Thicker Than Water — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

I settled myself on the edge of the bed and gestured to the other two to take up their stations. ‘You got names?’ I demanded.

‘Star of Renewed Being Phillips,’ said the old woman.

‘Caryl Langford,’ said the boy. ‘With a ‘y’. Like Caryl Chessman.’

Well, that was a fucking great omen. I took my whistle out and shrugged off my coat. It was feeling oppressively hot, all of a sudden. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Caryl. Ms Phillips. If this was a firing squad, you’d both be shooting blanks today. I’m the one who’s going to kill this thing. All I want you to do is to weave stay-nots around me so it can’t tear my soul into confetti while I’m working.’

The woman nodded but Caryl with a ‘y’ didn’t look too happy. ‘What if it turns on us?’ he asked.

‘It won’t,’ I promised. ‘Once I start playing, it’ll only have eyes for me. Okay, get your kit out and get ready.’

I watched them with half an eye as I went over in my mind the tune Asmodeus had given me, like a tailor poring over a swatch of cloth before starting to cut. It had to be good quality, and it had to be all of a piece. If there was a dropped stitch somewhere, we were all going to die in this room, probably with most of our insides on the outside.

Star of Renewed Being’s method of performing an exorcism seemed to rely on jacks - the children’s game in which you throw knuckle-bones up in the air and catch them again in more and more complicated ways. Of course, most kids these days use little plastic nubbins with six rounded points, whose resemblance to knuckle-bones is purely accidental. The old lady had the real thing: ten of them, well worn and shiny, off-white with brown flecks like the colour of clotted cream that’s been allowed to grow a proper crust.

The boy had a book, and I assumed for a moment that he’d learned his craft from Gwillam - that this would be another bloody Bible-reading. But the pages of the book were blank, and he took a stick of charcoal from his trouser pocket, choosing a page and smoothing it flat with nervous fingers.

There was no point prolonging the agony. This would either work or it wouldn’t. I started in to play, with none of my usual exploratory tuning-up because the tune was present in my head already, a finished thing. It started high and fast but plummeted precipitately into a doleful decelerando: abandon hope, all ye who riff on this one.

Nothing much seemed to happen at first. Because I was playing quite low, I was able to hear from outside the sounds - shouted order, shouted response, boots in lockstep - of serious men moving into position. The riot squad were here, and incredibly things were about to get even uglier than they already were.

But we had our window, and within it we made music. I did, anyway: the old woman threw bones and the boy sketched obsessive angularÃses""ju lines, turning the paper into a fractal landscape.

The air thickened and roiled. Something huge and diffuse turned its attention towards us."

"Darkness fell like a curtain, but it was darkness shot through with light: a curtain flapping in a strong wind, allowing me to glimpse through its folds a silver, saturated light like the luminosity of a coming storm. Everything was working beautifully: Star of Renewed Being and Caryl with a ‘y’ had my back, and the demon couldn’t drag me down into its black-on-black Hell the way it had at the Royal London. It could only bring a piece of that Hell along with it as it came into the room; as it coalesced around us like gritty shadows, angry and confused.

Got you now, you bastard. Your turf, but my rules. Now let’s put you on the griddle and see what colour your juices run.

I shifted my fingers on the stops and pushed the tune into a higher gear, raising the volume because the volume was the delivery system for the pain: and the demon was hurting now. Its rush on me had got it nowhere, because charcoal and knuckle-bones encompassed me like the arms of the Lord. Now it tried to withdraw, but it was too late for that. It was in a barbed-wire entanglement of music, a thicket of thorns like the devil’s briar patch. Unable to advance, unable to retreat, it thrashed and gored itself on the tune.

And I saw it.

Only for a moment, but I saw it. It stared at me through the shredded layers of its own protective darkness, as it had stared at me in the lightless abyss when I had met it by Kenny’s hospital bed. Not that our eyes met, exactly: in this synaesthetic maelstrom, seeing and hearing were metaphors for something else.

Say, I knew it.

It was just one synapse closing in my mind: making the last link in a chain of connections that I’d probably assembled subconsciously but not allowed myself to see until now.

A door opening, Asmodeus had said. An eggshell breaking across. Call it metamorphosis. Call it transformation.