Vicious Circle

I hadn’t even seen the chair. It was sitting in a patch of shadow just on the hither side of the ops board where two of the strip lights had failed to come on. A coil of rope and a doctor’s little black bag lay on the floor beside it. There was a table, too: a small, round coffee table with a stained Formica top that looked as though it had wandered in here from somewhere else. Gwillam swiveled the chair around to face me.

“Please,” he said, in the same deadpan tone.

“I’d rather stand.”

Gwillam sighed, pursed his lips in a way that suggested he got a lot of this selfish and hurtful behavior, but never quite got used to it.

“If you’re standing,” he pointed out patiently, “Zucker and Sallis can’t tie you to the chair.”

“My point exactly,” I agreed.

“And I want you to be tied to the chair because it makes some of the things I’m about to do to you that much easier.”

“Look,” I began, “as a concerned citizen, I’m really happy to cooperate with any—” But Gwillam must have given some kind of signal to his team that I didn’t catch. Po’s massive, clawed hand closed around my throat and he hauled me unceremoniously over to the chair, slammed me down, and held me in position. Zucker and Sallis made busy with the ropes. They were enthusiastic amateurs where knots were concerned, but they made up in quantity what they lacked in real finesse.

While they worked, Gwillam brought up another chair and placed it opposite me. Then, when they stood back respectfully from the finished job, he nodded them a curt acknowledgment. “Sallis,” he said, “you’re with me. Mr. Zucker, after your recent exertions you and Mr. Po might wish to avail yourselves of the chapel.”

“Thank you, father,” Zucker said, and the two of them turned on their heel and walked away into the darkness. Po looked over his shoulder at me: bared way, way too many teeth. Sallis went over to the wall and sat down with his back to it, the gun not exactly pointed at me but still ready in his hand.

“Is that a euphemism of some kind?” I asked Gwillam.

He shot me a look of genuine surprise.

“No,” he said. “We have a field chapel wherever we set up, Castor. Our faith is very important to us.”

“Your former faith.”

Gwillam quirked one eyebrow. He didn’t look upset, though; the barb didn’t have quite as much sting as I’d expected it to.

“Do you know how many Catholics there are in the world, Castor?” he asked me.

“Before you and your pals got their marching orders, or afterwards?”

“There are more than a billion. Seventeen percent of the world’s population. Five hundred million in the Americas alone.

“So the Holy Father must of necessity be a statesman as well as a religious leader. He has to play the games of men, and of nations. And sometimes that means he has to balance small injustices against larger gains.”

“Meaning?”

“The Anathemata Curialis was given a massive appropriation of funds just before the death of John Paul II. Then his successor, Benedict XVI, ordered us to disband or face excommunication. The two actions are best seen as the diastolic and systolic beats of a heart. The church has disowned us, but it has not ceased to wish us well.”

“Even though you use werewolves as field agents? How broad is your brief, Gwillam? I’m just curious.”

He knelt down, picked up the black bag and put it up on the coffee table. He snapped it open and rummaged inside. I hadn’t forgotten the bag: in fact, it was fair to say that it was preying on my mind a little.

“Our brief,” Gwillam said, “is narrow and exact. We fight the last war. We’re heaven’s skirmishers, sent into the enemy’s heartlands to gauge his strength and harry his forces as he attempts to deploy them.”

“The enemy being . . .?”

“Hell, of course.”

He took from the bag, one by one, a disposable hypodermic, a bubble pack with a small vial of some straw-yellow substance, a larger bottle of clear liquid, and an unopened pack of surgical swabs. “The rising of the dead,” he said, looking me full in the eyes with the deadly calm of the fanatic, “was the opening of hostilities. Hell is on the move against heaven, in every sphere, in every nation of earth. It was foretold, and it was foreseen. We were not taken by surprise. But there were those in the church who wouldn’t accept the evidence of their own eyes.”

He smiled bleakly. I got the impression that he was remembering specific conversations; specific clashes of will and words. “They forgot their duty of stewardship,” he said gently. “They became too ensconced in the comforts of the world, and forgot that the world must always and ever be a forge. You do not sit comfortably by God’s fire: you are plunged into it, and shaped and made by it.