Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

‘I tune that information out,’ Juliet said, but she looked a little disconcerted. ‘You’re not asking me to feel – whatever it’s called – guilt about this, are you?’

‘No.’ It was my turn to be impatient. ‘But think about it. She might not have got herself into this if she hadn’t been wandering around in a moon-eyed daydream thinking improper thoughts about you. I just didn’t feel happy about leaving her in there.’

‘Her emotions are no business of yours – or of mine.’

‘Fine. I’m not asking you to feel guilty. I’m just saying that I feel a little bit responsible for her myself.’

Juliet didn’t say anything to this, which was a pretty fair indication that I’d given her some food for thought. She’s taking this business of trying to be human very seriously: she still finds an awful lot of it completely unfathomable, but she is keen to get the details right and she does have the whole of eternity to work in.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve got an idea that might get both of us what we want. Let me show you something.’

I stepped past her, pulled the door open and went back out into the corridor. She followed me as I retraced my steps to the warehouse, and I showed her the open elevator shaft.

‘No use to me,’ I said. ‘But I thought maybe you could. . .’

‘Yes,’ said Juliet. ‘I could. But why should I?’

‘You want to look for your demon, and you don’t want to be watching your back all the time in case these nutcases stick a knife in it – especially not when the siege might turn into a firefight at any moment. So it makes sense if we clean up first and look around afterwards.’

‘Just tell me what you want me to do, Castor.’

‘You take the high road, and I’ll take the low road. While they’re watching me, you sneak up behind them and take them out with your usual mixture of elegance and brutality. Then we’ll look around and see what we can see.’

I was really impressed with my own performance: my voice didn’t shake in the slightest. You’d have thought I waded into the middle of riots every day of the week – whereas, in fact, since my student days ended I’ve more or less kicked the habit.

I’d expected more opposition from Juliet, but she made a one-handed gesture that suggested she was sick of the subject. She shucked her coat and let it fall to the ground. Roses opening. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll climb the lift shaft. And you’ll—?’

‘I’ll use the escalator. I want to stop in at Top Man.’

Before she could change her mind I walked away, still trying not to think about roses.

The other end of the corridor opened directly onto the main concourse, which was looking as though a hurricane had hit it while it was pulling itself together after an earthquake. The floor was a carpet of broken glass from storefront windows, in which display dummies lay sprawled like place-holders for the dead. Someone had trodden down hard on the head of one of them, shattering it into powdery shards: for some reason I thought of Abbie’s porcelain doll, and shuddered in a kind of premonitory unease. Dress rails that had been used as battering rams lay half-in and half-out of the window frames they’d shattered, and up against one wall a gutted till leaked copper coins like congealed blood. This didn’t look like looting, though: not that looters have any higher standards of respect for the retail environment, but the crunching debris under my feet included wristwatches and shiny gold bracelets from a jeweller’s carousel that I’d already had to step over. At some point, the sheer fun of destruction had taken over from any purely mercenary considerations here. That told me a little bit more about what I was dealing with – in fact, at that precise moment, more than I wanted to know.

The escalators were right out in the centre of the lower piazza, which meant that as I approached them I had plenty of time to look up at the galleries on the first and second floors. The first floor seemed to be deserted, but up on the top level three men were struggling with a fourth in what I took at first to be a good-natured scrum. Then I realised that I’d misread the situation: it only seemed friendly because three of the men were laughing. The fourth wasn’t making any sound at all, because they’d gagged him before slipping the noose around his neck. Now they were tying the other end of the rope around the railings: it wasn’t hard to guess what the next item on the agenda was.

Okay, it was definitely time to make an entrance. I stepped onto the escalator, which wasn’t moving, and put my whistle to my lips. Walking slowly up the steps, and almost stumbling because of their uneven height, I played a shrieking, nasal blast like the scream of a lovesick bagpipe. The mall had pretty good acoustics, at least when it was relatively empty like this. Up above me the crazies paused in their recreations to look around and find out who was killing the cat.

They separated and stood up, allowing me to get a better look at them. They looked scarily ordinary: one in late middle age, bespectacled and balding, dressed in shirtsleeves and suit trousers; the other two much younger – one of them maybe no more than a student – and in casuals. You couldn’t imagine them carrying out a murder together. You couldn’t even imagine them standing in the same bus queue.

But this wasn’t the time to speculate about how they’d met and discovered a common interest in death by hanging. No, this was showtime. Theatre was going to be all-important here: I wanted them to keep watching me rather than getting back to the business in hand. I started to scuff my feet on each step, Riverdance -style, to get a rhythm going in counterpoint to the skirling notes I was pushing out of the whistle. Left foot and then right, raising my knees high and swaying my upper body from side to side like some kind of deranged snake-charmer trying to go it alone after his cobra had left him.

All of which combined to produce the desired effect. The three men abandoned their hog-tied victim and crowded to the railings to watch me walking up towards them. Then a whole lot of other faces appeared behind theirs, men and women both, clustering at the railings to peer past them with varying expressions of alarm, eagerness and incomprehension. I hadn’t seen these people before because they’d been standing away at the back of the upper gallery, presumably in a tight, attentive cluster.

My skin crawled. Somehow the intended execution was made infinitely worse by the fact that it would have had an audience. If I’d had any doubts before as to whether I was in Kansas or the merry, merry land of Oz, I ditched them now: whatever was going on here, it wasn’t natural.

I stepped off the first escalator, turned and crossed the short expanse of tiling which separated it from the second. That meant presenting my back to the crazies, which I didn’t welcome at all, but on the credit side it meant the escalator was going to bring me out on the opposite side of the upper gallery from where they were. Something big and heavy crashed to the floor right in front of me, showering me with shards of glass and plastic. It had been a sound system of some kind, speakers not included, and one of the fragments close to my foot bore the Olu of a Bang & Olufsen logo: not a missile you see used all that often. I stepped over it, and kept on going.

There were howls and jeers now from the gallery above me, followed by a rain of smaller objects that I didn’t bother to acknowledge. One of them thumped me in the back, but it wasn’t sharp, or heavy enough to break bone. Maybe I hiccupped on a note, but it’s not like I was playing Beethoven’s Ninth to start with. It was just noise, loud and discordant and impossible to ignore.