Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

‘Why a church? Did you get religion?’

Her head snapped up and she frowned at me, eyes narrowing to slits. I threw up my hands, palms out, in a meant-no-harm pantomime. Sometimes I go too far. She infallibly lets me know when that happens.

As usual, once I’d started looking at her the tricky thing was stopping. Juliet is absurdly, unfeasibly beautiful. Her skin is melanin-free, alabaster-smooth, as white as any cliché you care to dredge up. If you go for the default option, snow, then think of her eyes as two deep fishing holes, as black as midnight. But if anyone’s fishing, it’s from the inside of those holes, and you won’t feel the hook until it’s way, way down in the back of your throat. Her hair is black, too: a waterfall of black that falls almost to the small of her back, texturelessly sheer. Her body. . . I won’t try to cover that. You could get lost there. People have: stronger people than you, and most of them never came back.

Because the point – and I know I’ve said this already – is that Juliet isn’t human. She’s a demon: of the family of the succubi , whose preferred method of feeding depends on arousing you to the point where your nervous system starts to fuse into slag and then sucking your soul out through your flesh. Even tonight, dressed coyly in black slacks, boots and a loose white shirt with a red rose embroidered up the left-hand side, you could never mistake her for anything other than what she was. The confidence, the strength that Susan Book had seen in her – that came from being the top carnivore in a food chain that no man or woman alive could even imagine. Except that carnivore wasn’t quite the right term: you needed something like noumovore , or animovore . And even more than that, you needed not to go there.

Thank God she’s on our side, that’s all. And I’m saying that as an atheist.

And, taking another step, I came within range of her scent. It hit me in two waves, as it always does. With the first breath, you’re gulping in the rank foulness of fox, cloying and earthy: with the second, which you draw shallowly because of the sharpness of that first impression, you inhale a mélange of perfumes so achingly sweet and sensual your body goes on instant all-points alert. I’m used to it and I was braced for it, but even so I felt a wave of dizziness as all the blood in my head rushed down to my crotch in case it was needed there to bulk out my sudden, painful erection. Men limp around Juliet: limp, and go partially blind because taking your eyes off her suddenly seems like a waste of valuable time.

Which is why it’s important never to forget what she is. That way, you can maintain a level of good old-fashioned pants-wetting terror as a bulwark against the desire. I’ve found that to be a healthy balance to keep, because obviously if I ever actually had sex with Juliet my immortal soul would be the cigarette afterwards. But still, it’s not easy to think logically when she’s right there in front of you. It’s not easy to think at all.

Juliet unfolded her legs and stepped down off the chunk of marble with unconscious grace. I realised that it was the cover of a family vault: Joseph and Caroline Rybandt, and a bunch of subsidiary Rybandts listed in a smaller font. Death is no more democratic than life is. I also realised that Juliet was carrying a grey plastic bowl half-full of water: it had been resting in her lap, and when I first saw her she must have been peering down into it.

‘So how’s tricks?’ I asked her.

‘Good,’ she said, neutrally. ‘On the whole.’

‘Meaning . . . ?’

‘It’s fine if I don’t think about the hunger. It’s been a year now since I actually fed. Fed fully on a human being, body and soul. It’s hard sometimes to keep the flavour, and the joy of it, out of my mind.’

I groped around for a response, but nothing came. ‘Yeah,’ I said after slightly too long a pause, ‘I thought you were looking slim. Think of it as a detox diet.’

Juliet frowned, not getting the reference. Now didn’t seem like a good time to explain it.

‘So you’ve got a spook?’ I said, to move things along. ‘A graveyard cling-on?’ It was one of the commonest scenarios we came across in our profession: ghosts battening fast to the place where their mortal remains still rested, anchored in their own flesh and unable to move on. Some of them got the hang of the wiring and rose again as zombies: most just stayed where they were, getting fainter and more wretched as the years went by.

Juliet looked at me severely. ‘In this graveyard? There hasn’t been a burial here in centuries, Castor – look at the dates.’

I did. Joseph had bitten the dust in 1782, and Caroline three years later. More to the point, all the stones were leaning at picturesque angles and most were green with moss. Some had even started to sink into the ground so that the lower parts of their eroded messages of grief and pious hope were hidden in the long grass.

‘There are no ghosts here,’ Juliet said, stating the obvious.

‘What, then?’ I said, feeling a little embarrassed and annoyed to have been called on such a basic point by my own apprentice. Few ghosts hang around for more than a decade or so – almost none past fifty or sixty years. There was only one case on record of a soul surviving through more than a century, and she was currently residing a few miles east of us. Her name was Rosie, and she was sort of a friend of mine.

‘Something bigger,’ said Juliet.

‘Then holy water is probably just going to piss it off,’ I said, nodding towards the bowl. She gave me a meaningful look and thrust the bowl into my hands. I took it by reflex, and to stop the contents slopping over my coat.

‘I never said it was holy,’ said Juliet.

‘So you were washing your hair? You know, human women tend to do that in the privacy of—’

‘Turn around.’ She pointed towards the church.

‘Widdershins or deasil?’

‘Just turn around.’ Juliet put her hands on my shoulders and did it for me, swivelling me a hundred and eighty degrees without any effort at all. The touch sent a jarring, sensual charge through me and reminded me yet again, as if I needed it, that Juliet had physical strength in spades, as well as the spiritual kind that Susan Book had been talking about. I stared up at the looming bulk of Saint Michael’s, which now blocked off the setting sun so that the church was just a monolithic slab of ink-black shadow.

‘My kind have a gift for camouflage,’ murmured Juliet, her throaty voice suddenly sinister rather than arousing. ‘We use it when we hunt. We make false faces for ourselves, pretty or harmless seeming, and we flash them in the eyes of those who look at us.’ She tapped the rim of the bowl and a ripple shot from edge to centre of the water within, then from centre back to edge in choppy, broken circles. ‘So the best way to see us is not to look at us at all.’

I stared into the bowl as the ripples subsided. I was seeing the inverted image of Saint Michael’s church. It didn’t look any better upside down. In fact, it looked a whole lot worse: black smoke or steam was roiling off it in waves, downwards into the inverted sky. It looked as though it was on fire – on fire without flames.

Startled, I raised my eyes to the building itself. It stood silent and sombre. No smoke, no fireworks.

But back down in the bowl, when I looked again, the black steam rolled and eddied off the church’s reflection. Saint Michael’s was the heart of a shadow inferno.

I stared at Juliet, and she shrugged.

‘Anyone you know?’ I asked, aiming for a flip, casual tone and missing it by about the length of an airport runway.

‘That’s a good question,’ she acknowledged. ‘But for later. Come inside. You need to get the whole picture.’