Thicker Than Water

There’s only one chair in the room. I waved Matt to sit down, but he crossed to the window instead and examined the badly repaired plasterwork around the sill. ‘This is where your sex-demon friend jumped through after she almost devoured you,’ he reminisced. It was such a transparent attempt to put me off balance that I felt a sudden wave of affection for him. It took me by surprise, reminding me of brotherly feuds long past, and the kind of dirty pool we always played against each other before he found God and lost the rest of us. Maybe for that reason, I came straight to the point instead of dancing around it looking for an unfair advantage.

‘What were you doing at the Salisbury, Matt?’ I demanded.

He turned to look at me. His blue-grey eyes, otherwise unknown in the Castor family, held my gaze unblinkingly. ‘I was just walking,’ he said, with immaculate calm. But I knew from way back how good he was at the straight-faced kidding.

I nodded. ‘Nice,’ I said. ‘Hell of a walk, from Cheam, but they’re your shoes. I saw someone else just walking there recently - Gwillam. That shitehawk from the Anathemata Curialis. You remember him?’

‘Of course I remember him,’ Matt said, with guarded emphasis.

‘When from?’

‘I’m sorry, Felix?’

‘When do you remember him from, exactly? When did you last see him, and what’s he got you doing on the Salisbury?’

‘Felix—’

‘Don’t get coy, Matty.’ I pushed the chair around so that it faced him. ‘That was Gwillam’s man you hauled off me right now, and you called him by name. And it makes sense, doesn’t it? He’s a self-righteous lunatic fighting a one-man crusade against the undead. You’re just a priest who can’t say no. Somewhere you were bound to meet.’

Matt still refused to sit. ‘You’re wrong, Felix,’ he said.

‘Am I?’

‘Yes. It’s not a one-man crusade. The Anathemata probably has upwards of a thousand members - a couple of hundred in the UK alone. It’s not an official arm of the Church any more, but it’s still highly respected in many circles. And Thomas Gwillam is a hugely influential voice when it comes to . . .’ he faltered for the first time, but it was a short hesitation and a good recovery ‘. . . the more controversial aspects of the afterlife.’

‘Thomas,’ I mused. ‘Probably named after the popular saint.’

‘Probably.’

‘Whose unique selling point was that he had those doubts, yeah? Amazingly, he wasn’t always a hundred per cent sure he was doing the right thing. I could really get behind a saint like that.’

Matt sighed - a long-drawn-out sound that was more indicative of exhaustion than of resignation. He did look tired, now that I looked at him properly: tired and a bit beaten down, as though something serious and distracting was weighing on him. ‘Aquinas, Felix,’ he said. ‘Saint Thomas Aquinas, not the apostle Thomas. You know this. You went to church too, and to Sunday school. You only pretend to be ignorant.’

‘But we are what we pretend to be, Matty,’ I countered. ‘Kurt Vonnegut, chapter 1, verse 1. So if you pretend to be a carpet-chewing religious bigot, that’s how you end up. What the fuck are you doing mixing with the likes of Gwillam?’

There was a long, strained silence.

‘You take a lot of things for granted,’ Matt said. His voice trembled slightly.

I shrugged. ‘Well, that’s me,’ I said. ‘Always jumping to conclusions. I see the head of a secret Church organisation hanging around on a street corner. Then I see my brother, who’s a priest, hanging around on the same corner less than twelve hours later. And I think to myself, something’s going down. Something’s got the ‘if-it’s-dead-bust-its-head’ brigade well and truly steamed up. And ctea to I start wondering what that something might be.’

Matt clenched his fist in a very uncharacteristic gesture, but then only massaged it absently with the other palm. ‘That’s absurd,’ he said. ‘I’m not even a member of the Anathemata.’

I shrugged. ‘If you say so. Lying’s a sin, so I’m sure you’d never do that. But you are from the arse-end of Walton. And you did take your holy orders at Upholland, just a few miles down the road from where we grew up. So if anyone was looking for a priest with a Liverpool 9 background, yours would be the first CV to pop up, wouldn’t it?’

‘Who would look?’ Matt asked, still meeting my gaze and still looking both weary and unmoved. ‘Why would they look?’

‘Because of Kenny Seddon,’ I said, and I saw the name hit home. Matt shook his head wordlessly, but his expression was almost a wince. ‘There’s something really strange going on over at the Salisbury,’ I went on, not giving him a chance to interrupt. ‘Something in the air that’s driving people crazy. I don’t know what it is, even though I’ve felt it. It’s not an emotion I can give a name to. It’s more like an impulse, moving people in different ways. Tonight I saw a kid try to kill himself, and I think it was because he was possessed by this - whatever it is. This spirit. This peripatetic emotion.