Damnation Read online

  Diabolists go to Hell, Don.

  Like I say I’d had a row with Debbie beforehand, and at the time the Burned Man had told me that made it her fault. It didn’t, obviously, I knew that. It was my fault and no one else’s, but all the same I couldn’t help wondering if that was why I was so desperate to find her. Jesus, was I only doing this because it wanted to find someone to blame?

  Bollocks, the Burned Man said. I’d all but forgotten about it. If that business is still on anyone’s mind it’s on yours not mine.

  I rubbed a hand over my face and sighed. Of course the Burned Man wasn’t dwelling on one dead kid. Why would it? It simply didn’t care, about that or much of anything else. It was a fucking archdemon, after all. I leaned forwards and put my head in my hands. Oh God, it was all on me, wasn’t it?

  Yeah, it really was.

  Will you pull yourself together, you maudlin piece of shit, the Burned Man sneered at me. Fuck knows what we’re even doing up here in the land that time forgot but you are well and truly getting on my tits now, Drake. It was just some pointless fucking kid. Get over it.

  That was it.

  That was the point where I just fucking broke.

  I don’t… I don’t even know what it was, really. The Burned Man had said worse things to me before, but that one just tipped me over the edge. It was too much, too much of everything I think, all on top of everything else. You can only cope with so much. You can grit your teeth and stiffen your upper lip and square your shoulders and all that fucking shit, but past a certain point you just break, however strong you think you are.

  I had been thinking about Debbie, before, back in Glasgow. I had been thinking about how maybe, once upon a cunting fairytale, we might have had a life together. A house, and children, and one of those godawful garish plastic swings in the back garden that I would have hated the sight of but that would have made me burst with happiness every time I saw my little son or daughter playing on it.

  Oh God, that was all gone, wasn’t it? All my hopes, all my futures, had died with the McRoth child and the coming of the Furies that I had brought down on myself. It was all gone forever, and so was Debbie. I was so deep in the life now, so far removed from the normality of regular human existence, that simple things like that would never be in my reach. Would Trixie ever give me children? Of course she fucking wouldn’t. She wouldn’t even sleep with me and I had no idea if we could make a child if she did. We weren’t even the same sodding species, after all.

  The fucking Burned Man always knew exactly where to stab me where it would hurt the most, didn’t it? Bastard fucking thing.

  It was just some pointless fucking kid.

  “Shut up!” I shouted out loud.

  A passerby turned and looked at me over his shoulder, then quickened his pace. Over the road I saw a curtain twitch in one of the other houses. It was time to go.

  I hurried off down the road, hands in my pockets and my head down. I needed to find a pub, any pub. The trouble was I drank so bloody much these days that I barely noticed it, and booze didn’t shut the Burned Man out of my head however pissed I got. There was only one thing that had ever brought me that much oblivion.

  When I had been a student, back when the Burned Man had still been training me, it had made me spend a week off my head on heroin. My Crowley phase, it had called it, after the famous magus Aleister Crowley and his drug fiend methods. I had bloody hated it, and I’d never been so ill in my life. But the heroin had brought total and utter oblivion, I remembered that much. I remembered the time last year when Trixie had shot me full of the stuff too. I remembered that all too well, and something deep inside me twitched with the memory, twitched with longing. Maybe I’ve just got an addictive personality, I don’t know, but right then I knew exactly what I wanted.

  I found a pub and started drinking, and I started talking to people. There’s always someone who know a guy who knows someone, you know what I mean? I left that place and walked to another pub, drank and asked careful questions and moved on, always heading further out. Edinburgh gets a lot less pretty the further from the centre you go, in case you didn’t know. I ended up in a dump not much better than the place where I had met Davey back in Glasgow, and I found my man.

  Of course I had to buy everything, not just the smack but a syringe and needles as well. Works, he called it, and I remember just hoping that it did.

  What the fuck do you think you’re doing? the Burned Man demanded as I rode back to my hotel in a taxi I couldn’t really afford any more.

  I’m getting well and truly off my fucking face, I told it. It can’t hurt can it, just this once?

  The Burned Man snorted.

  If you say so, it said.

  * * *

  Of course it fucking hurt. It hurt more than I could have imagined possible at the time.

  I locked myself in my room and cooked up the heroin in a teaspoon from the coffee service with a cheap plastic lighter held under it, my belt tied around my arm. When the time came I jabbed myself inexpertly in the crook of my elbow and winced, but I’d started now and I was fucking doing it. Seeing that house had just about finished me, if I’m perfectly honest about it. I just… I don’t know. Looking back on it I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking really. I think it was a combination of grief and horror and post-traumatic stress compounded by the constant voice of the Burned Man in my head and the feeling that I didn’t even know who I was any more.

  In the last six months I had killed a child and met an angel, lost a lover and fallen in love, argued with Lucifer, seen a Dominion die, been betrayed more times than I could count, sworn service to a living goddess and utterly betrayed the woman I loved. My life was a total and utter clusterfuck.

  I pushed the needle home and emptied the syringe into my arm.

