The Devil You Know

“You wrote to me,” I said, deliberately leaving the “you” hanging in the air. Despite what I’d said to Carla, I still wasn’t 100 percent certain whether it was Rafi or his evil passenger who had really been sailing the ship when that letter got written—and I felt like I needed to find out.

Rafi took the letter out of my hand and stared at it for a second with a calm, half-amused look on his face. Flame blossomed between his fingers, shot in an instant to all four corners of the crumpled sheet of paper, and consumed it in a single whoof of heat that I felt from where I was sitting. Rafi’s fingers opened, and black ash drifted down onto the floor between us.

“Yeah,” was all he said. “I did that.” He dabbled his finger in the ashes, staring at the ground.

“You said that I was about to make a mistake,” I prompted him, feeling more pessimistic by the second. “What mistake was that, Rafi?”

He glanced up at me again, and our stares locked. Rafi’s eyes were brown, normally; these were liquid black, as though tears of ink were welling up in them.

“You’re going to take this case,” Asmodeus rasped. “And it’s going to kill you.”

Three

WHEN I FIRST MET RAFAEL DITKO, I WAS NEARING THE bottom of a spiral. I was nineteen, and I’d been in Oxford for less than a year—as a student, mechanically following a degree in English because it was my best subject at school and because my dad hadn’t sweated in shipyards and factories for forty years to see his children go on and do the same.

But despair and nihilism had been eating into me for years. The more I saw of the sad and futile dead, hovering at the edges of life like beggars at the door of a fancy restaurant, the grimmer and more hopeless the whole universe looked to me. If there was a God, my reasoning went, he was either a psychopath or a fuck-up—nobody you could respect would ever have created a universe where you got one chance to warm your hands at the fire, and then you spent the rest of eternity out in the cold. Even when I could manage to forget my sister Katie’s scared little ghost and the way I’d slammed the door in its face, life didn’t make enough sense for me to want to engage with it.

Ditko was twenty-two, an exchange student from Czechoslovakia, which was a rare thing back then (“then” being the hedonistic 1980s, the dawn of the new age of heroic capitalism). With his dark hair and dark eyes, he looked like the bastard son of an archangel and a temple dancer, and he poured scorn on the dreams of entrepreneurial apotheosis that afflicted most of his fellow students. A job in the Square Mile? Retirement at thirty? Fuck that. He was hurrying headlong into life and sex and death with a fervor that ruled out even that degree of calculation.

Rafi borrowed the self-worship of the Thatcher generation, tried it on, and turned it into something graceful and ironic. Yeah, he stole his mates’ girlfriends, smoked their grass, colonized their floors, and ram-raided their fridges, but he paid us all back by giving us tickets to the show. Nobody ever managed to hate him for it, not even the women he scooped up and sifted through like trinkets on a market stall. Not even Pen, for whom he was the first and (ultimately) the only one.

I wonder sometimes what his life would have been like if he’d never met me. Certainly he was already fascinated by the occult, but it was an academic thing back then, because he was too flippant and too sharp really to believe in anything. But in our drunken conversations about the dead—the ones who never leave and the ones who come back—that interest started to quicken into something else. Even as he tempered my bitter atheism with his own agnostic, indulgent gospel (suck it and see, hold your fire, look at the pretty pictures), he listened to my descriptions of London’s ghosts with an enthusiasm that was way too intense to be healthy. I was so stupid and self-absorbed back then I didn’t see it, but I was giving him something new to get hooked on.

I gave up on university just after the start of my second year and set out on the aimless but intense round-the-world ramble that would consume the next four years of my life—my where-do-you-go-after-nowhere tour. Rafi had provided the emotional fuel for that journey—had pointed me and aimed me and lit the blue touchpaper—and that meant, on a practical level, that I probably owed him my life. But I didn’t see him for another two years after I got back, and when I did, he’d changed. He’d turned into one of those guys who hang out in basement bookshops and pay ten times over the odds for Aleister Crowley’s laundry lists.