She paused as if this was a game of some kind, as if she wanted me to guess.
‘What?’ I demanded.
‘Yourself, Felix. You come and work for me again.’
6
‘The Usual Suspects,’ said Nicky Heath. ‘Three Days of the Condor. And Costa Gavras’s Missing.’
Nicky smelled of Old Spice over other, more astringent chemicals, and the dark patches within his death-white pallor were more noticeable than they usually are. He was five years dead and doing pretty well, all things considered, but the loss of Imelda Probert’s professional services had hit him hard. Before Asmodeus killed her, the Ice-Maker was a faith healer for the dead: by a laying on of hands, she claimed to be able to lower a zombie’s core temperature and slow the processes of decay. Sounded like bullshit to me, when I first heard about it, but Nicky used her regularly and Nicky was unliving proof that whatever she did actually worked. Now though, he’d been thrown back on his own resources.
Nicky makes sure that the Walthamstow Gaumont, the long-disused and recently renovated cinema he’s made his home, is as cold as an Eskimo’s sock drawer; and he flushes his system with ferociously potent chemical cocktails every few days, effectively pickling his flesh to keep it from going bad. But from the look of things, he was facing some kind of a crisis on the preservation front. I decided the tactful thing was to avoid mentioning it, and since I’d walked in on him in the middle of setting up a late-night triple bill, another subject was ready to hand.
‘You’re slipping, Nicky,’ I said. ‘I can actually see a link between those three movies.’
‘So?’ Nicky was even more pugnacious than usual. Something was eating him, so to speak, but if it was my complicity in Imelda’s death, I wasn’t feeling up to that conversation just yet. I felt – for about the twentieth time that day – an overwhelming, almost crippling desire to get rat-arse drunk. Nicky had one of the best wine cellars in London, but he limited himself to inhaling the breath of the wine: the perfect companion for a boozy voyage into oblivion, in that he stayed sober and could be the designated driver on the return journey. But it was a joyride I couldn’t afford right then.
‘So, normally when you go for a triple bill it’s, like, they all had Filboyd Studge as key grip or something. It’s nice to see you go for something as obvious as conspiracy thrillers.’
‘Meta-conspiracy thrillers,’ Nicky said, clipping the film reel onto the projector’s massive horizontal spindle. We were up in the projection room, which was so cold that my breath wasn’t just visible, it hung in the air like a thickening fog and refused to dissipate. Nicky ignored the cold. He didn’t exactly enjoy it, but it didn’t bother him, whereas bright sunshine made him duck and run for cover. If you’re serious about the zombie lifestyle, you have to become as narcissistic as a professional bodybuilder. You’re sailing into eternity in a leaky boat, so it helps to have an obsessive nature. Nicky was born and bred for the gig.
‘Meta-conspiracy thrillers,’ I repeated, deadpan, inviting him to hit me with the punchline.
‘They’re all movies where the conspiracy is part of a bigger conspiracy,’ he said. ‘Where you think you’ve worked it out, but all you did was tear away the first layer of wallpaper. Like those dreams where you wake up sweating but, hey, you’re still asleep and it’s just another dream.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I get it. Is that how you see the world, Nicky?’
‘That’s how the world is, Castor. You just didn’t figure out yet who’s dreaming you. Maybe it’s Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, because the psycho-bitch-queen certainly seems to have a soft spot in her heart for you.’
I grunted non-commitally. That wound was still a little raw. But Nicky seemed happy to stick with the subject.
‘So what did you tell her?’ he demanded. ‘Did you use adjectives? Gestures? I want a slow-motion action replay.’
‘I just walked out,’ I said, which was the truth. I hadn’t trusted myself to answer Jenna-Jane without going for her throat, which would have brought her pet Nazis down on me in all their goose-stepping fury. So I just turned round and headed for the door, walking past Gil McClennan, whose face as he stared at me was full of contemptuous amusement. J-J let me go without a word. At least when demons try to steal your soul they snarl and slaver and make a show out of it.
Nicky was looking disappointed. He was clearly hoping for something more in the way of dramatic byplay. To forestall any further questions I held up my phone, which was displaying the chunk of grey stone I’d found in Pen’s front garden, with the red pentagram flaring on its upper face. Nicky squinted at it for a second, then waved it away. ‘My eyes don’t resolve down that far,’ he said. ‘You got anything bigger?’
‘I’ve just got this,’ I said. ‘Can’t you scale it up?’
Nicky returned his attention to the film, which he was threading through the projector’s complex series of spools and rollers. ‘Probably,’ he admitted grudgingly. ‘Send it on to my phone. I’ll see what I can do.’
While he was still working on the film, I composed a message with the photo as an attachment and forwarded it to Nicky’s mobile. It took a long time, because I’m far from slick with technology, but finally his phone buzzed and he reached into his back pocket to turn it off. Then I had to wait until he threw the mains power switch and turned on the projector to let it warm up. He leaves that to the last moment for reasons already given: warm isn’t good in Nicky’s world.
He didn’t bother to look at the display on his own phone, because the screen-size problem would still apply; he just relayed it on to one of his computers by means of some wireless skullduggery and opened it there.
‘Summoning,’ he said at once, seemingly without even reading the words in the ward.
‘How do you know?’ I demanded. I was supposed to be the practising exorcist here, so it pissed me off a little that Nicky was able to lecture me on my own craft. But then I’d never been big on the grimoire tradition, which boasts a common-sense-to-bullshit ratio somewhere in the region of one to a thousand.
‘Disposition of the runes between the inner and outer circles,’ Nicky rattled off absently. ‘Presence of outwardly radiating fan lines in the five negative spaces defined by the five arms of the pentangle. Use of aleph sigils to stand in for candles, as in the Gottenburg ritual.’
‘Okay,’ I said, giving up the point. ‘It’s a summoning. What’s being summoned?’
‘Not sure,’ Nicky admitted. ‘Let me check.’
He tapped at the keyboard, opening up some more files. At least one was a table of Aramaic letters. Another seemed to be a set of scanned pages from a very old book – probably one of the bat-shit grimoires aforementioned. As Nicky browsed and muttered to himself, I went to the window at the front of the projection booth, leaned on its sill and stared down into the auditorium below. It was silent and empty: most of the time Nicky plays his movies for an audience of one.
Not completely empty though. A single figure sat in the exact centre of the front row, barely visible as a silhouette against the diffused light bouncing back off the screen. Someone was watching the opening credits of The Usual Suspects, silent and motionless.
‘Tlullik,’ Nicky said from behind me. ‘Or maybe Tlallik. It depends whether this diacritical mark here is meant to have a curve or an angle.’
‘So who’s Tlullik?’
Nicky looked round at me and gave an expansive shrug. ‘Never heard of him,’ he said. ‘Her. It. Them. Probably a demon, judging from the name, but it can’t be a big one or else I’d have come across it elsewhere. The major heavies leave big footprints.’
‘Nicky, this was painted on a rock shoved under Pen’s rhododendrons,’ I told him. ‘I thought she’d put it there herself, but she doesn’t mess with necromancy. You think Asmodeus could be trying to get at her in some way?’