  I just about had the presence of mind to take the needle out and loosen the belt before the warm, heavy grey blankets came down and I nodded out on the bed.

  * * *

  When I woke up the hotel room was almost dark and he was standing beside the bed, staring at me.

  He had no eyes, of course. My screamer had taken those. His face was a torn and bloody ruin, his eye sockets black pits of dried blood. He held out a hand to me, and I almost wet myself.

  “I know you,” he said, his five year-old voice soft and slightly lisping like young children do, with the hint of a Scottish accent.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, struggling to sit up.

  “I’m Calum McRoth,” he said. “I’m five. I go to Tollcross primary school.”

  “I, um…” I said, staring at him in open-mouthed horror. “Um.”

  “A monster came,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, lost for words.

  “A monster killed Grandma and Grandpa and then it killed me. A bad man sent it.”

  Oh bloody hell…

  “I know you,” he said again. “You’re the bad man.”

  “I…” I started, but there was really no answer to that.

  I’m the bad man, I thought, and I knew it was true.

  The boy’s ruined face melted and ran like tallow, and his hands grew and grew as he reached out for me. He had huge, clawed hands, like a talonwraith.

  “The monster took me away to where it lives and I changed,” he said. “I’m a monster now and I know you.”

  I screamed as his hands found my throat.

  * * *

  When I woke up for real I felt hideous. I gagged on the vinegar acid taste in the back of my throat and cast a panicked look around for the child, but of course there was nothing there. I was alone in the hotel room, just me and my own stink.

  I didn’t know if it really had been a ghost or I had just been dreaming and had thought it was. I didn’t even think I believed in ghosts. All the same I was almost shaking with fear on top of the comedown. I’d had heroin dreams before but never anything like that. I hugged my knees to my chest and sobbed into the pillow.

  A monster came. Oh dear God ho
w had I got myself into this fucking mess? I know you.

  It comes to something when the bogeyman is afraid of the children instead of the other way around. Well, one child anyway. I was the bogeyman, I knew that much, and I hated myself for it.

  You fucking wet fart, the Burned Man snorted. It was a dream, get over yourself.

  Oh joy, it was back. I’d been off the nod for two whole minutes and the fucking thing was already back in my head again, sneering at me. I looked at my works, at the half a bag of heroin I still had left, and for a moment I was tempted to shoot up again just to shut the fucking thing up.

  And you need a shower, it added. You’ve pissed yourself.

  I realized with a flush of shame that it was right. I bloody had as well. It was a good job the hotel did laundry service. I dragged myself off the bed and looked at the clock. It was the middle of the night and I’d missed any chance of dinner now. So now I was hungry, scared, strung out and reeking of piss.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and found myself thinking about Debbie again, about the children we might have had if I had been a normal, decent human being and not the utter cunt that I actually was.

  I thought about those non-existent, impossible kids, and I realized that the last man on Earth I would have wanted anywhere near them was someone like me.

  The bogeyman.

  I put my head in my hands and wept. It wasn’t my finest hour, I have to admit.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but really I should have been counting my fucking blessings while I still had some left – because I soon wouldn’t have.

  Chapter Four

  I woke up in the squat and grimaced at the taste in my mouth. I rolled off my greasy sleeping bag and reached for the whisky bottle, taking a gulp to rinse my teeth. My client would be along soon and it wouldn’t do to have bad breath. I looked around at the truly disgusting conditions I was living in and snorted. Oh no, bad breath would never do, would it? Not amongst all this finery it wouldn’t.

  Of course I had gone downhill fucking fast after that first ridiculously unwise night on the smack. The Burned Man had been pissing me off all day and I’d still had another good hit’s worth left in the room so that night I did it, and of course the next day I went out and scored some more. The rest, as they say, is history.

  Shitty history admittedly, but there you go. If I had been bleeding money before then I was now absolutely haemorrhaging it, and it didn’t take long before nice hotels were a thing of the past. It was a fast and nasty descent to skid row, but when I was reduced to squatting in a condemned block of flats on the Muirhouse I knew I had got there. And here I still was six months later, armed with two half-dead rats and feeling half dead myself, waiting to do a spell for a pimp in return for a hundred quid to spend on more smack.

  Fuck a duck, how had it come to this? How had I become this fucking worthless?

  I remembered the child, the ghost or the dream or hallucination or whatever the fuck it had been back in the hotel that first night I had shot up, and shuddered. I knew exactly how it had come to this. I had seen it maybe two dozen times in the six months that had passed since then, and every time I had woken up screaming. My life had become fucking unbearable, and I had reached a point where I just wanted it to stop.

  I fingered my amulet and I was so, so tempted to hurl it out the window. I wanted to fall on my knees and beg her for forgiveness. She would come to me if I did, I knew she would. Even after six months of hiding from her and despite everything that had happened, she would still come. She was still the Guardian whether she liked it or not. And it had been me who had run away from her after all, not the other way around. It had been me who had run away from her, and from what I might do. It had been as though I was trying to run away from myself. I was still trying, and I was utterly sick and tired of it. I was sick of hiding, sick of being scared. I was sick of myself.

