by Mike Carey
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.’
Pen carried on staring at me, not speaking. She knew there was more.
‘But just now, after he came here - after I saw him jumping off your roof - I realised something else. Something I probably should have clicked on earlier. When we fought, Asmodeus wasn’t talking to me. Rafi was - he told me to run. But when Asmodeus referred to me, he used the third person every time. “He’s funny. He makes me laugh.” He never spoke to me once; he was just talking to Rafi the whole time. So he was telling Rafi to count backwards, not me. To count down to zero. And I’m nearly certain he meant it as a threat, or a promise.’
I did put my hand on her shoulder now, leaning forward until our faces were almost touching. I had to make her understand this. ‘He meant, “You’re going to lose your friends, one by one. I’m going to take out everyone who ever meant anything to you, until there’s no one left.” Pen, who’s to say he even started with Ginny? He could have been busy on this ever since he broke free from Imelda’s. He’s had time to work his way through Rafi’s entire address book by now. I don’t want to think about what we’re going to find when we start looking into this properly. And I don’t want you to be next.’
Pen swatted my hand away and put the tips of her fingers lightly, momentarily, to my chest: not pushing, but
warning me to keep my distance. ‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘I’m staying here.’
‘I’m telling you, he didn’t just come for me. He was hanging around here before, that’s obvious. He was probably the one who trampled your tulips. If he decides to—’
Pen cut across my words. ‘I didn’t say I didn’t believe you, Fix. I just said I’m staying.’ Well, I’d known before I weighed in that this was going to be tough. I opened my mouth to hit her with a fresh wave of eloquence, but she hadn’t finished. ‘If Asmodeus was after me, then why was he up on the roof when I live in the bloody basement? You know the answer as well as I do. It’s because I’ve put wards on every window and door and wall of this place. They’re strongest at ground level, because that’s where I cast them, but they work all the way up to the chimney stacks - otherwise you’d have woken up to find Asmodeus sitting in your lap. Today I’ll do the upstairs rooms and the eaves. And I’ll work outwards from the house through the drive and the garden, planting stay-nots every four or five feet. He won’t be able to get within a hundred yards of us.’
‘Pen, you can’t live like a hermit,’ I pointed out. ‘You’ve got to come out some time.’
‘You said it would just take a couple of days. I can stay at home for a couple of days. I work over the phone mostly anyway, so it’s no hardship.’
‘A couple of days was a guess,’ I protested. ‘It could be weeks, or months. We just don’t know.’
‘I’m staying,’ Pen repeated. ‘Don’t try to argue me out of it, Fix. If Rafi needs me, I want him to know where to find me. And if Asmodeus comes round, I’m not scared of him.’
Not scared? I was fucking terrified, and I didn’t care who knew it. I’d seen what the bastard could do.
When the sun came up I climbed up onto the roof using an extending ladder that I’d half-inched from a building site down the street. I was pretty sure I could get it back before anyone clocked on for the day.
Sitting precariously on the ridge, I inspected the damage. It made interesting reading. The demon had raked the slates with his fingernails, snapping several and scoring deep gouges in others, but he hadn’t punched at them or tried to tear them free. Pen was certainly right when she said that if it was a matter of strength alone he could have smashed his way in without even working up a sweat. So whatever had kept him at bay, it had nothing to do with the physical properties of slate and wood and lead flashing. Pen’s wards had taken the strength out of his hands and the will out of his cold, clammy heart.
That made them something special in the way of stay-nots. In St Albans, when I’d gone after the leader of the Anathemata, Father Thomas Gwillam, with Juliet riding shotgun, I’d seen my favourite succubus walk through a door that had a dozen different wards on it. They hurt her, but they didn’t slow her down. I’d seen her walk through Pen’s wards too, for that matter, seen it a dozen times, most recently when she’d brought me home after one of my epic drunks. The only thing different this time was that the demon Pen was keeping out was a passenger inside the body of her ex-lover. Food for thought. Maybe not all magical prophylactics were created equal; maybe, as in quantum physics, the observer was part of the system.
After I came down, I made up a list of people I should call: people who’d known Rafi at college and might possibly be on Asmodeus’ hit list now, and people he’d introduced me to later when we met up for one of our infrequent reunions. Some I didn’t have numbers for, and the numbers I did have, when I finally picked up the phone and tried, weren’t always live any more. But I put the word out (lie low, lock your doors and windows and don’t talk to strangers), and I asked everyone I could reach to call anyone else they knew who might have counted as a friend or acquaintance of Rafi’s either in Oxford or in London.
But Rafi had been born in Pilsen, in the Czech Republic, and for all I knew he had an entire extended family out there. Would Asmodeus go after them? He might be disinclined to try. Demons are chthonic powers, and they don’t respond well to air travel: the one time Juliet had tried it, it had knocked her out for days. Asmodeus could take a bus or a train, but it was a long trip and most of the demons I’ve met have tended to have a hard time with the concept of deferred gratification. Hopefully - assuming I was right in the first place about what he was doing - Asmodeus would start with the targets that were closest to hand.
