little girl. And a bloodstain. I couldn?t make out a lot of it, but it sounded bad.?
Yeah, I thought, with a sinking feeling in my stomach. And it would sound even worse in court. ?No,? I said brusquely. ?You can?t help. Whatever the hell she needs now, it isn?t a doctor.?
He?d come around the table, was standing only a few feet away from me, his brow furrowed with a somber thought. I could tell it wasn?t the answer he?d wanted to hear. Was he asking himself if he?d just aided and abetted a child-murderer?
?Look,? I said, ?the girl is?kind of?a client. You know what I do for a living, right??
?No. Sorry. I can?t say that I do.?
?I?m an exorcist. The girl is dead, and I was hired?this sounds crazy, but it?s the truth?to find her ghost.?
He nodded understandingly, as though that made perfect sense. But then he turned it over in his mind and started finding the rough edges. ?Hired by who? Who steals a ghost? Who tries to get one back??
?Who steals her? Probably her real father. Who tries to get her back, I don?t know because they gave me a truckload of bullshit. Maybe some fucking lunatic satanists. But I?m still going to find her, because I think she?s in trouble.?
The little man gave a humorless laugh. ?Worse trouble than being dead, you mean??
?Yeah.? It felt strange saying it, but I knew it was true. I realized I?d known it for a while now?even before Basquiat had shown me how Abbie died. ?Worse trouble than being dead.?
The doctor digested this in unhappy silence. ?Well, I hope it sorts itself out,? he said at last, with the look of a man trudging resolutely back into his depth. ?You should take it easy with that left arm for a little while. While the muscle?s all inflamed like that it?s easier to tear.?
?I?ll do that,? I said, and took Matt?s car keys out of the fruit bowl where Pen had left them.
?You may still be a bit shaky,? the little man said, frowning in concern. ?If you feel like you?re having trouble controlling the car, you should pull over and take a cab or something.?
As far as solicitude went, he was getting just a little bit in my face now. I owed the man plenty, but I?ve never liked lectures, sermons, or public health notices. ?Don?t worry about it,? I muttered as I headed for the door. ?It?s my brother?s car.?
* * *
The sky was darkening fast: too fast for spring. It was like a night that should have drained away a long time ago, but had clogged the sinkholes of eternity and now was backing up into the daylight. Either that, or I?d just slept for longer than I thought.
The front doors of St. Michael?s were still locked and bolted, and so was the lych-gate. That slowed me down for all of twenty seconds: the gate was more of a decorative feature than an actual barrier, and?weak as I still was?it offered me plenty of handholds. My landing on the graveyard side of the wall was a little bumpy, though, and I fell forward onto my hands, skinning them slightly.
I circled round through the graveyard until I could see the back door of the vestry up ahead of me. It was standing ajar. I walked out into the open, heading toward it, but was stopped before I?d gone ten steps by a breathless chuckle. I froze, looking around for the source of it.
There was a man propped up against the cemetery?s farther wall, his head lolling forward on his chest. He had long, lanky hair and he was wearing a stained mac. He looked like a drunk looking for an impromptu urinal on his way home from the boozer, but a second, slightly less cursory glance more or less ruled that out. The stains on the mac were dark, irregular spatters: the dim light didn?t allow me to be certain, but they looked like blood. The side of his skull was smashed in, and one of his arms was dangling uselessly, like a pendulum, swinging slightly from left to right as he shifted his balance.
A zombie?and one who?d been taking a lot less care with his mortal remains than Nicky did.
Some suspicion that I couldn?t quite explain to myself made me veer in his direction. Maybe I recognized him from somewhere. Maybe I just didn?t want to have him at my back as I went into the church.
?You okay there, sport?? I said, conversationally as I approached him. I was rummaging around in my pocket for the myrtle twig, but it wasn?t there. I must have left it on the floor at Imelda?s, where she?d probably have treated it like a dead rat: dustpan and brush, no direct contact, sterilize afterward.
The man lifted his head to stare at me through the one eye he had left. He grinned, too, although it was difficult to see through the tangled thickets of his beard. Yeah. I had him placed now: he was the guy at the mall, who?d shot Juliet through the chest and who she?d then kicked ass-backward through a plate-glass window. Judging by appearances, it hadn?t done him a bit of good.
