The Naming of the Beasts

15

The tramway tunnel slopes down from the regular road surface at an angle of about twenty degrees. For the first fifty yards or so, it’s not a tunnel at all because it’s open to the sky; it’s just a cobblestoned ramp, bordered on either side by black stone walls, with wrought-iron gates closing it off from the street.

We didn’t bother checking to see whether the gates were locked. The walls were low enough to climb, and Trudie was way ahead of me, already vaulting up one-handed onto the parapet and then dropping silently on the further side. A couple of passers-by gave us a curious look as I clambered after her, but they didn’t challenge us and I thought it was unlikely they’d dial 999. More likely than not, they’d think we were looking for a private spot to do some dogging.

Trudie walked on down the ramp, but stopped when she came to the tunnel opening. The gates here looked a lot more solid, and since they reached to within an inch or so of the tunnel roof, they couldn’t be climbed.

Trudie rattled them experimentally, then turned to me as I came up beside her. ‘Did you bring your lock picks?’ she asked.

I shook my head. Picking locks was a hobby of mine, dating back to a doomed attempt in my early twenties to make my name as a stage magician. I always appreciated a chance to keep my hand in, but I tended not to carry my burglary kit with me unless I knew I was going to use it. I’d had too many painful brushes with the long arm and short temper of the law to court any more of them when I didn’t have to.

It was impossible to see anything beyond the gates. We were entirely below the level of the street now, and almost no light filtered this far down. Perhaps that was why it took me a few seconds to see what was staring me in the face. The big padlock on the lower gates had been twisted with immense force, until the hasp had snapped off clean at one end, and then hung loosely in place again on the chain so that it looked as though the gates were still secured.

I slipped it off and let it fall to the ground, then took the chain and pulled it through the gates’ central uprights. I pushed the gate open, wincing a little at the loud squealing of the hinges even though I knew there was nobody inside. I bowed and threw out my free hand, inviting Trudie to go through first.

‘We’re not going to be able to see much,’ she pointed out as she crossed the threshold.

‘That depends,’ I muttered. I slipped through the gates behind her and pulled them to. ‘They connected all the lights back up for an art installation a few years back – something to do with the twentieth anniversary of 1984. Pen covered it for the Art Attacks webzine. If we’re lucky, there’ll be a switch somewhere.’

There wasn’t, or at least not at first. We advanced into the gloom, skirting huge grey bags full of builders’ rubble and canted stacks of MEN AT WORK signs. Dead leaves from seasons past didn’t so much crunch as sigh under our feet, crumbling instantly into dust like vampires caught out at dawn. There was no obvious sign that anyone had been here recently before us, but I put my trust in the broken padlock and kept on going.

For the first ten feet or so, the walls were whitewashed particle board; beyond that, the tiles of the original tunnel appeared. At the point where they joined, I found the switch at ground level and threw it. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then the lights woke slowly, dithering in spastic strobe before finally settling for on.

The tunnel gaped open in front of us like the gullet of Leviathan. It was unnerving, a trompe l’oeil in reverse, opening up a third dimension where the wall of darkness had seemed flat and solid and close to. Half a mile or more to the river, and the underpass went all the way there. This would be a bad place to get caught with the demon between us and the outside world.

I turned to Trudie. ‘Stay here,’ I told her. ‘Keep lookout for me.’

She met my gaze squarely.

‘No,’ she said.

‘This is a dead end.’

‘I don’t care, Castor. If he comes back, the two of us together have got a better chance of staying alive.’

I was going to argue the toss because she was flat-out wrong on that one, but she forestalled me by walking ahead into the tunnel. I had no choice but to follow.

Without discussion, Trudie took one side of the tunnel and I took the other. We moved fast, scanning walls and floor for any obvious breaks, openings or trapdoors. The dust underfoot deadened the echoes of our footfalls, but the sound of our breathing came back to us, amplified and distorted, from the tunnel’s further end, adding to the illusion that we were being swallowed alive.

We kept moving, roughly in sync. I was setting a good pace, but Trudie’s long stride easily matched mine. There was no sign of any opening off the tunnel ahead of us; it seemed to extend into unfathomable distance.

Then I spotted the mouth of a cross-way. It was invisible from a distance because the white-tiled tunnel wall stood proud at that point, concealing the actual opening until we were very close to it.

We quickened our pace until we reached the intersection. The right-hand tunnel was blocked after about ten feet by a concrete wall that looked fairly new. Road signs and traffic cones were stacked in this shallow space in great profusion. On our left the side tunnel went on for about twenty feet and then angled sharply, again to the left.

It made sense to cover this side branch first, rather than leave it to be explored on on the return leg. We walked quickly to the corner, skirting it widely to avoid being surprised.

Ahead of us there were only a further ten feet of corridor, ending in another wall of grey concrete. Set into it was a door, over which a sign – hanging slightly askew – read THAMES FLOOD CONTROL CENTRE.

‘That’s just surreal,’ I muttered.

‘It’s obsolete,’ Trudie answered, her voice pitched as low as mine. ‘Before they built the Thames Barrier, every borough had its own flood warning centre. This must have been where Camden’s was based.’

