The Naming of the Beasts

I gave it up. The unfriendly vibe was puzzling: the kid was making some assumption about me, but I just didn’t have the leisure time to tease it out. I grabbed a 297 bus over to Wembley, where Sue and Juliet live together in the house Sue inherited from her mother and walked the last half-mile through the day’s uncompromising heat, feeling slightly out of place and disadvantaged in the sunshine as nocturnal creatures usually do.

There was no answer to my knock. The windows were closed in spite of the heat, and the curtains drawn. It didn’t look promising. I knocked again, then took a few steps back from the door, positioning myself so that if anyone looked out from behind the living-room or bedroom curtains they’d see me standing there.

I waited for about two minutes. It occurred to me to pick the lock and go inside - my misspent youth has left me with the best set of cat-burgling tools in the Home Counties and a relaxed attitude to using them - but what would I say if Sue was in there, laid up with flu, and I walked in on her in her smalls? It was the sort of thing that might be hard to explain to Juliet, even on the grounds of neighbourly concern.

But unless my night-adapted eyes deceived me, there was indeed a twitching at the corner of an upstairs curtain. And then, after another short interval, the scratching sound of a door chain being disengaged.

The door opened a crack, and Sue peered out at me, a fuzzy-edged silhouette in the twilight of her hall.

‘Felix,’ she said, in a slightly bewildered tone.

I walked back to the porch, giving her a reassuring wave. ‘You called,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ If anything, the crack got a little narrower. ‘But . . . it’s all right now. I’m fine. I just wanted to ask you something, but . . . it got sorted.’

To get a less convincing tone of voice, you’d have to go to the court recordings of Adolf Eichmann saying, ‘I was only following orders.’ Lying didn’t come easy to Sue. I suspected that very few things did. Timid, self-effacing, uncomplaining and with lower self-esteem than a readers’ wives centrefold, she’d spent most of her life being the sort of willing drudge that props up half the organisations in the UK, quietly holding the fort while their colleagues ascend the ziggurat. But then she’d met Juliet, and her life had veered off in a new and wondrous direction.

‘I’m fine,’ Sue said again, with even less conviction. ‘I shouldn’t have bothered you.’

‘Well that’s what friends are for,’ I pointed out. ‘Listen, it was a long walk over here, and I’m feeling permanently dehydrated right now because I spent most of the last three weeks pickling my internal organs in Johnnie Walker, so could I come in for a quick drink? Of water, I mean.’

There was an awkward pause. ‘Well . . .’ Sue faltered. ‘I’m not dressed, and . . . I’m off sick, Felix. I . . . I haven’t been . . .’

Enough with the bullshit. I put a hand on the door and pushed it gently, not forcing my way in but forcing the point. Sue gave a sound that was almost a whimper and stepped away, averting her face, as the door swung open.

She was dressed in a slightly tatty blue silk dressing gown with a motif of ukiyo-e storks flying over the perfectly unruffled surface of a lake. She folded her arms across the front of it as if she was afraid it might fall open, even though it was tied with tassels at waist and hem.

With her head turned away from me, the side of her neck was fully exposed. There was a mark like a bruise there, wide and dark: a blue core surrounded by an irregular yellow halo.

‘Sue . . .’ I said.

Slowly, reluctantly, she raised her head and stared at me with wide, unhappy eyes.

‘She didn’t mean it,’ she said. ‘She just . . . I said something stupid and she got angry.’

The bruising continued up the left side of her face, an irregular archipelago of blue-black islets in malarial yellow waters. Her right eye was swollen closed.

‘Got angry?’ I repeated, incredulously. ‘Sue . . . I mean . . . fuck!’

‘It was me,’ Sue said flatly. ‘It was my fault.’

Juliet is a succubus, a demon whose specific modality is sex. That makes her one of the most perfectly adapted predators ever to emerge in any ecosystem. She makes men desire her - using a bag of tools that only starts with her stunning beauty and hypnotic scent - and then, when they’re at the highest pitch of sexual frenzy, vibrating like tuning forks, she devours them, body and soul.