Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

‘What have you tried?’ I asked her, keeping it businesslike.

‘A number of things. A number of askings and tellings, any one of which ought to have made whatever is in those stones show its face to me. They all came up blank. I’m grabbing at smoke.’

I remembered the roiling shadows I’d seen reflected in the bowl of water, and nodded. It was barely a metaphor.

‘And yet—’ Juliet murmured, and hesitated. I’d never seen her be tentative about anything before: it was, to be honest, a bit unnerving, like seeing an avalanche swerve.

‘What?’

‘Occasionally I feel a very faint presence. Not in the stones themselves but close. Close, and moving: moving against itself, in fragments, like a cloud of gnats. Whatever it is, I think it’s linked to what’s inside the church – but as soon as I look towards it, it hides itself from me.’

I remembered what I’d felt as I stood waiting by the church’s front door. ‘Yeah,’ I agreed, ‘I think maybe I got that too. A scent, I mean, but not strong enough to pin down.’

I glanced over at the lych-gate: Susan Book was waiting for us there, her pale face visible through the gathering gloom.

‘You want me to try?’ I asked. The stuff Juliet was talking about was probably necromancy – black magic – most of which I tend to regard as a mountain of quackery and bullshit surrounding a few grains of truth. What I do is different: the expression of a talent that’s inside me, with no recitations or rituals and no steganographic mysteries. It was a sincere offer, but Juliet was shaking her head: she wasn’t asking me to do her job for her.

‘I want you to tell me if I’m missing anything,’ she said. ‘You’ve been doing this a lot longer than I have.’

That was true, as far as it went. Juliet was a good few millennia old, from what she’d told me, but she’d only been living on Earth for a year and a half. There were things about the way the living, the dead and the undead interacted on the mortal plane that she didn’t know or hadn’t thought about.

But if this was a demon, then her experience counted for a fuck of a lot more than mine. What could I tell her about the Hell-kin, when for her Hell was the old neighbourhood?

I chewed it over. I liked it that Juliet called on me when she was baffled – I liked it a lot – and I didn’t want to just turn my pockets out and show they were empty. But this wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before.

‘Let me think about it,’ I temporised. ‘Ask a couple of friends. Right now I can’t think of any angle you’ve missed.’

‘Thank you, Castor. I’ll share the fee, of course – if this turns out to need our combined efforts.’

‘The twinkle in your eye is reward enough. Although actually, since I’m here, you can do me a favour in return.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘In your – umm – professional capacity—’

‘ This is my professional capacity now.’

‘Well, yeah. Obviously. But in the old days, when you were – hunting, hunting someone specific, I mean, and they knew you were coming and tried to hide. Did you – how did you—?’ It was hard to find a delicate way of putting it, but Juliet was smiling, really amused. Demons have an odd sense of humour.

‘You mean, when I was raised from Hell to feed on a human soul – yours, for example – how did I find you?’

I nodded. ‘In a nutshell.’

‘I hunt by scent.’

‘I knew that. What I was trying to ask was which scent? Was it the soul or the body that you tracked?’

‘Both.’

Now we were getting somewhere. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So did you ever come across a situation where your—’

‘Prey?’

‘– I was going to go with target, but yeah. Where your prey knew you were coming, and managed to brush over his trail in some way. So you couldn’t smell him any more?’

Juliet thought about this for a moment or two, visibly turning it over in her mind.

‘There are things that disguise the body’s scent,’ she said. ‘Lots of things. For the soul – a few. Running water would hide both.’

I nodded. That much I did know. ‘But did you ever have a situation where you were following a trail, and the scent was strong, and then suddenly it just went cold? Completely died on you.’

She shook her head without a moment’s hesitation. ‘No. That couldn’t happen.’

‘Somebody did it to me earlier today.’

‘No,’ Juliet said again. ‘That may have been how it felt to you, but it was something else that was happening.’

Good enough. And food for thought. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll stop by again tomorrow, see how you’re getting on.’

‘Come in the evening,’ she suggested. ‘We can have dinner.’

That was a very appealing prospect. ‘On you?’

‘On me.’

‘You’re on. Where do you want to meet?’

‘Here, I suppose. We’ll find somewhere close by – perhaps around White City. I’ll see you at eight-thirty.’

I turned to leave, but then I remembered something that had slipped my mind. That twin-peaked sound: surge and fall, surge and die, like waves of some curdled liquid crawling up an unimaginable shore. I turned back.

‘It didn’t come to me,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘The noise in there. You said it would come to me, but it didn’t. You think you know what it is?’

‘Oh.’ Juliet gave me a slightly disappointed look, as if I was asking her for the answers on a test that was too easy to need thinking about. I shrugged, partly in mock apology, mainly just asking that she cut to the chase.

‘It’s a heartbeat,’ she said. ‘Beating about once a minute.’

I went back to the car, which I’d parked in the back lot of a wine warehouse that closed early on Mondays. It was Pen’s Mondeo, which she lets me use whenever she doesn’t need it herself. With Dylan’s Lexus currently handling most of her transport needs, I had it on semipermanent loan.

I let myself in and locked the doors behind me just in case because my attention was going to be elsewhere for a few minutes. In a Sainsbury’s bag in the front passenger seat of the car was Abbie’s doll. I took it out, held it in both hands and closed my eyes.

And shuddered. There it was again: the fathomless ache of Abbie’s long-ago and long-sustained unhappiness, brimming behind the frail ramparts of rag-stuffed muslin. Got you, you bastard, I thought with cold satisfaction. You can throw me off the trail, but only when you know I’m on it. You can’t be on silent running all the goddamn time.

Laying the doll down on the steering wheel like a tiny Ixion, I took out my whistle and launched into the opening notes of the Abbie tune, which was still fresh in my mind.

Within seconds I got the same response as before; the same sense of something touching the music from outside, as though it was a physical skein that I was throwing over West London. Except that it was stronger this time. I was barely a quarter of a mile to the east of my office in Harlesden, but I was a good mile and a half further south. And yes, the orientation was different – the faint tug on the web of sound coming not from over my left shoulder now but from straight ahead, from where the sun had set not long before. That made it easier to shift my attention, my focus, into that one quarter. The touch was faint, vanishingly faint, but I opened myself up to it, shutting out all distractions, tautly listening in on that one channel even as I was creating it, sustaining it, with the soft drawn-out complaint of the tin whistle. She seemed to recede. I held a single note, almost too low to hear, the barest breath into the mouthpiece, and slowly, by infinitesimal degrees—