What had Asmodeus come back for? Why had he taken the trouble to find her, and then to talk to her before he murdered her? Had he come there with bloody execution already on his mind, or had his gleefully sadistic nature, which I knew only too well, simply got the better of him?
The night was hot and sticky, with the smell of tarmacadam rolling in from somewhere on a lethargic wind. It drowned out the more enticing smells of cooking from closer at hand: someone was having a very late supper of jerk chicken, and it wasn’t going to be me.
Perhaps because I’d been playing my whistle such a short time ago, my death-sense was fully awake. I saw a ghost sitting in the middle of the road, its knees drawn up to its chest and its head bowed. Hard to tell if it had been a man or a woman; after a while, unless you had an unshakeable self-image when you were alive, the fact of being dead tends to erode you at the edges. Little by little, you start to dissolve – unless someone like me gets to you first and wipes the slate clean all at once.
There was a much more recent ghost standing in the mouth of an alley just before the junction with Porden Road: a young man in a faded blue shell suit, conducting one half of the conversation he’d probably been having just before he died. The sound reached me as a thin mosquito whine. In his chest there was a deeply shadowed hole about the size of a grapefruit.
In a doorway a little further on, an old woman sat clutching a Tesco carrier bag like a baby in her arms. I could tell without looking that she was dead: not a ghost this time, but risen in the body, a zombie. The smell of putrefaction hung around her, as solid as a curtain.
There was nothing unusual about these sights. London, like the rest of the world, had been playing host to the walking, waking dead for about a decade now; and London, like the rest of the world, had adapted pretty well, all things considered. If a ghost minded its own business, you ignored it; if it became a nuisance, you hired an exorcist to drive it away. You steered clear of zombies unless they were family or close friends, and you put wards on the doors of your house because you knew there were other things abroad in the night that had never been alive in the conventional sense, and an ounce of prevention is worth a metric ton of cure.
So, yeah, this was the new status quo. And for me it’s a living, so it would be a bit hypocritical if I complained about it. But I couldn’t shake the suspicion – the fear – that the status quo was changing. Maybe it was just that drunk-dream about the new note I couldn’t make my whistle play, or maybe it was the stuff I’d learned on the Salisbury estate about how human souls – given the right conditions – can metastatise into demons, in much the same way that axolotls can become salamanders. What with one thing and another, the ground didn’t feel too solid under my feet right then.
And being preoccupied with weighty metaphysical questions, I let my guard down like a total fuckwit.
I was walking past the high wall of someone’s backyard, which was topped with an ornamental layer of broken glass to deter casual visitors. That gave me the only warning I got. Something moved – the merest flick of dark-on-dark at the very limit of my vision – and there was a faint, brittle sound from above my head as one of the shards of glass was broken off clean. Then a great weight hit me squarely between the shoulder blades and I pitched forward, the pavement coming up to meet me.
I managed to turn a little as I fell, meeting the cracked grey paving slabs with my shoulder rather than my face. That was the most I could manage though. I still got the wind knocked clean out of me, and a second later a boot hammered into my midriff to seal the deal. I lay there on the ground, curled around my pain, trying to pull my scattered wits together enough to move.
There was the sound of a footstep right beside my head. ‘You see? You see that?’ a harsh voice grated. Actually it didn’t sound like a voice at all; it sounded like someone trying to scrape up a tune by sliding one saw blade across another. ‘Even in this fucking weather, he wears the coat. I think the concept of mercy killing applies here.’
Booted feet walked into my line of sight. One of them drew back for another kick, which gave me time to throw my arms up and catch it as it came forward again. I twisted and pulled, hoping to throw my attacker off balance, but he tore loose from my grip before that could happen. I completed the roll anyway, came up facing him on one knee with my hands raised en garde.
Asmodeus threw back his head and laughed, which isn’t a sound you want to hear with a full stomach. He stared at me with contemptuous amusement. But when he spoke again, the words were so much at odds with the expression on his face that I felt an eerie sense of unreality.
‘Run, Fix,’ he said. ‘For Christ’s sake, run. Don’t try to fight him!’
This time it wasn’t Asmodeus’s voice; it was Rafi’s. It came as something of a jolt because Rafi had almost never managed to surface by himself, without the help my whistle could provide. Asmodeus was the dominant partner in their forced marriage, with all the rights and privileges that entailed.
He was dressed very differently than when I’d seen him last. He’d have to be, of course: you can’t walk around Brixton dressed in Marks and Spencer pyjamas and hope to avoid public notice. From somewhere he’d dredged up an all-black ensemble – boots, trousers and an overlarge shirt open to the waist over a string vest of the kind our American cousins call a wife-beater. Or maybe these things had been some other colour to start with, and had turned black after the demon put them on.
He walked around me, taking his time. The face was still Asmodeus: the black-on-black eyes, like holes in the world, would have told me that even without the mocking, bestial expression. If he was surprised that Rafi had taken momentary control of the communal vocal cords, he didn’t show it.
‘Think he’ll make a fight of it?’ he growled. ‘Or will he turn and run? I don’t mind either way; I’m just asking. As his friend, which way do you think he’ll jump?’
Asmodeus was talking to Rafi, over my head. If I hadn’t been preoccupied with the matter of my imminent death, I might have been offended. My hand went to my tin whistle by automatic reflex, but there was no help there. I’d never managed to work out a full exorcism for Asmodeus, though I’d tried a hundred times. Oh, I could have come up with a tune that would have have changed the balance of power between Asmodeus and Rafael Ditko, but there was no way I’d get beyond the first few bars before the demon made me eat my whistle.
He smiled, interpreting the gesture correctly and obviously being of much the same opinion as me with regard to my chances.
‘He’s funny, isn’t he?’ he grated, continuing his conversation with his internal audience. ‘He makes me laugh. He’s got that Dunkirk spirit. Eat as much shit as God wants to cram into your throat, but never say die.’
He took a step towards me. I threw a punch, but it didn’t connect. Asmodeus moved, faster than a snake, and batted my hand aside. ‘Count backwards,’ he said, ‘down to zero.’ Then his arm came back, and he smacked me open-handed across the face.
The force of the blow spun me round as a DJ spins a record. I hit the pavement again, tasting blood in my mouth, my head ringing. I looked up blearily as Asmodeus, in no particular hurry, walked across to join me. Behind him, headlights stabbed out of the darkness, turning the demon momentarily into a silver-edged silhouette.
I had to force myself to move. Knowing that it was either move or die helped, but the ringing in my ears distracted me and my fingers didn’t want to do what they were told. I reached for my whistle again and drew it out as the bright red double-decker bus loomed up behind the demon’s shoulder.
Asmodeus stared down at me, shaking his head in pitying wonder. ‘It’s like people say,’ he snickered. ‘If all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if all you’ve got is a whistle, the whole of life is one big fucking show tune.’