The Naming of the Beasts

10

Walthamstow High Street hosts the longest street market in Europe. It’s a proud boast, but it’s also one that’s worded with legalistic precision: it’s not the biggest market, just the longest. It’s a market shaped like a bootlace, in other words, stretching from Hoe Street in the east practically all the way down to Coppermill Lane in the west. By day it’s an ever-running river of people moving to the fractal music of a thousand shouted conversations.

At this time of night though, it was just me and the ghosts.

I’d had to take another cab – no choice, so long after the last train – but I’d asked the cabbie to drop me at Blackhorse Road Tube station so I could walk the last mile or so on foot and clear my head a little. It was a good idea in principle, but it didn’t work out all that well. The air was muggy, and heavy with a pre-thunderous load of unshed rain. There was a faint luminosity in the air, like the glow of a false dawn, although that was still a good few hours away. Around the railway bridge at the top of Vernon Street the ghosts of suicides clustered, a voiceless choir waiting for a cue that would never come. I felt like I was walking in the bulb at the bottom of a barometer: all those hundreds of miles of atmosphere, pressing down on me with a precisely calibrated intensity. One life, one load, one size fits all.

My bed was calling me, but Nicky – like rust – never sleeps, and we had a lot to talk about. This was a good time; I wasn’t going to let it slip just because I was tired. You can come out through the far end of tired into a productive if slightly dangerous place. I knew how that felt and I was consciously searching for it, even though it seldom comes when it’s looked for.

The street was twice as wide at night as it is by day, because none of the pitches are permanent. All the stall-holders pack their goods and their booths back up into a million white vans and depart with the setting sun, an east London caravanserai wending its way across the border into Essex, which for most of these wide boys is both physical and spiritual home.

But as I passed Manze’s pie and mash shop, I saw there was one stall still out, probably in violation of a hundred local by-laws. A few steps closer, and I recognised the stall-holder as Nicky. Only it was Nicky dressed as Del-Boy, in a herringbone jacket and a black shirt with a white yoke and collar.

He had a good pitch, as far as that went. Close to Sainsbury’s, which guarantees more passing trade than you can handle, and on a corner, which is always an advantage in terms of display space. What he didn’t have was any stock, or – this being four in the morning – any customers. He was showing off his bare trestle tables to me and the man in the moon.

‘Hey, Nicky,’ I said, as I drew level with him.

‘Hey, Castor.’ He didn’t look up from what he was doing, which was measuring the interior space of the stall and the dimensions of the three display tables with a tape measure.

‘So, may I politely enquire what the fuck?’ I asked him.

‘Give me a minute,’ Nicky said distractedly.

I waited while he paced up and down, applying the tape measure to every straight line available. He wasn’t writing anything down, but I knew he didn’t need to. Death hadn’t done anything to impair Nicky’s scarily efficient memory; if anything it had cleared his mind of a lot of distractions.

Finally he wound the tape measure around his hand – making me think momentarily of Trudie and her cat’s cradles – and slid it into his pocket. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’m done here. You want to help me pack all this stuff up?’ He pointed to a large, battered Bedford van standing with its doors open on the other side of the road.

‘You don’t think it’s worth hanging on for a few more minutes?’ I asked. ‘Trade’s bound to pick up once the word-of-mouth starts working.’

Nicky gave me a tired look. ‘Trial run,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see how much space these things give you.’

‘Why?’

‘Why the hell do you think, Castor?’ He started to fold up the tables as he spoke. ‘I’m going into business.’

I stared at him blankly. It was actually about the least likely explanation I could think of for this nocturnal ramble. ‘Selling what?’ I demanded.

‘DVDs. VHS tapes. Videodiscs. Actual film prints. Hard-to-get stuff in a variety of formats. In fact that’s probably going to be the name of the stall: Hard-to-Get.’

He was starting to fold down the stall’s marquee, which is a two-man job. Mechanically I stepped in to help. ‘But Nicky,’ I pointed out as tactfully as I could, ‘the market’s only open during the day.’

‘I know that.’

‘Whereas you’re kind of a nocturnal life form, give or take. Plus you just flat-out hate people. You think two’s a crowd.’

‘Thanks, Castor. Believe it or not, these things had not slipped my mind.’

‘Fine. Just checking.’

Nicky laid a bundle of scaffolding legs in a canvas bag, one at a time, where a living man might just have thrown them all in at once and taken a chance on the odd ricochet. You didn’t last long as a zombie if you were cavalier with your mortal remains – and when it came to longevity, Nicky intended to break all known records. ‘I’m buying a lot of stuff,’ he said, ‘and sometimes to get the stuff I want I have to buy a lot of shit I can’t use.’

‘So wouldn’t A Lot of Shit I Can’t Use be a more accurate name for the stall?’

He didn’t rise to the bait. ‘Maybe. We’ll see how it pans out. Anyway, the point is, selling this stuff helps me finance my own hobby. It cost a lot to get the Gaumont up and running again. Defraying the expense seemed like a good idea.’

‘Seriously, Nicky, how are you going to get around the going bad and stinking problem? You keep yourself chilled for a reason.’

He stuffed some canvas in on top of the ironmongery. He’d folded it quickly and expertly to the dimensions of the bag, which zipped shut with military precision. I had the sudden suspicion that he’d practised erecting and dismantling the stall in the auditorium at the Gaumont before bringing it out onto the street. ‘I thought about it,’ he said. ‘A lot. The truth is, Castor, unless I can find someone who can do for me what the Ice-Maker was doing, I’m gonna start falling apart sooner rather than later.’

