The Naming of the Beasts

9

‘A hundred pounds?’ Juliet repeated. She sounded suspicious.

‘Yeah,’ I confirmed.

‘Per day?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Plus expenses?’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Shit, no. What expenses are there likely to be, anyway? All I’m asking you to do is to watch Pen’s house and make sure Asmodeus doesn’t get near it. Pen’s already got the place hot and jumping with stay-nots, so the chances are you won’t have anything to do in any case. But if the wards go down, I want there to be another line of defence. That’s you.’

Juliet sipped her coffee, which was black and thick and treacle-sweet. The waiter, who had a hangdog look and a ridiculous bandito moustache, hovered nearby with the pot, hoping she’d hold up her cup for a refill. That way he’d have an excuse to get in close enough for another lungful of essence-of-succubus.

‘It sounds dull,’ she said, setting the cup down and dabbing her lips with the serviette. She left a smeared imprint of vivid red lipstick on the folded edge of it, like a streak of blood.

‘Oh, I think it will be a lot duller than it sounds. But it’s easy money, right?’ As in, ‘Easy come, easy go,’ I added mentally. It was everything I was getting from Jenna-Jane. I had very mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, it was kind of a relief to shunt J-J’s tainted favours directly onto a third party. On the other hand, you can’t eat air. If this thing didn’t wrap itself up quickly, I was going to be dining in the bins behind Pizza Hut.

‘I’m not interested,’ Juliet said.

‘What?’ I was dismayed. I’d started with my best offer, knowing from experience that you can’t drive a hard bargain with a woman who can smell your soul, so I had nowhere to go now but down. ‘At least think it over, Juliet. Please. It won’t be for very long, and you can always—’

‘I’m not interested in the money,’ Juliet clarified. ‘Give it to her.’

‘To her? Her who?’

‘The one who bruises so easily. My little friend.’

She spat the words out with searing contempt.

‘Susan?’

‘Exactly. She’s the one who needs clothes to wear and food to eat and toys to play with. Make her happy, if she’s capable of being happy. I’ll give you three days.’

I didn’t answer. To tell the truth, I was still trying to digest ‘bruises so easily’, and it was sticking in my throat like a chicken bone. Juliet stared at me with an edge of challenge in her narrowed eyes.

‘She’s . . .’ I began tentatively. ‘That is . . . Sue has been a lot more to you than a friend.’

‘Has she? How would you know, Castor?’

Okay, that was an easy one. ‘Because you can get sex anywhere,’ I pointed out bluntly. ‘You can have anyone you want, on whatever terms you want, for as long as you want. So if you choose to live with one woman, and to stay faithful to her, then it has to be because—’

Juliet’s coarse laugh cut across me. ‘Faithful?’ she repeated. ‘Please. It’s only your species, Castor, that makes a virtue out of not following its instincts. If I’m hungry, I eat something. If I’m angry, I kill something. And if I feel lustful, I make someone satisfy me. Where does faithful come into the equation? It’s just a word you use to hobble someone you love. To tie them to you. It’s a weapon the weak use against the strong.’

‘Interesting choice of words,’ I commented, looking studiously at the dregs in my own cup.

‘Weapon? What would you call it?’

‘Not that word,’ I said. ‘The other one. Love. There was a time when you would have said desire or want. Two years on Earth has changed you more than you know, Juliet. I bet Baphomet wouldn’t even know his kid sister if he saw her now.’

I met her gaze again, and the silence stretched. It’s a high-risk strategy, needling a succubus. Normally I’d have been pretty sure where the line lay and when to stop, but this was a Juliet I didn’t recognise, and I tensed under her stare like a small rodent under a stooping buzzard.

Then she laughed, and I relaxed.

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I have changed.’ She put down the cup and gave the waiter a tenth of a second’s glance – enough to make him come scampering over and give her the refill. He was happy to be of service, happy to be in the vicinity of this amazing woman, who for the moment was filling his mind to the exclusion of his wife, his kids, his other customers, his mortgage, the entirety of his past and the entirety of his future. He filled the cup and then made to raise the pot. Juliet rested a finger lightly on his hand, and he kept on pouring. Hot coffee splashed over the edge of the cup to soak into the tablecloth in a spreading brown stain.

‘Maybe I’ve changed too much,’ Juliet said. ‘Maybe I’ve lost something. A lot of what I’m doing right now bores me.’

The waiter made a small, helpless sound, a half-swallowed moan of dismay. Juliet wasn’t pressing down on his hand; she was holding him in place with the strength of her will, not with any physical force. The coffee had saturated the tablecloth now and was spattering down onto the floor and onto the waiter’s well-shined shoes.

‘Then maybe you need a new challenge,’ I suggested. ‘I mean, as opposed to the same old same old, like making guys have wet dreams while they’re awake. Too easy, surely?’

Juliet lifted her finger. The waiter took an involuntary step back as the skin-to-skin contact was broken, gasping like a landed fish.

‘Everything is too easy,’ Juliet said with heavy emphasis. ‘As I said, I’ll watch your woman for three days. If Asmodeus is really hunting her, that might be a fight – or a fuck – worth having. But three days is my limit. If he hasn’t come by then, he isn’t coming.’

‘Pen isn’t my woman,’ I pointed out scrupulously.

‘Then I’m even less interested. Let’s make it two days.’

Juliet stood up, leaving the refilled cup untouched in the centre of the swamped table. The waiter was staring at her with huge, hapless eyes, haunted by his own unrequitable desire. A lot of other people were staring too, but Juliet’s well used to that. It never bothers her.

We walked back to Sue’s house in silence. Juliet stopped me with a firm push to the chest as I made to walk in through the gate.

‘As you were, Castor.’

I stared at her in surprise. ‘I just wanted to say hi to Susan,’ I said. ‘Since I’m in the neighbourhood.’

