‘Yeah. That was my conclusion too.’
‘Which means that Asmodeus is trying to summon her simultaneously in multiple aspects or incarnations.’ She paused as if she expected me to say something. When I didn’t, she went on with sardonic emphasis. ‘Despite the fast that she’s already been definitively summoned.’
I’d never been sure exactly how much Jenna-Jane knew about Juliet. She’d sounded me out on a few occasions in a way that made me think she was fishing for more information based on guesswork or rumour. I sure as Hell wasn’t going to play join-the-dots for her now.
‘Multiple aspects?’ I mused.
‘Each name would correspond to a stage of the demon’s life cycle,’ Jenna-Jane went on, her tone heavy and resigned, as though she was letting me off the hook for now. ‘One theory is that they change their names in much the same way that insects moult: sloughing off old traits and aspects, redefining and reshaping themselves through the morphic power of a new name. That’s why necromancers use the demon’s name to summon and command it. Castor, if you know anything more than you’ve told me about this, now would be a very good time to put your cards on the table.’
‘I don’t know anything,’ I lied.
‘About a succubus passing for human?’
‘There’s always talk,’ I admitted. ‘Mostly you stop believing in that stuff after you hit puberty.’
A pause on the other end of the line, then Jenna-Jane’s voice again. ‘Where are you now?’
‘I’m still in town, but I’m probably not going to be here much longer. I’m just waiting to hear how Pax is.’
‘Very well. Another early meeting, I think.’
I responded to that with a profanity. I’d had enough of turning out of bed at dawn to present myself at J-J’s door. ‘I’ll call you in the morning,’ I offered by way of compromise and hung up.
I took a stroll around the hospital’s ground floor, found a coffee machine that actually worked and - more surprisingly - enough coins in my greatcoat’s many pockets to make it work. Sipping the rat’s piss that passed for black unsweetened, I made my way back to the A & E waiting room. The nurse I’d met earlier was waiting for me there.
Trudie was out of surgery and awake, she told me. The surgery had seemed to go well, but it was too early to tell whether or not there’d be any lasting loss of function in the right arm and hand. I could talk to Trudie if I wanted, but only for a few minutes and only if I promised to keep it low key. I agreed docilely and was led to a ward, where Trudie lay on one of a dozen beds, her upper body propped up nearly vertical. She was shockingly pale, and her expression slack and drained. She roused when she saw me though, and twitched her left hand in a feeble wave. Her right arm was swathed in thick bandages, and her neck was in a cast.
‘How’s it hanging, Pax?’ I asked, trying for a tone of brusque camaraderie.
‘By a thread,’ she murmured. ‘Can’t feel my fucking fingers, Castor. They’re still there, right?’
I looked down. ‘They look to be,’ I reported. ‘You want me to count?’
She shook her head weakly, her eyes bright with unshed tears. ‘Can’t do it one-handed,’ she said in the same low monotone. ‘I’m useless if I don’t get it back.’
The fingers of her left hand flickered, manipulating a loop of string that wasn’t there. Of course, she meant the the cat’s cradles: the way she touched the spirit world and worked her will on it. If she didn’t get the full use of her right arm and hand back, she’d be crippled in more ways than one.
‘You’ll be fine as soon as the anaesthetic wears off,’ I promised - a guarantee with nothing to back it except my overdrawn account at the bank of optimism. I only said it to offer her a crumb of comfort, and I could see from her face that she took no comfort from it at all.
‘What happened at Super-Self?’ she asked me.
By way of answer, I took the music box out of my pocket and held it out to her. She took it in her good hand and stared at it for a few seconds, at first without seeming to realise what it was. Then she got the feel of the thing in her death-sense and swore softly.
‘You caught it,’ she said, awed even through the drug haze. ‘In a fucking box.’
‘Yeah. I did. I was thinking of tossing it in the Thames, but I may not even have to. Being separated from the Super-Self ghosts seems to have made it switch itself off. There hasn’t been a peep out of it.’
‘Throw it away anyway,’ Trudie advised me. ‘You don’t want to be around it when it wakes up.’
I took it back and returned it to my pocket. ‘What I want even less than that is for Jenna-Jane to get wind of it,’ I said. ‘It’s a neat trick, but for the time being I want it to be our little secret. Deal?’
