Vicious Circle

“In the meantime it would be as if each of those people had a tiny demon of their own, inside them—not controlling them, but encouraging them to see things from a more infernal perspective. And again, the stronger the demon, the more intense the persuasion. You might experience it just as a slight change in perceptions—so you’d suddenly be aware that if that traffic cop flags you down you could swerve just a little, hit him with your near-side wing, and give him something else to worry about. Or that if your girlfriend doesn’t want to kiss on a first date, drugging her and raping her is still an option.”

“Can I get you anything else?” The waiter had appeared again, assiduous as ever, like a dog who has to have a stick thrown for him every so often to stop him from humping your leg. I asked him to bring me another whisky; Juliet passed.

“Okay,” I said after he’d gone, “you’ve made your case. St. Michael’s was visited by a demon, and little pieces of this demon rained down on all the people who were there at the time. But the demon didn’t possess them fully: he’s still there, inside the church, in some form or other, which explains the cold and the slo-mo heartbeat and all of the rest of that shit.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Juliet.

“Just joining the dots. Isn’t that what you meant?”

Juliet downed her Bloody Mary in a single swallow. “It’s a possibility,” she said. “But I was giving you an example, not an explanation. Something possessed the St. Michael congregation, yes. Something strong enough to leave a piece of itself in each and every one of them. That could be a demon, but it wouldn’t have to be. Human ghosts can possess living things, after all—you’ve met the were.”

I nodded reluctantly, but I wasn’t sold on that explanation. “Yeah,” I agreed, “I have. And if there’s one thing I know about loup-garous, it’s that they go for animal hosts for a reason. Human minds are too hard—way too hard. You hear stories about that kind of possession, but I never came across a case yet where it’s been proved to have happened.”

“Then I might be about to make history.”

Her tone worried me. “I thought we were here to discuss strategy,” I said. “Looks like you’ve come up with a plan all by yourself.”

“I’m going to go in,” she said.

A whisky appeared at my elbow. I took it without even looking: right then, the sight of the waiter’s eager puppy face would just have screwed up my mood even further.

“Go in where, exactly?” I asked, although I had a pretty good inkling already.

“I’m going to treat St. Michael’s Church as if it were a living thing,” Juliet said, “and try to possess it. If there’s an invading spirit there, whether it’s a ghost or a demon, then it ought to be driven out by my arrival.”

“You could do that?”

“Yes. It’s not the way I normally work, but I was born and raised in hell, Castor. Of course I can do it.”

I mulled the prospect over, unhappily. Something about it gave me a dull twinge of foreboding, but it took me a moment or two to isolate what it was. Then I saw the flaw. “You said it would take a fairly big player to do something like this,” I reminded her. “To possess so many people all at the same time. Whether it’s a demon or a ghost or whatever the hell it is, what do you do if it’s stronger than you? I mean, suppose you go into your trance or whatever, and you send your spirit out into the church . . . Do demons even have spirits?”

“No. Demons are spirit. If it’s stronger than me, it will lock me out. I’ll try to penetrate, and the church simply won’t let me in. I’ll find it solid and dense instead of porous. In any case there’ll be no risk to speak of. I’ll either succeed or I’ll fail. And if I succeed, it might help me with that dietary problem we were discussing.”

“You could feed on this thing?”

“I could absorb it. It wouldn’t be like feeding for me, because I feed when I fuck. It would be more like taking nourishment through a drip.”

“Which is better than starving to death,” I allowed, without much enthusiasm. I tried to catch the waiter’s eye, failed, managed to snag the maître d’s instead. “But the same point applies. If you go head to head with this thing, and if it’s bigger and stronger than you to start with, then maybe it’s you that’ll end up on the menu.”

“Yes,” agreed Juliet. “Maybe. Does that worry you, Castor?”

I measured my words out with care.

“It’s a job,” I reminded her. “You offered me part of the fee. If you get eaten by a church, I end up a little poorer.”

She looked at me with wicked amusement. “Do you think that would be a waste?” she asked. “Me being eaten? Or do you want to volunteer for the job yourself?”

I put my chin on my fist, pretended to consider. “I took the pledge,” I said at last. “I’ll never let another woman pass my lips.”

“A man of principle. I despise that: it’s bad for business.”