Juliet smiled mockingly. ‘I’m sure you did,’ she agreed. ‘But she belongs to me, and I get to say who she talks to. I make sure she stays faithful. Go home. Tell your landlady she’s got a guardian angel. For two days, I think we said. After that, she’ll have to make her own arrangements.’

She walked to the door, let herself in and slammed it behind her.

As I stood there at the gate, my death-sense unexpectedly pricked up its metaphorical ears. I might have noticed it sooner, but Juliet’s emphatic presence tends to elbow almost everything else right out of my perceptual field.

This was a tiny ping on my metaphysical radar, but it was very close – and I didn’t see any ghosts or zombies abroad in the bright sunlight who could have been responsible for it. There was something familiar about it too, and whatever the association was, it had a negative feel to it. Negative. Recent. Necromantic. Out on the street in broad daylight . . .

I had it. This was what I’d felt when I held the stone I’d found in Pen’s garden: the invocation to Tlallik, whoever or whatever that sonofabitch might be.

Okay. So since I was here already and wasn’t invited in to tea, I might as well give the place the once-over at least. Hoping fervently that Juliet wasn’t watching out of the window, I hopped over the low wooden fence into Sue Book’s front garden – if that isn’t too grandiose a term for a lawn the size of an Oyster card, a dead-and-alive privet hedge and three beds of geraniums.

I squatted down and pushed aside the lower leaves of the hedge, looking for any evidence that someone had been there before me. At first, everything seemed to be kosher, but as I cast my gaze to left and right I caught a glimpse of red. In among the flowers, half-buried in the friable soil, was a second stone: grey like the first, and once again bearing a circular ward, crudely but legibly painted in bright red. It was fresher, so this time I could tell from the smell what the red was. It was nail varnish.

I photographed it, as I had the first, and put it back in place. It was clearly different from the first one I’d seen: not in the general design, which was identical, but in the collection of Aramaic symbols at the centre. Only two symbols this time. If the stones were summonings, and I saw no reason to doubt Nicky’s accuracy on that score, then they were summoning two different beings. Spirits of mischief, rage and paranoia, whistled up to drive Juliet off her head? No, that made no sense. One demon couldn’t possess another demon, and Juliet would know in a second if anyone tried to pull shit like that on her. Her succubus-sense would tingle, she’d follow the magic spoor to its source, and some unhappy necromancer would be trying to put his internal organs back with one hand while he wanked with the other. And in any case, the first pentagram I’d found had been at Pen’s house: Pen was still Pen, and as far as I knew, I was still me, not afflicted by any unusual mood swings or sudden bursts of indiscriminate rage.

Something else then. But what? And why? I’d promised Sue I’d sort out Juliet’s scary abreactions. My record with promises is a little patchy, but I was determined to keep this one. I couldn’t let Juliet be Somebody Else’s Problem, any more than I could do that with Rafi. On some things your room for manoeuvre is effectively zero.

I killed the rest of the day in various unproductive ways. I went to Bunhill Fields cemetery and sat among the old graves – old enough now to be completely ghost-free – to think about Rafi, and Asmodeus, and magic bullets. Normally I get good value for money out of that place. Something about the silence, or maybe the proximity to William Blake’s hallowed bones, makes my mind work at about 150 per cent efficiency when I’m there. Not this time though. I sat and watched the darkness come on, chasing the same few thoughts around in smaller and smaller circles. It would be hard enough to bring Asmodeus down, even with the gloves off and using every low blow in the book; doing it without killing Rafi seemed impossible.

I called Nicky Heath at odd intervals, got him on about the third or fourth time. He’d been down in the main auditorium of the Gaumont, fucking around with the seating layout yet again. I refrained from asking what the point of that was, given that he was the only one who ever got to sit there. Instead, I asked him if he had any news for me.

‘Yeah,’ Nicky said, ‘I do. On the Ditko front, quite a lot of stuff – but it’s more quantity than quality, if you get my drift. Anyway, there’s too much to go over on the phone. Come and pick it up whenever you’re free.’

‘Anything on that ward I picked up at Pen’s place?’

‘Not so far. I did the grimoires, came up with a big zero. Now I’m feeding Tlallik and Tlullik into some weird-arsed meta-search engines, and trailing them across my favourite necromantic noticeboards, but if anyone’s ever heard of them, they sure as fuck didn’t write it down anywhere.’

‘I’ve got another one for you,’ I said. ‘Same pentagram, different payload.’

‘Shoot it on over. The more the merrier.’

Nicky’s funereal tone belied his words, but I took the invitation anyway. Then I checked my watch.

‘I’ve got to be somewhere at midnight,’ I said. ‘Is it okay if I come over after that?’

‘I don’t sleep, Castor. Night and day’s all the same to me, except at night I can take a walk round the block without going rotten.’

‘Not in this weather,’ I pointed out.

He snorted. ‘Yeah, you got that right. Come over whenever you like. My door’s always open.’

‘Your door is booby-trapped, Nicky.’

‘Well, that too.’ I was about to hang up when he spoke again. ‘Oh, wait. I won’t be here. I’ll be over in Hoe Street. Hoe Street Market.’

‘In the early hours of the morning?’ I demanded.

‘Yeah.’

‘Okay. Which end?’

‘You’ll find me, Castor. The crowds will have thinned out by then.’

So I was looking at a night on the town with Gil McClennan, followed by a visit to a dead man in a deserted street market. You can see why people don’t go into exorcism for the glamour.

When I got to Charing Cross station it was still five minutes before the hour. Midnight isn’t particularly late by West End standards, so there were a fair number of people around, even though most of the restaurants and coffee houses on the Strand had already closed their doors.

Thinking I was the first one there, I leaned against the cheap replica of the Eleanor Cross and settled in to wait for the others. Then I spotted Trudie Pax standing just inside the station entrance, nervously winding and unwinding the string on her left hand.

