Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

‘I take it you struck out,’ I said, after a carefully judged pause.

‘Can’t hide a thing from your rapier intellect,’ Pen muttered bitterly.

‘Where did you look?’

‘Everywhere.’

‘I mean, were you working to a plan? Following any concrete leads? Or were you just thinking you’d recognise Rafi’s aftershave if you got close to him?’

Pen poured herself another. ‘He never wore it,’ she said, staring into the glass. ‘Even back when he was . . .’ a perceptible pause ‘. . . himself.’

And doesn’t that seem like a long time ago, I thought glumly.

‘I asked myself what you’d do,’ Pen said, returning unexpectedly to my last question. She shot me a look of the kind that’s usually called old-fashioned. ‘What you’d do if you weren’t totally stewed, I mean.’

I took both the compliment and the insult on the chin. ‘And?’ I prompted.

‘I decided you might try a bit of lateral thinking. Who’d know about demons?’

‘Other demons?’

‘And users. And people who want to be users. I’ve been going round the two-finger clubs, blagging my way into other people’s conversations. And the reason I stayed out all night is because I got an invite back to a house party down in Surrey where they were meant to be doing a summoning. Only it turned out it was just a bunch of ponced-up ovates who couldn’t find their arses with a map and a photofit picture.’

She stopped, registering my shocked expression. ‘What?’ she asked defensively.

I was both impressed with her grasp of the lingo and appalled at what she’d been doing. Only exorcists apply the term ‘user’ primarily to people who summon demons rather than people who ingest chemicals to get happy. The two-finger clubs, in the same trade-specific argot, are satanist dives – so called because the satanists like to draw their pentagrams with two arms pointing upwards and three down – symbolically rejecting the Holy Trinity. An ovate is the lowest rank in the Druidic Gorsedd, but when applied to the satanist churches it also means a wanker who can’t draw a magic circle without making it look like an Easter egg – which if you’re a demon-worshipper sends entirely the wrong kind of message.

‘You don’t want to mess with those people,’ I told Pen, meaning it. ‘In among the harmless tosspots there are some real nasty pieces of work. People who’ve hung around with Hell-kin long enough to go native.’

‘Those were the ones I was hoping to meet,’ Pen answered impatiently. ‘Don’t baby me, Fix. I know what I’m doing.’ She took a sip of her brandy and scowled at the glass as if it had done her some mortal hurt. ‘In any case,’ she said, ‘it didn’t work. I didn’t get to meet any of the big operators. Oh, there are rumours everywhere. The infernal messiah has been born at last, and he’s incubating inside the Centrepoint tower. Someone’s drawing a socking great magic circle around the whole of London by joining up the white lines on the M25. The bishops of all the satanist churches are meeting over in Kensington Palace for the biggest summoning ever seen. But you could tell when you tried to pin them down to specifics that it was all bollocks. Most of the people I was talking to knew less about what was really going on than I did.’

‘What is going on?’ I asked her. ‘I’ve been out of the loop for a few days.’

Pen snorted derisively. ‘Try two weeks,’ she suggested. ‘Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself, doesn’t it?’

I wouldn’t describe the mill I’d just been through – was still going through – as ‘enjoying myself’, but I didn’t bother to argue. ‘Are the police looking for Rafi too?’ I asked, calling a spade a spade.

Pen shrugged. ‘They must be,’ she said bleakly. ‘His fingerprints were all over Imelda’s house. Mostly in other people’s blood.’ Her face crumpled momentarily, and tears welled up in her eyes. I moved forward to hug her, but she warded me off with one hand, not ready or willing to take comfort from me. ‘I don’t know how this can end now,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘He killed her, Fix. He killed Imelda.’

‘Asmodeus killed Imelda,’ I amended.

‘And Rafi did too. It was his hands that Asmodeus used. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t want to do it. When they catch him, they’ll lock him away for life.’ She wiped away the tears with furious energy before they could fall.

I couldn’t think of anything consoling to say. Everything she’d said was true, and she hadn’t said the worst of it. Even if London’s finest dropped the ball, and Rafi somehow got away without being had up for murder, being welded to Asmodeus was a life sentence in itself.

Back when I first met Rafael Ditko, at college in Oxford, I really didn’t know what the hell to make of him: he was a bum, essentially, but a bum with his own inimitable style. A mature student from the Czech Republic, he was older than the rest of our little circle by three years and some small change, and he had a spectacular impact on all of us: on Pen more than anyone, because she’d fallen in love with him more or less at first sight, and then had to watch while he bedded every other girl we knew, weaving his way in and out between their official boyfriends with no call-out charge and no waiting.

He was the sort of guy who never paid for a round, never cleaned up his own messes, always called the tune but left someone else to settle accounts with the piper. By rights we should probably have hated him, but he had that knack – that mix of rakish good looks, ineffable charm and perfectly faked sincerity – that makes other people love you and want to carry your burdens for you. He was destined for a happy, directionless life probably full of other people’s sofas and other people’s wives: nature had adapted and equipped him for that evolutionary niche.

But that was until he met me. I was falling fast at that time – a fall that had begun when my death-sense kicked in at full power, around my thirteenth birthday. Rafi was rising like an ego-propelled rocket, and we ricocheted off each other in a perfect example of Brownian motion. Rafi’s exuberant hedonism and the cool, arrogant way he handled the world’s slings and arrows helped me to pull out of the self-destructive anomie that I was drowning in. My effect on him was less wholesome: I triggered a fascination in him, an obsession with the dead. Rafi being Rafi, the obsession expressed itself in competition. He wanted to outdo me in delivering the necromantic goods: to go on expeditions to the undiscovered country and bring back souvenirs.

It destroyed him, in the end. By some route I’ve never been able to reconstruct, he fell into the orbit of one Anton Fanke, the founder and leader and prophet-in-residence of the so-called Satanist Church of the Americas. The SCA seems to model itself on the Moonies in some respects: its deacons use total-environment conditioning, surrounding you with their own people so that the only truths you hear are theirs. Rafi dropped his old acquaintances and disappeared from our radar, much to Pen’s dismay. Ginny, his girlfriend at that time, was an SCA plant who fed Rafi’s addiction with badly photocopied grimoires, mountains of steganographic horse shit and a few nuggets of lethal, undeniable fact.

I don’t know why they chose Rafi. What I do know is that Fanke had a lot of arcane and complex ideas about how magical ritual should work, and he’d come to the conclusion that in magic the practitioner is part of the system. For some reason, that meant that when he attempted his biggest ever summoning, raising one of the most powerful demons in Hell by means of an adjuration spell adapted from Honorius’ Liber Iuratus , he decided it should be Rafi Ditko rather than himself who drew the circle and intoned the needful words.