The Naming of the Beasts

He telegraphed the punch, so I was able to knock it aside before it connected with my face. He followed up fast though, and my own uppercut glanced off his chin as he closed with me and locked both of his hands around my throat. It wasn’t a smart move, because it didn’t leave him any limbs free for defence, but he held onto me with the strength of blind rage. Two punches to the side of the head didn’t loosen him, and his thumbs were compressing my windpipe agonisingly. Reflexively, I tried to draw breath, and felt my heart race on an adrenalin flood as I failed.

Improvising desperately, I hooked my foot behind his leg and threw my weight forward. We sprawled on the floor of the corridor, with me on top, and then I rolled to the side, finally breaking his grip.

We came up together, more or less, but I’d had more than enough of this bullshit. I feinted with my right hand and threw a roundhouse punch with my left almost at the same time. It smacked against Gil’s cheek with a meaty sound. A jolt of pain shot from my fist to my elbow, but it did the job: Gil folded and went down again heavily.

I leaned against the corridor wall, getting my breath back. That was painful in itself, because my throat felt as though I’d swallowed a cricket ball. My left hand throbbed painfully, the index finger in particular refusing to bend when I tested it. It was already starting to swell up around the bottom joint.

Gil pulled himself together slowly, levering himself into a sitting position with his back against the corridor wall. The building work had evidently drowned out the sound of our fight, so nobody came out to see what was happening.

‘You . . . bastard,’ Gil panted, his voice slurred. ‘Get out of my . . . fucking . . . life!’

‘I told you,’ I panted back. ‘I’m here for one thing. If you want to see the back of me . . . give me Ditko.’ I lurched away before he could answer. I needed to plunge my hand into some cold water before it swelled up any further. I’d be fuck-all use to anybody if I couldn’t play.

Trudie showed me her map with a proprietary and slightly nervous air. It had changed a lot since the last time I’d seen it: it was marked now by hundreds of short black dashes, clustered together and aligned to form longer lines. The lines swept and swirled across the face of the city like the tracks left by primordial particles in a bubble chamber, the spoor of something both ephemeral and eternal, struck from violence the way sparks are struck from stone.

‘This is where he’s been,’ I said, tracing the nearest lines with my finger.

‘Yes.’

‘But where is he now?’

Trudie’s expression went from anxious midwife to grieving parent. ‘I have no idea. There’s a faint sense when I’m tracing the lines that some are fresher than others. They’re the ones that are easiest to find, the ones that have the strongest attraction. But there’s no . . .’ She hesitated, searching for a word.

‘Gradient?’ I suggested.

‘Exactly. No real gradient, so no way of telling which way he walked along each line or how long he spent in any of these places. It’s just a map of his movements.’

‘Which means it will get less and less useful as he goes to more and more places. Eventually the map would be solid black.’

Trudie eyed me grimly. ‘Thanks, Castor. I only spent twelve hours on this. Don’t spare my feelings.’ Behind her, Etheridge glared at me fiercely, outraged on her behalf.

‘I didn’t say it wasn’t useful now,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s amazing. I never expected you to get this far.’

Trudie seemed as unhappy with praise as she was with criticism. ‘Well, it’s only the first stage,’ she said defensively. ‘We’ve still got to go over the map again and try to figure out where he’s actually spending his time.’

I pointed to one of the densest tangles on the map, and then to another: two places where a great many lines came together, merging into areas of pure shiny black. At the heart of those areas the paper had rucked into hard wrinkles, swollen and saturated with ink. It was like looking at one of Trudie’s cat’s cradles translated onto a flat, static medium - because, of course, that’s what it was.

‘Here,’ I said, ‘and here.’

‘Yeah,’ said Trudie. He’s been to those two places a lot. Both in north London, about seven miles apart. Do you have any idea what’s there?’

‘This one - that’s a couple of miles north of King’s Cross - is where I live. No surprises there - I knew he was staking out Pen’s house. This one over to the west though, that’s more worrying.’

‘Why?’ Trudie stared at me hard, hard enough to let me know that my face was showing too much of what I felt.

‘This is Royal Oak,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a friend who lives out there.’

The penny dropped. ‘Oh my God,’ Trudie murmured.

‘About as far from your God as it’s possible to get, strictly speaking,’ I said grimly.

‘The succubus. The fallen creature you used to work with.’

‘Exactly.’