Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

‘The Jerusalem in Britton Street would be a good bet.’

‘Okay. I’ll see you there.’

I let myself out, remembering to ditch the film canister under Rafi’s bunk so it would look like I’d made my delivery. The thing about lying is that it gets to be a habit, like anything else.

And then you have to remind yourself to stop.

The great thing about riding a motorbike at stupid, reckless speed through the streets of a busy city at night is that it stops you from thinking about anything very much else. If you let your mind stray for more than a second or so, you’re likely to end up attached so intimately to a wall that nothing short of a scraper and a bucket will get you off again.

That almost didn’t stop me, though. I was in a weird state of mind, keyed up for a fight that might never happen – or that might already be over. If Fanke had gone ahead and completed his summoning ritual, then Abbie’s soul had been struck like a match and used up to light Asmodeus’s way into the world of men – after two unscheduled stopovers in Rafi Ditko and Saint Michael’s church. Or if Fanke had set up his kit at Saint Michael’s but been interrupted by Gwillam and his hairy Catholic apostates, then probably the Satanists were all dead by now – the upside – but Abbie would have been exorcised by the people who thought of themselves as the good guys – the downside. Either way, she was gone for ever and the promise I’d made to Peace was blowing in the wind along with the answers to Bob Dylan’s coy little riddles.

No, the only hope here, the only way I could make the smallest difference, was if Fanke hadn’t started the ritual yet and the Anathemata didn’t know where it was going to happen. I had to hope both that the logistics of Satanism were more complicated than they seemed to be from the outside and that I’d passed out before Gwillam’s needle had loosened my tongue too far.

I rode straight past Saint Michael’s so I could look it over without committing myself. No lights on, and no sign of life: either it was all over or the fun hadn’t started yet. Or maybe Fanke just preferred to work in the dark, which would make a certain kind of sense.

I ditched the bike three blocks up and walked back, the bundle of film canisters under one arm and the other hand in the pocket of the leather jacket, gripping the gun hard. Despair would make me weak, so I tried to turn what I was feeling into anger – which brought problems of its own in terms of planning ahead and keeping a clear perspective on things.

It had to be here. If it hadn’t already happened, this was where Fanke was going to come. What I had to do was to stop him before he succeeded in raising Asmodeus: before he spread the psychic poison that the congregants of Saint Michael’s had already swallowed to the city as a whole – and before he consumed the soul of Abbie Torrington.

I put my chances pretty high: right up there with a white Christmas, the Second Coming and the Beatles (living and dead) getting together again.

The lych-gate of the church was locked, as always. I took a quick look up and down the street to see if anyone was staking the place out, then shinnied over it and dropped down into the graveyard beyond. On a moonless night, and with the church itself still mantled in darkness, there was enough natural cover here so that I didn’t need to worry too much about stealth. I just circled around to a position from which I could watch the presbytery without being seen myself.

Sitting under the ancient oak, with my back against its broad trunk, I settled in for the long haul. But as it turned out, my threadbare patience wasn’t tested very much at all. Barely an hour after I’d arrived, the clanking of a chain drew my attention from the church back to the gate. It was followed a second or so later by the grinding clack of a bolt-cutter biting through thick steel. The gate swung open and three figures stepped silently through. One of them threw the chain and padlock negligently down on the ground, just inside the gate.

I was completely hidden where I sat by the deep shadows under the tree and by the unrelieved blackness of the night. Not only was it dark of the moon but it was a clear night, so there were no clouds to bounce back the muddied radiance of the street lights. Contrary to popular belief, there isn’t much that you can see by starlight.

Two of the three men – at least, their height suggested they were men – went on around to the vestry door: the third stationed himself at the gate, either on guard duty or maybe carrying out some more ceremonial function.

The men had brought crowbars with them, but they didn’t need them because the vestry door was still hanging on one hinge from Juliet’s assault on it the night before. They pushed it all the way open and stepped inside.

By this time, more people were filing silently in through the gate, past the man on watch. Some of them were carrying sports bags or shoulder bags: one carried slung across his back a long case of some kind that looked as though it could contain a fishing rod. It was a regular field-and-stream meet, to judge by appearances.

I counted about two dozen of them in all as they trickled past in twos and threes over the next ten minutes or so. They must have been staggering their arrival so that anybody passing in the street would be less likely to pay them any attention. It had probably been the same drill the week before, at the Quaker meeting house. Discretion is the watchword of the modern necromancer: mustn’t upset the neighbours or you’ll never be invited back. I wondered, fleetingly, what sort of people thought it was a great idea to spend their weekends murdering children to hasten the rule of Hell on Earth, but I gave it up pretty quickly. The less I knew about them the better I liked it.

Fanke himself, when he arrived, was unmistakable. It wasn’t that his build was so distinctive: it was the fawning servility of the men who walked at his side, or rather a couple of paces behind him on either hand, and the way the guard on the gate bowed low as he passed. He didn’t deign to notice this act of self-abasement: he sailed on by, his arrogance ringing him like a visible halo. I fingered the gun again. If I’d been sure that Fanke’s death would have stopped the ritual, and if I’d had more confidence in my aim, I would have emptied the clip at him. But it would have been depressing to do that and miss, and then to have to watch while the bastards got their infernal groove on. No, the gun was more useful in my hands as a deterrent than as an actual weapon: so long as I didn’t use it, nobody would guess what a lousy shot I was.

When the last few stragglers had made their way inside, the guard on the gate pulled it to and tied it off with a short length of rope, or maybe wire – from my vantage point I couldn’t quite see. I was hoping and expecting him to join his friends at the altar, but he didn’t. He leaned against the wall, peering out into the street through the crack where the gate hung slightly loose on its new moorings. Glancing across towards the presbytery, I thought I saw the faintest hint of movement in the darkness just inside the doorway. Then the lights went on in the nave and the man standing there was outlined clearly.

Two guards. No clear line of sight between them, but I couldn’t approach either one without revealing my position to the other. And I really didn’t want Fanke knowing I was there before I was ready to face him. So I had to take these guys out, quietly, without raising an alarm inside the church – and I had to do it fast, before the ritual got too far along to be stopped.

I considered a few variations on thrown stones and improvised diversions before I finally noticed that there was a way up onto the presbytery roof. From where I was, I could carry on around to the far right, shinny up onto the far wall of the cemetery and from there onto the sloping slates. If they took my weight, I could get in close to the guy in the doorway without the one at the gate seeing me coming.