Vicious Circle

21

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.

Okay, so that was the plan – if I could call it that without breaching the Trades Descriptions Act. But before I put it into action, there was one more thing I had to do. I took Paul’s mobile out and keyed in a number in the dark, using the raised bump on the number five to guide my thumb. The ring tone sounded loud in my ear – but only in my ear, thank God.

‘Emergency. Which service, please?’ A woman’s voice, brisk and impersonal.

‘Police,’ I murmured throatily.

‘Routing you through, caller.’

I waited. After ten seconds or so, the silence turned into another ring tone. A man picked up. ‘Bowater Street police station, how can I help?’

‘You can patch me through to Uxbridge Road,’ I growled.

There was a fractional pause. ‘I’m sorry, caller, I didn’t get that. How can I help?’

‘Put me through to Uxbridge Road,’ I repeated. ‘This is an emergency.’

I waited some more. This wasn’t how emergency calls were supposed to go, but I knew that the main station on any switchboard had direct lines to all of the others. If the guy tried to pump me for information, I’d just have to leave the details with him. Otherwise . . .

‘This is Uxbridge Road. Do you have a problem, sir?’

‘I’ve got a message,’ I said, ‘for Detective Sergeant Basquiat. Tell her it’s Felix Castor. Tell her I’m at Saint Michael’s church, on Du Cane Road, and that Anton Fanke is here too. Tell her to come right now – and mob-handed.’

I hung up, and put the phone away. I’d played two wild cards now, and that ought to be enough for any hand. Whatever happened next, and whatever happened to me, I took some comfort in the thought that Fanke and his religiously inverted friends were going to have a hard time getting out of the building alive and free.

I stood up, as slowly and smoothly as I could, and slipped away between the gravestones with my knees bent so that my head wouldn’t show against the skyline. For the first ten yards or so, I was in both men’s line of sight if they chanced to turn around: I was counting on the dense shadows to hide my movements and the distant traffic noises from the street to conceal any sound I might make. All the same, I went as carefully as I could, barely lifting my feet off the ground in case they came down on a twig or a discarded Coke can and gave my presence away.

Once I got far enough around for the presbytery wall to give me cover, I relaxed a little. I straightened my back and picked up speed, reaching the wall in a few nearly normal strides. Climbing it in the dark was harder than I expected, because a good foothold at the bottom could still leave me stranded and groping seven or eight feet up, pinned to the wall with my arms splayed out like Christ’s dumb understudy. Once a loose chunk of stone slid away under my foot and fell to the ground below with an audible thump: I froze in place, straining my ears for sounds of approaching footsteps, but nobody came. I resumed the climb, teeth gritted, suddenly aware that there might be razor wire or broken glass or some other bullshit at the top of the wall which I’d seen in daylight but not registered or remembered.

There wasn’t. The stones at the top were uneven, but they were wide enough for me to stand on and walk along without much difficulty. And the roof was no trouble at all: the guttering was old, of solid metal rather than UPVC, and it took my weight with a reassuring lack of give.

Leaning into the pitch of the tiles, I edged along from the back of the presbytery to the front. Now I could look around and down and see the doorway below me, a faint glow filtering out from it to light up a keystone-shaped area of gravel in pale gold. Within that lighted space, a dark blob just off-centre showed me where Fanke’s watchman was standing inside the doorway: but the man himself I couldn’t see.

There was no time for bluff, finesse or actual cleverness. All I could think of doing was to reach out and scrape the end of the gun barrel against the stone of the wall. The first time got no response, and neither did the second: traffic sounds from the street drowned out the faint noise. The third time was the charm. Below me in the dark, a darker figure stepped out and a pale face looked up. I launched myself into space.

The guy never knew what hit him, and maybe he would never wake up to find out. As I landed on top of him I struck down hard with the butt of the gun, letting gravity and momentum add their force to mine. It smacked into his skull with a solid, slightly sickening sound and he crumpled underneath me, providing me with a much softer landing than I was expecting.

