The Devil You Know

Twenty-five

YOU MOVE ON. YOU MOVE BACK. ON BECAUSE YOU’RE always getting older, back because there’s always a set of habits and routines to catch you and suck you back in when your guard is down.

Before that happened, or before it finished happening, I borrowed Pen’s car and drove over to the Charles Stanger Care Facility in the early hours of a Sunday morning. I parked up, skirted the front door, and walked on around into the formal gardens. The place was as quiet as it ever gets, at least from this perspective. No screams or weeping to be heard; no rushes, charges, or scuffles. Just the flowers waving in the moonlight, the furious barking of a distant dog, and an occasional moth trying unsuccessfully to immolate itself on a twenty-five-watt solar-powered garden light.

I chose a bench and sat down. Then, for a while, I just waited, letting the mood sink into me, and finding the closest approximation to it in the key of D. When I thought I knew what I was doing, I took out my whistle and started to play.

It was another Clarke that I held in my hands, but not an Original. For whimsical reasons connected with turning over a new leaf, I’d gone for a green Sweetone. I hadn’t trained my mouth to it yet, though, and I was also still stiff from the wound I’d taken to the shoulder when Juliet sank her claws into me on the Mercedes, so the rendition of “Henry Martin” I launched into probably sounded a little wobbly and wild, rough enough, in fact, so that I was afraid it might not work at all. I played it through all the way, careful not to raise my head until I’d reached “. . .and all of her merry men drowned.”

When I did finally look up, they were there—the three little ghosts with their pale, solemn faces, the oldest about thirteen, the youngest not more than ten. Two of them were neat and clean in 1940s school uniforms, berets and all. The third wore a torn blouse and rumpled skirt with stains like leaf moss across the front.

Now that I had their attention, I played a different tune, a quicker one with a jauntier and more complex rhythm. It wasn’t a tune that had a name, particularly, or one that I’d ever heard before. It was a musical incision into reality, at a slightly different angle to the tunes I usually played. They listened silently and attentively.

When it was done, they exchanged a glance that cut me out entirely, as it cut out all the living. Then, all at the same time, as if at some signal I couldn’t hear, they ran. Across the gardens, through the boles of trees, through the distant wire mesh of the fence, over the eight lanes of the North Circular, and on out of sight.

I couldn’t do for them what Rosa had done for Snezhna because I didn’t know what it was, besides the fear and indignity of their deaths, that kept them tied to the Earth. But I could set them free to this extent, so that now they could at least choose what place they haunted.

Fuck knows, it was little enough.

And later still, I was back in Harlesden, sorting through the mail again—which, since it was a solstice thing, meant that about half a year had passed. Quiet outside, because it was after midnight. The breath of cherry blossom coming in through the open window, like news from another world. I was sitting with my feet up on the dwarf filing cabinet, a glass of whisky at my elbow, and a sense in my heart of what passes with me for peace.

The immediate trigger for that feeling wasn’t the whisky. It was a letter from Rosa Alanovich, now back in Oktyabrskiy and apparently doing very well for herself as the proprietor of a small grocery store. The payout she’d got from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board had been insultingly small, but only by British standards. In the wilds of Primorsk, it was serious stake money—and Rosa had hit the ground running.

So I was miles away, and my guard was so far down it was nonexistent. Then in an instant, the freshness of the cherry was cut wide open by a hot, miasmic stink of fox, which in another instant was refracted into a thousand shades of unbearable sweetness. My head came up, and my feet crashed down as though a celestial puppet master leaning forward out of the sky had tugged hard and sharp on my strings.

She stood beside the open window, her hair lifted slightly by a cool spring breeze. She was naked and, as before, her terrible beauty stirred me and cowed me in equal measure. For a long time we regarded each other in silence. The smell faded instead of building, which gave me hope she wasn’t hunting that night; but just in case, I didn’t move. Succubi react to a running man as cats do to a running mouse.

“I was summoned for a specific task,” Juliet said at last, her incredible shot-silk voice caressing me like the flat of a razor blade.

I nodded. I knew damn well what that task was.

“And I can’t go back home until I finish it.”

There was no way I’d get to the door before she got to me, and the only thing at hand that would be any use as a weapon was the whisky bottle. I let my hand fall on it, as casually as I could.

The moment stretched.

“It never occurred to me before,” Juliet said, “that failure would bring such extensive benefits. But then—while I wore the chain, failure wasn’t an option. I really ought to thank you for that.”

I shook my head. It was meant to indicate that unbinding demons was all part of the Castor service, and that no thanks were needed or expected. Of course, I realized numbly, home for Juliet was Hell—or at any rate, a place for which Hell was the only word we had. It probably wasn’t a place that anyone ever got nostalgic about.

“So I need something else to occupy my time,” Juliet finished. “And I believe the job that you do would suit me well. But clearly there are rules, and some of them will be alien to me. So I’ve come here looking for instruction—you being the only human I’ve met who’s still alive.”

It took me a while to get a coherent answer out, because first I had to run what I’d just heard through my internal logic circuits, many of which had shorted out at the first sight of her.

“Work experience,” was what I managed to say after a pause that stretched out almost to breaking point. “You want a work-experience placement.”

“If that’s what it’s called, yes. To work with you. To watch you. To learn how it’s done.”

I sat down again, slowly and carefully, so that I wouldn’t fall over and so that there wouldn’t be any sudden movements that might make her change her mind and eviscerate me.

“Okay,” I said. “Yeah. Yes. I’m prepared to—take you on. It’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative. But—if you don’t mind me asking this—could you please put some clothes on? Because I need some blood to be in my brain. Otherwise I’m probably going to lose consciousness.”

Juliet quirked an eyebrow, glancing down at my agonizing erection where it tented the cloth of my trousers as if she was noticing it for the first time.

“Sorry,” she said, and without there being any interval of time or any sense of movement, she was dressed in the outfit that she’d worn when I’d first met her—the black shirt, the black leather trousers, the ice-pick heels.

It was an impressive ensemble, and it did the job. But did it—just maybe—lack the proper sense of professional gravitas?

I sat back in my chair, frowning judiciously as I rubbed the line of my chin with forefinger and thumb. After a moment or so, inspiration came.

“I’ve got this trench coat,” I told her. “One careful owner.”