Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

At 4.00 a.m. I was woken up by my own phone ringing. It was Jenna-Jane.

‘Felix, this is remarkable,’ she said. ‘You saw the sigils in the demon’s lair?’

‘I couldn’t take my eyes off them, J-J,’ I said, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.

‘Are you aware of what they represent?’

‘Yeah. Are you?’

‘They’re steganographic homonyms. They all denote the same entity. It appears to be the succubus who is referred to in late-medieval grimoires as Ajulutsikael.’

‘Yeah. That was my conclusion too.’

‘Which means that Asmodeus is trying to summon her simultaneously in multiple aspects or incarnations.’ She paused as if she expected me to say something. When I didn’t, she went on with sardonic emphasis. ‘Despite the fast that she’s already been definitively summoned.’

I’d never been sure exactly how much Jenna-Jane knew about Juliet. She’d sounded me out on a few occasions in a way that made me think she was fishing for more information based on guesswork or rumour. I sure as Hell wasn’t going to play join-the-dots for her now.

‘Multiple aspects?’ I mused.

‘Each name would correspond to a stage of the demon’s life cycle,’ Jenna-Jane went on, her tone heavy and resigned, as though she was letting me off the hook for now. ‘One theory is that they change their names in much the same way that insects moult: sloughing off old traits and aspects, redefining and reshaping themselves through the morphic power of a new name. That’s why necromancers use the demon’s name to summon and command it. Castor, if you know anything more than you’ve told me about this, now would be a very good time to put your cards on the table.’

‘I don’t know anything,’ I lied.

‘About a succubus passing for human?’

‘There’s always talk,’ I admitted. ‘Mostly you stop believing in that stuff after you hit puberty.’

A pause on the other end of the line, then Jenna-Jane’s voice again. ‘Where are you now?’

‘I’m still in town, but I’m probably not going to be here much longer. I’m just waiting to hear how Pax is.’

‘Very well. Another early meeting, I think.’

I responded to that with a profanity. I’d had enough of turning out of bed at dawn to present myself at J-J’s door. ‘I’ll call you in the morning,’ I offered by way of compromise and hung up.

I took a stroll around the hospital’s ground floor, found a coffee machine that actually worked and – more surprisingly – enough coins in my greatcoat’s many pockets to make it work. Sipping the rat’s piss that passed for black unsweetened, I made my way back to the A & E waiting room. The nurse I’d met earlier was waiting for me there.

Trudie was out of surgery and awake, she told me. The surgery had seemed to go well, but it was too early to tell whether or not there’d be any lasting loss of function in the right arm and hand. I could talk to Trudie if I wanted, but only for a few minutes and only if I promised to keep it low key. I agreed docilely and was led to a ward, where Trudie lay on one of a dozen beds, her upper body propped up nearly vertical. She was shockingly pale, and her expression slack and drained. She roused when she saw me though, and twitched her left hand in a feeble wave. Her right arm was swathed in thick bandages, and her neck was in a cast.

‘How’s it hanging, Pax?’ I asked, trying for a tone of brusque camaraderie.

‘By a thread,’ she murmured. ‘Can’t feel my fucking fingers, Castor. They’re still there, right?’

I looked down. ‘They look to be,’ I reported. ‘You want me to count?’

She shook her head weakly, her eyes bright with unshed tears. ‘Can’t do it one-handed,’ she said in the same low monotone. ‘I’m useless if I don’t get it back.’

The fingers of her left hand flickered, manipulating a loop of string that wasn’t there. Of course, she meant the the cat’s cradles: the way she touched the spirit world and worked her will on it. If she didn’t get the full use of her right arm and hand back, she’d be crippled in more ways than one.

‘You’ll be fine as soon as the anaesthetic wears off,’ I promised – a guarantee with nothing to back it except my overdrawn account at the bank of optimism. I only said it to offer her a crumb of comfort, and I could see from her face that she took no comfort from it at all.

‘What happened at Super-Self?’ she asked me.

By way of answer, I took the music box out of my pocket and held it out to her. She took it in her good hand and stared at it for a few seconds, at first without seeming to realise what it was. Then she got the feel of the thing in her death-sense and swore softly.

‘You caught it,’ she said, awed even through the drug haze. ‘In a fucking box.’

‘Yeah. I did. I was thinking of tossing it in the Thames, but I may not even have to. Being separated from the Super-Self ghosts seems to have made it switch itself off. There hasn’t been a peep out of it.’

‘Throw it away anyway,’ Trudie advised me. ‘You don’t want to be around it when it wakes up.’

I took it back and returned it to my pocket. ‘What I want even less than that is for Jenna-Jane to get wind of it,’ I said. ‘It’s a neat trick, but for the time being I want it to be our little secret. Deal?’

Trudie shrugged, and then winced because her wrecked shoulder made shrugging a hazardous proposition. ‘If you say so, Castor,’ she grunted. ‘I suppose I’m lucky you confided in me. You seem to see all other exorcists as the enemy.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I don’t see the dead as the enemy. If the MOU find out you can trap ghosts in boxes, that’s going to be a bad day for ghosts.’

‘But you’re alive, so what do you care?’

‘I’m alive,’ I agreed, ‘but I’m planning to be dead one day. You think I want to spend eternity in an afterlife made out of plywood and screws?’

‘Castor, you’re a hopeless case!’ Trudie was getting exasperated, and her raised voice brought the nurse at a run to remove the source of the irritation. ‘You know how many dead people there are to every one living person? And how many people die in any given day? If this does come to a fight, we’re going to need all the help we can get.’

‘If it comes to a fight, Trudie, we’ve lost.’

The nurse manhandled me unceremoniously toward the door.

‘You can’t believe that, Castor,’ Trudie implored me, her face twisted in almost visceral dismay. ‘You can’t.’

‘It’s just a matter of time,’ I said. ‘Living versus dead? Sooner or later, we all defect to the other side.’

The door slammed in my face.

I walked home, just as I had on the night of Ginny Parris’s murder, mulling all this stuff over in my mind. Maybe Trudie was right about me. I did seem to be pretty comfortable in the company of the dead, and the undead, and the never born. Was I a traitor to the living? A fifth columnist in an undeclared war? Could I really be the only one who saw how self-defeating that concept was?

I was still kicking those thoughts around in my head when I turned into Pen’s road and saw a deeply unwelcome sight. Parked in front of her door, a hundred yards away, was the same black limousine I’d seen outside Super-Self.

Jenna-Jane had decided not to wait for that early-morning conference call.

With a sinking heart, I trudged toward that mortal rendezvous. But when I was close enough to see the house itself, that dejection was washed away in an instant by a rush of pure panic.

The ground-floor window was smashed, and the upright piano that had once belonged to Pen’s grandmother was lying at a crazy angle on the lawn, with a gaping rent in its polished wooden frame and its peg-and-string intestines spilled out onto the grass.