Vicious Circle

I leaned against the side of the ambulance next to him, but upwind of his cigar. “And Rafi will be okay. At least, he’ll be none the worse for anything that happened tonight.”

Paul raised his eyebrows as he pondered this. “Cuts all over his face,” he mused. “Two broken fingers. Maybe a broken jaw. That shit on his chest looked like blisters—like he was catching fire from the inside.”

“But you know I’m right. The fingers will reset themselves tonight. The jaw, too, if I actually broke it. The gouges and the burns will already have healed up: if you looked right now, there wouldn’t be a damn thing to see. Rafi’s got a very healthy immune system. I guess it’s all the good food and exercise.”

Paul gave me a slightly fish-eyed stare, checking to see if any of that second-rate irony was at his expense. Then he shook his head again, giving it up. “That lady of yours,” he said, after taking another deep drag on the cigar, “she’s a class act, Castor. About as big as a high-heel shoe, but she just went for Rafael back there like it was a fair fight. Went for Dr. Webb, too.” He grinned wickedly. “That was the highlight of the fucking day. Truth.”

“Yeah, Pen is one of a kind,” I agreed. “She’s not mine, though. I mean, she’s just a friend.” A whole lot of memories surged up from one of the less-frequented areas of my mind: I shoved them right back down again. “She’s—she and Rafi used to be—together. When we were all at university, they were”—I groped for a phrase that accurately defined Pen and Rafi’s relationship, but there wasn’t one—“an item,” I finished lamely. “But it didn’t last. Rafi was the flit-and-sip type.”

We stood in silence for a few seconds.

“He was my best friend,” I said, aware of how bizarre and unhealthy all this sounded. “Pen’s, too, both before and after the sweat-and-roses stuff. Everybody liked him. You’d like him, too, if you met him.”

“If I met him?” Paul’s intonation was pained.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I guess I do. Kind of. I’ve always wanted to ask you, though. What exactly is that thing inside him?”

“Asmodeus. He’s a demon. A fucking big one, too. A lot of the literature on the subject says—”

“The literature?” Paul shook his head, wondering. “What, like The Lancet? Scientific American?”

“Not exactly, no. I’m talking about books written by carpet-chewing natural philosophers five hundred years ago. Grimoires. Magical textbooks. Anyway, they put Asmodeus close to the top of the infernal pecking order. Not someone you want to mess with. But Rafi did just that. He tried to summon Asmodeus about two years ago. I think he was looking to do some kind of Faust thing: buy a shitload of forbidden knowledge from before the world was made. It didn’t work out that way, though. Somehow Asmodeus got into him and started to burn him up from the inside.”

The words, banal and deadpan as they were, stirred up a series of disconnected impressions in my mind—some of the component parts of a night I still couldn’t forget. Because of the way my mind works, it was mostly the sounds that stayed with me. Rafi’s breathing, harsh and shallow and with longer and longer gaps between the in breaths. The grating laughter that was coming from his throat, welling up like blood out of the night-black void that showed when his mouth gaped open. The endless mumble and hiss of boiling water: we’d dumped Rafi into a bathtub full of ice because patches of his skin were going from red to black, but after about a minute the ice was water and the water was bubbling like a witch’s cauldron.

“You were there?” Paul asked, sounding—to put it politely—a little skeptical. It’s not just cops: everyone draws their lines in the sand, sooner or later, and once they’re drawn it takes a lot to shift them.

“His girlfriend called me in the middle of the night. She heard him say my name, and it sounded like his own voice, not the voice of the thing inside him, so she found my number in the back of his diary. By the time I got there, it looked like I might already be too late, but I tried anyway.”

“Tried what, exactly.”

“I played him a tune.”

He nodded. I’d already told him over a couple of beers what it is I do for a living, and how I do it. “You see,” I went on, reluctantly, “I was assuming it was a human spirit inside him. A ghost. I’d never even met a demon back then. So I listened for a human spirit, and when I found it I started to play it out of him. Then about ten minutes in, I realized that what I’d dredged up was Rafi’s own soul. I was dispossessing him from his body—finishing what Asmodeus had started.

“I tried to undo the damage I’d already done. I switched keys in mid-tune, played the opposite of what my instincts were telling me to play, in the hope that I could pull Rafi back into his own flesh. And it sort of worked.”

“Sort of?”