Thicker Than Water

- 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.

‘Who calls so loud?’ the demon asked mildly, raising his head - Rafi’s head - and twisting it around to an unnatural angle so that he could stare directly at Trudie. His voice was razor blades shaving your mind too close. ‘Come a little closer, girl. Let me look at you.’

‘Asmodeus,’ I said, from his right-hand side. ‘You offered me a deal, the last time we spoke.’

‘I’ll get to you, Felix,’ Asmodeus growled, ‘when I’m good and ready. But let me taste the Christian soldiers first, for reasons of decorum. Too much to hope that you’ve brought either one along as a sacrifice, I suppose?’

‘I adjure you to keep in your place,’ Trudie said, trying hard not to flinch as Asmodeus leaned forward the better to examine her. ‘And - and to make no move without our hest, in plain words stated. Qui tacet non consentiri videtur.’

Rafi’s handsome face distorted suddenly, the lower jaw sagging like wax to reveal a gaping, shapeless mouth with too many teeth. Trudie’s shoulders jerked and her hands came up reflexively for a moment, before she got control of herself and lowered them again.

Asmodeus inhaled deeply. ‘Mmmm,’ he rumbled appreciatively. ‘Scrubbed so clean it doesn’t even smell like meat. Pissed yourself just a little, though, didn’t you, sweetheart? You were almost sure your little circle would hold, but there’s always that little niggling do»tleissubt, isn’t there? Suppose God is too busy watching the sparrows fall in the market place. Snap. Crunch. Where’s little Trudie?’

‘You won’t be harming anyone in this house,’ the Ice-Maker said from directly behind him, her voice cold and hard.

Asmodeus snarled - a long, rumbling sound like distant thunder. He didn’t look at Imelda, any more than he’d looked at me; but then, we were known quantities. He’d gravitated towards Trudie because it’s in his nature to test out all the variables before he moves. He lowered his head, Rafi’s joints making audible clicks and cracks as Asmodeus reshaped his fleshly tabernacle more to his liking.