We tried the door, found it locked, and went back to the main corridor. As we advanced now, I became aware that there was something wrong with the endless perspective of the tunnel ahead of us. The proportions were subtly – and then not so subtly – off true. A few moments later, Trudie muttered a profanity.

‘The ceiling is closing in on us,’ she said.

She was right. It had been high above our heads when we started, but now it was almost close enough to touch. As I stared up at it, I heard a distant basso rumble.

‘The road tunnel,’ I said. ‘They built it inside the shell of the underpass. The road is right over our heads here.’

This stretch of the tunnel was more untidy, with piles of bricks, steel buckets and even the occasional hammer or trowel stacked against the wall or casually dropped on the floor. Dead leaves had drifted in ragged heaps against all of these objects, giving each of them its own dull brown comet tail.

We kept on moving, and the distance between floor and ceiling kept on narrowing, so that after another couple of minutes we were having to stoop. It was hard to fight off a feeling of claustrophobia. Trudie reached up and touched the underside of a manhole cover, gave it a tentative push, but it was rusted into place. It was obvious it hadn’t been opened in decades.

Up to now the air had smelled only of dust and damp stonework, but in this stretch of the tunnel it had curdled into something much more unpleasant: a sweet-sour tang like rotting vegetables, overlaid with something hard-edged and chemical. It was subtle at first, but it intensified as we went forward.

Up ahead it now looked as though the converging perspective lines met within a few hundred yards, rather than at some distant horizon. I was about to make some remark about running out of road and suggest we turn back, when I realised that I’d been tricked again by the flat light and the ubiquitous white tiles.

The floor and the ceiling didn’t actually meet at all. At the point where we would have had to go down on all fours and crawl to keep moving forward, the corridor ended at a letterbox-shaped opening about two feet high but stretching across the full width of the underpass. Just in front of it, on Trudie’s side of the corridor, a dark irregular mass resolved itself as we approached into a human body.

This was where the rotting-vegetable smell was coming from, and Trudie covered her mouth with her hand as she knelt to examine it. I crossed the tunnel to look over her shoulder.

The raincoat, piebald Doc Martens and grubby workmen’s trousers with pockets on the knees gave the overall impression that the body was that of a man; otherwise it would have been hard to say. He’d been dead a 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 was Asmodeus; there was no reason to doubt that any more. The dead man might have left no echo of himself in this place, but the demon’s sickly essence hung around us now like a pall, and I knew it beyond all possibility of mistake. He hadn’t just passed through here; he’d lingered, and made himself at home. Trudie’s face showed that she felt it too. We’d struck the mother lode.

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 all of those names,’ I said, my mouth suddenly dry. ‘Or at least I know who they belong to. Jesus Christ, this is—’

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.

‘You know why the lion limps?’ he asked me, his voice a low, exultant growl.

I braced myself to rise as he bent forward and hit him with as much force as I could manage. He didn’t even seem to feel it.

At that moment, Trudie appeared in the hole behind and above him, head down. Dangling over the abyss, she flung her right arm out to its full extent, and there was a smacking sound as something hit the back of Asmodeus’ head. He grunted in surprise and faltered in his step. Then he raised a tentative hand to his head, which had sprouted – as if by magic – a vertical appendage. He turned his head slightly, and I saw that it was the shaft of a claw hammer, the business end of which was embedded several inches into his skull. So that was what Trudie had picked up in the dark: not a mere brick but a handy multi-purpose assault weapon.

I rolled to the side and jumped up. Asmodeus turned to keep me in his sights, but there was a drunken list to his body and a jerkiness to his movements. Still, he was between me and the manhole and there was no way I was getting up to ground level without going through him first.

I headed straight for him, then as he moved in to close me down I stopped suddenly and jabbed out with my left hand. Ordinarily the punch wouldn’t have had a chance of getting past the demon’s guard, but now it connected with his face, Asmodeus’ momentum adding to mine to give it some real heft.

Asmodeus stopped in his tracks, his knees buckling slightly, and I did what felt natural and inevitable at that moment. I reached past him, grabbed the handle of the hammer and wrenched it down and to the side, turning the bifurcated claw inside his skull like a spoon inside the shell of a coconut. The hammer came free in my hand with a liquescent crunching sound, and Asmodeus crashed down onto his knees, then onto his knees and elbows.

He was trying to rise, but for the moment Rafi’s nervous system wasn’t cooperating. The switchboard was down, and there was no way of routing messages past the crimson ruin at the back of his skull to the still functioning limbs and torso.

I dropped the hammer – reluctantly, but I needed both hands – stepped onto the demon’s back and launched myself from it towards the manhole in a graceless lunge. Trudie got out of my way just in time to avoid being headbutted, then helped me to clamber up as I got my arms and then my upper body through the gap.

‘We did it!’ she gasped, her voice hoarse with disbelief.

‘Yeah,’ I agreed, ‘we did. Now run like fuck!’

Trudie looked towards the open manhole. Judging by her face, she thought the fight was over. A groping hand thrust over the rim made my point for me. We took off down the road tunnel like two sprinters vying for gold.

