The Naming of the Beasts

‘The first ones were the hardest, because he was fighting me. Look at this mess here.’ The old man turned his hand and tugged his loose shirt-cuff up over his skinny wrist so that I could see the inner surface of his forearm. The seamed and rutted skin was like the surface of the moon, and the bosses that stood out there were in no real order: just five ragged bumps, clustered together. ‘I made the holes with a penknife, jab jab jab.’ He mimed doing it. ‘Then just shoved the sigils in one after another. He didn’t know what I was doing at first. Probably thought I was just trying to slit my wrist, which would have been a real fucking hoot as far as he was concerned.

‘Once he realised, he started to fight me. But I knew damn well it was the only chance I had, and he couldn’t take my right hand back from me, and I was still holding the knife.’ Moulson opened his eyes wide and stared. The light from the bare bulb was stark and eye-hurting, but he was looking into the dark of his own recollections. ‘It took hours. Most of a day, I think, but it wasn’t that easy to tell because he was messing with my head. You’ve probably heard that expression about having a tiger by the tail. Well imagine how it fucking feels if you’ve swallowed the tiger and it’s fighting you from the inside.’

I lifted the box in my hands so I could gauge its weight. Twenty, thirty pounds of metal? Madness. Madness born out of complete and utter desperation. The grudging respect I’d started to feel for Moulson shifted slightly, became something like awe.

‘Did you come up with this idea by yourself?’ I asked him.

His gaze flicked across to me, as though he’d almost forgotten I was there and had to remind himself who I was. He nodded slowly, distractedly. ‘It was the rule of names,’ he said. ‘I remembered my mother telling me that story when I was maybe four or five years old. How God brought all the animals to Adam to be named. “And whatsoever he called them, that they became.” As though they hadn’t been anything up until then, and the names pinned them down.’

A violent shudder went through him, but I couldn’t tell whether it was something that came from the memories he was reliving, or a purely physical thing. ‘We bring them by using their names,’ he said. ‘And we send them away by using their names. The names have got all the power in them, even now. So I drove that evil fucker out of me by driving in my own name, every few inches, until he had no place to hide, no place he could go that wasn’t marked as mine.’

‘Brilliant,’ I said, meaning it. ‘Fucking brilliant.’

Moulson showed his prison-house teeth again. ‘Brilliant? If I’d had the brains I was fucking born with, I would have used stainless steel. Or gold, if I could have afforded it. Copper’s poisonous. Did you know that? I didn’t. Came as a real shock to the system. Started to get the shakes, first, a few months after I did it. Then the shakes turned into falling-down fits. I knew what it was, but I didn’t go to a doctor because I didn’t see any point. It wasn’t as though I had a choice.

‘Then my liver started to give out, and when they took me in for the transplant they X-rayed me. As soon as they found out I was walking around with all this metal in me, they tried to get me to agree to take it out. I told them to go fuck themselves. It was touch and go for a while whether or not they’d give me the transplant, since any new liver would go the same way as the first. In the end they did it, and gave me ovalbumin injections to keep the copper salts under control. Whole load more shit too, pills and needles and all of it. I still get the fits from time to time, but I can ride them out, mostly. Been a while now since I broke a bone or anything.’

Moulson fixed me with a grim, defiant stare. ‘So that’s me,’ he said. ‘Doing well. Doing really well. And believe me, this is the best your friend can look forward to. Except that a big player like Asmodeus won’t let you get away with a move like this. He’ll see you coming and melt the metal out of your fucking hands. Make you drink it hot, most likely.’

I didn’t answer. For a moment or two I’d forgotten why I’d come, lost in the old man’s crazy, sickening narrative. His words jolted me back to the present with deadening finality. He was right. The trick with the coins was balls-out genius, but it wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t help Rafi. I was still looking for salvation in all the wrong places.

‘Seen enough?’ Moulson demanded. ‘Then turn the light out.’ He pulled his shirt closed a little, pathetically trying to reclaim a little of his dignity.

‘Can I . . . ?’ I asked, awkwardly ‘Is there anything you need? Anything I can get you?’

He stared at me bleakly. ‘You can get the fuck out, ghost-breaker,’ he said. ‘You and all your friends. That’s what you can do for me.’