Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

The chair had a wing back and was upholstered in brick-red leatherette, darkened here and there by the sweat-and-scuff smear marks of a couple of difficult decades. Moulson was sitting in the chair, his head slumped sideways against one of the wings, his hands resting limply on its arms. He was in shirt and trousers, his feet bare. The shirt hung open all the way down, I guess because it was a little early in the day to worry about that level of fine detail.

He was in the same colour range as the chair, more or less, his skin flushed an unhealthy red that darkened locally to brown and even black. His face was like a Maori mask that had been tossed off quickly for the tourist trade, with no real feel for what a face ought to look like. Gnarled little bosses stood out from his flesh like rivets on a cast-iron bucket, stretching in two lines from his temples to the bridge of his nose, then flaring out again across his cheeks and down under his chin. There were similar bumps on the backs of his hands where they gripped the chair arm – straight lines of them radiating from wrist to knuckles. His chest, sunken in on his ribs like the sails of a becalmed ship, bore a horizontal line of swellings across the collar bone and two diagonals sweeping in towards the nipples on either side. There was also a little cluster of them to the left of his chest, where his heart would be.

Every one of the swollen bumps rose out of a nest of old scar tissue, which was what gave his skin its piebald look. There was scarcely an inch of his body that didn’t bear the asymmetrical spoor of old, unimaginable excavations.

‘Like it?’ Moulson creaked. He raised his hand in a vague, tremulous gesture, inviting me to feast my eyes. ‘It’s something to see, isn’t it? All done with my own fair hand.’

‘Why?’ was the only thing I could think to ask.

‘Inoculation,’ Moulson said. He said nothing more for a moment or two. Then his right hand, still raised, unfolded and flexed as he pointed towards the bed.

‘In the drawer,’ he said. ‘A shoebox. Take it out.’

I didn’t see what he meant at first. Then I saw that the bed was a drawer divan, the drawers mostly hidden by the unmade sheets hanging down to the floor. I pushed them aside and opened the left-hand drawer, where his hand pointed.

The shoebox sat at the front, ready to hand, nestling in a substrate of socks and underwear. I lifted it out and set it on the floor next to the bed.

‘Open it,’ Moulson commanded.

I did. It was full of tiny copper discs – halfpennies, I thought at first, but since the halfpenny hasn’t been lawful currency in Britain for two decades or more, I lifted one out and gave it a closer look.

It was a little thicker than a halfpenny, and it had never been legal tender anywhere in the world. Two words had been stamped on it, slightly off centre, in letters so small I could barely read them. The spidery diagonals of a pentagram enfolded them.

Martin Moulson.

I grabbed a handful of the things and sifted them between my fingers. Every one of them bore the same imprint, on one side only. The verso was blank.

I stared at Moulson in amazement. The magnitude of what he had done was dawning on me. It was like glancing over a garden wall and finding an abyss, unsuspected, on the further side.

‘How many?’ I managed to ask. ‘How many of them?’

Moulson grinned, his lips peeling back from regular but blackened teeth. In the virtual absence of gums, they filled his mouth from top to bottom, like the bars of a cage. ‘That’s the question, all right,’ he agreed. ‘How many? How small a hole can one of these filthy bastards crawl into?’

His hand wove across and down through the air, sketching a process I couldn’t begin to imagine, and fervently didn’t want to.

‘The first ones were the hardest, because he was fighting me. Look at this mess here.’ The old man turned his hand and tugged his loose shirt-cuff up over his skinny wrist so that I could see the inner surface of his forearm. The seamed and rutted skin was like the surface of the moon, and the bosses that stood out there were in no real order: just five ragged bumps, clustered together. ‘I made the holes with a penknife, jab jab jab.’ He mimed doing it. ‘Then just shoved the sigils in one after another. He didn’t know what I was doing at first. Probably thought I was just trying to slit my wrist, which would have been a real fucking hoot as far as he was concerned.

‘Once he realised, he started to fight me. But I knew damn well it was the only chance I had, and he couldn’t take my right hand back from me, and I was still holding the knife.’ Moulson opened his eyes wide and stared. The light from the bare bulb was stark and eye-hurting, but he was looking into the dark of his own recollections. ‘It took hours. Most of a day, I think, but it wasn’t that easy to tell because he was messing with my head. You’ve probably heard that expression about having a tiger by the tail. Well imagine how it fucking feels if you’ve swallowed the tiger and it’s fighting you from the inside.’

I lifted the box in my hands so I could gauge its weight. Twenty, thirty pounds of metal? Madness. Madness born out of complete and utter desperation. The grudging respect I’d started to feel for Moulson shifted slightly, became something like awe.

‘Did you come up with this idea by yourself?’ I asked him.

His gaze flicked across to me, as though he’d almost forgotten I was there and had to remind himself who I was. He nodded slowly, distractedly. ‘It was the rule of names,’ he said. ‘I remembered my mother telling me that story when I was maybe four or five years old. How God brought all the animals to Adam to be named. “And whatsoever he called them, that they became.” As though they hadn’t been anything up until then, and the names pinned them down.’

A violent shudder went through him, but I couldn’t tell whether it was something that came from the memories he was reliving, or a purely physical thing. ‘We bring them by using their names,’ he said. ‘And we send them away by using their names. The names have got all the power in them, even now. So I drove that evil fucker out of me by driving in my own name, every few inches, until he had no place to hide, no place he could go that wasn’t marked as mine.’

‘Brilliant,’ I said, meaning it. ‘Fucking brilliant.’

Moulson showed his prison-house teeth again. ‘Brilliant? If I’d had the brains I was fucking born with, I would have used stainless steel. Or gold, if I could have afforded it. Copper’s poisonous. Did you know that? I didn’t. Came as a real shock to the system. Started to get the shakes, first, a few months after I did it. Then the shakes turned into falling-down fits. I knew what it was, but I didn’t go to a doctor because I didn’t see any point. It wasn’t as though I had a choice.

‘Then my liver started to give out, and when they took me in for the transplant they X-rayed me. As soon as they found out I was walking around with all this metal in me, they tried to get me to agree to take it out. I told them to go fuck themselves. It was touch and go for a while whether or not they’d give me the transplant, since any new liver would go the same way as the first. In the end they did it, and gave me ovalbumin injections to keep the copper salts under control. Whole load more shit too, pills and needles and all of it. I still get the fits from time to time, but I can ride them out, mostly. Been a while now since I broke a bone or anything.’

Moulson fixed me with a grim, defiant stare. ‘So that’s me,’ he said. ‘Doing well. Doing really well. And believe me, this is the best your friend can look forward to. Except that a big player like Asmodeus won’t let you get away with a move like this. He’ll see you coming and melt the metal out of your fucking hands. Make you drink it hot, most likely.’