The Naming of the Beasts

3

Which brings me back around to where I was, more or less: standing in Ginny Parris’s drying blood and swallowing the bitter pill of her true identity with a growing sense of dread.

‘Rafi’s girlfriend.’ I repeated the words.

‘Yeah,’ Coldwood confirmed with a laconic nod. ‘I note the pained emphasis, Castor. I know Pen Bruckner is the only woman who deserves that label in your book, but this is all ancient history now. Ginny Parris was named on the incident sheet when Ditko was first brought into the Stanger for psych evaluation. Her statement was still there in the paperwork, and that’s how she described herself. Relationship to patient: girlfriend.’

He stared at me for a moment, as if he was expecting me to argue the point. It was the last thing on my mind.

‘So,’ I said, my casual tone sounding hollow even to me, ‘did your forensics boys come up with anything?’

Gary shrugged with his eyebrows. ‘They took prints,’ he said.

‘From where?’

‘The door. The broken table. The light. Even a good virtual from the dead woman’s throat. Whoever it was didn’t go out of his way to be discreet.’

‘Whoever it was?’ I must have sounded like I was clutching at straws.

Coldwood’s eyebrows rose and fell in a virtual shrug. ‘We haven’t had a chance to match them yet,’ he said. ‘That’s what we’re doing now. Ditko’s prints are on file. If it was him, we should get a positive in the next couple of minutes.’

He looked past me towards the door. ‘So he comes in through the door,’ he said didactically. ‘We’ll assume it’s a he. He doesn’t force it. Doesn’t have to. Left hand on the knob, which is consistent with using a key. Smeared print on the lintel above the door, which we’re taking to mean . . .’

‘That’s where she kept the spare,’ I said.

Coldwood smiled dryly. ‘You’ve got a larcenous mind, Fix.’

‘I keep the wrong company. Coppers, mainly.’

Gary let the insult slide, turning his head as his gaze travelled from the door to the broken table and then on to the bed. ‘She hasn’t heard him yet. Most likely she’s asleep. He walks towards her. Maybe he smashes the table then, to wake her up, to get her attention. Maybe he just says her name. But she hears something anyway, and she reaches out for the light.’ He glanced down at the bedside lamp lying on its side on the floor: its feeble little pool of radiance reminded me of a votive candle in a funeral chapel. ‘She turns the lamp on, but her hand slips – probably she’s panicking a little. The lamp falls but doesn’t break. She can see him now. Her gentleman caller – again, just for the sake of argument. He doesn’t touch the lamp himself. No prints of his anywhere around there. So evidently he doesn’t mind being seen.’

Coldwood turned again, to look at the window. My gaze followed his, and a little bile rose in my throat as I stared at Ginny’s broken body.

‘The fingerprints on the throat were a telling little detail,’ Coldwood ruminated. ‘I mean, given that the cause of death wasn’t strangulation. It ties in with what you said about him being in here with her for a long time. He held her by the throat, but he wasn’t trying to kill her. Not straight away.’

‘You don’t know that.’

Gary was measuring angles with his eye, his head turning to the bed, to the window, back to the bed. ‘Yes, we do,’ he said absently. ‘Well, if it’s Ditko we do. Because he could have snapped her neck one-handed in half a second. He might have been giving her a shiatsu massage, or intimidating her, or feeling for a pulse, or doing pretty much anything else, but the one thing he wasn’t doing right then was killing her. So . . .’

He paced out the distance from the corpse to the bed, walking around the tangle of bedclothes.

‘So there was something else,’ I finished. ‘Something he did first. Or tried to do.’

‘Makes sense, doesn’t it?’ Gary knelt at the head of the bed, staring at the headboard. I’d only just noticed that there was blood on it, and on the pillows beneath it. ‘What do you make of this?’ he asked, pointing.

I thought of the emotions – recent, strong – that hung in the air of the room like a visible fog. Fear had been the most vivid of all, but hope had been in the mix too. Ginny Parris knew what Rafi was now: who he bunked with. But at least once after she woke up and realised she wasn’t alone in the room, she had thought she might make it out of this alive. What did that mean? That she saw Rafi, as well as Asmodeus? Spoke to him?

I tried to piece it together in my mind.

‘He was holding her still,’ I said tentatively. ‘Maybe while he talked to her.’

‘About what?’

‘No idea. Maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree. But whatever they were doing, he started to get angry. The blood on the headboard means she was injured here, right?’

