Vicious Circle

“Something laughed at us,” she said.

It was so incongruous, I didn’t take it in. “Laughed at . . . ?”

“Something laughed,” Susan repeated stubbornly, defensively. “It came from high up, near the roof, a long way over our heads. And it was loud. It was very, very loud. It filled the church.” She glanced across at me, her face set, as though she was certain in her own mind that I thought she was lying. “But I can’t describe the tone of it. I can’t make you understand what it felt like. People started to run. Or they just . . . fell down, where they were. Some of them seemed to be having fits, because their arms and legs were jerking and their mouths were wide open.

“It was horrible! All I wanted to do was get away from that awful sound, but I couldn’t think. I started to run without even knowing where I was going. I bumped into Ben—Canon Coombes—and he didn’t even see me, but he’s so much bigger and heavier than me that I went flying. I grabbed hold of the altar rail to keep from falling, and then I couldn’t seem to let go of it. It was so cold—the cold going right through me, taking my strength away. You know you see skaters on an ice rink, clinging to the side because they’re scared to move out onto the ice? That’s what I must have looked like. I just leaned against the rail, with my head spinning, and people screaming and running all around me.

“Then when I did manage to get moving again, I almost tripped over a woman who’d fallen down in the aisle right in front of me. Fainted, or perhaps just hit her head on something. I couldn’t leave her there. But she was too heavy for me to carry, so I dragged her towards the door, a few feet at a time, with rests in between. The laughter had stopped by then, but there was still a sort of sense of . . . of being stared at. I was scared to look up. It really felt as if something enormous—some giant ogre—had taken the roof off the church and was peering in at us.”

She swallowed hard, shook her head. “I don’t remember getting to the door, but I must have done, because suddenly I was out on the street. The woman I’d been dragging along was still unconscious, lying on the pavement in front of me, and I realized that there was blood all over her white blouse. I thought she was dead, after all—that the laughing thing had managed to kill her somehow. But then I realized . . .”

She held out her hands for us to see. There was scabbed skin on both palms, all the way across in a broad straight line, angry and red at the top and bottom edges.

“It was my blood, not hers. It must have happened when I touched the altar rail. The metal was so cold that my skin just stuck to it. That was why it was so hard to let go.”

It was a pretty eloquent demonstration. I listened in silence as she wrapped up her story. Everyone got out alive, although some crawled out on their hands and knees: incredibly, very few were even hurt, beyond bruised arms and cut foreheads. The ones who’d gone into fits seemed to recover quite quickly, except that they were still pale and shaking. Canon Coombes had locked up the church there and then, and told Susan to cancel the Sunday services. After which he’d fled, leaving her to call ambulances for the hurt and the traumatized (leaving red smears on the keys of her mobile phone) and to try to talk down those who were still hysterical.

On Sunday he’d called her at home. He’d spoken to the diocese, he said, and they’d authorized him to engage an exorcist—so long as it was a church-approved one. He told Susan to pick someone out of the yellow pages.

But Susan didn’t have a yellow pages, so she’d gone online instead, and Juliet’s Web site had been the first to come up. I wasn’t surprised. It was sometimes the first to come up when your search string was “Chinese restaurants” or “plumbers.” I was pretty sure she’d done something to Google that was both illegal and supernatural.

The site listed Juliet’s church accreditations—Anglican and Catholic—as pending. Susan thought that was good enough, and called her.

“And now here you are,” she finished, brightly. “Two for the price of one.” She smiled her tentative smile at us both, turning her head to left and right to do it. It was the first time she’d acknowledged my presence since she started to tell her story.

“Here we are,” I agreed. I stood up. “And I guess we’d better confer about the case. Could you excuse us for a moment?”

“Of course,” said Susan, blushing a hectic red. “I have to lock up again, anyway.”

She got up and bustled away, keys jangling. We retreated up the hill to the Rybandt vault, with full night coming on.

“So you think it’s a demon, rather than a human soul?” I said, when I was sure we couldn’t be overheard.