The Devil You Know

When he did finally realize that something was wrong, he looked up at me, startled, as if it was some trick that I was trying to pull on him. Then he raised his hands and tried to swat the shadows away. That was as futile as it sounds. He gave a little shriek and rolled away toward the wall. The darkness followed him, zeroed on his face, sank into and through him.

“Castor!” Rich screamed. “Get it—get it off—don’t—”

I didn’t make a move. There probably wouldn’t have been much I could have done in any case. Not now. The shadows sank into and through Rich’s skin, drawn in by some psychic osmosis. His scream became muffled, liquid, inhuman. His hands flailed, groping blindly at his own face.

Except that he didn’t actually have a face—not much of one, anyway. From forehead to upper lip was just a red, rippling curtain of flesh. Chestnut-brown hair hung in lank ringlets over it, and the mouth that gaped formlessly underneath was rimmed by blood-red lips.

The illusion—if that’s what it was—held for the space of a long-drawn-out breath. Then it was gone, as if someone had thrown a switch, and it was just Rich there again, screaming and babbling, his fingers gripping his face as if he was trying to tear it off his skull. I waded in and stopped him from blinding himself in his panic.

“I’ll help,” he promised, raising his hand as if to ward off a blow. “Please! I’ll help, Castor. I’ll cooperate! You can tell her I cooperated. Don’t let her touch me! Please!”

“That’s great, Rich,” I said. “But I’m going to need you to get your breath back first.”

That took a while. When his breathing was close enough to normal that I thought he might be able to talk, I took out my mobile phone and threw it into his lap.

“Make a call,” I told him. “There’s another emergency.”

Twenty-one

RICH TURNED THE PHONE ON, WAITED FOR IT TO LIGHT up and find a network. Nothing happened. He stared at it nonplussed, robbed of all initiative by the psychic gut-punch he’d just taken. He looked at me with a mute appeal.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I snapped. “Hand it over.”

It was the usual problem: no charge. With an inward curse, I flicked through some unworkable alternatives and then had a sudden inspiration. In my inside breast pocket, I found the mobile phone I’d taken from Arnold after I’d coldcocked him in the toilet at the Runagate in Chelsea. I gave that to Rich instead.

He dialed clumsily, taking three goes before he managed to get the number right. Then we both waited, eavesdropping on some etheric limbo while the call wound its way through cyberspace. I was listening in, my head right up close to his. I didn’t trust Rich to fly straight on this unless he had a copilot. In my mind’s eye I saw the phone ringing in the foyer of Kissing the Pink, Weasel-Face Arnold picking up.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Rich Clitheroe,” Rich said. “I’ve got to speak to Mr. Damjohn.” There was a pregnant pause, and then he added, “It’s about Castor.”

“Hold on,” the voice muttered.

They kept him hanging. Damjohn wouldn’t make himself immediately available to anyone, let alone to someone as lowly as Rich. As the pause lengthened, though, I wondered if they were having trouble reaching Damjohn. Maybe he was somewhere else altogether.

After about a minute, Arnold came back on. “He’s on the boat,” he said, sounding slightly disgruntled—as if, maybe, he’d been torn off a strip for disturbing his boss’s repose. “He said you should call him there.” He rattled off the number, and Rich made a pretence of writing it down while we both did our best to commit it to memory. Rich made the follow-on call, his shaking hands causing a number of false starts. We got the ring tone, and it went on for what seemed like forever. Then, finally, someone picked up.

“Hello?” Damjohn’s voice. “Clitheroe?”

“Mr. Damjohn, I’ve got to talk to you. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do here.” I had to admit, Rich sounded suitably scared and agitated, but I guess that was mostly because he was. You couldn’t fake that degree of abject terror.

“Calm down, Clitheroe,” Damjohn said, his tone clipped. “You shouldn’t even be trying to contact me, but since you have, tell me what the problem is. And please—no hysteria.”

Rich flicked a frightened glance at me, looked away again quickly.

“It’s Castor,” he said. “He just came to my house.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. Then Damjohn’s voice said, “Why? What does he know?”

I shook my head silently at Rich. We’d already rehearsed this whole conversation, but I wanted to make sure he didn’t ad-lib. I didn’t want Damjohn panicked enough to do anything to Rosa.

“Nothing,” Rich said. “He doesn’t know anything. But he’s—he’s asking a lot of questions.”

“And who is he talking to? Just you, or everybody?”