The Naming of the Beasts

There was a long silence, long enough to make me think that the connection had broken, but Juliet spoke again just before I did.

‘Tell me where you are,’ she said.

From behind her, I could dimly hear a squeal of dismay from Sue. ‘Jules, no. He’s just a friend. He’s your friend too. It’s not—’

The crash that obliterated the end of the sentence was loud enough to make me flinch away from the phone. ‘Juliet,’ I shouted. ‘Don’t hurt her. Fuck it, don’t hurt her. I’m in town. On Seven Dials. What do you want?’

At that moment Trudie rounded the corner of Shorts Gardens, about fifty yards away. She waved to me, then registered my expression and lowered her hand. Only silence now on the other end of the line.

‘Juliet?’ I yelled again.

There’s a weird experience I get every now and then, where I look at my watch and I think it’s stopped, because the second hand doesn’t seem to be moving. It just sits there, seemingly for a whole lot longer than a second hand should, until finally it wakes up and jumps to the next notch. It’s just a second, but it’s a second you’re glancing at sideways somehow, and from that angle it looks longer. That’s probably what happened here. It felt like I was waiting for a night and a day, but since nothing else happened in that time, it’s a fair bet that it was no time at all.

‘She’s fine, Castor,’ said Juliet in her normal voice.

‘What do you mean, she’s fine?’ I snarled. ‘I heard you tearing the whole place apart.’

Her voice was eerily calm, and the dislocation from what had just happened was so complete it was terrifying. ‘I swung a chair against the wall, and it broke. Sue wasn’t hurt. But now she won’t let me touch her or come near her. Can I ask a favour?’

Trudie had come up to join me now, and was waiting silently at my side, trying to piece together what the hell this was about from my side of the conversation. ‘A favour?’ I repeated blankly.

‘I told you I’d send her away if I thought I might hurt her again.’ A pause. ‘She can’t stay here.’

‘I’ll be right there,’ I said. ‘Don’t either of you move.’ Inspiration struck, and I added, ‘Give Sue the phone.’ I looked around for a cab, but there were none in sight. I started walking rapidly along Mercer Street with Trudie in tow. I’d reached the end of the street before Sue’s voice sounded down the line again, breaking even on the single word ‘Hello?’

Plenty of cabs on Shaftesbury Avenue. I flagged one down with my right hand, holding the phone in my left.

‘I’m going to put a friend on,’ I said to Sue as we climbed into the cab. ‘Keep talking to her. Let her know if anything happens.’ I passed the phone to Trudie, adding ‘Royal Oak’ for the cabbie’s benefit, and we were away.

Thanks to Mr Livingstone and his wondrous congestion charge, we made good headway through the centre, but then got hopelessly snarled up as we headed up Edgware Road toward the Westway. Trudie was keeping up a non-stop stream of meaningless conversation with Sue Book the whole way, which was what I was hoping she’d do: taking Sue’s mind off the terror and at the same time letting me know that she was still alive. I sat with my eyes closed, thinking about Juliet, or rather thinking about the tune that corresponded to Juliet. If I had to fight her, I needed to have that music clear in my mind, and at the moment it was rubbing shoulders with other tunes, to their mutual detriment. I had to unremember the harsh skirls of the fear-thing in the Super-Self swimming pool and the insidious discontinuities of Asmodeus, had to put them way to the back of my mind where they couldn’t be heard.

I was kidding myself, of course. The tin whistle is a great specific against ghosts, but when you’re fighting demons it has the disadvantage of a crossbow against an AK-47: you get off one shot, and then you’re dead before you can ratchet up for the second. But this was yet another fine mess I’d invited an innocent bystander into, so there was no walking away from it. No, as usual, I had to walk right into it whistling a jaunty refrain.

Bourne Terrace was quiet and deserted, and from the outside Sue’s house looked similarly untroubled.

‘We’ll be right back,’ I told the cabbie. ‘Don’t move.’

Trudie kept up her running commentary all the way to the door. ‘We’re coming up the driveway now. We’re right outside . . .’ But it was Juliet who opened up, and stood aside to let us in. I stared at her questioningly. Her gaze flicked to the tin whistle I still had clutched in my hand, and she quirked an eyebrow.

‘You won’t need that,’ she said. ‘Luckily for you.’

‘Maybe I won’t,’ I conceded. ‘Do you?’

‘Need you to play me back into my right mind?’ Juliet asked with sardonic emphasis. ‘No. I don’t. Not for the moment, anyway. But get her out of here quickly. She won’t look at me, and she cries when I come near her. It makes me . . . agitated. I can feel myself slipping.’