Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

‘Not yet. I tell you what though: Juliet could ask her brother.’

‘Say again?’

‘She comes from Baphomet’s lineage, doesn’t she? She is of Baphomet the sister, and the youngest of her line , et cetera. His name turns up on one of these lists too, so maybe him and Tlallik ran in the same crew.’

‘I don’t think she phones home all that often,’ I said. It was an automatic response, dating back to when Juliet was trying to keep her nose clean. After last night’s performance, maybe I’d need to revise that estimate.

‘Doesn’t hurt to ask, anyway,’ Nicky said. ‘I’m still on it, but I’m thinking this is a waste of time. These guys all closed up shop a long time ago.’

‘Do demons retire, Nicky?’

‘You can run that one past her too.’

I got off the bus at Trafalgar Square, then walked up St Martin’s Lane, where I found a bank and wired a ton, in pounds sterling, to the personal account of D. Anastasiadis. A hundred quid a book, he’d said, so now he could make a start on Rafi’s journals if he hadn’t done so already. If you’d asked me what I hoped to find in there, and what I thought I could do with it, I’d have had to admit I had no idea. Again, it was the illusion of moving forward that was comforting, even though forward doesn’t really mean anything if you have no clue where it is you’re going.

As I carried on towards Seven Dials and my rendezvous with Trudie Pax, I made one final call, to Juliet – or as it turned out, to Sue Book. She sounded scared and hunted, as though picking up the phone was an act that was fraught with danger. I asked her if Juliet had seemed okay when she got home last night.

‘Last night?’ Sue echoed, sounding uncertain. ‘She wasn’t here. She didn’t . . . I thought . . .’ There was a pause, and then the sound of another voice in the background. Sue answered the other person, but her voice was muffled now – a hand over the receiver, most probably.

‘Sue?’ I prompted.

There was a spate of rattles and clicks.

‘Who is this?’ It wasn’t Sue’s voice. It wasn’t Juliet’s either – or rather, not quite. It was close, but it had a ragged edge to it with oddly placed peaks and troughs, as though it was being played back on the wrong device and in the wrong format.

‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘Castor.’

‘She called you?’

The threat in the tone was palpable. ‘Uh . . . no. I called her. I just wanted to see how you were feeling. If you’re managing to . . .’ I groped for a circumlocution that avoided words like devour and soul. ‘If you’re keeping it together,’ I finished cravenly.

There was a long silence, long enough to make me think that the connection had broken, but Juliet spoke again just before I did.

‘Tell me where you are,’ she said.

From behind her, I could dimly hear a squeal of dismay from Sue. ‘Jules, no. He’s just a friend. He’s your friend too. It’s not—’

The crash that obliterated the end of the sentence was loud enough to make me flinch away from the phone. ‘Juliet,’ I shouted. ‘Don’t hurt her. Fuck it, don’t hurt her. I’m in town. On Seven Dials. What do you want?’

At that moment Trudie rounded the corner of Shorts Gardens, about fifty yards away. She waved to me, then registered my expression and lowered her hand. Only silence now on the other end of the line.

‘Juliet?’ I yelled again.

There’s a weird experience I get every now and then, where I look at my watch and I think it’s stopped, because the second hand doesn’t seem to be moving. It just sits there, seemingly for a whole lot longer than a second hand should, until finally it wakes up and jumps to the next notch. It’s just a second, but it’s a second you’re glancing at sideways somehow, and from that angle it looks longer. That’s probably what happened here. It felt like I was waiting for a night and a day, but since nothing else happened in that time, it’s a fair bet that it was no time at all.

‘She’s fine, Castor,’ said Juliet in her normal voice.

‘What do you mean, she’s fine?’ I snarled. ‘I heard you tearing the whole place apart.’

Her voice was eerily calm, and the dislocation from what had just happened was so complete it was terrifying. ‘I swung a chair against the wall, and it broke. Sue wasn’t hurt. But now she won’t let me touch her or come near her. Can I ask a favour?’

Trudie had come up to join me now, and was waiting silently at my side, trying to piece together what the hell this was about from my side of the conversation. ‘A favour?’ I repeated blankly.

‘I told you I’d send her away if I thought I might hurt her again.’ A pause. ‘She can’t stay here.’

‘I’ll be right there,’ I said. ‘Don’t either of you move.’ Inspiration struck, and I added, ‘Give Sue the phone.’ I looked around for a cab, but there were none in sight. I started walking rapidly along Mercer Street with Trudie in tow. I’d reached the end of the street before Sue’s voice sounded down the line again, breaking even on the single word ‘Hello?’

Plenty of cabs on Shaftesbury Avenue. I flagged one down with my right hand, holding the phone in my left.

‘I’m going to put a friend on,’ I said to Sue as we climbed into the cab. ‘Keep talking to her. Let her know if anything happens.’ I passed the phone to Trudie, adding ‘Royal Oak’ for the cabbie’s benefit, and we were away.

Thanks to Mr Livingstone and his wondrous congestion charge, we made good headway through the centre, but then got hopelessly snarled up as we headed up Edgware Road toward the Westway. Trudie was keeping up a non-stop stream of meaningless conversation with Sue Book the whole way, which was what I was hoping she’d do: taking Sue’s mind off the terror and at the same time letting me know that she was still alive. I sat with my eyes closed, thinking about Juliet, or rather thinking about the tune that corresponded to Juliet. If I had to fight her, I needed to have that music clear in my mind, and at the moment it was rubbing shoulders with other tunes, to their mutual detriment. I had to unremember the harsh skirls of the fear-thing in the Super-Self swimming pool and the insidious discontinuities of Asmodeus, had to put them way to the back of my mind where they couldn’t be heard.

I was kidding myself, of course. The tin whistle is a great specific against ghosts, but when you’re fighting demons it has the disadvantage of a crossbow against an AK-47: you get off one shot, and then you’re dead before you can ratchet up for the second. But this was yet another fine mess I’d invited an innocent bystander into, so there was no walking away from it. No, as usual, I had to walk right into it whistling a jaunty refrain.

Bourne Terrace was quiet and deserted, and from the outside Sue’s house looked similarly untroubled.

‘We’ll be right back,’ I told the cabbie. ‘Don’t move.’

Trudie kept up her running commentary all the way to the door. ‘We’re coming up the driveway now. We’re right outside . . .’ But it was Juliet who opened up, and stood aside to let us in. I stared at her questioningly. Her gaze flicked to the tin whistle I still had clutched in my hand, and she quirked an eyebrow.

‘You won’t need that,’ she said. ‘Luckily for you.’

‘Maybe I won’t,’ I conceded. ‘Do you?’

‘Need you to play me back into my right mind?’ Juliet asked with sardonic emphasis. ‘No. I don’t. Not for the moment, anyway. But get her out of here quickly. She won’t look at me, and she cries when I come near her. It makes me . . . agitated. I can feel myself slipping.’

‘You’re sure there’s no other way?’ I asked lamely. ‘You don’t have any clue why this might be happening? You can’t get any kind of a handle on it?’ I remembered the painted stones. ‘I found some summonings around your house and in a few other places. You think maybe someone could have . . . ?’