Thicker Than Water

In spring we used to walk to the Seven Sisters — the bomb craters on the Walton Triangle that had turned into lakes — and go fishing for frogspawn. You’d bring it home in a jam jar, transfer it to a plastic bowl or bucket, stick it in a secluded part of the garden shed or, if you had a death wish or an indulgent mum, your bedroom, and wait for the little black dots at the heart of the translucent jelly to turn into tadpoles. Then the tadpoles would grow legs and turn over the space of weeks into microminiaturised frogs. It was enthralling in a way that cut right across more macho pursuits. You could watch it for hours and feel like you were plugged into some kind of primal magic.

I was thinking about that now as I looked from Juliet to Matt and then back again.

‘Do you want to tell him?’ I asked her. ‘Or is this one down to me?’

Juliet arched an eyebrow. ‘This is your decision, Castor,’ she said. ‘What you’re about to say can’t make anyone who hears it any happier. If I’ve kept the secret this long, it’s not because I’m afraid of what you’ll do with the knowledge. It’s because it can’t do you — any of you — one iota of good.’

‘Mark was into self-harm,’ I told my brother, who was coming out of his foetal crouch and staring at me with aggressive unease. ‘He cut himself for pleasure. Mostly with razor blades, occasionally with other sharp objects that he picked up here and there and saved for the purpose.’

‘Why are you telling me this, Felix?’ Matt demanded.

‘Because you need to know. He saw the whole process as kind of erotic somehow. I’ve read some of his poetry, and that was pretty much all it was about. How beautiful wounds are: how they’re like flowers and fertile river valleys and mouths that speak in a language more eloquent than words. He never said they were like vaginas but it was sort of implied.

‘It was his upbringing, Matt. Kenny was a sadistic bastard — you knew that — and Anita had convinced herself that she was a worthless speck of dirt who deserved no better than the abuse she got. The only thing in all of this fucking mess that I don’t understand is how the strongest, most capable, most alive girl we ever knew turned into this . . . this doormat, but she did. Maybe because the one man she really loved got her up the stick and then walked away whistling “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam”. Or maybe it was something else. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

‘But however it played, Mark had this thing in his life that was halfway between a hobby and a love affair. Blades. Wounds. Blood. And then he died. And his soul stayed here like so many souls do — stuck in the mire, too wrapped up in all the unfinished business to let go. I’ve never thought about it before, but there should be more young ghosts than there are old ones. Dead at seventeen? How could you go gentle into that last sod-off? How could you think it was your time?’

Matt uttered an unlovely sound, compounded of grief and pain and protest. He didn’t want to hear any more. But I had to tell him. I had to make him understand what was coming next.

‘I thought he summoned the demon by accident, Matt. I was certain that was how it must have happened. Like, his obsession opened a door wide enough for a creature that loved and lived in wounds to enter by. Like he made a trail it could follow. Like his soul had a scent.

‘But I was kidding myself. First of all because the truth was too insane to be believed, and then because it was too hard. It hurt too much. Juliet refusing to tell me what was going on over here rang alarm bells, but I didn’t know what to make of it. Then I met Bic — the kid next door. The closest thing Mark had to a friend, and the first soul the demon chose to anchor itself in. For months that was all it did. It lodged there, in that one small soul, until it was strong enough to try its luck elsewhere. Why him? No scars on him anywhere, so he’s never cut himself. And the demon didn’t cut him either. It cut everyone else, or made them cut themselves, but with Bic it was really gentle. It had to have the blood: couldn’t do without that. But it made Bic bleed without breaking his skin.’

Matt was looking at me in pure horror now, and Coldwood, two steps behind but catching on, swore obscenely.

‘Then I actually met the thing,’ I said. ‘And it spoke to me. Just the one word. “Mark”. I thought it was telling me who it was after, but it wasn’t.

‘No, Felix,’ Matt pleaded. ‘No.’

‘It was telling me its name. Mark didn’t summon the demon. Mark is the demon. That’s your son’s metastasised soul out there, feeding on innocents and driving them to their own destruction.’

