‘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.
4
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Pen shouted, for about the fourth or fifth time.
‘I was going to,’ I protested. ‘Seriously, Pen, I was going to. But . . . you were tired, and you were upset, and I just thought—’
‘Don’t spare my feelings, Fix!’ She stood before me, rigid with fury, her fists clenching as though she wanted to hit me. ‘Don’t ever hide things from me and think you’re sparing my feelings, because you don’t know what they bloody well are!’
It was four in the morning by the kitchen clock, and only ten or fifteen minutes after my brief encounter with Asmodeus, so we couldn’t expect the sun to come up for a couple of hours yet. The night seemed unfairly, impossibly prolonged. Its twisted events were taking on some of the flavour of those heart-hammering nightmares that start to lose coherence even as you’re waking up from them, but that still manage to leave their mouldering fingerprints all across your day.
‘Fair enough,’ I said, rubbing my eyes with the heel of my hand. They felt like they’d been boiled and peeled in their sockets. I leaned against the wall for some much-needed support, but I didn’t feel as though I could sit down right then, with every nerve in my body still trying to opt for either fight or flight and arguing the toss with its neighbours. ‘You’re right. I know you’re right. I’m sorry.’
The soft answer is meant to get you out of corners like this, and it generally works pretty well for me because I use it sparingly. Now, though, Pen seemed to take my throwing in the towel as an insult on a par with the original offence. She needed to fight someone, and I wasn’t helping. ‘You . . . ratbag!’ she exploded, and punched me hard on the shoulder. My shoulder had seen a fair amount of rough handling when I danced with the devil down in Brixton, and Pen packs more beef than you’d think, given her petite frame, but I gritted my teeth and took it like a man.
She stomped away to the sink and threw stuff around for a while. I thought she might have been making coffee, or maybe running up a tasty and nourishing meal out of Ryvita crumbs and bloody-mindedness, but there were no visible results: just pots and pans and dishes and items of cutlery being moved from A to B, and in some cases from B back to A again.
After a few minutes they weren’t moving so fast or so frequently, then they stopped altogether, but Pen still kept her back to me and didn’t speak for a while.
‘How did he look?’ she asked at last, her voice barely audible.
‘He was . . . mostly Asmodeus,’ I answered, choosing my words very carefully. ‘I mean, Rafi was in there, but Asmodeus was driving. And, you know . . . the first time he was attacking me. The second time I only saw him for a moment. We didn’t get the chance to talk much.’
It’s hard to fob someone off when they know you as well as Pen knows me. She turned to stare at me grimly, hands clasping the sink’s stainless steel rim, like a boxer in his corner waiting for the bell to ring for the next round.
‘He looked unhappy,’ I temporised.
‘Go on.’
‘He looked as though he was awake and aware but completely under Asmodeus’ thumb.’
Pen flinched visibly. It was a worst-case scenario: for Rafi, it meant not just seeing but experiencing everything that the demon did. But there was worse, and I had to say it now, because if I let it roll until the morning she’d be even less likely to accept it.
‘Pen,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to get out of here.’
Her eyes widened and she gasped out loud. ‘What?’
‘Just for a while.’ I raised my hand placatingly, thought about putting it on her shoulder and then thought again. ‘Just for a few days, until this is all over. Until we’ve managed to get him back.’ Those last three words sounded exactly like the shameless fudge they were, eliding the whole process of subduing the demon, capturing him without harming Rafi, and getting him back into some place where he could actually be contained. I had no ideas, currently, as to how any of that was going to be done, but it didn’t change the situation, and I ploughed on doggedly, trying to make her understand.
‘He’s trying to kill us,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why, when he’s walked the thin red line for so long, but he’s out for blood, and we’re all in danger until he’s locked up again.’
‘You don’t know that,’ Pen snapped back angrily. ‘He came after you. Twice. That doesn’t mean he wants to hurt me.’
I took a deep breath, wincing because my ribs were bruised too and it bloody well hurt. ‘The woman he killed in south London,’ I said. ‘Her name was Ginny Parris. She was involved with Rafi around about the time he was getting into all the black magic stuff. She helped him with it, because she was part of that scene. But they were lovers too, Pen. And for one of those reasons or the other, or maybe both, he went to her flat tonight, had a little chat about old times, and then murdered her with the leg of a table.’
Pen looked me squarely in the eyes, unimpressed. ‘Then the connection’s obvious, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘This woman helped Rafi to perform his summoning. You tried to exorcise Asmodeus afterwards. It’s the people who were there on that night - that’s who he’s going after.’
‘No,’ I said flatly, ‘it’s not.’ This was the hardest part to explain, but I tried anyway. ‘Asmodeus was talking all the while we were fighting. Taunting. Making jokes.’
‘He does that, Fix.’
‘I know. But he said one thing that stuck in my mind because I didn’t get it at first. He said, “Count backwards, down to zero.” It felt weird. Sort of abstract, when you put it next to the “I’m going to feed you your own intestines” stuff. I thought . . . maybe he was thinking of a surgical operation, where the anaesthetist tells you to count down from ten, and you fall asleep when you get to seven. That kind of black humour would be in Asmodeus’ style.’