The Naming of the Beasts

‘Something you’re not telling me,’ I said. It was a statement, not a question. This whole situation was screaming set-up at me in three-part harmony.

‘Yeah,’ Gary admitted. ‘The other reason why I came to you with this. I mean, you’re not really on the books any more, and your friend Juliet has it all over you in the eye-candy department. But I think this one’s yours, Fix.’

I waited, but he didn’t seem in any hurry to spit it out.

‘Well?’ I demanded. ‘What?’

‘The name didn’t mean anything to you?’

‘Ginny,’ I murmured. ‘Ginny Parris.’ Maybe it did at that. The memory wouldn’t come clear, but alarm bells started to ring, way down in my subconscious.

‘Not her real name. Birth certificate has Jane, but she liked to call herself Guinevere. When that wouldn’t fly, she shortened it to Ginny.’

My heart took a ride down to my stomach, in the express elevator.

‘Oh Jesus,’ I said. ‘She was . . .’

Gary waited for a few seconds in case I finished the sentence myself. When I didn’t, he finished it for me. ‘Yeah,’ he confirmed. ‘Rafi Ditko’s old girlfriend.’

2

I went to pieces for a while back there. It wasn’t pretty.

It began about three months ago, after the demon Asmodeus, wearing my friend Rafi’s body, broke out of the bespoke prison cell I’d run up for him at the house of the Ice-Maker, Imelda Probert, killing Imelda herself and three other people along the way, and walked out into the world to see what was new.

That was enough of a catastrophe in itself: Imelda left a teenaged daughter, Lisa, who as far as I knew had no other living relatives. Asmodeus was a monster, and his tenancy of Rafi’s flesh was an abomination. And demons being demons, I had to assume that those first four murders were only a foretaste of things to come. But what made the whole thing infinitely worse was that it was mostly my fault.

Okay, it wasn’t me who had freed Asmodeus from captivity. The honours for that fiasco went to a little-known and technically excommunicate Catholic sect known as the Anathemata and their priest-slash-general Thomas Gwillam. Gwillam wanted to exorcise Asmodeus, but the people he put on that work detail weren’t up to it. They went in half-cocked, got themselves cut to pieces, and in the process freed the demon from the psychic straitjacket I’d put him in.

But I was the reason he was there in the first place: I’d taken him to Peckham, to Imelda’s house, from the Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill, in a desperate attempt to keep him from falling into even worse hands. I was also the reason why he was strong enough to get free and fight back, because I’d allowed him to feed on part of another demon. It had all seemed to make sense at the time: feeding Asmodeus had set a young boy free from a possession that would eventually have killed him.

But then the Anathemata had stuck their oar in, everything had gone to Hell in a hand basket, and Imelda had died.

I honestly didn’t give a tinker’s fuck about Gwillam’s three exorcists. Like Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, they’d made love to their employment, and they’d only got what they’d been asking for. But Imelda . . .

Christ Jesus and all his angels. Imelda.

‘Don’t make me regret this,’ she’d said when she finally gave in to my undignified begging and let me land Rafi on her. And then when I suggested waking Asmodeus to let him feed on one of his homeys, she was horrified and enraged. She’d only agreed because she loved her own kid so much, and she couldn’t stand by and watch someone else’s kid dragged down to Hell when she had it in her power to do something about it.

I drew up the plan of attack. I led the charge. She was the Light Brigade and I was Lord fucking Cardigan.

So yeah. I took it hard. And yeah, I suppose I took the coward’s road.

I stayed with Imelda’s daughter, Lisa, until the ambulance arrived. She hadn’t said a word the whole time; just sat with her mother’s head in her lap, rocking her back and forth as though she was asleep. The only time she showed any animation at all was when the paramedics tried to separate her from the blood-boltered corpse. Even then, she didn’t fight them or cry or swear at them; she just held on tightly to Imelda’s chest, forcing them to pry her fingers loose one by one. And after that she stopped moving altogether.

I watched the ambulance go.

Then I found an off-licence, bought a bottle of whatever whisky came readiest to hand, took it to one of the wooden benches at Elephant and Castle and drank it dry.

My memories of the days and weeks that followed are a little patchy, but I know that that bottle was only the first of many. I would have taken other drugs, probably, if any had been kicking around, but booze has always been my sledgehammer of choice when I want to throw a tarp over the day and pass out fast.

Only now it wasn’t just a day I wanted to blot out. I wanted to forget I’d ever been born. I wanted to erase Felix Castor and rewind. Someone else might do a better job of taking up the space he used to occupy.