I led the way up the stairs. Matt lingered by the front door for a moment, as if contemplating making a break for it. ‘I’m serious, Matt,’ I said. ‘We’re having this conversation sooner or later, and I did you the courtesy of not having it in front of a copper. So let’s make it sooner, eh?’
Without protest — in fact, without reacting at all — Matt followed me up to my attic room. That put two clear storeys between us and Pen: enough so that she wouldn’t be disturbed by raised voices or colourful language.
There’s only one chair in the room. I waved Matt to sit down, but he crossed to the window instead and examined the badly repaired plasterwork around the sill. ‘This is where your sex-demon friend jumped through after she almost devoured you,’ he reminisced. It was such a transparent attempt to put me off balance that I felt a sudden wave of affection for him. It took me by surprise, reminding me of brotherly feuds long past, and the kind of dirty pool we always played against each other before he found God and lost the rest of us. Maybe for that reason, I came straight to the point instead of dancing around it looking for an unfair advantage.
‘What were you doing at the Salisbury, Matt?’ I demanded.
He turned to look at me. His blue-grey eyes, otherwise unknown in the Castor family, held my gaze unblinkingly. ‘I was just walking,’ he said, with immaculate calm. But I knew from way back how good he was at the straight-faced kidding.
I nodded. ‘Nice,’ I said. ‘Hell of a walk, from Cheam, but they’re your shoes. I saw someone else just walking there recently — Gwillam. That shitehawk from the Anathemata Curialis. You remember him?’
‘Of course I remember him,’ Matt said, with guarded emphasis.
‘When from?’
‘I’m sorry, Felix?’
‘When do you remember him from, exactly? When did you last see him, and what’s he got you doing on the Salisbury?’
‘Felix–’
‘Don’t get coy, Matty.’ I pushed the chair around so that it faced him. ‘That was Gwillam’s man you hauled off me right now, and you called him by name. And it makes sense, doesn’t it? He’s a self-righteous lunatic fighting a one-man crusade against the undead. You’re just a priest who can’t say no. Somewhere you were bound to meet.’
Matt still refused to sit. ‘You’re wrong, Felix,’ he said.
‘Am I?’
‘Yes. It’s not a one-man crusade. The Anathemata probably has upwards of a thousand members — a couple of hundred in the UK alone. It’s not an official arm of the Church any more, but it’s still highly respected in many circles. And Thomas Gwillam is a hugely influential voice when it comes to . . .’ he faltered for the first time, but it was a short hesitation and a good recovery ‘. . . the more controversial aspects of the afterlife.’
‘Thomas,’ I mused. ‘Probably named after the popular saint.’
‘Probably.’
‘Whose unique selling point was that he had those doubts, yeah? Amazingly, he wasn’t always a hundred per cent sure he was doing the right thing. I could really get behind a saint like that.’
Matt sighed — a long-drawn-out sound that was more indicative of exhaustion than of resignation. He did look tired, now that I looked at him properly: tired and a bit beaten down, as though something serious and distracting was weighing on him. ‘Aquinas, Felix,’ he said. ‘Saint Thomas Aquinas, not the apostle Thomas. You know this. You went to church too, and to Sunday school. You only pretend to be ignorant.’
‘But we are what we pretend to be, Matty,’ I countered. ‘Kurt Vonnegut, chapter 1, verse 1. So if you pretend to be a carpet-chewing religious bigot, that’s how you end up. What the fuck are you doing mixing with the likes of Gwillam?’
There was a long, strained silence.
‘You take a lot of things for granted,’ Matt said. His voice trembled slightly.
I shrugged. ‘Well, that’s me,’ I said. ‘Always jumping to conclusions. I see the head of a secret Church organisation hanging around on a street corner. Then I see my brother, who’s a priest, hanging around on the same corner less than twelve hours later. And I think to myself, something’s going down. Something’s got the ‘if-it’s- dead-bust-its-head’ brigade well and truly steamed up. And I start wondering what that something might be.’