Trudie shrugged, and then winced because her wrecked shoulder made shrugging a hazardous proposition. ‘If you say so, Castor,’ she grunted. ‘I suppose I’m lucky you confided in me. You seem to see all other exorcists as the enemy.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I don’t see the dead as the enemy. If the MOU find out you can trap ghosts in boxes, that’s going to be a bad day for ghosts.’
‘But you’re alive, so what do you care?’
‘I’m alive,’ I agreed, ‘but I’m planning to be dead one day. You think I want to spend eternity in an afterlife made out of plywood and screws?’
‘Castor, you’re a hopeless case!’ Trudie was getting exasperated, and her raised voice brought the nurse at a run to remove the source of the irritation. ‘You know how many dead people there are to every one living person? And how many people die in any given day? If this does come to a fight, we’re going to need all the help we can get.’
‘If it comes to a fight, Trudie, we’ve lost.’
The nurse manhandled me unceremoniously toward the door.
‘You can’t believe that, Castor,’ Trudie implored me, her face twisted in almost visceral dismay. ‘You can’t.’
‘It’s just a matter of time,’ I said. ‘Living versus dead? Sooner or later, we all defect to the other side.’
The door slammed in my face.
I walked home, just as I had on the night of Ginny Parris’s murder, mulling all this stuff over in my mind. Maybe Trudie was right about me. I did seem to be pretty comfortable in the company of the dead, and the undead, and the never born. Was I a traitor to the living? A fifth columnist in an undeclared war? Could I really be the only one who saw how self-defeating that concept was?
I was still kicking those thoughts around in my head when I turned into Pen’s road and saw a deeply unwelcome sight. Parked in front of her door, a hundred yards away, was the same black limousine I’d seen outside Super-Self.
Jenna-Jane had decided not to wait for that early-morning conference call.
With a sinking heart, I trudged toward that mortal rendezvous. But when I was close enough to see the house itself, that dejection was washed away in an instant by a rush of pure panic.
The ground-floor window was smashed, and the upright piano that had once belonged to Pen’s grandmother was lying at a crazy angle on the lawn, with a gaping rent in its polished wooden frame and its peg-and-string intestines spilled out onto the grass.
I ran up the path to the door. Dicks was standing in the hall. He made to block me, which could have had unfortunate consequences for both of us, but as I clenched my fists and lowered my head a voice from inside the house called, ‘Let him come, Dicks!’ He stood aside with bad grace, at the last moment, and glared at me as I passed.
Jenna-Jane was at the head of the stairs that led down into the basement. She gave me a look of profound commiseration.
‘Where are they?’ I demanded, my mouth so dry I could hardly get the words out. ‘Where are they?’
‘Felix,’ she said gently, ‘if you’d only listened to me at the outset—’
Without waiting to hear how that one finished, I ran on down the stairs. Pen’s basement looked as though a pack of hyenas had come through in a steam train, stopped to party a little, and then moved on. Every piece of furniture had been smashed to matchwood. Broken glass crunched underfoot, and the rich, bitter-sweet reek of spilled brandy was everywhere. The computer had been driven into the TV - an ancient behemoth - hard enough to leave the two buckled plastic casings inextricably crushed together, each partially embedded in the other so they looked like lovers in the midst of a French kiss that had got way out of hand.
Amidst the wreckage of the desk lay something like a shot-silk scarf, its glittering black flecked and crossed with deep red. It was Edgar the raven, twisted and broken and casually thrown aside. There was no sign of Arthur.
Jenna-Jane’s assistant, Gentle, was rummaging through the debris with an intent frown on her face. ‘The question I’m asking myself,’ she remarked without looking up, ‘is why the wards kept him out for so long.’
‘Are you seriously that stupid?’ I spat out, harshly enough to make her look up in surprise. ‘They didn’t. They didn’t keep him out for one blind fucking second.’
You know why the lion limps?
So gormless gazelles will think they’re safe, and come on down to the waterhole.
Then you can pick the luckless little fuckers off whenever you’ve a mind to.
17
‘The names build,’ said Gentle. ‘One syllable at a time.’
She had rough-and-ready photo printouts of the wards we’d found underground, laid out on the table in front of her. Her hand went from one photo to the next, and she pronounced each name as she pointed to it, slowly, like a primary school teacher mouthing kuh-ah-tuh.
