The Naming of the Beasts

It was hard to make myself move. I knew that Asmodeus was sprinting through the darkness towards us, fast and sure, homing on the smell of our souls. He could probably see us already, the way an eagle stooping over a meadow can find and focus on a fieldmouse in a square mile of tall grass.

‘Where are we going?’ Trudie demanded. ‘Castor, we’re going to run right into him!’

‘No we’re not,’ I muttered. I was still holding her wrist, but my other hand was running across the ceiling, fingers spread wide. When I couldn’t reach up high enough to touch it any more, I knew we’d gone too far. Quickly I retraced my steps, again yanking hard on Trudie’s arm. There! There it was!

‘What are you—?’ she demanded.

‘Here,’ I said, cutting across her. ‘Help me.’

It was the manhole we’d found earlier, the only way back up to the surface that didn’t involve getting past Asmodeus. Groping blindly in the dark, I’d finally found the outline of it, and now I put her hands on it too. ‘Push,’ I commanded.

‘It’s rusted shut!’

‘Try again!’

We braced ourselves against the tunnel floor, straightened our backs and strained against the unyielding cast-iron cover. The tunnel walls channelled a soft rhythmic sound to our unwilling ears: the sound of Asmodeus’s feet slapping the cobbles as he ran. It sounded like a barber stropping a razor.

My spine felt like it was breaking already, but I poured on the effort. Beside me, Pax growled low in her throat. The manhole cover didn’t budge by a fraction of an inch.

Pax moved away from me, and I heard her scrabbling around on the floor. Then I felt the vibration through the palms of my hands as she came upright again and drove something - one of the loose bricks that had been lying against the tunnel wall - repeatedly against the edge of the manhole cover. She was trying to dislodge the rust that had welded it into place, and it seemed to be working. It gave slightly, shifting against the pressure of my hands.

‘Push again!’ I grunted.

Trudie added her efforts to mine. With a squeal like a stuck pig, the manhole cover started to move. The light that rushed in was pale and washed out, but it was still startling. It showed the demon closing on us soundlessly in the dark, as fast as a torpedo.

With a booming clang, the manhole cover fell out onto the street. I grabbed Trudie before she even knew what I was doing, lifting her by her lower legs so that she had no choice but to grasp the rim of the hole and haul herself up. It was that or go over backwards into the dark.

Then I gathered myself and jumped, getting a grip on the edge and trying to pull myself up by my hands. My head cleared the rim of the hole, and I had a momentary, skewed vision of the road tunnel above: strip lights high overhead canted at a crazy angle, a soot-streaked crash barrier only a foot or so away, a car swerving around us and almost hitting the kerb. Trudie gripped my forearm and leaned back, using her weight to land me the way an angler lands a big fish. But something gripped my ankle hard and dragged me back into the dark. I clung desperately to Trudie’s arm, kicking out with my free foot but making contact with nothing more substantial than air. I went down heavily on my back, with a jarring impact that knocked the breath out of my body.

Asmodeus stood over me, grinning like the wicked land-lord in a melodrama. ‘It’s a mess down here,’ he said, conversationally. ‘You should have told me you were coming. I’d have made a bit of an effort.’

I scrabbled backwards, agonisingly aware that I was retreating not just from the demon but from the only exit. ‘You said . . . you’d save me for last,’ I reminded him, groping in the dark for something - anything - I could use as a weapon.

Asmodeus shook his head. ‘But you will keep putting yourself in harm’s way,’ he chided me gently. ‘What am I to do, Castor? I love our little talks, but I’ve got things to do and you keep tugging at my coat-tails like a kid who wants a lollipop. Anyway, I’m pretty much done here. Got all the ducks in a row. So I think I may go ahead and give you a spanking, just so you remember your place.’

His face went from light into shadow as he walked past the open manhole and out of the narrow, wan little spotlight it was casting down into the tunnel.

‘You know why the lion limps?’ he asked me, his voice a low, exultant growl.

I braced myself to rise as he bent forward and hit him with as much force as I could manage. He didn’t even seem to feel it.