The Naming of the Beasts

The scratching stopped. There was a single muffled thump and then a skitter of movement. I jumped out of bed, tracking it, moving with it across the room, around the chair where I’d dumped my clothes to the open window.

The dead thing got there before me. It dropped down from the roof onto the broad window ledge, man-sized and man-shaped, outlined in silhouette for the briefest of seconds before it bunched the muscles in its legs and kicked off backwards, somersaulting out of my field of vision.

In that second I’d been staring into Rafi’s face - twisted into something like agony, his mouth straining open as though he was emptying a continuous scream into some fold of the night I didn’t have access to.

4

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Pen shouted, for about the fourth or fifth time.

‘I was going to,’ I protested. ‘Seriously, Pen, I was going to. But . . . you were tired, and you were upset, and I just thought—’

‘Don’t spare my feelings, Fix!’ She stood before me, rigid with fury, her fists clenching as though she wanted to hit me. ‘Don’t ever hide things from me and think you’re sparing my feelings, because you don’t know what they bloody well are!’

It was four in the morning by the kitchen clock, and only ten or fifteen minutes after my brief encounter with Asmodeus, so we couldn’t expect the sun to come up for a couple of hours yet. The night seemed unfairly, impossibly prolonged. Its twisted events were taking on some of the flavour of those heart-hammering nightmares that start to lose coherence even as you’re waking up from them, but that still manage to leave their mouldering fingerprints all across your day.

‘Fair enough,’ I said, rubbing my eyes with the heel of my hand. They felt like they’d been boiled and peeled in their sockets. I leaned against the wall for some much-needed support, but I didn’t feel as though I could sit down right then, with every nerve in my body still trying to opt for either fight or flight and arguing the toss with its neighbours. ‘You’re right. I know you’re right. I’m sorry.’

The soft answer is meant to get you out of corners like this, and it generally works pretty well for me because I use it sparingly. Now, though, Pen seemed to take my throwing in the towel as an insult on a par with the original offence. She needed to fight someone, and I wasn’t helping. ‘You . . . ratbag!’ she exploded, and punched me hard on the shoulder. My shoulder had seen a fair amount of rough handling when I danced with the devil down in Brixton, and Pen packs more beef than you’d think, given her petite frame, but I gritted my teeth and took it like a man.

She stomped away to the sink and threw stuff around for a while. I thought she might have been making coffee, or maybe running up a tasty and nourishing meal out of Ryvita crumbs and bloody-mindedness, but there were no visible results: just pots and pans and dishes and items of cutlery being moved from A to B, and in some cases from B back to A again.

After a few minutes they weren’t moving so fast or so frequently, then they stopped altogether, but Pen still kept her back to me and didn’t speak for a while.

‘How did he look?’ she asked at last, her voice barely audible.

‘He was . . . mostly Asmodeus,’ I answered, choosing my words very carefully. ‘I mean, Rafi was in there, but Asmodeus was driving. And, you know . . . the first time he was attacking me. The second time I only saw him for a moment. We didn’t get the chance to talk much.’

It’s hard to fob someone off when they know you as well as Pen knows me. She turned to stare at me grimly, hands clasping the sink’s stainless steel rim, like a boxer in his corner waiting for the bell to ring for the next round.

‘He looked unhappy,’ I temporised.

‘Go on.’

‘He looked as though he was awake and aware but completely under Asmodeus’ thumb.’

Pen flinched visibly. It was a worst-case scenario: for Rafi, it meant not just seeing but experiencing everything that the demon did. But there was worse, and I had to say it now, because if I let it roll until the morning she’d be even less likely to accept it.

‘Pen,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to get out of here.’

Her eyes widened and she gasped out loud. ‘What?’

‘Just for a while.’ I raised my hand placatingly, thought about putting it on her shoulder and then thought again. ‘Just for a few days, until this is all over. Until we’ve managed to get him back.’ Those last three words sounded exactly like the shameless fudge they were, eliding the whole process of subduing the demon, capturing him without harming Rafi, and getting him back into some place where he could actually be contained. I had no ideas, currently, as to how any of that was going to be done, but it didn’t change the situation, and I ploughed on doggedly, trying to make her understand.

‘He’s trying to kill us,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why, when he’s walked the thin red line for so long, but he’s out for blood, and we’re all in danger until he’s locked up again.’