The Naming of the Beasts (15 page)

‘When you were younger?’ I repeated.

‘Your race hadn’t invented written language yet.’

She made a gesture, clenching her fist and then opening it again, as though she was giving up on the effort of self-analysis. ‘It’s strange,’ she said. ‘I imagine someone else hurting her, and I feel anger. A really simple, strong anger. It’s arousing.’

I thought I must have misheard that last word. ‘It’s what?’ I asked.

‘Arousing,’ Juliet repeated impatiently. ‘It turns me on to think of hurting someone who’s injured Sue. Making him pay for it, making him beg for his life, and devouring him while he’s still begging. It’s pleasurable to think of things like that.’ She made a move that I couldn’t interpret: a twitch of the shoulders, sudden and swift. ‘If I think there’s a danger I might really harm her,’ she muttered, ‘I’ll send her away.’

‘And how long do you think she’ll last after that?’

Juliet half-turned to stare at me over her shoulder: a silent query.

‘Come on,’ I said irritably. ‘You kissed me once, two years ago, and I still wake up sweating. She’s shared your bed for sixteen months. If you make her go cold turkey, Juliet, she’ll crash and burn faster than the fucking
Hindenburg
.’

She scowled. ‘It’s possible,’ she agreed. ‘Or else she might survive, as you did. I’m not reponsible for every man or woman who sniffs my crotch, Castor.’

She seemed to be waiting for me to disagree with her, but I thought there was a certain mileage to be got out of just letting the words hang in the air. It was kind of a resonant image, after all.

‘I didn’t mean that,’ Juliet said, after a strained pause. ‘I don’t equate her with you.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Or with any of those I hunted. What we have is different from that. It’s . . .’ She seemed to grope for words, but she was trying to explain something that was inherently inexplicable - not just for her but for anyone who ever went looking for a quick shag and got more than they bargained for. ‘It’s not a hunt,’ she finished testily.

‘Tell her you’re sorry,’ I suggested.

‘Mind your own business,’ she snapped back.

She headed for the door. I was going to call her back and ask her about Tlallik, or Tlullik, but I chickened out. Juliet may be refreshingly open about sexual matters, but when it comes to her own species she closes up again real fast. Get a finger caught in that door and you could easily lose it, she’d warned me, very explicitly, a very short while ago.

I sat down heavily. Now that she was gone, there was no need for me to keep up appearances.

‘So how did that go?’ Nicky asked. I looked up to see him standing over me. Incongruously, he had a shotgun in his hands.

‘Could have gone better,’ I admitted, hearing a slight tremor in my voice and hoping he didn’t hear it too.

‘I did warn you she was pissed off.’

‘Yeah. You did. Nicky, what is that thing you’re holding?’

‘A homage.’

‘To . . . ?’

‘Someone else’s good idea. You told me the first time Juliet tried to love you to death, your landlady shot her with a air gun filled with rosary beads. I liked that a lot. And we live in a wicked world, so I keep this baby loaded day and night. Twelve ounces in each barrel.’

I shook my head to try to clear it. ‘Jesus! Have you got a licence?’

‘I’m a dead man, Castor. The law doesn’t apply to dead men. Legally, this is a gun without an owner.’

I tried to stand, managed it with only one slight stumble. Nicky didn’t put out a hand to steady me, but I didn’t expect him to. Like I said, he’s very chary of his own flesh, and even more so of his bones. He doesn’t have any way of healing from a wound or an injury any more.

‘Thanks for coming to my rescue, masked man,’ I said, tilting the shotgun’s barrels a little away from me so I didn’t have to look them in the eye.

‘Hey, for Lester Young I’ll go out on a limb. You’re looking a little sick, Castor. Whatever she did to you, she stuck it in deep. You should go home and sleep it off.’

I nodded, knowing that I wouldn’t. ‘Get onto that ward, Nicky,’ I said. ‘I want to know what Tlallik is, and what it does.’

‘I’ll call you,’ Nicky said. He looked up at the screen, where Gabriel Byrne was leading his dysfunctional team to its destruction, trying to steal illusory riches for an illusory employer, conspiracy meeting meta-conspiracy. ‘I guess she’s only reverting to type,’ he mused. ‘Demons are like wolverines: they don’t domesticate all that easily. But if she goes rogue, Castor . . .’

