‘The first ghost I ever exorcised was my own sister, Gary,’ I answered, shaking my head with ferocious emphasis. ‘I’m not going back there. Today it’s Matt’s turn.’
‘Mine?’ Matt’s voice trembled as he raised his red, tear-stained face to stare at me.
‘I think it’s our only chance,’ I said. ‘He’s kin to you and he’ll feel the connection. He may listen to you where he wouldn’t listen to anyone else. Most ghosts — they hang around because they can’t get it into their heads that their life is over. They’re tied to all the stuff they didn’t do, or wish they hadn’t done. You have to tell him it’s okay. Make your peace with him. You have to ask him to leave, of his own free will. It’s the only way.’
At least, I added mentally, it’s the only way that doesn’t involve me doing an encore for my biggest sin. For Katie. And I marvelled again at how big a bastard Asmodeus was: how nearly perfectly he’d led me to this massacre of the innocents. Because that’s what Mark was, however deadly his infatuation with wounds had become. His real father literally didn’t know he was alive, his stepfather was a vicious sadist and his mother was probably already broken before he was born. His cards had been well and truly marked. And then when he did finally break out of the ghetto, by metamorphosing into something big and powerful and scary, along came Uncle Felix with his magic equaliser.
No. Sorry. We are not at home to Mister Kin-slayer. Not today, at any rate.
‘They’ve never met,’ Juliet pointed out. ‘There’s no reason why the demon should recognise Matthew as its father.’
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘That could be just wishful thinking on my part. But it’s the only shot we’ve got left in the locker, because I’m telling you I can’t do this. I’m empty.’
Matt got himself under some kind of control and climbed to his feet. Amazingly, Juliet’s embrace didn’t seem to have left him aroused at alclass="underline" maybe it was because of the welter of other emotions running through him — or maybe she put out different pheromones when she was being maternal.
‘I’ll do it,’ Matt said, bleakly but calmly. ‘I—Obviously. Yes. I have to do it. I can see why it has to be me.’
He looked at me, trying to keep the fear out of his face. Fear of going up against a demon, or fear of meeting his son for the first time in these less than auspicious circumstances? Maybe it was a little of both. ‘So what happens?’ he asked. ‘You play your whistle and I . . . call his name?’
‘The whistle’s the last thing we need,’ I said. ‘I play that tune, it’s like I put his arm up behind his back and jam his face into a wall. And he’s had a lot of that tonight already. No, I think we need a different approach.’
I went through into the other bedroom. Like the living room it had seen a bit of ransacking, but it didn’t seem to have been very thorough in this case. Some drawers pulled out, a few clothes strewn around, but that was about the extent of it. Whoever the looters were, they hadn’t put their backs into it: and by providential chance, they’d run out of steam before they’d got to the wardrobe.
I went back through into Mark’s room, holding his cutting kit in my hands. Once again, just from holding the box, I felt the deep, insistent pulse of long-gone feelings that Mark had left there: the echo of his excitement and his joy. I put it down on the floor in the centre of the room where everyone could see it.
‘If Mark had an emotional focus, it was this,’ I said.
‘What is it?’ Juliet asked.
‘His works. A box full of razor blades, essentially, with a few more sharp objects for the sake of variety, and a bit of disinfectant. This is what he used to cut himself.’ Matt winced, but he seemed to know what was expected of him. He knelt down and touched his hand to the lid of the box. Closing his eyes he spoke Mark’s name.
Nothing happened. With my psychic antenna fully extended, I listened to the eerie silence beyond the windows. It was still dark out there. I looked at my watch and it was way past seven o’clock. There ought to be some light in the sky by now.
Matt called again, a little louder. Still nothing. No sense of movement, either on the psychic plane or in the world of brute, inarguable flesh.
A minute or two passed like this, with Matt calling Mark’s name and nobody answering.
‘Okay,’ I said at last. ‘It seemed like a good idea. Sorry to waste your time.’
‘Where did he die?’ Juliet asked. We all looked at her. ‘The boy,’ she clarified unnecessarily. ‘Where did he die? Was it in this room?’
‘No,’ Coldwood said, pointing. ‘It was out there. He threw himself off the walkway.’
‘Then that’s where we should be.’
It was clutching at straws, but it was worth a shot. I nodded and went to retrieve the cutting kit from the floor, but Matt had already picked it up and seemed unwilling to hand it over.
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
The hallway was completely still. We pulled open the swing doors — with some difficulty because of the broken glass and débris littering the floor — and stepped out into the darkness. Automatically I looked towards the east. The sliver of light I’d seen there before had gone now: the sky was unrelieved black from horizon to zenith. Except that there wasn’t any horizon, to speak of. The nearer towers loomed out of the dark like black cliff faces, pitted with darker holes like caves where the broken windows stared down at us. Beyond that, there was nothing.
Matt was in the lead as we spread out across the walkway. He cleared a space with his foot, knelt and set the cutting kit down between his knees. He looked up into the blind, black sky.
‘Mark,’ he said again. ‘This is Matthew, your –’ he choked on the word but he got it out ‘your father. Please stop this. Please let these people–’
He didn’t even get to finish the sentence. A wind from nowhere ripped the breath from his mouth. It hit us full-on, sending Coldwood and me slip-sliding backwards on the treacherous footing of broken glass and powdered brick. Juliet leaned into it and kept her footing.
A second later, we realised that the dust and débris on the walkway hadn’t stirred. This was a wind that had no quarrel with matter: just with us.
‘Mark–’ Matt yelled, and the darkness swallowed the sound so that, standing a scant few feet away from him, I could barely hear it.
I heard an answering bellow, though, equally muted but many-throated. It came from the windows above, where the pale blobs of faces could now be seen looking down at us.
Okay. That probably wasn’t good. Juliet was staring at Matt. I touched her shoulder and, as she turned towards me, pointed up. She nodded. She was aware of the watchers already: she didn’t need to see them to know they were there.
Matt was still speaking, speaking continuously now, but the words were torn up and scattered by the void-wind so they never reached me. Seeing Juliet walk past Matt to guard the further end of the walkway, I turned with Gary beside me to watch the nearer end.
They came on us from both sides at once, with the terrifying, utterly focused madness of the possessed. There were a couple of dozen of them, and I realised with a shock that I actually knew some of the ones at our end: they were the gang that Bic’s older brother belonged to. They had jagged shards of glass in their hands, and blood coursed down over their wrists unheeded as they ran at us. Gary faced them with his bare fists, but I had my whistle out and I blew the first skirling notes of the wound-demon’s exorcism in their faces like pepper spray. They slowed and faltered, which saved Gary from being julienned in the first couple of seconds. After that, even though they moved like sleepwalkers, he was fighting for his life. The narrowness of the walkway worked in our favour, but there were so many of them: and a single lucky thrust might be all it took. Coldwood ducked and punched, spun and kicked, used every dirty trick they teach in cop school. I dropped the whistle and joined him, humming the exorcism tune between dry lips as I fought.