Thicker Than Water

Darkness fell like a curtain, but it was darkness shot through with light: a curtain flapping in a strong wind, allowing me to glimpse through its folds a silver, saturated light like the luminosity of a coming storm. Everything was working beautifully: Star of Renewed Being and Caryl with a ‘y’ had my back, and the demon couldn’t drag me down into its black-on-black Hell the way it had at the Royal London. It could only bring a piece of that Hell along with it as it came into the room; as it coalesced around us like gritty shadows, angry and confused.

Got you now, you bastard. Your turf, but my rules. Now let’s put you on the griddle and see what colour your juices run.

I shifted my fingers on the stops and pushed the tune into a higher gear, raising the volume because the volume was the delivery system for the pain: and the demon was hurting now. Its rush on me had got it nowhere, because charcoal and knuckle-bones encompassed me like the arms of the Lord. Now it tried to withdraw, but it was too late for that. It was in a barbed-wire entanglement of music, a thicket of thorns like the devil’s briar patch. Unable to advance, unable to retreat, it thrashed and gored itself on the tune.

And I saw it.

Only for a moment, but I saw it. It stared at me through the shredded layers of its own protective darkness, as it had stared at me in the lightless abyss when I had met it by Kenny’s hospital bed. Not that our eyes met, exactly: in this synaesthetic maelstrom, seeing and hearing were metaphors for something else.

Say, I knew it.

It was just one synapse closing in my mind: making the last link in a chain of connections that I’d probably assembled subconsciously but not allowed myself to see until now.

A door opening, Asmodeus had said. An eggshell breaking across. Call it metamorphosis. Call it transformation.

Juliet, reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar: the little caterpillar pushed his nose out of the cocoon, and looked around in wonder . . .

Kenny’s ghost, wailing, ‘He’s too big now, and he made me—’

One note, one beat, one breath away from the mercy stroke, and I knew the demonic presence for what it was. Knew, what’s more, Asmodeus’s treachery and the depth of his hatred for me. How perfectly he’d set me up and how many layers of perverse sadism his little plan had wrapped up in it.

The whistle fell from my hands. It scattered the old lady’s knuckle-bones and she yelled in alarm and fear, but she was a second behind the times because the sudden silence had opened a hole in the net: the demon rushed through it and was gone, too intent on its own survival even to hit out at us aÃhites s it left.

‘What are you doing?’ Caryl screamed.

‘Shut up.’ My voice was so thick that he probably couldn’t even make out the words. I lurched to my feet, made it as far as the door before my legs buckled under me. My knees hit the floor first, my hands a second later. I could hardly breathe. My chest was heaving but no oxygen was making its way through to my brain.

‘Mister Castor.’ Something cold touched my throat: the barrel of a tiny pistol. A Jesus gun. The old lady had a Jesus gun, hidden up her sleeve. How funny was that? ‘Finish the exorcism.’

‘Go - fuck - yourself!’ I panted.

‘Finish the exorcism, or I’ll have to shoot you. A bullet this small probably won’t kill you, but if I aim it straight at your spine I can almost guarantee it will leave you quadriplegic. ’

I didn’t answer.

‘It’s your call, Mister Castor. What do you want me to do?’ There was cold steel in the old lady’s voice. She’d have made a good nun: might even have been one, at some point, before she’d heard Gwillam’s call.

‘Pray,’ I suggested, with a bitter, choking laugh. ‘Pray for him.’

The gun stayed where it was for a moment longer, then withdrew.

The next time I looked up, I was alone. But not really: you’re never really alone in a big city. The screams and scuffles and the sounds of ruinous impact as the riot squad met the people of the Salisbury Estate right outside my window were more than enough to drive that fact well and truly home.

22

From the comfort of Mark’s bedroom, I watched the world end. Or at least, that was how it felt. Melodramatic, I know, but it’s not easy to keep a sense of proportion when the wind gusts with the bitter reeks of burnt flesh and half-spent tear gas, and ignorant armies are clashing by night right in front of your sleep-deprived eyes.