‘It’s a plan that might seem irresistible,’ Juliet said, ‘if a wound-demon was whispering in your ear. Blood and pain must have started to feel like desirable things in themselves. Kenny Seddon just tried to harness them to a different end.’
‘But it doesn’t work,’ Gary pointed out bluntly. ‘There’s still the angle of the wounds. Some of them were self-inflicted, but some of them couldn’t have been. A fit-up doesn’t explain the facts.’
‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ I said.
‘Oh really?’ Gary’s tone was savagely sardonic. ‘I thought it did. Your fucking brother is facing a murder charge, you self-satisfied tosspot!’
‘My fucking brother,’ I snarled back at him, my temper fraying right through, ‘thinks his biggest sin was a fucking bunk-up with Anita Yeats eighteen fucking years ago. When in point of fucking fact, it’s this.’ I threw out my arms, indicating with a sweeping gesture not just the room, the flat, the tower, but the whole of the Salisbury Estate in all its singed, shattered, punctured, incised and blood-smeared horror.
‘This is your biggest sin, Matty. How long has it been since your last confession?’
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?’