‘Ket. Tlallik. Tsukelit. Illaliel. Jetaniul. Aketsulitur. Ajulutsikael.’
‘Illaliel and Jetaniul are the same length,’ Jenna-Jane pointed out.
Gentle shrugged. ‘The same length to us, but if you elide the medial “i” in either word there could be a difference that our ears don’t register.’
It was an hour and a half later, and we hadn’t moved. Well, that wasn’t strictly true: we’d relocated to the first floor, where there was a room that was still more or less intact. The furniture was under dust covers, the ornaments wrapped in plastic bags hailing from defunct supermarket chains like Gateway and Victor Value. Nobody had set foot in this room since Pen’s mother died.
My first instinct had been to go back to Asmodeus’ underground lair and storm the place, but Jenna-Jane said her people had it staked out and he hadn’t shown there. There was no way of knowing where he was. We couldn’t even use Trudie’s map. She’d torn it to pieces before she left the MOU, and in any case she was out of action for now, maybe for good.
So we sat, and we talked, and we went nowhere. Jenna-Jane restated her moult theory, that demons start out as simpler organisms, and change their names as they develop. I didn’t care, and I barely listened. Asmodeus had Pen and Sue, and that was all I could think about. Obviously it would help to understand what the fuck he was up to with Juliet, but I didn’t think insight was going to come from looking at pretty pictures. It was something to do with what Juliet was and what she did - and it had to fit in with all the other shit he’d been doing since he escaped.
Unless I was wrong. Unless he was just rabid and tearing at the world, and in the end he’d kill us all just for the immediate sense of relief it would bring.
I got up from the table. ‘I have to make a call,’ I said. Jenna-Jane and Gentle continued to pore over the printouts, and made no answer.
I crossed to the window, far enough away that I wouldn’t be overheard, and dialled Sue Book’s number yet again. Just the same answerphone message, and this time I found I couldn’t muster a reply. How do you say to an answerphone ‘a monster has stolen the woman you love’? I just said ‘Call me, Juliet. Please, for fuck’s sake, just call me.’ Then I hung up.
I stared down at the lawn. The piano still lay dead in the long grass, and the stolid Mr Dicks still stood by the gatepost, arms folded, glaring at the pre-dawn rubberneckers. He looked up at the window, and when he saw me watching him his eyes narrowed. I had too much on my mind right then even to flash him a wave.
Behind me, Jenna-Jane was rummaging in her pockets - an incongruously human thing for her to do, making her seem for a moment like a forgetful grandma, looking in vain for her front door keys.
‘Is the succubus his ally?’ Gentle was asking. ‘Could summoning all her aspects make her stronger? A sort of ontological layering . . .’
‘It was driving her insane,’ I muttered.
There was a momentary silence from behind me. Then I distinctly heard the dry click of Jenna-Jane’s tongue against her palate, an involuntary but very discreet expression of surprise and enlightenment.
‘Not a benign effect at all,’ she mused. ‘A form of torture.’
‘Or just an uncontrolled regression,’ Gentle chipped in.
A sequence of seven tinny and discordant notes sounded suddenly from somewhere nearby. J-J took her phone from her pocket and put it to her ear.
‘Mulbridge,’ she said, with a simplicity more arrogant than any degree of ostentation could ever be. Honorifics were for mere mortals.
She listened intently for a few seconds, then started to interject questions and comments. ‘Where? How far, exactly? Good. Good. What’s the address? Thank you.’
When she slapped the phone closed, less than a minute had elapsed.
‘Your Mr Moulson, Felix,’ she said. ‘The man who was possessed, and allegedly found a way to free himself. We’ve finally run him to ground. Appleton House, Godalming Lane, Eashing, in Surrey. It’s straight down the A3. Only twenty miles, apparently.’
I headed for the door, but I went from giant strides to dead stop again in the space of three steps.
‘Shit!’ I exploded. ‘Pen’s car. He fucking totalled her car!’
‘You can take my car,’ Jenna-Jane said without hesitation. ‘Gentle, give Mr Castor your radio. I’ll go and tell Dicks he’s to take you directly there.’
She hurried out of the room. Gentle took a somewhat bulky walkie-talkie out of her pocket and held it out to me.