Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

Both men were loup-garous , as I’d more than half suspected already: human souls that had forced their way into animal flesh for a messy, compromised rebirth. I had no idea in this case, though, what animals had been party to the deal. There was something about the increased mass of Feld’s shoulders that suggested a gorilla, but his fanged face and clawed hands looked like someone had crossed a weasel with a leopard and fucked up the vertical hold in the process. Speight mostly looked like a big dog, but the quills of his mane recalled a porcupine — and surely that mouth had never been seen before on anything that walked, crawled or did the can-can.

‘Write in a book thyself,’ Gwillam intoned, ‘all the words that He hath spoken unto thee. The sun to rule by day, the moon and stars by night, for His mercy endures for ever.’ Feld stretched his elongated body full length on the ground and a ripple ran through his flesh, his spine arching like a bow. Speight’s terrifying jaws clashed, making a sound like a hundred spears on a hundred shields.

Gwillam looked to the left, then to the right, and it seemed that he was satisfied. ‘Go,’ he said.

Feld and Speight hit the ground running — so fast that they became liquescent blurs and you found yourself staring at their after-images without quite knowing how. Bricks and bottles and even steel window frames rained down around them as the watchers in the windows higher up reacted to the assault on the barricade, but the missiles landed where the two loup-garous had been, never where they were. In less than two seconds they were across the rubble-strewn walkway and swarming up the barricades.

Then they were gone from our sight, and we could only track them by sound. For the most part, they were sounds I’d prefer to forget, if that were an option: the scuffles, the thuds and even the screams were innocuous enough, but there were more insinuating sounds in the mix, too: choked gurgles, liquid pops and splats, and in one case the shuddersome impact of what could only have been a skull on the unyielding and unforgiving concrete.

A second later, Feld’s streamlined head appeared atop the barricade and he signalled to us with a hand whose scimitared claws were dark with blood.

‘After you,’ said Gwillam.

We ran hell-for-leather, but the bombardment we received was both more sporadic and less accurate: the watchers in the windows were able to see what had happened on the far side of the barricade, and clearly shock and awe weren’t even the half of it.

All the same, a lobbed brick came way too close to my head for comfort as I crested the top of the shifting, treacherous mound: and as I half-slid, half-fell down the other side, a flatscreen TV set hit the ground and shattered explosively two feet to my right, showering me with a million shards of high-impact plastic.

But the door was open ahead of me, and on the far side of the door was a safe haven. Never mind what I was treading on, or what unforgivable acts the two were-beasts were still committing up ahead of us as they cleared our path. I ran along in their wake, feeling something thump against my shoulder but without really hurting all that much. I realised why when I glanced down: it wasn’t a bottle or a piece of masonry but somebody’s severed thumb.

‘Jesus Christ!’ I yelled involuntarily. Speight’s head snapped around and he bellowed, opening those horrendous jaws right in my face. The man in black — Eddings, that was his name — pushed me forward through the doors, interposing himself at the same time between me and the loup-garou . ‘No, Speight!’ he snapped out. ‘Leave him!’

Touchy Catholic werewolves: you have to remember to watch your language around them.

I slumped against the wall, getting my breath back. Speight and Feld were at our backs, facing the doors we’d just come through. Of course: the stairs were on the outside of the building, so nothing could come at us so long as the doors held.

Unless they used the lift.

It pinged at that moment, with perfect ironic timing. Eddings turned to stare at it. The illuminated displays above the three lift doors weren’t working, so there was no way of telling which lift was in operation or whether it was heading for our floor. I chose the middle one and stood squarely in front of it, waiting to see what would emerge, but Eddings touched my shoulder and shook his head sharply.

‘Go inside,’ he said tersely, pointing to Kenny’s door. ‘You complete the exorcism, this all stops. Until then, we’re just racking up the body count.’

‘What about Gwillam?’ I asked. ‘Don’t we wait for him?’

Eddings looked out towards the barricade we’d just scaled. I did too. There was no sign of movement out there now. ‘No,’ Eddings said. ‘Father Gwillam will join us when he can. The three of you should be enough to make a fist of it. If not — get word out to me and I’ll send Speight in to you.’

I looked at the hideous thing hunkered down by the right-hand lift doors, like Frankenstein’s cat at the world’s biggest mousehole. ‘Speight?’ I echoed.

‘He’s an exorcist,’ Eddings reminded me. ‘When he’s in human form. Go. We’ll deal with whatever comes through here.’

To put the matter beyond argument, he kicked in the boarded-up door of Kenny’s flat. It wasn’t hard: the council do that sort of job in the perfect knowledge that it’s not going to last more than a day or two.

I went inside and down Kenny’s stairs, followed by the woman and the boy. I heard Eddings levering the particle board back into place behind us, sealing us in as best he could.

The living room was a shambles, which I was more or less expecting. The most likely reason for the place being boarded up was because it had already been broken into: a familiar pattern that almost made me nostalgic for the Walton of my youth. Our feet crunched over fractured photo frames and shards of porcelain.

Mark’s bedroom, though, hadn’t been touched: possibly because there hadn’t been anything there to steal or despoil. I settled myself on the edge of the bed and gestured to the other two to take up their stations. ‘You got names?’ I demanded.

‘Star of Renewed Being Phillips,’ said the old woman.

‘Caryl Langford,’ said the boy. ‘With a ‘y’. Like Caryl Chessman.’

Well, that was a fucking great omen. I took my whistle out and shrugged off my coat. It was feeling oppressively hot, all of a sudden. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Caryl. Ms Phillips. If this was a firing squad, you’d both be shooting blanks today. I’m the one who’s going to kill this thing. All I want you to do is to weave stay-nots around me so it can’t tear my soul into confetti while I’m working.’

The woman nodded but Caryl with a ‘y’ didn’t look too happy. ‘What if it turns on us?’ he asked.

‘It won’t,’ I promised. ‘Once I start playing, it’ll only have eyes for me. Okay, get your kit out and get ready.’

I watched them with half an eye as I went over in my mind the tune Asmodeus had given me, like a tailor poring over a swatch of cloth before starting to cut. It had to be good quality, and it had to be all of a piece. If there was a dropped stitch somewhere, we were all going to die in this room, probably with most of our insides on the outside.

Star of Renewed Being’s method of performing an exorcism seemed to rely on jacks — the children’s game in which you throw knuckle-bones up in the air and catch them again in more and more complicated ways. Of course, most kids these days use little plastic nubbins with six rounded points, whose resemblance to knuckle-bones is purely accidental. The old lady had the real thing: ten of them, well worn and shiny, off-white with brown flecks like the colour of clotted cream that’s been allowed to grow a proper crust.