?When will it come?? the man asked me. His voice was low, and it had a horrible, liquid undertow to it. He grinned, showing shattered teeth like a bamboo pit trap. ?When will it be here??
?Tell me what it is, I?ll give you an ETA,? I offered. ?What is it you?re waiting for??
A shudder went through him. ?The thing that ate me,? he muttered, his head sagging again. After a long silence he added, as if to himself, ?Got to finish . . . Got to finish the job. Can?t just . . . eat me and then spit me out.?
Torn between pity and nausea, I turned back toward the church door. That was when he came at me.
He was a big man, and he had the advantage over me in weight. He charged into me like a trolley car, ungainly and not even all that fast but pretty much ustoppable. As I fell he came down on top of me, clawing at me with the fingers of his one good hand, laughing deep in his throat as though the whole thing were a huge joke.
I brought my head up fast, ramming it into the bridge of his nose, and I heard the bone snap with a pulpy sound like rotten wood giving way. No blood flowed: he didn?t have a heart to pump it with, and it probably wasn?t liquid anymore in any case.
He got his fingers around my throat and started to squeeze. His head bowed toward me, his mouth working hard as if he wanted to devour me as well as kill me. The sour stench of his decaying flesh hit me, and my head reeled. Starting to panic now, I rolled to the side and swung a fist up into his stomach as hard as I could. He was too heavy to shift, and he didn?t react at all: no functioning nerves, either.
But he only had the one arm that still worked, so my hands were both free. Feeling like a bastard, I groped my way up his face even as my vision started to blur, and put his other eye out with my thumb.
He jerked his head away from me, flailing to fend me off now that it was too late. I brought my knees up to my chest and kicked outward with both legs, sending him flying backward against a gravestone, where he fell in an untidy heap. He clawed weakly at his face, mewling like an animal. Slow spasms passed through his body, and his legs moved alternately as if he thought he was upright and walking. He reminded me of a toy robot I?d had as a kid; a clockwork one, made in Hong Kong, that kept on striding along until it wound down, even if you kicked it over onto its side, even if it wasn?t going anywhere.
I got up and staggered toward him, resting my weight against the gravestone so I could lean forward and look at him. If the damage was bad enough, his ghost would let go its hold on his ruined flesh, but it might take a long time. And in the meantime he was trapped in there, blinded, terrified, his immortal spirit still shackled to his half-pulped brain and trying to make it work.
I didn?t have any choice. I took out my whistle, my hands shaking, and put it to my lips. Our little tussle among the tombstones had given me a reasonably strong sense of his essence, his ?this-ness?: enough to get me started. The notes tumbled out into the darkening sky, feeble and tentative but enlivened by an unintentional vibrato. The dead man stared up at me with the sightless holes that had been his eyes. His mouth moved, made a string of incoherent sounds that rumbled beneath my playing as if he was trying to sing along. Then he stopped, and whatever spark was still animating him went out for good.
I went to put the whistle away, but then thought better of it. Holding it clutched in my two hands, ready to play, I crossed the grass toward the vestry door.
It was hanging on one hinge: without Susan Book to unlock it for her, Juliet must have just kicked it open. I stepped inside, the bitter chill closing over me as though I?d stepped through a hanging curtain, invisible but tangible.
The church was dark. Of course it was: light had a tough time of it in here. I hadn?t brought a flashlight, but I wasn?t sure how much use it would have been in any case.
The heartbeat was clearly audible now: a slowed down loop of sound, lapping insinuatingly against my ears like waves against a rock.
I went forward one step at a time: slowly, slowly, letting my feet slide across the floor rather than lifting them, so I didn?t go arse over tip in the dark. The frigid air was absolutely still: the only thing that told me when I?d reached the end of the transept and stepped out into the larger gulf of the nave was a change in the timbre of the echoes my footsteps raised. My arm brushed heavily against something, and there was a reverberating din as the something fell over and unseen objects rolled away across the floor. The table where the votive candles stood. I ignored it and kept on going.
Maybe a dozen steps farther on, the tip of my foot touched something on the floor. I knelt down carefully, explored its outlines gingerly. It was a human body, completely unmoving.
I had to put the whistle away now, though I?d been clutching it
