Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

‘How long at a fast walk, would you say?’

‘Probably about an hour.’

Dicks showed his teeth. ‘And how long at a slow crawl?’

I saw the kick coming, and jackknifed at the waist to get some distance from it, but Dicks had a lot of weight to put into the manoeuvre. His foot slammed into my stomach like a freight train coming through, knocking all the breath out of me in an explosive bolus as it actually lifted me momentarily off the ground. I came down at the very lip of the ditch, staring down into it, my diaphragm spasming agonisingly as I tried without much success to suck in more air.

Dicks turned me over with his foot, then leaned down and dragged me to my feet, without apparent effort. I was still too busy with the quest for oxygen to offer any resistance. I hung from his fist, my heels scrabbling at the loose earth.

‘Oh, well, crawling, that’s different,’ DeJong allowed.

‘It is different,’ Dicks agreed. ‘I don’t think he’s going to make it.’

He punched me in the mouth. I spun like a top and hit the ground rolling. My own momentum tumbled me down the slope into the ditch, where I came to rest against the curve of a concrete culvert at its very bottom. Levering my face and upper chest off the ground, I spat out some of the blood that was welling into my mouth. A throbbing note like the buzz of a Black & Decker power drill on low speed filled my head, giving me the momentary hallucination that I was thirteen again and at the dentist’s, having a bad tooth hollowed out with just a gulp or two of gas by way of anaesthetic.

Dicks and DeJong strolled down to join me, in no particular hurry. DeJong circled round towards my head, but it was clear by now that this was Dicks’s show. He stood over me, a frown of concentration on his face. The ditch was his crucible, and I was an experiment he’d set aside the whole morning for. The sun was coming up behind him, giving him a halo he’d done nothing to deserve.

I tried one last time.

‘Drop it,’ I warned him, my voice slurred. ‘Drop it, you stupid lager-lout fuckwit, or I’ll make you wish you’d never left the SAP.’

Dicks drew back his foot for another kick. There was no way of avoiding this one and, truth to tell, I didn’t even want to. I just put my hands out in front of my chest, where I could see he was aiming.

I might have been able to break open the cheap plywood music box by myself, but this was economy of effort. Dicks’s size-12 boot smashed it into matchwood, but unfortunately spent very little of its velocity in doing so. It thudded into my ribs, and my world dissolved into abstract, incendiary gouts of agony.

It was a lot worse than I was expecting. I may even have passed out, but if I did it was only for a second or two. When the first wave of pain had finished ripping and ricocheting its way through me, I became suddenly aware of three things. The ground pressing against my hands and face, the pervasive smell of rotten leaf mould, and a continuous scream like the whooping note of a London fire engine.

I tried to sit up, found that my body had no interest in that idea. Something rose in my gut and I tried to be sick, lying there on my side, but I couldn’t even do that. My muscles weren’t in the right alignment to heave, and their abortive efforts just made me twitch and shudder like a half-landed fish.

That was when the terror kicked in. But the intense pain I was in acted like a kind of neural Kevlar, protecting me from the worst of the impact. I was able to hold the nauseating dread at one remove; watch it writhing in the air like a clutch of tapeworms. Dicks and DeJong weren’t so lucky. The fear-thing had been rudely awakened, and it was pissed off. The two men were down, Dicks on his back and DeJong on his knees, both of them flailing and swatting at the air. It was DeJong who was screaming, although it had turned into a sort of high-pitched mewling sound now, like the protest of a hungry kitten.

Things might have gone pretty badly for me, because right then I was too far gone to move, but the fear-thing didn’t seem inclined to stick around. Perhaps it was because it didn’t have an anchor here. It had made itself a nice nest at Super-Self but it had been evicted, and the peaceful Surrey countryside didn’t have the same appeal. Or maybe it was scared itself, because it had been taken once before and didn’t know whether or not I had another shot left in my locker.

For whatever reason, the sense of panic lifted by slow degrees as the entity took to its metaphysical heels. After a couple of minutes, I was able to get back up on my feet, despite the stiffness in my chest and the fierce pain in my bruised guts.

Dicks and DeJong were slower coming out of it, but then this was their first time on the merry-go-round. I had all the time in the world to pick up DeJong’s gun from where it had fallen. Not knowing how to put the safety back on, I just fired the damn thing into the air until it stopped going bang and started going click . Then I gave each man a couple of hard whacks on the back of the head, sending them into dreamland before they could get control of their limbs again. Those are my kind of odds.

Dicks had the car keys in his pocket. He also had a wallet with a clutch of credit cards and two hundred and some quid in cash. Christmas in July.

I pocketed the cash, threw the cards into the culvert. Since they brought in chip and pin, plastic has never been worth the trouble.

Dicks was already stirring again, and trying to talk as he stared myopically up at me. He must have one hell of a hard head.

I climbed up the bank, wincing with every step. There were two bands of pain, one around my chest and one around my stomach. Moving without setting them off was like keeping two hula hoops on the go in very, very slow motion. The jagged fuzz filling my head didn’t help a bit.

By the time I got to the car, Dicks was at the lip of the ditch and crawling towards me, dragging one leg in a way that didn’t look good at all. I got inside the car and locked the doors.

Automatic. Deadlock on the key fob. No trouble.

Dicks was fumbling with the door handle, bellowing at me through the glass. His eyes were rolling in his head and there was foam or saliva on his lips.

I pulled round in a tight arc and fed him some dust.

Jenna-Jane is good at a whole lot of things. One of them is logical deduction; another is thinking on her feet.

She’d already decided from things I’d said earlier that the rumours were all true: that the succubus Ajulutsikael was living on Earth and passing for a human woman. When I took out my mobile and tried to call her, with that one move I put Juliet within her reach – and from then on she was working towards that one goal. It wasn’t that she forgot about Asmodeus; it was just that she rearranged her priorities and relegated him to number two.

This was the story I heard from Gil McClennan in the inelegantly named Mad Bishop and Bear pub on the main concourse at Paddington. We were so hemmed in by other people’s luggage, I felt like a First World War Tommy sitting in a trench between bombardments. The comparison held in other ways too. My ribs felt like broken splints, lacerating my internal organs whenever I moved; my split upper lip had swollen to the size of a ruby grapefruit segment; and half the dirt and unnameable shit from the bottom of that Surrey ditch had come with me when I left it.

‘I don’t get it,’ I told Gil, shifting my weight to see if I could find a position that didn’t hurt so much. ‘I mean, with Asmodeus there’s a clear and present danger. Juliet’s not – fuck! – not going anywhere, is she?’

‘You know that proverb?’ Gil said by way of answer. ‘Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish—’