‘You said there’s a guy in the Midlands somewhere . . .’

‘Yeah. There was, when I said it. Now there’s a pile of ashes in the garden of rest at Walsall Crematorium. He got cancer. Died last month. And he seems to have decided against bodily resurrection as an option for his own future.’

I hefted one of the bags. ‘So?’ I prompted. ‘Doesn’t that mean it’s even more of a bad idea for you to spend any time at room temperature?’

Nicky gave me a stony look. ‘Actually, what it means is that I’m just prolonging the inevitable. Which is probably what I was doing anyway, with or without the Ice-Maker. This just brought it home to me. Yeah, I can stay in the deep freeze the whole time, last another six months, maybe a year. Then take my chances when I hit the wall.

‘Or alternatively I can try coming at the problem from a different angle. Like I said, I’ve been thinking about it. The way I look at it, life is like matter and energy: it can’t be destroyed, it can only be transformed. So my working plan right now is that I’m going to see this body out and then maybe rethink my options.’

That proposition stopped me in my tracks. Nicky hadn’t got to be the longest-lived zombie in the known world by taking unnecessary risks; he’d done it by clinging stubbornly to what he had and what he knew, and advancing into the void one tentative, begrudged step at a time. This sort of thinking was way out of character for him.

‘What options, exactly?’ I demanded.

Nicky fiddled with the zip fastener on one of the bags, his expression turning a little shifty. ‘I’ve been out,’ he said.

‘Out?’ I echoed, but I already knew what he meant.

‘Out of the flesh. I tried it a few times right after I died, and got nowhere. Now . . . it isn’t even hard. I decide to do it, and it’s done. Suddenly I’m looking at the back of my own head or more usually looking down from on top like my body’s an actor in a show and the real me is up in the dress circle, watching. I guess it’s a skill you just pick up as you go along.’

Or else, I thought, this was another piece of evidence that the world’s coefficients were shifting, tumbling us all – whether we liked it or not – out of our comfort zones into the infinite.

‘So yeah,’ Nicky summarised. ‘I know the ejector seat’s working, after all. That makes me feel a little bit more relaxed about letting the bodywork get all messed up. I’m gonna survive, Castor. Whatever the Hell happens to this meat. Knowing that changes the way you look at things.’

I didn’t answer because I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound either banal or apocalyptic. We carried the dismantled stall over to the van. Such was Nicky’s precision that it only took two trips. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Okay, I got some stuff for you. You want it here or back at the movie house?’

Neither alternative seemed all that attractive. The night was a curdled bowl, but the Gaumont would be as frigid as a tomb. I went for the bird-in-the-hand option. ‘I’ll take it now,’ I said, ‘unless you need help unpacking at the other end.’

‘It can stay in the van. Okay, you asked me whether Ditko had any living relatives. The answer is one, and counting.’

He fished in the pocket of his jacket and handed me a folded sheet of paper. I took it and opened it up, but the light from the street lamps wasn’t good enough to read Nicky’s crabbed handwriting.

‘A brother,’ he summarised. ‘Name of Jovan.’

Tell my father . . . and Jovan . . . tell them I’m sorry. Do that for me. Please.

‘So where is he?’ I asked.

‘In FYROM.’

‘In what?’

‘The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. It’s a place. In Europe. You’ve just got the address there, no phone number or email. That’s all she wrote. Apart from Rafael, this is the last Ditko in the known universe. And if you want to talk to him, I suggest you move fast.’

‘Why’s that, Nicky?’

He flicked a corner of the paper with his thumbnail. ‘Because the address is death row, Irdrizovo Prison. He killed a guy, the cops caught him, and now he’s all out of appeals. Near as I can tell, the execution is going to be the day after tomorrow unless there’s a last-minute pardon.’

I carried on looking at him expectantly. He shrugged, deadpan. ‘What?’

‘It’s just a little barebones for you,’ I said. ‘It’s not that I’m not grateful. It just seems like . . . maybe . . . you left a stone unturned for once in your life.’

‘Yeah? Like what, for instance?’

‘Like “He killed a guy”?’

‘Well there’s more, but it’s ugly and would it help you to know? Irdrizovo is one fucking big oubliette. They’re not gonna let you see him. And they’re not gonna pardon him. That’s not the way the system works. But if you insist on wading in, there’s another name on there, and a telephone number. Jovan’s defence lawyer. Maybe you could get some questions to him somehow. Have to be fast, though.’

I slipped the paper into my pocket. ‘Thanks, Nicky. What else?’

Nicky feigned surprise. ‘That isn’t enough? Too bad. On the magic circle front, things are not going so well. The other one you sent me – you found it close to the first?’

‘Nowhere near,’ I said. ‘The first was at Pen’s place, the second was at Juliet’s.’

Nicky grimaced. ‘Would it surprise you to know that there was a third?’ he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he delved into his pocket, came up with a flat stone very like the two I’d already found. He flicked it into the air and I caught it at the height of its arc.

I opened my fist and examined it. It looked identical to the others, except that once more there was a different set of symbols at the heart of the pentagram. Four again, as with the stone I’d found at Pen’s.

‘Where’d you get it?’ I demanded.

‘Where do you think?’ Nicky countered. It was a fair question: it wasn’t as though he had a jet-setting lifestyle.

‘At your place.’

‘Up on the roof. So what’s the common denominator?’

I didn’t bother to ask him what he was doing up on the roof. Nicky is the kind of paranoiac who other paranoiacs feel should lighten up a little. I didn’t bother to answer his question, either, because it was clearly meant to be rhetorical.

‘They’re all in London,’ I mused.