‘Lesion to the back of the head. Lots of superimposed lacerations.’ Gary smacked the back of one hand into the palm of the other. ‘Bang, bang, bang. Then he lets go of her, and she runs. But for the window. Why not the door?’

I ignored the question because I was still thinking about the previous one. If it was Rafi – Asmodeus – then what would he want to talk to Ginny about? Would she still have connections among Fanke’s all-American satanists? Fanke himself was dead, but did she still subscribe to the newsletter? Attend the AGM? Was he shaking her down for a phone number or an address? That didn’t feel right, somehow. Surely Asmodeus would have better ways of making contact with the necromantic fraternity than dropping in on Rafi’s ex? And if he wanted to send a message, he’d probably have had enough self-control not to shoot the messenger.

‘She runs,’ I agreed. ‘And he kills her. Without a second thought. So either he’s already got what he came for by this time, or else he knows it’s not here. Or maybe he’s lost interest. Anyway, for whatever reason, it’s game over now. He . . .’ I didn’t finish the sentence. I just nodded toward the broken table.

‘We’re three storeys up,’ Gary persisted. ‘I don’t know why she didn’t head for the door.’

‘He was between her and the door,’ I pointed out, but that was only half the answer. She knew she couldn’t fall forty feet to the ground and walk away. She didn’t care. She had to get out of this room, and away from the thing that had come for her. Even death must have seemed better than the alternative right then. No, cancel that: death was on the cards either way. She just wanted to meet it on her own terms, without any help from the thing that was wearing her former lover like a glove puppet.

The opening bars of Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’ sounded in the room. Gary fished about in his pocket and came up with his mobile.

‘Hello?’ he said into the phone, and then, ‘Right. Thanks. Keep me posted.’ The voice at the other end of the line gabbled, sounding – as voices at the other end of the line always do – like a sound effect from a 1940s Looney Tunes cartoon. Gary frowned. ‘What? What’s that supposed to mean? Well put him on then. No. No, I’m still at the effing crime scene. I’ll come in when I’m done here, not before.’

He lowered the phone and put it back where it came from. ‘That was the lab,’ he said. ‘It’s Ditko all right.’

‘Asmodeus,’ I corrected automatically. I was already so sure it was him that I felt no surprise, just a faint sense of increased pressure weighing down on me, as though my invisible bathysphere had descended another hundred feet or so into the shit soup that now surrounded us.

‘Listen, I’ve got to get back to Uxbridge Road nick,’ Gary said. ‘Some tosspot from SOCA has popped up and started throwing his weight around. Says he wants to review the case. I’ve got to slap the cheeky sod down before he gets his feet under the table.’

He headed for the door, and I followed him.

‘You want a lift?’ he asked.

I thought about that. It was a long way home, and the last Tube train had gone more than an hour ago. It would have been easy to say yes. But I had a lot to think about, and I wanted to shake off the atmosphere of that room by walking in the clean air.

‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m good. Gary, keep me in the loop, yeah? I know Asmodeus better than anyone. If you get a lead on where he is, count me in.’

‘Makes sense to me,’ Gary answered as we went down the stairs. ‘No offence, Castor, but I’d rather have you face this bastard than any of my lads – or me, for that matter. At least you know what you’re letting yourself in for. If we get anything, I’ll call you. But keep your bloody phone turned on for once, all right?’

We parted company at the door and I walked away through the thinning crowd of onlookers. Nothing to see now: just the dead woman’s arm up at the window, raised as if she was waving to us. Gary’s hard-working boys and girls were packing up their circus and the novelty had all worn off. Tomorrow was another working day.

As I walked back up Brixton Hill, I tried my best to think about the circumstances of Ginny’s death without letting the image of her body, sprawled on the floor like a broken toy, intrude into my mind. I didn’t manage it.

What had Asmodeus come back for? Why had he taken the trouble to find her, and then to talk to her before he murdered her? Had he come there with bloody execution already on his mind, or had his gleefully sadistic nature, which I knew only too well, simply got the better of him?

The night was hot and sticky, with the smell of tarmacadam rolling in from somewhere on a lethargic wind. It drowned out the more enticing smells of cooking from closer at hand: someone was having a very late supper of jerk chicken, and it wasn’t going to be me.

Perhaps because I’d been playing my whistle such a short time ago, my death-sense was fully awake. I saw a ghost sitting in the middle of the road, its knees drawn up to its chest and its head bowed. Hard to tell if it had been a man or a woman; after a while, unless you had an unshakeable self-image when you were alive, the fact of being dead tends to erode you at the edges. Little by little, you start to dissolve – unless someone like me gets to you first and wipes the slate clean all at once.

