Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

‘Nah, I’ll take him through. You sign in first, though,’ he said to me severely. ‘This is a stupid time to be making a delivery in any case. Come on, move it up. Some of us have got work to do.’

The nurse held out a biro and I signed the day book as Frederick Cheney LaRue, a name that had stuck with me after I’d read that Woodward and Bernstein book about Watergate.

‘It’s this way,’ Paul said, ambling away along the corridor. I waved to the nurse, the helmet making the gesture look more paramilitary than civil, and followed him. I wanted to look back but made myself keep right on going: I hoped for my sake that whatever chapter Lizzie was on in her book was more interesting than a weird stranger walking in out of the night to take a movie reel to her boss.

Webb’s office was off to the right when you reached the annexe. We went left, towards the secure cells. Paul used the Judas window to check exactly where Rafi was – a touch of caution born of long experience – and then unlocked the door for me. I stepped inside, and he followed close on my heels, swinging the door to. When I looked a question at him, he shrugged. ‘How’m I going to say you had a gun on me if I’m out there keeping lookout, Castor?’

‘Fair point,’ I admitted.

Rafi was lying on a tubular steel bunk – a new addition to the cell that was in itself a vivid testimony to how much he’d changed in the last few days. When Asmodeus was in the ascendant, the cell was kept absolutely bare because you could never tell when the demon’s mood would toggle from quiescent to murderously playful. Too many staff had taken hits in the early days: Webb had made Pen sign a waiver as Rafi’s legal executor, and the cell had been reduced, as far as possible, to a featureless metal cube.

By contrast with those bad old days, right now it was looking almost cosy. In addition to the bed there was a poster on the wall – a reproduction of Van Gogh’s sunflowers – and a chest of drawers with a pencil and paper resting on top of it. Enough right there for Asmodeus to have caused some serious mayhem back in the day.

Rafi was asleep: very deeply asleep. I looked from him to Paul, who gave a grin that was almost a snarl. ‘Doctor Webb says that until we get the results of the new assessment back, Mister Ditko stays on his meds. Same times, same dosages. Of course, when he was sharing the premises, so to speak, it didn’t matter so much. He could shrug off the drugs whenever he needed to, seemed like. Now those two Temazepam he gets at nine p.m. knock him out stone-cold until morning.’

It didn’t surprise me, because that was the kind of bastard Webb was: the play-it-by-the-book and my-hands-are-tied kind. Since there was nobody to explain myself to, I did what I’d come to do without preamble. Taking out the scissors that I’d taken from the first-aid box back at the South Bank Centre, I carefully cut a lock of Rafi’s hair without waking him.

‘What d’you need his hair for?’ Paul asked me, his face registering something like disgust.

‘Sucker bait,’ I said grimly. Paul’s distaste couldn’t be anything like as great as mine: I knew the truth. It would be the last resort, I told myself. I wouldn’t use it unless everything else failed. Anyway, I probably wouldn’t even get in close enough to use it in the first place. And the timing would have to be perfect, so the chances were that I’d made this detour for nothing.

I ran through that litany three times over: it didn’t make me feel the slightest bit better.

I put the scissors in my pocket and tied the hair around the ring finger of my left hand where I couldn’t lose it. Then, self-conscious because Paul was still standing right behind me, staring at my back, I lowered myself to the floor and crossed my legs. With my head bowed and my eyes closed, I began to whistle softly.

It’s harder without an instrument, but far from impossible: back when Juliet was still mad, bad and fucking lethal to know, and was about to devour me body and soul, I’d dragged myself out of the jaws of death (actually it was a different part of death’s anatomy, but let’s not get bogged down in the technicalities) by tapping out a rhythm with my hand. Everything we ghost-breakers do is just a metaphor – visible or audible or what the hell else – for something else that’s going on inside our minds. The limits are the ones we impose on ourselves.

I whistled an old tune that has a lot of different names – one of them is ‘The Flash Lad’. It’s a highwayman ballad, meant to date all the way back to the eighteenth century, and if you listen to the lyrics it ends badly. Sweet tune, though, and it seemed to be an appropriate one for what I was trying to do.

Back when Asmodeus had first invaded Rafi’s body, I’d spectacularly failed to get a proper sense of him: that was why I’d screwed up so badly, and tied Rafi’s soul indissolubly to the demon’s essence. But I’d played my tin whistle for Rafi a hundred times since then, playing the demon down to sleep so that my friend could have a few hours’ respite from the Hell I’d bestowed on him. So I knew Asmodeus quite well by this time: knew how he felt in my fingers, how he sounded in my mind; knew the tune of him.

I teased the very edges of a summons, and I felt the demon respond. Faintly – ever so faintly – but unmistakably. Quickly I changed the rhythm and the pitch. I couldn’t just break off, but I could ease away, like a fisherman easing the tension on a line to let the fish pull free and escape. I didn’t want to face Asmodeus again in this narrow cell: very much indeed I didn’t want it. But I did want to be sure that he was there. That although the bulk of this monster’s being was embedded in the cold stones of Saint Michael’s, there was a corner of him still here in the soul of Rafael Ditko.

I had what I needed; and Rafi hadn’t even stirred. I let the tune fade down into silence and stood, wincing at a sharp pain in my left leg. It felt like I was bruised there – probably from when Gwillam and his werewolves had thrown me into the storeroom while I was unconscious.

That was when Rafi opened his eyes. For a moment or two, they didn’t focus – or maybe they focused past me, on something from his dreams that he was still seeing. Then he blinked, and something registered.

‘Fix,’ he muttered thickly.

‘Hello, Rafi,’ I said.

‘That was fucking weird. I was just talking to you.’

‘You were?’

‘Must’ve dreamed it. Everything okay?’

‘Everything’s fine, Rafi.’

He closed his eyes again, and in a second a change in the quality of his breathing made it clear that he was asleep again.

‘Thanks, Paul,’ I said, turning back to the burly nurse, who’d been watching me with a sort of glum fascination.

‘That was it? You got what you wanted?’

‘More or less. Do you carry a mobile?’

‘Sure.’

‘Can I borrow it?’

‘Okay. But it’s a piece of shit.’

He reached a big hand into his pocket and brought out a cute little silver device that he could have worn as an earring. I took it, and checked the battery charge before pocketing it.

‘And your lighter,’ I said.

Paul breathed out heavily enough for it to count as a sigh. But he handed the lighter over too.

I gave him an appraising look. ‘You want me to lock you in here or something so you look more like a victim and less like you were in on it?’ I asked him.

He made a dismissive gesture. ‘Yeah, go for it,’ he said. ‘Tell you the truth, though, I’ve been thinking of looking for another job. One where I won’t have to swallow so much bullshit. Mind how you go, Castor.’

‘Thanks, Paul. I owe you one.’

‘You owe me somewhere between six and ten. Tell me where you drink, I’ll come over some night and collect.’