Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

Kidnapping ghosts. Blind-siding the hunt. I was dealing with someone who was better than me at my own game. My professional pride was piqued, and slightly punctured. I had to see if I could reflate it.

Yeah, that shallow.

On bad days, I have to admit that I deserve everything I get.

The front door of Saint Michael’s church was massive: bivalved, with a lock on each side. Old wood four inches thick, set tight in a slightly narrow, low-arched narthex, and I could tell by the look of it that it had fossilised hard with age. It moved less than half an inch under my hand and I gave it up as a bad job. I could have picked the locks with nothing more than main strength and bloodymindedness, but there wouldn’t have been any point. From the feel of it, the doors were anchored at the bottom, too: there was a bolt on the inside.

There are churches that people will travel a thousand miles out of their way to see. Saint Michael’s wasn’t one of those. Don’t get me wrong – it was old, and impressive enough in its way. Early Gothic: very early, taking its shape from Abbé Suger’s original prescription. Which meant that it was straight up and down and plain as a pike: a colossal ecclesiastical doghouse on which the Holy Spirit could sleep like Snoopy until the Day of Judgement.

Some people would argue that he’d overslept.

This was where Juliet had told me to meet her, but she was nowhere in sight. All I could do was wait – and while I did, I became aware of a very faint presence somewhere close by: something immaterial and shifting, so faint that just the act of focusing my attention on it made it roll back out of reach as though my mind was a searchlight. Whatever it was, it had strongly negative overtones for me – like the psychic equivalent of some bitter medicine I’d taken long ago and never forgotten.

Curious, I laid my hands on the church door again, closed my eyes and listened with my extra sense.

Nothing at first – except for the discomfort of the cold wood against the palms of my hands. Maybe I’d been mistaken in the first place, and all I was feeling was the remains of that psychic hangover I’d had the day before. I considered taking out my whistle and seeing if I could refine the search a little, but just then a woman’s footsteps stirred a recursive symphony of echoes on the flags behind me. I turned with a witty and slightly obscene quip ready to launch. But it died before I could even open my mouth, because this wasn’t Juliet walking towards me. It was a young woman with bookish spectacles and shoulder-length white-blonde hair. She was slight and petite, pale-complexioned, and she walked with her shoulders hunched up as if against heavy rain. Except that the rain had rolled away westward: it was a fine night in late spring, and if it weren’t for the cold in under the shadow of the church I might even have been feeling overdressed in my heavy greatcoat. As it was, she clearly felt that her beige two-piece was too skimpy, even though the sleeves were full and the skirt was demurely calf-length: hands folded, she rubbed her upper arms nervously as she approached me.

Lashless black eyes blinked at me from behind those ‘I am serious’ glasses.

‘Mister Castor?’ the woman said, tentatively, as if the question might give offence.

‘That’s me,’ I said.

‘I’m Susan Book, the verger. Umm . . . Miss Salazar is around the back, in the cemetery. She asked me to show you the way.’

Her voice had that rising inflection that turns statements into questions. Normally that irritates me a little, but Susan Book was so clearly anxious to please that resenting her, even in the privacy of your own mind, would have felt like taking a hot iron to a puppy. She held out her hand diffidently. I took it and shook it, holding on long enough to listen in on her feelings. They were dark and confused: something was clearly weighing on her mind. I let go, sharpish: I’d had enough of that for one day.

‘I’m all yours,’ I said, and I threw out my arm to indicate that she should lead the way. She started and spun around as though I was pointing to something behind her. Then she recovered, blushed, and darted me a quick, flustered glance.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m really nervous today. All of this—’ She shrugged and made a face. Not knowing what she was talking about, all I could do was nod sympathetically. She turned on her heel and walked back the way she’d come: I fell in alongside her.

‘She’s amazing, isn’t she?’ Susan Book said wistfully.

‘Juliet?’

‘Yes, Jul— Miss Salazar. She’s so strong. I don’t mean physically strong, I mean spiritually. The strength of faith. You can tell just by looking at her that nothing can shake her, or make her doubt herself.’ There was something in her voice that sounded like yearning. ‘I really admire that.’

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Well, up to a point. Self-doubt can be useful too, though.’

‘Can it?’

‘Definitely. Prevents you from jumping straight off a cliff because you think you can fly, for example.’

Susan laughed uncertainly, as though she wasn’t entirely sure whether or not I was joking. ‘The canon says that doubts are like workouts,’ she said. ‘If he’s right, I ought to be benching a hundred kilos by now. I seem to get doubts all the time. But this – maybe the – maybe I’ll get stronger by dealing with all of this. Good comes out of evil. That’s His way.’

I caught the capital H on ‘His’, which my brother Matthew uses too. But there was an almost equally weighted emphasis on ‘all of this’, and I was tempted to ask her what the hell it was that had happened here. But I assumed there was some reason why Juliet hadn’t briefed me in advance, so I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t say a word about Juliet herself, either, although I wondered what Susan would think if she knew what Miss Salazar’s real name was, or where she hailed from. Best to leave her with her illusions intact.

The church stood in its own very narrow grounds on Du Cane Road, almost directly opposite the soul-dampening pile of Wormwood Scrubs – which is angry red chased with white, like bone showing through an open wound. To the left of the church itself, where Susan Book led me, there was a lych-gate, on the far side of which I could see a trim little graveyard like the stage set for a musical of Gray’s Elegy . This gate was locked, too, with a padlock on a chain. Susan took out a small ring of keys from her pocket, sorted through them and found the right one. It turned in the padlock after a certain amount of fidgeting and ratcheting, and she slid the chain free so that the gate swung open, stepping aside to let me through.

‘I’ll unlock the vestry door for you,’ she said. ‘It’s by the west transept, over there. Miss Salazar is—’ She pointed, but I’d already seen Juliet. The cemetery was on a slight slope and she was sitting cross-legged on top of a marble monument of some kind, outlined against the sky. A colossal oak that had to be a couple of hundred years old held up half the sky behind her.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘We’ll join you in a couple of minutes.’

Susan Book stood for a moment, staring up the hill at Juliet’s silhouetted form. Then she bustled away, casting a wide-eyed look at me over her shoulder as if I’d caught her out in a moment of self-doubt. I waved, reassuringly I hoped, and walked up the hill to join Juliet. She had her head bowed and she didn’t look up as I approached: she didn’t seem to notice me, although I knew damn well that she’d heard the key rattle in the lock of the lych-gate, smelled my aftershave on the air as I stepped through, and sieved my pheromones by taste to find out what kind of a day I’d had. As soon as she was close enough so that I didn’t have to raise my voice to speak to her, I voiced what was uppermost in my mind.