Nicky rolled his eyes. ‘Yeah, right. Well done. What are you waiting for? Until you find one shoved up your arse? They’re aimed at you, Castor.’

‘Maybe,’ I allowed. ‘Maybe not. But yeah, so far I’m the common denominator.’

‘The first one was in Pen’s drive?’ Nicky demanded.

‘Yeah,’ I confirmed. And what was it that was scratching at the back door of my mind as I said that, begging to be let in? Whatever it was, it was playing games with me, because when I opened the door there was nothing there.

‘Second?’

‘Sue Book’s garden.’

‘And the third was tucked in behind my satellite dish. So whoever it was didn’t come inside any at any point. Suggesting maybe they couldn’t, because they’re dead or undead and don’t like to get tangled up in whatever wards are on the buildings. Anyway, they’re all summonings, and they’re all done in the same style. I was right about that much.’

‘All petitioning the same entity? This Tlallik?’

‘No. As I’m sure you noticed, all three of them carry different names. So now, in addition to Tlallik we’ve got demons named Ket and Jetaniul. And I can’t find word one about any of them.’

‘Nothing?’ I was both amazed and disconcerted.

‘Almost nothing,’ Nicky qualified. ‘There’s a passage in Foivel Grazimir’s Enaxeteleuton that includes Tlallik, but the context makes it completely useless. Crazy Foivel is talking about demons that are worth dealing with as opposed to demons that aren’t. I could do it from memory, but here.’

He’d taken a second, much larger sheet of paper from the same pocket, which he unfolded now before handing it to me with a ceremonial flourish.

‘Nicky,’ I said, ‘if this is from one of the Russian hermetics it’s in fucking old Cyrillic.’

‘You can transliterate though, right? Look.’ He ran his finger down the right-hand side of the page. ‘Agathonou. Dyspex. Idionel. Tlallik.’

‘Yeah, but what is that? Grazimir’s Christmas card list?’

‘Probably not, Castor. He was Jewish. I can give you the rough sense of it. He’s been saying “bespeak this name for wealth” and “this demon can set you up with some female company for the weekend”. Then he goes “but you must know from lore, or else learn it by hard experiment, that some names thought to be potent don’t do Jack shit” – I’m paraphrasing, you understand – “so call not on these, for though they be of great renown and great power, they don’t pick up when you call”.’

I pondered this, looking down the list for some other names I recognised. There weren’t any.

‘Grazimir is writing when?’ I asked.

‘Thirteenth century. About the same time as Honorius and Ghayat al-Hakim.’

‘So, way early?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And he’s got Tlallik pegged as a has-been.’

‘Exactly. And as far as I can tell, none of the high medievals mention him at all. Whoever drew those circles, Castor, they’re either dipping into some very old magic or else they’re so far behind the curve they’re staring up their own arseholes.’

I breathed out heavily – almost a sigh – and tucked the list into my pocket along with Jovan Ditko’s contact details. ‘Thanks again,’ I said. ‘Feel like adding another chore to the list?’

‘Not so much.’

‘It’s an easy one.’

‘Then try me. But don’t be surprised if I tell you to go fuck yourself. I’ve got a new line of business now; I don’t have to worry so much about pissing you off.’

‘Like you ever did. I need some information about a place. An area of London.’ I told him about Super-Self, and what I’d seen there. He listened in silence until I got to the part with the ghosts in the swimming pool.

‘No fucking way,’ he said then.

‘I’m telling you what I saw, Nicky.’

‘Then you were stoned. Roman ghosts? In togas? Please! Were there any ghost-cavemen there, throwing spears at ghost-mammoths?’

‘The Aldwych end of the Strand,’ I repeated doggedly. ‘Close to what used to be Wych Street. Apparently there was some work done there around the turn of the century. The twentieth century, I mean.’

‘Some work done?’ Nicky snorted. ‘They levelled the whole area to build Aldwych. Which is Anglo-Saxon, by the way – it means “old settlement”. From a logistical point of view, you could take that as a hint that there might have been buildings of some sort there when the Romans came through. But it’s still ridiculous.’

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why is it ridiculous? Give me the reasons.’

He didn’t even have to pause for thought. ‘First off, ghosts don’t last that long. You know that as well as I do. Second, ghosts don’t interact with other ghosts. I know you’ve got that weird little dead-girl posse, but I never heard of anything like that anywhere else. Ghosts interact with the living, or else they’re locked in on themselves and they just replay their death. What they don’t do is have kaffee-klatches with other ghosts. And third, the ground level would have been a good thirty feet lower back then. I know you were in the basement, so that’s a few feet below the street, but it still wouldn’t have been low enough.’

‘Suppose their anchor isn’t a physical place. It could be something that was used in the building. Some of the stonework behind the tiles of the swimming pool, say. Maybe they moved because their anchor was moved.’

‘And they end up twenty feet closer to God, still playing out whole conversations like scenes from a silent movie? Why doesn’t that explanation convince me? Face it, Castor, the behaviour you’re describing doesn’t fit with anything you’ve ever seen before.’

‘That’s precisely the point,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t. So whatever the explanation turns out to be, it’s going to be new. I don’t want to rule anything out just because it sounds weird.’

‘Or insane,’ Nicky added. ‘Yeah, I hear you. But even Sherlock Holmes liked to eliminate the impossible before he got moving. Otherwise he would’ve fingered a lot more leprechauns and unicorns than he did.’

I was too tired to argue. ‘Just check the site out,’ I asked him. ‘Tell me if anything weird has happened there before now.’