She saw me at the same time and headed over, saving me the trouble of deciding whether or not to join her. She was wearing a khaki army fatigue jacket, jeans and boots, but despite the urban-adventurer chic she looked tired and a little distracted.

‘So how is the mapping going?’ I asked.

She made a non-committal gesture. ‘We’ve got something, ’ she said. ‘The start of something. I’ll show you tomorrow, and you can tell me what it’s worth. You don’t know what to say to me, do you, Castor?’

‘I don’t think I’ve got anything to say to you,’ I corrected her.

‘The last time we met—’

‘The last time we met you set me up, Trudie. Without you, Gwillam wouldn’t have got to Rafi, and we wouldn’t be in this shit now.’

She scowled where I thought she might blush. ‘I didn’t know what he was planning to do,’ she pointed out coldly. ‘When I told you there’d be no bugs, I meant it. There were none on me. Gwillam managed to take you anyway, but how is that my fault? I did what I could to keep my word. But he turned me into a liar, so I quit. I left the Anathemata that same night.’

‘To join the MOU,’ I mused. ‘That’s a really principled stand. Bravo.’

Trudie sighed. ‘I’m not asking for your approval, Castor,’ she said.

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘I just want you to know that it was a two-way deal. If you were screwed over, I was screwed over too – and I trusted Father Gwillam, so it was probably a harder knock for me.’

‘Still a good Catholic girl though, yeah?’

Trudie threw out her hands, her temper getting the better of her contrition. ‘What do you want from me?’ she demanded.

‘Not a thing,’ I growled back. But it was a fair question. I was sniping at her like a jealous husband, and she was probably right that she was more screwed against than screwing. I just couldn’t unbend with her because she was a part of that night – of the blood and the horror and the guilt. My guilt, mostly, but clearly I was more than happy to spread it around.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘We’re working together, so I’ll try to be civil whenever we’re rubbing shoulders. Beyond that, we don’t really have to talk, do we?’

Trudie stared at me unblinkingly. ‘I’ll leave that up to you,’ she said with an edge in her voice. ‘I know something about Ditko – Asmodeus, rather – that I haven’t told Professor Mulbridge. I was thinking that I’d tell you, and leave it up to you who else finds out. But maybe I’m giving you the benefit of too many doubts, Castor. Maybe you’re more concerned about your own righteousness than you are about helping your friend.’

She turned to walk away and ran straight into Gil McClennan, who had somehow got up really close to us without either of us seeing him. ‘Not interrupting anything, am I?’ he asked, with an expression on his face that was the second cousin to a leer.

‘Group prayers,’ I said. ‘Where are the others?’

‘It’s just the three of us tonight.’ Gil moved his index finger round in a circle to indicate Trudie, me and himself. ‘Devani and Etheridge have already seen this, and they came up blank. You two are new, so now it’s your turn to look comically amazed. Whenever you’re ready.’

He walked on, heading away from Trafalgar Square, up the Strand. I glanced at Trudie, who shrugged and followed him. Whatever she had to tell me, it would clearly have to wait.

We walked almost the full length of the Strand, stopping just short of Aldwych. On the side of the street opposite the Savoy, a little way past the Vaudeville theatre, Gil stopped and waited for us to catch up. He was standing in front of an inconspicuous door jammed into a narrow space between a camping shop and an Italian restaurant. To one side of the door, a glassed-in display cabinet contained nothing but a poster. SUPER-SELF GYM AND FITNESS CENTER, it proclaimed, flaunting the American spelling like a visible link to a far-off land of tans and six-packs. Underneath the gilt-edged words, a sprawl of photos showed exercise bikes, treadmills, a swimming pool, a sauna.

Gil produced a bunch of keys, put one in the lock and turned. As he opened the door, a red light flashed in the darkness beyond and a siren started a two-tone sotto voce complaint. Gil tapped numbers into a keypad just inside the door until the light and noise stopped. Then he flicked some switches and the lights came on, showing a small lobby with another door directly facing us. He crossed the lobby and held the far door open for us.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Over to you.’

Pax and I moved forward in a truncated skirmish line, death-sense awake and receptive, like soldiers advancing across a minefield. The space beyond was just a corridor, but it was much wider than the lobby as well as longer. One wall was a painted frieze on the theme of physically perfect human beings running, jumping, swimming, touching their toes. The other wall was entirely of glass, with darkness beyond. Staring into that fathomless black void, I felt something like dread rising inside me, so suddenly it took me by surprise. I wasn’t scared of the dark: I was scared of how little I knew about that darkness. The unlit room, separated from me by a single thickness of glass, could be as big as a cathedral or as small as a cupboard. What would it feel like to be lost in that darkness? To have no idea how far away from you the walls were?

Beside me, Trudie drew a shuddering breath. Her hand sought mine for a moment, then she seemed to realise what she was doing and lowered it again with a visible effort.

‘Yeah,’ Gil agreed dryly. ‘You’re starting to feel it, aren’t you?’ He hadn’t moved from the threshold; in fact he was standing a little way back from it, which meant that he’d propped the inner door open somehow. The street door too, I noticed. Over his shoulder I saw a night bus roll by, heard the distant hoot of a garbage boat on the Thames.

‘Feel what?’ I demanded.

Gil smirked, or tried to. He had his hands in his pockets, trying for a casual pose, but I could see from their outline that both fists were clenched. ‘Well, you tell me, Castor,’ he said. ‘What are you feeling? The joys of fucking spring?’

Not bothering to answer, I waited him out. After a few moments he gave an impatient toss of the head as if he despaired of me.

‘What have you got here?’ I demanded.