Matt clenched his fist in a very uncharacteristic gesture, but then only massaged it absently with the other palm. ‘That’s absurd,’ he said. ‘I’m not even a member of the Anathemata.’
I shrugged. ‘If you say so. Lying’s a sin, so I’m sure you’d never do that. But you are from the arse-end of Walton. And you did take your holy orders at Upholland, just a few miles down the road from where we grew up. So if anyone was looking for a priest with a Liverpool 9 background, yours would be the first CV to pop up, wouldn’t it?’
‘Who would look?’ Matt asked, still meeting my gaze and still looking both weary and unmoved. ‘Why would they look?’
‘Because of Kenny Seddon,’ I said, and I saw the name hit home. Matt shook his head wordlessly, but his expression was almost a wince. ‘There’s something really strange going on over at the Salisbury,’ I went on, not giving him a chance to interrupt. ‘Something in the air that’s driving people crazy. I don’t know what it is, even though I’ve felt it. It’s not an emotion I can give a name to. It’s more like an impulse, moving people in different ways. Tonight I saw a kid try to kill himself, and I think it was because he was possessed by this — whatever it is. This spirit. This peripatetic emotion.
‘And two nights ago, Kenny Seddon met a couple of guys a mile down the road for a quiet chat. Relaxed. Informal. Bring your own razor. And whatever it was they talked about, the conversation — as you just heard with no trace of surprise — ended with Kenny carved up like a Christmas turkey. And I mean the way Homer Simpson carves up a Christmas turkey.’
Matt held up a hand as if to correct me on a point of fact. I rode right over him. ‘Now maybe those things aren’t connected, but I’m working on the assumption that they are. Because the last thing Kenny did, as his nifty little urban runabout filled up with his own blood, was to write my name on the windshield. He called in an exorcist, Matty. The only exorcist whose name he knew. Leaving me with a lot to explain to the boys in blue, but making bloody sure I got to hear about what had happened to him. Why do you think that was?’
Matt’s brow constricted into a frown. ‘It wasn’t . . .’ he began, but then he shook his head as if despairing of shifting me from my point of view. ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘I have no idea at all.’
‘Me neither. But if I’m right — if the Anathemata is sniffing after something at the Salisbury, and if Kenny is a part of that something, then is it too much of a stretch to imagine good Father Thomas Aquinas Gwillam sifting through all the tools in the box until he finds the one Catholic priest who happened to know Kenny when we were all kids? Like I said, he’s got that kind of mindset. So I could see him asking you, Matty. I think that’s well within the bounds of possibility. Don’t you? The only thing left to wonder about is what answer you gave him.’
Instead of answering, Matt made to walk past me, heading for the door. I stepped into his way, forcing him to stop. Although I didn’t touch him, he backed away as if he was rebounding from a physical barrier. There was genuine pain on his face now.
‘Please, Felix,’ he said. ‘You really don’t understand. And I’m–’ He drew a slightly ragged breath. ‘I’m desperately sorry that you got involved in this. It’s unfortunate, and unforeseen. You should walk away, as quickly as you can. It’s not something that needs to concern you. It doesn’t bear on anything that you know about, or need to know about.’
He was grinding his clenched fist into his open palm again.
‘Are your palms itchy?’ I asked. He looked down at his hands as if only just realising they were there. The skin of my own hands felt like it was crawling with bugs, although the sensation seemed to have peaked and was now starting to fade. I’d forgotten it until Matt’s nervous gesture brought it back into mental focus.
‘I’m fine,’ Matt said, with slightly too much emphasis to be convincing.
I hesitated. We really don’t know each other all that well, Matt and me: that lost ground in our childhoods is somehow still there in between us, keeping us at a distance from each other no matter what else happens and what life turns us into. So now, for instance, I didn’t know if he wanted me to push it further or not, or even whether he saw me as a friend or an enemy.
From one point of view, Gwillam and I ought to be natural allies. I used to be an exorcist, at least after a fashion, and that put me on one side of a line that more and more people seemed to be keen to draw: between us and them; between the people who still lived and breathed and the people who’d passed through the veil only to
