He didn’t move. He was standing a little stiffly, his left shoulder a little higher than his right. I remembered him giving that spastic jerk when Peace had fired his second shot: Fanke had taken a bullet, either in the shoulder itself or high up on his right arm. But he was a trouper, and the show had to go on.
‘Castor,’ he said, with pitying condescension. ‘I gave you your life. True, I took away from you a great many other things, but still the overall balance, I thought, was maintained. Yet here you are. And perhaps, after all, it’s fitting that you should be here to welcome my lord Asmodeus when he comes.’
‘He missed his train,’ I snapped. ‘He said to send his love. Now step away from the fucking circle, Fanke, or I swear on my sainted mother’s grave I am putting enough holes through you so I can see the deposition of Christ in that central panel behind you.’
‘No.’ Fanke shook his head, lowering his gaze to the ground as if he was meditating on human folly. ‘You’re not. Patience?’ I took this last word to be a piece of supercilious advice, until a woman’s voice from off to my left answered shakily: ‘Yes, magister?’
‘Tell Mister Castor how many sacrifices we’ve got lined up for this evening.’
‘Thr-three, magister. There are three.’
‘And what’s the order of play?’
‘First the chi-the spirit. The spirit already dedicated. Then the demon. Last, the woman.’
Eyes left, just momentarily, and with my finger tense on the trigger so that if Fanke moved at all I could still cut loose at him. That quick glance was enough to confirm what I already more or less knew. The woman who was speaking was the woman who I’d met a few days ago in my office – the woman with the badly bruised face, who’d been introduced to me as Melanie Torrington. Then I was looking at Fanke again, and he raised his eyes to meet my gaze.
He wasn’t smug, exactly. His expression said that he didn’t think it was any great feat to out-think me.
‘I wanted to be sure this time,’ he murmured. ‘The child’s spirit ought to complete the summoning, and free my dread lord from this . . . place. But just in case, I thought it would be best to have a Hecateum – a three-way offering, covering living and dead, male and female, spirit and flesh.’
I took another step towards him and actually poked the barrel of the gun into his chest. This time he gave, slightly, and his back bumped against the altar rail. I was gratified to have got some kind of reaction out of him at last.
‘Show me,’ I suggested.
‘No. Put the gun away.’
I held his gaze and said it again, with a very final emphasis. ‘Show me. Or you and me are both going to Hell a little earlier than we expected.’
Fanke turned to glance across at the woman. ‘Bring them forward,’ he said, the command sounding as negligent and world-weary as he could make it. He’d seen in my eyes that I was ready to shoot, and he’d changed his mind about bluffing me. That was something.
There was a bustle of activity as robed figures ran to do his bidding. If I were going to join a cult, I’d want to go in at officer leveclass="underline" there’s fuck-all job satisfaction at the bottom of the tree.
I followed the proceedings out of the corner of my eye. Pen and Juliet weren’t even in another room, they were just in the shadows under the pulpit, laid side by side on the ground. Juliet was still in her coma/trance/whatever state, and didn’t react at all as she was carried forward and laid down just behind and to the right of Fanke. Pen was bound, gagged, conscious and mad as Hell. She managed to kick one Satanist in a part he’d probably already consecrated to the Dark Lord: he doubled up with an unmanly yelp and dropped her legs. Two other men stepped in and completed the task of hauling her out for my inspection. They laid her down to Fanke’s left-hand side, so that from my point of view he was bookended by comely hostages.
Then, with a consummate sense of theatre, he held out his clenched fist to me as if in salute, before opening it wide to show Peace’s locket – on a new chain – dangling from his index finger. ‘Veni, puella,’ he murmured. Abbie’s ghost materialised around his hand, very abruptly, looking startled and terrified. She cast her glance from side to side, from face to face, taking in the massed ranks of the Satanists surrounding her, and me facing her across the magic circle. On me her gaze rested for longest, big and wide and full of hate.
‘I don’t lie for effect, Castor,’ Fanke said, speaking to me through her translucent body. ‘I lie to achieve specific goals. In this case, as you can see, I’ve told the truth. Now put the gun down – unless you think that my death is a fair exchange for Pamela’s. Because my death is all you can hope to achieve: the ceremony will go on, and will be completed, in any case.’
‘Where’s your male?’ I demanded, still buying seconds.
Fanke actually smiled. ‘I don’t have one,’ he admitted. ‘I’d decided to use your zombie friend – Nicholas Heath. Yes, I know about him. I know everything there is to know about your life: I’ve been close to you for a long time, after all. But when my people went to fetch the zombie, they found this other creature, and I yielded to temptation. My lord doesn’t favour the succubi. There’s something appropriate about feeding one of that kindred to the flame to set him free.’
His eyes stared into mine, mocking and malevolent: the eyes of a man who was damn sure he was holding all the cards.
‘A male would still be useful,’ he said, ‘for the sake of balance. But it’s up to you. You can play out this film noir pantomime, if you like. Or you can take Pamela Bruckner’s place and die inside our circle. I’ll allow that. If you put the gun down right now, and apologise to me for your disrespect.’
I hesitated. He was lying, of course, but then time was what I was playing for here on a lot of different levels.
‘Where’s Nicky now?’ I demanded, buying a few more seconds. I guessed the wax on that candle was thicker than I’d thought; I guessed Basquiat hadn’t called in to check her messages; I guessed my luck was running pretty much true to form, after all.
Fanke frowned. ‘Your dead friend, I believe, is still extant,’ he said. ‘But the details get a little abstruse. He locked himself into a room on the first floor of the cinema. When my people tried to open the door—’ He stopped, seeing I was grinning. ‘Well, perhaps you already know about his security arrangements. I lost a number of valued colleagues, without managing to smoke the zombie out of his hole. But the succubus made a more than acceptable substitute. Hiring you was the best decision I ever made, Castor. At the time I thought I was just keeping things in the family – but it brought so many incidental benefits. But now we’re delaying proceedings, and they’ve been delayed too long already. Please – your decision.’
Fanke was looking at me expectantly, and I could see in his eyes that – unlike me – he hadn’t had to bluff at all. He was going to see this through, even if it meant me rearranging his innards with the aid of hollow-point ammunition. One way or another, the show was going to go on.
Trying to ignore Abbie, whose dead gaze still skewered me, I nodded.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let Pen go, give her five minutes to get clear, and then I’ll hand over the gun.’
‘No,’ said Fanke tersely. ‘You hand over the gun now, and you accept my word that she won’t be harmed. No more procrastinations. Decide.’
I waited in vain for an explosion from the back pews, or for a hammering on the knocker and a ‘This is the police!’ from the church’s main doors. The silence, in which Asmodeus’s hostile attention was like a raw overlay of subliminal hypersonics, remained unbroken.
After a long pause, and just as Fanke opened his mouth to speak again – to his subordinates, not to me, because his head snapped round to face them – I turned the gun in my hand and held it out to him, butt first. He gave a nod, quietly satisfied, and took it. Then he passed it on to a tall, cadaverous acolyte who appeared at his shoulder.