The Naming of the Beasts

I clambered up, a jolt of agony shooting through my right knee. Maybe I shouted out her name again, but I really don’t remember. She was face to face with Asmodeus now, and he was spreading his arms to receive her. The smile of welcome that broke across his face was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen.

* * *

‘What part of this are you not getting?’ Nicky demanded, exasperated.

‘All of it,’ Gil admitted. ‘You’re saying he actually wants the succubus to devour him?’

‘No, he wants her to devour Rafi,’ I said. ‘Think about it, Gil. Think about everything he’s done since he got free. First of all, he contacts the satanists—’

‘Castor!’ Trudie warned, but I had no intention of giving away professional secrets, and anyway it was all on the point of not mattering very much. I ignored her and went on. ‘They were meant to do an encore of their number from last time – carry out a sacrifice on a child who’d been born and raised and prayed over in all the right ways, and set him free. But they blew it. They couldn’t deliver.

‘That’s when he starts in on the murders. I think they’re a crude improvisation – trying to shake Rafi loose by making him despair. Certainly they weaken him. They keep him on the defensive. Maybe they loosen his hold on the body they both share.

‘But it’s plan C that Asmodeus is putting his money on. If Juliet can be made to devour Rafi – body and soul together – what will be left?’

Gil shrugged. ‘A greasy stain?’

‘The demon,’ Trudie said. ‘Just him, in some bodiless form. It has to be that. He wouldn’t respond to Juliet’s spell – he’d feel no lust for her, because it’s human lust she’s adapted herself to arouse. So he’d be indigestible. When she was finished, he’d still be there. It would just be Ditko who’d be gone.’

‘That’s insane,’ Gil objected.

‘I think it’s fucking genius,’ Nicky said. ‘As prison breaks go, it makes digging a tunnel under Rita Hayworth look like nothing at all.’

* * *

Juliet put one soft, caressing hand behind Asmodeus’ head, drawing his face in close to hers. Their lips met.

Presumably, on a psychic level, some vast ethereal centrifuge began to turn, slowly at first but with gathering speed and irresistible momentum. Being a man, Rafi was drawn to Juliet. There was nothing he could do to stop it. I’d been there and I knew how it felt: the desire that was so like despair that you poured your heart and soul and lungs and liver and lights into its welcoming emptiness, wanting nothing but to penetrate, to be accepted, to be swallowed up.

Asmodeus, being a demon, would stand out of that vortex, immune to its pull. He would watch Rafi succumb, experiencing the immense satisfaction of a long and complicated chain of events drawing to its inevitable conclusion. He had turned his enemies into the moving parts of a machine which would deliver him from his bondage; there couldn’t be many pleasures more visceral than that.

I heard a whimper come from Rafi’s lips, and I knew who it belonged to. On a different level entirely, I heard the whispering echo of the demon’s laugh.

And then, louder than either, I heard the liquescent, insinuating crunch as Juliet drove her makeshift blade home into Asmodeus’ chest.

His eyes widened and he drew in a shuddering, unsteady breath. He winced, almost in slow motion. It was as though he fought against the recognition of that pain, with all that it implied.

He took a single step back, staring down at his chest. The irregular triangle of glass, like a flattened icicle, protruded from the left side of his body, high up, more or less where you’d expect his heart to be. Blood welled up around it and poured down, saturating his shirt in an instant and spilling out across the fabric with the suddenness of the paint-bucket effect in Photoshop.

If it had been a knife, Asmodeus would have torn it out of his own flesh and cut Juliet’s throat with it. But it wasn’t a knife.

‘I thought silver was what you were supposed to use against demons and the undead,’ Gil said, with the tone of someone letting us down gently.

‘That’s the rule of silver,’ Trudie pointed out. ‘This is the rule of names.’

‘I’m . . . not seeing a name,’ Nicky interjected into the profound silence. ‘Should I be?’

‘It’s Rafi’s communion photo, Nicky.’ I held up the biggest piece to show him: an isosceles triangle, three inches wide at the blunt end and eight inches long, with half of Rafi’s twelve-year-old face visible close to the tip. ‘Printed onto the glass instead of onto paper. It’s a real big thing in Macedonia. Trust me.’

Nicky raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m sure. So the question is . . . ?’

I spelled it out. ‘Exactly how does this work? Do names have power because of their mystical correspondence with the thing they name? And if they do, would that correspondence be stronger or weaker for an actual image of the thing?’

‘What Martin Moulson did,’ Trudie mused, ‘was to inject himself – by means of his name – as an antibody into his own system, to drive the demon out of him. We want to drive Asmodeus out—’

‘With a Polaroid. Yeah. Pretty much.’

* * *

Asmodeus screamed.

It was a sound born out of anger as much as pain. He had it all worked out, and we weren’t playing by the rules.

But if having Rafi’s smiling face rammed into his left ventricle was an unpleasant surprise, it wasn’t the coup de grace I was hoping for. His arm came around like a scythe, smashing Juliet to her knees. Then he caught her as she fell with a swivel kick that lifted her into the air.

The wood of the banister exploded into jagged splinters, and Juliet pitched headlong into the stairwell. She fell past me, and there was a liquescent thud as she hit the tiles below.

And then there was one. But this was all about misdirection, and I hadn’t been a kids’ party magician for nothing. If you can make a roomful of six-year-olds watch your left hand while you slip the rabbit into the hat with your right, then a ten-thousand-year-old demon is nothing much. That’s what I told myself, anyway, as I advanced up the last flight of stairs, drawing my whistle and setting it to my lips like a sniper finding the spot weld.

Asmodeus snarled and stepped up to meet me – then stiffened, eyes wide, as Gil hit him from behind with the taser.

‘I’m going to be fuck-all use in all this,’ Gil commented sourly.

‘The one thing we’re not throwing against the sonofabitch is an actual exorcism.’

‘Can you climb a drainpipe?’ I asked him, producing Jenna-Jane’s M18 with a certain sense of occasion.

Fifty thousand volts isn’t a lot, when you come to think about it. That’s manufacturer’s spec, too, so you’re probably talking forty-eight thousand and some small change, if anyone bothered to check. A bolt of lightning can get you up into the millions, no trouble.

But Asmodeus was hurting already – in his dignity, as much as anywhere. He was pumping arterial blood, he had a razor-edged smiley face in his heart that was making him feel anything but happy, and his meticulously laid plans were turning into a Whitehall farce. So I’m willing to bet the effect in this case was out of all proportion to what it said on the label.

Again, it might have ended there. He could have folded up into nothing, and left Rafi in charge of a body that was leaking precious fluids faster than they could be replaced.

He didn’t. He grabbed hold of the taser’s conductive wire and hauled hard. Instinctively, Gil tightened his grip on the taser, so he was yanked forward, off balance. Asmodeus’ fist met him halfway, catching Gil at the junction of