on one knee with my hands raised
Asmodeus threw back his head and laughed, which isn’t a sound you want to hear with a full stomach. He stared at me with contemptuous amusement. But when he spoke again, the words were so much at odds with the expression on his face that I felt an eerie sense of unreality.
‘Run, Fix,’ he said. ‘For Christ’s sake, run. Don’t try to fight him!’
This time it wasn’t Asmodeus’s voice; it was Rafi’s. It came as something of a jolt because Rafi had almost never managed to surface by himself, without the help my whistle could provide. Asmodeus was the dominant partner in their forced marriage, with all the rights and privileges that entailed.
He was dressed very differently than when I’d seen him last. He’d have to be, of course: you can’t walk around Brixton dressed in Marks and Spencer pyjamas and hope to avoid public notice. From somewhere he’d dredged up an all-black ensemble – boots, trousers and an overlarge shirt open to the waist over a string vest of the kind our American cousins call a wife-beater. Or maybe these things had been some other colour to start with, and had turned black after the demon put them on.
He walked around me, taking his time. The face was still Asmodeus: the black-on-black eyes, like holes in the world, would have told me that even without the mocking, bestial expression. If he was surprised that Rafi had taken momentary control of the communal vocal cords, he didn’t show it.
‘Think he’ll make a fight of it?’ he growled. ‘Or will he turn and run? I don’t mind either way; I’m just asking. As his friend, which way do you think he’ll jump?’
Asmodeus was talking to Rafi, over my head. If I hadn’t been preoccupied with the matter of my imminent death, I might have been offended. My hand went to my tin whistle by automatic reflex, but there was no help there. I’d never managed to work out a full exorcism for Asmodeus, though I’d tried a hundred times. Oh, I could have come up with a tune that would have have changed the balance of power between Asmodeus and Rafael Ditko, but there was no way I’d get beyond the first few bars before the demon made me eat my whistle.
He smiled, interpreting the gesture correctly and obviously being of much the same opinion as me with regard to my chances.
‘He’s funny, isn’t he?’ he grated, continuing his conversation with his internal audience. ‘He makes me laugh. He’s got that Dunkirk spirit. Eat as much shit as God wants to cram into your throat, but never say die.’
He took a step towards me. I threw a punch, but it didn’t connect. Asmodeus moved, faster than a snake, and batted my hand aside. ‘Count backwards,’ he said, ‘down to zero.’ Then his arm came back, and he smacked me open-handed across the face.
The force of the blow spun me round as a DJ spins a record. I hit the pavement again, tasting blood in my mouth, my head ringing. I looked up blearily as Asmodeus, in no particular hurry, walked across to join me. Behind him, headlights stabbed out of the darkness, turning the demon momentarily into a silver-edged silhouette.
I had to force myself to move. Knowing that it was either move or die helped, but the ringing in my ears distracted me and my fingers didn’t want to do what they were told. I reached for my whistle again and drew it out as the bright red double-decker bus loomed up behind the demon’s shoulder.
Asmodeus stared down at me, shaking his head in pitying wonder. ‘It’s like people say,’ he snickered. ‘If all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if all you’ve got is a whistle, the whole of life is one big fucking show tune.’
He leaned down, his hands reaching for my throat. ‘Opera,’ I corrected. ‘
The timing was almost perfect. Asmodeus took two steps back, but regained his balance almost immediately and didn’t actually fall. That didn’t matter though, because the two steps had taken him off the edge of the pavement. He went under the nearside wheel of the bus and vanished from my sight.
The bus went into a skidding stop, slewing round in the road. A body like a shapeless sack was dragged along with it, trapped in the wheel arch in some way and dispersing itself in red-black smears of pulped flesh across the rough dry asphalt.
I was up and running by this time. One glance back over my shoulder showed me that Asmodeus was moving again already, his arms weakly twitching as he tried to lever his ruined body up off the road surface. I knew from past experience that no amount of purely physical damage would keep a demon down for long. Flesh is like an item of clothing to the Hell-kin, and they’re used to making running repairs. It would take Asmodeus a few minutes to replace his lost body mass though, and I could use that time to get clear.
