‘And the apology?’ Fanke asked, looking round at me again like a coaxing schoolmaster who doesn’t want to have to resort to the cane.
‘You’ll have to whistle for that,’ I said. ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you? If not, I can teach you.’
He gave me the coldest smile I’ve ever seen.
‘Grip, keep the gun trained on Mister Castor,’ he said, ‘and bring him to the circle. In fact, have someone pass a loop of piano wire around his throat, too, to make sure he stays exactly where he’s put. He has the look of a man who wants to go back on his word.’
The robed minions closed in on all sides, finding their courage all of a sudden, and a great many hands were laid on me. I was manhandled to the edge of the circle, which I saw clearly now for the first time. It seemed to be identical to the ruined one I’d seen in the Quaker hall, but this one was complete, uninterrupted by any chewed-up arc of pulped floorboards. In fact, this one was drawn on stone – and drawn with the tip of a knife blade, rather than in paint or chalk. Various half-formed schemes that had been forming in the forefront of my mind got discouraged and left.
The man Fanke had called Grip shoved the gun into the small of my back more emphatically than was necessary, and kept it there while another robed figure – a tall, heavy-set woman – passed a loop of piano wire very carefully around my neck. The care was for her own fingers: as soon as it was in place she pulled it tight, and I felt it bite into the flesh below my Adam’s apple. The two free ends of the wire had been tied around wooden blocks: she held one in each hand, like a paramedic with the charged plates of a defibrillator, but what she was actually holding was, in effect, the drawstring of a guillotine. If I moved from this spot, my head was going to stay right where it was while my body did its best to make shift without it.
Fanke walked around the circle to stand opposite me. Abbie went with him, dangling weightlessly in the air, his clenched fist wrapped around where her heart would have been if she were alive and still had one. Her confusion and fear were terrible to see.
The solemn-faced robed acolytes – except for Grip and the woman with the piano wire – took their stations all around in a wider circle that extended from the altar rail to the ragged heap of displaced chairs and to the aisle on either side. There were more of them than I’d thought: at least forty. Some of them must have come in through the main doors after the rest had set up shop and opened up for them: that explained why I hadn’t seen Pen and Juliet being brought in. One of them was the little doctor with the Scottish accent who’d given me my tetanus shots after I’d passed out in Pen’s hallway.
The crucified Christ stared down at us, looking uncertain about the whole proceeding.
‘I’d prefer to start with you,’ Fanke said, without animosity. ‘Like Pamela, you’re a little out of place here. In many ways, you’re beneath the dignity of the occasion. But the child’s spirit must be sundered. That won’t wait. To attempt any other sacrifice before the one that raised my lord is concluded would be unwise. So you’ll have to wait your turn, Castor. And you’ll have to watch your efforts and machinations come to nothing before you’re allowed to slink away into death. This isn’t cruelty on my part, you understand. Just . . . logistics.’
‘Well, if it’s just logistics, I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I was starting to think you didn’t like me.’ The piano wire tightened fractionally around my throat.
‘Marmarauôth marmarachtha marmarachthaa amarda maribeôth,’ Fanke said, in a sing-song voice. The acolytes came in on the chorus. ‘Satana! Beelzebub! Asmode!’ They threw out their hands, then drew them in and clasped them together in what was clearly a ritual gesture.
‘Iattheoun iatreoun salbiouth aôth aôth sabathiouth iattherath Adônaiai isar suria bibibe bibiouth nattho Sabaoth aianapha amourachthê. Satana. Beelzebub. Asmode.’ More hand-wringing. An acolyte at Fanke’s left held out a candle, and one on his right lit it with a taper. Fanke took it in his left hand without dropping a syllable. ‘Ablanathanalba, aeêiouô, iaeôbaphrenemoun. Aberamenthô oulerthexa n axethreluo ôthnemareba.’ Even though most of the room was already steeped in darkness, the area around us seemed to be getting darker still. I made the mistake of looking up, as though the church had some internal sun that was being eclipsed. Something hung above us in the gloom – something like black smoke, except that it was shot through with branching filaments of deeper dark like veins and capillaries. It was spreading out from a point twenty feet above Fanke’s head, and it was descending towards us. Or rather towards Abbie, who saw it coming and struggled like a fly in a web, her thrashing movements buying her no headway at all. ‘Please!’ she whispered. ‘Oh please!’
He looks a lot smaller in the medieval woodcuts, but I knew who it was that we were looking at: Asmodeus, coalescing out of the stone in answer to Fanke’s summons. The cold came with him, concentrating around us with such suddenness and intensity that I felt the skin on my face stretch taut.
Fanke held the locket up in his right hand, on a level with the candle flame. ‘Phôkensepseu earektathou misonktaich,’ he said. ‘Uesemmeigadôn Satana. Uesemmeigadôn Beelzebub. Uesemmeigadôn Asmode, Asmode atheresphilauô.’
He brought his hands together to let the locket meet the flame. Or at least he tried to: but it didn’t come. Abbie dug her heels into nothing and strained backwards against him, and although his hand trembled like a struck lightning rod, for a moment it didn’t move. His right arm was the injured one – the one where Peace had shot him – and I’d seen before that his movements with that hand and arm were stiff and jerky. Maybe that gave the desperate ghost some hint of purchase. Whatever it was, Fanke was startled: he turned to glare at her and pulled harder. His wrist spasmed once, twice, and began to move again.
But before the locket and the flame could touch, I thrust out my own hand and put my ring finger into the candle’s corona. Rafi’s hair, which was still tied there in a tight loop knot, singed and sizzled.
‘Amen,’ I growled, gritting my teeth against the pain so it looked like I was enjoying a private joke.
The piano wire tightened further around my throat, and the church exploded.
22
The noise was like nothing I can describe. If you could imagine a full brass band had packed their instruments with TNT and blown themselves to Hell on the final bar of the Floral Dance, then you’d be off to a good start. But that was just background noise: the sound of the film canisters being ripped into red-hot gobbets that ricocheted off the walls and scythed over our heads as the ignited film spools gushed out a geyser of flame and gas that expanded too fast for them to get out of its way.
It was Asmodeus’s scream that really made the moment special.
Dennis Peace had tried to describe it to me when he’d told me about what had gone down at the meeting house, but he hadn’t done it justice. It was as though you were hearing it through every inch of your skin, on a pitch that made your internal organs vibrate and scream in sympathy: as though you’d become a taut membrane on which broken glass was showering down, playing notes by tearing random holes in you.
I held my hand in the flame for a second or so longer, until the pain became too great to bear. Then I lurched back, which should have been the end of me – but the woman with the piano wire had lost the plot too, slamming her hands unavailingly to her ears. The wooden chocks on either end of the wire fell free, and their weight made the wire bite a little more deeply into my throat, but the sensation was drowned out in the allover-body migraine effect of Asmodeus’s bellowed pain and rage.