Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

Normally Nicky would have been at the computer terminal on the other side of the room – or maybe leaning on his elbows at the plan chest off to my far right, poring over maps and charts of London, England and the world scribbled over and over with his own hermetic symbols. Both of those spots were currently empty.

‘Hey, Nicky.’ I called, a little irritably. ‘Whenever you’re ready, mate. Meter’s running.’

‘Open your coat, Castor.’ Nicky’s voice doesn’t carry all that much, so it wasn’t a shout – just an insinuating murmur that didn’t seem to come from any particular direction but crept along the ground with the sparse tendrils of water vapour. I finally placed him, though: he was standing behind the row of spindly cane trees looking like Davy Crockett at the Alamo – except that the pistol he was holding in his hands was no museum piece: it was a chunky service automatic with a lot of miles on the clock but a very convincing businesslike look about it. Nicky was looking pretty serious, too: ordinarily the fake tan he insists on wearing gives him a slightly clownish look, but a gun adds a whole big helping of gravitas.

‘Have you lost your fucking mind?’ I asked him.

‘Nope. There’s some fucking weird shit going down in the big city right now, and I’m not planning to be a part of it. Just open your coat up. I want to see if you’re carrying a weapon.’

‘Only the usual, Nicky. Unless that’s some kind of coy euphemism for—’

‘Do it, Castor. Last time of asking.’ The volume was turned up a little bit this time, which meant he’d taken a big breath just for the occasion: when he’s not talking, he forgets to do that.

Swallowing some very bad words, I unbuttoned my paletot and shrugged it open to left and right. ‘There you go,’ I said. ‘No shoulder holsters. No bandoliers. Not even a machete in my belt. Sorry to disappoint you.’

‘If you’d disappointed me, you’d know it. Turn out your pockets.’

‘Christ Jesus, Nicky!’

‘I told you – this isn’t anything personal. We’re friends, as far as that goes. If I trusted anybody, it’d be you. But we’re in uncharted territory tonight, and I’m honest-to-God not taking any risks.’ His hand made a pass-repass over the gun, and I heard a sound that I recognised from countless movies and maybe twice in real life: the sound of the slide release on an automatic pistol being racked back and then forward again.

I stopped arguing. There wasn’t that much in my outside pockets in the first place: what there was – keys, wallet, Swiss Army penknife with thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves – I hauled out and dropped to the floor. There was a second set of pockets sewn into the lining of the coat, though, and with the things that were stored in there I took a fair bit more care: an antique knife with an inlaid handle; a small goblet in stained and heavily oxidised silver, the porcelain head of Abbie’s doll. These I laid down on the floor with care, one at a time. Last of all came the tin whistle. ‘Just one hand,’ Nicky warned as I slid the whistle out and held it up. As far as he was concerned, this was a weapon – and it had his name on it.

I’d had just about as much of this as I could take by this time, and I was in the mood to do something rash. Slowly, with elaborate and exaggeratedly unthreatening gestures, I bent from the waist and laid the whistle down on the bare cement floor. I gave it a little flick with my thumb as I did it, so that it rolled: I knew Nicky’s gaze would follow it, the way your stare would follow a grenade without a pin. Then I knelt down a little lower. The bucket that held the cane tree at the end of the line nearest to me was just within the reach of my left hand at full stretch: I grabbed it right in under the rim.

I stood up in one smooth movement, and the bucket toppled: the tree that was rooted in it went over too, knocking against its neighbour and starting a chain reaction that sounded like the swish of a thousand canes. And Nicky was standing in line like he was waiting for a spanking. Without a gasp or a whoof or a yell – because again he hadn’t laid in any spare breath for it – he went sprawling. His head hit the wall with a dull thud, but that wouldn’t slow him down much. From off to my right, though, there came a different sound: a metal-on-stone clatter, quickly swallowed. That seemed like the better bet, so I made a lunge even before I saw where the gun had ended up in the spreading pool of sludge from the overturned buckets. Nicky had managed to disentangle himself from the undergrowth and he was scrambling on all fours in the same direction. Being at ground level already he got there first, but my foot came down on his wrist just as his fingers closed on the gun.

‘I’m not putting my full weight down,’ I pointed out. ‘If I do, something’s going to break.’

Nicky has a morbid fear of physical trauma: being dead already, he doesn’t have any way of repairing it. All the systems which in a living body would re-knit flesh and bone and channel away infection are non-starters in a walking cadaver. He released his grip on the gun in great haste and I scooped it up. It was old and heavy but someone had been looking after it and I had no doubt at all that it would work, even covered in thick brown slurry. Not knowing how to put the safety back on or eject the clip, I aimed it at Nicky instead. He threw his hands up, desperately humping back across the floor on his backside.

‘Easy! Easy, Castor! I won’t heal! I won’t heal!’

‘Easy? You fucking bushwhacked me, you maniac!’

‘I wanted to make sure you weren’t going to kill me.’

‘What?’ I lowered the gun, pained and exasperated. ‘Nicky, you’re already dead. Did you forget that? Killing you would be fucking futile.’

‘To damage me, then.’ He was trying to get his legs under himself and stand up without using his hands, which were still high in the air.

‘Damage you. Right.’ I crossed to the window and tried to open it. Nothing doing: the sash was nailed down solid. I smashed it instead, raising a wail of indignation from Nicky, and dropped the gun out of the window onto the weed-choked sprawl of asphalt that used to be the cinema’s car park – a party favour for the next courting couple who decided to take a walk through the long grass.

Then I turned to face Nicky again. He lowered his hands and came across to look out of the window, then favoured me with a resentful scowl. I noticed for the first time that he was wearing a butcher’s apron over his usual Zegna suit. It was an odd and unsettling combination, even though the stains on it were mulch-green and mud-brown rather than blood-red.

You know what you’re getting with Nicky, most of the time: he was paranoid even before he died, and if anything that event had only reinforced his conviction that the universe was out to get him. So I wasn’t really surprised by any of this: just morbidly curious as to what exactly had triggered it.

‘Why the fuck would I want to damage you?’ I asked him. ‘No, let me rephrase that. I want to damage you all the time – but why would I choose today to de-repress?’

He was sullen and defensive. ‘Why does anybody choose a particular time to freak out? All I know is that a lot of people are choosing now. Did that get by you somehow? I thought you had this big umbilical thing going with London. Tuned in to the . . . Zeitgeist . City geist. Whatever. So if a whole lot of Londoners eat poison and lose their minds, I thought there was a chance you might get brainsick too. But I guess today you were receiving on other wavelengths.’ He could see that none of this meant anything to me – and also that I was starting to look a little pissed-off – so he came in again from a slightly less oblique angle. ‘You know how many murders there are in London in the average year, Castor?’