noticed it sooner, but Juliet’s emphatic presence tends to elbow almost everything else right out of my perceptual field.
This was a tiny
I had it. This was what I’d felt when I held the stone I’d found in Pen’s garden: the invocation to Tlallik, whoever or whatever that sonofabitch might be.
Okay. So since I was here already and wasn’t invited in to tea, I might as well give the place the once-over at least. Hoping fervently that Juliet wasn’t watching out of the window, I hopped over the low wooden fence into Sue Book’s front garden – if that isn’t too grandiose a term for a lawn the size of an Oyster card, a dead-and-alive privet hedge and three beds of geraniums.
I squatted down and pushed aside the lower leaves of the hedge, looking for any evidence that someone had been there before me. At first, everything seemed to be kosher, but as I cast my gaze to left and right I caught a glimpse of red. In among the flowers, half-buried in the friable soil, was a second stone: grey like the first, and once again bearing a circular ward, crudely but legibly painted in bright red. It was fresher, so this time I could tell from the smell what the red was. It was nail varnish.
I photographed it, as I had the first, and put it back in place. It was clearly different from the first one I’d seen: not in the general design, which was identical, but in the collection of Aramaic symbols at the centre. Only two symbols this time. If the stones were summonings, and I saw no reason to doubt Nicky’s accuracy on that score, then they were summoning two different beings. Spirits of mischief, rage and paranoia, whistled up to drive Juliet off her head? No, that made no sense. One demon couldn’t possess another demon, and Juliet would know in a second if anyone tried to pull shit like that on her. Her succubus-sense would tingle, she’d follow the magic spoor to its source, and some unhappy necromancer would be trying to put his internal organs back with one hand while he wanked with the other. And in any case, the first pentagram I’d found had been at Pen’s house: Pen was still Pen, and as far as I knew, I was still me, not afflicted by any unusual mood swings or sudden bursts of indiscriminate rage.
Something else then. But what? And why? I’d promised Sue I’d sort out Juliet’s scary abreactions. My record with promises is a little patchy, but I was determined to keep this one. I couldn’t let Juliet be Somebody Else’s Problem, any more than I could do that with Rafi. On some things your room for manoeuvre is effectively zero.
I killed the rest of the day in various unproductive ways. I went to Bunhill Fields cemetery and sat among the old graves – old enough now to be completely ghost-free – to think about Rafi, and Asmodeus, and magic bullets. Normally I get good value for money out of that place. Something about the silence, or maybe the proximity to William Blake’s hallowed bones, makes my mind work at about 150 per cent efficiency when I’m there. Not this time though. I sat and watched the darkness come on, chasing the same few thoughts around in smaller and smaller circles. It would be hard enough to bring Asmodeus down, even with the gloves off and using every low blow in the book; doing it without killing Rafi seemed impossible.
I called Nicky Heath at odd intervals, got him on about the third or fourth time. He’d been down in the main auditorium of the Gaumont, fucking around with the seating layout yet again. I refrained from asking what the point of that was, given that he was the only one who ever got to sit there. Instead, I asked him if he had any news for me.
‘Yeah,’ Nicky said, ‘I do. On the Ditko front, quite a lot of stuff – but it’s more quantity than quality, if you get my drift. Anyway, there’s too much to go over on the phone. Come and pick it up whenever you’re free.’
‘Anything on that ward I picked up at Pen’s place?’
‘Not so far. I did the grimoires, came up with a big zero. Now I’m feeding Tlallik and Tlullik into some weird- arsed meta-search engines, and trailing them across my favourite necromantic noticeboards, but if anyone’s ever heard of them, they sure as fuck didn’t write it down anywhere.’
‘I’ve got another one for you,’ I said. ‘Same pentagram, different payload.’
‘Shoot it on over. The more the merrier.’
Nicky’s funereal tone belied his words, but I took the invitation anyway. Then I checked my watch.
‘I’ve got to be somewhere at midnight,’ I said. ‘Is it okay if I come over after that?’
‘I don’t sleep, Castor. Night and day’s all the same to me, except at night I can take a walk round the block without going rotten.’
‘Not in this weather,’ I pointed out.
He snorted. ‘Yeah, you got that right. Come over whenever you like. My door’s always open.’
‘Your door is booby-trapped, Nicky.’
‘Well, that too.’ I was about to hang up when he spoke again. ‘Oh, wait. I won’t be here. I’ll be over in Hoe Street. Hoe Street Market.’
‘In the early hours of the morning?’ I demanded.
‘Yeah.’
‘Okay. Which end?’
‘You’ll find me, Castor. The crowds will have thinned out by then.’
So I was looking at a night on the town with Gil McClennan, followed by a visit to a dead man in a deserted street market. You can see why people don’t go into exorcism for the glamour.
When I got to Charing Cross station it was still five minutes before the hour. Midnight isn’t particularly late by West End standards, so there were a fair number of people around, even though most of the restaurants and coffee houses on the Strand had already closed their doors.
Thinking I was the first one there, I leaned against the cheap replica of the Eleanor Cross and settled in to wait for the others. Then I spotted Trudie Pax standing just inside the station entrance, nervously winding and unwinding the string on her left hand.
She saw me at the same time and headed over, saving me the trouble of deciding whether or not to join her. She was wearing a khaki army fatigue jacket, jeans and boots, but despite the urban-adventurer chic she looked tired and a little distracted.
‘So how is the mapping going?’ I asked.
She made a non-committal gesture. ‘We’ve got something, ’ she said. ‘The start of something. I’ll show you tomorrow, and you can tell me what it’s worth. You don’t know what to say to me, do you, Castor?’
‘I don’t think I’ve got anything to say to you,’ I corrected her.
‘The last time we met—’
‘The last time we met you set me up, Trudie. Without you, Gwillam wouldn’t have got to Rafi, and we wouldn’t be in this shit now.’
She scowled where I thought she might blush. ‘I didn’t know what he was planning to do,’ she pointed out coldly. ‘When I told you there’d be no bugs, I meant it. There were none on me. Gwillam managed to take you anyway, but how is that my fault? I did what I could to keep my word. But he turned me into a liar, so I quit. I left the Anathemata that same night.’
‘To join the MOU,’ I mused. ‘That’s a really principled stand. Bravo.’
Trudie sighed. ‘I’m not asking for your approval, Castor,’ she said.
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘I just want you to know that it was a two-way deal. If you were screwed over, I was screwed over too – and I trusted Father Gwillam, so it was probably a harder knock for me.’
‘Still a good Catholic girl though, yeah?’
Trudie threw out her hands, her temper getting the better of her contrition. ‘What do you want from me?’ she demanded.
‘Not a thing,’ I growled back. But it was a fair question. I was sniping at her like a jealous husband, and she was probably right that she was more screwed against than screwing. I just couldn’t unbend with her because she was a part of that night – of the blood and the horror and the guilt. My guilt, mostly, but clearly I was more than happy to spread it around.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘We’re working together, so I’ll try to be civil whenever we’re rubbing shoulders. Beyond that,