Not that I stayed down for long. I rolled and came up already moving, heading along the back wall of the church towards the corner where the lych-gate was. My feet were crunching on the gravel, but I couldn’t help that: I had to assume that the man at the gate had heard me touch down and would want to know what the Hell the commotion was about.

I reached the corner of the building just as he came around it. That worked out pretty well, because I was expecting him and he wasn’t really expecting me. He wasn’t expecting the fist that slammed into his stomach, either: he folded with a strangled, truncated grunt. I spun him round with a hand on his shoulder and slammed his head into a conveniently placed tombstone once, twice, three times. After three he looked like he’d lost interest in the altercation: I let go and he slumped bonelessly to the ground.

So far, so good. I rolled him on his back, gun in my hand, to make sure he wasn’t faking it. He was deeply unconscious, his slack mouth trailing blood and saliva from one corner. There was blood on the crown of his head, too.

Well, what the hell. In the absence of the Lord, vengeance would just have to be mine.

I went to the foot of the oak tree and retrieved the film canisters, then crossed back to the presbytery door, skirting around the body of the first guard. I weighed up the idea of moving the bodies off the path, in among the graves, but a clock was ticking inside my head. In any case, the windows of the church were stained glass: nobody was going to see the downed men unless they came in through the lych-gate and walked around to enter the church from the back. And if they did that they’d have the drop on me already.

I listened for a moment at the door, then slipped inside. The presbytery itself was empty, as I’d expected it to be. I crossed to the other door, which led into the church. It stood open. A distant murmur of voices came through it, and the clop-clop-whisper of soft but echoing footsteps, but from this vantage point there was nothing to see: the chancel was deserted, as I’d hoped it would be. With luck, whatever was happening in there was taking place in the nave close to the high altar.

There was a carpet in the vestry, for soft, priestly feet: before stepping out into the chancel, I kicked off my shoes. I didn’t want the excellent acoustics of Saint Michael’s to betray me before I had a chance to set my stall out.

The stone was so cold I almost gave myself away even more embarrassingly, by yelling out. It felt like some parasitic plant of the frozen tundra was growing up through the soles of my feet into my trembling legs. I regretted taking off the shoes now, but it was too late for that.

I stole along the chancel to the big box junction where it met the main drag of the nave. The light was coming from one end of the cavernous space – the altar end, as I’d guessed: Satanists are all about transgression, bless their little hearts. They’re so fucking predictable it’s not even funny. So where I was, there was a fair amount of deep shadow, and I felt reasonably confident that if I peered round the angle of the wall I wouldn’t be seen.

They were still setting up. The robed figures were moving chairs around to make a broad, bare space just below the altar. One of them – Fanke himself, judging by the red robes that Peace had already described to me – was on his knees in the centre of the space, and a scratching, rasping sound gave me a strong hint as to what he was doing: drawing the vicious circle.

So one way and another, the kiddies were all entertained. If they’d already started intoning and dancing in a ring, I’d have fired a warning shot into somebody’s back and gone in like thunder – an action replay of Peace’s moment of glory the week before – but as it was I took the time to set up my little ace in the hole. I went down on all fours: or rather on all threes, because I was hugging the film canisters to my chest with my left arm, tightly enough so they couldn’t bang against each other and give me away. I crab-scuttled out of the shadows of the chancel and across to the nearest row of pews, sliding in among them with as little sound as I could manage. Then I set down my burden with elaborate caution, and unpacked.

As already noted, old movie film is pretty much the most flammable thing on Earth. With a Molotov cocktail you need a bottle, a piece of rag, all sorts of paraphernalia. Movie film just burns, turning instantly into boiling plastic, searing smoke and blue-white flame like the flame of a dirty blowtorch: drop a match on it and you’d better be somewhere else when it hits.