‘I wouldn’t want to prejudice your professional objectivity,’ Gil said, deadpan. ‘Here. Go take a look for yourself.’ He took his right hand out of his pocket and threw something through the air to me. It smacked into my palm with a metal-on-metal clank. The bunch of keys. Gil pointed towards the far end of the corridor. ‘Check out basement level one. The swimming pool area. Pax, you and me will make a circuit of the outside of the building. Then we’ll meet back here and compare notes.’

Well, it was what we’d come here for. But before I moved, I found another bank of light switches and flicked them all on. Neon strips flash-bang-flickered into life in the room beyond the windows. It was an exercise area, reassuring in its complete banality, full of nothing more menacing than ski machines and rowing benches.

Feeling a little stupid, I walked on down the corridor and started to descend the stairs. When I got to the first bend I heard Gil yell something, followed by the sound of footsteps. I looked back as Trudie rounded the turn behind me. She passed me and kept on going, ignoring my questioning glance.

‘I thought you were meant to be doing the outside,’ I said.

‘I told Gil I wanted to get the full picture,’ she muttered. ‘He tried to pull rank and I left him to it. What’s the outside of the building going to tell us?’ I could see from the grim set of her jaw that this place had her as rattled as it had me, but that seemed to make her all the more determined not to show any fear.

Basement one was bigger than the street level – or at least the part of the street level that we’d seen. This was the gym’s reception area, with a counter in the centre of an open space, a quarry-tiled floor, a set of signs pointing away towards AEROBICS, WEIGHT TRAINING, PILATES STUDIO. With the lights blazing and the whole room deserted, it looked more like a stage set than a place in the real world – and thinking of it like that made me wonder whether someone or something was about to make an entrance. The irrational feeling of unease, even of fear, that had stolen over me upstairs came back even more strongly now. I had to fight the urge to look over my shoulder. The sense of threat was palpable. Something brushed faintly against the edges of my awareness, on the wavelength reserved for the dead.

‘There,’ said Trudie, pointing to a sign that read OLYMPIC POOL. Her voice trembled a little. Clearly I wasn’t the only one having a bad time of it down here.

We followed the sign to a double door, where there was a pause while I found the right key. Opening the door released a rush of chlorinated air. We stepped through into a smaller anteroom, with doors on either side bearing the male and female symbols and an open archway straight ahead, darkness beyond. We looked around for light switches but couldn’t find any. Somehow that seemed sinister. Why hide the light switches? What didn’t they want us to see?

Whatever it was, I had the sense that it was directly ahead of us, that what we’d come here to find was only a few steps away, on the other side of the arch. As if to confirm that, I was suddenly aware of the rhythmic slap of water against stone very close by. We’d found the pool.

‘Let’s go back,’ Trudie whispered from just behind me. I shook my head, as much to clear it as to disagree with her. This was absurd. The place was empty, and there was nothing down here to be afraid of. True, it might be haunted, but we were both exorcists. We were well placed to deal with anything that might be waiting beyond that archway.

‘We’ll just . . . take a look,’ I said with an effort. ‘And then we’ll come away.’

‘We won’t see anything,’ Trudie pointed out querulously. ‘It’s too dark.’

I put an end to the discussion by taking ten steps forward, passing under the arch and into the larger space beyond. I was walking on tiles again, hollow echoes rising with each step. A faint phosphorescence in the water showed me the edge of the pool now as my eyes began to adjust to the darkness.

In fact, it wasn’t completely dark. Even though we were below ground level, there was a light well in the centre of the room that must lead up through the centre of the building to the sky far above. Muddy radiance filtered down; seemed to hang in the air in granulated drifts.

But the light from the pool was unconnected to the light that came from above. It was stronger now, more defined, and there were eddies of movement within it. I was aware of two things: the first was that Trudie was standing at my side; the second was that my death-sense, which had been registering faint scrapes and whispers ever since we first came down the stairs, flared up now into a thousand-throated shriek like an air-raid siren.

It froze me in place for a second, and in that second Trudie walked past me to the edge of the pool. Silhouetted against that faint unsteady glow, she stared down into the depths. A strangled cry escaped her mouth. Her knees gave way and she almost fell. Lunging forward to catch her, I saw what she was seeing.

It was only incomprehension that saved me from falling myself. It took a couple of seconds for the movement below me to resolve itself into coherent shapes, and a couple of seconds more for my mind to process those shapes into meaning.

There were people moving around at the bottom of the pool, lots of them. They were visible by their own faint light, like so many Chinese lanterns burning under the water. Some wore armour. Others wore long, pale gowns that left their arms bare. All had sandals on their feet. One carried a short staff like a badge of office, which he brandished emphatically as he talked. And he was talking a lot: to the armoured soldiers, to another man dressed almost identically, to a woman whose long black hair was held back by a comb. They listened respectfully, all eyes on him as he gestured, turned, gestured again.

It was a convocation of ghosts – a caucus, a parliament of the dead – and it was impossible on a great many levels. But why did the sight of it fill me with such dread? Why was it suddenly impossible to draw a breath?

Trudie struggled free from my grip and backed away from the water’s edge, throwing up her hands as though to protect herself against some physical attack. I would have been happy to do the same thing, but I couldn’t move. Darkness was seeping in again from the edges of my vision, bringing with it an incandescent panic that swept away thought, deactivated muscles.

It was coming from above, I realised suddenly. It was hanging in the air over my head, and it was descending: falling around and over me like sand pouring into the lower half of an hourglass, burying me a grain at a time.

I tried to think through the fear, and then I tried to listen through it, which was even harder. This thing, whatever it might be, was dead, and it had an imprint, an essence that I could hear with my death-sense. It was almost drowned out by the screaming of my nerves, but it was there: the suggestion of pattern, of coherent form. If I had my whistle in my hands, I could start to play it. I’d have the beginnings of an exorcism.

