The Naming of the Beasts

When I got to the top of the basement stairs, Pen was bespeaking the door: talking to it in guttural undertones while touching the wood at the four cardinal points. Pretty much everyone puts wards on their doors and windows these days, to prevent unwanted visits from the recently deceased. Mostly they buy them in ready-made, though: photocopied stay-nots and tied-up sprigs of flowering herbs from the Camden Market spiritualist stalls, crucifixes and vials of holy water from the local church, mezuzahs and salats and cunningly modified Mani scrolls and every other flavour of religious prophylactic all readily available now by weight or piecemeal. Pen, though, makes up her own. She’s a pagan, and a priestess in an indie church that doesn’t even have a name. She keeps that side of her life very much to herself though, and I’ve learned not to ask.

The ward laid, she turned to look at me. It was a searching look that lingered speculatively on the clean shirt and the freshly sliced, mostly stubble-free chin.

‘Hey,’ I said, crossing over to her. ‘I was starting to get worried.’

She submitted to a kiss on the cheek, but I heard her sniff the air as I leaned in, so I knew she was still trawling for information on my sobriety and soundness of mind.

‘I’m sober,’ I assured her.

‘Yeah,’ she agreed dryly. ‘I’m sure that will last.’

She walked past me into the living room, threw her handbag down on the sofa, then threw herself down after it. I hadn’t really registered it until now, but she was in disguise. Instead of her usual flamboyant colours, she was wearing a suit in a subdued mid-brown, and she’d tied her hair back in a tight bun. In short, she’d done her best to avoid a second glance. Not easy for Pen: she stands five foot nothing in her cotton socks, but has intensely green eyes like chunks of radioactive kryptonite, flame-red hair and a general air - which is pretty much accurate - of being a compact container for a lot of dangerous energy. I’d had a serious thing for her once, but it was a long time ago, back when she and I and Rafi were all at college together. It might even have gone somewhere if Rafi hadn’t been an item in that list, but the chemical bond that developed between the two of them reduced the two of us, by some mysterious alchemy, into just-good-friends, which is where we’ve been ever since.

All the same, I must have looked a little like a suspicious husband as I stood over her now, arms folded and face solemnly set. ‘Where have you been?’ I demanded. ‘The birds were starving.’

‘Looking for Rafi,’ she answered shortly.

‘Overnight?’

‘He’s got a demon inside him, Fix. I don’t think demons keep office hours.’

She closed her eyes to deter further questions, so I waited to see if she was going to volunteer any more information on her own.

‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that you might have left me some of that brandy?’ she asked after a while.

I went and got her the bottle and a glass. Just the one glass, although my palms prickled at the proximity of the booze. A single medium-to-large-sized shot would set me up so right.

But that way lay madness, and another lost weekend that might easily last until the middle of next week.

Pen poured herself a generous shot, then as an afterthought she offered me the bottle. I shook my head and she grunted in what sounded like surprise but could have been approval. She emptied the glass in three swigs: not the most respectful way to treat the fruit of Monsieur Janneau’s labour of love.

‘I take it you struck out,’ I said, after a carefully judged pause.

‘Can’t hide a thing from your rapier intellect,’ Pen muttered bitterly.

‘Where did you look?’

‘Everywhere.’

‘I mean, were you working to a plan? Following any concrete leads? Or were you just thinking you’d recognise Rafi’s aftershave if you got close to him?’

Pen poured herself another. ‘He never wore it,’ she said, staring into the glass. ‘Even back when he was . . .’ a perceptible pause ‘. . . himself.’

And doesn’t that seem like a long time ago, I thought glumly.

‘I asked myself what you’d do,’ Pen said, returning unexpectedly to my last question. She shot me a look of the kind that’s usually called old-fashioned. ‘What you’d do if you weren’t totally stewed, I mean.’

I took both the compliment and the insult on the chin. ‘And?’ I prompted.

‘I decided you might try a bit of lateral thinking. Who’d know about demons?’

‘Other demons?’

‘And users. And people who want to be users. I’ve been going round the two-finger clubs, blagging my way into other people’s conversations. And the reason I stayed out all night is because I got an invite back to a house party down in Surrey where they were meant to be doing a summoning. Only it turned out it was just a bunch of ponced-up ovates who couldn’t find their arses with a map and a photofit picture.’

She stopped, registering my shocked expression. ‘What?’ she asked defensively.