Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

A single door led to a back room, off which a narrow staircase opened. It was much darker here. I groped for a light switch, found one at last to the right of the doorway and flicked it on.

A bare hundred-watt bulb flared into life over my head. From all around the room, a hundred Rafis stared back at me.

‘Sonofabitch!’ I muttered involuntarily.

‘His photos and his journals,’ Jovan had said – and he’d sneered at Rafi’s obsessive self-regard. Judging from this evidence, he hadn’t been exaggerating.

Some of the photos were five by three or six by four, snapshots taken with an ordinary thirty-five-millimetre camera, but many of them had been blown up – the largest, poster size with the grainy stippling that comes from trying to squeeze too much detail out of a poorly resolved original.

They were all portrait shots, not family groups nor even whole-body studies. A relentless gallery of head-and-shoulders close-ups, the blurred backgrounds merging into one, the only variety coming from Rafi’s facial expressions and from the vagaries of the lighting.

It was unsettling to meet my friend’s gaze so many times at once in this sad, abandoned place.

I took a few steps further into the room, and something shattered under my foot. I looked down, startled: more photos, in glass-fronted frames. No, I realised, as I knelt to examine them more closely. These were actually photographs printed on glass rather than paper, in black and white, but backed with coloured card so that the lighter areas became islands of intense red or green or gold.

The one I’d shattered had a silver backing. The memory of Rafi’s silver-lined cell at the Stanger Care Home came forcefully into my mind, and then, although silver isn’t gold, the tune of that old vaudeville favourite ‘I’m only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’. Rafi had gone a long way from this cramped room to find an even smaller cage in London, but both rooms were spacious compared with the vaulted oubliette of his own skull, which was where he was really trapped.

I pulled myself out of this pointless reverie with an effort. I still had a plane to catch, and even to appease Mr Anastasiadis there was nothing here I wanted to take with me.

I went upstairs briefly. I found two tiny bedrooms, a double bed in one, two small singles in the other. There was no room for any other furniture. The double bed still had blankets strewn across it, so it looked as though it had been vacated only recently, but no sheets covered the bare, stained mattress.

I went into the other room, glanced perfunctorily around. Through the dust-smeared window – no curtains here, not even of newspaper – I could see the yard below and the laywer’s big, imposing car. Half a dozen or so of the neighboorhood children were watching it from the yard entrance, their faces mostly sullen and disapproving as though the vulgar display of wealth offended them on principle.

Turning from the window, I noticed a small fleck of bright red colour against the bleached grey of the floor-boards. There was something under the left-hand bed. I squatted down to look a little closer.

The something turned out to be the top-most of a pile of four or five small fat notebooks. I picked it up, flicked through the pages. Lines of tight Slavonic script in faded blue ink met my gaze.

Rafi’s journals? Jovan said he’d burned them, but perhaps he’d only wanted to. At the front, where the writer of a diary might be expected to write his name, there was indeed a short string of characters. Rafael Ditko? Maybe. I picked up the little stash of books, slipped them into my greatcoat’s capacious outer pockets and headed for the stairs. If they were Rafi’s journals they might be worth having. The better I knew Rafi, the deeper and stronger my sense of him became, the more likely it was that I could separate him from his demonic bunk-buddy – assuming I could get a translation done before Asmodeus cornered me in a dark alley and strangled me with my own intestines. It was still a long shot, but it was something. At least I could tell myself – and Jenna-Jane – that I wasn’t coming away completely empty-handed.

I retraced my steps, down the stairs and back through the room of photos. One I hadn’t seen before caught my attention, one of those where the image had been printed on glass. In this picture, Rafi seemed to be about twelve years old. He was standing on the broad stone steps of a large old building, and whatever he was wearing must have been of a very light colour, because the pale gold backing shone through most of it. Perhaps it stood out from the rest because Rafi was so young in it, while in most of the others he was either in his late teens or early twenties – a period at which his self-love seemed to have reached its pinnacle – or perhaps it was just that his smile was so radiant, his satisfaction with the world and his place in it so transcendantly perfect.

Whatever it was, I took the damn thing with me.

Mr Anastasiadis was very pleased to see me emerge from the house. The feral kids had doubled in number now, and they were eyeing the Lexus with a malevolent hunger. ‘The airport,’ the lawyer said without preamble. Then he said a whole lot more, loudly, in Macedonian, looking at me but obviously playing to the wider audience.

‘What was that?’ I asked, when we were both in the car and backing out of the yard. The kids parted reluctantly to let us through. One or two of them took a kick at the bodywork en passant . Anastasiadis winced at each dull clunk, as though he was feeling the blows himself.

‘I called you chief inspector,’ he said a little disgruntledly. ‘And I asked you how your investigation was coming along. I thought this might deter those little thugs from hurting my car. But sadly, Mr Castor, such a deterrent is still beyond the grasp of human science.’

His gaze fell on the photo, which I was holding in my lap. ‘This is all you took?’ he said. ‘Well, it is a nice moment to commemorate, I suppose.’

‘What moment?’ I asked him.

‘The first communion. This is Jovan or Rafael?’

‘Rafael,’ I said. ‘How do you know when it was taken?’

The lawyer shrugged. ‘The white robe,’ he said. ‘And the steps of Hagia Katerina. Every house in Skopje has a photo like this.’

It was funny and painful at the same time to think of Rafi taking communion. The wine and wafer would stick in his throat now, and make the demon bellow like a bull under the gelding knife. Was there a possibility there? I wondered briefly. Trick Asmodeus into swallowing the host or drinking communion wine? The answer was no, of course. I could hurt him easily enough, but tricks like that wouldn’t pull or push or blast him out of his human vessel, and he’d recuperate with terrifying speed. If there was a magic bullet, that wasn’t it.

We stopped at a red light, which didn’t seem to be in any hurry to change. I was a little worried about catching my flight now, but I took advantage of the delay to fish one of the books out of my pocket and show it to Anastasiadis.

‘I took these too,’ I told him. ‘I think they may be Rafi’s journals.’

He took it from me and flicked through it curiously.

‘His name is inside the cover,’ he acknowledged. ‘Rafael Cyril Ditko. Yes. This is a diary of some kind. Or at least each entry has a date attached to it.’

‘Do you know of any way I could get them translated?’ I asked.

Anastasiadis handed the book back to me, returning his attention to the road as we started moving again. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I use translators myself all the time, for deeds and contracts. If you were willing to leave the books with me, I could arrange to have it done.’

‘I need it done quickly.’