Forcing my hands to move, I groped inside my coat, found my whistle on the third try and hauled it out. It slipped from my half-paralysed fingers, but I groped, flailed, caught it again before it fell. I pressed it to my lips and blew a note – a random, forlorn, pointless note, but it was something just to have made a sound. My fingers moved on the stops, and the next note crept a little closer to a place that meant something. I elided it into a phrase, unlovely and shrill.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Trudie’s hands move. Then she raised them in front of her face and the spider’s web of lines stretched out between them was dimly visible in the faint light from the pool. A cat’s cradle. She was working with me, bolstering my patterning with her own. It gave me strength, and the strength became music, still ham-fisted and painful to hear, but elbowing at the fear and pushing it away on one side and then the other. It became possible to think.

‘Castor!’ Trudie panted.

‘I’m with you,’ I snapped, taking my mouth away from the whistle as briefly as I could. ‘Move!’

We backed towards the arch, like two unwary picnickers who’d blundered into a minefield. Trudie wove her hands through forms that looked as though they had names like the two-headed cow and how to sever your thumb, and I supplied the music. I got one last glimpse of the ghosts at the bottom of the pool. Ignoring us, ignoring the pall of dread, they continued their lofty and animated discussion.

With each step we took, the fear lifted a little more. When we reached the archway, the feeling had diluted to the point where it was only a knot in my bowels where previously the knot had taken in my entire body. Trudie shuddered – an involuntary shrug of her whole body, like a dog shaking itself dry after climbing out of a river – then she turned and fled for the stairs. I was a negligible fraction of a second behind her.

But some wordless communication passed between us in the reception area, and we forced ourselves to slow down to walking pace. When we reached the turn of the stairs and ascended back into Gil McClennan’s field of vision, we were walking at something like normal strolling speed. Gil’s face fell. He was obviously hoping for something a lot more dramatic and demeaning. It was a real pleasure to disappoint him.

‘So,’ Gil said. ‘That was Super-Self.’

Perhaps because we hadn’t come screaming back up the stairs with our nerve broken and our trousers fouled, he seemed to feel the need to play it as cool as he possibly could. Leaning against one of the arches at the westernmost end of Covent Garden Market, which was where we’d retreated to, he rolled a cigarette one-handed, stuck it into the corner of his mouth and carried on talking around it as he lit up.

‘It’s a new operation. Just opened last year. The building was offices, previously. And before that it was a haberdasher’s or something, back to when it was first built in around 1901. Nothing out of the ordinary. No ghost stories or unsolved crimes. Nobody died on the premises, as far as we know.’

He exhaled smoke that smelled of menthol and wet socks. Trudie leaned a little back, away from the primary impact area.

‘Some time around the end of May,’ Gil went on, not deigning to notice, ‘the current owners contacted Professor Mulbridge, looking to get the building disinfected. They’d opened six months before that and hit the wall pretty fast. Reasonable volume of sign-ups, but everybody cancelled as soon as they could. No returns, almost no new business. The atmosphere, people said. The place had a really bad vibe.’

‘So?’ Trudie demanded. Our close encounter with the thing in the swimming pool had left her somewhat short on patience.

‘So the professor sent one of her ghost-breakers over. David Franklin. She had better people available, but this didn’t seem like anything particularly difficult or dangerous. The only odd thing about it was that nobody had seen an actual ghost. They just didn’t like the place. It made them feel uneasy.’

‘There are ghosts,’ I pointed out. ‘And uneasy doesn’t come close to describing what we felt down there.’

‘Yeah,’ Gil agreed in a detached tone. ‘It’s getting stronger. Franklin didn’t see any ghosts either, but he felt something, so he did a standard exorcism. Old school retro-me-Sathanas stuff with a bell, a book and a stub of candle. The next thing he knew, he was out on the street, bouncing off the bonnet of a Ford Mondeo. The thing hit back when it was poked – gave him the screaming shits – so he just cut and ran. Didn’t even know what he was doing. He wouldn’t go back after that. When Professor Mulbridge gave him a straight order, he quit: just gave his notice in and walked.’

‘The ghosts,’ I said. ‘When did they turn up?’

Gil scratched his chin. ‘Couple of weeks later. We’d made two more attempts to exorcise it, and they’d both been fiascos. The third man up was Etheridge, and he had to be carried out on a stretcher. You’ve seen what he’s like, right? Well, that’s all new. Before he went down into that basement, he was pretty solid.’

‘Why didn’t you warn us?’ Trudie demanded grimly.

Gil looked away, shrugged, then met Trudie’s gaze again with cool indifference. ‘I was interested in your first impressions, ’ he said. ‘If I’d briefed you, then you’d have seen what I told you to see. This way . . . you saw it cold. With your own eyes. Got a lot more out of it.’

Trudie’s shoulders were tensed and her eyes were narrowed to slits. She still hadn’t come down from the terror-rush, and Gil’s bullshit was rubbing her up all the wrong ways. ‘You lying sonofabitch,’ she snarled. ‘If you were interested in our impressions, you would have fucking asked.’

Gil dropped his half-smoked cigarette and stubbed it out with his heel. ‘So,’ he said, ‘Ms Pax, what were your impressions?’

She actually looked as though she was going to take a swing at him. Fun though that would have been to see, I stepped in to take the heat. For better or worse, I still needed the help that Jenna-Jane’s team could offer me. If they were at each other’s throats, they’d be able to offer me a whole lot less.

‘My impression is that we’re dealing with two separate phenomena,’ I said, steamrollering over whatever Trudie was starting to say. ‘The big scary one, which is invisible, and the ghosts.’

‘Crap,’ said Gil simply. ‘They’re two aspects of the same thing.’

‘Then why weren’t the ghosts in the mix to start with?’

‘Obviously they were. But there are no rules about this stuff. A lot of people can walk right through a ghost without seeing it. We’re dealing with imperfect observers who may or may not be sensitive across the full range.’

