Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

I ran up the path to the door. Dicks was standing in the hall. He made to block me, which could have had unfortunate consequences for both of us, but as I clenched my fists and lowered my head a voice from inside the house called, ‘Let him come, Dicks!’ He stood aside with bad grace, at the last moment, and glared at me as I passed.

Jenna-Jane was at the head of the stairs that led down into the basement. She gave me a look of profound commiseration.

‘Where are they?’ I demanded, my mouth so dry I could hardly get the words out. ‘Where are they?’

‘Felix,’ she said gently, ‘if you’d only listened to me at the outset—’

Without waiting to hear how that one finished, I ran on down the stairs. Pen’s basement looked as though a pack of hyenas had come through in a steam train, stopped to party a little, and then moved on. Every piece of furniture had been smashed to matchwood. Broken glass crunched underfoot, and the rich, bitter-sweet reek of spilled brandy was everywhere. The computer had been driven into the TV – an ancient behemoth – hard enough to leave the two buckled plastic casings inextricably crushed together, each partially embedded in the other so they looked like lovers in the midst of a French kiss that had got way out of hand.

Amidst the wreckage of the desk lay something like a shot-silk scarf, its glittering black flecked and crossed with deep red. It was Edgar the raven, twisted and broken and casually thrown aside. There was no sign of Arthur.

Jenna-Jane’s assistant, Gentle, was rummaging through the debris with an intent frown on her face. ‘The question I’m asking myself,’ she remarked without looking up, ‘is why the wards kept him out for so long.’

‘Are you seriously that stupid?’ I spat out, harshly enough to make her look up in surprise. ‘They didn’t. They didn’t keep him out for one blind fucking second.’

You know why the lion limps?

So gormless gazelles will think they’re safe, and come on down to the waterhole.

Then you can pick the luckless little fuckers off whenever you’ve a mind to.

‘The names build,’ said Gentle. ‘One syllable at a time.’

She had rough-and-ready photo printouts of the wards we’d found underground, laid out on the table in front of her. Her hand went from one photo to the next, and she pronounced each name as she pointed to it, slowly, like a primary school teacher mouthing kuh-ah-tuh.

‘Ket. Tlallik. Tsukelit. Illaliel. Jetaniul. Aketsulitur. Ajulutsikael.’

‘Illaliel and Jetaniul are the same length,’ Jenna-Jane pointed out.

Gentle shrugged. ‘The same length to us, but if you elide the medial “i” in either word there could be a difference that our ears don’t register.’

It was an hour and a half later, and we hadn’t moved. Well, that wasn’t strictly true: we’d relocated to the first floor, where there was a room that was still more or less intact. The furniture was under dust covers, the ornaments wrapped in plastic bags hailing from defunct supermarket chains like Gateway and Victor Value. Nobody had set foot in this room since Pen’s mother died.

My first instinct had been to go back to Asmodeus’ underground lair and storm the place, but Jenna-Jane said her people had it staked out and he hadn’t shown there. There was no way of knowing where he was. We couldn’t even use Trudie’s map. She’d torn it to pieces before she left the MOU, and in any case she was out of action for now, maybe for good.

So we sat, and we talked, and we went nowhere. Jenna-Jane restated her moult theory, that demons start out as simpler organisms, and change their names as they develop. I didn’t care, and I barely listened. Asmodeus had Pen and Sue, and that was all I could think about. Obviously it would help to understand what the fuck he was up to with Juliet, but I didn’t think insight was going to come from looking at pretty pictures. It was something to do with what Juliet was and what she did – and it had to fit in with all the other shit he’d been doing since he escaped.

Unless I was wrong. Unless he was just rabid and tearing at the world, and in the end he’d kill us all just for the immediate sense of relief it would bring.

I got up from the table. ‘I have to make a call,’ I said. Jenna-Jane and Gentle continued to pore over the printouts, and made no answer.

I crossed to the window, far enough away that I wouldn’t be overheard, and dialled Sue Book’s number yet again. Just the same answerphone message, and this time I found I couldn’t muster a reply. How do you say to an answerphone ‘a monster has stolen the woman you love’? I just said ‘Call me, Juliet. Please, for fuck’s sake, just call me.’ Then I hung up.

I stared down at the lawn. The piano still lay dead in the long grass, and the stolid Mr Dicks still stood by the gatepost, arms folded, glaring at the pre-dawn rubberneckers. He looked up at the window, and when he saw me watching him his eyes narrowed. I had too much on my mind right then even to flash him a wave.

Behind me, Jenna-Jane was rummaging in her pockets – an incongruously human thing for her to do, making her seem for a moment like a forgetful grandma, looking in vain for her front door keys.

‘Is the succubus his ally?’ Gentle was asking. ‘Could summoning all her aspects make her stronger? A sort of ontological layering . . .’

‘It was driving her insane,’ I muttered.

There was a momentary silence from behind me. Then I distinctly heard the dry click of Jenna-Jane’s tongue against her palate, an involuntary but very discreet expression of surprise and enlightenment.

‘Not a benign effect at all,’ she mused. ‘A form of torture.’

‘Or just an uncontrolled regression,’ Gentle chipped in.

A sequence of seven tinny and discordant notes sounded suddenly from somewhere nearby. J-J took her phone from her pocket and put it to her ear.

‘Mulbridge,’ she said, with a simplicity more arrogant than any degree of ostentation could ever be. Honorifics were for mere mortals.

She listened intently for a few seconds, then started to interject questions and comments. ‘Where? How far, exactly? Good. Good. What’s the address? Thank you.’

When she slapped the phone closed, less than a minute had elapsed.

‘Your Mr Moulson, Felix,’ she said. ‘The man who was possessed, and allegedly found a way to free himself. We’ve finally run him to ground. Appleton House, Godalming Lane, Eashing, in Surrey. It’s straight down the A3. Only twenty miles, apparently.’

I headed for the door, but I went from giant strides to dead stop again in the space of three steps.

‘Shit!’ I exploded. ‘Pen’s car. He fucking totalled her car!’

‘You can take my car,’ Jenna-Jane said without hesitation. ‘Gentle, give Mr Castor your radio. I’ll go and tell Dicks he’s to take you directly there.’

She hurried out of the room. Gentle took a somewhat bulky walkie-talkie out of her pocket and held it out to me.

‘What do I need this for?’ I demanded, nonplussed. ‘I’ve got my mobile.’

Gentle shrugged. ‘This uses police freaks,’ she said. ‘Some areas you don’t get good coverage from the mobile network. Radios always work – at least top-end kit like this does. You use band one unless there’s local interference, fall back to two, then three, and so on. Soon as the switchboard at the MOU picks you up, you’ll be patched through to Professor Mulbridge wherever she is.’

‘Wonderful,’ I muttered. ‘A hotline to God.’ I took the radio and shoved it into my pocket. I went downstairs with Gentle at my back, still explaining the finer points of the radio’s operation, but I couldn’t make myself listen any more. My mind was seething with questions and doubts. Why had Asmodeus taken Pen and Sue, instead of killing them here? How had he taken them, for that matter? In the back of a white van? Rolled up in a carpet? How did kidnapping fit in with the other things he’d done since he got free? Why did he need them alive, when he’d killed Ginny Parris and Jovan Ditko without a second thought?