He didn’t have to finish the sentence, and I didn’t offer to finish it for him. My friends were already an endangered species, and going up against Juliet meant I’d have one fewer, win or lose. That was taking the optimistic view, of course, and assuming I survived.

I stayed for the rest of Nicky’s triple bill. It felt like watching home movies.

It must have been getting on for midnight when I left the Gaumont and headed for the Tube. Nicky had broken open a bottle of some Lebanese wine which he swore was as good as a French premier cru, and I’d accounted for most of it, but I felt depressingly sober as I hopped the last train back into London so I could slingshot back out to Turnpike Lane.

The Tube is a good place for me to think, usually. Very few people die on trains, and when you’re moving fast you don’t pick up emotional resonances from the landscape around you. Radio Death wasn’t broadcasting. I was alone with my thoughts. The trouble was, my thoughts were a sea of turbulent shit.

Asmodeus was still out there, and he was hunting. Not just me, but everyone who’d ever meant anything to Rafi at any point in his life. He’d decided to celebrate his independence with a murder spree, starting (I had to
hope
it was starting) with Ginny Parris, the woman who’d played midwife when he was born again into Rafi’s flesh, and with me, the one who’d welded him in good and tight once he was there.

In a way, it could work in my favour. If I had a plan, I could use myself as bait: bring the demon in close and then spring some kind of trap. But I didn’t have a plan and I had no idea what form that trap might take.

It was maddening. There was a tune out there somewhere that would do the job, I knew that. I’d even heard it once, when Asmodeus himself played it for me in Imelda’s parlour on the night she died. But then he’d done a number on me before I had a chance to get my whistle to my mouth. That space in my memory no longer existed. When I replayed the events of that night, there was just a hole where the tune ought to be, a wound in my mind that wouldn’t heal.

But even if I found the tune, or reconstructed it, how in hell would I ever get to use it? If I summoned Asmodeus or got in close enough for him to be bound by the music, he’d tear me into sticky confetti before I got to the end of the first bar. Maybe with Juliet to run interference for me I’d have a fighting chance, but somehow this didn’t seem like a good time to ask her.

That left Jenna-Jane’s offer. My mind did a handbrake turn and shot off down a side street into places no less dark.

What was eating Juliet? Over the past couple of years she’d perfected her ‘nobody here but us human beings’ act to the point where you could almost forget what she was and mistake her for just another unfeasibly beautiful woman whose very existence impugned your manhood and left you feeling hollow and worthless. But now she was as bad as when she first came up on the express elevator from Hell, maybe worse. She’d sworn never to take another soul, but tonight I’d felt about three heartbeats away from oblivion. And those eyes . . . This wasn’t the Juliet I knew. And I didn’t like the glow-in-the-dark model one bit.

I was meant to be heading home, that was what I was telling myself. But somehow, without ever making an actual decision, I found myself taking the Northern Line and getting out at Archway. Whittington’s Hospital is a short walk back up Highgate Hill, its new frontage looking cool and suave in white and blue.

Visiting hours must have wrapped up long ago, but nobody challenged me as I walked in off the street. Running the gauntlet of the restless dead for the second time in one day, I made my way to the coma ward. Once there though, I was faced with a locked door. Access to the ward was determined by a buzzer and intercom system - or in my case by waiting until an inattentive nurse came out and walked past me, then catching the door again before it swung closed.

Lisa Probert was in a side ward, by herself. A single bouquet of white lilies stood at the foot of the bed, in a plastic bucket serving as a makeshift vase. She looked worse than I remembered - she’d always been a big, loud-mouthed, sassy kid - unconscious, tied up with tubes and gauze, fed by drips and drained by catheters. She’d already lost enough body mass for it to show. She looked like a bird that had crashed into a kitchen window and fallen half-broken to the ground. On the dark skin below her eyes, which were only three-quarters closed, darker semicircles showed like bruises. Her lips glistened with gelatine, but the skin was dry and cracked just the same.

