Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

‘My point exactly,’ I agreed.

‘And I want you to be tied to the chair because it makes some of the things I’m about to do to you that much easier.’

‘Look,’ I began, ‘as a concerned citizen, I’m really happy to cooperate with any–’ But Gwillam must have given some kind of signal to his team that I didn’t catch. Po’s massive clawed hand closed around my throat and he hauled me unceremoniously over to the chair, slammed me down and held me in position. Zucker and Sallis made busy with the ropes. They were enthusiastic amateurs where knots were concerned, but they made up in quantity what they lacked in real finesse.

While they worked, Gwillam brought up another chair and placed it opposite me. Then, when they stood back respectfully from the finished job, he nodded a curt acknowledgement to them. ‘Sallis,’ he said, ‘you’re with me. Mister Zucker, after your recent exertions you and Mister Po might wish to avail yourselves of the chapel.’

‘Thank you, father,’ Zucker said, and the two of them turned on their heels and walked away into the darkness. Po looked over his shoulder at me: he bared way, way too many teeth. Sallis went over to the wall and sat down with his back to it, the gun not exactly pointed at me but still ready in his hand.

‘Is that a euphemism of some kind?’ I asked Gwillam.

He shot me a look of genuine surprise.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We have a field chapel wherever we set up, Castor. Our faith is very important to us.’

‘Your former faith.’

Gwillam quirked one eyebrow. He didn’t look upset, though: the barb didn’t have quite as much sting as I’d expected it to.

‘Do you know how many Catholics there are in the world, Castor?’ he asked me.

‘Before you and your pals got their marching orders, or afterwards?’

‘There are more than a billion. Seventeen per cent of the world’s population. Five hundred million in the Americas alone.

‘So the Holy Father must of necessity be a statesman as well as a religious leader. He has to play the games of men, and of nations. And sometimes that means he has to balance small injustices against larger gains.’

‘Meaning?’

‘The Anathemata Curialis was given a massive appropriation of funds just before the death of John Paul II. Then his successor, Benedict XVI, ordered us to disband or face excommunication. The two actions are best seen as the diastolic and systolic beats of a heart. The Church has disowned us, but it has not ceased to wish us well.’

‘Even though you use werewolves as field agents? How broad is your brief, Gwillam? I’m just curious.’

He knelt down, picked up the black bag and put it up on the coffee table. He snapped it open and rummaged inside. I hadn’t forgotten the bag: in fact, it was fair to say that it was preying on my mind a little.

‘Our brief,’ Gwillam said, ‘is narrow and exact. We fight the last war. We’re Heaven’s skirmishers, sent into the enemy’s heartlands to gauge his strength and harry his forces as he attempts to deploy them.’

‘The enemy being . . . ?’

‘Hell, of course.’

He took from the bag, one by one, a disposable hypodermic, a bubble-pack with a small snap-in vial of some straw-yellow substance, a larger bottle of clear liquid and an unopened pack of surgical swabs. ‘The rising of the dead,’ he said, looking me full in the eyes with the deadly calm of the fanatic, ‘was the opening of hostilities. Hell is on the move against Heaven, in every sphere, in every nation of Earth. It was forseen, and it was foretold. We were not taken by surprise. But there were those in the Church who wouldn’t accept the evidence of their own eyes.’

Gwillam smiled bleakly. I got the impression that he was remembering specific conversations; specific clashes of wills and words. ‘They forgot their duty of stewardship,’ he said gently. ‘They became too ensconced in the comforts of the world, and forgot that the world must always and ever be a forge. You do not sit comfortably by God’s fire: you are plunged into it, and are shaped and made by it.

‘You seem to think, Castor, that there’s some contradiction between the battle we wage and the tools we use. There isn’t. We fight against the demons who are Satan’s generals in the field – and we avail ourselves of whatever weapons God places in our hands. If faithful Catholics return from the dead not because they conspired with the Adversary but because the rules of engagement have changed, then we will not turn our backs on them. Po and Zucker have suffered much, and they have turned their suffering to good account. I number them among my most trusted officers.’

He counted off the items on the table, pointing at each with his index finger, as if to satisfy himself that he had everything he needed. Then he nodded, satisfied, and stared at me again.

‘Where is Abbie Torrington?’ he asked me.

‘In a police morgue in Hendon.’

Gwillam blinked, once, twice. ‘I don’t mean her shell,’ he said, with the closest thing to heat I’d ever seen from him. ‘I mean her true self. Her spirit. As you of all people must appreciate.’

Me of all people? I let that one pass.

‘Her soul is in a locket,’ I said. ‘Made of gold. Shaped like a heart. Her father took it from her neck just after she died. I think it has a lock of her hair inside it, and I think that that’s what she’s clinging to. And Fanke has it now: he took it from Peace’s body after he killed him at the Oriflamme on Castlebar Hill.’

‘And where is Fanke?’

‘I don’t know. Gwillam, if you can see that Abbie’s ghost is the same thing as her soul, then how in fuck’s name can you talk about destroying it?’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Isn’t that what we do?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t that exactly the power that was given to us?’

‘We?’ I don’t know why that came as a shock: it was pretty much on the cards, given that he was the one the Anathemata had chosen to head up this mission. ‘You’re an exorcist?’

He nodded curtly. ‘That was how I knew that God had chosen me to fight in His cause.’

‘Funny,’ I said. ‘That was how I knew I’d never have to work on a building site. What do you use? A fragment of the True Cross?’

Gwillam looked at me reflectively. His hand slid into his breast pocket, and it came out holding a small book bound in black leather.

‘The Bible,’ he said. ‘This Bible. I read aloud – words and phrases taken at random from different verses. The words of God make a cage for the souls of sinners – as you would expect.’ He put the book away. ‘I told you, Castor. I’m a soldier. If I could save the child, then I would save her: but I can’t and won’t allow her soul to become the mechanism through which Hell’s mightiest general is unleashed upon the world. The ritual that was used here requires the sacrifice of body and soul: therefore without the girl’s soul, it can’t be completed. Now, I ask you again, for the second time: where is Fanke?’

‘I don’t have the faintest idea,’ I said. It was true, as far as it went: I didn’t know where Fanke was right then. I was pretty sure I knew where he was going to turn up at some point in the very near future, but I was keeping that little nugget to myself. Maybe Gwillam was the best chance I had of dropping a spanner into Fanke’s good works: but at the expense of Abbie’s soul? It couldn’t be done that way. Not if I was going to be able to look in the mirror afterwards.

Gwillam nodded to Sallis, who stepped up beside me. He tucked his gun into a holster strapped across his chest under his jacket and took a double handful of my hair, pulling my head back as far as he could. I tensed against him, but standing over me like that he could exert a lot more leverage than I could. Unhurriedly, Gwillam uncorked the large bottle and poured some of its contents onto one of the surgical swabs. The pungent smell of some strong disinfectant filled the air. Gwillam carefully swabbed the area where my shoulder and throat met, then threw the used swab down on the table.