By way of a fuse I used a votive candle which I’d picked up from the floor on my way down the transept: it was one of the ones that had rolled and scattered when I’d knocked over the table the night before. The thing was an inch and a half thick, but I broke it in my hands, muffling the sound inside my jacket, and pulled away the solid, almost translucent chunks of it to leave the shiny rigid wand of the wick itself – a makeshift taper, stiff and saturated with solid wax.

The nature of the sounds I was hearing from the front of the church had changed now. The footsteps had ceased, and a rhythmic chanting had begun. I hoped that the Satanist liturgy was as prolix as the regular one: I needed a couple of minutes more.

I slid the canisters open, found the ends of the films and hauled out a foot or so of each, which I tied together like the five intertwined tails of the rat king in the old folk legend. I slid the lower end of my taper in among them, balanced so that it stood nearly upright, then lit the business end. It burned brightly at first, then started to fade almost at once as the chill and the hate locked in the stones began to focus on the little point of light. I watched it with glowering suspicion for a moment or two, but it steadied. I couldn’t be sure that it would last long enough to burn all the way down to the film, but it was the best I could do.

A single voice had risen up above the murmured responses of the acolytes: Fanke’s voice, low and thrilling and solemn. I was expecting some bit of late-medieval guff about how Lucifer is a good old boy and he’d just love to reach out and touch you, but this sounded older – and my Classical Greek gives out after ‘Which way to the bathroom?’ and ‘I want mine with retsina.’

‘Aberamenthô oulerthexa n axethreluo ôthnemareba,’ Fanke boomed out, his voice rising now both in pitch and volume. ‘Iaô Sabaôth Iaeô pakenpsôth pakenbraôth sabarbatiaôth sabarbatianê sabarbaphai. Satana. Beelzebub. Asmode.’

I couldn’t have picked a better time to make my entrance. Standing up in the cheap seats, I fired one shot at the ceiling, and the noise roared around the room like the voice of God. The Satanists spun round with their mouths hanging open, and Fanke faltered in his recitation. I stepped out into the aisle, levelling the gun at his chest.

‘Hey, Anton,’ I said, strolling unhurriedly towards him. ‘Steve. Dylan. Whatever the fuck you call yourself tonight. How’s it hanging? I know how this one ends, if you’re interested. The next words are “I surrender”. And then you turn around, put your hands on the altar rail and assume the position.’

The acolytes backed away from me on either side. The last time they’d faced a self-righteous nutcase with a gun they’d found themselves transformed from chorus line to moving targets, and that experience seemed to have left its mark. Fanke stood his ground, though, and the look on his face didn’t change, except to add an overlay of sneering contempt to the cold superiority that was already there. That got my goat a little.

‘Step away from the circle,’ I said, close enough now so that I didn’t have to raise my voice. I tried to keep the stooges in my peripheral vision in case they went through their pockets and found out where they’d left their balls. But the first bullet was for Fanke in any case: and the second, third and fourth, if it came to that.

He didn’t move. He was standing a little stiffly, his left shoulder a little higher than his right. I remembered him giving that spastic jerk when Peace had fired his second shot: Fanke had taken a bullet, either in the shoulder itself or high up on his right arm. But he was a trouper, and the show had to go on.

‘Castor,’ he said, with pitying condescension. ‘I gave you your life. True, I took away from you a great many other things, but still the overall balance, I thought, was maintained. Yet here you are. And perhaps, after all, it’s fitting that you should be here to welcome my lord Asmodeus when he comes.’

‘He missed his train,’ I snapped. ‘He said to send his love. Now step away from the fucking circle, Fanke, or I swear on my sainted mother’s grave I am putting enough holes through you so I can see the deposition of Christ in that central panel behind you.’

‘No.’ Fanke shook his head, lowering his gaze to the ground as if he was meditating on human folly. ‘You’re not. Patience?’ I took this last word to be a piece of supercilious advice, until a woman’s voice from off to my left answered shakily: ‘Yes, magister?’

‘Tell Mister Castor how many sacrifices we’ve got lined up for this evening.’