Matt’s pleas turned into a wordless bellow of anguish and he started to hammer his head against the floor of the room. Coldwood and I lunged forward at the same time but Juliet’s lithe body isn’t subject to the same limitations as mere human flesh, and she got there almost before we started to move. She clasped Matt in her unbreakable grip and he slumped against her, moaning unintelligible syllables.

‘I think you’ve made your point,’ she said to me in a calm, detached tone.

‘Is this how all demons are made?’ I asked her, my mouth too dry to swallow. ‘Is this what you are?’

‘It’s none of your business what I am, Castor. If you pry into that subject again, I won’t take it kindly.’

‘I can’t believe I never saw it,’ I continued, because the words kept spilling out of me whether I wanted them to or not. It was as though none of this had been real until I said it, or until she confirmed it. Now I had to live with this knowledge and I didn’t think I could. We have met the enemy and he is us. The newest monster in town was my fucking nephew. ‘I mean, it ought to have been obvious. Zombies are people. Werewolves are people. Why shouldn’t demons be people too? It’s Occam’s fucking razor: it’s the one common factor that makes sense out of everything. But how can it be so big, Juliet? How can it be so fucking big and so fucking powerful if it’s –’ the word had a sour, almost obscene taste to it as I shaped my mouth around it ‘newborn?’

Juliet stared at me for long enough that I was sure she wasn’t going to answer. But then she made a gesture that conveyed very succinctly the impression that in talking to me about this she was trying to pour a major ocean into a pint pot. ‘Many of us start out . . . large and diffuse,’ she said. ‘Bodiless emotion. Pure power, but not concentrated. Like a vapour that fills any space it finds itself in. We condense gradually, over a long time. We find our form.’

‘But you come from souls?’ This from Matt, who was staring at her in utter horror. ‘From human souls?’

Juliet made another gesture: something close to a shrug.

‘Dear God!’ Matt whispered. ‘Oh dear God!’

‘Tell me if I’m missing something,’ Coldwood growled, ‘but fascinating as all this is from a religious standpoint, is it not also totally fucking irrelevant? Either you can sort this out or you can’t, Fix. Which is it?’

‘The first ghost I ever exorcised was my own sister, Gary,’ I answered, shaking my head with ferocious emphasis. ‘I’m not going back there. Today it’s Matt’s turn.’

‘Mine?’ Matt’s voice trembled as he raised his red, tear-stained face to stare at me.

‘I think it’s our only chance,’ I said. ‘He’s kin to you and he’ll feel the connection. He may listen to you where he wouldn’t listen to anyone else. Most ghosts — they hang around because they can’t get it into their heads that their life is over. They’re tied to all the stuff they didn’t do, or wish they hadn’t done. You have to tell him it’s okay. Make your peace with him. You have to ask him to leave, of his own free will. It’s the only way.’

At least, I added mentally, it’s the only way that doesn’t involve me doing an encore for my biggest sin. For Katie. And I marvelled again at how big a bastard Asmodeus was: how nearly perfectly he’d led me to this massacre of the innocents. Because that’s what Mark was, however deadly his infatuation with wounds had become. His real father literally didn’t know he was alive, his stepfather was a vicious sadist and his mother was probably already broken before he was born. His cards had been well and truly marked. And then when he did finally break out of the ghetto, by metamorphosing into something big and powerful and scary, along came Uncle Felix with his magic equaliser.

No. Sorry. We are not at home to Mister Kin-slayer. Not today, at any rate.

‘They’ve never met,’ Juliet pointed out. ‘There’s no reason why the demon should recognise Matthew as its father.’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘That could be just wishful thinking on my part. But it’s the only shot we’ve got left in the locker, because I’m telling you I can’t do this. I’m empty.’

Matt got himself under some kind of control and climbed to his feet. Amazingly, Juliet’s embrace didn’t seem to have left him aroused at all: maybe it was because of the welter of other emotions running through him — or maybe she put out different pheromones when she was being maternal.

‘I’ll do it,’ Matt said, bleakly but calmly. ‘I—Obviously. Yes. I have to do it. I can see why it has to be