Nicky shrugged irritably. ‘Castor, that’s what libraries are for. Seriously. Don’t use me to research stuff that’s in the public domain. It’s fucking insulting.’

‘Why do you care, if I’m paying?’ I asked, exasperated in my turn. ‘What, you have to have job satisfaction too?’

He gave me a sour look. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I do. Because what you pay me, frankly, it’s symbolic. It’s stuff I like to get, but I can get it elsewhere. I work with you because it’s interesting. You start treating me like Wikipedia, we’re done.’

He was serious, so I backed off. I knew damn well how many favours I owed him, and how much more I needed his digging skills than he needed the old sounds and rare reds I trawled for him. But since our relationship is based on a foundation of solid bullshit, I backed off bullshitting all the way.

‘Sorry to injure your professional pride, Nicky,’ I said. ‘I’ll make sure only to use you for big, philosophical stuff in future. And since the payment’s symbolic, I’ll switch to IOUs.’

‘Try it,’ he suggested, his voice dripping with sarcasm. He slammed the van’s doors shut and then turned to face me again. ‘I’m still working on the Tlallik thing,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a couple more avenues I haven’t tried yet. Far-Eastern mystical texts, and some African stuff. Different demons seem to work different territories, or at least to go by different names when they travel. I’ll be in touch.’ He headed round to the front of the van, then stopped halfway. ‘Oh, one other thing. On the subject of demons, and how to survive them . . .’

‘Yeah?’ My interest quickened. ‘Is this the thing you were so cagey about last time?’

‘I wasn’t cagey; I just don’t like coming out with half of the answer to a question. But I’m stretched on other fronts, so I figured you’d rather hear this now. Maybe get the bitch queen to put some of her people on it, because I’m not making much headway. You ever hear of a guy name of Martin Moulson?’

‘No. Should I have?’

‘Maybe not. This was a while back, and he was never in with the in crowd, as far as black magic is concerned. But the word I’m getting is that he had a passenger – a big bastard too. Not as big as Asmodeus, probably, but who is? But he got out from under, somehow. Fixed himself a spiritual enema, and came up demon-free. That, at least, is how the story goes. Unfortunately, it’s a story that ends with a whimper, because the guy seems to have vanished off the face of the Earth. If you can track him down, I figure you and him might have a few things to talk about.’

‘Yeah, I’d say so,’ I agreed, falling in with his understated tone. ‘Any leads at all?’

Nicky blew out his cheek. ‘Urban legends, mostly. It’s kind of like an Elvis deal: everyone’s got a story.’

‘Well if all else fails, you can look him up in Wikipedia.’

‘Drop dead, Castor.’

‘Working on it, Nicky,’ I said as I walked away. ‘One day at a time.’

‘My Lord, Felix, you look exhausted!’ Jenna-Jane’s face was the picture of concern. Maybe someone had hung the picture a little crooked; the effect was subtle enough that you had to look twice to see it.

‘Long night,’ I said, stating the obvious.

‘And productive, I hope.’ J-J was standing, I was sitting, which gave the meeting the flavour of an interrogation, even though she hadn’t asked me any questions yet. Slowly and deliberately, she pulled the cords that angled the slatted blinds to their closed position. She had to lean over Gil McClennan to do it, because the cords were in the corner where he was sitting. She treated him as part of the furniture, which to be fair was probably nothing personal. I was sure it was how she thought of all of us deep down.

‘You don’t mind if Gil sits in, do you?’ she asked me belatedly. ‘His experiences of the Super-Self entity will make a useful double check against yours, assuming’ – a momentary hesitation – ‘you’re able to take us beyond what we know already.’

It was the next morning, although for me it was continuous with the night before. I was contending not just with physical tiredness but also with a lingering feeling of disconnectedness which had hung over me ever since I walked into the pool area at Super-Self. At some point during the day I was going to have to find or make the time to crash, if only for half an hour. I’d probably wake up more exhausted than ever, but I’d be back in the real world, not floating a few feet above it.

‘What do you know already?’ I asked Jenna-Jane. The best defence is sometimes a pre-emptive strike, but it was her game and her rules. There was no way she’d ever play with an open hand. She didn’t even bother to answer; McClennan did it for her.

‘Everyone on my team has already filed a report on this. We’re here to listen to yours.’

I shrugged, giving it up. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Start with the obvious. It’s not what it looks like.’

Gil sneered nastily, and Jenna-Jane favoured me with an austere frown. ‘It’s an apparition, Felix, with no physical substance. It can be perceived by the naked eye but fails to register on any recording medium and is opaque to every other human sense. Surely by its very nature, it is exactly what it looks like.’

‘So a layman might think, Professor Mulbridge,’ I said solemnly. ‘But a woman of science and erudition like yourself knows the difference between phenomenon and epi-phenomenon – between the causal and the merely collateral.’

Jenna-Jane actually smiled, but only for a second, acknowledging both the distinction and the fact that I was slapping her in the face with her own overblown technical register. ‘Go on,’ she said.

‘The ghosts in the pool,’ I said. ‘They’re so weird and inexplicable, everyone looks at them first and assumes that they’re what needs to be explained. I did that myself. But then I went away and thought about it, and on second thoughts they’re pretty much beside the point.’ Nobody interrupted me, so I went on. ‘The bigger mystery – and certainly the bigger danger – is the one you can’t see. There’s something in that room that makes everyone who goes in there experience sudden, blind terror. You’ – I flicked a glance at Gil, who I was ignoring for the most part – ‘said that some of the other exorcists who’ve been into Super-Self have actually had mental breakdowns as a result of contact with that thing. You took them into the pool and made them stay long enough to attempt an exorcism. They failed, and they were fucked over. It broke them. Am I right?’