‘Yeah, but also we’re dealing with at least three exorcists. You’re telling me an exorcist could walk into a roomful of ghosts and miss them?’

The corner of Gil’s mouth twitched. ‘When they’re on Etheridge’s level? Yeah. I could believe that.’

‘You’re missing the point,’ Trudie said, still glaring at Gil as if she was hoping to gore him to death with her eyeballs. ‘Both of you. You’re saying ghosts as though you know what those things are. But they’re not what they look like. They can’t be.’

That was bothering me too. Something here was way out of whack, in fact, a lot of somethings. Apart from Rosie, nobody had ever seen or raised a ghost from more than a century ago, and the older a ghost was, the less likely it was to manifest as anything that looked remotely human. They lost their shape and their coherence as their memory of themselves, or else the residual energy left over from being alive, slowly and inexorably faded. Again, Rosie was the exception, but her resurrection had taken the sweating, straining best efforts of a dozen exorcists, and she was barely 500 years old. The spirits in the swimming pool were dressed as Roman centurions, Roman legionaries, Roman civilians in togas and sandals. I wasn’t sure exactly when the Roman empire had sold its UK holdings, but on the face of it the ghosts we’d seen had to be getting on for 2,000 years old. That was flat-out impossible.

But Trudie took that as read and went for the other impossibility. ‘Ghosts don’t team up,’ she said between gritted teeth. ‘They can haunt the same place, but they almost never acknowledge each other, even if they died at the same time. Those spirits were talking, interacting: they were replaying something they’d all been involved in. And there are at least a dozen of them. When has that ever happened before?’

‘I’ve never heard of it,’ I agreed. I was thinking of the Stanger ghosts. The three little girls who’d been Charles Stanger’s victims, and Abbie Torrington, whose death had come five decades later. They managed to interact okay, were the best of friends and seemed (allowing for the fact that that they were dead) to be having the time of their lives. But I’d had to intervene to cut them free from their past, from their place, with the help of my tin whistle. And they were young ghosts, in both senses, not beaten down and partially erased by the passage of time, whether pre- or post-mortem.

‘Something about the place,’ I mused. ‘About the history of the place. Maybe it’s got unusual properties. Has anyone researched that angle?’

‘I already told you we pulled the records,’ Gil pointed out with exaggerated patience. ‘All the way back to when the block was built. It was part of a big land-clearance project some time in the 1890s, when they built Aldwych. There used to be a road cutting through from the Strand to the market back then – Wych Street – right around here. But it was a shithole and they knocked it down. So yeah, before it was a building it was a street. A street with kind of a bad rep, but not in any way that would matter to us. It was just thieves’ rookeries, gin dives, that kind of thing.’

‘Do we know what it was like during the Roman occupation? ’ I pondered.

‘Probably harder to get a smoke,’ Gil said. ‘Listen, my brief was to bring you here and show you that thing. I’ve done it. The professor wants to hear your thoughts tomorrow morning at eight. Me, I couldn’t care less. I’m not expecting you to see anything I’ve missed. So unless you want to tell me you’ve cracked this thing, and pour forth your enlightenment on the grateful masses, I’m out of here.’

He gave me a sardonic look. I shrugged, and he nodded, satisfied. He held out his hand.

‘Keys,’ he demanded.

‘I’d like to hold on to them,’ I countered. ‘I think it might be useful to get some measurements. Maybe take another look into that swimming pool.’

Gil’s eyes boggled. I was bullshitting him about going back down to the pool: there was no way I was up for that just yet. But I was serious about wanting to take another look at Super-Self. Probably in daylight though, and probably not alone.

‘I keep the keys,’ Gil said.

‘I’ll give you them back first thing in the morning.’

‘I keep the keys.’

‘It would be really helpful to—’

‘Castor, give me the fucking keys!’

I shrugged and handed them over. ‘Thanks, Gil,’ I said. ‘Don’t let us keep you.’

Still bristling, giving us both a bare nod of acknowledgement, he walked away. I gave him a cheery wave. Trudie looked at me with scorn and exasperation then laughed incredulously as she saw what was sitting between my index and forefinger. It was the key to Super-Self’s front door, which I’d slipped off the ring and palmed, one-handed, as soon as it was clear Gil was going to be awkward.

‘Smooth,’ Trudie said.

‘My middle name.’

We looked at each other. ‘What was this thing you had to tell me?’ I asked.

She gave me an appraising stare. ‘Buy me a drink?’

‘At this hour? Where?’

‘I know a place.’

‘I’m skint.’

‘I’ll spot you a tenner.’

‘Then yeah,’ I allowed. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’

The place that Trudie had in mind was the Bridge that Fell, on Victoria Embankment directly behind the Savoy. It was a hot and cold bar: in other words, an establishment where the living and the dead were equally welcome. Like I said, zombies really shouldn’t eat or drink at all, because they don’t have functioning digestive systems any more and the stuff just sits in their stomachs and rots, hastening the final collapse of their bootstrapped bodies. But some go ahead and do it anyway, and others like Nicky Heath like the smell of booze even when they don’t actually drink it. Bars that take that kind of custom tend to stay open way past midnight, because their daytime trade is virtually non-existent.

We sat in the first-floor bar with a view over the river, in a room that smelled of cheap incense, embalming chemicals and organic decay. Most of the other patrons were zombies, and they were keeping themselves to themselves, nursing half-pints of beer through the watches of the night and dreaming of long-gone glories in the days when their hearts still pumped blood. I wondered as I got the drinks in how the place kept going. DMWs aren’t big spenders, after all. It’s hard for them to hold down a job, and since they can’t legally own property they mostly don’t succeed in taking any of their wealth with them when they die.

I realised the answer as a large party came in – three men and four women – talking in hushed, excited voices and taking photographs of anything that moved. Yeah, of course. The tourist dollar must subsidise a lot of places like this, the same way it did the London theatre.

