She grinned like a skull as she reached for the book, and for a moment of frozen panic Imp sensed that the book grinned back.
CHARNEL LIBRARY
The last normal day of Eve’s life began much like any other Sunday: she slept in an hour later than on a regular workday, then travelled by tube and overground to her parents’ house.
After graduation she had moved in with her then-boyfriend for a few months, but they’d split up under the pressure of sixty-hour work weeks and sharing a bedsit-sized flat while in their first training-wheels relationship. (Also, their sex life had been lacking a certain something—which she only discovered later.) She’d moved out again, into a room in an HMO shared with three other millennial girls all straining for a grip on the bottom rung of corporate serfdom: a baby solicitor, a freshly minted hospital doctor who only ever came home to snore, and a junior marketing manager. Still, it was better than going back to her old bedroom in the wilderness beyond Heathrow, even though her digs were just as far from the office and cost her a thousand a month more than her parents’ spare bedroom.
By turning up around noon, Evie ensured that Mum would already be out. Her church-going had gone from mildly serious to moderately alarming over the past five years, as she drifted from a wooly mainstream C of E congregation towards a hardcore evangelical import from the USA. If Evie turned up too early Mum would try to get her to come along. She hated to say no, but something about the eight-hour-long audience participation services with the meals and the singing and the readings from their weird apocrypha—The Apocalypse of St. Enoch the Divine?—resonated in all the wrong ways with her magic. She’d been to one service and sneaked out halfway through after throwing up in the ladies’—just the memory of it left her distinctly nauseous.
The combination of religious faith and actual ritual power made Evie deeply uneasy. It was as bad as if her mum was a habitual drunk-driver, so she reacted by pretending to herself that it wasn’t happening. And the easiest way to make that work was to avoid any reminder of it.
That lunchtime she found Dad in his den (really a windowless closet off the side of the living room, which he’d fitted out with shelves, a comfy chair, and a fold-down desk bolted to the wall), wearing his threadbare sorcerer’s robe over jogging pants and a gray sweatshirt with a coffee stain on the front. “Hey, Daddy.” She leaned forward to kiss his bald spot. “How’s life treating you?”
Her father sighed uneasily then smiled for her. He picked up the leatherbound journal he’d been writing in and closed it then stood up, a trifle creakily. “I’ll make tea,” he said. With his back turned, he added, “I’m worried about your mother.”
Oh crap. Evie dutifully tensed up, even though—she hated to admit this even in the privacy of her own head—Mum was increasingly alien to her these days, her eyes coming alive with enthusiasm only when she tried to overshare her faith with someone who made the mistake of asking how she was. Evie followed Dad out to the kitchen. “Is it her church habit again?”
Dad shoved the jug kettle under the tap and filled it. White noise washed out conversation for a few moments. He closed the lid, placed it back on its base, and turned it on in silence, lost in thought as he prepared the teapot and measured out the correct quantity of his precious breakfast tea leaves. It was a calming ritual he carried out every day, for as long as she could remember. Now his hands were shaking. “It’s cancer,” he finally said. “Cancer and church. One or the other I think I could handle.”
Evie felt a momentary sense of unreality, the instant in which, stepping off a curb, one sees the oncoming dump truck: the instant in which one is committed to that fatal footfall, toes caught in mid-stride and unable to avoid the disaster, but aware of rushing towards one. “What kind of cancer?” she heard her voice ask.
The kettle came to a rolling boil and switched off. Dad filled the teapot before continuing. “Bowel cancer,” he said, calmly enough. “She was too embarrassed to talk about the spotting. Her GP noticed something wrong during her health MoT and referred her for screening.”
“Oh crap—sorry.” Dad normally didn’t like it when his little girl swore, but either he didn’t notice or he chose to ignore it this once.
“Her pastor told her to ignore the doctors and trust in the Lord,” Dad added, as calmly as if he were discussing the weather. “She doesn’t like the idea of chemo, Evie. I’ve had enough of this church. I intend to take them down. Will you help?”
And there it was, the moment of impact, and she found herself nodding and going along. “Sure. Which one are they, anyway? I mean, is she still with the Promise, uh, the—”
“The Golden Promise Ministries, yes. Bunch of gold-digging prosperity gospel charlatans.” Dad’s tone was even, but there was a quietly venomous undernote to his voice that his daughter could barely recognize. “Evie, I’m not going to let my wife die just to line the pockets of a high-rolling American preacher in a ten-thousand-pound suit. She was sane before he got his claws into her. She’ll thank us once she’s back in her right mind and the cancer’s in remission.”
Evie’s tongue froze to the roof of her mouth. “She won’t consent,” she said carefully. “Have you got medical power of attorney?”
“No.” Her father looked grim. “Never thought we’d need it, and now it’s too late. It’s much harder if the subject refuses consent.”
“So you’re going to do it without her willing…”
For a moment Dad was distraught. “Do you think I want to? Do you think I shouldn’t? They’ve planted something in her head,
