Thicker Than Water

Rafi was never part of the exorcist fraternity: he was just an enthusiastic amateur with a sharper mind than most who mixed and matched necromantic rituals until he put one together that actually worked. But he was never a completer-finisher, either, which was the first part of his downfall. He left out one of the necessary wards, and the magic circle that should have kept Asmodeus safely contained was fatally flawed. The demon - one of the most hard-core bastards in Hell - battered his way out and into Rafi’s soul.

A lot of things could have happened at that point: demonic possession is a fairly new phenomenon, and not all that well documented. What actually happened was that Rafi became delirious and got so hot he actually seemed in danger of catching fire. His girlfriend called me, and I tried to carry out an exorcism.

That was the coup de grâce. I’d never encountered a demon before, let alone one as powerful as this. I screwed up badly, welding the two of them together in a way that I couldn’t undo. Asmodeus has lived inside Rafi ever since, the senior partner in a very unequal alliance."

"For Rafi it was effectively the end of any kind of normal life. A human soul is pretty lightweight when weighed against one of Gehenna’s finest, so Asmodeus would surge up and take the driving seat whenever he felt like it. After a couple of ugly incidents, Rafi was sectioned under the Mental Health Act: there are aspects of the way we live now that the law hasn’t caught up with yet, and this was one of them. Being realists, though, the senior management at the Stanger wrote ‘Schizophrenic’ on the paperwork, while at the same time they lined Rafi’s cell with silver to curb the demon’s worst excesses.

For three years we bumped along and made the best of a bad job: I went along to the Stanger every so often and used my tin whistle to play the demon down so that Rafi got some peace, and Doctor Webb, who ran the place, was happy so long as we kept the money coming.

Happy, that is, until he got a better offer from a former colleague of mine: Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, the director of the Metamorphic Ontology Unit at Queen Mary’s hospital in Paddington. Jenna-Jane was just a ruthless monster back when I worked for her, but for the past couple of years she’s been reinventing herself as a crazed zealot, convinced - just as Father Gwillam is - that humanity is now engaged in a last-ditch, apocalyptic struggle against the forces of darkness. As far as I can tell, she sees her role as broadly similar to Q’s in the James Bond films: humanity’s armourer and engineer, forging the weapons that we’re bound to need when the dead and the undead back us up against the wall and finally come squeaking and gibbering for our thro kg founats.

But before she can be Q, she has to be Mengele. She’s turned the Helen Trabitch Wing at Queen Mary’s into a little concentration camp over which she rules with loving, obsessive sadism, and she’s managed to persuade the CEOs of the hospital trust that this still counts as medicine. She’s got an amazing variety of inmates there: werewolves, zombies, the oldest ghost ever raised and some tragic nutcase who thinks he’s a vampire. About the only thing she hasn’t got is a demon, and she’s got her heart set on acquiring Rafi.

About a month back, the cold war between me and J-J got a little hotter, as it periodically does: it looked like she was going to be able to persuade the High Court to overturn a decision made by a local magistrate, which had given Pen power of attorney over Rafi. She was looking to have Rafi transferred from the Stanger to the MOU, with the connivance of Doctor Webb, whose balls she seems to have in her pocket.

But I’ve started a ball collection too, and the aforementioned magistrate is part of it. I got my own court order, immaculately forged, and went in first. Webb and J-J woke up the next morning to a fait accompli. Rafi was gone, having traded the dubious hospitality of the Stanger for the ministering hands of my good friend Imelda Probert - known to most of London’s dead and undead as the Ice-Maker.

It was a spoiler run, and it was desperate improvisation. At the Stanger, Rafi was penned in a silver cell and Webb and his team had a dozen or more ways, ranging from subtle to brutal, of keeping Asmodeus in check when he rose into the ascendant. Now all we had was my whistle, and Imelda - who had never thought that this was a good idea in the first place.

As I trudged back to the Tube, I imagined the ructions I was going to have with her, and the sheer gruelling agony of whistling the hell-spawn up and then back down again in a single session. It was going to be bad. Bad for me, anyway: Pen would see it differently, because she’d be able to visit with Rafi while I - assuming things went to plan - consulted his bad-ass alter ego.