Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

Trudie had torn off my shirt and wadded it up under my chin to staunch the worst of the bleeding. That was as much as she could do, right then. She’d called 999 and an ambulance was on its way; in the meantime, there were a lot of other people to check in on.

Rafi seemed to be alive. At least, Gwillam reported, he had a pulse, although it was weak and irregular. The wound in his chest had all but stopped bleeding, so Trudie saw no point trying to pack it. The shotgun wounds were too many and too small for her to do anything about them.

Juliet didn’t have a pulse and she wasn’t breathing, but when Trudie muttered a blessing over her, she sat up and swore in some guttural language whose inhuman consonants made Trudie’s eyes water. Leaving Gwillam conferring with his chiefs of staff, the three of us went into the building together to get the final count and find out whether we’d won or lost that night.

Gil seemed the least damaged of all of us, but he was only stirring into consciousness when we arrived on the second-floor landing. He climbed groggily to his feet, only to sit back down again hurriedly. The left side of his face was a single bruise, the eye swollen shut. He stared in fascinated horror at my bemonstered face, then made a thumb-up, thumb-down gesture: a question.

I shrugged: jury still out.

Juliet led the way because Juliet could find them by smell alone. She went into a room next to the one where we’d kept Rafi confined after we took him from the Stanger, less than two months before. The only piece of furniture in the room was a tall free-standing wardrobe. Juliet tried the doors, found them locked.

I offered the stock of the shotgun, but Juliet broke the lock with her bare hands and threw the door open.

Pen and Sue were standing side by side in the wardrobe, their hands and legs tied, kept on their feet by crude nooses slung around the clothes rail above their heads. If they’d fallen asleep or stumbled, they would have hanged themselves.

They hadn’t been touched. Not a wound, not a bruise. Even now, that’s the part I find hardest to understand. Asmodeus needed them alive because he needed to be sure that Juliet would come to him. But he wanted her angry, and what would drive her more berserk than the broken body of her lover, waved in her face?

It’s possible that he’d promised himself their degradation and death after all this was over, that he put it off as an epicure might put off a fine meal, sharpening the pleasure by prolonging the anticipation. But that kind of logic only gets you so far with a demon; mostly they just take what they want when they want it, and in this case our reactions – meaning mine and Juliet’s – would have been a big part of the fun for him.

So I’m wondering, crazy as it sounds, whether it might have been Rafi who spared them rather than Asmodeus. Maybe he saved his strength for one final rebellion, and fought down the demon’s hands whenever they tried to consummate that part of the plan.

The bottom line is that I don’t know. And there’s nobody I can ask.

Rafi doesn’t remember one damned thing after the night he drew that fucking magic circle and said, ‘ Surgat mihi Asmodeus .’

About a month after the dust settled on all this, I went back to the Whittington one last time. I slipped in quietly, late in the evening.

Nobody had ever come round to question me in connection with the mayhem at the MOU, or the physical and psychological dismantling of two security guards last seen in my company down in Surrey, but that just made me more uneasy. Sooner or later, somehow, the axe was going to fall.

It had been impossible even for Nicky to find out how things had turned out after I slammed the door on Jenna-Jane and her staff and walked away. The embargo on that information went both very high and very deep, which left me with the unnerving conviction that she must somehow have survived. If she’d died, then what was left of her operation would surely have been in more disarray.

I came dressed in overalls and carrying a plastic bucket. That was enough to stop anyone from challenging me as I slipped into the pediatric ward in the wake of a visiting family.

Once in Lisa Probert’s room, I locked the door and took out my whistle. Closing my eyes, I started to move my fingers on the stops, imagining the tune, low and fast; letting it play in my head, because it would take another three months for the bone graft to be stable enough to allow the steel pins to be removed from my jaw.

It was a tune I knew really well, easy enough to visualise in its entirety. I held one end of it in my mind, cast the other end like a hook out into the dark. It seemed like no time at all before a telltale prickle of pressure on the skin of my face and hands told me I was being watched.

The four little girls stood in a ragged horseshoe formation, staring at me impatiently. They never liked to have their city-wide games of hide-and-seek interrupted.

‘Abbie,’ I said, sounding like a bad ventriloquist because my mouth wouldn’t open wider than half an inch. ‘Good to see you. Good to see you all.’ I could never remember the names of Charles Stanger’s three victims, and I never wanted to go back to the records to refresh my memory. ‘I hate to bug you, but I was hoping you could do me a favour.’

I pointed to the still, barely breathing figure in the bed.

‘Find her,’ I said. ‘Find where her spirit is hiding. Bring her home, if you can, back to this body. And if you can’t . . . then maybe she can hang out with you, for a while, until she decides what she wants to do.’

‘All right, Mr Castor,’ Abbie whispered, her voice not stirring the air. ‘We’ll see what we can do.’

I left as quietly as I’d arrived, and nobody even knew I’d been there.

Come to think of it, that’s pretty much how I felt when I dropped in on Juliet and Sue later that same night. The two of them were so wrapped up in each other, they scarcely knew the world existed.

Somehow the power dynamic in the relationship had shifted, and it was a strange thing to see. Juliet had come back to her full strength, but to look at them together you’d think that it was Sue who had the whip hand and the ineluctable magnetism. Juliet was as attentive to her, as solicitous for her, as quietly, ubiquitously there for her, as a Victorian butler. She kept touching Sue’s hand, or her cheek, or her shoulder, as though she had to reassure herself constantly that she was still there.

It was because she’d been back to Hell, or at least that was my best guess. Because Asmodeus’ wards had dragged her back against her will into her own past, and she’d seen with sudden, terrible clarity what it had been like: what she’d gained and what she’d lost, and what she might be again if she let herself slip. She held onto Sue because Sue was the embodiment and the anchor of her new life. Sue was the mnemonic that let her remember who she was.

I excused myself as soon as I found a decent opening, using some mumbled bullshit about Nicky inviting me over for a screening. He hadn’t, but I dropped in on him anyway. As it turned out, he was busy pricing up stock for his new enterprise down the market and had no time to spare for socialising, but he had one quick question for me before he shut the door in my face.

‘One of the original prints of A Matter of Life and Death ,’ he said, hefting the heavy silver canister, like a thick discus, so I could see it. ‘Shit-awful condition. Breaks. Burns. Splices. Not really playable, but still . . . an original print. How much?’

‘A tenner?’

‘I was thinking a couple of thousand.’

‘Hoe Street Market? You want to attract the casual impulse buyer, Nicky, not the cruising millionaires.’