He leaned down, his hands reaching for my throat. ‘Opera,’ I corrected. ‘Götterdämmerung, you smug bastard.’ I plunged the whistle a couple of inches deep into his left eye, and as he bellowed in pain and rage I slammed my foot into his stomach with all the force I could muster.
The timing was almost perfect. Asmodeus took two steps back, but regained his balance almost immediately and didn’t actually fall. That didn’t matter though, because the two steps had taken him off the edge of the pavement. He went under the nearside wheel of the bus and vanished from my sight.
The bus went into a skidding stop, slewing round in the road. A body like a shapeless sack was dragged along with it, trapped in the wheel arch in some way and dispersing itself in red-black smears of pulped flesh across the rough dry asphalt.
I was up and running by this time. One glance back over my shoulder showed me that Asmodeus was moving again already, his arms weakly twitching as he tried to lever his ruined body up off the road surface. I knew from past experience that no amount of purely physical damage would keep a demon down for long. Flesh is like an item of clothing to the Hell-kin, and they’re used to making running repairs. It would take Asmodeus a few minutes to replace his lost body mass though, and I could use that time to get clear.
I was sorry that Rafi had had to suffer along with Asmodeus, sorrier still for the poor sod of a bus driver, whose trauma at running down a pedestrian was now about to be compounded by seeing the man in question get back on his feet looking like a couple of hundred pounds of rough-chopped chuck steak. But needs must when the devil drives, and the pushy bastard has been my chauffeur for as long as I can remember.
I ran with my head down and my arms pumping, putting the adrenalin that had flooded my system during the fight to good use. God help me when I crashed, but at least now I had a fifty-fifty chance of living long enough to do it.
I risked a single glance behind me. Asmodeus was already up and running. His gait was drunken and asymmetrical, but he had more than human stamina and he seemed to be at least matching me for speed. Further back, a thin scattering of shrieks rose raggedly into the air as the passengers on the bus saw what had risen from under its wheels. They had nothing to complain about: the demon was heading away from them.
At Baytree Road, where the one-way system kicks in, God decided to smile on me – although with most of the street lights down it was a miracle he could find me in the first place. A black cab with its flag up was coming slowly into the bend. The cabbie must have been lost: you don’t go wandering around Brixton Hill at two in the morning just to take the air, and it’s not a salubrious place to fish for fares. Not unless you’re prepared to do a Teddy Roosevelt and kerb-crawl lightly while carrying an apocalyptically big stick.
I leapt into his path, throwing my arms into the air like some idiot at a Neil Diamond concert. He slammed on the brakes, started to curse me out and then thought better of it as I brandished a twenty-quid note under his nose and shouted, ‘North of the river. Anywhere.’ He waved me in with a long-suffering shake of the head, and we picked up speed as we headed west.
In the cab’s rear window, Asmodeus receded into the distance. I was safe. Even so, it took the better part of ten minutes before I stopped trembling. I’ve looked death in the face before but it’s a little different when he’s wearing your best friend’s face. It gets you on a whole other level. I had to fight to get my breathing back under control, and to stop the window-shutter slamming of my ribs against my heart. I was like a marathon runner hitting his twentieth mile, and the stink of the cab’s upholstery, unleashed by the long hot evening and compounded of equal parts sweat, cigarette smoke and crappy perfume, didn’t help one bit.
But tonight’s events, whichever angle you looked at them from, stank worse than anything the cab had to offer.
After we crossed Father Thames at Vauxhall I got the cabbie to fork right onto Millbank, where New Labour used to keep shop in the good old days before they availed themselves – with no sense of irony – of the cheaper work-force available in North Shields. There were lights on in the decaying tower block, shining pale and a little baleful across the restless night: the ghosts of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, maybe, pursuing their old disagreements like the boarhound and the boar through the rifts of some low-rent eternity.
The cab dropped me off at the western end of the Strand, near Cockspur Street. There was eighteen quid on the clock and the cabbie took the twenty with bad grace, no doubt believing that a pick-up in Brixton at that hour of the morning deserved something special in the way of a tip. I was inclined to agree, but that was all I had on me so the argument was purely academic. He muttered something under his breath as he drove away: probably, in the circumstances, something more or less accurate.
The walk from the centre of town back up to Turnpike Lane took me over an hour. I felt like I needed the time to think, even if my thoughts kept circling around the same drain. Asmodeus had killed Ginny, and then he’d hung around the scene long enough to pick up my scent and take a crack at me. What the Hell was he up to? We’d had a sort of love-hate thing going for most of the time Rafi was at the Stanger. Asmodeus knew who he had to thank for his human ball and chain, and would have liked nothing better than to rip my head off and spit down my throat. But he knew that killing me would close a possible escape route, so for the most part he contented himself with more subtle forms of revenge. The only time he’d ever seriously tried to kill me was when he was sure Fanke’s satanists were going to cut him loose again with a ritual involving human sacrifice.
Was that the link? Ginny. Fanke. The Satanist Church. Was Asmodeus demob-happy again, looking for an early remission on his life sentence? Or had he just given up hoping that I’d find a musical sieve that would strain out the demon from the man? Either way, it was bad news for me.
In Somers Town I passed a small group of zombies sitting huddled around a fire they’d made in the eternally closed doorway of an abandoned parking garage. It was a pathetic sight, because there was no way the fire could warm them: the nerves in the dermal layers of the skin are the first to go. And the night was still clinging onto the day’s heat like a lover keen for one last sweaty embrace, so surely this was the only campfire burning in London tonight. Comfort food for the dead.
Zombies get a lousy press in movies, horror novels and comic books, but I’ve always found them pretty easy to get on with. Ghosts, now they can be bad news. A poltergeist is a ghost that’s made of nothing but pent and pissed-off feelings, and they can do real harm unless you bring in someone like me to cut the feelings off at the source. But the poor bastards who come back in the flesh have put all their fortunes in a sinking ship, and with a few notable exceptions they’re as docile as lambs. Who wants trouble when your body’s falling apart anyway and can’t repair itself from damage? It’s better to sit tight: to think good and hard about that last shallow ledge you’re about to fall off, and what you’re going to do when it gets too narrow to hold on to.
These guys didn’t look like they were going to be any trouble. There were around a dozen or so, and I’m using ‘guys’ in the inclusive sense: it was a mixed gathering. In the hot, humid air they smelled like a fridge on the third day after a power cut, but that was the only offence they were capable of giving.
‘Spare a quid, guvnor?’ one of the women said, holding up her hand as I passed.
If I’d had one I would have flicked it over my shoulder and kept on going. But the cab had taken the last of my liquid funds, so I was denied that easy out.