There was a moment’s silence. ‘You put the situation very dramatically,’ Jenna-Jane chided me, ‘but yes, we have had casualties. Poor Victor Etheridge, to name but one. And it’s true that this is a peculiarly tenacious haunting.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘it isn’t. Call it that, and you’re never going to get anywhere – because you’ll be charging off to battle in the wrong direction.’

‘Meaning . . . ?’ Jenna-Jane asked.

‘What I said. It’s not a haunting at all. It’s something else that has a haunting as part of its furniture. The ghosts aren’t the thing we need to be looking at. Whatever lives in that room, and makes grown men and women want to piss themselves and run under moving cars – that’s what we need to be looking at.’

Gil had been having trouble sitting still through this sermon. ‘I disagree,’ he said now, emphatically. ‘Both with the reasoning and with the conclusion. What we know, Castor – the only thing we know – is that those ghosts break all the rules we thought couldn’t be broken. They’re more than a thousand years older than any other ghost we’ve found, and yet they show no signs of morphological decay; and they acknowledge each other’s presence, talk to each other, even seem to hand each other objects. Physical objects.’

He tapped the corner of Jenna-Jane’s desk as if to remind me what ‘physical objects’ meant. ‘I think whatever explains the ghosts will explain the fear too,’ he said. ‘If you’re right that we’re talking about cause and effect, the ghosts are the cause. Why shouldn’t ghosts that old generate a psychic-emotional field?’

‘Why shouldn’t ghosts that old ride in Cadillacs and smoke fine Cuban cigars?’ I countered. ‘McClennan, we’re not even arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, here; we’re trying to guess what colour their underpants will be.’

Gil started to say something, but Jenna-Jane spoke over him and he let her run with the ball. ‘Does it make any practical difference,’ she asked, ‘whether we make the ghosts or the room’s emotional resonance the centre of our investigation? We’re assuming, either way, that there’s a single agency at work here. We’re aiming to understand – and then to eradicate – both manifestations.’

I didn’t bother to challenge the mission statement. I’ve been skittish about casual eradication for a while now, but if J-J wanted to believe that I was toeing the company line and strumming the company banjo, I was happy to let her. ‘It makes a big difference,’ I said, ‘because it ties in with some other stuff that’s happening, and if I’m right, it opens up a new line of attack.’

I’d finally reached the point, but I hesitated to put it into words. It would have been hard, even with a more sympathetic audience. I was thinking of a lot of things: of Nicky, a few scant hours ago, talking about the new options that had opened up for him; of the ghost on the Salisbury estate, the spirit of a teenage boy that had metamorphosed into a newly born demon; of the time, even more recently, when I found myself sitting in the gutter in a drunken stupor with my whistle in my hands, trying to hit a note that had crept into the world while I wasn’t even looking; of the story of Chicken Licken; of the sad, wrecked old zombie in Somers Town saying, ‘World’s changing. It don’t want us no more’; and of Rosie, repeating the same sentiment almost word for word. Like the light in a room when the sun comes up, or when it goes down. You don’t notice it until it’s happened.

‘I think we’re starting to see some stuff that’s totally new,’ I said, taking refuge in the jargon. ‘Things that won’t be in the grimoires, because nobody’s ever encountered them before. I think we might be coming to a point where the rulebook won’t help us all that much.’

Jenna-Jane was staring at me intently. She hadn’t sat down all this time; she’d been standing over me, like a teacher over an unruly pupil who’ll stop working as soon as he knows he’s not being watched. ‘And why do you think this is happening?’ she demanded.

‘I have no idea,’ I said, and it was the truth. ‘Maybe a balance shifted somewhere. Some big cosmic constant wasn’t quite as constant as we thought, and now it’s tilting. Maybe the sewers are blocked in Hell, and all the shit is backing up. I don’t know, Jenna-Jane. I’m just throwing it out there. But if I’m right, then I think you’ll probably already know what I’m talking about – either because you’ve had this conversation with some of your own people, or because you’ve found some way of measuring it for yourself.’

She was staring at me with an air of cool, detached appraisal that didn’t quite ring true. I met her gaze stolidly, until after a few moments she looked away.

‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘This is why I missed you, Felix. Because you work through the evidence without preconceptions.’

‘With respect,’ Gil said, his voice sounding a little thick, ‘he’s told us nothing at all about the Super-Self ghosts. He’s only justifying his own failure to reach any solid conclusions.’

Jenna-Jane smiled indulgently. ‘He’s told us his conclusions, Gilbert – although it’s true they don’t amount to a solution as yet. In that regard, Castor, do you have a solution? It would be an excellent way to round off your first twenty-four hours on my staff.’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘I don’t. Teamwork helps, I can tell you that much. Pax and I got out in one piece because we ran interference for each other. But we didn’t even get close to attempting an exorcism. You just can’t keep your head together enough for that. Maybe you need a sort of Normandy landing approach, with exorcists advancing in waves. But even then . . .’

‘I like that,’ Jenna-Jane mused. ‘A brute-force approach. It has the merit of simplicity.’

‘And the drawback that we’ll be throwing all our people into a blind alley,’ Gil objected. ‘If it goes wrong, they could all end up like Etheridge.’

Actually, that was a fair point. If Etheridge had become the jumpy little bag of nerves he now was by getting too close to the Super-Self entity, that made a strong case for staying away from it at least until we knew what it was. It suddenly occurred to me that we should have asked Juliet that question. Erratic as her recent behaviour had been, she was still the acknowledged expert when it came to matters demoniacal: our inside man. And since I was already paying her to babysit Pen, it might not be too much of an ask to have her come down to the Strand for a consultation.