‘Thr-three, magister. There are three.’

‘And what’s the order of play?’

‘First the chi-the spirit. The spirit already dedicated. Then the demon. Last, the woman.’

Eyes left, just momentarily, and with my finger tense on the trigger so that if Fanke moved at all I could still cut loose at him. That quick glance was enough to confirm what I already more or less knew. The woman who was speaking was the woman who I’d met a few days ago in my office – the woman with the badly bruised face, who’d been introduced to me as Melanie Torrington. Then I was looking at Fanke again, and he raised his eyes to meet my gaze.

He wasn’t smug, exactly. His expression said that he didn’t think it was any great feat to out-think me.

‘I wanted to be sure this time,’ he murmured. ‘The child’s spirit ought to complete the summoning, and free my dread lord from this . . . place. But just in case, I thought it would be best to have a Hecateum – a three-way offering, covering living and dead, male and female, spirit and flesh.’

I took another step towards him and actually poked the barrel of the gun into his chest. This time he gave, slightly, and his back bumped against the altar rail. I was gratified to have got some kind of reaction out of him at last.

‘Show me,’ I suggested.

‘No. Put the gun away.’

I held his gaze and said it again, with a very final emphasis. ‘Show me. Or you and me are both going to Hell a little earlier than we expected.’

Fanke turned to glance across at the woman. ‘Bring them forward,’ he said, the command sounding as negligent and world-weary as he could make it. He’d seen in my eyes that I was ready to shoot, and he’d changed his mind about bluffing me. That was something.

There was a bustle of activity as robed figures ran to do his bidding. If I were going to join a cult, I’d want to go in at officer level: there’s fuck-all job satisfaction at the bottom of the tree.

I followed the proceedings out of the corner of my eye. Pen and Juliet weren’t even in another room, they were just in the shadows under the pulpit, laid side by side on the ground. Juliet was still in her coma/trance/whatever state, and didn’t react at all as she was carried forward and laid down just behind and to the right of Fanke. Pen was bound, gagged, conscious and mad as Hell. She managed to kick one Satanist in a part he’d probably already consecrated to the Dark Lord: he doubled up with an unmanly yelp and dropped her legs. Two other men stepped in and completed the task of hauling her out for my inspection. They laid her down to Fanke’s left-hand side, so that from my point of view he was bookended by comely hostages.

Then, with a consummate sense of theatre, he held out his clenched fist to me as if in salute, before opening it wide to show Peace’s locket – on a new chain – dangling from his index finger. ‘Veni, puella,’ he murmured. Abbie’s ghost materialised around his hand, very abruptly, looking startled and terrified. She cast her glance from side to side, from face to face, taking in the massed ranks of the Satanists surrounding her, and me facing her across the magic circle. On me her gaze rested for longest, big and wide and full of hate.

‘I don’t lie for effect, Castor,’ Fanke said, speaking to me through her translucent body. ‘I lie to achieve specific goals. In this case, as you can see, I’ve told the truth. Now put the gun down – unless you think that my death is a fair exchange for Pamela’s. Because my death is all you can hope to achieve: the ceremony will go on, and will be completed, in any case.’

‘Where’s your male?’ I demanded, still buying seconds.

Fanke actually smiled. ‘I don’t have one,’ he admitted. ‘I’d decided to use your zombie friend – Nicholas Heath. Yes, I know about him. I know everything there is to know about your life: I’ve been close to you for a long time, after all. But when my people went to fetch the zombie, they found this other creature, and I yielded to temptation. My lord doesn’t favour the succubi. There’s something appropriate about feeding one of that kindred to the flame to set him free.’

His eyes stared into mine, mocking and malevolent: the eyes of a man who was damn sure he was holding all the cards.

‘A male would still be useful,’ he said, ‘for the sake of balance. But it’s up to you. You can play out this film noir pantomime, if you like. Or you can take Pamela Bruckner’s place and die inside our circle. I’ll allow that. If you put the gun down right now, and apologise to me for your disrespect.’

