The Naming of the Beasts

Nicky feels about early jazz the way heroin addicts feel about heroin, but he did his best to look unimpressed. He huffed out air, which he had to inhale specially for the purpose. ‘Jam tomorrow . . .’ he said sardonically.

‘The jam’s seventy years old,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s not going to spoil in a day. It’s an interesting item, I heard. On lacquer, with some kind of note from Shad Collins scribbled on the sleeve.’

‘I’ll see what I can do, Castor.’

‘All I can ask for, Nicky.’

‘Is it?’ Nicky examined his thumbnail, rubbing at the cuticle with the little finger of his other hand. ‘You surprise me. I was sort of expecting you to say, “How do you get a demon out of a close friend?” Something of that nature.’

The slight smirk that marred his studiously casual expression made me want to walk out without asking the question. Well, that and the fact that we’d been down this road a hundred times when Rafi was at the Stanger without finding a damn thing that would stick. But even when hope doesn’t triumph over experience, it can still make you go through the motions.

‘Are you onto something, Nicky?’ I asked him.

‘Something,’ he admitted. ‘I’m still trying to put it together. Ask me about it next time you come over.’

I was about to leave, but I had to pass the window on the way to the door and I looked down into the auditorium again. The silhouette was still there; it didn’t seem to have moved at all. There was something very familiar about it.

‘Nicky,’ I said. ‘Your guest . . .’

I turned to look at him. He was wearing the expression of a man who had been waiting for the penny to drop for a long, long time, and was both surprised and saddened at how long it had taken.

‘She’s been waiting for you for three hours,’ he said. ‘And she’s in a shit-awful mood. If I were you I wouldn’t make her come up and get me.’

Juliet was staring at the screen with unblinking eyes, watching Kevin Spacey’s tribulations with no sign of empathy or engagement.

At first I thought that Nicky had exaggerated. She didn’t look angry or agitated; in fact she was preternaturally still, like one of Antony Gormley’s iron men who’d wandered in off the street for a breather.

But as I opened my mouth to speak her name, she turned to look at me, and her eyes shone in the dark with a red light, self-luminous like the eyes of a cat.

‘Castor,’ she said. Her voice was a bass chord that started sympathetic vibrations in my guts and loins.

‘Hey,’ I said lightly, dropping into a seat three along from her. That meant I could look at the screen instead of those eyes. It wasn’t that glowing red eyes were unusual accoutrements for a demon; it was just that Juliet had never had them before, and they scared the living shit out of me. ‘Rosebud was his sledge.’

Juliet didn’t get the joke, and didn’t bother to ask me to explain it. I felt a wash of psychosomatic heat spill across my cheek. She was still staring at me through the intervening dark, which hid me from her about as effectively as a throw rug hides a rhinoceros.

‘You talked to Sue,’ she said, in the same low, burry voice.

‘Yeah.’ I nodded. ‘She’s . . . worried about you. So am I. Is there something I should know?’

‘You should know not to talk to her behind my back,’ Juliet growled.

That made me turn to meet her gaze again. ‘Behind your back?’ I said. ‘Juliet, you hurt her. You hurt her and you terrified her. You think it’s wrong that she should want to talk about that?’

Juliet stood, so I did too. It wasn’t that I had any more of a chance against her on my feet than I did sitting down, but that old fight or flight reflex dies hard. Looking at her grim face, I wondered if I was about to do the same.

‘What’s mine is mine, Castor,’ Juliet said. ‘You know what I can do to you, so I’m telling you to leave her alone.’

Oh man. We were really on slippery ground now. But I’ve never let that stop me from trying to tap-dance. ‘Juliet,’ I said, ‘she doesn’t belong to you. We talked about this way back in the day, when the two of you were . . .’ I hesitated. ‘Going out together’ is the default phrase, but the way I remembered it, Juliet and Sue spent most of the first month of their relationship indoors, barely surfacing for long enough to put out the empty milk bottles and feed the cat. If you start a romance with a succubus, you have to be prepared to clock up some serious hours in the bedroom - and probably on the sofa, the carpet, the kitchen table and the top of the bookcase. I settled for ‘. . . getting to know one another,’ and pressed on quickly so the pause wouldn’t show. ‘Sue isn’t your pet or a conveniently warm and cuddly sex toy; she’s a human being. I know that doesn’t mean the same thing to you that it does to me, but for the love of Christ! You can’t pick her up and put her down whenever you want to; you can’t dictate who she does and doesn’t talk to; and you can’t beat the shit out of her when she doesn’t come up to scratch. Understand?’