Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

Pen nodded, but I could see from her face that she didn’t buy my ‘time heals all wounds’ approach.

‘He never has,’ she said. ‘Taken over in quite that way. Asmodeus is cruel, and spiteful, and a little bit insane, but that—’ She finished off the sentence with a shrug.

She was right, too. The berserker fit was a new one in my experience, and I couldn’t see what the demon had to gain by it. In the past Asmodeus had told me he was playing a waiting game, in the knowledge that sooner or later I’d figure out a way to undo whatever it was I’d done and set him and Rafi free from each other. Tonight it seemed he’d run out of patience and out of whatever demons have instead of sanity.

I tried to think of something vaguely reassuring to say, but Paul pre-empted me by throwing down his unfinished cigarillo, stamping it out, and stretching his shoulders like somebody warming up for a workout.

‘Gotta say goodnight to you people,’ he said. ‘I’m on until two a.m., and that’s my break over. You take my advice, you should get some sleep yourselves. The both of you look wiped.’ He gave us a nod and headed back into the building.

‘Thanks again,’ I called to his retreating back.

‘No problem. I’ll send in a bill.’

I turned to Pen. ‘That sounds like sense to me,’ I said. ‘Unless you’re up for some chicken vindaloo? The exotic delights of East Finchley are on our doorstep.’

Pen shook her head.

‘I’m meant to be going out,’ she said. ‘With Dylan.’

Dylan? Oh yeah, Dylan Forster – Doctor Feelgood. I’d sort of forgotten about him. The truth was, I kept on forgetting about him again every time Pen mentioned him. I’d long ago abandoned any thoughts of rekindling whatever the two of us had had, but on some level it still disturbed me to think of her going out with someone else. She was part of a triangle whose other two corners were me and Rafi. I knew how unfair that was, and I hated myself for having any reservations when Pen tried to scrape up a little happiness for herself: so whenever she mentioned her affluent, passionate, druid-in-training, Lexus-driving, trust-me-I’m-a-doctor new boyfriend, I put a certain amount of effort into sounding more positive and enthusiastic than I felt.

‘Well, even better,’ I said now. ‘Take your mind off this stuff for a few hours. Hope it’s something good.’

‘I don’t think he had anywhere particular in mind. He just said it was going to be a murderous day, and he absolutely had to see me at the end of it so there’d be something to balance out all the shitty stuff. I told him I was going to see Rafi, and he said he’d meet me afterwards.’

She gave me a brief but fierce hug and climbed into the car.

‘Drop you somewhere?’ she asked, holding the door open for a moment so we could go on talking.

I mulled that one over, but not for very long. My mind was still crawling with the dread that I’d felt when I saw the nurse lying crumpled on the floor of Rafi’s cell like yesterday’s laundry. Right then I wanted to be out in the open for a little while, and by myself.

I shook my head. ‘Thanks, but I think I need the walk,’ I said.

‘Then I’ll see you tomorrow.’ She slammed the door, revved up and pulled away, the Mondeo rocking a little on its wheelbase because it was getting on a bit now and the suspension was more or less shot.

The night was mine. Woot.

As it turned out, I needed more than just a walk. I spent the next few hours trying to shake off that sense of unease in a string of pubs and insomniac waterholes from Finchley to King’s Cross and beyond. Somewhere along the way, chugalugging my fifth or sixth whisky on the rocks in some Irish-themed nowhere on Kentish Town Road, I realised that what I was feeling had nothing to do with what had happened at the Stanger. It was something in the air; hanging over the whole oblivious city like an ectoplasmic slag heap waiting to start its inexorable downhill slide.

I got back home some time after three a.m. Pen’s place is off Turnpike Lane. It’s big and old, built in a nameless fin-de-siècle style that’s even heavier than High Victorian, and it’s on the side of a hill so that the basement, where Pen lives, becomes ground level at the back of the house and gives out directly onto the garden. I checked for lights, as I always do: if she’d still been up I’d have gone and split a bottle or at least a glass with her. But everything was dark and silent. She was probably staying over with Dylan at his flat out in Pinner – a sign of how besotted she must be, because the house was a lot more than just somewhere where she hung up her boots: it was also the seat of her own very personal religion, the place of her power, the cave where she was high priestess and sibyl in residence.

My room is up in the eaves, as far away from all that Earth-mother stuff as I can get, which suits me fine. Apart from anything else, that’s a lot of stairs for anyone to climb if they want to come and find me, and I’ll usually hear them coming.

I barely managed to shrug out of my clothes: then I hit the bed and was asleep before I bounced.

I don’t know about Rafi, but I sure as hell didn’t see a lot of Sunday morning. I woke up at the lag end of lunchtime, bright sunlight cutting through the gap in my curtains like a maniac with a chainsaw. I had a furry mouth and a hangover that was as much psychological as physical. Or animistic, maybe: a hangover of the spirit. How the hell do you cure that? A hair of the god that bit you?

Still no sign of Pen. I breakfasted alone in the sun-bleached kitchen, feeling a slight sense of unreality. The night had seemed so dark, the weight of foreboding so real, it was odd and even a little aggravating that nothing had happened. I felt as though reality was impugning my gut instincts.

But if there was some severing sword suspended over London, it was pretty firmly attached, and probably conformed to all relevant EU safety standards. I prowled about the house all day like a hermit with haemorrhoids, waiting for that doom-drenched feeling to revisit me. But it didn’t, and disaster didn’t strike. In the end I was reduced to watching old episodes of Fawlty Towers on some cable channel, and I kept forgetting to laugh.

Pen rolled home early in the evening to find me in the basement, feeding strips of fresh sheep’s liver to her two ravens, Edgar and Arthur. She was touched.

‘You didn’t need to do that, Fix,’ she said, squeezing my hand – a mistake, since it was dripping with blood and oozy bits of tissue. ‘They don’t mind if I’m a bit late. But thanks.’

‘I’m always afraid that if I don’t keep them happy I’m going to be set meal B,’ I groused. ‘They’re getting to be the size of bloody vultures.’

Pen seemed tired, and not all that happy: normally she came back from dates with Doctor Feelgood walking on air, so I was solicitous – and maybe a little curious.

‘How was your night?’ I asked, waggling my eyebrows suggestively.

She shrugged, gave a faint smile. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘It was . . . yeah. It was okay.’

I waited for clarification, and after meeting my gaze in silence for a moment or two she shrugged again. ‘Dylan was really tired,’ she said. ‘He’d had an awful shift, clearing up other people’s messes. He wasn’t supposed to be on duty today, but he said he had to, just for an hour or so – to check up on some of the work he did yesterday. He didn’t trust the doctor who was supposed to take over from him. So I went shopping, over at Camden Market, and he joined me there for a late lunch.’

‘Did you check in on Rafi?’

‘Yeah. We went over there this afternoon. But he was still asleep.’