We were running against the traffic. Car after car braked and slewed to avoid hitting us, then accelerated past us with a blast on the horn or a bellowed curse from the driver-side window.

We put enough distance between ourselves and the demon for me to think we were free and clear. Younger and fitter than me, Trudie got an early lead and kept it, but then as she reached the steeper ramp at the tunnel entrance she turned like Orpheus at the doorsill of the Underworld to see if I was coming. Something whipped past me, something perfectly round, flashing a startling silver-grey with reflected light so that it looked for a moment like a lightning bolt caught in a bubble. It flashed past Trudie too, missing her head by a few lazy inches but bumping her shoulder and spinning her on her axis like a skater doing a sudden unplanned bracket turn. Her eyes widened in shock and she made a sound like a gasp broken in two.

I was level with her in a second and caught her before she could fall. There was a splintering crash from somewhere up ahead of us, where the manhole cover had ricocheted off the concrete wall of the tunnel and struck the wing of an articulated truck a glancing blow. The truck jackknifed, its trailer swinging round to form a wall-to-wall roadblock. For a moment it looked as though it was going to keel over on top of us, but it rocked back on its wheel base at the last moment and settled.

Trudie’s mouth was working, but no sound was coming out. A dark stain spread out and down from her shoulder across the front of her shirt. The manhole cover had barely seemed to tap her, but it must have weighed close on a hundred pounds, and it had whipped through the air like a discus. The damage was obviously a lot worse than I’d thought. She sagged in my arms, but I took the weight and kept her more or less on her feet.

‘Not yet, Pax,’ I yelled. ‘Not yet. Stay with me!’

I manhandled her on towards the truck, whose driver was now climbing down out of his cab with a look of anger and confusion on his face. He shouted something at me but I ignored him, heading for the narrow gap between the back of the trailer and the tunnel wall. There was just room for us to squeeze through.

Trudie was taking some of her own weight by this time, but her breathing was ragged and shallow as we stumbled up the ramp. Even in the baleful light of the street lamps I could see her face was pale and glistening with sweat.

‘Can’t . . . move my arm,’ she muttered. Then she stopped dead in the road and was violently sick.

I looked back towards the mouth of the tunnel. A dozen or so cars were stopped there, and the trucker was having a loud argument with some of their drivers. At any moment I expected to see them flung aside as Asmodeus came storming through, but there was no sign of the demon. For some reason he’d given up the pursuit, maybe because flinging the manhole cover had taxed Rafi’s damaged body too far, and he’d had to stop and recuperate.

We still had to get out of there though, Pax to an A & E department and me to—Shit, what time was it? I looked at my watch, which showed 11.59. The Super-Self raid was about to start.

Trudie’s gaze met mine. ‘Go on,’ she said, teeth clenched on the pain. ‘I’ll flag down a car.’

‘I can’t leave you lying in the street,’ I protested.

She pushed away from me, stood swaying but unsupported. The whole of the front of her shirt was soaked in red so dark it looked black under the street lights. ‘I’m not lying anywhere,’ she snarled. ‘Go, Castor. I’m not dying; I’ve just got a broken arm. If you think your little toy will do the job, you have to get it over there before Gil sends the troops in and somebody dies.’

A car was coming towards us, slowing down as its driver saw the snarl-up ahead and realised that the tunnel entrance was blocked. Trudie finessed the argument by stepping into its path and forcing it to a sudden halt. The driver was a young guy in a Kings of Leon T-shirt, his windows wound down and his stereo banging out some Jamaican dance-hall number. He stared at Trudie’s blood-soaked shirt in almost comical horror.

‘I have to get to a hospital,’ she said.

‘Y-yeah,’ he stammered. ‘Okay. Jesus!’ He opened the car door and got out to let her into the back seat, although he cast a woeful glance at his light-tan upholstery. He looked almost as pale as Trudie did.

‘Go, Castor,’ Pax said again. ‘I’ll be fine.’

‘I’ve memorised your number plate,’ I muttered to the dance-hall fan as I passed him. ‘Get her to where she needs to go. Don’t leave her.’ Then I accelerated into a run as I headed on down Kingsway to the junction with Aldwych.

The Strand was close by, but I was winded and sore from my tussle with Asmodeus and from the earlier hundred-metre freestyle fleeing. I couldn’t keep up the pace, and by the time I got to the bottom of Exeter Street I was limping along in a slo-mo parody of a run.

The pavement outside Super-Self was deserted and the door wide open. Turning in off the street, I almost went sprawling as I tripped over a body lying right across the threshold.

It was a man, tall and well built, lying on his stomach. He was breathing like a bellows: quick and shuddering gulps of air that made his upper body rise and fall as though he was trying to do push-ups.

The Spiro Agnew wristwatch on his right hand told me who I was dealing with.

‘Samir,’ I said, and then when he didn’t answer, ‘Turk? What’s happening?’

There was a sound like the stuttering pop-gurgle-pop of a blocked pipe, but he didn’t answer. When I rolled him onto his back, I saw why.

The lower half of his face was a mask of blood. His mouth gaped open, and the stump of his tongue writhed like a snake as he tried to speak.