  Fuck, if I could have run away from myself that’s exactly what I would have done but wherever you go there you are, as they say. There was only one way I could see to make it end, and I’m sorry but I’m just not that brave. Diabolists may well go to Hell, but I had been raised Catholic and brought up believing that suicides did, too. Suicide is a mortal sin, after all, according to the Church. Did I still believe that? Probably not, but I was scared enough of going to Hell as it was. I couldn’t take the risk, and to be blunt I didn’t have the balls to do it anyway.

  Getting all fucking deep and religious on us now, are you? the Burned Man sneered in my head. You’re about as deep as a puddle of piss. You need to pack that in and get your shit together if you want this fucking money.

  I wanted the fucking money. Of course I did. I was down to my last half a gram. I needed this money. I needed the smack. There was no kidding myself any more, I wasn’t just doing junk to keep the Burned Man out of my head and I hadn’t been for some time. Maybe to start with but that had been then, and then was in the past. Now I was well and truly addicted and I was doing it because I fucking had to.

  I put my head in my hands and tried not to cry.

  “Yeah,” I said out loud. “Yeah, I need to do this.”

  Well get off your fucking arse then, you worthless bag of shit, the Burned Man said in that gently coaxing way it had. He’s coming.

  I dragged myself up off the sleeping bag and scrubbed my hands over my bearded cheeks and back through my long hair. God, I must look like a fucking tramp. I remembered horrible old Davey back in Glasgow, and how I’d thought he looked a state. I was in a much worse state than him by now, that was for bloody sure. At least I still had all my teeth, which was more than he did. That was something, I supposed.

  That’s it Don, look on the bright side, I told myself. You haven’t got hepatitis yet either but it’s probably only a matter of sodding time.

  That might have been a blessing, in a way. Hepatitis is fatal if it isn’t treated, and at least if disease took me there would be no sin. Just the blessed relief of an end to it all.

  I told myself to shut up and had another gulp of whisky while I waited. I had a client coming, and that was important. Business was important. It was time to pull my sorry shit together and do some real work.

  Of course, I fucked it up.

  There was a thump on the door a couple of minutes later, and I opened it and let my client in. I had thought my old clients back in London were sleazy but they had nothing on this geezer. He was probably somewhere in his late thirties, with pinched, acne-scarred cheeks and long straggly hair that didn’t quite hide his bald patch. He was wearing a shabby brown leather jacket and stonewashed skinny jeans and pointy toed cowboy boots like tossers wore back in the Eighties. Pretty much everything about him said “cheap pimp” – which was exactly what he was, of course.

  “You must be Joe,” I said.

  “Joey, aye,” he said. His breath could have stunned a buzzard at twenty paces. “You Drake?”

  I was almost ashamed to admit it to this horrible wanker but I nodded all the same.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Step into my office.”

  I held the door open for him to walk into the squat. I saw his twitchy gaze dart around the room, taking in my grotty sleeping bag and the nearly empty bottle of whisky, the stubs of candles on the floor and the saucer with my works on it. He knew what he was looking at all right, I could see it in his face.

  “Aye, right,” he said. “So my pal Lambo, he says to me you’re a man who…”

  He tailed off, and I could see he was staring at my works again.

  “Who what?” I prompted him.

  He flicked his horrible long greasy hair out of his face and glared at me.

  “Was Lambo taking the piss?” he demanded.

  I shrugged. “Might have been,” I said. “That would depend on what exactly he told you, wouldn’t it?”

  “You’re supposed to be a warlock, aye? A man who can make shite go away an’ that. All I’m seeing is another fucking junkie.”

  Fucking warlock. I h
ate that bloody word. I glared at this Joey prick and gave the Burned Man a mental kick up the arse.

  “That right?” I said. I raised my right arm and the Burned Man sniggered in my head and obligingly set my hand on fire for me. “You see a lot of fucking junkies do this do you, Joey?”

  “Fucking shite!” Joey said, taking a step backwards. “Aye all right big man, I believe you.”

  I showed him a cold smile and let the flames die away.

  “Right, now we’ve finished measuring cocks I believe you said a hundred quid,” I said.

  “Aye, right,” he said. “When you’ve done it.”

  “Before I do it,” I said.

  He met my eyes for a minute, then nodded and pulled a thin fold of money out of the pocket of his jeans and held it in his hand.

  “This arsehole that’s hassling my girls, you can make him fuck off then?” he said. “Binding, I think Lambo called it.”

  “I can do that,” I said.

  I wished I had the slightest memory of who he actually wanted me to get rid of. I wished I even remembered who his mate Lambo was, for that matter. My memory was a bit patchy by that point, it has to be said.

  “So how do we do this?”

  “Did you bring something of his?” I asked. “Or a photo of him, anything like that?”

  I would have asked for that, surely? Please tell me I hadn’t been so off my face when I had spoken to whoever I had agreed this with that I had forgotten to even ask for a magical focus. There was no way it was going to work without one, after all.