The rest of the last twenty-four hours was swimming back into focus now, and none of it looked much better than the fiasco it had ended on. The ghost’s snapshots of life and death and Gabriel McClennan; the intruder at the archive and my forestalled attempt to take a long walk off a short stairwell; a day spent chasing my own tail in various scenic locations in North London; and then an unlikely encounter with a predatory demon who was cruising the lower end of Charing Cross Road looking for a square meal and a bed—not necessarily in that order.
I looked at my watch. Just after three o’clock, which meant I’d been unconscious for more than two hours. I felt a sudden, almost physically painful sense of urgency: a feeling that I had a lot to do, and it was already almost too late to start. In fact, I wasn’t sure if I could even walk, but if you don’t try, you never find out. I threw the covers aside and swung my legs off the bed.
“You’ll need to rest,” Matt said, a slight edge of warning in his voice. “Your system has taken a huge shock. And if you could bring yourself to pray—”
I waved away that suggestion. I was trying to stand, but my body wasn’t cooperating.
“What are you even doing here?” I demanded irritably. “Did the Holy Spirit come and wag its tail at you to tell you there was a soul in danger?”
Matt frowned. “Your landlady called me. When she tried to wake you up and couldn’t get any response, she became afraid. And since she knew that what had fled out of that window was something other than human, she chose to put her faith in an agency that is itself more than human.” I didn’t answer; I was still trying to get my legs under me and my balance straight. I was naked apart from my socks, which somehow is a lot more undignified than being all the way there, and my body was marked all over with shallow cuts that looked as though they could spell out a hidden message in Mandarin Chinese. “You ought to be grateful,” Matt went on. “To her, if not to me. Without the holy water and the blessings I put on you, you’d be sinking into coma by now.”
I gave a humorless laugh, but it was a straw in the wind. Annoyingly, the church’s armory of waters, oils, and sing-alongs did have some efficacy over ghosts and demons—only sometimes, and only if they were wielded with genuine faith, but Matty had that in spades. I couldn’t deny that he’d probably saved me from much worse damage. After Pen had come riding to my rescue like Davy Crockett and . . .
I put a hand to my shoulder. There was a small, raised welt there with a perfectly circular wound in the center of it. The mark left by Pen’s rifle. Except that it wasn’t a rifle at all. It was a kid’s air gun, and I realized abruptly what it was that it had been loaded with—what it was that had made the succubus fuck and run like a traveling salesman in a bad old joke.
“Rosary beads,” I muttered with mixed admiration and disgust. Rosary beads filed down to the size of BB shot. She’d said she was worried about me—and that Rafi had given her a warning. Evidently it had been a fair bit more circumstantial than the one he’d given to me.
Matt stood up and walked around the bed to stand over me. He looked down at me, his mouth set into a stern line. “Felix,” he said quietly, “you can’t go on like this. You’ve turned a gift from God into a stock-in-trade—and it’s a debased trade at that—one you can’t follow with a clear conscience. Exorcism is the Church’s business, not a game for amateurs or a get-rich-quick scheme.”
“Do I look rich?” I demanded, throwing out my arms to indicate my modest surroundings—more modest than ever, now that they’d been trashed by the demon. “Or were you thinking of the seven-figure deal I’m going to sign for my memoirs?”
Matt didn’t give an inch; he wasn’t capable of it. “You can’t banish ghosts without shriving them,” he pointed out with the same dogged calm. “Otherwise you could be sending innocent souls to Hell. You don’t understand what any of this is about. You’re like a blind man wandering down a busy street and firing a handgun at random into the crowd—except that the harm you’re doing is enormously, incomparably greater.”
With the help of the bedpost I did manage to get on my feet this time, so our faces were only a few inches apart as I gave him my answer, with as much quiet dignity as I could manage given the whole stark-bollock-naked thing.
“Thanks for the sermon, Matty. But you’ll have to bear in mind that I don’t believe in Heaven, or Jesus, or papal infallibility. And all that stuff about fighting the good fight and serving God instead of mammon—well, it’s inspiring, but let’s be honest. Your crowd are no better at poverty than they are at chastity, are they?”
Matt was silent for a moment, but not because my eloquence had struck him dumb. He just wanted to make sure that he didn’t talk back in anger; that would probably be a sin.
“You don’t believe in anything, Felix,” he said at last, composing his face into an absolute deadpan. “And that’s precisely why you shouldn’t have anything to do with the final disposition of human souls. You don’t know where you’re sending them, or by what authority, or how the power that God has placed in your hands works.”
“Whereas you’d like to slot it into a convenient schematic that has unbaptised babies going to Hell,” I shot back. “You’re in a pyramid-selling scheme—the biggest one in history. And maybe a thousand million people bought into it, but that doesn’t make you right.”
“Limbo,” said Matt. “Unbaptised babies go to Limbo. But you knew that.” He turned his back on me and crossed to the gaping window; Matt never did like staring contests. “Nobody in this world can know whether or not they’re right,” he murmured. “We see as through a glass, darkly. We can only do our best. But when the choice is between doing nothing and doing harm, surely nothing is the wiser option?”
I took a step after him, which was almost a serious mistake; I was still weak enough to need the bedpost’s support and solidarity. “The Gospel according to Cool Hand Luke? Sweet, Matty—and low-down. Because the alternative to freelance exorcism isn’t nothing. I mean, what your people do, that’s a sod of a long way from nothing, isn’t it?” I saw his shoulders tense slightly at that. “You think I don’t know that the Church has got its own exorcists? You think I don’t know there’s a recruitment drive on? Sorting out the sheep from the ghosts on behalf of Mother Church—I wouldn’t call that nothing. And the ones who meet your stringent quality standards—well, I assume they get the blessing, the whistle, and the wave. Fuck knows what you do with the others, but I’ve heard some ugly rumors, and it’s obvious you don’t want anyone to see you doing it. At least with me it’s one size fits all. I don’t pretend to be God—or to be on first-name terms with the bastard.”
I didn’t realize how loud my voice had got until I saw Pen standing in the open doorway—this time holding a tea tray with a single mug on it, and so looking less like Annie Oakley, more like one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s busty waitresses. In the sudden silence, Matt turned to face me, and there was a gleam in his eyes that could almost have been called threatening if my brother hadn’t been above such unworthy emotions.
“One size fits all is what the devil says, Felix,” he said in a tone of mild and sad reproof. “One size only fits all if you’ve got nothing to measure by. But you do have something to measure by. If you remember nothing else, remember dear Katie, God rest her. And your poor friend Rafi. Remember what you did to him. You see how dangerous it is when good intentions—”
The contents of the mug hit Matt full in the face. From the smell of it, it was gunpowder green tea laced with something herbal and potent. It was warm rather than hot, though, and it didn’t do much damage. The tray did; it smacked edge-on into his nose and made him stagger back. He turned to stare at Pen in absolute astonishment. She was standing with the tray gripped tightly in both hands, clearly ready to deal out more retribution as soon as he opened his mouth again.