long time, which meant that rats and flies and the elements and the chemicals inside his own body had had their way with him. What flesh was left looked dry and mummified: one side of his face was staved in almost flat; from the other side, where most of the flesh had fallen or been picked away, the empty orb of his eye socket stared up at us with an expression of innocent surprise. He’d left no ghost to warn our death-sense that he was there, and mercifully he hadn’t risen in the flesh. There was nothing left of him except this sad ruin, and the smell.
‘Homeless guy,’ Trudie surmised, probably on the evidence of the boots. ‘How do you think he died?’
‘I think we can rule out natural causes,’ I said grimly.
I pointed to the tunnel wall above the man’s head. A dark stain on the tiles there had dried black, but with dark red highlights still visible here and there. It was shaped like an exploding firework, rising up on a slender column to blossom out in all directions. But the column had come last, of course. That was where the tramp had slithered down the wall after Asmodeus had slammed his head into it hard enough to shatter his skull.
It
Without a word, we ducked and clambered through the narrow opening into a much larger space beyond. This was where the corridor ended, in a concrete wall about twenty feet ahead of us, but it came out beyond the road tunnel here, so it resumed its full height for this last stretch. What we were in was like a room whose only doorway was the one we’d just entered through.
It was even furnished, after a fashion. There was a grubby mattress on the floor, a sleeping bag on top of it, both of which must once have belonged to the poor bastard outside. In the near corner a dozen or so overstuffed carrier bags clustered like chubby little children cowering from an ogre: the dead man’s worldly goods.
But these melancholy, mundane details were pushed to the edges of my attention by the sight of the far wall, at which Trudie was staring open-mouthed. The chemical stench was stronger here. It was coming from a sprawl of pots and cans at the base of the wall, and from the wall itself, where Asmodeus had made himself busy.
From floor to ceiling, the space was covered with symbols, with words and with wards. The words were in Aramaic, so I couldn’t make them out, but the design was instantly familiar. A downward-pointing pentagram, with aleph sigils at the point of each arm and radiating lines fanning out across the negative spaces between the arms. Even if Nicky hadn’t listed those features for me, I would have known it. Whoever had drawn these designs had also left the unidentified wards in Pen’s drive, under Juliet’s hedge and on the roof of the Gaumont.
‘Tsukelit,’ Trudie spelled out. ‘Ket. Ilalliel. Jetaniul. Tlallik. Aketsulitur. Castor, do you know any of these names?’
For a moment I didn’t; they were just sounds. But then the thing that all the sounds had in common drove itself into my brain like a railroad spike. I’d been way, way off, and so had Nicky. The common denominator had never been me. ‘I know
The lights went out before I could finish the sentence, plunging us into absolute blackness. A whole second later, snaking down the corridor like a whiplash, came the chunking sound of the switch being thrown.
‘Fuck!’ Trudie gasped.
We were in the dark, half a mile away from the light switch, and we both knew who was out there, standing between us and the light, even before we heard the chilling boom of his laughter.
‘Run,’ I said tightly.
‘Run where?’ Trudie snarled. ‘We can’t see to run. Get out your whistle, Castor. Let’s give the bastard a fight at least.’
I found her arm in the dark, gripped it tightly and hauled her back towards the opening. ‘Not here,’ I said. ‘Not on his terms. He can see in the dark, Pax. If we stay here, we’re dead. Come on.’
She pulled back against me for a second, then gave in. We crawled on hands and knees back over the demon’s threshold into the corridor beyond. Trudie gave a sobbing cry of protest, which I took to mean that her hand had made contact with the corpse. I dragged her to her feet, though we still had to crouch, and set off at a stumbling jogtrot back up the tunnel.
It was hard to make myself move. I knew that Asmodeus was sprinting through the darkness towards us, fast and sure, homing on the smell of our souls. He could probably see us already, the way an eagle stooping over a meadow can find and focus on a fieldmouse in a square mile of tall grass.
‘Where are we going?’ Trudie demanded. ‘Castor, we’re going to run right into him!’
‘No we’re not,’ I muttered. I was still holding her wrist, but my other hand was running across the ceiling, fingers spread wide. When I couldn’t reach up high enough to touch it any more, I knew we’d gone too far. Quickly I retraced my steps, again yanking hard on Trudie’s arm. There! There it was!
‘What are you—?’ she demanded.
‘Here,’ I said, cutting across her. ‘Help me.’
It was the manhole we’d found earlier, the only way back up to the surface that didn’t involve getting past Asmodeus. Groping blindly in the dark, I’d finally found the outline of it, and now I put her hands on it too. ‘Push,’ I commanded.
‘It’s rusted shut!’
‘Try again!’
We braced ourselves against the tunnel floor, straightened our backs and strained against the unyielding cast-iron cover. The tunnel walls channelled a soft rhythmic sound to our unwilling ears: the sound of Asmodeus’s feet slapping the cobbles as he ran. It sounded like a barber stropping a razor.
My spine felt like it was breaking already, but I poured on the effort. Beside me, Pax growled low in her throat. The manhole cover didn’t budge by a fraction of an inch.
Pax moved away from me, and I heard her scrabbling around on the floor. Then I felt the vibration through the palms of my hands as she came upright again and drove something – one of the loose bricks that had been lying against the tunnel wall – repeatedly against the edge of the manhole cover. She was trying to dislodge the rust that had welded it into place, and it seemed to be working. It gave slightly, shifting against the pressure of my hands.
‘Push again!’ I grunted.
Trudie added her efforts to mine. With a squeal like a stuck pig, the manhole cover started to move. The light that rushed in was pale and washed out, but it was still startling. It showed the demon closing on us soundlessly in the dark, as fast as a torpedo.
With a booming clang, the manhole cover fell out onto the street. I grabbed Trudie before she even knew what I was doing, lifting her by her lower legs so that she had no choice but to grasp the rim of the hole and haul herself up. It was that or go over backwards into the dark.
Then I gathered myself and jumped, getting a grip on the edge and trying to pull myself up by my hands. My head cleared the rim of the hole, and I had a momentary, skewed vision of the road tunnel above: strip lights high overhead canted at a crazy angle, a soot-streaked crash barrier only a foot or so away, a car swerving around us and almost hitting the kerb. Trudie gripped my forearm and leaned back, using her weight to land me the way an angler lands a big fish. But something gripped my ankle hard and dragged me back into the dark. I clung desperately to Trudie’s arm, kicking out with my free foot but making contact with nothing more substantial than air. I went down heavily on my back, with a jarring impact that knocked the breath out of my body.
Asmodeus stood over me, grinning like the wicked land-lord in a melodrama. ‘It’s a mess down here,’ he said, conversationally. ‘You should have told me you were coming. I’d have made a bit of an effort.’
I scrabbled backwards, agonisingly aware that I was retreating not just from the demon but from the only exit. ‘You said . . . you’d save me for last,’ I reminded him, groping in the dark for something – anything – I could use as a weapon.
Asmodeus shook his head. ‘But you will keep putting yourself in harm’s way,’ he chided me gently. ‘What am I to do, Castor? I love our little talks, but I’ve got things to do and you keep tugging at my coat-tails like a kid who wants a lollipop. Anyway, I’m pretty much done here. Got all the ducks in a row. So I think I may go ahead and give you a spanking, just so you remember your place.’
His face went from light into shadow as he walked past the open manhole and out of the narrow, wan little spotlight it was casting down into the tunnel.
