The last, tiny, desolate nub of Felix Castor thought, Now eat this, you little fucker, as I threw the switch again.
The mechanism inside the box whirred and clicked into action, and a tinny, hollow tune filled the room. Actually, to call it a tune was far too generous; it was a wayward sequence of notes that bounced and bucked and sprawled gracelessly out onto the tainted air. But, my God, what a dying fall it had. And how perfectly, how suddenly, the fear-thing stopped its own game to listen to mine.
The summoning is only the first part of an exorcism, but it’s the most important. Shut up and listen to me, it says. Heel, Fido, and don’t move another fucking inch until I tell you to. It was the part I’d never managed to get right for Asmodeus, despite all the years of trying. For this monster, by contrast, it had come almost at once. The trick was getting the tune out there when my own frozen heart was faltering in my chest and the lights were going out all over Europe.
Like all music boxes, this one mangled the tune, turning it into a stylised, flattened parody of itself. That didn’t seem to matter though. Like Noël Coward said, it’s amazing how potent cheap music can be. The pressure in the air lifted, and my heart came down from DEFCON 2 to something more sustainable. I drew in a tremulous breath, feeling as though vast curtains of rotting muslin were being hauled up on all sides of me.
The fear-thing was in trouble, which was gratifying to know. What’s harder to explain is how I knew it. There was nothing to see, and less and less to feel. The sense of it – the way the invisible monstrosity impinged on the radar of my death-sense – turned on some notional ectoplasmic axis, and diminished as it turned.
It turned to face the music box. As the notes of the summoning tumbled out into the dark, the fear-thing’s own attack faltered and died. It obeyed the summons. Overlaid and gathered in on itself in pleats and rucks of dimensionless emotion, it was pulled into the box like the endless scarves and ribbons that a conjuror folds into the palm of his hand before spreading his fingers to show that the hand is empty.
After a minute or so, I found I was able to stand. I closed the switch on the music box, killing the tune in the middle of a phrase. I waited, tense, for a moment or two, in case the fear-thing broke free again now that the music had stopped. What I’d played hadn’t been a full exorcism, only a summoning. But the orders seemed to stand. As in the game of musical chairs, the entity was staying where it had been when the music stopped, its focus swapped from the swimming pool to the box. More importantly, cut off from the ghosts in the pool and the skein of old emotions it had woven there, it seemed to be quiescent now – dormant, at least for the time being.
I turned on all the lights and checked out the three people closest to hand, making sure they were all still breathing. One of them had blood trickling down her face from a deep gash in her forehead, but none of them had suffered in the way Devani had. Post-traumatic stress aside, they’d all recover from this.
Once I went through into the pool though – taking the music box with me – I could see that not everyone was going to be so lucky. Two of McClennan’s exorcists were lying face down in the pool, and a third was sprawled at the edge of it with his head at a crazy angle that suggested a broken neck. The remaining stalwarts of the Jenna-Jane Irregulars – more than a dozen of them – were scattered around the room twitching and moaning and writhing. I remembered news footage I’d seen of the aftermath of a suicide bombing. There were no detached limbs here, but in other ways it was pretty close.
Gil McClennan had led from the front, I’ll say that much for him. He was in the pool too: not one of the floaters, but up to his chest at the far end, holding onto another man who had obviously collapsed against him. He was keeping the guy’s head out of the water with a loose armlock around his neck, although his own eyes were so wide I could see white all around the pupils. He was shouting incoherent phrases – exhortations to his team, maybe, or fragments of prayer. Whatever they were, they’d kept him alive and upright through the maelstrom. Now he was starting to retreat towards the pool’s edge.
I walked around to join him, and helped him manhandle the other man – who was profoundly unconscious – up out of the water. After a moment’s hesitation I gave Gil a hand up too. It seemed petty to keep up old enmities when we’d just survived death by blind panic.
McClennan got slowly to his feet, using the wall for support and then turning to lean his back against it when he was fully upright. His chest was working hard, but he was getting his breath back and starting to come down from the fear-high. He threw me a look, curious and slightly bitter.
‘What did you do?’ he demanded.
I’d stowed the music box back in my pocket by this time. As far as I was concerned, Gil was one end of an open mike that led straight back to Jenna-Jane, and there was no way I wanted her to know about this before I’d had time to think through the implications.
‘Why do you care?’ I asked him. ‘It’s gone. And the credit’s all yours. I was never here.’
‘The credit?’ He laughed incredulously. ‘The credit? Look at what’s left of my team!’ He came away from the wall. ‘I’ve got to get some ambulances over here,’ he muttered. He walked past me down the side of the pool but turned before he was out of earshot. ‘You think I wanted this?’ he demanded, his voice trembling slightly.
I shrugged. ‘You could have said no,’ I pointed out.
‘She doesn’t let you say no.’
‘That’s down to you.’
McClennan laughed again. It sounded even harsher than the first time. He seemed about to say something else, but whatever it was he locked it down and turned away.
I put my hand in my pocket, checking that the box was still there and unchanged. It was an involuntary reflex. A box full of Gader’el demon seemed to be identical in every way that mattered to a box full of nothing. It didn’t hum or rattle or throb with ectoplasmic energy. It didn’t even weigh any more than it had.
I’d pushed my modality to the limit, and a little bit over. I’d made the music play for me when I couldn’t play it myself, and somehow the link had held. Whatever power I tapped when I put the whistle to my lips still allowed itself to be accessed in this clumsy, second-hand and mechanical way.
What did that mean? What else could I do if I set my mind to it? I had to think about this, and soon.
But before that I had to call Trudie and make sure she was okay.
And I had to do something about Asmodeus. I had some inkling of what he was doing now, but not why he was doing it. I either had to figure it out for myself or get someone else on the case, fast. ‘I’m pretty much done here now,’ he’d said. ‘Got all the ducks in a row.’ I had a suspicion bordering on certainty that his plans were in their final phase, and I knew now who they revolved around.
I followed McClennan back through the anteroom to the reception area. He was checking his people, trying to make one of them sit up and talk to him, and I left him to it. Battlefield triage isn’t my strong suit.
Upstairs, the ambulances had already arrived, far too quickly for them to have responded to any call from Gil. Samir Devani was being loaded into one of them by two paramedics, an oxygen mask over his bloodied face. A third man was walking alongside, holding a saline drip that had already been attached to Samir’s arm.
In the midst of the ambulances, incongruous, a storm crow among doves, stood a black limousine. Its rear door was open, and Jenna-Jane Mulbridge stood beside it in a light raincoat, overseeing operations with a calm and slightly distant expression.
She turned and saw me as I approached, acknowledging me with a nod. ‘I’m glad you were able to lend a hand after all, Felix,’ she said. ‘Gilbert appears to have over-stretched his own resources rather badly.’