Vicious Circle (5 page)

I turned around with my arms up ready to defend myself against a renewed attack, but whatever was happening to Rafi now had made him forget all about me. He was still lying on the ground where he’d fallen, and another ululating howl of pain and desolation was pouring without pause out of his gaping mouth. It was as if my punch hadn’t registered with him at all: whatever was hurting him, I could see it had nothing to do with me.

Paul knelt down beside Rafi and felt his pulse. He rolled Rafi’s eyelids back and inspected his eyes, then extended the examination to gums and teeth, which was a risk I wouldn’t have taken myself. Rafi kept on howling, directly into Paul’s face: he seemed to have forgotten our existence.

Two more male nurses loomed over us, looking down at Rafi as if they were wondering where it might be safe to take ahold of him. Paul glanced up, saw them, and pointed into the cell. “Karen,” he shouted over Rafi’s inhuman keening. “She’s still inside. Get her out of there.” They snapped to attention like soldiers, turned around and went into the cell.

From where I was kneeling I had a good view through the doorway. I saw the two men kneel beside the fallen nurse, one of them touching a hand to her forehead. Then I saw her move, flinching away from the touch. She was hurt, maybe badly hurt, but she wasn’t dead. Caught between relief and delayed shock, I felt a sickly floating sensation rise inside me, filling me like sour gas: I doubled over and threw up copiously. It was a few moments before I could take notice of my surroundings again.

When I did, I realized that Rafi’s siren-sharp wail had died away into abrupt silence. Pen had him cradled in her arms, and Paul was kneeling beside her, his forefinger on Rafi’s bare wrist again and an abstracted frown on his face.

Dr. Webb approached us with a certain caution, eyeing the mess I’d just made on the carpet. Then his gaze traversed to Rafi, his head in Pen’s lap as she murmured reassurances to him and smoothed his sweat-slicked hair off his forehead. Rafi seemed to be asleep now—a profound, exhausted sleep, his chest rising and falling slowly with his long, deep breaths. Still, Webb’s eyes continually kept flicking back to him as he snapped out orders to his staff to start putting the place back together.

I stood up, my legs shaky, and pulled my crushed shirt collar back into some kind of shape, wincing at the pain in my equally crushed throat. “What set this off?” I asked Webb, my voice sounding hoarse and flat.

He gave a bleak snort. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all. Karen and Paul went in to give him his evening meds, and he took them. One moment he was fine, the next—well, you saw. He started screaming, and when Karen tried to calm him he lashed out at her. We’re lucky she wasn’t killed.”

I nodded dumbly at that. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Webb wasn’t expecting an answer, though. “Castor,” he said, “this brings forward a discussion we were going to have to have in any case. When we took Ditko on, we did so in the belief that we could help him. We clearly can’t. He needs dedicated facilities of a kind that we can’t offer.”

I looked down at Pen. She wasn’t hearing this, fortunately. “There aren’t any dedicated facilities for what Rafi’s got,” I pointed out, but that was bullshit and he knew it. There just weren’t any that I wanted to deliver him to.

“There’s the
MOU
,” Webb said.

“Rafi’s not a lab rat.”

“He’s not mentally ill, either. He doesn’t belong here.”

“We’ve got a contract,” I pointed out, playing my ace.

Webb trumped it. “ ‘Voidable where the welfare of staff or other inmates is at stake,’ ” he quoted from memory. “I don’t think there’s any argument about that.”

I shrugged. “We’ll talk.”

Webb shook his head. “No, we won’t. Make alternative arrangements, Castor. You have twenty-eight days.”

“You’re all heart, Webb,” I croaked. “You’ll have to toughen up or people will start taking advantage of you.”

He gave me an austere, contemptuous look. “Nobody can say you didn’t try,” he said coldly.

Out in the grounds the moon was up, full and huge, turning everything into a Mercurochrome photograph of itself. I took a turn through the rose garden, enjoying the peace and quiet. It was only relative: there were still some shouts and moans from inside the building, but after Rafi’s endless, agonizing foghorn howl it sounded a lot like silence. Rafi was sleeping now, but Pen wouldn’t let anyone else touch him for the time being. I thought I’d give them half an hour, then go back inside and see if I was needed.