Jenna-Jane put on her Solomon-come-to-judgement face. ‘I understand your concerns, Gilbert,’ she said. ‘Still, a combined attack did pay very definite dividends in the summoning of Rosie Crucis. It’s possible that a number of simultaneous exorcisms might work where individual attempts have failed. You can organise your people into teams of two, with one leading partner in each team. The second man watches the first from further back, and pulls him out if he starts to show signs of strain.’

Gil was getting exasperated, persumably at the prospect of my plan being adopted after he’d given it the thumbs down. ‘What if the trailing man gets hit first?’ he demanded, throwing out his arms in an indignant shrug. ‘We know the pool is ground zero, but you can feel the effects of this thing from a long way away. It would be stupid to just go in there thinking that we’re attacking the pool, or what’s in it. It would be like . . . like going after a wasps’ nest with a baseball bat and thinking you can’t get stung as long as you kill the queen.’

‘Nice analogy,’ I conceded. ‘Look, I’m not saying that going in mob-handed is a good idea. I was just thinking aloud.’

Jenna-Jane made a dismissive gesture, as if this was all just a matter of fine detail.

‘Still,’ she said, ‘I see no harm in trying. Make a list, Gilbert. Ten lead exorcists, with ten in support. Castor will be one of the leads, as will you.’

She stared at Gil for so long it was impossible to miss the point that he was being dismissed. He stood up but didn’t leave, fighting a visible psychomachia against his strong instinct to roll over and die for the queen.

‘If it doesn’t work,’ he said, ‘that’s twenty of us in the shit.’

‘The larger number spreads the risk,’ said Jenna-Jane, her tone cold and deliberate.

Gil stood his ground for a moment longer. Then he nodded curtly and headed for the door.

When it closed behind him, Jenna-Jane turned back to me with a look on her face that was almost arch. ‘Gilbert doesn’t like you very much, Felix,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried hard to bring him round to my way of thinking, but I’m afraid it’s an uphill struggle.’

‘I killed his favourite uncle,’ I pointed out. ‘Makes it a little hard for us to bond.’

‘Oh, it’s not that,’ Jenna-Jane assured me, sounding surprised at the very idea. ‘It’s much more personal, and much more straightforward. He’s afraid that you might be a better exorcist than him. That thought niggles at him. It throws him off his stride.’

‘Really?’ I demanded. ‘Why me, particularly? Everyone on the team is probably a better exorcist than him.’

Jenna-Jane shook her head admonishingly. ‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘He has a lot of raw power. More than anyone else in the family. I tested his cousin Dana, and she was impressive. She worked here for a year, and did a lot of good work for us. She left in the end for personal reasons, after a quarrel with another woman on the team turned into something more ugly. Gilbert is better than Dana, but he’s still not what you might call emotionally stable. In order to manage him, I’ve bonded with him on a very personal level. Now he sees you as a threat to that . . . closeness.’

I stared at her in silence, a smart answer dying on my lips. The thought of being part of a love triangle that had Jenna-Jane as one of its other two vertices made my stomach go through some complicated and unpleasant revolutions.

‘Now,’ she said, moving briskly along, ‘the Ditko situation . . .’

Right, I thought. And the Rafi situation too, while we’re on the subject. I squared my shoulders involuntarily, because I was about to tell J-J some bare-faced lies and I wanted to do it with an upright posture and a lot of eye contact.

‘I think you should send me to Macedonia,’ I said.

Jenna-Jane tilted her head to one side, looking faintly puzzled.

‘Really?’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘Because Rafi Ditko has a brother. Jovan.’ J-J didn’t exclaim in surprise or ask any further questions. She just stared at me, knowing there had to be more. ‘He’s on death row,’ I went on, ‘convicted of murder. If we want to talk to him, we’ve got precisely two days to do it in.’

‘But why should we want to talk to him?’ J-J asked, sounding genuinely puzzled. ‘Ditko only became possessed after he arrived in England. It’s not likely that his brother would know anything that could help us.’

‘I copy you on that, as far as it goes,’ I agreed. ‘I started looking for Rafi’s family in the first place so I could warn them that Asmodeus might be dropping into their lives. But now I’m thinking that it might be worth a trip to meet this guy. Did you know that Asmodeus can’t walk through wards drawn by Pamela Bruckner?’

J-J frowned. ‘No, I didn’t. Bruckner is the vile-tempered little redhead, correct? Ditko’s former girlfriend, as well as yours.’

‘Pen was never my girlfriend,’ I corrected her scrupulously. I let the ‘vile-tempered’ stand, since Pen wouldn’t have taken it as an insult in any case. ‘She’s my landlady. Sometimes. The point is, I’ve seen Asmodeus ignore wards drawn by strangers. They hurt him, but they don’t slow him down all that much. The personal connection seems to make a difference.’

‘So you believe Ditko’s brother might have a similar power over the demon? But if he’s in prison . . .’

‘I just want to talk to him,’ I repeated. ‘Mostly about Rafi’s childhood. It may come to nothing. Probably will. But at the very least, deepening our understanding of Rafi may help us to bring his consciousness and his reactions to the fore when we meet Asmodeus again. At the moment the bastard seems to have things all his own way. Rafi can’t get any purchase, so he’s led around like a dog.’

