The Naming of the Beasts

‘I’m . . . not seeing a name,’ Nicky interjected into the profound silence. ‘Should I be?’

‘It’s Rafi’s communion photo, Nicky.’ I held up the biggest piece to show him: an isosceles triangle, three inches wide at the blunt end and eight inches long, with half of Rafi’s twelve-year-old face visible close to the tip. ‘Printed onto the glass instead of onto paper. It’s a real big thing in Macedonia. Trust me.’

Nicky raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m sure. So the question is . . . ?’

I spelled it out. ‘Exactly how does this work? Do names have power because of their mystical correspondence with the thing they name? And if they do, would that correspondence be stronger or weaker for an actual image of the thing?’

‘What Martin Moulson did,’ Trudie mused, ‘was to inject himself - by means of his name - as an antibody into his own system, to drive the demon out of him. We want to drive Asmodeus out—’

‘With a Polaroid. Yeah. Pretty much.’

Asmodeus screamed.

It was a sound born out of anger as much as pain. He had it all worked out, and we weren’t playing by the rules.

But if having Rafi’s smiling face rammed into his left ventricle was an unpleasant surprise, it wasn’t the coup de grace I was hoping for. His arm came around like a scythe, smashing Juliet to her knees. Then he caught her as she fell with a swivel kick that lifted her into the air.

The wood of the banister exploded into jagged splinters, and Juliet pitched headlong into the stairwell. She fell past me, and there was a liquescent thud as she hit the tiles below.

And then there was one. But this was all about misdirection, and I hadn’t been a kids’ party magician for nothing. If you can make a roomful of six-year-olds watch your left hand while you slip the rabbit into the hat with your right, then a ten-thousand-year-old demon is nothing much. That’s what I told myself, anyway, as I advanced up the last flight of stairs, drawing my whistle and setting it to my lips like a sniper finding the spot weld.

Asmodeus snarled and stepped up to meet me - then stiffened, eyes wide, as Gil hit him from behind with the taser.

‘I’m going to be fuck-all use in all this,’ Gil commented sourly.

‘The one thing we’re not throwing against the sonofabitch is an actual exorcism.’

‘Can you climb a drainpipe?’ I asked him, producing Jenna-Jane’s M18 with a certain sense of occasion.

Fifty thousand volts isn’t a lot, when you come to think about it. That’s manufacturer’s spec, too, so you’re probably talking forty-eight thousand and some small change, if anyone bothered to check. A bolt of lightning can get you up into the millions, no trouble.

But Asmodeus was hurting already - in his dignity, as much as anywhere. He was pumping arterial blood, he had a razor-edged smiley face in his heart that was making him feel anything but happy, and his meticulously laid plans were turning into a Whitehall farce. So I’m willing to bet the effect in this case was out of all proportion to what it said on the label.

Again, it might have ended there. He could have folded up into nothing, and left Rafi in charge of a body that was leaking precious fluids faster than they could be replaced.

He didn’t. He grabbed hold of the taser’s conductive wire and hauled hard. Instinctively, Gil tightened his grip on the taser, so he was yanked forward, off balance. Asmodeus’ fist met him halfway, catching Gil at the junction of neck and shoulder, so that he fell to the ground as heavily as a bag of hammers. It had all happened so fast that the echoing boom reached me a second afterwards.