Thicker Than Water

It wasn’t the kind of comeback I expected from a woman who was big in the Church - even if we were talking about the Church’s black-ops division. Then again, Sue Book had been a verger when I’d first met her and now she was in a more than civil partnership with a demon. You never can tell with these mission dolls.

‘I’m celibate,’ I said shortly. ‘Only the pure in heart can seek the Holy Grail.’

Walking past Kenny’s door, which was now nailed shut and sporting police-incident tape, made my skin tingle as though I was showering in battery acid. I was nearly certain it wasn’t psychosomatic, although by now I had a vivid enough sense of the horrors that must have been enacted behind that door that I didn’t have to go reaching for supernatural explanations. Did the wound demon have a physical locus after all? Would an exorcism undertaken in Mark Blainey’s bedroom have a better chance of succeeding?

Another missed opportunity, I was willing to bet; like Bic. Although with Bic we still had one final chance to make good. If ‘good’ was the right word.

Jean Daniels answered to my knock, looking like a woman who was self-medicating in order to perform open-heart surgery on her own ventricles, and had been called away in the middle of the procedure. She stared at me with hollow eyes, seeming to take several seconds to register who I was.

‘Mister Castor,’ she mumbled. ‘You’re back. I called you a few times, and left messages, but you didn’t . . .’

‘I haven’t been home, Jean,’ I said, ‘so I wouldn’t have got them. I’m really sorry. Can we come in?’

She nodded brusquely, stepping aside to let me in: then she realised I wasn’t alone.

‘This is—’ I said, pointing towards the cat’s-cradle woman. ‘Well, actually, who the hell are you?’

‘Trudie Pax,’ she said, holding out her hand to Jean. ‘I’m with Father Gwillam.’

Jean took a step back, as though Trudie’s hand was contaminated in some way. ‘We’ve already told Father Gwillam that we’ve got nothing more to say to him,’ she said coldly.

‘And we’ve accepted that,’ Trudie said sweetly. ‘In any case, Mrs Daniels, we don’t believe any more that your son has been touched by God. The way things have gone over the past few days has proved us wrong. But Castor has thought of something that might improve William’s condition, and we’re here to help in any way we can.’

Tom had come from somewhere to stand behind his wife, so he was hearing this too. He looked almost as wrecked as Jean, and pugnacious with it, but Jean had locked onto the salient point in Trudie’s little recitation. Her face as she looked at me lit up with something like hope.

‘You can help him?’ she said.

‘Let me look at him,’ I said, by way of a non-answer.

Jean led us through, not to the living room where I’d been before but to a bedroom that led off the hall to the left. Walking through the doorway gave me a premonitory shudder, but it was because of the room itself: because the floor plan was the same as that of Kenny’s flat, and Bic’s room occupied the identical space in the layout to Mark’s.

Lost boys, sharing the same existential billet. But Bic, at least, was loved and looked for: and he wouldn’t fall off the edge of the world the way that Mark had done. Not if there was anything I could do to stop it.

He was lying on his bed, on top of the covers, in the Spiderman PJs again. A rumpled blanket lying beside him had presumably been laid over him at some previous point, but I could see why it hadn’t stayed there. He was twitching and shaking, his head and limbs moving constantly, and his wide-open eyes darted from side to side, scanning from one corner of the room to another as though he was trying to locate the source of some troubling sound.

He was muttering under his breath, and when I sat down at the foot of the bed I was close enough to hear some of the words.

‘Flowering like flowers like it’s there because I lost I lost I lost it until I nailed it down. Saves my life every hour, every day. Sewing. Sewing myself with a needle, stitching up the holes but you only see the scars and you don’t hear when all these mouths all these red mouths talk talk talk’

I felt his forehead, but as Jean had said the last time I’d been here there was no fever. Bic’s skin was cold to the touch.

‘Has he been back to the hospital?’ I asked.

Tom looked at Jean and Jean, after a moment’s pause and a hunted look at Trudie, shook her head. ‘What would they do at the hospital?’ she demanded. ‘Put him on drugs? Cut him open? The only thing that calms him down a bit is me holding his hand and talking to him. It . . . brings him back, for a few minutes at a time. We told the school he had gastric flu, so they wouldn’t send anyone round. I’m scared of them taking him. They might think he wasn’t right in the head. Might take him somewhere and not let him out again.’ She raised a warning finger in Trudie’s face. ‘You get anyone in here,’ she said, ‘and I’ll split you.’