Vicious Circle

As it turned out, I needed more than just a walk. I spent the next few hours trying to shake off that sense of unease in a string of pubs and insomniac water holes from Finchley to King’s Cross and beyond. Somewhere along the way, chugalugging my fifth or sixth whisky on the rocks in some Irish-themed nowhere on Kentish Town Road, I realized that what I was feeling had nothing to do with what had happened at the Stanger. It was something in the air, hanging over the whole oblivious city like an ectoplasmic slagheap waiting to start its inexorable downhill slide.

I got back home sometime after three a.m. Pen’s place is off Turnpike Lane. It’s big and old, built in a nameless fin de sičcle style that’s even heavier than High Victorian, and it’s on the side of a hill so that the basement, where Pen lives, becomes ground level at the back of the house and gives out directly onto the garden. I checked for lights, as I always do: if she’d still been up I’d have gone and split a bottle or at least a glass with her. But everything was dark and silent. She was probably staying over with Dylan at his flat out in Pinner—a sign of how besotted she must be, because the house was a lot more than just somewhere where she hung up her boots, it was also the seat of her own very personal religion, the place of her power, the cave where she was high priestess and sibyl in residence.

My room is up in the eaves, as far away from all that earth-mother stuff as I can get, which suits me fine. Apart from anything else, that’s a lot of stairs for anyone to climb if they want to come and find me, and I’ll usually hear them coming.

I barely managed to shrug out of my clothes, then I hit the bed and was asleep before I bounced.

I don’t know about Rafi, but I sure as hell didn’t see a lot of Sunday morning. I woke up at the lag end of lunchtime, bright sunlight cutting through the gap in my curtains like a maniac with a chainsaw. I had a furry mouth and a hangover that was as much psychological as physical. Or animistic, maybe: a hangover of the spirit. How the hell do you cure that? A hair of the god that bit you?

Still no sign of Pen. I breakfasted alone in the sun-bleached kitchen, feeling a slight sense of unreality. The night had seemed so dark, the weight of foreboding so real, it was odd and even a little aggravating that nothing had happened. I felt as though reality was impugning my gut instincts.

But if there was some severing sword suspended over London, it was pretty firmly attached, and probably conformed to all relevant EU safety standards. I prowled about the house all day like a hermit with hemorrhoids, waiting for that doom-drenched feeling to revisit me. But it didn’t, and disaster didn’t strike. In the end I was reduced to watching old episodes of Fawlty Towers on some cable channel, and I kept forgetting to laugh.

Pen rolled home early in the evening to find me in the basement, feeding strips of fresh sheep’s liver to her two ravens, Edgar and Arthur. She was touched.

“You didn’t need to do that, Fix,” she said, squeezing my hand—a mistake, since it was dripping with blood and oozy bits of tissue. “They don’t mind if I’m a bit late. But thanks.”

“I’m always afraid that if I don’t keep them happy I’m going to be set meal B,” I groused. “They’re getting to be the size of bloody vultures.”

She seemed tired, and not all that happy: normally she came back from dates with Dr. Feelgood walking on air, so I was solicitous—and maybe a little curious.

“How was your night?” I asked, waggling my eyebrows suggestively.

She shrugged, gave a faint smile. “Okay,” she said. “It was . . . yeah. It was okay.”

I waited for clarification, and after meeting my eyes in silence for a moment or two she shrugged again. “Dylan was really tired,” she said. “He’d had an awful shift, clearing up other people’s messes. He wasn’t supposed to be on duty today, but he said he had to, just for an hour or so—to check up on some of the work he did yesterday. He didn’t trust the doctor who was supposed to take over from him. So I went shopping, over at Camden Market, and he joined me there for a late lunch.”

“Did you check in on Rafi?”

“Yeah. We went over there this afternoon. But he was still asleep.”

“Told you. He’ll wake up right as rain.”

She nodded glumly—then visibly brightened as another thought struck her. “Dylan says he might be able to prescribe some stuff that will keep Asmodeus under for more of the time. He wants me to have a word with Webb about letting him in to give Rafi some tests.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Worth a try,” I said. “I thought you said he was a rag and bone man.”

“Bones and joints,” she corrected, looking at me severely. “But he interned in endocrinology.”

She followed me as I walked through into her cramped, pie-slice-shaped bathroom and washed my bloody hands in the sink. I was trying to get away from another lecture about how wonderful Dylan is—Pen’s favorite theme for the past few weeks—but it wasn’t going to be that easy.