I sat beside her for a while, listening to her. I can do this with the living as well as the dead: open the doors of perception and catch the spoor of some immaterial essence, a soul or atman or whatever you want to call it, distilled into music. Lisa’s music was a riotous polyphonic jumble. Its strength didn’t depend on the strength of her body, and it didn’t correlate in any direct way with what she was like as a person. It was just there, propagating outward from her at an acute angle to the world we know.

When I had the music fixed in my head, I took out my whistle and started to play it. It sounds stupid, but it’s been known to work. I did it for Juliet once, when she was almost killed in a fight against the demon Moloch, and the tune had given her strength. It’s the summoning, essentially: the first part of an exorcism, when you raise the spirit up and make it attend you. I was calling Lisa back into herself, or trying to. But after ten or fifteen minutes of playing she hadn’t moved and there was no visible difference in her condition.

‘Could you please tell me what you’re doing here.’ The voice yanked me out of the half-trance I sink into when I play. I looked up to see a ruddy-faced man in a white doctor’s coat standing over me. The badge on his chest read DR SULLIVAN. He didn’t look happy.

‘The door was open,’ I lied. ‘I’m Felix Castor. I made the call to the emergency services the night Lisa was brought in here. I think you’ve got me down as next of kin.’

The doctor’s expression changed, but it didn’t soften. ‘Oh,’ he grunted. ‘That’s you, is it? We’ve tried to contact you a dozen times.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve been away.’ It was as good an explanation as any - as good as I felt like giving him, anyway. ‘I understand you want me to sign some permissions.’

‘We did,’ Doctor Sullivan corrected me. ‘But we decided we couldn’t wait any longer. Since Lisa has no living relatives, we were able to have her declared a ward of court. It went through yesterday, in your absence since you didn’t respond to the court summons.’ I remembered the large brown envelope on Pen’s hall table. ‘So there’s nothing more we need from you now, Mr Castor, and your visiting rights are at my discretion. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’

‘I’d prefer to stay a while,’ I said. ‘I’ll stop playing, if that will make a difference.’ What I meant was that I’d hum under my breath. The tin whistle is a conduit for the power and helps to keep it focused, but it’s not an essential part of the process.

‘It won’t,’ said Doctor Sullivan. ‘I’m asking you to leave right now. If you refuse, I’ll call security.’

I weighed up the pros and cons, found that there weren’t any pros. If I pissed this guy off, he could shut me out of here altogether. I had to be meek and mild now if I wanted to come back another time and try this stunt again.

‘Visiting hours,’ I said. ‘When would they be?’

‘Two o’clock until eight o’clock, seven days a week.’ He remained in the doorway of the room, staring in at me. He obviously wasn’t going to leave before I did. He didn’t seem to trust me to find my own way out.

I gave it up, and let him escort me to the door. ‘Is she responding at all?’ I asked him on the way. ‘Has there been any change in her condition?’

‘None,’ he said bluntly.

‘And . . . the prognosis . . . ?’

‘It’s too early to say. There are lots of different physical and psychological mechanisms that can induce this kind of extreme fugue. Until we understand the aetiology of Lisa’s condition, we can only treat the symptoms.’

‘The aetiology? She saw her mother murdered . . .’

‘And that was certainly a factor. Probably the dominant factor. But we can’t assume it’s the only one, and we’re not in the habit of prescribing treatment on the basis of unsupported opinion.’ He went on talking about brain chemistry and traumatic shock, but I’d stopped listening because something had begun niggling at the back of my mind. Since Lisa has no living relatives . . .

I stopped dead in my tracks. ‘Who left the flowers?’ I demanded.

‘What?’ Doctor Sullivan looked mystified.

‘The lilies!’ I didn’t wait for an answer. I was already striding back down the corridor and into the small room where Lisa lay. ‘Mr Castor!’ the doctor yelled at my back. ‘I’m calling security! I’m doing it right now.’

There was a note with the flowers, in a white envelope about three inches square, but since Lisa couldn’t read it, nobody had bothered to open it. It was still tucked into the white ribbon that bound the stems of the flowers together. Lilies. White lilies for the dead.

The card inside the envelope bore a bloody thumbprint and ten words written in a tortured, angular hand so large that they filled the available space and in places overlapped each other.