Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

‘Meta-conspiracy thrillers,’ Nicky said, clipping the film reel onto the projector’s massive horizontal spindle. We were up in the projection room, which was so cold that my breath wasn’t just visible, it hung in the air like a thickening fog and refused to dissipate. Nicky ignored the cold. He didn’t exactly enjoy it, but it didn’t bother him, whereas bright sunshine made him duck and run for cover. If you’re serious about the zombie lifestyle, you have to become as narcissistic as a professional bodybuilder. You’re sailing into eternity in a leaky boat, so it helps to have an obsessive nature. Nicky was born and bred for the gig.

‘Meta-conspiracy thrillers,’ I repeated, deadpan, inviting him to hit me with the punchline.

‘They’re all movies where the conspiracy is part of a bigger conspiracy,’ he said. ‘Where you think you’ve worked it out, but all you did was tear away the first layer of wallpaper. Like those dreams where you wake up sweating but, hey, you’re still asleep and it’s just another dream.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I get it. Is that how you see the world, Nicky?’

‘That’s how the world is , Castor. You just didn’t figure out yet who’s dreaming you. Maybe it’s Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, because the psycho-bitch-queen certainly seems to have a soft spot in her heart for you.’

I grunted non-commitally. That wound was still a little raw. But Nicky seemed happy to stick with the subject.

‘So what did you tell her?’ he demanded. ‘Did you use adjectives? Gestures? I want a slow-motion action replay.’

‘I just walked out,’ I said, which was the truth. I hadn’t trusted myself to answer Jenna-Jane without going for her throat, which would have brought her pet Nazis down on me in all their goose-stepping fury. So I just turned round and headed for the door, walking past Gil McClennan, whose face as he stared at me was full of contemptuous amusement. J-J let me go without a word. At least when demons try to steal your soul they snarl and slaver and make a show out of it.

Nicky was looking disappointed. He was clearly hoping for something more in the way of dramatic byplay. To forestall any further questions I held up my phone, which was displaying the chunk of grey stone I’d found in Pen’s front garden, with the red pentagram flaring on its upper face. Nicky squinted at it for a second, then waved it away. ‘My eyes don’t resolve down that far,’ he said. ‘You got anything bigger?’

‘I’ve just got this,’ I said. ‘Can’t you scale it up?’

Nicky returned his attention to the film, which he was threading through the projector’s complex series of spools and rollers. ‘Probably,’ he admitted grudgingly. ‘Send it on to my phone. I’ll see what I can do.’

While he was still working on the film, I composed a message with the photo as an attachment and forwarded it to Nicky’s mobile. It took a long time, because I’m far from slick with technology, but finally his phone buzzed and he reached into his back pocket to turn it off. Then I had to wait until he threw the mains power switch and turned on the projector to let it warm up. He leaves that to the last moment for reasons already given: warm isn’t good in Nicky’s world.

He didn’t bother to look at the display on his own phone, because the screen-size problem would still apply; he just relayed it on to one of his computers by means of some wireless skullduggery and opened it there.

‘Summoning,’ he said at once, seemingly without even reading the words in the ward.

‘How do you know?’ I demanded. I was supposed to be the practising exorcist here, so it pissed me off a little that Nicky was able to lecture me on my own craft. But then I’d never been big on the grimoire tradition, which boasts a common-sense-to-bullshit ratio somewhere in the region of one to a thousand.

‘Disposition of the runes between the inner and outer circles,’ Nicky rattled off absently. ‘Presence of outwardly radiating fan lines in the five negative spaces defined by the five arms of the pentangle. Use of aleph sigils to stand in for candles, as in the Gottenburg ritual.’

‘Okay,’ I said, giving up the point. ‘It’s a summoning. What’s being summoned?’

‘Not sure,’ Nicky admitted. ‘Let me check.’

He tapped at the keyboard, opening up some more files. At least one was a table of Aramaic letters. Another seemed to be a set of scanned pages from a very old book – probably one of the bat-shit grimoires aforementioned. As Nicky browsed and muttered to himself, I went to the window at the front of the projection booth, leaned on its sill and stared down into the auditorium below. It was silent and empty: most of the time Nicky plays his movies for an audience of one.

Not completely empty though. A single figure sat in the exact centre of the front row, barely visible as a silhouette against the diffused light bouncing back off the screen. Someone was watching the opening credits of The Usual Suspects , silent and motionless.

‘Tlullik,’ Nicky said from behind me. ‘Or maybe Tlallik. It depends whether this diacritical mark here is meant to have a curve or an angle.’

‘So who’s Tlullik?’

Nicky looked round at me and gave an expansive shrug. ‘Never heard of him,’ he said. ‘Her. It. Them. Probably a demon, judging from the name, but it can’t be a big one or else I’d have come across it elsewhere. The major heavies leave big footprints.’

‘Nicky, this was painted on a rock shoved under Pen’s rhododendrons,’ I told him. ‘I thought she’d put it there herself, but she doesn’t mess with necromancy. You think Asmodeus could be trying to get at her in some way?’

Nicky nodded, but he didn’t look convinced. ‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘A guy wants to drive you crazy, he can summon a minor Hell-spawn to crawl inside your head and fuck you over. It’s becoming kind of a fashion statement in gangster circles – if you don’t pack demon heat these days, you’re nobody.

‘But if Asmodeus is behind this, he’s using two very different MOs. He ran Ginny Parris through with the sharp end of a broken chair leg, according to the police report. There’s kind of a mismatch between that and hiding in the bushes with a permanent marker.’

He was right, of course. But if not Asmodeus, then who? If it was aimed at me rather than Pen, it could be almost anyone. There’s no shortage of people sufficiently pissed off with me to traffic with Hell if it would give me some grief. ‘Can you find out what this Tlullik is?’ I asked Nicky.

‘I can try,’ he said. ‘Are we done now?’

‘One more thing.’

Nicky rolled his eyes, conveying how much faith he had in the number ‘one’ in that sentence.

‘Could you find out if Rafi Ditko has any living family or friends, besides the ones I know from Oxford?’

‘That’s a pretty open-ended search, Castor. What’s it worth?’

‘At the moment,’ I admitted, ‘more than I can pay. But I know a man who knows a woman who knows a goatherd in the Yemen who can get me a line on a 1940s Lester Young jam session.’

Nicky feels about early jazz the way heroin addicts feel about heroin, but he did his best to look unimpressed. He huffed out air, which he had to inhale specially for the purpose. ‘Jam tomorrow . . .’ he said sardonically.

‘The jam’s seventy years old,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s not going to spoil in a day. It’s an interesting item, I heard. On lacquer, with some kind of note from Shad Collins scribbled on the sleeve.’

‘I’ll see what I can do, Castor.’

‘All I can ask for, Nicky.’

‘Is it?’ Nicky examined his thumbnail, rubbing at the cuticle with the little finger of his other hand. ‘You surprise me. I was sort of expecting you to say, “How do you get a demon out of a close friend?” Something of that nature.’