I was sorry that Rafi had had to suffer along with Asmodeus, sorrier still for the poor sod of a bus driver, whose trauma at running down a pedestrian was now about to be compounded by seeing the man in question get back on his feet looking like a couple of hundred pounds of rough-chopped chuck steak. But needs must when the devil drives, and the pushy bastard has been my chauffeur for as long as I can remember.
I ran with my head down and my arms pumping, putting the adrenalin that had flooded my system during the fight to good use. God help me when I crashed, but at least now I had a fifty-fifty chance of living long enough to do it.
I risked a single glance behind me. Asmodeus was already up and running. His gait was drunken and asymmetrical, but he had more than human stamina and he seemed to be at least matching me for speed. Further back, a thin scattering of shrieks rose raggedly into the air as the passengers on the bus saw what had risen from under its wheels. They had nothing to complain about: the demon was heading away from them.
At Baytree Road, where the one-way system kicks in, God decided to smile on me – although with most of the street lights down it was a miracle he could find me in the first place. A black cab with its flag up was coming slowly into the bend. The cabbie must have been lost: you don’t go wandering around Brixton Hill at two in the morning just to take the air, and it’s not a salubrious place to fish for fares. Not unless you’re prepared to do a Teddy Roosevelt and kerb-crawl lightly while carrying an apocalyptically big stick.
I leapt into his path, throwing my arms into the air like some idiot at a Neil Diamond concert. He slammed on the brakes, started to curse me out and then thought better of it as I brandished a twenty-quid note under his nose and shouted, ‘North of the river. Anywhere.’ He waved me in with a long-suffering shake of the head, and we picked up speed as we headed west.
In the cab’s rear window, Asmodeus receded into the distance. I was safe. Even so, it took the better part of ten minutes before I stopped trembling. I’ve looked death in the face before but it’s a little different when he’s wearing your best friend’s face. It gets you on a whole other level. I had to fight to get my breathing back under control, and to stop the window-shutter slamming of my ribs against my heart. I was like a marathon runner hitting his twentieth mile, and the stink of the cab’s upholstery, unleashed by the long hot evening and compounded of equal parts sweat, cigarette smoke and crappy perfume, didn’t help one bit.
But tonight’s events, whichever angle you looked at them from, stank worse than anything the cab had to offer.
After we crossed Father Thames at Vauxhall I got the cabbie to fork right onto Millbank, where New Labour used to keep shop in the good old days before they availed themselves – with no sense of irony – of the cheaper work-force available in North Shields. There were lights on in the decaying tower block, shining pale and a little baleful across the restless night: the ghosts of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, maybe, pursuing their old disagreements like the boarhound and the boar through the rifts of some low-rent eternity.
The cab dropped me off at the western end of the Strand, near Cockspur Street. There was eighteen quid on the clock and the cabbie took the twenty with bad grace, no doubt believing that a pick-up in Brixton at that hour of the morning deserved something special in the way of a tip. I was inclined to agree, but that was all I had on me so the argument was purely academic. He muttered something under his breath as he drove away: probably, in the circumstances, something more or less accurate.
The walk from the centre of town back up to Turnpike Lane took me over an hour. I felt like I needed the time to think, even if my thoughts kept circling around the same drain. Asmodeus had killed Ginny, and then he’d hung around the scene long enough to pick up my scent and take a crack at me. What the Hell was he up to? We’d had a sort of love-hate thing going for most of the time Rafi was at the Stanger. Asmodeus knew who he had to thank for his human ball and chain, and would have liked nothing better than to rip my head off and spit down my throat. But he knew that killing me would close a possible escape route, so for the most part he contented himself with more subtle forms of revenge. The only time he’d ever seriously tried to kill me was when he was sure Fanke’s satanists
