Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

Before I went in I checked an additional piece of equipment that I’d picked up along the way. It was a sprig of myrtle, borrowed from a graveyard. Myrtle for May: if I’d been on the ball, I should have had some already – then I wouldn’t have had to shinny up cemetery walls after midnight. I whispered a blessing to it, feeling like a fraud as I always do when I’m mucking about with things that lay-people would call magic.

The stairwell smelled of piss and stale beer – two stages in a conjugation that usually ends with ‘dead-drunk guy face down in his own vomit’. But I didn’t meet anybody on the way up, and when I knocked on the door on the third floor – the only door that wasn’t covered over with plywood and nailed shut – the sound echoed through the building with telling hollowness.

After a few seconds, the door was opened by a skinny black girl of about sixteen or so, whose eyes were each, individually, bigger than her whole face. I only knew she was a girl by the pigtails: the hard, hatchet face was one-size-fits-all, and the black jeans and manga-chick T-shirt were unisex.

‘Yeah?’ she said.

‘Friend of Nicky’s,’ I told her.

She frowned at me with truculent suspicion. ‘You got a pulse?’

I checked. ‘I do, but it’s running kind of slow. Is that a deal-breaker?’

She swivelled her head and looked behind her into the flat. ‘Mum,’ she called. ‘There’s a live man out here.’

‘Is he police?’ a much deeper voice answered from somewhere inside. ‘If he’s police, Lisa, you tell him to go fuck himself because I paid already.’

The moppet turned her face to me again. ‘Mum says if you’re police, you can—’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I got it. I’m not police. The name’s Castor. If Nicky Heath is in there, I’m here to see him and give him a ride home.’

Lisa called out over her shoulder, keeping her stare fixed on me this time in case I tried to steal something. It would have had to be the door or one of the walls: there was nothing else on the landing, not even carpet to cover the warped floorboards. ‘He says he’s Castor and he’s gonna give Nicky a ride.’

‘Oh, Castor.’ There was edgy disapproval in the voice, and I knew exactly why. ‘Yeah, you show him into the parlour, Lisa. He can just hold his horses until I’m done here.’

Rolling her eyes to show what she thought of these instructions, Lisa flung the door open. Showing me into the parlour meant pointing to a door off the narrow entrance hall to the left as she took off in the opposite direction herself. There was a door right at the end of the hall where I could see Imelda’s back as she laboured over her latest patient. She was singing to herself: a gospel song, most likely, but it was under her breath and from this distance I couldn’t make out either the words or the tune.

I’d been here before, about two years back, so I knew the drill. I also knew that Imelda didn’t like me very much: exorcists were bad for business. Sending me into the parlour to wait was a piece of calculated sadism, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do about it, so I just took a deep breath, held it, and walked in.

The Ice-Maker is basically just a faith healer with a very specialised clientele: a clientele whom no other doctor, whether alternative or vanilla, is likely to want to poach. She deals exclusively with zombies, and she claims, by laying-on of hands, to slow the processes of decay almost to a standstill. I always thought it was bullshit, but Nicky goes to her twice a month without fail – and he’s been dead a long while now, so I respect his judgement on matters of physical decomposition. Her moniker – Ice-Maker – comes from her boast that her hands are as good as a deep-freeze when it comes to keeping dead meat fresh.

But the smell in the parlour, I have to say, was one of sour-sweet decay, deeply ingrained. Like I said, this wasn’t my first visit, so I knew what to expect, but it still hit me like a wall and almost knocked me down. I went on inside, and six or seven of the walking dead glanced up to appraise the newcomer: the sitting dead, actually, since the room was laid out like a doctor’s waiting room with chairs all around three of the walls, and most of the chairs were taken. There were even magazines: a chalk-faced woman in the corner with a small hole in the flesh of her cheek was flicking through a vintage copy of Cosmo .

Zombies don’t breathe, so sharp intakes of breath were out of the question; and there wasn’t a stand-up piano to tinkle and plunk its way into shocked silence as I walked in. All the same, though, I could feel the tension. The zombies who’d already looked up to clock me carried on staring: the others, catching the mood, glanced up to see what was happening.

I sat down, just inside the door, and picked up a Reader’s Digest . Flicking through it, I found an article about a possible enhanced role for walnuts in the treatment of colonic cancer, and started to read. The great thing about the Reader’s Digest is that it exists outside of space and time as we know them: mystics and ecstatics read it to achieve a trance state deeper than normal meditative techniques allow.

Sadly, though, I wasn’t going to be allowed to attain a lower consciousness tonight. Over the top of the magazine, I saw a man’s broad torso heave into view.

‘You’re alive,’ said a harsh voice, through a bellows-like soughing of breath.

‘Yeah,’ I agreed, without looking up. ‘I’m working on it, though. You know how it is.’

‘The fuck you doing here, you blood-warm piece of shit?’ This was said more vehemently, and the waft of fetid breath made me wince.

‘I’m waiting for a friend,’ I said mildly.

There was a heavy pause, and then: ‘Wait outside.’

I looked up. The guy must have been a real holy terror back when he was still counted among the living, and if anything he was even scarier now that he was dead. He stood about six-two, and it was mostly muscle: the kind of sculpted, highly defined muscle you get from working out. And his arms were bare and his T-shirt was tight, so you got to see the muscles sliding against one another like tectonic plates when he moved. His bald head glistened – not with sweat, obviously, so I guessed it must have been with oil of some kind. He was a thanato-narcissist, in love with his own defunct flesh and keeping it polished up like a museum piece.

But I’d been pushed around enough for one night: enough, and heading inexorably towards more than enough.

‘I’m fine right here,’ I said, and returned to the good news about walnuts.

He smacked the magazine out of my hands. ‘No,’ he growled. ‘You’re not. ’Cause if you stay here, I’m gonna rip your tongue out.’

I glanced around the room and took in the reactions from the rest of Imelda’s dead clientele. They seemed a little uneasy about what was happening – but then, Imelda’s services aren’t cheap; most of them looked to be a lot more well-heeled than this sad piece of worm-food, and they probably had that whole middle-class anxiety about making a scene. That was good news for me: it meant they were less likely to mob me and tear my arms and legs off if this went badly.

‘Okay, sport,’ I murmured. I stood up and he squared off against me, waiting for me to throw the first punch. He was sure enough of his own strength to know that nothing I could swing would put him down, and having allowed me an ineffectual tap at his chin he could dismantle me at his leisure.

I had the myrtle twig wrapped twice around my hand. I just slapped it to his forehead and spat out the words ‘Hoc fugere.’ He shot backwards as fast if I’d stuck a shotgun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.