The Naming of the Beasts

I didn’t argue. It wasn’t just her hands that were shaking, it was her whole body. She looked down at the trailing strings that dangled from her wrists, made a half-hearted gesture towards rewinding them, but then gave it up after the first two or three turns.

‘Will you?’ I asked her. ‘Walk out?’

Trudie shook her head slowly. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘Not yet. Not until we’ve found Asmodeus and got him locked away again. After that . . . I’ll see how I feel.’

‘Then can I ask for your help with one other thing?’ I asked, keeping my tone studiously neutral.

‘What’s that?’

‘The Super-Self entity. Gil is scheduled to start his demolition run at midnight. I want to get in there first and see if I can take it down myself.’

Trudie stared at me, mystification rousing her for the first time from her own tortured thoughts. ‘Take it down?’ she repeated. ‘Last time it chewed us up and spat us out. Why should tonight be any different?’

‘Because tonight I’ve got a secret weapon,’ I said. ‘Inspired by you, actually. I liked what you did with the map - the way you pushed yourself out past your comfort zone and did the necessary. I think maybe I can do the same thing here. But I want an anchor in case things go Pete Tong on me. The two of us working together damped that thing down just enough so that we could walk out of Super-Self on our own four feet. That’s what I want you to do tonight: be my back-up, and give me some room to manoeuvre if it drops on me before I make my play.’

Trudie hesitated for a second, then shrugged. ‘Okay. Why not?’

‘Thanks. Is there anything else you need to do here?’

She surveyed the devastation she’d wrought and shook her head again. ‘No. I think I’m done.’

We were both pretty near stony, as it turned out - I should have kept one of those fifties back for emergencies - so my first idea of grabbing a cab down to the Strand foundered on an absence of hard cash. We used our travel-cards from earlier in the day instead, taking the Circle back round to King’s Cross and then changing to the Piccadilly Line. But Holborn was closed because of a suspect package, so we were booted off at Russell Square and had to walk the rest of the way.

That didn’t feel like much of a hardship. The day had been another scorcher, and even this late in the evening, with the rush-hour crowds long gone, the train had smelled like one titanic armpit. It was a relief to walk in the cooling air, and to feel the city poised on that luminous knife-edge where day becomes night. There was still light in the sky, but the buildings were black masses on either side of us, the occasional still-open shop looking like a cave in a cliff face.

Another dark mass rose ahead of us, and it took me a moment to realise what it was. When I did, I stopped dead and stared at it in blank-faced wonder.

Trudie looked at me curiously, then followed my gaze. The same penny dropped a moment later.

‘Mary, mother of us!’ she whispered.

London hasn’t had a tram system since before the Second World War, but some of the infrastructure is still kicking around. You can see stretches of track in a hundred places where old street surfaces haven’t been asphalted over, or have been restored, and in my west London stamping ground the Acton tram depot, which looks like a Victorian siding shed with white-brick walls and a massive fan-vaulted ceiling, was still used for buses right up until last year.

What we were looking at was the north end of the Kingsway underpass - an underground tramway closed down in the 1940s. Later on, the council converted part of it into a tunnel for cars and buses coming from Aldwych by the simple expedient of building a new steel-and-cement corridor within the tiled and brick-built passage that already existed. The rest had been closed off and left to rot.

‘How did we miss it?’ Trudie demanded, amazed.

I was asking myself the same question. The answer - beyond ‘We’re thick as bricks and we can’t find our own arses without a map’ - was that the tunnel had no opening between Holborn and the river. This end was on Southampton Row, a couple of hundred yards up from Holborn station, and the other end was somewhere on the Embankment west of Waterloo Bridge. Both ends were closed off now, and apart from this short stretch of black stone parapet wall there was nothing to show on the surface that the tunnel was there.

We looked at each other, probably thinking in tandem. If this was where Asmodeus was hiding, then going inside with the light failing and no torch was probably insane. On the other hand, with the demon still out of town, this might be the best chance we were ever going to get.

‘Do you feel anything?’ I asked Trudie.

She raised her hands in front of her face, fingers flicking back and forth, weaving complex traceries out of her looped strings. ‘Nothing,’ she said tersely. ‘How about you?’

‘Nothing,’ I admitted. ‘You think we should call J-J?’