Vicious Circle

Fanke was looking at me expectantly, and I could see in his eyes that—unlike me—he hadn’t had to bluff at all. He was going to see this through, even if it meant me rearranging his innards with the aid of hollow-point ammunition. One way or another, the show was going to go on.

Trying to ignore Abbie, whose dead gaze still skewered me, I nodded.

“All right,” I said. “Let Pen go, give her five minutes to get clear, and then I’ll hand over the gun.”

“No,” said Fanke, tersely. “You hand over the gun now, and you accept my word that she won’t be harmed. No more procrastinations. Decide.”

I waited in vain for an explosion from the back pews, or for a hammering on the knocker and “This is the police!” from the church’s main doors. The silence, in which Asmodeus’s hostile attention was like a raw overlay of subliminal hypersonics, remained unbroken.

After a long pause, and just as Fanke opened his mouth to speak again—to his subordinates, not to me, because his head snapped round to face them—I turned the gun in my hand and held it out to him, butt first. He gave a nod, quietly satisfied, and took it. Then he passed it on to a tall, cadaverous acolyte who appeared at his shoulder.

“And the apology?” he asked, looking round at me again like a coaxing schoolmaster who doesn’t want to have to resort to the cane.

“You’ll have to whistle for that,” I said. “You know how to whistle, don’t you? If not, I can teach you.”

He gave me the coldest smile I’ve ever seen.

“Grip, keep the gun trained on Mr. Castor,” he said, “and bring him to the circle. In fact, have someone pass a loop of piano wire around his throat, too, to make sure he stays exactly where he’s put. He has the look of a man who wants to go back on his word.”

The robed minions closed in on all sides, finding their courage all of a sudden, and a great many hands were laid on me. I was manhandled to the edge of the circle, which I saw clearly now for the first time. It seemed to be identical to the ruined one I’d seen in the Quaker hall, but complete, uninterrupted by any chewed-up arc of pulped floorboards. In fact, this one was drawn on stone—and drawn with the tip of a knife blade, rather than in paint or chalk. Various half-formed schemes that had been forming in the forefront of my mind got discouraged and left.

The man Fanke had called Grip shoved the gun into the small of my back more emphatically than was necessary, and kept it there while another robed figure—a tall, heavyset woman—passed a loop of piano wire very carefully around my neck. The care was for her own fingers; as soon as it was in place she pulled it tight, and I felt it bite into the flesh below my Adam’s apple. The two loose ends of the wire had been tied around wooden blocks: she held one in each hand, like a paramedic with the charged plates of a defibrillator, but what she was actually holding, in effect, was the drawstring of a guillotine. If I moved from this spot, my head was going to stay right where it was while my body did its best to make shift without it.

Fanke walked around the circle to stand opposite me. Abbie went with him, dangling weightlessly in the air, his clenched fist wrapped around where her heart would be if she were alive and still had one. Her confusion and fear were terrible to see.

The robed acolytes—except for Grip and the woman with the piano wire—took their stations with solemn faces all around in a wider circle that extended from the altar rail to the ragged heap of displaced pews, and to the aisle on either side. There were more of them than I’d thought: at least forty. Some of them must have come in through the main doors after the rest had set up shop and opened up for them, which explained why I hadn’t seen Pen and Juliet being brought in. One of them was the little doctor with the Scottish accent who’d given me my tetanus shots after I passed out in Pen’s hallway.

The crucified Christ stared down at us, looking dubious about the whole proceeding.

“I’d prefer to start with you,” Fanke said, without animosity. “Like Pamela, you’re a little out of place here. In many ways, beneath the dignity of the occasion. But the child’s spirit must be sundered. That won’t wait. To attempt any other sacrifice before the one that raised my lord is concluded would be unwise. So you’ll have to wait your turn, Castor. And you’ll have to watch your efforts and machinations come to nothing before you’re allowed to slink away into death. This isn’t cruelty on my part, you understand. Just . . . logistics.”

“Well if it’s just logistics, I don’t mind,” I said. “I was starting to think you didn’t like me.” The wire tightened fractionally around my throat.