I made a comment in which both buttonholes and arseholes figured largely, and hung up on the cheeky sod.
As I walked up Pen’s crazy-paved garden path, something in the semi-tamed undergrowh next to it caught my eye. Maybe the trampled tulips were still in my mind, or maybe I was catching some death-sense echo from what was hidden there. Either way, before I really thought about what I was doing I knelt down and parted the blades of elephant grass.
There was a flat piece of stone lying on the ground, right beside the path. It was the neutral grey of granite, but it had a slightly polished sheen. On the upper face of it someone had painted, in red, a pentagram.
I picked it up and examined it. The work was very fine: thin lines, perfectly straight and uniformly thick. The whole thing was only about four or five inches across, so the lettering around the outside was very tiny, but still perfectly legible: the names of Samael and Lilith figured there, along with the names of three of their kissing cousins. In the centre was a single word consisting of four Aramaic symbols:
I ducked out of seeing
There are two kinds of necromantic contraption exorcists regularly run into. The first is a ward, also called a stay-not or occasionally a foad (short for ‘Fuck off and die’). They’re basically magical prophylactics, setting up boundaries the dead and undead can’t pass. Some of them aren’t necromantic at all: they’re pure nature magic, using flowering herbs and twigs cut, bound and blessed by priests or adepts – life and faith as a bulwark against death and its dominion. Others are incantations, like the ones that Pen uses to bless the walls of her house. Often though, they’re devices just like the one I was holding in my hand right then: collections of visual symbols tied together in intricate patternings that somehow trap a tiny potent piece of reality in their folds. I suppose it’s something like the way my music works. In the centre of the circle there’s a command aimed directly at the dead soul to show it how unwelcome it is:
The other kind of magic circle is the exact opposite of a ward: it’s a summoning. The design is similar in almost every respect, but the word in the centre of the pentagram will usually be the name of the entity you’re trying to call up or get on the right side of.
I didn’t know what it was I had here, because I had no idea what that four-letter word meant. I could see at a glance though, that it was a meticulous piece of work: someone had put a lot of time into it, even if they hadn’t bothered with the incantations that usually go with the design. You didn’t make a ward like this and then throw it over your right shoulder for luck.
Something of Pen’s, then, set down here to supplement the organic wards she normally used. It was straying a bit further into Dennis Wheatley territory than she normally liked to go – her magic being of the ‘Hello birds, hello sky, hello trees’ variety – and for a moment I thought about asking her what it was for. Second thoughts prevailed: given the mood she was in right then, it could wait.
In any case, there’s always more than one way to skin a cat, especially in the digital age. I took out my phone and used its crappy little built-in camera to take a picture of the stone, right up close, then put it back where I’d found it.
Willesden is within spitting distance of my walk-up office in Harlesden, but I try not to spend a lot of time over there in case someone tries to employ me. It’s been known to happen in the past, and it usually leads to unfortunate consquences.
I’d tried calling Sue Book to tell her I was coming, but I only got her voicemail. And at Willesden Green Library, what I got was short shrift. ‘She’s not in,’ the man at the desk told me. ‘She took the day off sick.’ He was a slim, vaguely Goth-looking twenty-something with a festive sprinkling of acne across his forehead and a
‘Is she okay?’ I asked him.
‘Depends what you mean by okay.’
‘Well let’s say I mean what everyone else means by okay. Is she sick? Unhappy? Has she been hurt in some way.’
‘You should probably ask her.’
I gave it up. The unfriendly vibe was puzzling: the kid was making some assumption about me, but I just didn’t have the leisure time to tease it out. I grabbed a 297 bus over to Wembley, where Sue and Juliet live together in the house Sue inherited from her mother and walked the last half-mile through the day’s uncompromising heat, feeling slightly out of place and disadvantaged in the sunshine as nocturnal creatures usually do.
There was no answer to my knock. The windows were closed in spite of the heat, and the curtains drawn. It didn’t look promising. I knocked again, then took a few steps back from the door, positioning myself so that if anyone looked out from behind the living-room or bedroom curtains they’d see me standing there.
I waited for about two minutes. It occurred to me to pick the lock and go inside – my misspent youth has left me with the best set of cat-burgling tools in the Home Counties and a relaxed attitude to using them – but what would I say if Sue was in there, laid up with flu, and I walked in on her in her smalls? It was the sort of thing that might be hard to explain to Juliet, even on the grounds of neighbourly concern.
But unless my night-adapted eyes deceived me, there was indeed a twitching at the corner of an upstairs curtain. And then, after another short interval, the scratching sound of a door chain being disengaged.
The door opened a crack, and Sue peered out at me, a fuzzy-edged silhouette in the twilight of her hall.
‘Felix,’ she said, in a slightly bewildered tone.
I walked back to the porch, giving her a reassuring wave. ‘You called,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ If anything, the crack got a little narrower. ‘But . . . it’s all right now. I’m fine. I just wanted to ask you something, but . . . it got sorted.’
To get a less convincing tone of voice, you’d have to go to the court recordings of Adolf Eichmann saying, ‘I was only following orders.’ Lying didn’t come easy to Sue. I suspected that very few things did. Timid, self-effacing, uncomplaining and with lower self-esteem than a readers’ wives centrefold, she’d spent most of her life being the sort of willing drudge that props up half the organisations in the UK, quietly holding the fort while their colleagues ascend the ziggurat. But then she’d met Juliet, and her life had veered off in a new and wondrous direction.
‘I’m fine,’ Sue said again, with even less conviction. ‘I shouldn’t have bothered you.’
‘Well that’s what friends are for,’ I pointed out. ‘Listen, it was a long walk over here, and I’m feeling permanently dehydrated right now because I spent most of the last three weeks pickling my internal organs in Johnnie Walker, so could I come in for a quick drink? Of water, I mean.’
There was an awkward pause. ‘Well . . .’ Sue faltered. ‘I’m not dressed, and . . . I’m off sick, Felix. I . . . I haven’t been . . .’
Enough with the bullshit. I put a hand on the door and pushed it gently, not forcing my way in but forcing the point. Sue gave a sound that was almost a whimper and stepped away, averting her face, as the door swung open.
She was dressed in a slightly tatty blue silk dressing gown with a motif of ukiyo-e storks flying over the perfectly unruffled surface of a lake. She folded her arms across the front of it as if she was afraid it might fall open, even though it was tied with tassels at waist and hem.
With her head turned away from me, the side of her neck was fully exposed. There was a mark like a bruise there, wide and dark: a blue core surrounded by an irregular yellow halo.
‘Sue . . .’ I said.
Slowly, reluctantly, she raised her head and stared at me with wide, unhappy eyes.
‘She didn’t mean it,’ she said. ‘She just . . . I said something stupid and she got angry.’
The bruising continued up the left side of her face, an irregular archipelago of blue-black islets in malarial