There was a much more recent ghost standing in the mouth of an alley just before the junction with Porden Road: a young man in a faded blue shell suit, conducting one half of the conversation he’d probably been having just before he died. The sound reached me as a thin mosquito whine. In his chest there was a deeply shadowed hole about the size of a grapefruit.

In a doorway a little further on, an old woman sat clutching a Tesco carrier bag like a baby in her arms. I could tell without looking that she was dead: not a ghost this time, but risen in the body, a zombie. The smell of putrefaction hung around her, as solid as a curtain.

There was nothing unusual about these sights. London, like the rest of the world, had been playing host to the walking, waking dead for about a decade now; and London, like the rest of the world, had adapted pretty well, all things considered. If a ghost minded its own business, you ignored it; if it became a nuisance, you hired an exorcist to drive it away. You steered clear of zombies unless they were family or close friends, and you put wards on the doors of your house because you knew there were other things abroad in the night that had never been alive in the conventional sense, and an ounce of prevention is worth a metric ton of cure.

So, yeah, this was the new status quo. And for me it’s a living, so it would be a bit hypocritical if I complained about it. But I couldn’t shake the suspicion – the fear – that the status quo was changing. Maybe it was just that drunk-dream about the new note I couldn’t make my whistle play, or maybe it was the stuff I’d learned on the Salisbury estate about how human souls – given the right conditions – can metastatise into demons, in much the same way that axolotls can become salamanders. What with one thing and another, the ground didn’t feel too solid under my feet right then.

And being preoccupied with weighty metaphysical questions, I let my guard down like a total fuckwit.

I was walking past the high wall of someone’s backyard, which was topped with an ornamental layer of broken glass to deter casual visitors. That gave me the only warning I got. Something moved – the merest flick of dark-on-dark at the very limit of my vision – and there was a faint, brittle sound from above my head as one of the shards of glass was broken off clean. Then a great weight hit me squarely between the shoulder blades and I pitched forward, the pavement coming up to meet me.

I managed to turn a little as I fell, meeting the cracked grey paving slabs with my shoulder rather than my face. That was the most I could manage though. I still got the wind knocked clean out of me, and a second later a boot hammered into my midriff to seal the deal. I lay there on the ground, curled around my pain, trying to pull my scattered wits together enough to move.

There was the sound of a footstep right beside my head. ‘You see? You see that?’ a harsh voice grated. Actually it didn’t sound like a voice at all; it sounded like someone trying to scrape up a tune by sliding one saw blade across another. ‘Even in this fucking weather, he wears the coat. I think the concept of mercy killing applies here.’

Booted feet walked into my line of sight. One of them drew back for another kick, which gave me time to throw my arms up and catch it as it came forward again. I twisted and pulled, hoping to throw my attacker off balance, but he tore loose from my grip before that could happen. I completed the roll anyway, came up facing him on one knee with my hands raised en garde.

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. ‘Götterdämmerung, you smug bastard.’ I plunged the whistle a couple of inches deep into his left eye, and as he bellowed in pain and rage I slammed my foot into his stomach with all the force I could muster.

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 were going to cut him loose again with a ritual involving human sacrifice.

Was that the link? Ginny. Fanke. The Satanist Church. Was Asmodeus demob-happy again, looking for an early remission on his life sentence? Or had he just given up hoping that I’d find a musical sieve that would strain out the demon from the man? Either way, it was bad news for me.

In Somers Town I passed a small group of zombies sitting huddled around a fire they’d made in the eternally closed doorway of an abandoned parking garage. It was a pathetic sight, because there was no way the fire could warm them: the nerves in the dermal layers of the skin are the first to go. And the night was still clinging onto the day’s heat like a lover keen for one last sweaty embrace, so surely this was the only campfire burning in London tonight. Comfort food for the dead.

Zombies get a lousy press in movies, horror novels and comic books, but I’ve always found them pretty easy to get on with. Ghosts, now they can be bad news. A poltergeist is a ghost that’s made of nothing but pent and pissed-off feelings, and they can do real harm unless you bring in someone like me to cut the feelings off at the source. But the poor bastards who come back in the flesh have put all their fortunes in a sinking ship, and with a few notable exceptions they’re as docile as lambs. Who wants trouble when your body’s falling apart anyway and can’t repair itself from damage? It’s better to sit tight: to think good and hard about that last shallow ledge you’re about to fall off, and what you’re going to do when it gets too narrow to hold on to.

