Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

The boy had a book, and I assumed for a moment that he’d learned his craft from Gwillam — that this would be another bloody Bible-reading. But the pages of the book were blank, and he took a stick of charcoal from his trouser pocket, choosing a page and smoothing it flat with nervous fingers.

There was no point prolonging the agony. This would either work or it wouldn’t. I started in to play, with none of my usual exploratory tuning-up because the tune was present in my head already, a finished thing. It started high and fast but plummeted precipitately into a doleful decelerando: abandon hope, all ye who riff on this one.

Nothing much seemed to happen at first. Because I was playing quite low, I was able to hear from outside the sounds — shouted order, shouted response, boots in lockstep — of serious men moving into position. The riot squad were here, and incredibly things were about to get even uglier than they already were.

But we had our window, and within it we made music. I did, anyway: the old woman threw bones and the boy sketched obsessive angular lines, turning the paper into a fractal landscape.

The air thickened and roiled. Something huge and diffuse turned its attention towards us.

Darkness fell like a curtain, but it was darkness shot through with light: a curtain flapping in a strong wind, allowing me to glimpse through its folds a silver, saturated light like the luminosity of a coming storm. Everything was working beautifully: Star of Renewed Being and Caryl with a ‘y’ had my back, and the demon couldn’t drag me down into its black-on-black Hell the way it had at the Royal London. It could only bring a piece of that Hell along with it as it came into the room; as it coalesced around us like gritty shadows, angry and confused.

Got you now, you bastard. Your turf, but my rules. Now let’s put you on the griddle and see what colour your juices run.

I shifted my fingers on the stops and pushed the tune into a higher gear, raising the volume because the volume was the delivery system for the pain: and the demon was hurting now. Its rush on me had got it nowhere, because charcoal and knuckle-bones encompassed me like the arms of the Lord. Now it tried to withdraw, but it was too late for that. It was in a barbed-wire entanglement of music, a thicket of thorns like the devil’s briar patch. Unable to advance, unable to retreat, it thrashed and gored itself on the tune.

And I saw it.

Only for a moment, but I saw it. It stared at me through the shredded layers of its own protective darkness, as it had stared at me in the lightless abyss when I had met it by Kenny’s hospital bed. Not that our eyes met, exactly: in this synaesthetic maelstrom, seeing and hearing were metaphors for something else.

Say, I knew it.

It was just one synapse closing in my mind: making the last link in a chain of connections that I’d probably assembled subconsciously but not allowed myself to see until now.

A door opening , Asmodeus had said. An eggshell breaking across. Call it metamorphosis . Call it transformation.

Juliet, reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar : the little caterpillar pushed his nose out of the cocoon, and looked around in wonder . . .

Kenny’s ghost, wailing, ‘ He’s too big now, and he made me–’

One note, one beat, one breath away from the mercy stroke, and I knew the demonic presence for what it was. Knew, what’s more, Asmodeus’s treachery and the depth of his hatred for me. How perfectly he’d set me up and how many layers of perverse sadism his little plan had wrapped up in it.

The whistle fell from my hands. It scattered the old lady’s knuckle-bones and she yelled in alarm and fear, but she was a second behind the times because the sudden silence had opened a hole in the net: the demon rushed through it and was gone, too intent on its own survival even to hit out at us as it left.

‘What are you doing?’ Caryl screamed.

‘Shut up.’ My voice was so thick that he probably couldn’t even make out the words. I lurched to my feet, made it as far as the door before my legs buckled under me. My knees hit the floor first, my hands a second later. I could hardly breathe. My chest was heaving but no oxygen was making its way through to my brain.

‘Mister Castor.’ Something cold touched my throat: the barrel of a tiny pistol. A Jesus gun. The old lady had a Jesus gun, hidden up her sleeve. How funny was that? ‘Finish the exorcism.’

‘Go — fuck — yourself!’ I panted.

‘Finish the exorcism, or I’ll have to shoot you. A bullet this small probably won’t kill you, but if I aim it straight at your spine I can almost guarantee it will leave you quadriplegic. ’

I didn’t answer.

‘It’s your call, Mister Castor. What do you want me to do?’ There was cold steel in the old lady’s voice. She’d have made a good nun: might even have been one, at some point, before she’d heard Gwillam’s call.

‘Pray,’ I suggested, with a bitter, choking laugh. ‘Pray for him.’

The gun stayed where it was for a moment longer, then withdrew.

The next time I looked up, I was alone. But not really: you’re never really alone in a big city. The screams and scuffles and the sounds of ruinous impact as the riot squad met the people of the Salisbury Estate right outside my window were more than enough to drive that fact well and truly home.

From the comfort of Mark’s bedroom, I watched the world end. Or at least, that was how it felt. Melodramatic, I know, but it’s not easy to keep a sense of proportion when the wind gusts with the bitter reeks of burnt flesh and half-spent tear gas, and ignorant armies are clashing by night right in front of your sleep-deprived eyes.

The riot cops had a hard time of it when they made their first charge. They got past the barricades at ground level and on the third-floor walkways, but they couldn’t penetrate on the eighth and twelfth floors — so the further they advanced, the tougher the going got. A plexiglass riot shield is a fine defence against a lobbed brick or a Molotov cocktail, but it’s not much use when an armchair drops on you out of the skies. They pulled back at last, leaving a few sprawled bodies — some in uniform, some civilians — behind them.

The second time was better coordinated, and they seemed to have larger numbers on their side too. Using the towers at the north end of the estate as staging points, they swept the upper walkways first, blasting away the barricades and the opposition with water cannons before venturing out themselves. The top-to-bottom sweep meant they weren’t exposed to attack from above, and they made good headway, moving on past me towards the southern towers which they hadn’t been able to crack the first time around.

But by then they themselves were visibly slowing as they felt the effects of the demon’s touch. One by one they started to take an interest in the broken glass on the walkways, jabbing shards of it experimentally into their own palms or seeking out rioters or former colleagues for impromptu knife fights.

With so many wounds in which to root itself, so much sliced and broken flesh, the demon’s power was increasing exponentially. My own palms were itching almost unbearably, and the cutting kit that had been in Kenny’s wardrobe kept coming into the forefront of my mind. It would be a useful thing to have to hand, in case I felt the need to . . .

No! I whistled the first few bars of the tune over and over again to keep the demon’s insidious tendrils from anchoring in my mind. And I tried not to think about blood. The blood that beats in the tell-tale heart of every one of us. The blood that’s thicker than water.