Thicker Than Water

‘We tried a straight exorcism,’ she said. ‘But it fights back. It tries to take you onto its own ground.’ Thinking about my own ham-fisted efforts at the hospital, and the black pit where I’d briefly faced this thing, I knew exactly what she meant. I nodded and she went on, her clipped, emotionless tones making a strange contrast with the horrors she was describing. ‘Peyer went in first, and then - he tried to put his own ey³ pun, es out. He succeeded with one, but Feld managed to stop him before he got to the other. After that we used strength of numbers: one exorcist doing the binding, two or three others watching over him, weaving stay-nots around him so the thing can’t get close.’

She held up her hands as if I could read their failure in the complexity of the woven threads that covered them.

‘It doesn’t work,’ she said flatly. ‘Because its focus isn’t really this place. It’s more - like it—’

‘Like it lives in the wounds,’ I finished.

She nodded. ‘And most of the people on the estate have got broken flesh of some kind by now. So it’s all around us. In a hundred or a thousand different places. You drive it out of one vessel and it goes. It retreats. Then it flows back as soon as you look away. We’ve been here all night, and the best we can say is that the thing is focused on us, so it’s not making any mischief anywhere else. But we can’t keep this up for ever. And if anything it seems to be getting stronger.’

That wasn’t surprising at all. If wounds were its joy and its sustenance, and if there were a thousand wounded people crammed into these few hundred square metres of space, then the demon’s cup must surely be running over. And if every man, woman or child who got hurt, who got cut, gave it a new anchor and a new home, then its growth could become something truly exponential and unstoppable.

‘So we feel we need a fresh approach,’ Gwillam summed up tersely, giving me a cold, expectant look. ‘And since you knew most of this before we did, we hoped you might be able to advise us on where we go from here.’

‘Sorry to disappoint you, father,’ I said, ‘but you’ve got further than I have. When I met it, I was lucky to get out with both balls and a soul.’

Out of the corner of the eye I saw the woman’s shoulders sag. Gwillam shook his head. ‘Then you’ve had a wasted journey,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry to have taken up your time. If you’ll excuse us, we’ll return to our labours, however futile they may ultimately turn out to be.’

‘There is one other thing we could try, though,’ I said. He was already turning his back on me, but he stopped and waited.

‘The boy,’ I said. ‘Bic.’

‘William Daniels,’ Gwillam translated.

‘Exactly. You thought he had Jesus as his co-pilot.’

‘Castor, I’ve already admitted that I was mistaken about what was happening here.’

‘But you thought that for a reason, right?’ Gwillam stared at me, waiting for me to go on. Everyone else had their gaze on me, too, and I could feel the quickening of interest behind every pair of weary eyes: they made such a lovely audience I would have loved to take them home with me. If home was Guantánamo Bay. ‘He was the first,’ I said, impatiently. ‘The first ³ly.y mby a long way, I’m guessing. This thing found him long before it did anything to anyone else. He’s a sensitive: he’s got some sort of gift that lets him pick up what you’re thinking and feeling. Most exorcists have got a touch of it, too, but he’s got more than most. He’s like a radio satellite pointing into inner space. And he picked up the wound demon.’

‘Is that why it came?’ the little man, Speight, demanded in his lisping voice.

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘It came because of another boy. Mark Blainey, who died here a year ago. He was a self-harmer. He found wounds, or the inflicting of wounds - I don’t know, exciting, I guess. Appealing. He thought about them a lot. He obsessed on them. He cut himself in a lot of different ways, with different kinds of objects. And somehow, somewhere along the way, this thing noticed him. It came looking for him. I heard it speak his name, when I met it in that place where it lives. It came looking for Mark, but it stayed because it found Bic. And now it’s expanded its friendship group. That’s what I think happened, anyway.’

Gwillam considered, and all eyes now shifted to him because he was the authority, the giver of truth. That’s the trouble with the Church: it’s a top-down hierarchy where everyone does what they’re told by the guy on the next rung up. Which would be fine, I suppose, if it was me on the top rung instead of God.

‘We learned about Mark Blainey in our researches here,’ Gwillam conceded. ‘We thought him an early symptom.’