The Naming of the Beasts

I might have been able to break open the cheap plywood music box by myself, but this was economy of effort. Dicks’s size-12 boot smashed it into matchwood, but unfortunately spent very little of its velocity in doing so. It thudded into my ribs, and my world dissolved into abstract, incendiary gouts of agony.

It was a lot worse than I was expecting. I may even have passed out, but if I did it was only for a second or two. When the first wave of pain had finished ripping and ricocheting its way through me, I became suddenly aware of three things. The ground pressing against my hands and face, the pervasive smell of rotten leaf mould, and a continuous scream like the whooping note of a London fire engine.

I tried to sit up, found that my body had no interest in that idea. Something rose in my gut and I tried to be sick, lying there on my side, but I couldn’t even do that. My muscles weren’t in the right alignment to heave, and their abortive efforts just made me twitch and shudder like a half-landed fish.

That was when the terror kicked in. But the intense pain I was in acted like a kind of neural Kevlar, protecting me from the worst of the impact. I was able to hold the nauseating dread at one remove; watch it writhing in the air like a clutch of tapeworms. Dicks and DeJong weren’t so lucky. The fear-thing had been rudely awakened, and it was pissed off. The two men were down, Dicks on his back and DeJong on his knees, both of them flailing and swatting at the air. It was DeJong who was screaming, although it had turned into a sort of high-pitched mewling sound now, like the protest of a hungry kitten.

Things might have gone pretty badly for me, because right then I was too far gone to move, but the fear-thing didn’t seem inclined to stick around. Perhaps it was because it didn’t have an anchor here. It had made itself a nice nest at Super-Self but it had been evicted, and the peaceful Surrey countryside didn’t have the same appeal. Or maybe it was scared itself, because it had been taken once before and didn’t know whether or not I had another shot left in my locker.

For whatever reason, the sense of panic lifted by slow degrees as the entity took to its metaphysical heels. After a couple of minutes, I was able to get back up on my feet, despite the stiffness in my chest and the fierce pain in my bruised guts.

Dicks and DeJong were slower coming out of it, but then this was their first time on the merry-go-round. I had all the time in the world to pick up DeJong’s gun from where it had fallen. Not knowing how to put the safety back on, I just fired the damn thing into the air until it stopped going bang and started going click. Then I gave each man a couple of hard whacks on the back of the head, sending them into dreamland before they could get control of their limbs again. Those are my kind of odds.

Dicks had the car keys in his pocket. He also had a wallet with a clutch of credit cards and two hundred and some quid in cash. Christmas in July.

I pocketed the cash, threw the cards into the culvert. Since they brought in chip and pin, plastic has never been worth the trouble.

Dicks was already stirring again, and trying to talk as he stared myopically up at me. He must have one hell of a hard head.

I climbed up the bank, wincing with every step. There were two bands of pain, one around my chest and one around my stomach. Moving without setting them off was like keeping two hula hoops on the go in very, very slow motion. The jagged fuzz filling my head didn’t help a bit.

By the time I got to the car, Dicks was at the lip of the ditch and crawling towards me, dragging one leg in a way that didn’t look good at all. I got inside the car and locked the doors.

Automatic. Deadlock on the key fob. No trouble.

Dicks was fumbling with the door handle, bellowing at me through the glass. His eyes were rolling in his head and there was foam or saliva on his lips.

I pulled round in a tight arc and fed him some dust.

18

Jenna-Jane is good at a whole lot of things. One of them is logical deduction; another is thinking on her feet.

She’d already decided from things I’d said earlier that the rumours were all true: that the succubus Ajulutsikael was living on Earth and passing for a human woman. When I took out my mobile and tried to call her, with that one move I put Juliet within her reach - and from then on she was working towards that one goal. It wasn’t that she forgot about Asmodeus; it was just that she rearranged her priorities and relegated him to number two.