The Naming of the Beasts

But that was until he met me. I was falling fast at that time - a fall that had begun when my death-sense kicked in at full power, around my thirteenth birthday. Rafi was rising like an ego-propelled rocket, and we ricocheted off each other in a perfect example of Brownian motion. Rafi’s exuberant hedonism and the cool, arrogant way he handled the world’s slings and arrows helped me to pull out of the self-destructive anomie that I was drowning in. My effect on him was less wholesome: I triggered a fascination in him, an obsession with the dead. Rafi being Rafi, the obsession expressed itself in competition. He wanted to outdo me in delivering the necromantic goods: to go on expeditions to the undiscovered country and bring back souvenirs.

It destroyed him, in the end. By some route I’ve never been able to reconstruct, he fell into the orbit of one Anton Fanke, the founder and leader and prophet-in-residence of the so-called Satanist Church of the Americas. The SCA seems to model itself on the Moonies in some respects: its deacons use total-environment conditioning, surrounding you with their own people so that the only truths you hear are theirs. Rafi dropped his old acquaintances and disappeared from our radar, much to Pen’s dismay. Ginny, his girlfriend at that time, was an SCA plant who fed Rafi’s addiction with badly photocopied grimoires, mountains of steganographic horse shit and a few nuggets of lethal, undeniable fact.

I don’t know why they chose Rafi. What I do know is that Fanke had a lot of arcane and complex ideas about how magical ritual should work, and he’d come to the conclusion that in magic the practitioner is part of the system. For some reason, that meant that when he attempted his biggest ever summoning, raising one of the most powerful demons in Hell by means of an adjuration spell adapted from Honorius’ Liber Iuratus, he decided it should be Rafi Ditko rather than himself who drew the circle and intoned the needful words.

The summoning went wrong, and Rafi ended up possessed by Asmodeus instead of commanding him. Then I sealed his fate by trying to carry out an exorcism without knowing what it was I was trying to cast out. I’d never met a demon back in those days. I was armed for bear, but I found myself drawing a bead on Leviathan.

I’ve tried many times since that night to reconstruct what it was I did, with a view to reverse-engineering my own tune and finding a way to put things right. It’s not easy, for a lot of reasons. The scene was one of violent chaos: in the bathroom of Rafi’s flat in the Seven Sisters Road, with Rafi thrashing and raving in a bathtub full of boiling water right beside me. That water had been ice about a minute and a half before, but the fierce heat that was burning Rafi up from the inside had made short work of it.

I found what I thought was the intruding spirit, and I started to weave a tune around it. The notes came quickly and fluently. I was expecting this thing, whatever it was, to put up more of a fight, but despite Rafi’s cursing and convulsions, the binding wasn’t too hard at all.

But as I was about to move on to the banishing, Rafi had a moment of lucidity. He stared at me with absolute terror in his eyes. ‘Fix . . .’ he whispered. ‘Please! Please don’t . . .’ In an instant he’d vanished again, going down for the third time in the lightless wells of his own hind brain. Asmodeus surfaced in his place, tenting the skin of Rafi’s face with the ridge poles of his own inhuman physiognomy, and blistering my ears with a curse from the arse-end of Tartarus.

I twigged it then, all of it. I knew what it was that was possessing Rafi, and I knew what I’d caught in the tightening coils of my tune. I was about to exorcise my best friend’s spirit from his own body, and leave the demon standing alone on the field.

I couldn’t just stop playing; that would destroy Rafi for sure. So I did the only thing I could think of, which was to change the tune into something else. I modulated key and pitch and tempo, trying to ground the binding power of the music in something else besides Rafi. And the demon, seeing what I was doing, fought back.

It was like being in a tug of war in which the rope is a frayed mains cable with a million volts flowing through it. I couldn’t stop, couldn’t let go, couldn’t let my concentration slacken for a moment. We wrestled for hours, the demon writhing inside my friend’s flesh, me hunched over the bathtub with the whistle jammed to my mouth, playing a skirling, nightmare arabesque.

And I won. Kind of. I bound the demon.

Only I bound it to Rafi, and I couldn’t untie them again.