These guys didn’t look like they were going to be any trouble. There were around a dozen or so, and I’m using ‘guys’ in the inclusive sense: it was a mixed gathering. In the hot, humid air they smelled like a fridge on the third day after a power cut, but that was the only offence they were capable of giving.

‘Spare a quid, guvnor?’ one of the women said, holding up her hand as I passed.

If I’d had one I would have flicked it over my shoulder and kept on going. But the cab had taken the last of my liquid funds, so I was denied that easy out.

‘Sorry, love,’ I said, slowing involuntarily. ‘I’m boracic.’

She stared at me with one eye, the other socket being full of some milky-white goo that I was trying not to examine too closely. ‘All right, sweetheart,’ she said, resignedly. ‘Have a good night.’ She looked down and away suddenly, as though staring at my face hurt too much.

One of the other walking dead took up the slack, favouring me with a truly hideous grin. ‘What about plastic, mate? We take everything except American Express.’ A hollow snicker went through the ranks of the undead, like a breeze through dry grass.

I turned out my pockets theatrically. ‘Only thing between me and you lot is a pulse,’ I said. ‘But I come through this way a lot. When I’m in funds, I’ll stop by again.’

‘Course you will,’ one of the zombies agreed sardonically.

I’d stopped walking now, which in purely social terms was a mistake: once you’ve stopped, how do you start again without looking like a selfish, blood-warm bastard who thinks of the dead in the way racists think of people with a different skin colour, as belonging to an alien species?

‘What do you spend the money on?’ I asked, by way of small talk. The walking dead can’t eat or drink: they don’t have any stomach enzymes to break food down, or any blood to carry the disassembled feast through the lightless chambers of their bodies.

‘Wards.’ It was the woman who’d asked me for money in the first place. She spoke bluntly, tersely, her face – still averted from mine – expressionless. ‘Wards and stay-nots.’

I laughed politely. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Scared of ghosts, are we?’

Now she looked up at me again, and the others did too. ‘Not ghosts, mate,’ one of the men said.

‘Loup-garous?’ That did make a kind of sense, although it would be a pretty desperate werewolf that fed on this meat.

I was still the focus for all eyes. The woman put her hands out towards the fire, the gesture forlorn and futile, like a bereaved mother singing a lullaby to her dead child’s doll. The fire was only a memory of something she’d had once and would never have again.

‘There’s other things besides the hairy men,’ she muttered. ‘More all the time, from what I can see. They come in the night, wriggling all around you. Shining, some of them. Don’t know what they are, or where they came from, but I don’t want them crawling over me in the dark, that’s for bloody sure.’

There were murmurs of agreement from all sides. I flashed on a memory: the tapeworm-like ribbons of nothingness that had drifted around me as I sat on the pavement, drunk out of my mind, and tried to play the new note I was hearing in the night.

‘World’s changing,’ said another of the zombies, his voice a horrendously prolonged death rattle. ‘It don’t want us no more.’

‘Never fucking did, mate,’ said another man gloomily. ‘Cold leftovers is what we are. Shoved to the side of the plate.’

‘Something always turns up though, doesn’t it?’ I pointed out with impeccable banality. I fished in another of my coat’s many and capacious pockets and came up with something that might cheer them up – a half-bottle of blended Scotch. I handed it to the woman, who looked at it with solemn approval. Although I said that the dead couldn’t eat or drink, some of them do anyway, even though they know it will sit in their stomach and rot, giving the vectors of decay something extra to work on. Others, like my friend Nicky, drink the wine-breath and take some attenuated comfort from that.

‘Thanks, mister,’ the dead woman said. ‘You’re a diamond.’

‘Take care of yourself,’ I said, probably at least a month or so too late, and went on my less-than-merry way.

Pen was not only still up, she was actually outside the house, prowling around the floral border underneath the ground-floor windows in a state of simmering rage.

‘Look at this,’ she said as I came up, as though we were already in the middle of a conversation. ‘I only planted these tulips yesterday, and something’s trampled right through them. You can’t keep anything. Not a thing.’

The sheer ordinariness of the topic was welcome right then. ‘You could put a circle of salt down,’ I said. ‘That’s what my dad used to do, to stop cats shitting in our coal bunker.’

Pen breathed out hard and audibly. She hates the way I elide the fragile boundary between folk magic and bullshit.

