Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

I walked on through the gardens, eventually circling around to the far side of the building where they gave out at last onto the asphalt apron of the car park. It was after midnight now, so the place was deserted except for a few staff cars and Pen’s old Mondeo. Paul was leaning against the side of an ambulance in lonely splendour, smoking a fairly pungent cigarillo. He was looking glum.

‘How’s life?’ I asked, slowing to a halt.

He blew out smoke, shook his head in disgust. ‘You should’ve asked me when I fuckin’ had one, man,’ he said morosely. ‘My old lady keeps telling me to give this up, and fuck if she ain’t right. What do I need it for? My back feels like I did ten rounds with Tyson, my left eye’s closing over. Karen’s most likely got a concussion. And my man Rafael’s righteously fucked, poor bastard.’

I was impressed that he could still worry about Rafi when Rafi’s evil passenger had just nearly done for the both of us. I was reminded once again of how much there was going on under that tank-like exterior. ‘Well, I’m glad you put your retirement off until after tonight, anyway,’ I said, meaning it. ‘You probably saved my life.’

‘Yeah, you’re welcome.’

‘Your boss is an arsehole, though.’

‘Got that right.’

I leaned against the side of the ambulance next to him, but upwind of his cigar. ‘And Rafi will be okay. At least, he’ll be none the worse for anything that happened tonight.’

Paul raised his eyebrows as he pondered this. ‘Cuts all over his face,’ he mused. ‘Two broken fingers. Maybe a broken jaw. That shit on his chest looked like blisters – like he was catching fire from the inside.’

‘But you know I’m right. The fingers will reset themselves tonight. The jaw, too, if I actually broke it. The gouges and the burns will already have healed up: if you looked right now, there wouldn’t be a damn thing to see. Rafi’s got a very healthy immune system. I guess it’s all the good food and exercise.’

Paul gave me a slightly fish-eyed stare, checking to see if any of that second-rate irony was at his expense. Then he shook his head again, giving it up. ‘That lady of yours,’ he said, after taking another deep drag on the cigarillo, ‘she’s a class act, Castor. About as big as a high-heel shoe, but she just went for Rafael back there like it was a fair fight. Went for Doctor Webb, too.’ He grinned wickedly. ‘That was the highlight of the fucking day. Truth.’

‘Yeah, Pen is one of a kind,’ I agreed. ‘She’s not mine, though. I mean, she’s just a friend.’ A whole lot of memories surged up from one of the less-frequented areas of my mind: I shoved them right back down again. ‘She’s – she and Rafi used to be – together. When we were all at university, they were –’ I groped for a phrase that accurately defined Pen and Rafi’s relationship, but there wasn’t one ‘– an item,’ I finished lamely. ‘But it didn’t last. Rafi was the flit-and-sip type.’

We stood in silence for a few seconds.

‘He was my best friend,’ I said, aware of how bizarre and unhealthy all this sounded. ‘Pen’s, too, both before and after the sweat-and-roses stuff. Everybody liked him. You’d like him too, if you met him.’

‘If I met him?’ Paul’s intonation was pained.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yeah,’ he admitted. ‘I guess I do. Kind of. I’ve always wanted to ask you, though. What exactly is that thing inside him?’

‘Asmodeus. He’s a demon. A fucking big one, too. A lot of the literature on the subject says . . .’

‘The literature?’ Paul shook his head, wondering. ‘What, like The Lancet ? Scientific American ?’

‘Not exactly, no. I’m talking about books written by carpet-chewing natural philosophers five hundred years ago. Grimoires. Magical textbooks. Anyway, they put Asmodeus close to the top of the infernal pecking order. Not someone you want to mess with. But Rafi did just that. He tried to summon Asmodeus about two years ago. I think he was looking to do some kind of Faust thing: buy a shitload of forbidden knowledge from before the world was made. It didn’t work out that way, though. Somehow Asmodeus got into him and started to burn him up from the inside.’

The words, banal and deadpan as they were, stirred up a series of disconnected impressions in my mind – some of the component parts of a night I still couldn’t forget. Because of the way my mind works, it was mostly the sounds that stayed with me. Rafi’s breathing, harsh and shallow and with longer and longer gaps between the in-breaths. The grating laughter that was coming from his throat, welling up like blood out of the night-black void that showed when his mouth gaped open. The endless mumble and hiss of boiling water: we’d dumped Rafi into a bathtub full of ice because patches of his skin were going from red to black, but after about a minute the ice was water and the water was bubbling like a witch’s cauldron.

‘You were there?’ Paul asked, sounding – to put it politely – a little sceptical. It’s not just cops: everyone draws their lines in the sand, sooner or later, and once they’re drawn it takes a lot to shift them.

‘His girlfriend called me in the middle of the night. She heard him say my name; and it sounded like his own voice, not the voice of the thing inside him, so she found my number in the back of his diary. By the time I got there, it looked like I might already be too late, but I tried anyway.’

‘Tried what, exactly?’

‘I played him a tune.’

Paul nodded. I’d already told him over a couple of beers what it is I do for a living, and how I do it. ‘You see,’ I went on, reluctantly, ‘I was assuming it was a human spirit inside him. A ghost. I’d never even met a demon back then. So I listened for a human spirit, and when I found it I started to play it out of him. Then, about ten minutes in, I realised that what I’d dredged up was Rafi’s own soul. I was dispossessing him from his body – finishing what Asmodeus had started.

‘I tried to undo the damage I’d already done. I switched keys in mid-tune, played the opposite of what my instincts were telling me to play, in the hope that I could pull Rafi back into his own flesh. And it sort of worked.’

‘Sort of?’

I nodded bleakly. ‘Yeah, sort of. I stuck Rafi back together again – and at the same time I stuck Asmodeus to Rafi, which wasn’t part of the plan. They’ve been trapped in there together ever since. That’s why Asmodeus tends to leave me alone, most of the time – he knows he’s going to need me sooner or later if he’s ever going to get free again. He’s just waiting for me to figure out how to do it.’ I scowled, fingering one of the bruises on my shoulder. ‘Don’t know what the Hell went wrong tonight. He knew who I was, but for once he didn’t seem to give a fuck. In fact, he really seemed happy to be getting a crack at me. Like he hadn’t expected it.’

There was a long silence. I could see how a lot of this must strike Paul as total bullshit, even after what he’d seen. It would have sounded ridiculous to me, if I hadn’t lived through it: if I hadn’t lived through worse things since. All those things in Heaven and Earth that philosophy tries not to dream about.

Eventually he opened his mouth to say something, but we were interrupted by the sound of high heels on wet asphalt. Pen came out from the shadow of the building and headed over to us. I looked a question at her and she managed a weak smile.

‘He’s sleeping like a baby,’ she said.

‘Good,’ I answered. ‘From past experience, he probably won’t surface until sometime late morning. Whenever Asmodeus takes over like that, Rafi burns up a hell of a lot of energy all at once. The best thing we can do now is to let him sleep it off in his own good time.’