‘There are some things I’m not prepared to tell you,’ she interrupted, making a pass through the air with her hand like someone waving away a paparazzo’s camera. ‘That’s one of them. But if you were going to say “Is that God?” then the answer is no. It’s more . . . involved than that.’
‘Involved?’
‘Complicated. Things fall out in a certain way, and accidents of the terrain give birth to rules of engagement. But in any case, that’s one form that possession can take – the most extreme form. The demon devours the human host and lives in its shell.’
‘Okay,’ I conceded. ‘Go on.’
‘Number two is house arrest. It’s possible for a demon to overwhelm a soul without its consent and hold it captive. Again, that would allow it to use the host body as if it was its own, but the human soul would still be inside, witnessing its own actions and even experiencing them, but as a passenger rather than a driver.’
‘Fuck.’ I let my laden chopsticks fall back into my pad thai. That was what Asmodeus did to Rafi: hijacked the bus and made him watch while he went on a joyride that was still going on two years later.
‘One and two have a lot in common,’ Juliet said, ignoring my discomfort. ‘They both involve the demon literally invading the human host. But there are other ways in which human and demon can be grafted together. Other degrees and gradations, I suppose you could say. At the opposite extreme, a demon can gift a man or woman with a tiny part of its own essence.’
‘Gift?’
‘Infect, if you prefer. Impart. Impose. Don’t argue semantics with me, Castor. You can’t expect me to have the same moral perspective on this that you have.’
‘I guess not,’ I acknowledged. ‘And yet, here you are.’
Juliet shrugged with her eyebrows. ‘It’s a job.’
‘Right. Like if bubonic plague was a woman, and she signed on as a charge nurse in a hospital.’
She actually laughed at that. ‘Yes. Exactly. Anyway, the point about gifting is that we can do it as many times as we like. It diminishes us a little, and that imposes a limit. A strong demon could gift a couple of hundred people at once, but it would be severely weakened afterwards. To get its full strength back, it would have to call all those pieces home eventually.’
‘But in the meantime—?’
‘In the meantime it would be as if each of those people had a tiny demon of their own, inside them – not controlling them, but encouraging them to see things from a more infernal perspective. And again, the stronger the demon, the more intense the persuasion. You might experience it as just a slight change in perception – so you’d suddenly be aware that if that traffic cop flags you down you could swerve just a little, hit him with your nearside wing and give him something else to worry about. Or that if your girlfriend doesn’t want to kiss on a first date, drugging her and raping her is still an option.’
‘Can I get you anything else?’ The waiter had appeared again, assiduous as ever, like a dog who has to have a stick thrown for him every so often to stop him from humping your leg. I asked him to bring me another whiskey, but Juliet passed.
‘Okay,’ I said after he’d gone, ‘you’ve made your case. Saint Michael’s was visited by a demon, and little pieces of this demon rained down on all the people who were there at the time. But the demon didn’t possess them fully: he’s still there, inside the church, in some form or other, which explains the cold and the slo-mo heartbeat and all of the rest of that shit.’
‘I didn’t say that,’ said Juliet.
‘Just joining the dots. Isn’t that what you meant?’
Juliet downed her Bloody Mary in a single swallow. ‘It’s a possibility,’ she said. ‘But I was giving you an example, not an explanation. Something possessed the Saint Michael congregation, yes. Something strong enough to leave a piece of itself in each and every one of them. That could be a demon, but it wouldn’t have to be. Human ghosts can possess living things, after all – you’ve met the were-things.’
I nodded reluctantly, but I wasn’t sold on that explanation. ‘Yeah,’ I agreed, ‘I have. And if there’s one thing I know about loup-garous, it’s that they go for animal hosts for a reason. Human minds are too hard – way too hard. You hear stories about that kind of possession, but I never came across a case yet where it’s been proved to have happened.’
‘Then I might be about to make history.’
Juliet’s tone worried me. ‘I thought we were here to discuss strategy,’ I said. ‘Looks like you’ve come up with a plan all by yourself.’
‘I’m going to go in,’ she said.
A whiskey appeared at my elbow. I took it without even looking: right then, the sight of the waiter’s eager-puppy face would just have screwed up my mood even further.
‘Go in where, exactly?’ I asked, although I had a pretty good inkling already.
‘I’m going to treat Saint Michael’s church as if it was a living thing,’ Juliet said, ‘and try to possess it. If there’s an invading spirit there, whether it’s a ghost or a demon, then it ought to be driven out by my arrival.’
‘You could do that?’
‘Yes. It’s not the way I normally work, but I was born and raised in Hell, Castor. Of course I can do it.’
I mulled the prospect over, unhappily. Something about it gave me a dull twinge of foreboding, but it took me a moment or two to isolate what it was. Then I saw the flaw. ‘You said it would take a fairly big player to do something like this,’ I reminded her. ‘To possess so many people all at the same time. Whether it’s a demon or a ghost or whatever the Hell it is, what do you do if it’s stronger than you? I mean, suppose you go into your trance or whatever, and you send your spirit out into the church . . . Do demons even have spirits?’
‘No. Demons are spirit. If it’s stronger than me, it will lock me out: I’ll try to penetrate, and the church simply won’t let me in: I’ll find it solid and dense instead of porous. In any case there’ll be no risk to speak of. I’ll either succeed or I’ll fail. And if I succeed, it might help me with that dietary problem we were discussing.’
‘You could feed on this thing?’
‘I could absorb it. It wouldn’t be like feeding for me, because I feed when I fuck. It would be more like taking nourishment through a drip.’
‘Which is better than starving to death,’ I allowed, without much enthusiasm. I tried to catch the waiter’s eye, failed, managed to snag the maître d’s instead. ‘But the same point applies. If you go head-to-head with this thing, and if it’s bigger and stronger than you to start with, then maybe it’ll be you that ends up on the menu.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Juliet. ‘Maybe. Does that worry you, Castor?’
I measured my words out with care.
‘It’s a job,’ I reminded her. ‘You offered me part of the fee. If you get eaten by a church, I end up a little poorer.’
She looked at me with wicked amusement. ‘Do you think that would be a waste?’ she asked. ‘Me being eaten? Or do you want to volunteer for the job yourself?’
I put my chin on my fist, pretended to consider. ‘I took the pledge,’ I said at last. ‘I’ll never let another woman pass my lips.’
‘A man of principle. I despise that: it’s bad for business.’
‘When are you planning to do this?’ I demanded, cutting through the banter. It was making me uncomfortable because the physical desire Juliet arouses is very real and very acute; and because, given that she is what she is, I know exactly where that desire leads. That fact makes jokes about oral sex ring a little hollowly.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Five minutes to midnight.’
‘Why so precise? What happens then?’
‘Moonrise – except that tomorrow is dark of the moon. It’s a propitious time.’
‘I’d like to be there for it. As back-up, in case something goes wrong.’
Juliet looked a little perplexed. ‘What could you do to help,’ she demanded, ‘if something went wrong?’
‘Maybe nothing,’ I said. ‘But that party at the mall gave me the thin end of a scent for this thing. Maybe I could run interference for you.’ I half-lifted my tin whistle out of my coat pocket and let it slide back again.