I’d said my piece. It was all garbage, of course, and I felt pretty uneasy about that. Not about lying to Jenna-Jane, of course, but about going AWOL at a time when the hunt for the demon might finally be starting to get somewhere. But Rafi had begged me to deliver his message to his father and his brother. I’d already missed the boat as far as Mr Ditko senior was concerned, and this was my last chance to talk to Jovan. I really didn’t have any other option, unless it was to write Jovan a letter, send it first class and hope it beat the hangman.

Jenna-Jane appeared to consider. ‘If you think this could actually be of some value . . .’ she said.

‘I don’t think we can afford to pass up the opportunity,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘I’d need you to fly there and back today,’ she said. ‘You’re wanted here.’

‘It should be a short flight,’ I said. ‘I don’t see there’d be a problem getting a day return.’

Jenna-Jane picked up the phone and dialled, still without sitting down. ‘Hello, Edward,’ she said. ‘Could you please book a flight to Macedonia in the name of Felix Castor. Flying out and returning today. No, I have no idea. If there’s more than one airport, we need the one that’s closest to the capital city. Get him some currency too. And ground transport. Soonest would be best. Thank you.’

She put the phone down. ‘Anything else?’ she asked me.

‘Get your research team looking for a man named Martin Moulson.’

‘Who is he?’

‘I don’t have the slightest idea. But he was possessed by a major demon, and he survived. It was a long time ago, and the name’s pretty much all I’ve got.’

Jenna-Jane wrote down the name and looked at me expectantly. I shrugged. ‘I’m done,’ I said. ‘For now.’

‘In that case, you should go and talk to Ms Pax. Her mapping experiment has borne some fruit.’

As I stood, she favoured me with a warm smile. ‘I value your expertise, Felix. I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but I believe that this time we’ll make the partnership work.’

‘It’s a point of view,’ I said as non-committally as I could manage. As an answer, it was better than sticking two fingers down my throat and hurling on her carpet tiles.

The first thing I saw when I walked out into the corridor was Gil McClennan standing at the far end of it, staring out of the window. He turned as I walked towards him and stared at me hard until I came level with him. I stopped, because he looked as though he wanted to say something, but he just kept on staring.

‘If it pisses you off so much that she thinks this was my idea, then leave me out,’ I suggested. ‘You think I give a fuck? I didn’t come here to upstage you, McClennan. I only want one thing and then I’m out of here.’

‘I don’t want another Etheridge on my conscience,’ he muttered, his voice a little thick. ‘You hate the unit so much, you think everyone here is expendable.’

I couldn’t keep the surprise off my face. Maybe I didn’t try. ‘You thought me and Pax were expendable last night,’ I reminded him. ‘You sent us down those stairs hoping the thing in the pool would fuck us up.’

‘Would fuck you up,’ he corrected me angrily. ‘I tried to keep her out of it.’

That was true, as far as it went. ‘A McClennan with a conscience,’ I grunted, shaking my head. ‘Must be a recessive gene or something.’

He telegraphed the punch, so I was able to knock it aside before it connected with my face. He followed up fast though, and my own uppercut glanced off his chin as he closed with me and locked both of his hands around my throat. It wasn’t a smart move, because it didn’t leave him any limbs free for defence, but he held onto me with the strength of blind rage. Two punches to the side of the head didn’t loosen him, and his thumbs were compressing my windpipe agonisingly. Reflexively, I tried to draw breath, and felt my heart race on an adrenalin flood as I failed.

Improvising desperately, I hooked my foot behind his leg and threw my weight forward. We sprawled on the floor of the corridor, with me on top, and then I rolled to the side, finally breaking his grip.

We came up together, more or less, but I’d had more than enough of this bullshit. I feinted with my right hand and threw a roundhouse punch with my left almost at the same time. It smacked against Gil’s cheek with a meaty sound. A jolt of pain shot from my fist to my elbow, but it did the job: Gil folded and went down again heavily.

I leaned against the corridor wall, getting my breath back. That was painful in itself, because my throat felt as though I’d swallowed a cricket ball. My left hand throbbed painfully, the index finger in particular refusing to bend when I tested it. It was already starting to swell up around the bottom joint.

Gil pulled himself together slowly, levering himself into a sitting position with his back against the corridor wall. The building work had evidently drowned out the sound of our fight, so nobody came out to see what was happening.

‘You . . . bastard,’ Gil panted, his voice slurred. ‘Get out of my . . . fucking . . . life!’

‘I told you,’ I panted back. ‘I’m here for one thing. If you want to see the back of me . . . give me Ditko.’ I lurched away before he could answer. I needed to plunge my hand into some cold water before it swelled up any further. I’d be fuck-all use to anybody if I couldn’t play.

Trudie showed me her map with a proprietary and slightly nervous air. It had changed a lot since the last time I’d seen it: it was marked now by hundreds of short black dashes, clustered together and aligned to form longer lines. The lines swept and swirled across the face of the city like the tracks left by primordial particles in a bubble chamber, the spoor of something both ephemeral and eternal, struck from violence the way sparks are struck from stone.

‘This is where he’s been,’ I said, tracing the nearest lines with my finger.

‘Yes.’

‘But where is he now?’

Trudie’s expression went from anxious midwife to grieving parent. ‘I have no idea. There’s a faint sense when I’m tracing the lines that some are fresher than others. They’re the ones that are easiest to find, the ones that have the strongest attraction. But there’s no . . .’ She hesitated, searching for a word.

‘Gradient?’ I suggested.

‘Exactly. No real gradient, so no way of telling which way he walked along each line or how long he spent in any of these places. It’s just a map of his movements.’

‘Which means it will get less and less useful as he goes to more and more places. Eventually the map would be solid black.’

