Vicious Circle

Rafi was lying on a tubular steel bunk—a new addition to the cell that was in itself a vivid testimony to how much he’d changed in the last few days. When Asmodeus was in the ascendant, the cell was kept absolutely bare because you could never tell when the demon’s mood would toggle from quiescent to murderously playful. Too many staff had taken hits in the early days. Webb had made Pen sign a waiver as Rafi’s legal executor, and the cell had been reduced, as far as possible, to a featureless metal cube.

By contrast with those bad old days, right now it was looking almost homely. In addition to the bed there was a poster on the wall—a reproduction of Van Gogh’s sunflowers—and a chest of drawers with a pencil and paper resting on top of it. Enough right there for Asmodeus to have caused some serious mayhem back in the day.

Rafi was asleep: very deeply asleep. I looked from him to Paul, and he gave a grin that was almost a snarl. “Dr. Webb says until we get the results of the new assessment back, Mr. Ditko stays on his meds. Same times, same dosages. Of course, when he was sharing the premises, so to speak, it didn’t matter so much. He could shrug off the drugs whenever he needed to, seemed like. Now those two temazepam he gets at nine p.m. knock him out stone cold until morning.”

It didn’t surprise me, because that was the kind of bastard Webb was: the play-it-by-the-book and my-hands-are-tied kind. Since there was nobody to explain myself to, I did what I’d come for without preamble. Taking out the scissors that I’d taken from the medicine cabinet back at the South Bank Centre, I carefully cut a lock of Rafi’s hair without waking him.

“What d’you need his hair for?” Paul asked me, his face registering something like disgust.

“Sucker bait,” I said, grimly. His distaste couldn’t be anything like as big as mine: I knew the truth. It would be the last resort, I told myself. I wouldn’t use it unless everything else failed. Anyway I probably wouldn’t even get in close enough to use it in the first place. And the timing would have to be perfect, so the chances were that I’d made this detour for nothing.

I ran through that litany three times over: it didn’t make me feel the slightest bit better.

I put the scissors in my pocket, tied the hair around the ring finger of my left hand where I couldn’t lose it. Then, self-conscious because Paul was still standing right behind me, staring at my back, I lowered myself to the floor and crossed my legs. With my head bowed and my eyes closed, I began to whistle softly.

It’s harder without an instrument, but far from impossible: back when Juliet was still mad, bad, and fucking lethal to know, and was about to devour me body and soul, I’d dragged myself out of the jaws of death (actually it was a different part of death’s anatomy, but let’s not get bogged down in the technicalities) by tapping out a rhythm with my hand. Everything we ghostbreakers do is just a metaphor—visible or audible or what the hell else—for something else that’s going on inside our minds. The limits are the ones we impose on ourselves.

I whistled an old tune that has a lot of different names—one of them is “The Flash Lad.” It’s a highwayman ballad, meant to date all the way back to the eighteenth century, and if you listen to the lyrics it ends badly. Sweet tune, though, and it seemed to be an appropriate one for what I was trying to do.

Back when Asmodeus had first invaded Rafi’s body, I’d spectacularly failed to get a proper sense of him: that was why I’d screwed up so badly, and tied Rafi’s soul indissolubly to the demon’s essence. But I’d played my tin whistle for Rafi a hundred times since then, playing the demon down to sleep so that my friend could have a few hours’ respite from the hell I’d bestowed on him. So I knew Asmodeus quite well by this time; knew how he felt in my fingers; knew how he sounded in my mind; knew the tune of him.

I teased the very edges of a summons, and I felt the demon respond. Faintly—ever so faintly—but unmistakeably. Quickly I changed the rhythm and the pitch. I couldn’t just break off, but I could ease away, like a fisherman easing the tension on a line to let the fish pull free and escape. I didn’t want to face Asmodeus again in this narrow cell; very much indeed I didn’t want it. But I did want to be sure that he was there. That although the bulk of this monster’s being was embedded in the cold stones of St. Michael’s, there was a corner of him still here in the soul of Rafael Ditko.

I had what I needed, and Rafi hadn’t even stirred. I let the tune fade down into silence and stood, wincing at a sharp pain in my left leg. It felt like I was bruised there—probably from when Gwillam and his werewolves threw me into the storeroom while I was unconscious.

That was when Rafi opened his eyes. For a moment or two, they didn’t focus—or maybe they focused past me, on something from his dreams that he was still seeing. Then he blinked, and something registered.

“Fix,” he muttered thickly.