Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

Matt was looking at me in pure horror now, and Coldwood, two steps behind but catching on, swore obscenely.

‘Then I actually met the thing,’ I said. ‘And it spoke to me. Just the one word. “Mark”. I thought it was telling me who it was after, but it wasn’t.

‘No, Felix,’ Matt pleaded. ‘No.’

‘It was telling me its name. Mark didn’t summon the demon. Mark is the demon. That’s your son’s metastasised soul out there, feeding on innocents and driving them to their own destruction.’

Matt’s pleas turned into a wordless bellow of anguish and he started to hammer his head against the floor of the room. Coldwood and I lunged forward at the same time but Juliet’s lithe body isn’t subject to the same limitations as mere human flesh, and she got there almost before we started to move. She clasped Matt in her unbreakable grip and he slumped against her, moaning unintelligible syllables.

‘I think you’ve made your point,’ she said to me in a calm, detached tone.

‘Is this how all demons are made?’ I asked her, my mouth too dry to swallow. ‘Is this what you are?’

‘It’s none of your business what I am, Castor. If you pry into that subject again, I won’t take it kindly.’

‘I can’t believe I never saw it,’ I continued, because the words kept spilling out of me whether I wanted them to or not. It was as though none of this had been real until I said it, or until she confirmed it. Now I had to live with this knowledge and I didn’t think I could. We have met the enemy and he is us. The newest monster in town was my fucking nephew. ‘I mean, it ought to have been obvious. Zombies are people. Werewolves are people. Why shouldn’t demons be people too? It’s Occam’s fucking razor: it’s the one common factor that makes sense out of everything. But how can it be so big, Juliet? How can it be so fucking big and so fucking powerful if it’s –’ the word had a sour, almost obscene taste to it as I shaped my mouth around it ‘newborn?’

Juliet stared at me for long enough that I was sure she wasn’t going to answer. But then she made a gesture that conveyed very succinctly the impression that in talking to me about this she was trying to pour a major ocean into a pint pot. ‘Many of us start out . . . large and diffuse,’ she said. ‘Bodiless emotion. Pure power, but not concentrated. Like a vapour that fills any space it finds itself in. We condense gradually, over a long time. We find our form.’

‘But you come from souls?’ This from Matt, who was staring at her in utter horror. ‘From human souls?’

Juliet made another gesture: something close to a shrug.

‘Dear God!’ Matt whispered. ‘Oh dear God!’

‘Tell me if I’m missing something,’ Coldwood growled, ‘but fascinating as all this is from a religious standpoint, is it not also totally fucking irrelevant? Either you can sort this out or you can’t, Fix. Which is it?’

‘The first ghost I ever exorcised was my own sister, Gary,’ I answered, shaking my head with ferocious emphasis. ‘I’m not going back there. Today it’s Matt’s turn.’

‘Mine?’ Matt’s voice trembled as he raised his red, tear-stained face to stare at me.

‘I think it’s our only chance,’ I said. ‘He’s kin to you and he’ll feel the connection. He may listen to you where he wouldn’t listen to anyone else. Most ghosts — they hang around because they can’t get it into their heads that their life is over. They’re tied to all the stuff they didn’t do, or wish they hadn’t done. You have to tell him it’s okay. Make your peace with him. You have to ask him to leave, of his own free will. It’s the only way.’

At least, I added mentally, it’s the only way that doesn’t involve me doing an encore for my biggest sin. For Katie. And I marvelled again at how big a bastard Asmodeus was: how nearly perfectly he’d led me to this massacre of the innocents. Because that’s what Mark was, however deadly his infatuation with wounds had become. His real father literally didn’t know he was alive, his stepfather was a vicious sadist and his mother was probably already broken before he was born. His cards had been well and truly marked. And then when he did finally break out of the ghetto, by metamorphosing into something big and powerful and scary, along came Uncle Felix with his magic equaliser.

No. Sorry. We are not at home to Mister Kin-slayer. Not today, at any rate.

‘They’ve never met,’ Juliet pointed out. ‘There’s no reason why the demon should recognise Matthew as its father.’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘That could be just wishful thinking on my part. But it’s the only shot we’ve got left in the locker, because I’m telling you I can’t do this. I’m empty.’

Matt got himself under some kind of control and climbed to his feet. Amazingly, Juliet’s embrace didn’t seem to have left him aroused at all: maybe it was because of the welter of other emotions running through him — or maybe she put out different pheromones when she was being maternal.

‘I’ll do it,’ Matt said, bleakly but calmly. ‘I—Obviously. Yes. I have to do it. I can see why it has to be me.’

He looked at me, trying to keep the fear out of his face. Fear of going up against a demon, or fear of meeting his son for the first time in these less than auspicious circumstances? Maybe it was a little of both. ‘So what happens?’ he asked. ‘You play your whistle and I . . . call his name?’

‘The whistle’s the last thing we need,’ I said. ‘I play that tune, it’s like I put his arm up behind his back and jam his face into a wall. And he’s had a lot of that tonight already. No, I think we need a different approach.’

I went through into the other bedroom. Like the living room it had seen a bit of ransacking, but it didn’t seem to have been very thorough in this case. Some drawers pulled out, a few clothes strewn around, but that was about the extent of it. Whoever the looters were, they hadn’t put their backs into it: and by providential chance, they’d run out of steam before they’d got to the wardrobe.

I went back through into Mark’s room, holding his cutting kit in my hands. Once again, just from holding the box, I felt the deep, insistent pulse of long-gone feelings that Mark had left there: the echo of his excitement and his joy. I put it down on the floor in the centre of the room where everyone could see it.

‘If Mark had an emotional focus, it was this,’ I said.

‘What is it?’ Juliet asked.

‘His works. A box full of razor blades, essentially, with a few more sharp objects for the sake of variety, and a bit of disinfectant. This is what he used to cut himself.’ Matt winced, but he seemed to know what was expected of him. He knelt down and touched his hand to the lid of the box. Closing his eyes he spoke Mark’s name.

Nothing happened. With my psychic antenna fully extended, I listened to the eerie silence beyond the windows. It was still dark out there. I looked at my watch and it was way past seven o’clock. There ought to be some light in the sky by now.

Matt called again, a little louder. Still nothing. No sense of movement, either on the psychic plane or in the world of brute, inarguable flesh.

A minute or two passed like this, with Matt calling Mark’s name and nobody answering.

‘Okay,’ I said at last. ‘It seemed like a good idea. Sorry to waste your time.’

‘Where did he die?’ Juliet asked. We all looked at her. ‘The boy,’ she clarified unnecessarily. ‘Where did he die? Was it in this room?’

‘No,’ Coldwood said, pointing. ‘It was out there. He threw himself off the walkway.’

‘Then that’s where we should be.’

It was clutching at straws, but it was worth a shot. I nodded and went to retrieve the cutting kit from the floor, but Matt had already picked it up and seemed unwilling to hand it over.