Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

There was a bustle of activity as robed figures ran to do his bidding. If I were going to join a cult, I’d want to go in at officer level: there’s fuck-all job satisfaction at the bottom of the tree.

I followed the proceedings out of the corner of my eye. Pen and Juliet weren’t even in another room, they were just in the shadows under the pulpit, laid side by side on the ground. Juliet was still in her coma/trance/whatever state, and didn’t react at all as she was carried forward and laid down just behind and to the right of Fanke. Pen was bound, gagged, conscious and mad as Hell. She managed to kick one Satanist in a part he’d probably already consecrated to the Dark Lord: he doubled up with an unmanly yelp and dropped her legs. Two other men stepped in and completed the task of hauling her out for my inspection. They laid her down to Fanke’s left-hand side, so that from my point of view he was bookended by comely hostages.

Then, with a consummate sense of theatre, he held out his clenched fist to me as if in salute, before opening it wide to show Peace’s locket – on a new chain – dangling from his index finger. ‘Veni, puella,’ he murmured. Abbie’s ghost materialised around his hand, very abruptly, looking startled and terrified. She cast her glance from side to side, from face to face, taking in the massed ranks of the Satanists surrounding her, and me facing her across the magic circle. On me her gaze rested for longest, big and wide and full of hate.

‘I don’t lie for effect, Castor,’ Fanke said, speaking to me through her translucent body. ‘I lie to achieve specific goals. In this case, as you can see, I’ve told the truth. Now put the gun down – unless you think that my death is a fair exchange for Pamela’s. Because my death is all you can hope to achieve: the ceremony will go on, and will be completed, in any case.’

‘Where’s your male?’ I demanded, still buying seconds.

Fanke actually smiled. ‘I don’t have one,’ he admitted. ‘I’d decided to use your zombie friend – Nicholas Heath. Yes, I know about him. I know everything there is to know about your life: I’ve been close to you for a long time, after all. But when my people went to fetch the zombie, they found this other creature, and I yielded to temptation. My lord doesn’t favour the succubi. There’s something appropriate about feeding one of that kindred to the flame to set him free.’

His eyes stared into mine, mocking and malevolent: the eyes of a man who was damn sure he was holding all the cards.

‘A male would still be useful,’ he said, ‘for the sake of balance. But it’s up to you. You can play out this film noir pantomime, if you like. Or you can take Pamela Bruckner’s place and die inside our circle. I’ll allow that. If you put the gun down right now, and apologise to me for your disrespect.’

I hesitated. He was lying, of course, but then time was what I was playing for here on a lot of different levels.

‘Where’s Nicky now?’ I demanded, buying a few more seconds. I guessed the wax on that candle was thicker than I’d thought; I guessed Basquiat hadn’t called in to check her messages; I guessed my luck was running pretty much true to form, after all.

Fanke frowned. ‘Your dead friend, I believe, is still extant,’ he said. ‘But the details get a little abstruse. He locked himself into a room on the first floor of the cinema. When my people tried to open the door—’ He stopped, seeing I was grinning. ‘Well, perhaps you already know about his security arrangements. I lost a number of valued colleagues, without managing to smoke the zombie out of his hole. But the succubus made a more than acceptable substitute. Hiring you was the best decision I ever made, Castor. At the time I thought I was just keeping things in the family – but it brought so many incidental benefits. But now we’re delaying proceedings, and they’ve been delayed too long already. Please – your decision.’

Fanke was looking at me expectantly, and I could see in his eyes that – unlike me – he hadn’t had to bluff at all. He was going to see this through, even if it meant me rearranging his innards with the aid of hollow-point ammunition. One way or another, the show was going to go on.

Trying to ignore Abbie, whose dead gaze still skewered me, I nodded.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let Pen go, give her five minutes to get clear, and then I’ll hand over the gun.’

‘No,’ said Fanke tersely. ‘You hand over the gun now, and you accept my word that she won’t be harmed. No more procrastinations. Decide.’

I waited in vain for an explosion from the back pews, or for a hammering on the knocker and a ‘This is the police!’ from the church’s main doors. The silence, in which Asmodeus’s hostile attention was like a raw overlay of subliminal hypersonics, remained unbroken.

After a long pause, and just as Fanke opened his mouth to speak again – to his subordinates, not to me, because his head snapped round to face them – I turned the gun in my hand and held it out to him, butt first. He gave a nod, quietly satisfied, and took it. Then he passed it on to a tall, cadaverous acolyte who appeared at his shoulder.

‘And the apology?’ Fanke asked, looking round at me again like a coaxing schoolmaster who doesn’t want to have to resort to the cane.

‘You’ll have to whistle for that,’ I said. ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you? If not, I can teach you.’

He gave me the coldest smile I’ve ever seen.

‘Grip, keep the gun trained on Mister Castor,’ he said, ‘and bring him to the circle. In fact, have someone pass a loop of piano wire around his throat, too, to make sure he stays exactly where he’s put. He has the look of a man who wants to go back on his word.’

The robed minions closed in on all sides, finding their courage all of a sudden, and a great many hands were laid on me. I was manhandled to the edge of the circle, which I saw clearly now for the first time. It seemed to be identical to the ruined one I’d seen in the Quaker hall, but this one was complete, uninterrupted by any chewed-up arc of pulped floorboards. In fact, this one was drawn on stone – and drawn with the tip of a knife blade, rather than in paint or chalk. Various half-formed schemes that had been forming in the forefront of my mind got discouraged and left.

The man Fanke had called Grip shoved the gun into the small of my back more emphatically than was necessary, and kept it there while another robed figure – a tall, heavy-set woman – passed a loop of piano wire very carefully around my neck. The care was for her own fingers: as soon as it was in place she pulled it tight, and I felt it bite into the flesh below my Adam’s apple. The two free ends of the wire had been tied around wooden blocks: she held one in each hand, like a paramedic with the charged plates of a defibrillator, but what she was actually holding was, in effect, the drawstring of a guillotine. If I moved from this spot, my head was going to stay right where it was while my body did its best to make shift without it.

Fanke walked around the circle to stand opposite me. Abbie went with him, dangling weightlessly in the air, his clenched fist wrapped around where her heart would have been if she were alive and still had one. Her confusion and fear were terrible to see.

The solemn-faced robed acolytes – except for Grip and the woman with the piano wire – took their stations all around in a wider circle that extended from the altar rail to the ragged heap of displaced chairs and to the aisle on either side. There were more of them than I’d thought: at least forty. Some of them must have come in through the main doors after the rest had set up shop and opened up for them: that explained why I hadn’t seen Pen and Juliet being brought in. One of them was the little doctor with the Scottish accent who’d given me my tetanus shots after I’d passed out in Pen’s hallway.