The Naming of the Beasts

I’d got to the door. I paused with my hand on the latch and turned back. She was holding something out to me. By reflex, I took it. A small sheaf of fifty-pound notes, the four I’d given to her two days ago, when I’d paid her to keep watch over Pen.

‘You’re right,’ Juliet said. ‘She’s more than a friend. I don’t want her to be hurt. I need you - I’m employing you - to make sure that doesn’t happen.’

‘I’ll do that without the money,’ I said.

‘Do it with the money. Friendship is hard for me to understand or to believe in right now. Bargains I understand. Say yes.’

‘Yes.’

‘Bind yourself to it.’

‘I bind myself to it. I won’t let her get hurt.’

‘Good then. Go away.’

I hesitated. ‘What will you do?’ I asked.

She made another of those abrupt movements, like a shrug that was close to getting out of control. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. Her voice was cold and flat, with none of its usual thrilling harmonics. ‘I might give up on this experiment. Go home.’

I felt an unnerving shifting in my stomach. It wasn’t pleasant hearing Asmodeus’ words echoed so closely by Juliet.

‘Don’t do that without talking to me first,’ I said.

She shot me a bleak hard stare. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ she growled.

14

Despite what she’d said the night before about going hunting on her own account, Pen was home when we arrived, and once I’d explained the situation, she rolled with the punch of having a new tenant landed on her.

‘We’ve got lots of empty rooms,’ she said to Sue, taking the little sheaf of fifties from me without comment. ‘Come and find one you like, and we’ll open the windows and air it out a bit.’

She spirited Sue away into the remote fastnesses of the house - the no-man’s-land between her basement and my attic, where she scarcely ever ventured. Like Sue, she was living on in the house where her mother had lived. In fact, she could boast three generations of Bruckners who’d all lived and (with one exception) died on this soil. Maybe that would give the two of them something to talk about.

Judging by the look on Trudie’s face, we had something to talk about too, and I knew what it was before she spoke.

‘That thing is dangerous,’ she said. ‘Probably too dangerous for you to handle yourself. The fact that it’s been playing house with a human being doesn’t change what it is underneath. You should tell Professor Mulbridge about what’s happening here.’

‘Juliet isn’t a thing,’ I said. I helped myself to a large brandy from a bottle on Pen’s sideboard, then realised what I was doing when the glass was halfway to my lips. Tense and frustrated, I set it down again untasted. ‘I count her as a friend.’

Trudie shook her head grimly. ‘Then you’re an idiot,’ she said. ‘Castor, didn’t you learn anything from what happened with Ditko?’

I fought down a surge of anger. Trudie had been a tower of strength out at Royal Oak, but every time I got close to lowering my guard around her her she pulled something like this.

‘Rafi is an old friend who got ram-raided by a demon,’ I said, deadpan. ‘Juliet is a demon I happen to like. I don’t see the analogy.’

Trudie saw the warning in my look, but she had no intention of backing down. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you do. You just don’t want to. If you anthropomorphise these things, you blind-side yourself. You start expecting them to behave like people.’

‘Well, I haven’t given up on you yet,’ I pointed out.

Surprisingly, the sucker punch seemed to hurt her. She affected a laugh but blinked a few times quickly and looked away. I’d been seeing her as Joan of Arc up until then: armoured in righteousness, no time for losers. It was a surprise to find that the armour had weak points.

‘They’re our enemies,’ she said, automatically adjusting the strings around her hands. ‘They torture and they kill and they poison everything they touch. I don’t understand why you don’t see that.’

‘And I don’t understand why you think you already know all the answers,’ I said, but with a lot less heat. ‘Look, the point about Juliet is that she doesn’t always kill when she can, or when she wants to. She didn’t kill me, two years ago. That was what broke the ice between us.’

I could see she wasn’t the slightest bit convinced, and for some reason, now, I wanted to plant the seed of a doubt. ‘Trudie,’ I said, ‘think about this. There’s a difference between Mount Ararat and Noah’s Ark. Have you ever been to Ararat? It’s in Turkey. You can go up there on a day trip, take a picnic. But does that prove that Noah washed up there when the flood waters fell?’

Trudie was giving me a blank stare. ‘You think I’m a literalist?’ she asked incredulously. ‘You think I believe every word of the Bible is infallible truth?’

‘No. I just want you to see the difference. Ararat exists, but it doesn’t prove Noah, or the flood. Now we know that Hell exists too. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that you, or Gwillam, or any other Christian soldier, knows what Hell is. Gossip isn’t fact, and when it comes to Hell, the Bible is just the Hello! magazine of the ancient world.’