Trudie eyed me grimly. ‘Thanks, Castor. I only spent twelve hours on this. Don’t spare my feelings.’ Behind her, Etheridge glared at me fiercely, outraged on her behalf.

‘I didn’t say it wasn’t useful now,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s amazing. I never expected you to get this far.’

Trudie seemed as unhappy with praise as she was with criticism. ‘Well, it’s only the first stage,’ she said defensively. ‘We’ve still got to go over the map again and try to figure out where he’s actually spending his time.’

I pointed to one of the densest tangles on the map, and then to another: two places where a great many lines came together, merging into areas of pure shiny black. At the heart of those areas the paper had rucked into hard wrinkles, swollen and saturated with ink. It was like looking at one of Trudie’s cat’s cradles translated onto a flat, static medium – because, of course, that’s what it was.

‘Here,’ I said, ‘and here.’

‘Yeah,’ said Trudie. ‘He’s been to those two places a lot. Both in north London, about seven miles apart. Do you have any idea what’s there?’

‘This one – that’s a couple of miles north of King’s Cross – is where I live. No surprises there – I knew he was staking out Pen’s house. This one over to the west though, that’s more worrying.’

‘Why?’ Trudie stared at me hard, hard enough to let me know that my face was showing too much of what I felt.

‘This is Royal Oak,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a friend who lives out there.’

The penny dropped. ‘Oh my God,’ Trudie murmured.

‘About as far from your God as it’s possible to get, strictly speaking,’ I said grimly.

‘The succubus. The fallen creature you used to work with.’

‘Exactly.’

I weighed my options for a few moments. I’d already said too much in front of Etheridge. Damaged as he was, he still owed his allegiance to Jenna-Jane, and I had to assume he was going to report back to her. I wasn’t ready to trust Trudie either, come to that – at least, not all the way – but probably I needed to tell her at least something about what was going down on the Juliet front. ‘Let’s take the air,’ I suggested, looking pointedly at her alone.

Trudie hesitated, then nodded. Turning to Etheridge, she gave him a notepad and a pen. ‘Start writing down the names of the streets, Victor,’ she told him. ‘When I come back we’ll start checking them out with Google maps.’

We went to Paddington Basin, which runs right behind St Mary’s. Part of the basin had been drained a few months back, and the council had erected a sculpture of a giant plug and plughole to raise the morale of local residents while their picturesque canal was a plain of stinking mud. This was where we fetched up, sitting out in front of a pavement café that hadn’t opened for lunch yet.

After extorting a promise from Trudie not to pass any of what I was about to say on to Jenna-Jane, I told her about the bizarre glitches in Juliet’s behaviour, including the beating she’d administered to Susan and the threat she’d made to me. I mentioned the ward I’d found in Juliet’s garden, too, but only in passing because it was part of a wider pattern whose meaning seemed to lie elsewhere. Trudie heard me out in silence, then as soon as I’d finished she started in with the questions.

‘Isn’t this creature savage by her very nature?’ she demanded. ‘Why is any of this a surprise?’

‘It’s a surprise because it goes against everything that Juliet has done since she decided to stay on Earth,’ I explained patiently. ‘She knows damn well that she can only live here as long as she manages to stay on the wagon. If she starts to eat people, even just on special occasions, every exorcist in London is going to come looking for her. And good as she is, sooner or later someone is bound to sneak up on her blind side and finish the job.’

Trudie didn’t look convinced. ‘But what would that do?’ she asked with a shrug. ‘It might just send her back to Hell. She’d be free to rise again whenever she wanted.’

I stared her down. ‘Is that what you think exorcism is?’

‘I don’t know, Castor. And neither do you.’

‘But we know that demons avoid it strenuously. Desperately, even. It’s got to be more than a cab ride home.’

There was a silence. A waiter unlocked the front door of the café, obviously thinking we were his first customers of the day. Not being in the mood for coffee, tea, or any other drink that wasn’t at least 30 per cent proof, I got up and moved on. Trudie followed.

‘Can I see the wards you found?’ she asked.

‘I’ve got a photo of it on my phone,’ I said. ‘I’ll send it on to you.’

‘What about you, Castor? What’s your next move?’

‘I’m going to Macedonia to meet what’s left of Rafi’s family. How about you?’

‘I’ll work over the map with Victor. See if it gives us any clues to where Asmodeus is hiding.’

‘And then when I come back we’re going to make a second raid on Super-Self.’

Trudie rolled her eyes. ‘That’ll be fun.’

‘Working for Jenna-Jane is like being in the army,’ I said. ‘Every day is a holiday.’

‘Send me those pictures before you go,’ Trudie said.

‘Sure.’ I turned to face her. Might as well have this out now as later. ‘But these are the standard terms and conditions, ’ I told her. ‘We don’t share any of this with either your former or your current employer unless I say we do.’

After the barest moment of hesitation, Trudie nodded. ‘Agreed.’

‘And anything new you come up with, you run it by me before you go to Jenna-Jane.’

Another pause. ‘If you agree to do the same thing,’ Trudie said. ‘Share whatever you find in Macedonia with me. And pass me anything you get from Nicholas Heath.’

That came as something of a shock. ‘How did you know I’d seen Nicky?’ I demanded, tensing involuntarily.

Trudie smiled, a little smugly. ‘I researched you very thoroughly when I worked for the Anathemata,’ she said. ‘You’re too set in your ways, Castor. Got your habits. Your superstitions and foibles. Your prime directives. Heath is one of them.’

‘I’m still alive,’ I reminded her.

‘Yeah,’ she agreed. ‘That’s another.’