Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

There was no answer to my knock. The windows were closed in spite of the heat, and the curtains drawn. It didn’t look promising. I knocked again, then took a few steps back from the door, positioning myself so that if anyone looked out from behind the living-room or bedroom curtains they’d see me standing there.

I waited for about two minutes. It occurred to me to pick the lock and go inside – my misspent youth has left me with the best set of cat-burgling tools in the Home Counties and a relaxed attitude to using them – but what would I say if Sue was in there, laid up with flu, and I walked in on her in her smalls? It was the sort of thing that might be hard to explain to Juliet, even on the grounds of neighbourly concern.

But unless my night-adapted eyes deceived me, there was indeed a twitching at the corner of an upstairs curtain. And then, after another short interval, the scratching sound of a door chain being disengaged.

The door opened a crack, and Sue peered out at me, a fuzzy-edged silhouette in the twilight of her hall.

‘Felix,’ she said, in a slightly bewildered tone.

I walked back to the porch, giving her a reassuring wave. ‘You called,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ If anything, the crack got a little narrower. ‘But . . . it’s all right now. I’m fine. I just wanted to ask you something, but . . . it got sorted.’

To get a less convincing tone of voice, you’d have to go to the court recordings of Adolf Eichmann saying, ‘I was only following orders.’ Lying didn’t come easy to Sue. I suspected that very few things did. Timid, self-effacing, uncomplaining and with lower self-esteem than a readers’ wives centrefold, she’d spent most of her life being the sort of willing drudge that props up half the organisations in the UK, quietly holding the fort while their colleagues ascend the ziggurat. But then she’d met Juliet, and her life had veered off in a new and wondrous direction.

‘I’m fine,’ Sue said again, with even less conviction. ‘I shouldn’t have bothered you.’

‘Well that’s what friends are for,’ I pointed out. ‘Listen, it was a long walk over here, and I’m feeling permanently dehydrated right now because I spent most of the last three weeks pickling my internal organs in Johnnie Walker, so could I come in for a quick drink? Of water, I mean.’

There was an awkward pause. ‘Well . . .’ Sue faltered. ‘I’m not dressed, and . . . I’m off sick, Felix. I . . . I haven’t been . . .’

Enough with the bullshit. I put a hand on the door and pushed it gently, not forcing my way in but forcing the point. Sue gave a sound that was almost a whimper and stepped away, averting her face, as the door swung open.

She was dressed in a slightly tatty blue silk dressing gown with a motif of ukiyo-e storks flying over the perfectly unruffled surface of a lake. She folded her arms across the front of it as if she was afraid it might fall open, even though it was tied with tassels at waist and hem.

With her head turned away from me, the side of her neck was fully exposed. There was a mark like a bruise there, wide and dark: a blue core surrounded by an irregular yellow halo.

‘Sue . . .’ I said.

Slowly, reluctantly, she raised her head and stared at me with wide, unhappy eyes.

‘She didn’t mean it,’ she said. ‘She just . . . I said something stupid and she got angry.’

The bruising continued up the left side of her face, an irregular archipelago of blue-black islets in malarial yellow waters. Her right eye was swollen closed.

‘Got angry?’ I repeated, incredulously. ‘Sue . . . I mean . . . fuck!’

‘It was me,’ Sue said flatly. ‘It was my fault.’

Juliet is a succubus, a demon whose specific modality is sex. That makes her one of the most perfectly adapted predators ever to emerge in any ecosystem. She makes men desire her – using a bag of tools that only starts with her stunning beauty and hypnotic scent – and then, when they’re at the highest pitch of sexual frenzy, vibrating like tuning forks, she devours them, body and soul.

I know all this because I was one of her victims. Gabriel McClennan, a fellow exorcist and part-time necromancer in the pay of an eastern European master-pimp named Lucasz Damjohn, had raised the demon Ajulutsikael and set her on my tail, figuring that a lethally close encounter with a demon would look like an occupational hazard for someone in my line of work. But I survived, against the odds. I managed to talk the succubus out of finishing me off (an experience which bore the same relationship to normal coitus interruptus as an exploding supernova does to a Bic lighter), and then she talked herself into sticking around on Earth. She changed her name to Juliet Salazar, met a nice girl, got married and settled down. A happy ending for everyone except me: part of my soul still has a hard-on for her that doesn’t look like dying down any time soon.

The phrase ‘drop-dead gorgeous’ gets bandied around a lot, with ‘drop-dead’ functioning as an over-intense intensifier. Juliet is drop-dead gorgeous in a very specific and literal sense. The bone-white skin, the black eyes that are almost entirely without whites – these things might seem too odd to be attractive if you met them anywhere else, but as soon as you see Juliet you want her. Her tall, generously curved body becomes the image of the ideal for you, the incarnation of desire. And if you get in close enough to inhale her perfume – her earthy natural musk – then you’re lost.

There was a time, back when she was just starting out in the business, when we used to share a lot of our cases. You could say that I showed her the ropes, or at least taught her some knots that she didn’t already know, but if I’m honest, what I was mainly doing was trying to domesticate a big, scary jungle predator into behaving like a house cat. It was a bumpy process, with a number of very memorable upsets along the way.

As I stared at Sue’s battered face, one of them flashed across my memory with sudden and unsettling vividness.

Juliet and I were mooching our way through a disused factory somewhere out past Gants Hill. It had changed hands at a bankruptcy auction, and the new owners were concerned about the complaints they were getting from residents in the area. People had seen lights and heard noises in the dead of night when it wasn’t Christmas and they weren’t even drunk. So the outfit that had taken possession hired me to give the place a prayer and a sing-song, and I took Juliet in with me because at that point I was still pretending to be her sensei.

We’d been all through the building once and found nothing more suspicious than some obscene graffiti. It was half past one in the morning, nothing was moving, and we were pretty sure that we were in for a quiet night. So we sat down on a lathe, or maybe a steam press, and I started to rummage through my pockets for a hip-flask full of liquid sunshine which by rights ought to be there.

But Juliet caught the edge of a scent that shouldn’t be there, and before I could even get comfortable she was off – across two shop floors and a storage hangar the size of the Hatfield Galleria, out onto the yard and in among some prefab packing sheds at the far end of a desolate asphalt apron where a fleet of a hundred vans had once been parked.

Seven of these sheds were empty. The eighth . . . well, that was empty too, but there was a trapdoor in the floor and Juliet made a beeline straight for it. It was locked, but it didn’t fit all that tightly. She got her fingers in around the edge on one side of the lock plate and started to pull. I went looking for a crowbar, and found one eventually. I also found some stuff I wished I hadn’t, including an inspection pit full of gnawed bones. I had a bit of an inkling now what it was that had been giving the neighbours disturbed nights.