I hesitated. He was lying, of course, but then time was what I was playing for here on a lot of different levels.

‘Where’s Nicky now?’ I demanded, buying a few more seconds. I guessed the wax on that candle was thicker than I’d thought; I guessed Basquiat hadn’t called in to check her messages; I guessed my luck was running pretty much true to form, after all.

Fanke frowned. ‘Your dead friend, I believe, is still extant,’ he said. ‘But the details get a little abstruse. He locked himself into a room on the first floor of the cinema. When my people tried to open the door—’ He stopped, seeing I was grinning. ‘Well, perhaps you already know about his security arrangements. I lost a number of valued colleagues, without managing to smoke the zombie out of his hole. But the succubus made a more than acceptable substitute. Hiring you was the best decision I ever made, Castor. At the time I thought I was just keeping things in the family – but it brought so many incidental benefits. But now we’re delaying proceedings, and they’ve been delayed too long already. Please – your decision.’

Fanke was looking at me expectantly, and I could see in his eyes that – unlike me – he hadn’t had to bluff at all. He was going to see this through, even if it meant me rearranging his innards with the aid of hollow-point ammunition. One way or another, the show was going to go on.

Trying to ignore Abbie, whose dead gaze still skewered me, I nodded.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let Pen go, give her five minutes to get clear, and then I’ll hand over the gun.’

‘No,’ said Fanke tersely. ‘You hand over the gun now, and you accept my word that she won’t be harmed. No more procrastinations. Decide.’

I waited in vain for an explosion from the back pews, or for a hammering on the knocker and a ‘This is the police!’ from the church’s main doors. The silence, in which Asmodeus’s hostile attention was like a raw overlay of subliminal hypersonics, remained unbroken.

After a long pause, and just as Fanke opened his mouth to speak again – to his subordinates, not to me, because his head snapped round to face them – I turned the gun in my hand and held it out to him, butt first. He gave a nod, quietly satisfied, and took it. Then he passed it on to a tall, cadaverous acolyte who appeared at his shoulder.

‘And the apology?’ Fanke asked, looking round at me again like a coaxing schoolmaster who doesn’t want to have to resort to the cane.

‘You’ll have to whistle for that,’ I said. ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you? If not, I can teach you.’

He gave me the coldest smile I’ve ever seen.

‘Grip, keep the gun trained on Mister Castor,’ he said, ‘and bring him to the circle. In fact, have someone pass a loop of piano wire around his throat, too, to make sure he stays exactly where he’s put. He has the look of a man who wants to go back on his word.’

The robed minions closed in on all sides, finding their courage all of a sudden, and a great many hands were laid on me. I was manhandled to the edge of the circle, which I saw clearly now for the first time. It seemed to be identical to the ruined one I’d seen in the Quaker hall, but this one was complete, uninterrupted by any chewed-up arc of pulped floorboards. In fact, this one was drawn on stone – and drawn with the tip of a knife blade, rather than in paint or chalk. Various half-formed schemes that had been forming in the forefront of my mind got discouraged and left.

The man Fanke had called Grip shoved the gun into the small of my back more emphatically than was necessary, and kept it there while another robed figure – a tall, heavy-set woman – passed a loop of piano wire very carefully around my neck. The care was for her own fingers: as soon as it was in place she pulled it tight, and I felt it bite into the flesh below my Adam’s apple. The two free ends of the wire had been tied around wooden blocks: she held one in each hand, like a paramedic with the charged plates of a defibrillator, but what she was actually holding was, in effect, the drawstring of a guillotine. If I moved from this spot, my head was going to stay right where it was while my body did its best to make shift without it.

Fanke walked around the circle to stand opposite me. Abbie went with him, dangling weightlessly in the air, his clenched fist wrapped around where her heart would have been if she were alive and still had one. Her confusion and fear were terrible to see.