That thought glanced off something else in my recent memory, something that seemed important but refused to come clear. I left it alone, knowing that chasing it wouldn’t work.

Trudie took her whisky and water out of my hand before I’d even sat down, and emptied a good half of it in a single, prolonged swig. She shuddered as the alcohol went down, shaking her head as if to clear it. ‘Cheers,’ she said belatedly, clinking glasses.

‘Cheers,’ I agreed. ‘Super-Self still in your system?’

‘Yeah. Yours too?’

‘More than somewhat.’

The tourists ambled past our table, saw that we were alive and kept on going. They didn’t bother to take any photos of us.

‘How did you first get into this business?’ Trudie asked.

‘By not being any good at anything else,’ I said. ‘How about you?’

She thought about it for a second before answering. ‘The redemption train,’ she said at last.

‘Which is what, exactly?’

Trudie swirled the liquid in her glass, staring down into it like my mum reading tea leaves. ‘What it sounds like. You try to make up for something bad you’ve done. Balance the books. That’s how a lot of people get into the order. It makes a lot of sense, at first, even though it’s never that easy. Atonement’s got its own built-in logic. But you, Castor . . . you’re a mystery to me.’

‘Yeah?’ I asked. ‘In what way?’

Trudie shook her head. ‘You’ve been through all this shit – Ditko’s possession, the White City Riot, the insanity at the Salisbury – but you never seem to put two and two and two and two and two together.’

‘Meaning . . . ?’

‘Meaning that it’s not just isolated incidents. So why do you pretend it is? “Nothing is at stake.” Do you remember saying that to me? I remember it. It was the night when the Salisbury burned and Asmodeus got free.’

‘The night when you and Gwillam carved me up,’ I reminded her – not to pick a fight, just to keep things clear.

She rolled her eyes. ‘If you like. But my point is that you said it, even when the world was coming to pieces all around us. You’re like some anti-Chicken Licken, running around telling everyone the sky isn’t falling, when you ought to be able to see that it damn well is.’

Some of the things that had happened since that night flashed through my mind like a slide show, things that weren’t on Trudie’s list but made her point, if anything, even stronger.

‘I may have been wrong about the sky,’ I conceded. ‘But if I admit that it might be falling, will you at least consider the possibility that fanatics like Gwillam and Jenna-Jane aren’t doing anything to hold it up?’

Trudie tapped the side of her glass, watched the ripples chase each other from edge to centre and back again. Then she looked up and met my gaze. ‘Doing something is better than doing nothing,’ she said flatly.

‘Is it? So if your bed’s on fire and you’ve got no water, you might as well douse it in petrol?’

‘You know what I mean, Castor.’

‘Yeah, I do. Have you seen what J-J keeps in the cellar yet? If not, take a look. Then we’ll talk some more.’

An uncomfortable silence descended. Trudie finished her drink and I made some serious inroads into mine.

‘You said you had something to tell me about Asmodeus,’ I reminded her. I just wanted to hear her out and get away now. The sense of camaraderie that comes from any shared ordeal had dissipated quickly, and I was feeling the distance that separated us more keenly than ever. I’d been wrong to think there could be any common ground between us.

‘After I left the order . . .’ Trudie began hesitantly. Then she lapsed into silence again. After a moment she stood up. ‘I think maybe I need another drink,’ she muttered and headed for the bar.

It took her a while to get served. Another bunch of guys with flashy cameras had rolled in and there was a logjam at the bar. Two in the morning seemed to be happy hour in this place. When she came back, bringing me another pint of London Pride and herself what looked like a triple whisky, she tried again.

‘I told Father Gwillam that same night – the night when we met – that I was out of the game,’ she said. ‘I was angry at the way I’d been set up. I told him I couldn’t be a part of the order because I couldn’t trust him any more.’

‘How did he take that?’

She laughed ruefully. ‘It didn’t seem to bother him all that much. He certainly didn’t beg me to stay, anyway. And he didn’t apologise. He just said I should think carefully about my decision, because it would be irreversible. Once I left, I couldn’t come back. The Anathemata would strike me from their list retroactively, so I wouldn’t ever have been a part of their operations. I’d be forbidden from contacting anyone in the order or talking about our work, with the implied threat that if I didn’t keep quiet, they could turn my volume down permanently.

‘So . . . I walked. And I thought that would be the end of it. But it wasn’t.’

‘Harder to make the break than you thought?’

Trudie was grim. ‘No, Castor. I said I was through, and I was through. But despite what Father Gwillam said, they weren’t quite through with me. About three weeks later I went back to the hostel where I’d been living. It was more of a barracks, really, for the members of the order, but it looked like an ordinary church hall from the outside. I needed to clear out the last of my stuff, and I’d emailed one of the deacons to say I was coming.’

She scowled into her drink, her hand gripping the stem of the glass tightly enough for the knuckles to show white. ‘I walked into the aftermath of a battle. They’d turned the dormitory into a field hospital. Every bed was occupied, and there were people running around with bandages, tourniquets, buckets. Doctors stitching up wounds. Members of the order – people I knew – screaming or sobbing or shrieking out swear-words. Some of the bodies on the beds weren’t moving. They were dead. And the wounds . . .’ She stared at me. ‘They looked as though they’d been clawed by wild animals or . . . or been dragged along behind a truck, or something.

‘I just stood there in the doorway, staring. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t move. The . . . the smell was worse than anything. Blood, and shit, and sweat, all mixed together.

‘Then someone shoved a bucket and a sponge into my hands, and at least I had something to do. Mopping up the blood, so nobody would slip in it and break their neck. I got stuck in. It was a way of shutting my mind down, so I didn’t have to think about it.