‘Seriously?’ I said. ‘You’re standing in the garden in the middle of the night because something broke your tulips?’

Pen looked at me and shook her head. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I’m laying down some more wards.’ She showed me the lump of white chalk in her hand.

‘The ones on the doors and windows aren’t enough?’

‘They always have been. Now . . . I don’t know. It’s weird, Fix. This is a warm night, isn’t it?’

‘Very.’

‘But I can’t stop shivering. Everything feels wrong, somehow. It has done ever since . . .’ She didn’t have to finish the sentence. By tacit assumption, all unfinished sentences could be taken to refer back to the night of Asmodeus’ escape. She might have had some more to say about how she felt, but it was then that I stepped into the light from the open doorway. Pen gave an audible gasp as she stared at my damaged face.

‘Oh my God,’ she said, dismayed and solicitous. ‘What happened? Don’t just stand there, you twerp. Come on inside and let me put something on those cuts.’ She shoved me toward the house, leaving chalk marks on the sleeve of my coat.

‘I was in a fight,’ I said, putting up only a token resistance.

‘With what? A combine harvester?’

I hesitated. Sooner or later, I’d have to tell Pen what had happened tonight but, given the mood she was in, if I did it right then and there I’d be guaranteeing her a sleepless night.

‘It was just an argument that got out of hand,’ I said.

‘At Coldwood’s crime scene?’ Pen didn’t sound convinced.

‘Well, some of these grass-green constables still need the rough edges knocking off of them . . .’

She let the lie stand, but since she knew that was what it was, she reneged on her promise of a hot poultice. She handed me a yellow Post-it note instead. Sue Book, it read. 10.30. Get back to her tonight if you can.

But I couldn’t. Not now. Sue might be shacking up with a sex-demon, but she was a humble librarian and she worked nine to five like most ordinary, decent people. If I called her up at three in the morning and interrupted her beauty sleep, I might get a tongue-lashing from Juliet. And pleasant though that sounds, Juliet’s tongue can strip rivets off steel.

‘She sounded like she’d been crying,’ Pen said, as Arthur the raven came swooping down from the banister to take up his station on her left shoulder.

Sue? Crying? That was unnerving.

‘Anyone else?’ I asked.

Pen shook her head.

‘Then I guess I’ll turn in,’ I said. ‘Unless you want to draw some more stay-nots. I’m good for that if you’ve got another piece of chalk.’

Pen snorted. ‘As if I’d trust a ward you’d written,’ Pen said. ‘I know mine work: all I know about yours is that they’d be spelled wrong. Goodnight, Fix.’

It wasn’t, particularly. I couldn’t get to sleep for a long while. The night was a furnace and the booze-craving was still churning sourly in my stomach and sending static through my nerves.

When I did sleep, it was a shallow doze punctuated with disconnected, rambling dreams. A dog scratched at a dry crumbling fence; a butcher sharpened an overlarge knife on a leather strap, accidentally slashing his own arms every so often with the tip of the unwieldy blade; an old gramophone played all by itself in a dark empty room, the horn echoing with nothing but scraping static because the song had finished.

Some time before dawn I opened my eyes, still half-adrift on the tides of sleep. What was the sound now? I wondered dully. But this was the waking world, and the intermittent scratching that had accompanied me along all the avenues of my dreams was now sounding from directly over my head.

Something was up on the roof.

My room is under the eaves, with nothing but a skin of plasterboard and another of slate between me and the outside world. Whatever it was that was moving up there, it was close enough to register on my death-sense as a synesthetic thicket of jangling, discordant notes. This wasn’t a cat out for a night on the tiles. It was one of the dead, or the undead, or the never-born.

I responded instinctively, whistling a few of those spiky notes between my teeth. I know damn well that the tin whistle I carry is just an amplifier for something inside me: I can work unplugged when I need to, and that was what I did now.

The scratching stopped. There was a single muffled thump and then a skitter of movement. I jumped out of bed, tracking it, moving with it across the room, around the chair where I’d dumped my clothes to the open window.

The dead thing got there before me. It dropped down from the roof onto the broad window ledge, man-sized and man-shaped, outlined in silhouette for the briefest of seconds before it bunched the muscles in its legs and kicked off backwards, somersaulting out of my field of vision.

In that second I’d been staring into Rafi’s face – twisted into something like agony, his mouth straining open as though he was emptying a continuous scream into some fold of the night I didn’t have access to.