Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

All the same, I could ask Nicky Heath, my go-to dead guy, to pull up whatever family records he could find and maybe shake loose a few phone numbers for me. I had to try, anyway: the karmic weight I was carrying already from this fucking fiasco was heavy enough to stave half my ribs in, and I seriously didn’t want to add to it.

Nicky doesn’t like talking specifics over the phone. He has a paranoid streak wider than the Thames at Deptford, and prefers to take commissions on a face-to-face basis. That meant a pilgrimage out to Walthamstow, to the abandoned cinema he’d lovingly restored and re-equipped for an audience of one. It wasn’t a place I liked to linger: the decor is great, but being of the zombie persuasion, Nicky finds a temperature of three degrees Celsius a little on the warm side.

I called Gary Coldwood first, and told him about my late-night bare-knuckle fight with Asmodeus. He was solicitous for my health but oddly vague about the progress he’d made on the case.

‘I talked to about fifteen or twenty people,’ I said. ‘To tell them what had happened to Rafi if they didn’t already know, and to warn them that they might get a visit. But some of them must have thought I was just a crank. It might sound better coming from a copper – and you could probably get updated numbers for some of these other names. Do you want the list?’

‘Where are you now?’ Coldwood asked instead of answering me.

‘I’m at Pen’s, but I won’t be staying here for long. Sue Book has been trying to get hold of me for the past few days, so I need to go see her.’

‘Sue Book?’

‘Juliet’s lady love.’

Gary gave an involuntary exhalation, somewhere between a sigh and a grunt. It was the same sound he always makes when he’s forcibly reminded of Juliet’s sexual orientation. He’s not homophobic; it just hurts him, fairly viscerally, that she’s not available.

‘Well where will you be in a couple of hours?’ he asked me.

‘Willesden Green, most likely. Sue works in the library over there.’

‘Okay. You know the Costella Café on Dudden Hill Lane?’

‘I can find it.’

‘Call me when you’re done. I’ll meet you there. If Asmodeus didn’t leave enough of your face for me to recognise, wear a red carnation in your buttonhole.’

I made a comment in which both buttonholes and arseholes figured largely, and hung up on the cheeky sod.

As I walked up Pen’s crazy-paved garden path, something in the semi-tamed undergrowh next to it caught my eye. Maybe the trampled tulips were still in my mind, or maybe I was catching some death-sense echo from what was hidden there. Either way, before I really thought about what I was doing I knelt down and parted the blades of elephant grass.

There was a flat piece of stone lying on the ground, right beside the path. It was the neutral grey of granite, but it had a slightly polished sheen. On the upper face of it someone had painted, in red, a pentagram.

I picked it up and examined it. The work was very fine: thin lines, perfectly straight and uniformly thick. The whole thing was only about four or five inches across, so the lettering around the outside was very tiny, but still perfectly legible: the names of Samael and Lilith figured there, along with the names of three of their kissing cousins. In the centre was a single word consisting of four Aramaic symbols:

I ducked out of seeing The Passion of the Christ because someone spoiled the ending for me, so my Aramaic is pretty rusty these days. If it had been Greek, I could probably have made shift, but I can’t get along with these proto-Hebraic alphabets that have about seven different shapes for each letter depending on where they appear in the sentence: they give me migraines. Some things though, I could tell just from a superficial inspection.

There are two kinds of necromantic contraption exorcists regularly run into. The first is a ward, also called a stay-not or occasionally a foad (short for ‘Fuck off and die’). They’re basically magical prophylactics, setting up boundaries the dead and undead can’t pass. Some of them aren’t necromantic at all: they’re pure nature magic, using flowering herbs and twigs cut, bound and blessed by priests or adepts – life and faith as a bulwark against death and its dominion. Others are incantations, like the ones that Pen uses to bless the walls of her house. Often though, they’re devices just like the one I was holding in my hand right then: collections of visual symbols tied together in intricate patternings that somehow trap a tiny potent piece of reality in their folds. I suppose it’s something like the way my music works. In the centre of the circle there’s a command aimed directly at the dead soul to show it how unwelcome it is: Hoc fugere is the commonest – Latin for ‘Get out of town’ – closely followed by Apoloio , which means ‘Don’t let the sun go down on you here’ in Ancient Greek.

The other kind of magic circle is the exact opposite of a ward: it’s a summoning. The design is similar in almost every respect, but the word in the centre of the pentagram will usually be the name of the entity you’re trying to call up or get on the right side of.

I didn’t know what it was I had here, because I had no idea what that four-letter word meant. I could see at a glance though, that it was a meticulous piece of work: someone had put a lot of time into it, even if they hadn’t bothered with the incantations that usually go with the design. You didn’t make a ward like this and then throw it over your right shoulder for luck.

Something of Pen’s, then, set down here to supplement the organic wards she normally used. It was straying a bit further into Dennis Wheatley territory than she normally liked to go – her magic being of the ‘Hello birds, hello sky, hello trees’ variety – and for a moment I thought about asking her what it was for. Second thoughts prevailed: given the mood she was in right then, it could wait.

In any case, there’s always more than one way to skin a cat, especially in the digital age. I took out my phone and used its crappy little built-in camera to take a picture of the stone, right up close, then put it back where I’d found it.

Willesden is within spitting distance of my walk-up office in Harlesden, but I try not to spend a lot of time over there in case someone tries to employ me. It’s been known to happen in the past, and it usually leads to unfortunate consquences.

I’d tried calling Sue Book to tell her I was coming, but I only got her voicemail. And at Willesden Green Library, what I got was short shrift. ‘She’s not in,’ the man at the desk told me. ‘She took the day off sick.’ He was a slim, vaguely Goth-looking twenty-something with a festive sprinkling of acne across his forehead and a Love Will Tear Us Apart T-shirt which I was willing to bet he’d bought on the strength of hearing the track once on YouTube. He looked me up and down with what he probably thought was withering scorn. But I’ve been withered by the best, and this kid left my foliage intact.

‘Is she okay?’ I asked him.

‘Depends what you mean by okay.’

‘Well let’s say I mean what everyone else means by okay. Is she sick? Unhappy? Has she been hurt in some way.’

‘You should probably ask her.’

I gave it up. The unfriendly vibe was puzzling: the kid was making some assumption about me, but I just didn’t have the leisure time to tease it out. I grabbed a 297 bus over to Wembley, where Sue and Juliet live together in the house Sue inherited from her mother and walked the last half-mile through the day’s uncompromising heat, feeling slightly out of place and disadvantaged in the sunshine as nocturnal creatures usually do.