The Devil You Know
never come across one.
    In any case, Rafi didn’t listen. He was onto something, he said, and this something would make the things that I could do irrelevant overnight. “Quicker, even,” he repeated, snapping his fingers in my face with a wild grin. “As quick as that. Your round again, Fix.”
    It was my round all seven times, and I drew some comfort from that afterward. In some respects, at least, Rafi hadn’t changed. He was still an elegant parasite who managed to make you feel you should be thanking him while he scrounged off you. Maybe the Ditko core was still intact under all this other bullshit. Maybe he’d ride it out and find yet another brand-new high.
    The next time I saw him was in the spring of 2004. A phone call at midnight dragged me out to a studio flat in the Seven Sisters Road, where Rafi was sitting slumped and blank-eyed in a claw-foot bathtub with the taps running. His girlfriend, who was skinny and wasted, with the kind of wispy white hair that always reminds me of daffodil puffballs, had to top the bath off with a couple of packets of ice from the liquor store every ten minutes when the water started to boil.
    “Rafi done a spell,” she said. “Something fucking big.” He’d summoned a ghost, but something had gone wrong, and instead of ending up in the circle, the loose spirit had gone into him. Then he’d started burning up.
    I sat with him through that night, listening as he rambled and raged in what sounded like four different languages, trying to get a feel for the spirit that was sticking it to him. By about six a.m., we’d run out of ice, and I was scared that if I waited much longer, he’d just burn himself out. So I took out my whistle, cleared the girl out of the room, and started to play. That’s how I do it. The music is a cantrip, and if it works, it has the same effect on bodiless spirits as flypaper does on flies. The ghosts get wrapped up in it, and they can’t get free. Then, when the music stops, abracadabra, there’s nothing for them to hang on to—so they stop, too. When the last note fades, they’re just not there anymore.
    If that sounds easy, put it down to the fact that I never did finish that English degree. In reality, it’s hard and slow, and it only works at all if I can get a real fix on the ghost in question. The clearer my mental image of it, the better the tune and the more reliable the effects.
    In this case, the ghost had such a strong presence, it was almost like smoke coming off Rafi’s overheated skin. I thought I had it nailed. I put the whistle to my lips and blew a few notes on it, high and fast, to get things started.
    It might just as well have been a gun—something big and heavy, like a .38 Trooper, say—pointed at Rafi’s head.

    I sat on the silver-steel floor of the cell while the chill of the metal, never less than glacial, crawled slowly up my spine. A nurse shouted in the distance, something jovial and probably obscene, and a door slammed heavily.
    Rafi’s black-on-black eyes closed and then opened again, keeping me pinned in their lazy, mad crosshairs. A smell of stale meat wafted off him, which I knew was because I’d just come from my office over Grambas’s kebab shop. One of the hallmarks of Asmodeus’s presence was that Rafi would start to smell of the last place you’d been, which was typical of the demon’s peekaboo bullshit.
    “You’re going to die,” he said again, almost absently, turning over a couple of cards in his sprawling game of patience.
    “You’re wrong,” I said, feeling a premature sense of relief. “A job did come my way tonight, but I already said no.”
    “Of course you did,” the smashed-glass voice grated again, in open mockery. “You’re still in mourning for your old friend, aren’t you? You made a promise to yourself that you wouldn’t screw the pooch like that again. ‘First, do no harm’—which in your case means ‘Don’t do a blind fucking thing.’”
    Rafi’s tongue snaked

Similar Books

Unknown

Unknown

Sharon Sobel

Lady Larkspur Declines (v5.0) (epub)

Deals With Demons

Victoria Davies

If Only

Becky Citra

Hurricane Season

Patient Lee

Mascara

Ariel Dorfman

Star Trek: The Original Series - 082 - Federation

Judith Reeves-Stevens, Garfield Reeves-Stevens

Eden

Stanislaw Lem