Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

The summoning went wrong, and Rafi ended up possessed by Asmodeus instead of commanding him. Then I sealed his fate by trying to carry out an exorcism without knowing what it was I was trying to cast out. I’d never met a demon back in those days. I was armed for bear, but I found myself drawing a bead on Leviathan.

I’ve tried many times since that night to reconstruct what it was I did, with a view to reverse-engineering my own tune and finding a way to put things right. It’s not easy, for a lot of reasons. The scene was one of violent chaos: in the bathroom of Rafi’s flat in the Seven Sisters Road, with Rafi thrashing and raving in a bathtub full of boiling water right beside me. That water had been ice about a minute and a half before, but the fierce heat that was burning Rafi up from the inside had made short work of it.

I found what I thought was the intruding spirit, and I started to weave a tune around it. The notes came quickly and fluently. I was expecting this thing, whatever it was, to put up more of a fight, but despite Rafi’s cursing and convulsions, the binding wasn’t too hard at all.

But as I was about to move on to the banishing, Rafi had a moment of lucidity. He stared at me with absolute terror in his eyes. ‘Fix . . .’ he whispered. ‘Please! Please don’t . . .’ In an instant he’d vanished again, going down for the third time in the lightless wells of his own hind brain. Asmodeus surfaced in his place, tenting the skin of Rafi’s face with the ridge poles of his own inhuman physiognomy, and blistering my ears with a curse from the arse-end of Tartarus.

I twigged it then, all of it. I knew what it was that was possessing Rafi, and I knew what I’d caught in the tightening coils of my tune. I was about to exorcise my best friend’s spirit from his own body, and leave the demon standing alone on the field.

I couldn’t just stop playing; that would destroy Rafi for sure. So I did the only thing I could think of, which was to change the tune into something else. I modulated key and pitch and tempo, trying to ground the binding power of the music in something else besides Rafi. And the demon, seeing what I was doing, fought back.

It was like being in a tug of war in which the rope is a frayed mains cable with a million volts flowing through it. I couldn’t stop, couldn’t let go, couldn’t let my concentration slacken for a moment. We wrestled for hours, the demon writhing inside my friend’s flesh, me hunched over the bathtub with the whistle jammed to my mouth, playing a skirling, nightmare arabesque.

And I won. Kind of. I bound the demon.

Only I bound it to Rafi, and I couldn’t untie them again.

It was the opposite of an exorcism: the man and the monster were welded so tightly and inextricably that they’d almost become one being. It wasn’t exactly a Jekyll and Hyde deal, though; it was worse than that. Asmodeus was calling the shots from day one. Rafi’s personality remained totally submerged, except when I was able to bring it to the surface again with another summoning.

And Rafi’s body was locked up in a silver-lined cell at the Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill, silver being a good specific against demons as well as the undead. The official diagnosis was schizophrenia, but the Stanger knew what they were dealing with and took no chances. They kept the demon down with wards and charms and neuroleptic drugs, administered in industrial quantities.

That was how things stayed for the next three years. I tried a hundred times to recreate the tune that had turned Rafi and Asmodeus into spiritual Siamese twins, but I never even got close. And without that starting point to work from, I didn’t have a bastard clue how to separate them out again. There’s no sieve in the world with a mesh fine enough for souls.

And now I’d run out of time. Asmodeus was walking the streets, leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake. Something had to be done, and now that I’d sobered up long enough to string two thoughts together, I knew that it was me who had to do it. It was either that or stay smashed out of my skull for the rest of my life.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. It’s a bitch.

After finishing her second brandy, Pen tried to re-establish an air of normality by mucking out the rats’ cage. I left her to it and went back up to my room to make another pass at the mess: a parallel process really, except that my room smelled a lot worse than rat shit.

I worked with more of a will this time, and made some inroads into the chaos. Just having something to do was therapeutic, although I still felt fragile from the heroic abuses of the past few days and I had to take things slow.

Every so often random flashes of memory would play across my inner eye. I let them come and go again without trying to force them, intriguing though some of them were. As with birds, chasing after them would be the surest way to make them scatter.

I remembered sitting on cooling asphalt and trying to find a new note on my whistle, convinced that I was hearing the note in the air all around me. I could almost hear it again now, but it remained tantalisingly just out of reach, like a dream that’s already started to evaporate as you wake up piecemeal from a troubled sleep.

The withdrawal pangs hit me again, harder than ever, prickling my skin and covering me in an instant with cold sweat. I hardly even noticed. That note, that elusive ostinato, remained wedged in the doorway of my mind like an overlarge piece of furniture that couldn’t be pulled or pushed. It wouldn’t come into clear focus and it wouldn’t leave me alone.

I took out my whistle, put it to my mouth and blew a few random chords. A, C and then G took me by a sort of natural progression into ‘Henry Martin’, a wholesome little tune about murder, exploitation and the irreversible loss of innocence.

When Henry Martin was swinging from the gallows tree, I moved on to another equally pleasant ditty, and then another after that. The evening wore on into night as I played, and an unsettling feeling crept over me by degrees: a solid conviction based on the most fleeting and ephemeral of impressions.

Imagine you woke up to find yourself a prisoner in an unfamiliar room, in total darkness, with your hands and feet tied. Unable to move, unable to see, you’d have no way of finding out what kind of place you were in. But when you shouted for help, the echoes of your own voice would come back to you, and give you some sense of the size of the room: the extent and maybe even the shape of the volume of air that surrounded you.

That was kind of what I felt right then: playing the whistle woke up my death-sense, and my death-sense told me that the world had changed. The echoes of the simple, dolorous tune described a space that was subtly, infinitesimally altered from what I knew, what I’d expected. I wondered what in Hell that might mean.

Disconcerted, I lowered the whistle. I was about to try another tune when I saw Pen standing in the doorway, staring in at me. There was a tension in her pose and in her expression. ‘You’re upsetting the birds,’ she said.

I put the whistle down on the table beside my bed. ‘Everyone’s a critic,’ I deadpanned.

She stared at the whistle for a moment, then shook her head, visibly giving it up. She turned away, towards the stairs, but an afterthought struck her and she stopped on the top step, looking back at me over her shoulder. ‘You had some calls,’ she said.

‘When I was . . . out?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Anything I should know about?’