The Naming of the Beasts

The skin on the back of my neck prickled, but I stepped forward over the threshold. My hand groped for the light switch at the left of the door, found a cord dangling there instead. I tugged it and the light came on: a single bare bulb, painfully bright, hanging without a shade in the centre of the room.

With the heavy curtains closed, the room seemed claustrophobically small, just a cubicle really, with a bed and a table and a single chair. I thought of Jovan Ditko’s cell back at Irdrizovo. Moulson at least had a carpet, although its red and orange exploding-sun pattern recalled the worst excesses of the 1970s.

The chair had a wing back and was upholstered in brick-red leatherette, darkened here and there by the sweat-and-scuff smear marks of a couple of difficult decades. Moulson was sitting in the chair, his head slumped sideways against one of the wings, his hands resting limply on its arms. He was in shirt and trousers, his feet bare. The shirt hung open all the way down, I guess because it was a little early in the day to worry about that level of fine detail.

He was in the same colour range as the chair, more or less, his skin flushed an unhealthy red that darkened locally to brown and even black. His face was like a Maori mask that had been tossed off quickly for the tourist trade, with no real feel for what a face ought to look like. Gnarled little bosses stood out from his flesh like rivets on a cast-iron bucket, stretching in two lines from his temples to the bridge of his nose, then flaring out again across his cheeks and down under his chin. There were similar bumps on the backs of his hands where they gripped the chair arm - straight lines of them radiating from wrist to knuckles. His chest, sunken in on his ribs like the sails of a becalmed ship, bore a horizontal line of swellings across the collar bone and two diagonals sweeping in towards the nipples on either side. There was also a little cluster of them to the left of his chest, where his heart would be.

Every one of the swollen bumps rose out of a nest of old scar tissue, which was what gave his skin its piebald look. There was scarcely an inch of his body that didn’t bear the asymmetrical spoor of old, unimaginable excavations.

‘Like it?’ Moulson creaked. He raised his hand in a vague, tremulous gesture, inviting me to feast my eyes. ‘It’s something to see, isn’t it? All done with my own fair hand.’

‘Why?’ was the only thing I could think to ask.

‘Inoculation,’ Moulson said. He said nothing more for a moment or two. Then his right hand, still raised, unfolded and flexed as he pointed towards the bed.

‘In the drawer,’ he said. ‘A shoebox. Take it out.’

I didn’t see what he meant at first. Then I saw that the bed was a drawer divan, the drawers mostly hidden by the unmade sheets hanging down to the floor. I pushed them aside and opened the left-hand drawer, where his hand pointed.

The shoebox sat at the front, ready to hand, nestling in a substrate of socks and underwear. I lifted it out and set it on the floor next to the bed.

‘Open it,’ Moulson commanded.

I did. It was full of tiny copper discs - halfpennies, I thought at first, but since the halfpenny hasn’t been lawful currency in Britain for two decades or more, I lifted one out and gave it a closer look.

It was a little thicker than a halfpenny, and it had never been legal tender anywhere in the world. Two words had been stamped on it, slightly off centre, in letters so small I could barely read them. The spidery diagonals of a pentagram enfolded them.

Martin Moulson.

I grabbed a handful of the things and sifted them between my fingers. Every one of them bore the same imprint, on one side only. The verso was blank.

I stared at Moulson in amazement. The magnitude of what he had done was dawning on me. It was like glancing over a garden wall and finding an abyss, unsuspected, on the further side.

‘How many?’ I managed to ask. ‘How many of them?’

Moulson grinned, his lips peeling back from regular but blackened teeth. In the virtual absence of gums, they filled his mouth from top to bottom, like the bars of a cage. ‘That’s the question, all right,’ he agreed. ‘How many? How small a hole can one of these filthy bastards crawl into?’

His hand wove across and down through the air, sketching a process I couldn’t begin to imagine, and fervently didn’t want to.