Not that I stayed down for long. I rolled and came up already moving, heading along the back wall of the church towards the corner where the lych-gate was. My feet were crunching on the gravel, but I couldn’t help that: I had to assume that the man at the gate had heard me touch down and would want to know what the Hell the commotion was about.
I reached the corner of the building just as he came around it. That worked out pretty well, because I was expecting him and he wasn’t really expecting me. He wasn’t expecting the fist that slammed into his stomach, either: he folded with a strangled, truncated grunt. I spun him round with a hand on his shoulder and slammed his head into a conveniently placed tombstone once, twice, three times. After three he looked like he’d lost interest in the altercation: I let go and he slumped bonelessly to the ground.
So far, so good. I rolled him on his back, gun in my hand, to make sure he wasn’t faking it. He was deeply unconscious, his slack mouth trailing blood and saliva from one corner. There was blood on the crown of his head, too.
Well, what the hell. In the absence of the Lord, vengeance would just have to be mine.
I went to the foot of the oak tree and retrieved the film canisters, then crossed back to the presbytery door, skirting around the body of the first guard. I weighed up the idea of moving the bodies off the path, in among the graves, but a clock was ticking inside my head. In any case, the windows of the church were stained glass: nobody was going to see the downed men unless they came in through the lych-gate and walked around to enter the church from the back. And if they did that they’d have the drop on me already.
I listened for a moment at the door, then slipped inside. The presbytery itself was empty, as I’d expected it to be. I crossed to the other door, which led into the church. It stood open. A distant murmur of voices came through it, and the clop-clop-whisper of soft but echoing footsteps, but from this vantage point there was nothing to see: the chancel was deserted, as I’d hoped it would be. With luck, whatever was happening in there was taking place in the nave close to the high altar.
There was a carpet in the vestry, for soft, priestly feet: before stepping out into the chancel, I kicked off my shoes. I didn’t want the excellent acoustics of Saint Michael’s to betray me before I had a chance to set my stall out.
The stone was so cold I almost gave myself away even more embarrassingly, by yelling out. It felt like some parasitic plant of the frozen tundra was growing up through the soles of my feet into my trembling legs. I regretted taking off the shoes now, but it was too late for that.
I stole along the chancel to the big box junction where it met the main drag of the nave. The light was coming from one end of the cavernous space – the altar end, as I’d guessed: Satanists are all about transgression, bless their little hearts. They’re so fucking predictable it’s not even funny. So where I was, there was a fair amount of deep shadow, and I felt reasonably confident that if I peered round the angle of the wall I wouldn’t be seen.
They were still setting up. The robed figures were moving chairs around to make a broad, bare space just below the altar. One of them – Fanke himself, judging by the red robes that Peace had already described to me – was on his knees in the centre of the space, and a scratching, rasping sound gave me a strong hint as to what he was doing: drawing the vicious circle.
So one way and another, the kiddies were all entertained. If they’d already started intoning and dancing in a ring, I’d have fired a warning shot into somebody’s back and gone in like thunder – an action replay of Peace’s moment of glory the week before – but as it was I took the time to set up my little ace in the hole. I went down on all fours: or rather on all threes, because I was hugging the film canisters to my chest with my left arm, tightly enough so they couldn’t bang against each other and give me away. I crab-scuttled out of the shadows of the chancel and across to the nearest row of pews, sliding in among them with as little sound as I could manage. Then I set down my burden with elaborate caution, and unpacked.
As already noted, old movie film is pretty much the most flammable thing on Earth. With a Molotov cocktail you need a bottle, a piece of rag, all sorts of paraphernalia. Movie film just burns, turning instantly into boiling plastic, searing smoke and blue-white flame like the flame of a dirty blowtorch: drop a match on it and you’d better be somewhere else when it hits.
By way of a fuse I used a votive candle which I’d picked up from the floor on my way down the transept: it was one of the ones that had rolled and scattered when I’d knocked over the table the night before. The thing was an inch and a half thick, but I broke it in my hands, muffling the sound inside my jacket, and pulled away the solid, almost translucent chunks of it to leave the shiny rigid wand of the wick itself – a makeshift taper, stiff and saturated with solid wax.
The nature of the sounds I was hearing from the front of the church had changed now. The footsteps had ceased, and a rhythmic chanting had begun. I hoped that the Satanist liturgy was as prolix as the regular one: I needed a couple of minutes more.
I slid the canisters open, found the ends of the films and hauled out a foot or so of each, which I tied together like the five intertwined tails of the rat king in the old folk legend. I slid the lower end of my taper in among them, balanced so that it stood nearly upright, then lit the business end. It burned brightly at first, then started to fade almost at once as the chill and the hate locked in the stones began to focus on the little point of light. I watched it with glowering suspicion for a moment or two, but it steadied. I couldn’t be sure that it would last long enough to burn all the way down to the film, but it was the best I could do.
A single voice had risen up above the murmured responses of the acolytes: Fanke’s voice, low and thrilling and solemn. I was expecting some bit of late-medieval guff about how Lucifer is a good old boy and he’d just love to reach out and touch you, but this sounded older – and my Classical Greek gives out after ‘Which way to the bathroom?’ and ‘I want mine with retsina.’
‘Aberamenthô oulerthexa n axethreluo ôthnemareba,’ Fanke boomed out, his voice rising now both in pitch and volume. ‘Iaô Sabaôth Iaeô pakenpsôth pakenbraôth sabarbatiaôth sabarbatianê sabarbaphai. Satana. Beelzebub. Asmode.’
I couldn’t have picked a better time to make my entrance. Standing up in the cheap seats, I fired one shot at the ceiling, and the noise roared around the room like the voice of God. The Satanists spun round with their mouths hanging open, and Fanke faltered in his recitation. I stepped out into the aisle, levelling the gun at his chest.
‘Hey, Anton,’ I said, strolling unhurriedly towards him. ‘Steve. Dylan. Whatever the fuck you call yourself tonight. How’s it hanging? I know how this one ends, if you’re interested. The next words are “I surrender”. And then you turn around, put your hands on the altar rail and assume the position.’
The acolytes backed away from me on either side. The last time they’d faced a self-righteous nutcase with a gun they’d found themselves transformed from chorus line to moving targets, and that experience seemed to have left its mark. Fanke stood his ground, though, and the look on his face didn’t change, except to add an overlay of sneering contempt to the cold superiority that was already there. That got my goat a little.
‘Step away from the circle,’ I said, close enough now so that I didn’t have to raise my voice. I tried to keep the stooges in my peripheral vision in case they went through their pockets and found out where they’d left their balls. But the first bullet was for Fanke in any case: and the second, third and fourth, if it came to that.