“Christopher, you’ll be out of here in a couple of days, I promise you,” Olek said.

No response. Devaz just stared.

“Christopher?”

“Please go away,” Devaz said, quietly. “Please.”

I did recognise the voice. If it wasn’t the real Devaz, it was a very convincing impersonation.

Back in the white corridor, I said: “Okay, fine, it’s Devaz. Now what?”

“Now,” Olek said, hands in pockets, “we wait for the full moon to rise. At which point you’ll see that Christopher is no longer under its spell. You’ll see, not to put too fine a point on it, that he’s human again. Ergo, the method works.”

And makes you suicidal, apparently.

“Now,” Olek said. “The method. Follow me.”

Back down the corridor to the heaviest of the doors. Vault or submarine-hatch thickness. Numbered keypad entry. Inside, another of the steel tables. On it, a black metal container a little bigger than a briefcase, also with a numbered keypad. Olek tried not to make a show of not letting me see the code and I tried not to make a show of not trying to see it. Wulf, to my surprise, had gone completely still.

A small hydraulic hiss and the sound of a precision mechanism—then the case was unlocked. Olek opened it. “Take a look,” he said.

The container’s interior was foam padded. In the middle of the cutaway was a flat piece of whiteish stone—the sort of thing I imagined the Ten Commandments being written on—with two pieces missing, one from the bottom left corner, one from the right-hand edge. There was a rough circular hole the size of a tennis ball in what looked like its exact centre. It was covered from top to bottom in carved symbols—a script of some kind—and stained with (my nose confirmed the visuals) human blood. Weeks old, the blood. Weeks. Not millennia.

“You’ll remember,” Olek said, “that along with Quinn’s journal went a stone tablet. This is it.”

I didn’t touch it. I was thinking of all the times I’d seen ancient things in museums. Arrowheads. Pottery. Mummies. Always under glass. Even under glass the objects gave off a calm, clear, mute energy that collapsed the space between your time and theirs, that astonished you with the proof of time itself, that it really passed, that not just individual people but whole civilisations came and went. Millions were born and lived full lives and died and some little bit of stone or clay that had lain untouched through it all testified that there had been a time before any of that had happened. The air around them had a different silence, one that had never been passed through by the racket of modernity.

… but it was not until people returned to the banks of Iteru that

“You know,” Olek said, “I’ll be honest with you. I did this as an experiment. I had absolutely no belief in it. It was, as far as I was concerned, risible, pure fucking mumbo-jumbo, contrary to every principle I hold dear. I’d like to be able to take the scientific line and say that just because a phenomenon is unexplained at the moment doesn’t mean it’s terminally inexplicable. I’m an adherent of Ockam. All things being equal, look for an explanation in the terms you already have. Don’t start inventing phenomena to explain a phenomenon. But I have to say, this has rocked me. This has rocked and confounded me. If it’s as it seems to be, frankly, it changes everything. I still can’t really believe it …”

He was off on the little journey of his own amazement. He hadn’t been able to leave it alone, since it had happened (whatever it was that had happened); he hadn’t been able to get over it.

I realised that until now I hadn’t taken the possibility of reversing the Curse seriously. Or no more than half seriously. It wasn’t belief in a cure that had led me here. It was the feeling of answering something calling from behind the surface events. As if something were asking for my help in bringing itself about. As if I was—oh, dear God—a necessary part of a story. Ever since the night the vampire came to call. I’ll see you again. When I opened my mouth to say what I said next, sickness, excitement and weariness rose up in me like a wretched Trinity.

“Not that Devaz is any kind of advertisement,” I said, “but how does it work?”

66

Justine

ANOTHER NEAR-MISS AT the hotel in Bangkok. I got there less than an hour before sunrise. I was in such a fucking state I gave the cab driver the equivalent of $100 and didn’t take the change. Just ran straight into the lobby.

“You don’t look well,” a voice said, behind me, while I stood in line for the desk, trembling. “Can I be of assistance?”

I turned. A tall paunchy guy in his early fifties in jeans, white shirt and black blazer. Side-parted brown hair and gold-rimmed spectacles. He had a moony face and an annoying little smile—and a padded surgical dressing over his nose. His face was bruised. My first thought was that he’d been in a car crash. Then, somehow, I felt sure he hadn’t. I felt sure someone had done this to him. With good reason. There was a smell coming off him, too: bitter cologne and some tomato sauce thing he’d eaten recently, and something else it took me a moment to identify: incense.

“What?” I said, while every muscle tightened and my dumb brain still registered the piped hotel music softly filling the air-conditioned space around us, a bad cover version of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.”

“You seem distressed,” he said, looking as if my distress was just about the nicest thing he’d ever seen. “I was just wondering if you were … If you needed any help?”

For a moment I stood there, mentally jammed, hands and feet and throat packed with panicking blood. The sun was a big sick smile waiting to break over the horizon. The cells in my face were screaming, silently.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks.”

I turned my back on him but I could still feel him there, sense him smiling, as if his smile were a tiny fragment of the sun’s, one of its messengers that came on ahead of it. If my turn hadn’t come I don’t know what I would’ve done, but the businessman in front of me picked up his briefcase and headed for the elevators and suddenly there was the beautiful Thai clerk, a girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty, smiling at me and saying “Welcome to the Sofitel. Are you checking-in?” and I had to focus on registering, though my hands were shaking so badly I could hardly sign.