‘I worked for hours. Not just with the bucket. I stitched up a wound too, which is the first time I’ve used a needle and thread since I left seminary school. It was Speight. I think you met him. Something had gashed his arm really badly, from the shoulder down to the elbow. I stitched it up the best way I knew how, while someone else – a man I didn’t know – held his arm still and stopped him from struggling.’

‘Why do this there?’ I demanded. ‘Why not take them to a proper hospital?’

Trudie had a hard time focusing on the question. She was back in that room, in her own vivid memories, breathing in the stink of other people’s pain and terror. ‘I think . . . operational secrecy, mainly,’ she said at last. ‘We’re legal in some ways, but we’re vulnerable in others. It’s a difficult balance to keep, and if . . . if our people had left other people dead . . .’ I nodded and waved her on. I got it. When you’re an excommunicated secret sect fighting an undeclared guerrilla war, sometimes it’s best not to invite too much scrutiny. At the Salisbury the Anathemata had moved openly, but then at the Salisbury there were tower blocks burning and dead people falling out of the sky. The cops had been grateful for all the help they could get. Evidently this operation was different. More like the Abbie Torrington business, in fact, when Gwillam’s lunatics were shooting it out with another secret army in a west London church. That was an unwelcome memory. A prickle of presentiment made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

‘Speight was raving,’ Trudie went on. ‘Feverish. I think his wound was poisoned in some way. They’d shot him full of antibiotics but he was burning up. I wasn’t listening; I was too busy trying to sew up all these loose shreds of flesh into the shape of an arm. But I heard him anyway. Enough to put it together. There’s a group called the Satanist Church of the Americas . . .’

‘I’ve met them,’ I said. ‘Twice.’

Trudie nodded. She knew that, of course. The Anathemata had a file somewhere with Rafi’s name on it, and she’d presumably read it from cover to cover before she ever met me in the flesh. Most of the last three years of my life would be in there.

‘We thought they were defunct,’ she said, sombrely. ‘The man in charge – Anton Fanke – died, and after that there was a schism. They spent a lot of last year fighting among themselves. But from what Speight said, there was a clear winner in that contest. And then the order got word that SCA people were filtering into the UK, in ones and twos. Some of them were travelling on false passports, but we had people in place, watching them. We were able to track them as they started to come together.’

My throat was dry by this time. It wasn’t just the vividness of Trudie’s description, it was the growing certainty that I knew where she was going. ‘How long ago was this?’ I asked tersely.

‘Last weekend. Six days ago. But Father Gwillam was tracking these arrivals for two weeks before that, so the Satanists started to gather in London about a week after Asmodeus broke free.

‘They didn’t come here to see the sights, Castor. They came to perform an invocation of some kind. They’d brought a girl with them: a sacrifice-child, like Abbie Torrington, born and bred to be ritually murdered. But the order was right on top of them, every step of the way. Father Gwillam called down an attack before they could finish the ritual.’

‘The girl,’ I said. ‘Did you—?’

‘Not me,’ Trudie corrected, deadpan. ‘I wasn’t there, remember? But yeah, the order got her out in one piece.’

Remembering Abbie, I bared my teeth. ‘How long is that likely to last?’ I demanded. ‘Gwillam is all about the greater good, isn’t he? He’d kill this kid in a heartbeat if he thought there was any risk the satanists would try again.’

‘That’s just it.’ Trudie tapped the back of my hand with her index finger. It was the first time we’d touched, and the tiny, subtle gesture of intimacy made me start slightly. ‘There isn’t a risk. Not any more. The order took casualties, but we wiped them out: not one of the satanists got out of that room alive. And they put everything into this. Our agents in America raided all their known chapter houses and found nothing. Even the sacrifice farm in Iowa was deserted.’

I tried to get my head round this. So either Asmodeus had contacted his acolytes as soon as he was free, or else they’d known by some other means that he was back in circulation. They’d tried to mount an operation that was a carbon copy of the one they’d pulled off two years ago when Fanke was still alive: to summon the demon out of Rafi’s body by means of an esoterically prepared human sacrifice. And they’d failed.

After that, Asmodeus had murdered Ginny Parris, attacked me, started to stalk Pen. Why? Just out of rage that plan A hadn’t worked? Or was he already working on plan B? I had to ask myself what I was missing, because there was bound to be something. Following the demon’s terrifying corkscrew logic was like trying to figure-skate on the pitching deck of an icebreaker.

Trudie was staring at me as though she was waiting for me to speak. ‘Thanks,’ I said awkwardly. ‘I did need to know about that stuff, and I appreciate you telling me.’

That seemed to exasperate her. ‘Oh you’re very fucking welcome,’ she said, throwing out her hands. The tourists looked across at us from their table, startled at her loud imprecation. When you’re having a cheap holiday in someone else’s death, you don’t expect to hear bad language. ‘Castor,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘whatever you think of me – of my opinions – you have to see that we’re on the same side in this one thing. We were both there. We both helped to set Asmodeus free because somebody else lied to us and tricked us.’

She leaned in closer to me, not for intimacy’s sake this time but because she’d realised she needed to lower her voice. ‘So you feel dirty? Compromised? Played? Well, snap. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I went straight from the Anathemata to the MOU – because there wasn’t anywhere else I could go, if I still wanted to be in this fight. I’m going to do what I came for, which is to put that monster back in its cage. And I’m doing that whether you help me or hinder me or blank me or sabotage me, or whatever the hell you choose to do. But I think if we trust each other we might get further.’

She didn’t wait for an answer this time: she was too angry and too full of the restless energy the memories had stirred up. She downed her second whisky in a single swallow, grabbed her bag and walked, leaving me to it.

She was right, of course. We were both enemy agents, in effect, in the monolithic structure of the MOU, and we’d be a lot more effective if we were prepared to at least watch each other’s backs.

It was a big if, though. It was a very big if.