The Naming of the Beasts

It was a tune I knew really well, easy enough to visualise in its entirety. I held one end of it in my mind, cast the other end like a hook out into the dark. It seemed like no time at all before a telltale prickle of pressure on the skin of my face and hands told me I was being watched.

The four little girls stood in a ragged horseshoe formation, staring at me impatiently. They never liked to have their city-wide games of hide-and-seek interrupted.

‘Abbie,’ I said, sounding like a bad ventriloquist because my mouth wouldn’t open wider than half an inch. ‘Good to see you. Good to see you all.’ I could never remember the names of Charles Stanger’s three victims, and I never wanted to go back to the records to refresh my memory. ‘I hate to bug you, but I was hoping you could do me a favour.’

I pointed to the still, barely breathing figure in the bed.

‘Find her,’ I said. ‘Find where her spirit is hiding. Bring her home, if you can, back to this body. And if you can’t . . . then maybe she can hang out with you, for a while, until she decides what she wants to do.’

‘All right, Mr Castor,’ Abbie whispered, her voice not stirring the air. ‘We’ll see what we can do.’

I left as quietly as I’d arrived, and nobody even knew I’d been there.

Come to think of it, that’s pretty much how I felt when I dropped in on Juliet and Sue later that same night. The two of them were so wrapped up in each other, they scarcely knew the world existed.

Somehow the power dynamic in the relationship had shifted, and it was a strange thing to see. Juliet had come back to her full strength, but to look at them together you’d think that it was Sue who had the whip hand and the ineluctable magnetism. Juliet was as attentive to her, as solicitous for her, as quietly, ubiquitously there for her, as a Victorian butler. She kept touching Sue’s hand, or her cheek, or her shoulder, as though she had to reassure herself constantly that she was still there.

It was because she’d been back to Hell, or at least that was my best guess. Because Asmodeus’ wards had dragged her back against her will into her own past, and she’d seen with sudden, terrible clarity what it had been like: what she’d gained and what she’d lost, and what she might be again if she let herself slip. She held onto Sue because Sue was the embodiment and the anchor of her new life. Sue was the mnemonic that let her remember who she was.

I excused myself as soon as I found a decent opening, using some mumbled bullshit about Nicky inviting me over for a screening. He hadn’t, but I dropped in on him anyway. As it turned out, he was busy pricing up stock for his new enterprise down the market and had no time to spare for socialising, but he had one quick question for me before he shut the door in my face.

‘One of the original prints of A Matter of Life and Death,’ he said, hefting the heavy silver canister, like a thick discus, so I could see it. ‘Shit-awful condition. Breaks. Burns. Splices. Not really playable, but still . . . an original print. How much?’

‘A tenner?’

‘I was thinking a couple of thousand.’

‘Hoe Street Market? You want to attract the casual impulse buyer, Nicky, not the cruising millionaires.’

‘It’s a piece of fucking history.’

‘Cut it into three-inch pieces. Sell them for a tenner each.’

He tried the idea on for size and decided that - besides increasing his profit margin substantially - it made a lot of sense. ‘I guess people only want as much history as they can easily carry around, right?’

‘That’s always been my personal preference.’

‘Yours feeling any lighter?’

‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘A little. But I’m benching three and a half decades, Nicky. A month here, a year there . . . it makes less difference than you’d think.’

He nodded philosophically. ‘Sure, sure. Well, I’m up to my neck here, and tomorrow is the grand opening. Stop by if you’re in the neighbourhood.’

I headed back out into the night, the heavy steel doors echoing behind me.

I could have taken in a late-night movie, or caught the last couple of rounds at a bar where the music and the beer were more or less bearable. I could even have gone back home and slept. But Pen and Rafi were renovating both the house and their relationship right then. I never knew which room they were going to turn up in, so the less time I spent at home, the less chance I had of accidentally walking in on some of the wilder stretches of the Kama Sutra.

I caught the last Tube out of Walthamstow Central back into town, and walking on autopilot I found my steps taking me through Somers Town again. To my amazement, I bumped into a familiar group of zombies sitting around a familiar fire, although they had it banked a little higher now that the nights had started to turn.