The Naming of the Beasts

7

I remember a game we used to play as kids at school, a conceptual game which consisted of endless variations on the same question. If it was a choice between doing X or dying, which would you do? X might be buggering a dog, or killing your mum, or pissing in the communion wine. Usually the game started with stuff like that and then veered slowly but inexorably into even more fantastical waters. If it was a choice between having a third eyeball or dying, which would you do? If you were stuck on a tiny rock in the middle of outer space and it was a choice between eating a bucket of cockroaches or starving to death, which would you do? The fun part was comparing answers and picking holes in each other’s code of ethics. We all knew that some things were so bad that dying was preferable, but we didn’t always agree on what they were. You’d be amazed, for example, how many people found the cockroach diet a sticking point. I always said I’d tuck right in. I suspect that when it comes to the crunch, if I can put it that way, most people would.

But here I was, standing on the lonely heights of my own personal moral watershed. And I was frozen like a rabbit in headlights, dazzled by the appalling vista that presented itself on either hand.

Asmodeus had made it clear that he wasn’t going to stop until everyone who knew Rafi was dead. The Anathemata could stop him, I was pretty sure, but they’d kill Rafi in the process – then go to confession, have their sins washed away and go out on the razzle.

Somewhere in the middle was Jenna-Jane Mulbridge. The devil at the crossroads.

The phone rang three times. The static on the line sounded like claws scratching at the bottom of a door: something scrabbling to be let in, or out.

Jenna-Jane picked up on the fourth ring. ‘Hello?’

‘I’m calling your bluff,’ I said.

‘Felix!’ That same tone of simple and sincere delight that she always used whenever I was dragged kicking and thrashing back into her life. ‘You left so suddenly this afternoon, I was afraid I’d offended you.’

It was a tempting phrase, just hanging there in the crackling void. But there was no point taking the cheap shots, not if I was dining from the à la carte menu. ‘You’ve been after Asmodeus for years,’ I said. ‘We do it my way, and I promise you, you’ll get him. Yes or no. Which is it going to be?’

‘That’s not something you can guarantee, Felix,’ Jenna-Jane chided me, using another tone I knew well from times past – the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger one. ‘From my point of view, you’re asking me to divert a lot of the resources of my department into a hunt that might not bear any fruit at all. I’m asking you, in return, to shore up those resources by offering me your own professional services – not in the longer term, but just while this operation is in progress. Just until we have Asmodeus under restraint.’

I laughed in spite of myself. ‘You make that sound so reasonable!’ I said. ‘My professional services. Who do you want me to entrap, Jenna-Jane? Who do you want me to destroy? I mean, give it a name. Let me know exactly how much I’m going to hate myself in the morning.’

Jenna-Jane sighed a little theatrically. ‘I can accommodate your scruples, Felix,’ she said, like a waitress confirming that the restaurant did indeed have a vegetarian option. ‘You wouldn’t be required to do anything that made you feel uneasy or compromised.’

‘What, you want me to sweep the floors? Make the coffee?’

‘I want you to investigate a situation and then advise on it.’

‘What kind of situation?’ I felt like I was sniffing around the outline of a bear trap only half-hidden among the leaves on the forest floor.

‘A haunting.’

‘You’ve already got exorcists, Jenna-Jane. You’ve got an army of exorcists. Why not get one of them to advise you?’

‘I’ve put several of them onto this case already. None of them has been able to account for it or eradicate it.’

‘I don’t do eradications any more.’

‘So I’ve heard. But you do offer spiritual services.’ She said the words with a slightly ironic emphasis. It was what the sign on my office door said: FELIX CASTOR, SPIRITUAL SERVICES. I felt it covered enough sins to give me a running start.

‘Question stands,’ I said. ‘Why me?’

‘Because we’ve hit a stone wall, frankly. And this is a new phenomenon, in some ways. It’s something I want to have explained to me, Felix, and that’s what you’d be offering me: an explanation.’

‘And you’d be offering me . . . ?’

‘You know the answer to that. That’s why you came to me in the first place. Oh, we’d pay you, of course. Initially you’d be on a probationary contract. The term for that is usually a week or a month, but given our past history, perhaps we should review your progress after the first three days. Your stipend for those three days would be at an emergency rate of a hundred pounds a day, after tax. But that isn’t the issue, is it? I have an equipment and skills base uniquely suited to finding and capturing Asmodeus. Alive. Intact. With a minimum of damage to the host body he’s currently using. I can get you your friend back, in other words. I can bring Rafael Ditko back into some kind of secure and stable environment. I may even be able to excise the thing that’s living in him.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

If it was a choice between working for Jenna-Jane Mulbridge or eating a bucket of cockroaches, which would you do?

I wasn’t kidding anyone but myself. I called her back about two hours later, which at least gave me the satisfaction of waking her up after she’d gone to bed, and spat out the two words that would make everything else happen, for good or bad.

‘I’m in.’

‘Excellent,’ said Jenna-Jane briskly. ‘So happy to have you back, Felix. ‘It’s like old times.’

I could only cross my fingers and hope that she was wrong.

* * *

Pen had already retired to bed when I let myself in, or at least all the lights were out, and there was no sound either from the basement or from her first-floor bedroom. I trudged up the remaining two flights of stairs, lay down on the bed with good intentions about getting undressed and getting under the covers, and was dragged down immediately into an exhausted sleep.

There were dreams, but they were of the kind you always get when you’re so tired you’re almost sick with it: fragmentary, repetitive, meaningless, anchored more in formless feelings than in comprehensible images. The dominant feeling was urgency – the sense of something important that I’d forgotten and still needed to do. I stumbled from one half-imagined scenario into another, locking and bolting doors, looking for car keys, turning off gas rings, but the feeling persisted. If anything, it got worse. Music was playing somewhere: a tune I knew and really didn’t like at all. It sounded something like a waltz played backwards, the notes of the violins sucking themselves up into a dimensionless point and disappearing into themselves instead of expanding and reverberating. A waltz from Hell. I knew bad things would happen if I danced to it.

I woke an hour or maybe two hours later, in pitch dark. The music was still there, playing not in the air but in my mind. Something dead or unborn was nearby, and I knew its pattern as well as I knew my own face in the mirror.

I got out of bed, crossed to the window and looked out.

He was standing at the bottom of the drive, his gaze fixed on the front door of the house. Absolutely motionless, his arms at his sides, he was a darker stain on the fabric of the night.

‘Asmodeus,’ I murmured.

As though he’d heard me, he raised his head and looked up at my window. I couldn’t see his eyes but I could feel his stare like a physical pressure against the surface of my skin.

I kicked off my shoes, shrugged my greatcoat on and walked back down to the front hall, taking care to make no sound as I passed Pen’s room. I unlocked the street door, feeling the skin between my shoulder blades prickle even though I knew rationally that the door – as a physical barrier – made no difference to whether or not