Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

I backed away, one step at a time. Juliet and Coldwood came with me, Gary throwing a curious glance at the man who’d come out of nowhere to help us.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Was he part of the programme?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Pure serendipity. It has to work on our side every once in a while.’

‘What’s his name?’

I shook my head. It was a long story, I was ignorant of more than half of it, and I was too tired to explain the parts I did know.

‘The body belonged to a man named Roman,’ I said. ‘But that was a while back. I think he probably answers to Anita these days.’

Coldwood blinked. ‘Anita, as in—?’

‘Yeah. As in Anita Yeats. Kenny’s — whatever you want to call it. She died, and she came back.’

‘And she’s what, cross-dressing?’ Gary sounded pained.

‘More or less. Ninety-nine times out a of a hundred, a zombie clings to their own flesh: Anita chose the flesh of the bloke she was knocking off. Maybe if you ask her she’ll tell you why.’

I turned away from him to end the conversation, because it was scraping on a raw nerve right then. From behind us on the walkway, I heard Matt’s voice and then Anita’s. And then Matt’s again, broken as he spoke by what sounded like sobs. I needed to get further away. I might hear some of the words, and I didn’t feel strong enough for that. I pushed the swing doors open and stepped back into Weston Block. For a moment the floor under me seemed to lurch and shift. I slumped against the wall, waiting for the dizziness to pass. It intensified instead. It was costing me a lot of effort just to stay on my feet.

‘Christ,’ I muttered. ‘I need a Band-Aid and some TCP.’

Gary inspected the knife that was still jutting out of my shoulder. ‘You need a hospital,’ he said. ‘If we take this out you’ll bleed like a stuck pig.’

By way of answer, I held up my blood-boltered hand. Coldwood was unimpressed. ‘That’s nothing compared to the Niagara you’re going to see when that knife comes out,’ he said. ‘Stay there, Fix. Do not fucking move.’

He got out his phone, dialled and started talking rapidly into it. But I couldn’t follow the words. Juliet was talking too, looking back the way we’d come, out onto the walkway. I turned my head — actually, turned my body because my neck didn’t seem able to move independently any more — and followed her gaze.

Matt was talking to the sky. Anita in her borrowed flesh stood beside him with her hands clenched into fists, her neck craned right back, her pale flesh almost luminous in the surrounding darkness. Something blacker than the darkness hovered above them, almost close enough to touch. Its voice was a soundless pulse inside my head: diastole followed by systole, the tide of my own blood given voice. Anita raised her hands — Roman’s hands — above her head, not in surrender but as if she was trying to reach something that hung in the air above her, to lift it down. Matt had his hands on her shoulders now, offering her strength or comfort or maybe just clinging to her to keep from falling down onto his knees.

I thought of the two of them in the nativity play: Come, Joseph. I am close to my time and we must reach Bethlehem before our baby is born. It was too much. I closed my eyes and looked away.

But the darkness was still there, behind my eyes. It filled the space around me, so big and so vast that it became to all intents and purposes the landscape in which I stood. And I remembered that I’d stood here before, in this selfsame black-on-black void: conversing with the genius loci, which had named itself and then asked me — pleaded with me — to stay. not leave this place.

Which I’d read as a threat instead of what it was: the lost boy asking not to be left alone in the dark.

The lightless immensity gathered itself and began to shrink: receded from me by concentrating its terrible essence into a smaller and smaller space. Soon it was almost invisible: a distant point of anti-light, impossibly small, painfully vivid. Then it winked out altogether, like the dot in the centre of the screen when you turn off an old CRT television set. What it left behind in the place where it had been was an absence, almost equally dark but empty of being, drained of purpose.

A metallic clatter from somewhere nearby made my eyes snap open. The knife had fallen from my shoulder, and Coldwood, still on the phone, was staring at it with a bemused look on his face.

I put my finger in through the hole in the neck of my paletot, searching for the wound. It had gone. My skin was completely unbroken.

The demon — my kinsman, my brother’s only son — had withdrawn itself from me, and this was the mark of its disfavour. A moment later, the rising sun peered out from behind Boateng Tower and — finding no substantial opposition — threw its radiant weight around the suddenly clear sky.

Bethlehem. That’s where we’re all heading for. The rough beasts and the messiahs and the poor bloody infantry, all slouching along together to the place where we’ll finally be counted.

Anita started to deteriorate almost as soon as Mark’s spirit left us.

I’d seen this before. It wasn’t physical decay: it was a more subtle and inexorable surrender, a failure of the motive force, the driving will-power that allows something as tenuous and fragile as a ghost to bludgeon something as solid as a body into submission. Her farewell to her son and her reconciliation with Matt had shifted some crucial point of balance within her, and her hold over her borrowed flesh was faltering moment by moment. She was slowing to a final halt.

We sat with her amidst the rubble of the walkway, keeping her company while she died for the second time. She told us about the first time: about how Kenny had found her and Roman in flagrante, in the climactic phase of a hastily snatched knee-trembler in the flat’s poky kitchen.

She’d been doing the ironing before the sex got under way, and it was the iron that Kenny used to kill her. She was still turning, trying to disengage herself from Roman’s embrace when it hit her, and that was the last she knew. But Kenny carried on hitting her for a long time after she was dead. She knew that because . . . well, because she’d seen the results. Later.

She woke in the ground: a burning splinter of consciousness filled with fear and urgency, not knowing why it had no eyes to see with and no hands to claw its way free from the undefined place where it was caught.

She did the zombie thing, but the zombie thing didn’t work. Her own body was mostly pulp, bones broken in so many places her insides were like the kids’ game of PickUp Sticks.

But Roman’s body was right next to her, and Roman had been killed with a single stab wound to the neck. She didn’t know why Kenny had dropped the iron and used a knife: maybe it was a kitchen knife that Roman had picked up to defend himself and Kenny had turned against him. It didn’t matter, anyway. Roman’s spirit had gone on to its eternal reward, and his flesh was lying there with a TO LET, UNFURNISHED sign figuratively pinned to his chest.

Anita moved in, and sat up. Kenny had buried them in his allotment, and he hadn’t troubled to bury them deep because he was the only one who ever went there. She carefully replaced the soil so there was no sign of what had happened, and went off to settle accounts with her bastard husband.

But she wasn’t sure how exactly she should go about it. She didn’t feel she could go to the police because she had no way of proving who she was. She didn’t even know whether the born-again could give evidence in court, or whether she’d be allowed to walk free again once she’d brought herself to the authorities’ notice. Was taking Roman’s body actually a crime? Would she be dispossessed and kicked out into nothingness? She couldn’t let that happen.