Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

Okay, it wasn’t me who had freed Asmodeus from captivity. The honours for that fiasco went to a little-known and technically excommunicate Catholic sect known as the Anathemata and their priest-slash-general Thomas Gwillam. Gwillam wanted to exorcise Asmodeus, but the people he put on that work detail weren’t up to it. They went in half-cocked, got themselves cut to pieces, and in the process freed the demon from the psychic straitjacket I’d put him in.

But I was the reason he was there in the first place: I’d taken him to Peckham, to Imelda’s house, from the Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill, in a desperate attempt to keep him from falling into even worse hands. I was also the reason why he was strong enough to get free and fight back, because I’d allowed him to feed on part of another demon. It had all seemed to make sense at the time: feeding Asmodeus had set a young boy free from a possession that would eventually have killed him.

But then the Anathemata had stuck their oar in, everything had gone to Hell in a hand basket, and Imelda had died.

I honestly didn’t give a tinker’s fuck about Gwillam’s three exorcists. Like Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, they’d made love to their employment, and they’d only got what they’d been asking for. But Imelda . . .

Christ Jesus and all his angels. Imelda.

‘ Don’t make me regret this ,’ she’d said when she finally gave in to my undignified begging and let me land Rafi on her. And then when I suggested waking Asmodeus to let him feed on one of his homeys, she was horrified and enraged. She’d only agreed because she loved her own kid so much, and she couldn’t stand by and watch someone else’s kid dragged down to Hell when she had it in her power to do something about it.

I drew up the plan of attack. I led the charge. She was the Light Brigade and I was Lord fucking Cardigan.

So yeah. I took it hard. And yeah, I suppose I took the coward’s road.

I stayed with Imelda’s daughter, Lisa, until the ambulance arrived. She hadn’t said a word the whole time; just sat with her mother’s head in her lap, rocking her back and forth as though she was asleep. The only time she showed any animation at all was when the paramedics tried to separate her from the blood-boltered corpse. Even then, she didn’t fight them or cry or swear at them; she just held on tightly to Imelda’s chest, forcing them to pry her fingers loose one by one. And after that she stopped moving altogether.

I watched the ambulance go.

Then I found an off-licence, bought a bottle of whatever whisky came readiest to hand, took it to one of the wooden benches at Elephant and Castle and drank it dry.

My memories of the days and weeks that followed are a little patchy, but I know that that bottle was only the first of many. I would have taken other drugs, probably, if any had been kicking around, but booze has always been my sledgehammer of choice when I want to throw a tarp over the day and pass out fast.

Only now it wasn’t just a day I wanted to blot out. I wanted to forget I’d ever been born. I wanted to erase Felix Castor and rewind. Someone else might do a better job of taking up the space he used to occupy.

So I did my best to turn my brain into half-congealed soup, but in spite of my best efforts, a few scraps of sense input from that time manage to stand out fairly distinctly.

I remember being carried home one night by my good friend Juliet – who, being a succubus, didn’t even break a sweat – and propped up against the door like a sack of coal. She would have taken me all the way to my bed, I’m sure, except that my landlady, Pen, doesn’t allow her in the house: Pen has a ‘no succubi’ rule that’s fairly strict.

I remember Pen standing in the doorway of my room, cursing me out. ‘You selfish, self-pitying bastard!’ she was saying. ‘He’s out there. He’s out there on the streets right now, and all you’re doing about it is lying here in your own vomit! Well fuck you, Fix! I’ll find him myself, if you won’t help.’

I remember crawling on my hands and knees on the floor of my room, groping under my bed for a bottle that had fallen and rolled. When I found it, most of the contents had spilled out. Heartbroken from the loss, I cried. Then drank what was left in a single gulp, and coughed and hacked and wheezed for five minutes because the neck of the bottle had attracted enough dust and fluff to choke a horse.

I remember being called to the hospital to talk about Lisa’s condition. I’d given myself as next of kin because I didn’t know any other name to put down. So I had to go, wishing all the while that I’d given the paramedics a false name and address. She was still completely unresponsive, and the doctors wanted to know if she had any history of catatonia or neural disorders. They also wanted me to sign a shit-load of papers. I started in blithely enough, until my eyes came briefly into focus and I realised what some of the consent forms were for. Anti-psychotics. Electroshock. Surgical interventions. I fled, pursued by shouted assurances that most of the permissions were ‘just in case’.

I remember sitting in a car park late at night, my back up against the rear tyre of a truck, playing my whistle. I was trying to reproduce a note I’d never heard before. Something totally new: an ostinato that had sneaked its way into the world without my noticing, and that only my legless, almost mindless state was allowing me to hear right then. As I moved my fingers to half-block the stops and hit painfully elided semitones, ribbons of nearly invisible nothingness like the ghosts of tapeworms drifted past me and through me, seeking the music as though it was a form of sustenance.

I remember lying with my cheek pressed against cold stone, thinking with something like relief that it might all be over at last. This might be a mortuary slab that I was sprawled out on. But it wasn’t. It was just another stinking, sticky pavement strewn with broken glass, just another station of the booze-hound’s cross.

Alcohol is a curious thing: an arcane and complex thing that opens up its mysteries to you in successive layers. At the very heart of its cruelty, there’s a dark and terrible compassion, which is this: after it’s poisoned you, you can take it as medicine. You can get into a cycle where you’re drinking to carry your body through the pains and wrenches of withdrawal, and in the short term it actually works.

I rode that horse for a while. Then I fell off it and it trampled me. Then it pissed on me as I lay in the gutter.

Coming back was slow, and at first almost accidental. I woke up in my lightless room, stewed in my own sweat and feeling like someone had magically transformed my tongue into a size-10 army boot. I was on fire with the ague of chemical need, alternately too hot and too cold inside my skin, on which salamanders were crawling with hooked claws, and snakes with rasping scales.

I couldn’t find the light switch, couldn’t even remember the layout of my own room. I staggered to the bathroom in the dark, filled the bath with cold water and fell into it, fully clothed. Well, the clothes smelled like they needed a wash in any case, so it counted as economy of effort.

By the time the sun came up, I’d ridden out the worst of the shakes. I stood up on wobbly legs, stripped the sodden clothes from my body and washed properly. Shaving was harder, because my hands were still about as steady as the plastic mule in the game of Buckaroo, but I persevered.

I staggered downstairs about an hour later, wearing a pair of clean underpants that I’d providentially found down the back of a radiator and one of Pen’s 200 or so T-shirts with Celtic knot designs on them. On the table in the hall there was a stack of mail for me, including a brown envelope in legal quarto size which had come recorded delivery and had bad news written all over it. I ignored it for now. First things first.