Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

I took the crowbar back to the trapdoor and started to use it to good effect on the opposite side from where Juliet was tugging, but I think she’d have got there without my help. After thirty or forty seconds the wood of the trap gave a series of gunshot-sharp cracks and she lifted two thirds of it free. The rest stayed attached to the hinges.

From the bottom of the lightless well we’d opened came a weak, despairing wail, and then another.

I’d brought a torch with me. I switched it on now and pointed it down into the dark. It lit up a small, terrified face – just for a second, before a hand came up to shield those wide eyes from the sudden, unaccustomed light. I moved the beam to right and left: wherever the spotlight fell, whimpering children ducked and scurried away from it.

We’d stumbled across a loup-garou ’s larder.

We looked for a ladder or a rope, but found nothing. The kids, meanwhile, cried and shrieked at the bottom of the hole. I shouted a few reassurances down to them, but clearly this was a conditioned reflex: they knew by now that when the trapdoor opened, someone’s number was up.

After a terse parley, we agreed that Juliet would stay at the mouth of the pit and keep guard while I went and found some means of getting down into it. I headed for the door, but I was still a few steps short of it when two unsettlingly tall shapes filled it, blocking my path.

Not one loup-garou then; this was a team effort.

I eyed their muscular frames to get an inkling of what I’d be up against. They weren’t overly broad at the shoulder, but they were so tall that they easily outmassed me anyway. The one on the left looked unremarkable except that when he grinned – as he did then – his teeth showed as a spiked forest of razor-sharp incisors with not a molar in sight. The other had a face that was a mass of old scar tissue so deep and rucked that I could barely see his eyes. They were both dressed in blue overalls, presumably so that from a distance – or to a trusting or myopic observer – they’d look as though they had some reason to be here.

They came inside and closed the heavy steel door with an echoing clang.

I took a step back, reaching into my coat and unshipping my whistle. Then I changed my mind, let it slide back again and picked up a heavy cast-iron pulley block from a pile of packing cases instead. Werewolves, you’ve got to hate them. They’re mostly old souls because it’s a difficult trick to pull off, and to pry the spirit loose from the animal flesh that it’s shaped and sculpted . . . well, that’s even harder. In fact it’s like pulling buckshot out of a tiger’s hide while the tiger is trying to eat your head. Given the fact that the pair of them were going to be on me inside a second, I was probably going to have better luck with the pulley block than the whistle – a cat in Hell’s chance, say, rather than a snowball’s.

They moved forward in unconscious synchrony, and I swung with the block. I timed it right, catching the scar-faced one off balance as he moved in, but it made no difference: he was too damn fast. His arm flicked out and swatted the thing out of my hand before it could touch him. On the backswing he pounded his closed fist into the side of my head and I staggered back a step, seeing stars. Then I backed away again, quickly, out of instinct, and his extended claws whipped past so close that if I’d been wearing a tie it would have been reduced to comical confetti.

The two of them tensed to leap, and I went for my whistle again because it was all I had left. But then Juliet pushed me firmly aside and strode past. I caught my breath. I had to, because it was so thick with her pheromones it almost choked me. The two loup-garous stared at her as if she was a page of unholy writ.

‘Last man standing gets to kiss me on the lips,’ she said. And then, after a charged pause of about half a second, she added, ‘Dealer’s choice.’

The were-thing with the teeth made a clumsy lunge for her on the spot, which just left him open for a scything uppercut from his partner that almost floored him. He got his feet back under him though, and came back spitting and snarling, slamming scarface against the wall and pinning him there with his shoulder. As they wrestled, trying to get a grip with teeth and claws, I found myself stepping forward with my own fists tightly clenched. Juliet’s arm came out and blocked me, without effort.

‘Not you, Castor,’ she said with clinical calm. ‘This one is by invitation only.’

She watched as they took each other apart. I’m not normally squeamish but I looked away before the end, because the loup-garous couldn’t stop fighting even when they were bleeding to death and their entrails were spilling out on the floor. They lost their hold on their human forms as they weakened, the fluid flesh sliding back into half-remembered configurations. Even then they snapped at each other feebly with misshapen snouts, looking like nothing that had ever lived or moved on the face of the Earth.

Juliet breathed in and then out, savouring the tang of blood on the air – or more likely some other spoor that I couldn’t even detect.

‘Go and look for that rope,’ she suggested, her voice thick.

It was hard to walk away from her – like walking uphill with a bag of rocks on my back. The attraction she exerted was that strong: as strong as gravity.

I took my time poking around the storeroom for a suitable coil of rope. The hormonal stranglehold on my mind had loosened by this time, and I was aware that the petrified little kids had been stuck at the bottom of the pit all this time, hearing the roars and snarls and howls of agony from above them. I was aware of it, but I truly didn’t want to go back too soon and catch a glimpse of Juliet feeding.

By the time I did step back into the shed, she was sitting in the open space left by the shattered trapdoor, her legs dangling over the edge, entertaining the children with her own version of Little Red Riding Hood. Of the two loup-garous there was no trace, whether flesh or bone or sinew or greasy stain. I dumped the rope down next to her and listened to the end of the story, resigned to sleeping with the light on for the foreseeable future.

‘It was my fault,’ Sue repeated, more defiantly this time – as if warning me that any criticism of Juliet was off-limits. In the one eye that was still functional, tears brimmed but didn’t fall.

With more tact than I can usually muster, I closed the street door. At the same time, Sue remembered my face-saving lie about needing a drink and fled to the kitchen, mumbling that she’d bring me a glass of water. I went through into the lounge and waited for her there. I knew her well enough to be sure she wouldn’t want an audience for her weeping.

As I waited, sitting on a black leather sofa that squeaked whenever I breathed, the surly assistant at the library came back into my mind. I thought I could see now why he’d been so truculent with me. Sue kept her private life to herself and presumably hadn’t introduced any of her work colleagues to Juliet, so the guy had put two and two together and got the square root of one, pegging me for an abusive boyfriend.

‘Water,’ Sue said, coming in with a tray. ‘And some biscuits. Just ginger thins – that’s all we’ve got. I haven’t . . . I didn’t do my weekly shop at the weekend.’

She set the tray down and retreated to a chair opposite me, angling her body so that the damaged side of her face was mostly out of my line of sight. She’d brought a glass of water for herself too, because a good hostess doesn’t let her guest drink alone. She held it in both hands but didn’t raise it to her lips.

‘Can you tell me what happened?’ I asked. Any small talk would have sounded grotesque in these circumstances, so I just cut to the chase.