they catch him, they’ll lock him away for life.’ She wiped away the tears with furious energy before they could fall.
I couldn’t think of anything consoling to say. Everything she’d said was true, and she hadn’t said the worst of it. Even if London’s finest dropped the ball, and Rafi somehow got away without being had up for murder, being welded to Asmodeus was a life sentence in itself.
Back when I first met Rafael Ditko, at college in Oxford, I really didn’t know what the hell to make of him: he was a bum, essentially, but a bum with his own inimitable style. A mature student from the Czech Republic, he was older than the rest of our little circle by three years and some small change, and he had a spectacular impact on all of us: on Pen more than anyone, because she’d fallen in love with him more or less at first sight, and then had to watch while he bedded every other girl we knew, weaving his way in and out between their official boyfriends with no call-out charge and no waiting.
He was the sort of guy who never paid for a round, never cleaned up his own messes, always called the tune but left someone else to settle accounts with the piper. By rights we should probably have hated him, but he had that knack – that mix of rakish good looks, ineffable charm and perfectly faked sincerity – that makes other people love you and want to carry your burdens for you. He was destined for a happy, directionless life probably full of other people’s sofas and other people’s wives: nature had adapted and equipped him for that evolutionary niche.
But that was until he met me. I was falling fast at that time – a fall that had begun when my death-sense kicked in at full power, around my thirteenth birthday. Rafi was rising like an ego-propelled rocket, and we ricocheted off each other in a perfect example of Brownian motion. Rafi’s exuberant hedonism and the cool, arrogant way he handled the world’s slings and arrows helped me to pull out of the self-destructive anomie that I was drowning in. My effect on him was less wholesome: I triggered a fascination in him, an obsession with the dead. Rafi being Rafi, the obsession expressed itself in competition. He wanted to outdo me in delivering the necromantic goods: to go on expeditions to the undiscovered country and bring back souvenirs.
It destroyed him, in the end. By some route I’ve never been able to reconstruct, he fell into the orbit of one Anton Fanke, the founder and leader and prophet-in-residence of the so-called Satanist Church of the Americas. The SCA seems to model itself on the Moonies in some respects: its deacons use total-environment conditioning, surrounding you with their own people so that the only truths you hear are theirs. Rafi dropped his old acquaintances and disappeared from our radar, much to Pen’s dismay. Ginny, his girlfriend at that time, was an SCA plant who fed Rafi’s addiction with badly photocopied grimoires, mountains of steganographic horse shit and a few nuggets of lethal, undeniable fact.
I don’t know why they chose Rafi. What I do know is that Fanke had a lot of arcane and complex ideas about how magical ritual should work, and he’d come to the conclusion that in magic the practitioner is part of the system. For some reason, that meant that when he attempted his biggest ever summoning, raising one of the most powerful demons in Hell by means of an adjuration spell adapted from Honorius’
The summoning went wrong, and Rafi ended up possessed by Asmodeus instead of commanding him. Then I sealed his fate by trying to carry out an exorcism without knowing what it was I was trying to cast out. I’d never met a demon back in those days. I was armed for bear, but I found myself drawing a bead on Leviathan.
I’ve tried many times since that night to reconstruct what it was I did, with a view to reverse-engineering my own tune and finding a way to put things right. It’s not easy, for a lot of reasons. The scene was one of violent chaos: in the bathroom of Rafi’s flat in the Seven Sisters Road, with Rafi thrashing and raving in a bathtub full of boiling water right beside me. That water had been ice about a minute and a half before, but the fierce heat that was burning Rafi up from the inside had made short work of it.
I found what I thought was the intruding spirit, and I started to weave a tune around it. The notes came quickly and fluently. I was expecting this thing, whatever it was, to put up more of a fight, but despite Rafi’s cursing and convulsions, the binding wasn’t too hard at all.
But as I was about to move on to the banishing, Rafi had a moment of lucidity. He stared at me with absolute terror in his eyes. ‘Fix . . .’ he whispered. ‘Please! Please don’t . . .’ In an instant he’d vanished again, going down for the third time in the lightless wells of his own hind brain. Asmodeus surfaced in his place, tenting the skin of Rafi’s face with the ridge poles of his own inhuman physiognomy, and blistering my ears with a curse from the arse-end of Tartarus.
I twigged it then, all of it. I knew what it was that was possessing Rafi, and I knew what I’d caught in the tightening coils of my tune. I was about to exorcise my best friend’s spirit from his own body, and leave the demon standing alone on the field.
I couldn’t just stop playing; that would destroy Rafi for sure. So I did the only thing I could think of, which was to change the tune into something else. I modulated key and pitch and tempo, trying to ground the binding power of the music in something else besides Rafi. And the demon, seeing what I was doing, fought back.
It was like being in a tug of war in which the rope is a frayed mains cable with a million volts flowing through it. I couldn’t stop, couldn’t let go, couldn’t let my concentration slacken for a moment. We wrestled for hours, the demon writhing inside my friend’s flesh, me hunched over the bathtub with the whistle jammed to my mouth, playing a skirling, nightmare arabesque.
And I won. Kind of. I bound the demon.
Only I bound it to Rafi, and I couldn’t untie them again.
It was the opposite of an exorcism: the man and the monster were welded so tightly and inextricably that they’d almost become one being. It wasn’t exactly a Jekyll and Hyde deal, though; it was worse than that. Asmodeus was calling the shots from day one. Rafi’s personality remained totally submerged, except when I was able to bring it to the surface again with another summoning.
And Rafi’s body was locked up in a silver-lined cell at the Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill, silver being a good specific against demons as well as the undead. The official diagnosis was schizophrenia, but the Stanger knew what they were dealing with and took no chances. They kept the demon down with wards and charms and neuroleptic drugs, administered in industrial quantities.
That was how things stayed for the next three years. I tried a hundred times to recreate the tune that had turned Rafi and Asmodeus into spiritual Siamese twins, but I never even got close. And without that starting point to work from, I didn’t have a bastard clue how to separate them out again. There’s no sieve in the world with a mesh fine enough for souls.
And now I’d run out of time. Asmodeus was walking the streets, leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake. Something had to be done, and now that I’d sobered up long enough to string two thoughts together, I knew that it was me who had to do it. It was either that or stay smashed out of my skull for the rest of my life.
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. It’s a bitch.
After finishing her second brandy, Pen tried to re-establish an air of normality by mucking out the rats’ cage. I left her to it and went back up to my room to make another pass at the mess: a parallel process really, except that my room smelled a lot worse than rat shit.
I worked with more of a will this time, and made some inroads into the chaos. Just having something to do was therapeutic, although I still felt fragile from the heroic abuses of the past few days and I had to take things slow.
Every so often random flashes of memory would play across my inner eye. I let them come and go again without trying to force them, intriguing though some of them were. As with birds, chasing after them would be the surest way to make them scatter.
I remembered sitting on cooling asphalt and trying to find a new note on my whistle, convinced that I was hearing the note in the air all around me. I could almost hear it again now, but it remained tantalisingly just out of reach, like a dream that’s already started to evaporate as you wake up piecemeal from a troubled sleep.
The withdrawal pangs hit me again, harder than ever, prickling my skin and covering me in an instant with cold sweat. I hardly even noticed. That note, that elusive ostinato, remained wedged in the doorway of my mind like an overlarge piece of furniture that couldn’t be pulled or pushed. It wouldn’t come into clear focus and it wouldn’t leave me alone.