I leaned against the sundial and looked down a trellised avenue canopied with sweet-smelling blooms. It didn’t frame much of a view, though: just a high fence with an inward-tilting fringe of razor wire at the top, and beyond that the six lanes of the North Circular, where even at this hour a steady river of headlights flowed on by.

Alternative arrangements. That was really easy for Webb to say, especially with the gods of the small print on his side. Not so easy to do, though: not unless I wanted to take the route that Webb had suggested, and give Rafi over to the tender mercies of the Metamorphic Ontology Unit at Queen Mary’s in Paddington. But that was a last-ditch, desperation kind of thing, and I didn’t think we were quite there yet. Much as I respected my old sparring partner Jenna-Jane Mulbridge on an intellectual level, I knew better than anyone that she had some shortcomings where bedside manner was concerned. And that her heart and human feelings were in long-term storage underneath a crossroads somewhere.

While I was still propping up the sundial, making the place look untidy, three small figures loped out of the foliage about fifty yards away and flitted across the lawn in absolute silence. They were in a triangle formation, with the largest of the three in front, the other two flanking and following her. There were some trees on the far side of the lawn, but trees didn’t slow them down: they raced on unheeding, their slender bodies sliding through wood as though wood were air. When they got to the wall that separated the Stanger from Coldfall Wood, the girl in the lead—she was about thirteen, or rather had been that age when she died—stopped and looked across at me. She tossed back a full head of ash-blond hair and gave me a wave. I waved back. Then she turned and walked on through the wall, where her two younger companions had already gone on before her.

These were the ghosts of three little girls whom the original Charles Stanger had murdered in the late forties—before being sent down for life and endowing the institution that now carries his name. They’d spent the next fifty years tied to the stones of the old cottages like dogs chained up in a yard. Most ghosts are tethered to a particular place, more often than not the place where they died. It was just a cruel irony that in this case it meant the girls had to rub shoulders with the criminally insane for the rest of eternity—or at least, for as long as the Stanger stayed open. But about a year or so ago I’d given them a private concert: used my tin whistle to play a fragment of an exorcism to them in this same garden, so that although they weren’t banished from the place they were free to leave it. Since then I’d heard rumors of sightings as far afield as the Trocadero and Shadwell Stair, but they still seemed to use the Stanger as a base. I guess they were used to the place now: after half a century, it was as close to being home as anywhere they knew. I kept expecting them to move on—I mean, on to whatever else there is when this world has worn out its welcome—but obviously they still hadn’t taken that inevitable step.

I walked on through the gardens, eventually circling around to the far side of the building where they gave out at last onto the asphalt apron of the car park. It was after midnight now, so the place was deserted except for a few staff cars and Pen’s old Mondeo. Paul was leaning against the side of an ambulance in lonely splendor, smoking a fairly pungent cigarillo. He was looking glum.

“How’s life?” I asked, slowing to a halt.

He blew out smoke, shook his head in disgust. “You should’ve asked me when I fuckin’ had one, man,” he said morosely. “My old lady keeps telling me to give this up, and fuck if she ain’t right. What do I need it for? My back feels like I did ten rounds with Tyson, my left eye’s closing over. Karen’s most likely got a concussion. And my man Rafael’s righteously fucked, poor bastard.”

I was impressed that he could still worry about Rafi when Rafi’s evil passenger had just nearly done for the both of us. I was reminded once again of how much there was going on under that tanklike exterior. “Well I’m glad you put your retirement off until after tonight, anyway,” I said, meaning it. “You probably saved my life.”

“Yeah, you’re welcome.”

“Your boss is an arsehole, though.”

“Got that right.”

I leaned against the side of the ambulance next to him, but upwind of his cigar. “And Rafi will be okay. At least, he’ll be none the worse for anything that happened tonight.”

Paul raised his eyebrows as he pondered this. “Cuts all over his face,” he mused. “Two broken fingers. Maybe a broken jaw. That shit on his chest looked like blisters—like he was catching fire from the inside.”

“But you know I’m right. The fingers will reset themselves tonight. The jaw, too, if I actually broke it. The gouges and the burns will already have healed up: if you looked right now, there wouldn’t be a damn thing to see. Rafi’s got a very healthy immune system. I guess it’s all the good food and exercise.”

