.

‘Mark,’ he said again. ‘This is Matthew, your -‘ he choked on the word but he got it out ‘- your father. Please stop this. Please let these people--‘

He didn’t even get to finish the sentence. A wind from nowhere ripped the breath from his mouth. It hit us full-on, sending Coldwood and me slip-sliding backwards on the treacherous footing of broken glass and powdered brick. Juliet leaned into it and kept her footing.

A second later, we realised that the dust and débris on the walkway hadn’t stirred. This was a wind that had no quarrel with matter: just with us.

‘Mark—’ Matt yelled, and the darkness swallowed the sound so that, standing a scant few feet away from him, I could barely hear it.

I heard an answering bellow, though, equally muted but many-throated. It came from the windows above, where the pale blobs of faces could now be seen looking down at us.

Okay. That probably wasn’t good. Juliet was staring at Matt. I touched her shoulder and, as she turned towards me, pointed up. She nodded. She was aware of the watchers already: she didn’t need to see them to know they were there.

Matt was still speaking, speaking continuously now, but the words were torn up and scattered by the void-wind so they never reached me. Seeing Juliet walk past Matt to guard the further end of the walkway, I turned with Gary beside me to watch the nearer end.

They came on us from both sides at once, with the terrifying, utterly focused madness of the possessed. There were a couple of dozen of them, and I realised with a shock that I actually knew some of the ones at our end: they were the gang that Bic’s older brother belonged to. They had jagged shards of glass in their hands, and blood coursed down over their wrists unheeded as they ran at us. Gary faced them with his bare fists, but I had my whistle out and I blew the first skirling notes of the wound-demon’s exorcism in their faces like pepper spray. They slowed and faltered, which saved Gary from being julienned in the first couple of seconds. After that, even though they moved like sleepwalkers, he was fighting for his life. The narrowness of the walkway worked in our favour, but there were so many of them: and a single lucky thrust might be all it took. Coldwood ducked and punched, spun and kicked, used every dirty trick they teach in cop school. I dropped the whistle and joined him, humming the exorcism tune between dry lips as I fought.