She stopped, registering my shocked expression. ‘What?’ she asked defensively.
I was both impressed with her grasp of the lingo and appalled at what she’d been doing. Only exorcists apply the term ‘user’ primarily to people who summon demons rather than people who ingest chemicals to get happy. The two-finger clubs, in the same trade-specific argot, are satanist dives – so called because the satanists like to draw their pentagrams with two arms pointing upwards and three down – symbolically rejecting the Holy Trinity. An ovate is the lowest rank in the Druidic Gorsedd, but when applied to the satanist churches it also means a wanker who can’t draw a magic circle without making it look like an Easter egg – which if you’re a demon-worshipper sends entirely the wrong kind of message.
‘You don’t want to mess with those people,’ I told Pen, meaning it. ‘In among the harmless tosspots there are some real nasty pieces of work. People who’ve hung around with Hell-kin long enough to go native.’
‘Those were the ones I was hoping to meet,’ Pen answered impatiently. ‘Don’t baby me, Fix. I know what I’m doing.’ She took a sip of her brandy and scowled at the glass as if it had done her some mortal hurt. ‘In any case,’ she said, ‘it didn’t work. I didn’t get to meet any of the big operators. Oh, there are rumours everywhere. The infernal messiah has been born at last, and he’s incubating inside the Centrepoint tower. Someone’s drawing a socking great magic circle around the whole of London by joining up the white lines on the M25. The bishops of all the satanist churches are meeting over in Kensington Palace for the biggest summoning ever seen. But you could tell when you tried to pin them down to specifics that it was all bollocks. Most of the people I was talking to knew less about what was really going on than I did.’
‘What is going on?’ I asked her. ‘I’ve been out of the loop for a few days.’
Pen snorted derisively. ‘Try two weeks,’ she suggested. ‘Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself, doesn’t it?’
I wouldn’t describe the mill I’d just been through – was still going through – as ‘enjoying myself’, but I didn’t bother to argue. ‘Are the police looking for Rafi too?’ I asked, calling a spade a spade.
Pen shrugged. ‘They must be,’ she said bleakly. ‘His fingerprints were all over Imelda’s house. Mostly in other people’s blood.’ Her face crumpled momentarily, and tears welled up in her eyes. I moved forward to hug her, but she warded me off with one hand, not ready or willing to take comfort from me. ‘I don’t know how this can end now,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘He killed her, Fix. He killed Imelda.’
‘Asmodeus killed Imelda,’ I amended.
‘And Rafi did too. It was his hands that Asmodeus used. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t want to do it. When they catch him, they’ll lock him away for life.’ She wiped away the tears with furious energy before they could fall.
I couldn’t think of anything consoling to say. Everything she’d said was true, and she hadn’t said the worst of it. Even if London’s finest dropped the ball, and Rafi somehow got away without being had up for murder, being welded to Asmodeus was a life sentence in itself.
Back when I first met Rafael Ditko, at college in Oxford, I really didn’t know what the hell to make of him: he was a bum, essentially, but a bum with his own inimitable style. A mature student from the Czech Republic, he was older than the rest of our little circle by three years and some small change, and he had a spectacular impact on all of us: on Pen more than anyone, because she’d fallen in love with him more or less at first sight, and then had to watch while he bedded every other girl we knew, weaving his way in and out between their official boyfriends with no call-out charge and no waiting.
He was the sort of guy who never paid for a round, never cleaned up his own messes, always called the tune but left someone else to settle accounts with the piper. By rights we should probably have hated him, but he had that knack – that mix of rakish good looks, ineffable charm and perfectly faked sincerity – that makes other people love you and want to carry your burdens for you. He was destined for a happy, directionless life probably full of other people’s sofas and other people’s wives: nature had adapted and equipped him for that evolutionary niche.
But that was until he met me. I was falling fast at that time – a fall that had begun when my death-sense kicked in at full power, around my thirteenth birthday. Rafi was rising like an ego-propelled rocket, and we ricocheted off each other in a perfect example of Brownian motion. Rafi’s exuberant hedonism and the cool, arrogant way he handled the world’s slings and arrows helped me to pull out of the self-destructive anomie that I was drowning in. My effect on him was less wholesome: I triggered a fascination in him, an obsession with the dead. Rafi being Rafi, the obsession expressed itself in competition. He wanted to outdo me in delivering the necromantic goods: to go on expeditions to the undiscovered country and bring back souvenirs.
It destroyed him, in the end. By some route I’ve never been able to reconstruct, he fell into the orbit of one Anton Fanke, the founder and leader and prophet-in-residence of the so-called Satanist Church of the Americas. The SCA seems to model itself on the Moonies in some respects: its deacons use total-environment conditioning, surrounding you with their own people so that the only truths you hear are theirs. Rafi dropped his old acquaintances and disappeared from our radar, much to Pen’s dismay. Ginny, his girlfriend at that time, was an SCA plant who fed Rafi’s addiction with badly photocopied grimoires, mountains of steganographic horse shit and a few nuggets of lethal, undeniable fact.
I don’t know why they chose Rafi. What I do know is that Fanke had a lot of arcane and complex ideas about how magical ritual should work, and he’d come to the conclusion that in magic the practitioner is part of the system. For some reason, that meant that when he attempted his biggest ever summoning, raising one of the most powerful demons in Hell by means of an adjuration spell adapted from Honorius’ Liber Iuratus, he decided it should be Rafi Ditko rather than himself who drew the circle and intoned the needful words.
The summoning went wrong, and Rafi ended up possessed by Asmodeus instead of commanding him. Then I sealed his fate by trying to carry out an exorcism without knowing what it was I was trying to cast out. I’d never met a demon back in those days. I was armed for bear, but I found myself drawing a bead on Leviathan.
I’ve tried many times since that night to reconstruct what it was I did, with a view to reverse-engineering my own tune and finding a way to put things right. It’s not easy, for a lot of reasons. The scene was one of violent chaos: in the bathroom of Rafi’s flat in the Seven Sisters Road, with Rafi thrashing and raving in a bathtub full of boiling water right beside me. That water had been ice about a minute and a half before, but the fierce heat that was burning Rafi up from the inside had made short work of it.
I found what I thought was the intruding spirit, and I started to weave a tune around it. The notes came quickly and fluently. I was expecting this thing, whatever it was, to put up more of a fight, but despite Rafi’s cursing and convulsions, the binding wasn’t too hard at all.
But as I was about to move on to the banishing, Rafi had a moment of lucidity. He stared at me with absolute terror in his eyes. ‘Fix . . .’ he whispered. ‘Please! Please don’t . . .’ In an instant he’d vanished again, going down for the third time in the lightless wells of his own hind brain. Asmodeus surfaced in his place, tenting the skin of Rafi’s face with the ridge poles of his own inhuman physiognomy, and blistering my ears with a curse from the arse-end of Tartarus.