Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

Pen scooped her into an embrace, saying the usual consoling nothings. We exchanged a glance over Jean’s bowed head, and I pointed towards the kitchen.

‘Let’s get ourselves a cup of tea,’ Pen suggested, taking Jean in hand and steering her in that direction with the magic of artificial good cheer. ‘I can talk you through what Castor does while he’s doing it, and then we won’t be getting in his way.’

They went through into the hall and I pushed the door to. Pen hadn’t needed to ask why I wanted to be alone for this. She knows from past experience that when I’m putting a tune together for the first time — using the music as sonar to zero in on a dead or undead presence that I haven’t got a proper fix on yet — the two things that are most likely to screw me up are strong emotions and external sounds.

I turned to look at Bic. He had carried on twitching and muttering all through our conversation, his eyes wide and unseeing. Lost in his own little world , Jean had said, describing what her son was like when he was reading superhero comics. Well, he was now, that was for damned sure. And wherever that world was, it was a long way from South London.

Sitting on the arm of the sofa, I closed my eyes and fitted the whistle to my lips. I blew a few exploratory notes, drawing them out long and slow, not even trying to fit them together into a phrase. They faded from the air but remained in my mind and on my inner ear: something to build on. The next notes had a suggestion of melody to them, although it was a melody that kept changing its mind, rising and then falling, approaching a resolution and then shying away from it, breaking into discord and then finding the key again when you thought it was out of reach. Gently and painstakingly, I assembled braided ropes of sound and sent them out into the room. And as they grew in complexity, my sense of the room itself faded. I drifted in an undefined un-place, drawn along in the wake of my expelled breath like a sailboat making its own headwind.

Two presences hung off to the right of me, one small and bright, the other huge and sprawling and dark: the boy’s soul and its passenger. But bright and dark were metaphors in this case, because I wasn’t seeing them with my eyes: it was more like how a bat sees a moth, through the shapes made by the distorted echoes of its own shrill cries.

I tried to stifle the surge of triumph that I’d found the thing so soon, because finding it wasn’t the same as driving it out. But it seemed like a good omen, all the same, and I couldn’t resist the urge to push it a little further. I played an atonal sequence that approximated to a stay-not: a crude command to the dark thing to piss off out of here before things got rough. The notes rolled straight forward from my mind like the bow wave of my will and consciousness. They touched the edges of the dark thing.

It backed away from me, in some direction that wasn’t up or down or left or right or anything else I could find a name for. It receded or shrank, and I pressed it hard with more and louder trills and elisions, the tune becoming a hurried, spiky thing with no grace to it but lots of momentum.

Bourbon Bill Bryant, the former ghostbreaker who used to run the Oriflamme, the exorcists’ pub on Castlebar Hill, told me once that one of the biggest mistakes you can make in our profession is to go hunting bear with a pea-shooter. Pretty self-evident, you’d think: but that was the trap I’d fallen into. I was chasing this thing just because it was running away, forgetting that until I had a clear enough mental impression of it to feed into the music I was not only wielding a pea-shooter — I hadn’t even brought along any peas.

Suddenly, the darkness was no longer receding. It was standing still, and I was rushing towards it. It seemed to grow, not continuously but in a series of flickering freeze-frames, becoming denser and deeper and bigger by the moment. I was sailing into a storm, and there was nothing ahead but blackness.

I modulated the tune, letting it dip almost into silence, letting the wind drop. But the darkness was moving toward me now of its own volition, and it was so huge that I had no sense any more of where it began and ended. It was the world around me. It was the hungry void in which I floated, and although it already filled the sky it was still getting closer.

When it was right on top of me, my skin prickling with the ghost-sense of imminent contact, I forced myself to open my eyes. It felt like I was hefting two bowling balls, one on each eyelid. My sight was swimming, both eyes watering and stinging as though I’d jammed slivers of raw onion into my tear ducts. There was a ringing in my ears. But I was back in the real world, so abruptly that it felt like that moment just before sleep when you jolt back into wakefulness with a feeling like you’ve fallen out of thin air onto the bed.

Bic wasn’t moving any more. He was preternaturally still. Very distinctly, he said, ‘I got the sword.’

‘What sword is that, Bic?’ I asked, my voice scraping against the sides of my dry throat.

‘Wilkinson’s. Wilkinson’s Sword.’

‘Just those three words?’ Pen demanded.

‘Yeah. Just those three words.’

‘But what did he mean?’

I shook my head, walking faster so that she had to trot a little to keep up. We could have grabbed a cab down to Peckham, but I was restless and walking felt like a good way to burn it off. A little unfair to Pen, though, whose legs, although in perfect proportion to the rest of her, are a good bit shorter than mine.

‘You don’t know either?’ Pen asked.

‘I know what the words mean,’ I muttered. ‘I’m just not sure who was saying them.’

‘Fix, am I going to have to drag this out of you one syllable at a time? Either tell me or–’

‘Wilkinson’s Sword,’ I said, ‘is a well-known and popular brand of razor blade, second only to Gillette in UK market share.’

Pen digested this in silence for a moment or two. ‘The boy who died,’ she mused.

‘Mark. He was a self-harmer. So is Kenny.’

‘The bully who beat you up when you were a kid? Are you sure?’

‘Reasonably sure, yeah. He’s kept his dead kid’s hurt-kit and there’s so much scar tissue on his wrists he’d have a hard time putting his hands in his pockets.’

‘Is there a connection?’

I shrugged irritably. Having to tell Jean Daniels that I’d blown the gig had left me in a sour mood. I’d promised to come back and try again, but for the time being all I’d managed to do was calm Bic down a little and leave him in a light, seemingly normal sleep. It was some considerable way short of a command performance. Whatever this thing was, it had stopped me cold. But then again, I’d gone in half-cocked, so I had nobody but myself to blame.

Which was about as much of a consolation as it ever is.

We were on the outskirts of Peckham by this time, and Pen’s excitement was becoming a palpable thing. Short legs and all, she was outstripping me now: but then, I was only going to have a chat with a demon — a process that always carries the risk of agonising death — while she was going to meet her lover. On balance, her jubilant horniness took some of the edge off my unease.

And there’s a darker side to Peckham, too, once you get in deep: a side I like a lot more, because I identify with the past and prefer even worm-eaten wood to wipe-clean plastic. If you set your back against the kitsch-Bauhaus folly that is Peckham library and walk half a mile south towards the common, you’ll eventually find yourself walking through streets that the property developers haven’t found their way to yet: streets where endless curved terraces of turn-of-the-century three-storey town houses, like the tiers of some city-sized amphitheatre, have been left to fall in on themselves at their leisure. There’s a hectic tubercular beauty to them.