The Naming of the Beasts

Pen was not only still up, she was actually outside the house, prowling around the floral border underneath the ground-floor windows in a state of simmering rage.

‘Look at this,’ she said as I came up, as though we were already in the middle of a conversation. ‘I only planted these tulips yesterday, and something’s trampled right through them. You can’t keep anything. Not a thing.’

The sheer ordinariness of the topic was welcome right then. ‘You could put a circle of salt down,’ I said. ‘That’s what my dad used to do, to stop cats shitting in our coal bunker.’

Pen breathed out hard and audibly. She hates the way I elide the fragile boundary between folk magic and bullshit.

‘Seriously?’ I said. ‘You’re standing in the garden in the middle of the night because something broke your tulips?’

Pen looked at me and shook her head. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I’m laying down some more wards.’ She showed me the lump of white chalk in her hand.

‘The ones on the doors and windows aren’t enough?’

‘They always have been. Now . . . I don’t know. It’s weird, Fix. This is a warm night, isn’t it?’

‘Very.’

‘But I can’t stop shivering. Everything feels wrong, somehow. It has done ever since . . .’ She didn’t have to finish the sentence. By tacit assumption, all unfinished sentences could be taken to refer back to the night of Asmodeus’ escape. She might have had some more to say about how she felt, but it was then that I stepped into the light from the open doorway. Pen gave an audible gasp as she stared at my damaged face.

‘Oh my God,’ she said, dismayed and solicitous. ‘What happened? Don’t just stand there, you twerp. Come on inside and let me put something on those cuts.’ She shoved me toward the house, leaving chalk marks on the sleeve of my coat.

‘I was in a fight,’ I said, putting up only a token resistance.

‘With what? A combine harvester?’

I hesitated. Sooner or later, I’d have to tell Pen what had happened tonight but, given the mood she was in, if I did it right then and there I’d be guaranteeing her a sleepless night.

‘It was just an argument that got out of hand,’ I said.

‘At Coldwood’s crime scene?’ Pen didn’t sound convinced.

‘Well, some of these grass-green constables still need the rough edges knocking off of them . . .’

She let the lie stand, but since she knew that was what it was, she reneged on her promise of a hot poultice. She handed me a yellow Post-it note instead. Sue Book, it read. 10.30. Get back to her tonight if you can.

But I couldn’t. Not now. Sue might be shacking up with a sex-demon, but she was a humble librarian and she worked nine to five like most ordinary, decent people. If I called her up at three in the morning and interrupted her beauty sleep, I might get a tongue-lashing from Juliet. And pleasant though that sounds, Juliet’s tongue can strip rivets off steel.

‘She sounded like she’d been crying,’ Pen said, as Arthur the raven came swooping down from the banister to take up his station on her left shoulder.

Sue? Crying? That was unnerving.

‘Anyone else?’ I asked.

Pen shook her head.

‘Then I guess I’ll turn in,’ I said. ‘Unless you want to draw some more stay-nots. I’m good for that if you’ve got another piece of chalk.’

Pen snorted. ‘As if I’d trust a ward you’d written,’ Pen said. ‘I know mine work: all I know about yours is that they’d be spelled wrong. Goodnight, Fix.’

It wasn’t, particularly. I couldn’t get to sleep for a long while. The night was a furnace and the booze-craving was still churning sourly in my stomach and sending static through my nerves.

When I did sleep, it was a shallow doze punctuated with disconnected, rambling dreams. A dog scratched at a dry crumbling fence; a butcher sharpened an overlarge knife on a leather strap, accidentally slashing his own arms every so often with the tip of the unwieldy blade; an old gramophone played all by itself in a dark empty room, the horn echoing with nothing but scraping static because the song had finished.

Some time before dawn I opened my eyes, still half-adrift on the tides of sleep. What was the sound now? I wondered dully. But this was the waking world, and the intermittent scratching that had accompanied me along all the avenues of my dreams was now sounding from directly over my head.

Something was up on the roof.

My room is under the eaves, with nothing but a skin of plasterboard and another of slate between me and the outside world. Whatever it was that was moving up there, it was close enough to register on my death-sense as a synesthetic thicket of jangling, discordant notes. This wasn’t a cat out for a night on the tiles. It was one of the dead, or the undead, or the never-born.

I responded instinctively, whistling a few of those spiky notes between my teeth. I know damn well that the tin whistle I carry is just an amplifier for something inside me: I can work unplugged when I need to, and that was what I did now.