The Naming of the Beasts

‘Then that’s the clue, isn’t it?’ She tapped the note with an extended finger. ‘He specifically tells you to bring her, because it’s her that he needs. He wants her to do something for him, and he doesn’t want her to be able to think too much about it.’

‘What kind of something?’ Gil demanded. ‘She’s just a venus fly trap. She draws people in and eats them. Are you saying Asmodeus wants to arrange a hit? He can hit anyone he wants to.’

‘You’re coming at this from the wrong end,’ Nicky told us. ‘Unsurprisingly. You should be asking yourself what he wants and then trying to figure out from that how he could use Juliet to get it.’

‘He wants to be free,’ I said. ‘He wants to get out of Rafi’s flesh and go home.’

‘And he thinks he’s done it,’ Trudie pointed out. ‘He says in the note that this is his farewell party. So he’s found some way of—’

‘Wait.’ Nicky was waving his hands in a rewind gesture. ‘Go back, Castor. What did you say?’

‘He wants to go home.’

‘No. You said he wants to get out of Ditko’s flesh. Right?’

‘Same thing, Nicky?’

‘No,’ he said emphatically. ‘It’s not. It’s not the same thing at all. Tell me how the succubus works. I’ve read about it, but I’ve never seen it. You saw it, didn’t you? On that boat.’

He meant the Mercedes, the floating home of Lucasz Damjohn, whoremaster, where Juliet had been summoned to kill me and had turned on her handlers instead. That seemed like a long time ago now, and actually I hadn’t seen all that much because I’d kept my eyes closed for most of it.

‘You know what she does,’ I hedged.

‘I know what the books say. In real life, how does it work?’

I cast my mind back, with some reluctance, to the events of that night, and to the other night, even earlier, when Juliet had come close to devouring me. ‘She turns you on,’ I said, tersely, inadequately. ‘She makes you aroused - very, very aroused. Then she eats you.’

‘Seriously? I mean, bones crack, blood spills, meat is chewed?’

Fuck. I took a deep, slightly shaky breath. ‘There’s no mess,’ I said. ‘When she took Damjohn, I didn’t see any blood. Any remains.’ Actually, it had been even more remarkable than that. He’d been bleeding from a gut wound before she embraced him. Afterwards, the blood that had been on the deck was gone, without even a stain on the woodwork to show where it had been.

‘So we’re talking about physical consumption,’ Nicky insisted.

‘Yeah. That, and . . . the other kind. Her nutritional needs are pretty complicated, Nicky. She needs the soul as well as the flesh. It’s as though lust is a digestive enzyme for her. It’s the magic ingredient that makes it possible for her to feed on us. On people. Otherwise it’s like what happens when we eat grass: we can’t break down the cell walls, so we can’t get any nourishment from it. We could fill our stomachs . . . and still, you know . . . still starve to death.’

I wound down like a clock, because I’d suddenly seen what he was driving at. I could see that Trudie had too. She was shaking her head in sick amazement.

‘What am I missing?’ Gil asked the room at large.

For a moment or two nobody answered him, because we were all still trying to work out the implications. Then I explained, haltingly, aware as I said it how absurd and unlikely it sounded. Unlikely to the point of impossible. The only thing it had going for it was that no other theory explained everything that Asmodeus had done.

‘That’s insane,’ Gil said, when I’d finished.

‘I think it’s fucking genius,’ Nicky said, shaking his head in wonder. ‘As prison breaks go, it makes digging a tunnel under Rita Hayworth look like nothing at all.’

‘So the succubus is the key to Asmodeus’ plan,’ Trudie summarised. ‘So we work without her, obviously.’ She shrugged her good arm. ‘She’s probably too weak to move in any case. It’s a pity, because she would have been our biggest gun, but we don’t let her get near this thing.’

‘And how . . .’ said Juliet haltingly ‘. . . do you intend . . . to stop me?’

She was on her feet and limping towards us. She let the surgical gown fall from her shoulders. For Juliet, disrobing serves the same purpose that shrugging the hem of his poncho back to show his six-guns does for Clint Eastwood. But this time the magic failed to flow. Looking at the half-healed cuts that criss-crossed her body, I felt no arousal at all, just a sort of numb sadness. You know that feeling you get when you watch a movie you loved as a kid, and you find out it’s nothing special? What I felt then was like that, only raised to the nth power. The true north of my libido was gone, and my disenfranchised dick had nothing to point to.

Juliet reached the table, but staggered when she got there and almost fell to her knees. Clutching its edge in both hands, she glared at me. ‘He took Susan,’ she said. Her voice had a terrible hollowness to it, as though she’d been cored out by the torture runes and was just an empty, walking skin.

There was no point in lying. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘he did. Who told you?’