The solemn-faced robed acolytes – except for Grip and the woman with the piano wire – took their stations all around in a wider circle that extended from the altar rail to the ragged heap of displaced chairs and to the aisle on either side. There were more of them than I’d thought: at least forty. Some of them must have come in through the main doors after the rest had set up shop and opened up for them: that explained why I hadn’t seen Pen and Juliet being brought in. One of them was the little doctor with the Scottish accent who’d given me my tetanus shots after I’d passed out in Pen’s hallway.

The crucified Christ stared down at us, looking uncertain about the whole proceeding.

‘I’d prefer to start with you,’ Fanke said, without animosity. ‘Like Pamela, you’re a little out of place here. In many ways, you’re beneath the dignity of the occasion. But the child’s spirit must be sundered. That won’t wait. To attempt any other sacrifice before the one that raised my lord is concluded would be unwise. So you’ll have to wait your turn, Castor. And you’ll have to watch your efforts and machinations come to nothing before you’re allowed to slink away into death. This isn’t cruelty on my part, you understand. Just . . . logistics.’

‘Well, if it’s just logistics, I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I was starting to think you didn’t like me.’ The piano wire tightened fractionally around my throat.

‘Marmarauôth marmarachtha marmarachthaa amarda maribeôth,’ Fanke said, in a sing-song voice. The acolytes came in on the chorus. ‘Satana! Beelzebub! Asmode!’ They threw out their hands, then drew them in and clasped them together in what was clearly a ritual gesture.

‘Iattheoun iatreoun salbiouth aôth aôth sabathiouth iattherath Adônaiai isar suria bibibe bibiouth nattho Sabaoth aianapha amourachthê. Satana. Beelzebub. Asmode.’ More hand-wringing. An acolyte at Fanke’s left held out a candle, and one on his right lit it with a taper. Fanke took it in his left hand without dropping a syllable. ‘Ablanathanalba, aeêiouô, iaeôbaphrenemoun. Aberamenthô oulerthexa n axethreluo ôthnemareba.’ Even though most of the room was already steeped in darkness, the area around us seemed to be getting darker still. I made the mistake of looking up, as though the church had some internal sun that was being eclipsed. Something hung above us in the gloom – something like black smoke, except that it was shot through with branching filaments of deeper dark like veins and capillaries. It was spreading out from a point twenty feet above Fanke’s head, and it was descending towards us. Or rather towards Abbie, who saw it coming and struggled like a fly in a web, her thrashing movements buying her no headway at all. ‘Please!’ she whispered. ‘Oh please!’

He looks a lot smaller in the medieval woodcuts, but I knew who it was that we were looking at: Asmodeus, coalescing out of the stone in answer to Fanke’s summons. The cold came with him, concentrating around us with such suddenness and intensity that I felt the skin on my face stretch taut.

Fanke held the locket up in his right hand, on a level with the candle flame. ‘Phôkensepseu earektathou misonktaich,’ he said. ‘Uesemmeigadôn Satana. Uesemmeigadôn Beelzebub. Uesemmeigadôn Asmode, Asmode atheresphilauô.’

He brought his hands together to let the locket meet the flame. Or at least he tried to: but it didn’t come. Abbie dug her heels into nothing and strained backwards against him, and although his hand trembled like a struck lightning rod, for a moment it didn’t move. His right arm was the injured one – the one where Peace had shot him – and I’d seen before that his movements with that hand and arm were stiff and jerky. Maybe that gave the desperate ghost some hint of purchase. Whatever it was, Fanke was startled: he turned to glare at her and pulled harder. His wrist spasmed once, twice, and began to move again.

But before the locket and the flame could touch, I thrust out my own hand and put my ring finger into the candle’s corona. Rafi’s hair, which was still tied there in a tight loop knot, singed and sizzled.

‘Amen,’ I growled, gritting my teeth against the pain so it looked like I was enjoying a private joke.

The piano wire tightened further around my throat, and the church exploded.