Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

Something about Pen? Or about Rafi? I should be there for him. I had been there for him. That was the problem. That was why he was so fucked-up now.

The door slammed, startling me out of a half-doze. I tried to get up, but I didn’t manage it. I opened my mouth to say, ‘I’m coming with you,’ but Pen wasn’t there any more. Of course, that was why the door had slammed. She’d left already.

But that wasn’t the issue, was it? Pen was fine, because she was going to visit Rafi, and Asmodeus – most of Asmodeus – was somewhere else. So what was the problem? Why did I feel like there was something I hadn’t done, that I had to do right then without wasting any more time? And given that feeling of urgency, why was I still half-sitting, half-lying on the couch with my head hanging like a weight from my shoulders, staring at the floor?

This time I managed to get upright, even though the floor was lurching in every direction at once, trying to throw me down again. I groped in my pocket for Matt’s car keys. They weren’t there. Maybe I’d left them in the car. Where had I left the car? I had to see someone. Juliet. I had to see Juliet, and tell her where to find Rafi on a Saturday night.

Out into the hall. Which way now? Had to be either left or right, because there weren’t any other directions. Except I was forgetting down: there was an unreasonable prejudice against down. Down was amazing. Once you’d tried it, it was hard to get up again.

I was stretched out on the stairs, diagonally crucified on dusty carpet that didn’t have a pattern any more because the sun had bleached the threads to a uniform pale gold. It smelled of must and very faintly of tarragon: not the recipe I would have used. I couldn’t even remember deciding to go upstairs, so I levered myself upright, leaned backwards as far as I could and fell down them again. You have to be decisive at times of crisis or people will walk all over you.

Lying on my back in the hallway, I saw the door open and a pair of shiny black shoes advancing towards me, apparently walking on the ceiling. A man’s voice said a single word. Ship? Shit? Shirt? Then a huge face heaved itself into my field of vision like the moon rising in the middle of the day. It was a nice face, but it wasn’t one I knew.

‘Does anything hurt?’ his lips said. A second or so later, the sound broke over me like a sluggish wave. I shook my head infinitesimally.

‘Then is there any part of you that you can’t move?’

That would have made me laugh, if I could have remembered how laughing worked. There wasn’t anything I could move right then. Maybe a finger, if I tried hard enough.

The guy moved on to a lot of inappropriate touching: feeling my neck and my cheeks, pulling my eyelids down so that he could peer into my eyes, finally opening my mouth and looking down my throat with the aid of a flashlight: not a doctor’s flashlight, either – a Mag-Lite about a foot and a half long that he must have found under Pen’s sink or somewhere similarly insalubrious.

‘Fuck you,’ I said. Or tried to say: maybe I didn’t manage it, because he didn’t react in any way or even seem to hear me. He went away and came back again, once or perhaps a couple of times. Then he put a bag down on the carpet next to me and leaned in close again.

‘Do you have any recent injuries?’ he asked me. ‘Wounds, I mean? Wounds that might still be open?’

Well, this was covered under doctor-patient privilege, so it was okay to talk. But my teeth were clenched together and they wouldn’t separate. Coming through, coming through, I thought; coherent sentence coming through. But they didn’t fall for the bluff, and nothing at all happened. I managed to roll my eyes in the direction of my shoulder: a minimalist clue, but he seemed to get it. He pulled my coat open, undid the top three buttons on my shirt and peeled it back. He nodded at what he saw there.

‘You’ve got an infection,’ he said, a whistling echo to his voice sounding like a cheap guitar effect. ‘I’m going to—’

His voice became a ribbon in the air, a flick of motion travelling from one end of it to the other like the crack of a whip seen in fascinating slow motion. When it got to the further end, it fell off into absolute silence.

I half-woke with a mouth so dry it felt like it was full of panel pins. I tried to speak, and something cold and wet was pressed to my face. I was able to put my tongue to it and get some moisture. The pain faded a little, and I faded right along with it.

The next thing I was aware of was Colonel Bogie’s march playing on someone’s car horn. Who invented that story about Hitler’s ball? I wondered dreamily. Alternatively, who got in close enough to count?

Then memory poured in on me from all directions at once and I sat up as abruptly as if I was spring-loaded. I was in my own room, lying in my own bed, and the window was open. Alarmingly, dislocatingly, it was evening outside.

‘Fuck!’ I croaked. ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!’

I threw off the covers, discovering in the process that I was naked and slick with cold sweat. My fever had broken while I slept, and now I felt weak but relatively clearheaded. Clear-headed enough to remember . . . something. Some revelation that had loomed out of the fog of my malfunctioning brain and caught me in its headlights just before I collapsed. But not cool enough to remember what it was.

Juliet. It was something to do with Juliet, and her plans for tonight. For some reason, I had a feeling – no, a dead, cold conviction – that it wouldn’t be a good idea for her to send her spirit into the stones of Saint Michael’s church. I wasn’t sure why, but I had to be there and I had to stop her.

I found my clothes neatly stacked on the chest of drawers just inside the door, my coat slung over the back of a chair. My mobile was in my pocket, but when I tried to turn it on I realised that it had run out of charge. Occupational hazard for me: I came to the technology late and unconvinced. I turned out every pocket, but there was no sign of Matt’s car keys.

I hauled the clothes back on in the order they came to hand. I needed a shower in the worst way, but there was no time. I stumbled down the stairs, my legs still trembling just a little.

The phone was in the kitchen, and so was a short, stocky man with a sizeable beer gut. He was sitting at the kitchen table, leafing through a very old copy of Cosmo, but he closed it as I came in and stood up. He was wearing a brown corduroy jacket that looked slightly frayed, and National Health glasses that did nothing for his florid, pitted face apart from magnify one of the least impressive parts of it. The top of his head was bald, but tufts of hair clung on around his ears like thin scrub on treacherous scree. I gave him a nod, but I had too much on my mind right then for small talk: I picked up the phone on the kitchen wall. The short man watched me dial.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asked. He had a very faint Scottish accent.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Can you give me a moment?’

The communal phone at the refuge rang a couple of dozen times without anybody answering. I was about to give it up when someone finally picked up. ‘Hello? This is Emma, who are you?’ A little girl’s voice, with that awkwardly formal telephone manner that some kids pick up from grown-ups without quite knowing how it works.

‘My name’s Castor,’ I said. ‘Can I speak to Juliet? Is she there?’

There was a murmured conversation on the other end of the line. Then: ‘She’s gone out,’ Emma said. ‘You can leave a message if you like.’

‘Thanks. The message is that she should call me.’ I thought that through. No good: I’d be on my way west. ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘the message is that she shouldn’t go to church. I’ll explain why when I see her.’