Thicker Than Water

It was draining, and in the long run it wasn’t going to get me anywhere. It did tie up some of the monster’s psychic resources, though, so that the riot police mostly woke up from their trance, wiped the blood off their hands and retreated at a stumbling, undignified Îpsyrun. Only a few remained: presumably those in whom the demon had been able to embed itself most deeply and most quickly. Maybe they were guys who already had a tendency towards self-harm, or at any rate a fetish thing about wounds and pain.

Inside the flats of the estate, though, nothing moved. There was no general exodus: no chorus of screams as people woke up to the full horror of what they’d done during the night. The demon’s hold was unbreakable there because he had too much of a head start on me. Some of them were never going to wake up at all.

The sky off to the left, behind Guy’s Hospital, had started to lighten just a little but then stalled: the sun stayed stubbornly below the horizon and the zenith was as black as a lecher’s heart.

Then a commotion below me told me that the riot police were back. Only a small contingent of them, coming in from the north in a packed huddle that was vaguely reminiscent of the ancient Roman ‘tortoise’ manoeuvre.

There was a stirring on the barricades and behind the windows. The demon gathered itself - a single entity looking out through a thousand eyes. I put the whistle to my lips and played again, but I was weak and spacey from lack of sleep and my fingers kept fumbling on the stops.

Missiles started to sail down and crash onto the concrete around the tight cluster of Kevlar-clad cops. A couple of bottles and something bigger and heavier found their mark, hitting raised riot shields with thunderous reports that echoed through the eerie silence enveloping the rest of the estate. One of the bottles was a Molotov cocktail, and spilled flame spread across the topmost shields in neon traceries.

One of the riot cops who’d stayed behind when the rest had left appeared now from somewhere and sprinted across towards his colleagues. I thought - and they probably thought, too - that he was trying to rejoin them: but then his hand came up with something jagged clutched in it and he uttered a scream that was more like a torture victim’s dying agonies than like a battle cry.