Paul gave me a slightly fish-eyed stare, checking to see if any of that second-rate irony was at his expense. Then he shook his head again, giving it up. “That lady of yours,” he said, after taking another deep drag on the cigar, “she’s a class act, Castor. About as big as a high-heel shoe, but she just went for Rafael back there like it was a fair fight. Went for Dr. Webb, too.” He grinned wickedly. “That was the highlight of the fucking day. Truth.”

“Yeah, Pen is one of a kind,” I agreed. “She’s not mine, though. I mean, she’s just a friend.” A whole lot of memories surged up from one of the less-frequented areas of my mind: I shoved them right back down again. “She’s—she and Rafi used to be—together. When we were all at university, they were”—I groped for a phrase that accurately defined Pen and Rafi’s relationship, but there wasn’t one—”an item,” I finished lamely. “But it didn’t last. Rafi was the flit-and-sip type.”

We stood in silence for a few seconds.

“He was my best friend,” I said, aware of how bizarre and unhealthy all this sounded. “Pen’s, too, both before and after the sweat-and-roses stuff. Everybody liked him. You’d like him, too, if you met him.”

“If I
met
him?” Paul’s intonation was pained.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I guess I do. Kind of. I’ve always wanted to ask you, though. What exactly is that thing inside him?”

“Asmodeus. He’s a demon. A fucking big one, too. A lot of the literature on the subject says—”

“The literature?” Paul shook his head, wondering. “What, like
The Lancet
?
Scientific American
?”

“Not exactly, no. I’m talking about books written by carpet-chewing natural philosophers five hundred years ago. Grimoires. Magical textbooks. Anyway, they put Asmodeus close to the top of the infernal pecking order. Not someone you want to mess with. But Rafi did just that. He tried to summon Asmodeus about two years ago. I think he was looking to do some kind of Faust thing: buy a shitload of forbidden knowledge from before the world was made. It didn’t work out that way, though. Somehow Asmodeus got into him and started to burn him up from the inside.”

The words, banal and deadpan as they were, stirred up a series of disconnected impressions in my mind—some of the component parts of a night I still couldn’t forget. Because of the way my mind works, it was mostly the sounds that stayed with me. Rafi’s breathing, harsh and shallow and with longer and longer gaps between the in breaths. The grating laughter that was coming from his throat, welling up like blood out of the night-black void that showed when his mouth gaped open. The endless mumble and hiss of boiling water: we’d dumped Rafi into a bathtub full of ice because patches of his skin were going from red to black, but after about a minute the ice was water and the water was bubbling like a witch’s cauldron.

“You were there?” Paul asked, sounding—to put it politely—a little skeptical. It’s not just cops: everyone draws their lines in the sand, sooner or later, and once they’re drawn it takes a lot to shift them.

“His girlfriend called me in the middle of the night. She heard him say my name, and it sounded like his own voice, not the voice of the thing inside him, so she found my number in the back of his diary. By the time I got there, it looked like I might already be too late, but I tried anyway.”

“Tried what, exactly.”

“I played him a tune.”

He nodded. I’d already told him over a couple of beers what it is I do for a living, and how I do it. “You see,” I went on, reluctantly, “I was assuming it was a
human
spirit inside him. A ghost. I’d never even met a demon back then. So I listened for a human spirit, and when I found it I started to play it out of him. Then about ten minutes in, I realized that what I’d dredged up was Rafi’s own soul. I was dispossessing him from his body—finishing what Asmodeus had started.

“I tried to undo the damage I’d already done. I switched keys in mid-tune, played the opposite of what my instincts were telling me to play, in the hope that I could pull Rafi back into his own flesh. And it sort of worked.”

“Sort of?”

I nodded bleakly. “Yeah, sort of. I stuck Rafi back together again—and at the same time I stuck Asmodeus to Rafi, which wasn’t part of the plan. They’ve been trapped in there together ever since. That’s why Asmodeus tends to leave me alone, most of the time—he knows he’s going to need me sooner or later if he’s ever going to get free again. He’s just waiting for me to figure out how to do it.” I scowled, fingering one of the bruises on my shoulder. “Don’t know what the hell went wrong tonight. He knew who I was, but for once he didn’t seem to give a fuck. In fact, he really seemed happy to be getting a crack at me. Like he hadn’t expected it.”