Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

‘Is there no other way of doing this?’ he asked.

‘None that I can think of,’ I said. ‘But believe me, Rafi, I’m open to suggestions.’

Rafi looked to Imelda in mute appeal, and Imelda shook her head: the rock, crying out no hiding place . ‘If you’re asking me if this is safe,’ she said sternly, ‘then, honey, I’m going to have to tell you I don’t know. Castor and me have been up to the job so far, more or less — kept that nasty little thing under his rock most of the time. But this is different. We’re waking him up and we’re letting him off the leash. Whether we can put him down again afterwards is a blue-breezing blind guess, and anyone who’d tell you any different would be lying.’

‘But it’s not just the two of us this time,’ I pointed out.

Imelda looked at Trudie, who was missing all the finer points here because of the BDSM harness.

‘Can you let her out of that thing now?’ Imelda asked Cheadle.

‘No,’ Cheadle answered shortly. ‘But you can. I don’t mind what you do here in this room, so long as she’s all wrapped up in the ribbons and bows again when we come to leave. I’ll be waiting at the bottom of the stairs. And you can tell madam that if she comes down them with her eyes open, I’ll bounce five pounds of loose change off the back of her neck. She might survive the experience, but she won’t appreciate it.’

He left without further ceremony. Imelda helped me to undo the straps and we removed the mask from Trudie’s flushed, sweating face. ‘Thank God!’ she said. ‘I thought I was going to suffocate in–’ She broke off, staring hard at Rafi. After a moment or two, she crossed herself: four short, decisive jabs of her right hand, which she then clenched into a fist.

‘The abomination,’ she said.

‘I go by Rafi,’ Rafi answered bleakly.

Trudie nodded. ‘I know. You’re only the vessel. I’ve heard of you, of course. We have . . . briefing materials on you. At one time there was talk of killing you, but the prevailing opinion in the society was that Asmodeus would survive, and then he’d be free to choose another vessel. So we left you as you were.’

In the charged silence that followed this pronouncement, she looked from face to face.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘That was tactless, right? I’m sorry. I’ll shut up until I’m spoken to.’

‘We’re about to wake — the abomination,’ I told her. ‘And we want to make sure we can keep him contained. Not to mention putting him back to sleep again afterwards. Any ideas?’

‘Intravenous silver oxide,’ she said, without a moment’s hesitation.

I patted my coat pockets theatrically, searched a couple randomly and shrugged, coming up empty.

‘Well, you did insist I change out of my regular clothes,’ Trudie said, in a slightly truculent tone. ‘Wards, then. Lots of them. On the doors and on the walls and probably on his flesh, too.’

‘Wards keep him down if he starts from down,’ Imelda objected. ‘They’re not going to slow him much once he’s up and running. He’s too old and he’s too sly. Let you nail a thousand signs to him, he’s still going to find a way to slip in between them and come for you.’

‘A pentagram, then,’ Trudie said.

We all stared at her.

‘You can draw a pentagram?’ I demanded.

She seemed surprised at my surprise. ‘Of course.’ ‘With all the whistles and bells?’

She nodded. ‘Yes. Why not?’

‘You’ve had a slightly more catholic education than I would have expected,’ I said. ‘Small c.’

‘We use whatever methods work.’ Trudie’s tone was cold, as though I’d accused her of sleeping with the enemy. ‘We’re soldiers, Castor, not pastors or contemplatives. We’ve got a different brief.’

‘Evidently.’ I looked at Imelda, who nodded curtly, and Rafi, who gave a resigned and helpless shrug.

‘Black magic is how I got into this fucking mess in the first place,’ he said, with a touch of bitterness. ‘Don’t ask me for an opinion.’ He paused, swallowed, shrugged again. ‘I don’t want the kid to die any more than you do. If this is what it takes, then go for it. But if Asmodeus rips your throats out, try not to bleed on my Kerouacs.’

‘A magic circle it is, then. Let’s go.’

Imelda went and got some chalk while Rafi, Trudie and

I moved the furniture and rolled the carpets back. Bic roused a little when we rolled the couch to the wall, staring at us with slightly more focused eyes.

‘The red sea,’ he said, more or less distinctly. ‘Blood is salt water. That’s all.’

‘Lisa is asleep upstairs,’ Imelda reminded us as she came back in with the chalk. ‘Let’s do this quietly.’

‘We can do the invocation quietly,’ Trudie said. ‘But we can’t be sure that we can control everything the demon does once he rises.’

Imelda closed the door, firmly. ‘Thank you for the reminder,’ she said, shooting me a look that would have knocked me back ten feet or so if I hadn’t already been up against the wall. The room was feeling a little crowded now, since we couldn’t walk in the cleared space at the centre where Trudie was about to draw the circle, and the margins of the room were full of displaced furniture.

‘I’m going to use the Baphomet sigil, inscribed with the ordinals of Leviathan,’ Trudie told us as she started to sketch in the first line. ‘Stanislas de Guaita, not LaVey’s Hell’s Kitchen Baphomet. Mister Ditko, you’d better be inside the circle before I close it.’

‘What about Bic?’ I asked her. She looked at me, thinking it through.

‘Outside,’ she said at last. ‘If we frame the conjuration right, Asmodeus won’t need to cross the circle to touch the boy on the psychic level. And this way there are four of us in total, which is a strong number. Should I perform the conjuration, Mister Castor, or would you prefer to do that yourself? You know this demon better than I do.’

‘I’d like to see you work,’ I said, which fell squarely into the ‘truth as far as it goes’ category. I was curious as to how she’d approach this — and I also wanted to keep my own powder dry in case Asmodeus cut up rough somewhere down the line. My chest was still weak from my injuries, and this was going to be the kind of balancing act I wouldn’t normally attempt even when I was at full strength. If I’d had a single other option left in the world, I wouldn’t have been trying it.

We placed Bic at the southernmost point of the pentacle

Trudie complaining once again that I’d made her come without her kit so she couldn’t check the alignment with a compass — and took our own places more or less at the other three cardinal points, with Trudie as east because this was a Satanic rite and the east is Satan’s appointed sphere. Rafi stepped into the circle and sat cross-legged in the middle. ‘I’m going to get chalk all over my arse,’ he complained. It was probably meant as a joke, but none of us were in the mood for laughing.

Trudie unwound the string from her hands, flexed her fingers, and started to weave a new cat’s cradle. She chanted a rhyme at the same time, but it wasn’t anything that a practising Satanist — or a practising Christian, for that matter — would have expected. It was a playground rhyme, starting with the familiar sequence ‘Apple, peach, pear, plum,’ but mostly muttered so fast and so low in her throat that it couldn’t be followed.

I caught a whiff of a sour, slightly unnerving smell — like the curdled tang of formic acid when you burn an ant with a magnifying glass. In the centre of the circle, Rafi shuddered suddenly, his shoulders tensed.

‘Johnny broke a bottle,’ Trudie chanted, ‘and blamed it on me. I told ma, ma told pa–’ Her fingers flickered in and out between the strings like the shuttles of a tiny loom. The pattern emerged, one line at a time.