All the same, I could ask Nicky Heath, my go-to dead guy, to pull up whatever family records he could find and maybe shake loose a few phone numbers for me. I had to try, anyway: the karmic weight I was carrying already from this fucking fiasco was heavy enough to stave half my ribs in, and I seriously didn’t want to add to it.
Nicky doesn’t like talking specifics over the phone. He has a paranoid streak wider than the Thames at Deptford, and prefers to take commissions on a face-to-face basis. That meant a pilgrimage out to Walthamstow, to the abandoned cinema he’d lovingly restored and re-equipped for an audience of one. It wasn’t a place I liked to linger: the decor is great, but being of the zombie persuasion, Nicky finds a temperature of three degrees Celsius a little on the warm side.
I called Gary Coldwood first, and told him about my late-night bare-knuckle fight with Asmodeus. He was solicitous for my health but oddly vague about the progress he’d made on the case.
‘I talked to about fifteen or twenty people,’ I said. ‘To tell them what had happened to Rafi if they didn’t already know, and to warn them that they might get a visit. But some of them must have thought I was just a crank. It might sound better coming from a copper - and you could probably get updated numbers for some of these other names. Do you want the list?’
‘Where are you now?’ Coldwood asked instead of answering me.
‘I’m at Pen’s, but I won’t be staying here for long. Sue Book has been trying to get hold of me for the past few days, so I need to go see her.’
‘Sue Book?’
‘Juliet’s lady love.’
Gary gave an involuntary exhalation, somewhere between a sigh and a grunt. It was the same sound he always makes when he’s forcibly reminded of Juliet’s sexual orientation. He’s not homophobic; it just hurts him, fairly viscerally, that she’s not available.
‘Well where will you be in a couple of hours?’ he asked me.
‘Willesden Green, most likely. Sue works in the library over there.’
‘Okay. You know the Costella Café on Dudden Hill Lane?’
‘I can find it.’
‘Call me when you’re done. I’ll meet you there. If Asmodeus didn’t leave enough of your face for me to recognise, wear a red carnation in your buttonhole.’
I made a comment in which both buttonholes and arseholes figured largely, and hung up on the cheeky sod.
As I walked up Pen’s crazy-paved garden path, something in the semi-tamed undergrowh next to it caught my eye. Maybe the trampled tulips were still in my mind, or maybe I was catching some death-sense echo from what was hidden there. Either way, before I really thought about what I was doing I knelt down and parted the blades of elephant grass.
There was a flat piece of stone lying on the ground, right beside the path. It was the neutral grey of granite, but it had a slightly polished sheen. On the upper face of it someone had painted, in red, a pentagram.
I picked it up and examined it. The work was very fine: thin lines, perfectly straight and uniformly thick. The whole thing was only about four or five inches across, so the lettering around the outside was very tiny, but still perfectly legible: the names of Samael and Lilith figured there, along with the names of three of their kissing cousins. In the centre was a single word consisting of four Aramaic symbols:
I ducked out of seeing The Passion of the Christ because someone spoiled the ending for me, so my Aramaic is pretty rusty these days. If it had been Greek, I could probably have made shift, but I can’t get along with these proto-Hebraic alphabets that have about seven different shapes for each letter depending on where they appear in the sentence: they give me migraine
s. Some things though, I could tell just from a superficial inspection.
There are two kinds of necromantic contraption exorcists regularly run into. The first is a ward, also called a stay-not or occasionally a foad (short for ‘Fuck off and die’). They’re basically magical prophylactics, setting up boundaries the dead and undead can’t pass. Some of them aren’t necromantic at all: they’re pure nature magic, using flowering herbs and twigs cut, bound and blessed by priests or adepts - life and faith as a bulwark against death and its dominion. Others are incantations, like the ones that Pen uses to bless the walls of her house. Often though, they’re devices just like the one I was holding in my hand right then: collections of visual symbols tied together in intricate patternings that somehow trap a tiny potent piece of reality in their folds. I suppose it’s something like the way my music works. In the centre of the circle there’s a command aimed directly at the dead soul to show it how unwelcome it is: Hoc fugere is the commonest - Latin for ‘Get out of town’ - closely followed by Apoloio, which means ‘Don’t let the sun go down on you here’ in Ancient Greek.
The other kind of magic circle is the exact opposite of a ward: it’s a summoning. The design is similar in almost every respect, but the word in the centre of the pentagram will usually be the name of the entity you’re trying to call up or get on the right side of.
I didn’t know what it was I had here, because I had no idea what that four-letter word meant. I could see at a glance though, that it was a meticulous piece of work: someone had put a lot of time into it, even if they hadn’t bothered with the incantations that usually go with the design. You didn’t make a ward like this and then throw it over your right shoulder for luck.
