Vicious Circle

So far so good. I rolled him on his back, gun in hand, to make sure he wasn’t faking it. He was deeply unconscious, his slack mouth trailing blood and saliva from one corner. There was blood on the crown of his head, too.

Well, what the hell. In the absence of the Lord, vengeance would just have to be mine.

I went to the foot of the oak tree and retrieved the film canisters, then crossed back to the presbytery door, skirting around the body of the first guard. I weighed up the idea of moving the bodies off the path, in among the graves, but a clock was ticking inside my head. In any case, the windows of the church were stained glass: nobody was going to see the downed men unless they came in through the lych-gate and walked around to enter the church from the back. And if they did that they’d have the drop on me already.

I listened for a moment at the door, then slipped inside. The presbytery itself was empty, as I’d expected it to be. I crossed to the other door, which led into the church. It stood open. A distant murmur of voices came through it, and the clop-clop whisper of soft but echoing footsteps, but from this vantage point there was nothing to see; the chancel was deserted, as I’d hoped it would be. Hopefully whatever was happening in there, it was in the nave close to the high altar.

There was a carpet in the vestry, for soft, priestly feet: before stepping out into the chancel, I kicked off my shoes. I didn’t want the excellent acoustics of St. Michael’s to betray me before I had a chance to set my stall out.

The stone was so cold I almost gave myself away even more embarrassingly, by yelling out. It felt like some parasitic plant of the frozen tundra was growing up through the soles of my feet into my trembling legs. I regretted the shoes now, but it was too late for that.

I stole along the chancel to the big box junction where it met the main drag of the nave. The light was coming from one end of the cavernous space—the altar end, as I’d guessed: satanists are all about transgression, bless their little hearts. They’re so fucking predictable it’s not even funny. So where I was, there was a fair amount of deep shadow, and I felt reasonably confident that if I peered round the angle of the wall I wouldn’t be seen.

They were still setting up. The robed figures were moving chairs around to make a broad, bare space just below the altar. One of them—Fanke himself, judging by the red robes that Peace had already described to me—was on his knees in the center of the space, and a scratching, rasping sound gave me a strong hint as to what he was doing: drawing the vicious circle.

So one way and another, the kiddies were all entertained. If they’d already started intoning and dancing in a ring, I’d have fired a warning shot into somebody’s back and gone in like thunder—an action replay of Peace’s moment of glory the week before—but as it was I took the time to set up my little ace in the hole. I went down on all fours; or rather on all threes, because I was hugging the film canisters to my chest with my left arm, tightly enough so they couldn’t scrape against each other and give me away. I crab-scuttled out of the shadows of the chancel and across to the nearest row of pews, sliding in amongst them with as little sound as I could manage. Then I set down my burden with elaborate caution, and unpacked.

As already noted, old movie film is pretty much the most flammable thing on earth. With a Molotov cocktail you need a bottle, a piece of rag, all sorts of paraphernalia. Movie film just burns, turning instantly into boiling plastic, searing smoke, and blue-white flame like the flame of a dirty blowtorch: drop a match on it and you’d better be somewhere else when it hits.

By way of a fuse I used a votive candle that I’d picked up from the floor on my way down the transept: it was one of the ones that had rolled and scattered when I knocked the table over the night before. The thing was an inch and a half thick, but I broke it in my hands, muffling the sound inside my jacket, and pulled away the solid, almost translucent chunks of it to leave the shiny, rigid wand of the wick itself—a makeshift taper, stiff and saturated with solid wax.

The nature of the sounds I was hearing from the front of the church had changed now. The footsteps had ceased, and a rhythmic chanting had begun. I hoped the satanist liturgy was as prolix as the regular one; I needed a couple of minutes more.