Thicker Than Water

Rafi stepped into the circle and sat cross-legged in the middle. ‘I’m going to get chalk all over my arse,’ he complained. It was probably meant as a joke, but none of us were in the mood for laughing.

Trudie unwound the string from her hands, flexed her fingers, and started to weave a new cat’s cradle. She chanted a rhyme at the same time, but it wasn’t anything that a practising Satanist - or a practising Christian, for that matter - would have expected.

It was a playground rhyme, starting with the familiar sequence ‘Apple, peach, pear, plum,’ but mostly muttered so fast and so low in her throat that it couldn’t be followed.

I caught a whiff of a sour, slightly unnerving smell - like the curdled tang of formic acid when you burn an ant with a magnifying glass. In the centre of the circle, Rafi shuddered suddenly, his shoulders tensed.

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‘Johnny broke a bottle,’ Trudie chanted, ‘and blamed it on me.

I told ma, ma told pa—’ Her fingers flickered in and out between the strings like the shuttles of a tiny loom. The pattern emerged, one line at a time.

The air in the room seemed to thicken. A cat yowled in the alley behind us and Rafi moaned, both at the same time. It was probably pure coincidence, but it felt as though the power that Trudie was putting out in Rafi’s direction was hitting random targets on the same vector.

Her movements quickened, reached a crescendo. She held up her two hands, joined by the cat’s cradle, then tugged twice and the string magically fell free, dangling from the index finger of her right hand while her left described an arabesque in the tainted air.

Rafi sagged and then stiffened, his limbs shifting suddenly into a new configuration as his sleeping passenger woke and stretched.

I watched the demon surface within the man’s flesh. From one point of view, nothing much actually changed: it was more like one of those trompe l’oeil drawings where the same sketched outline, seen from two different angles, can be either a woman with a parasol or a charging rhino. The same thing had happened here: Rafi didn’t look any different, but he had turned into something else.