Thicker Than Water

It pinged at that moment, with perfect ironic timing. Eddings turned to stare at it. The illuminated displays above the three lift doors weren’t working, so there was no way of telling which lift was in operation or whether it was heading for our floor. I chose the middle one and stood squarely in front of it, waiting to see what would emerge, but Eddings touched my shoulder and shook his head sharply.

‘Go inside,’ he said tersely, pointing to Kenny’s door. ‘You complete the exorcism, this all stops. Until then, we’re just racking up the body count.’

‘What about Gwillam?’ I asked. ‘Don’t we wait for him?’

Eddings looked out towards the barricade we’d just scaled. I did too. There was no sign of movement out there now. ‘No,’ Eddings said. ‘Father Gwillam will join us when he can. The three of you should be enough to make a fist of it. If not - get word out to me and I’ll send Speight in to you.’

I looked at the hideous thing hunkered down by the right-hand lift doors, like Frankenstein’s cat at the world’s biggest mousehole. ‘Speight?’ I echoed.

‘He’s an exorcist,’ Eddings reminded me. ‘When he’s in human form. Go. We’ll deal with whatever comes through here.’

To put the matter beyond argument, he kicked in the boarded-up door of Kenny’s flat. It wasn’t hard: the council do that sort of job in the perfect knowledge that it’s not going to last more than a day or two.

I went inside and down Kenny’s stairs, followed by the woman and the boy. I heard Eddings levering the particle board back into place behind us, sealing us in as best he could.

The living room was a shambles, which I was more or less expecting. The most likely reason for the place being boarded up was because it had already been broken into: a familiar pattern that almost made me nostalgic for the Walton of my youth. Our feet crunched over fractured photo frames and shards of porceÃsha brlain.

Mark’s bedroom, though, hadn’t been touched: possibly because there hadn’t been anything there to steal or despoil. I settled myself on the edge of the bed and gestured to the other two to take up their stations. ‘You got names?’ I demanded.

‘Star of Renewed Being Phillips,’ said the old woman.

‘Caryl Langford,’ said the boy. ‘With a ‘y’. Like Caryl Chessman.’

Well, that was a fucking great omen. I took my whistle out and shrugged off my coat. It was feeling oppressively hot, all of a sudden. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Caryl. Ms Phillips. If this was a firing squad, you’d both be shooting blanks today. I’m the one who’s going to kill this thing. All I want you to do is to weave stay-nots around me so it can’t tear my soul into confetti while I’m working.’

The woman nodded but Caryl with a ‘y’ didn’t look too happy. ‘What if it turns on us?’ he asked.

‘It won’t,’ I promised. ‘Once I start playing, it’ll only have eyes for me. Okay, get your kit out and get ready.’

I watched them with half an eye as I went over in my mind the tune Asmodeus had given me, like a tailor poring over a swatch of cloth before starting to cut. It had to be good quality, and it had to be all of a piece. If there was a dropped stitch somewhere, we were all going to die in this room, probably with most of our insides on the outside.

Star of Renewed Being’s method of performing an exorcism seemed to rely on jacks - the children’s game in which you throw knuckle-bones up in the air and catch them again in more and more complicated ways. Of course, most kids these days use little plastic nubbins with six rounded points, whose resemblance to knuckle-bones is purely accidental. The old lady had the real thing: ten of them, well worn and shiny, off-white with brown flecks like the colour of clotted cream that’s been allowed to grow a proper crust.

The boy had a book, and I assumed for a moment that he’d learned his craft from Gwillam - that this would be another bloody Bible-reading. But the pages of the book were blank, and he took a stick of charcoal from his trouser pocket, choosing a page and smoothing it flat with nervous fingers.

There was no point prolonging the agony. This would either work or it wouldn’t. I started in to play, with none of my usual exploratory tuning-up because the tune was present in my head already, a finished thing. It started high and fast but plummeted precipitately into a doleful decelerando: abandon hope, all ye who riff on this one.

Nothing much seemed to happen at first. Because I was playing quite low, I was able to hear from outside the sounds - shouted order, shouted response, boots in lockstep - of serious men moving into position. The riot squad were here, and incredibly things were about to get even uglier than they already were.

But we had our window, and within it we made music. I did, anyway: the old woman threw bones and the boy sketched obsessive angularÃses"ju lines, turning the paper into a fractal landscape.

The air thickened and roiled. Something huge and diffuse turned its attention towards us.