‘We tried a straight exorcism,’ she said. ‘But it fights back. It tries to take you onto its own ground.’ Thinking about my own ham-fisted efforts at the hospital, and the black pit where I’d briefly faced this thing, I knew exactly what she meant. I nodded and she went on, her clipped, emotionless tones making a strange contrast with the horrors she was describing. ‘Peyer went in first, and then — he tried to put his own eyes out. He succeeded with one, but Feld managed to stop him before he got to the other. After that we used strength of numbers: one exorcist doing the binding, two or three others watching over him, weaving stay-nots around him so the thing can’t get close.’
She held up her hands as if I could read their failure in the complexity of the woven threads that covered them.
‘It doesn’t work,’ she said flatly. ‘Because its focus isn’t really this place. It’s more — like it–’
‘Like it lives in the wounds,’ I finished.
She nodded. ‘And most of the people on the estate have got broken flesh of some kind by now. So it’s all around us. In a hundred or a thousand different places. You drive it out of one vessel and it goes. It retreats. Then it flows back as soon as you look away. We’ve been here all night, and the best we can say is that the thing is focused on us, so it’s not making any mischief anywhere else. But we can’t keep this up for ever. And if anything it seems to be getting stronger.’
That wasn’t surprising at all. If wounds were its joy and its sustenance, and if there were a thousand wounded people crammed into these few hundred square metres of space, then the demon’s cup must surely be running over. And if every man, woman or child who got hurt, who got cut, gave it a new anchor and a new home, then its growth could become something truly exponential and unstoppable.
‘So we feel we need a fresh approach,’ Gwillam summed up tersely, giving me a cold, expectant look. ‘And since you knew most of this before we did, we hoped you might be able to advise us on where we go from here.’
‘Sorry to disappoint you, father,’ I said, ‘but you’ve got further than I have. When I met it, I was lucky to get out with both balls and a soul.’
Out of the corner of the eye I saw the woman’s shoulders sag. Gwillam shook his head. ‘Then you’ve had a wasted journey,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry to have taken up your time. If you’ll excuse us, we’ll return to our labours, however futile they may ultimately turn out to be.’
‘There is one other thing we could try, though,’ I said. He was already turning his back on me, but he stopped and waited.
‘The boy,’ I said. ‘Bic.’
‘William Daniels,’ Gwillam translated.
‘Exactly. You thought he had Jesus as his co-pilot.’
‘Castor, I’ve already admitted that I was mistaken about what was happening here.’
‘But you thought that for a reason, right?’ Gwillam stared at me, waiting for me to go on. Everyone else had their gaze on me, too, and I could feel the quickening of interest behind every pair of weary eyes: they made such a lovely audience I would have loved to take them home with me. If home was Guantánamo Bay. ‘He was the first,’ I said, impatiently. ‘The first by a long way, I’m guessing. This thing found him long before it did anything to anyone else. He’s a sensitive: he’s got some sort of gift that lets him pick up what you’re thinking and feeling. Most exorcists have got a touch of it, too, but he’s got more than most. He’s like a radio satellite pointing into inner space. And he picked up the wound demon.’
‘Is that why it came?’ the little man, Speight, demanded in his lisping voice.
‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘It came because of another boy. Mark Blainey, who died here a year ago. He was a self-harmer. He found wounds, or the inflicting of wounds — I don’t know, exciting, I guess. Appealing. He thought about them a lot. He obsessed on them. He cut himself in a lot of different ways, with different kinds of objects. And somehow, somewhere along the way, this thing noticed him. It came looking for him. I heard it speak his name, when I met it in that place where it lives. It came looking for Mark, but it stayed because it found Bic. And now it’s expanded its friendship group. That’s what I think happened, anyway.’
Gwillam considered, and all eyes now shifted to him because he was the authority, the giver of truth. That’s the trouble with the Church: it’s a top-down hierarchy where everyone does what they’re told by the guy on the next rung up. Which would be fine, I suppose, if it was me on the top rung instead of God.
‘We learned about Mark Blainey in our researches here,’ Gwillam conceded. ‘We thought him an early symptom.’
‘So did I, at first,’ I agreed. ‘But a nurse at the Royal London put me straight on that one. He’s not a symptom, Gwillam. His death sticks out like a bishop in a brothel, saving your presence. No puncture wounds involved: no blades, no points or edges. He just jumped right off the walkway. So it’s a fair bet that this demon wasn’t what drove him to his death. He didn’t die from it: he brought it, and then died of something else.’
And I probably know what the something else was, I added inside my own head.
‘So you think if we attempt an exorcism on William Daniels–’ Gwillam began.
‘No,’ I cut in impatiently. ‘I already tried that. That might have worked back when he was the only one affected, but it’s not going to work any more. Like you said, the thing has got its hooks into too many people now. It can just shift its ground and come back at you from a different angle.’
‘Then what?’ Gwillam asked impatiently.
So I told him what I had in mind.
I hadn’t expected the next part to be easy, but even so I’d underestimated Gwillam’s sheer, unremitting stubbornness in the face of something he didn’t trust and couldn’t control.
He was appalled at what I was planning to do, and he dug his heels in fast and hard. He wanted names and addresses, just for starters. He also wanted to take charge of the operation and leave me here as a hostage with his people to ensure the cooperation of the other parties I wanted to involve. And he wanted to keep his options wide open with regard to other sanctions — up to and including exorcising or otherwise destroying any non-humans who ended up playing a part in the operation.
I told him, in a certain amount of detail, exactly what positions he might use when he fucked himself.
We argued it backwards and forwards for half an hour before finally reaching an impasse. Gwillam had the entire place sewn up, with at least one of his people on every walkway, and he flat-out refused to let me take Bic off the estate even if his parents consented — unless he got to come along in force and run the show. I told him that couldn’t work, and that he was condemning the residents of the Salisbury to the death of a thousand cuts, and he said — in effect — that their suffering was part of God’s great plan.
I gave up in the end and left them to it. At least they didn’t stop me from going up to the eighth floor of Weston Block to look in on Bic and his family, which might have been interesting because he had serious muscle and I was in a black enough mood to have pushed it. But as it was I walked on across the forecourt and in through the double doors while Gwillam was still deep in murmured confab with his minions.
But the lifts were out, so I went around to the external staircase and started my trek into the sky, not looking round in case I locked eyes with Gwillam and he called me back. But while I was trudging up the stairs I heard hurried footsteps clattering behind me. I turned and waited, so that at least I’d be meeting whoever it was head- on: in this place, it was best to take nothing for granted.
It was the tall woman with the cat’s cradles wound around her hands.
‘Father Gwillam changed his mind,’ she said, simply, stopping three steps below me. I noticed, impressed, that she wasn’t out of breath after her sprint up the stairs. A childhood infatuation with Ellen Ripley stirred in the depths of my hindbrain and reminded me of the space where once it had sat enthroned in my libido.
‘About what?’ I asked.
‘About the boy. He said if you let one of us come with you, to make sure nothing goes wrong, you can do it.’
‘I already told you–’ I began. But she lifted a school-marmish finger to shut me up.
‘Double blind. Whoever goes with you doesn’t get to know the address, and you do whatever you need to do to make sure they don’t get a clear look at the route.’ She looked at me expectantly. ‘We’re meeting you halfway, Castor. It’s up to you to figure it out now. One of us has to come, but it can be on your terms. Okay?’
