Thicker Than Water

She looked to Gwillam for permission and he gave it with a resigned wave of the hand."

"‘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.

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.

‘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.