The Naming of the Beasts

16

I could feel it long before I reached the stairs. The fear-thing was awake and feasting. It was almost like a taste in the air, a hot metal tang that stung the back of my throat and made my eyes start to water. More to the point, it made me want to run and hide. I had to force myself to keep walking into that solid wall of terror. Every step was like the moment when you launch yourself off a diving board for the first time as a kid – when you come to the edge and almost can’t make your body do something that stupid and hazardous.

I gripped the smooth-sided box in my pocket, reminding myself that I was armed and dangerous. I wasn’t the hunted here, I was the hunter, and this bloated spider, sitting in the dark in its invisible web, was going to learn that not all flies are created equal.

But all that macho talk flew out of my head when I got to the top of the stairs and saw two more of Gil McClennan’s exorcists trying to crawl up them to safety. The fly analogy came back into my head full force, because that was what they looked like: dying flies, crawling blindly, trying to escape the poison that was killing them and failing because it was already inside them.

I don’t know where the idea came from. I had slowed almost to a halt, fighting so hard against the instinct to turn on my heel and flee that my muscles were starting to lock. Walking down those stairs one at a time was going to be like climbing Everest without oxygen. So I just let my legs stop dead, which was what they wanted more than anything else to do, and leaned far out over that gulf of poisoned air.

There’s an art to falling without being hurt: you have to tuck your head and arms in, concentrate your weight, and lean into the fall so that it turns into a controlled roll. I didn’t do any of those things, because my mind was screaming and squalling inside my skull like a cat in a box as it got closer and closer to the epicentre of this psychic storm front.

At the bottom of the stairs, I climbed doggedly to my feet again. There were more bodies here, some of them moving, some of them not. I took one step forward, then another. Close enough. It would have to be close enough because a third step was beyond me.

My arms jerking and twitching like the detached legs of one of Signor Galvani’s frogs, I fought to get the box out of my pocket. This was my sheet anchor, my ace in the hole, my grail. This would show the thing in the darkness who was boss.

I pressed the tiny toggle switch, and threw the box end over end towards the gaping doors that led to the changing rooms and the swimming pool beyond. It rolled, clattered, came to a halt.

And nothing happened.

Caldessa hadn’t wound the keys.

I made a mewling sound in the back of my throat. I’d thrown the box a good ten feet. To get it back, I’d have to walk ten feet toward the pool, ten feet into that storm of terror.

But looking on the bright side, my trip-hammering heart would probably explode before I’d covered half that distance.

I tried the falling down thing again, but this time it didn’t work. I just sank to my knees without moving an inch further forward. I couldn’t even throw myself flat on the ground. My body was rebelling one joint at a time, closing shop.

Ironically, it was Juliet who gave me the strength to move. The image of her rose suddenly in my mind, as she’d looked when we’d stood here the night before. Perhaps it was because this overmastering, hectoring, screaming fear was like the equally devastating, hectoring lust that she inspired. I used the one as a bulwark against the other, raising my libido as a battered sleazy shield against the slings and arrows of outrageous, pants-wetting, heart-stopping dread.

On hands and knees I shuffled inch by inch towards the box, across the no-man’s-land of my own fractured personality. When my fingers closed on it, it felt like the climax to a lifetime’s questing. And then the closing of the switch was like another lifetime, and the winding of the keys an etiolated eternity of running in a lonely place.

The last, tiny, desolate nub of Felix Castor thought, Now eat this, you little fucker, as I threw the switch again.

The mechanism inside the box whirred and clicked into action, and a tinny, hollow tune filled the room. Actually, to call it a tune was far too generous; it was a wayward sequence of notes that bounced and bucked and sprawled gracelessly out onto the tainted air. But, my God, what a dying fall it had. And how perfectly, how suddenly, the fear-thing stopped its own game to listen to mine.

The summoning is only the first part of an exorcism, but it’s the most important. Shut up and listen to me, it says. Heel, Fido, and don’t move another fucking inch until I tell you to. It was the part I’d never managed to get right for Asmodeus, despite all the years of trying. For this monster, by contrast, it had come almost at once. The trick was getting the tune out there when my own frozen heart was faltering in my chest and the lights were going out all over Europe.

Like all music boxes, this one mangled the tune, turning it into a stylised, flattened parody of itself. That didn’t seem to matter though. Like Noël Coward said, it’s amazing how potent cheap music can be. The pressure in the air lifted, and my heart came down from DEFCON 2 to something more sustainable. I drew in a tremulous breath, feeling as though vast curtains of rotting muslin were being hauled up on all sides of me.

The fear-thing was in trouble, which was gratifying to know. What’s harder to explain is how I knew it. There was nothing to see, and less and less to feel. The sense of it – the way the invisible monstrosity impinged on the radar of my death-sense – turned on some notional ectoplasmic axis, and diminished as it turned.

It turned to face the music box. As the notes of the summoning tumbled out into the dark, the fear-thing’s own attack faltered and died. It obeyed the summons. Overlaid and gathered in on itself in pleats and rucks of dimensionless emotion, it was pulled into the box like the endless scarves and ribbons that a conjuror folds into the palm of his hand before spreading his fingers to show that the hand is empty.

After a minute or so, I found I was able to stand. I closed the switch on the music box, killing the tune in the middle of a phrase. I waited, tense, for a moment or two, in case the fear-thing broke free again now that the music had stopped. What I’d played hadn’t been a full exorcism, only a summoning. But the orders seemed to stand. As in the game of musical chairs, the entity was staying where it had been when the music stopped, its focus swapped from the swimming pool to the box. More importantly, cut off from the ghosts in the pool and the skein of old emotions it had woven there, it seemed to be quiescent now – dormant, at least for the time being.

I turned on all the lights and checked out the three people closest to hand, making sure they were all still breathing. One of them had blood trickling down her face from a deep gash in her forehead, but none of them had suffered in the way Devani had. Post-traumatic stress aside, they’d all recover from this.

Once I went through into the pool though – taking the music box with me – I could see that not everyone was going to be so lucky. Two of McClennan’s exorcists were lying face down in the pool, and a third was sprawled at the edge of it with his head at a crazy angle that suggested a broken neck. The remaining stalwarts of the Jenna-Jane Irregulars – more than a dozen of them – were scattered around the room twitching and moaning and writhing. I remembered news footage I’d seen of the aftermath of a suicide bombing. There were no detached limbs here, but in other ways it was pretty close.

Gil McClennan had led from the front, I’ll say that much for him. He was in the pool too: not one of the floaters, but up to his chest at the far end, holding onto another man who had obviously collapsed against him. He was keeping the guy’s head out of the water with a loose armlock around his neck, although his own eyes were so wide I could see white all around the pupils. He was shouting incoherent phrases – exhortations to his team, maybe, or fragments of prayer. Whatever they were, they’d kept him alive and upright through the maelstrom. Now he was starting to retreat towards the pool’s edge.

I walked around to join him, and helped him manhandle the other man – who was profoundly unconscious – up out of the water. After a moment’s hesitation I gave Gil a hand up too. It seemed petty to keep up old enmities when we’d just survived death by blind panic.

McClennan got slowly to his feet, using the wall for support and then turning to lean his back against it when he was fully upright. His chest was working hard, but he was getting his breath back and starting to come down from the fear-high. He threw me a look, curious and slightly bitter.

‘What did you do?’ he demanded.

I’d stowed the music box back in my pocket by this time. As far as I was concerned, Gil was one end of an open mike that led straight back to Jenna-Jane, and there was no way I wanted her to know about this before I’d had time to think through the implications.

‘Why do you care?’ I asked him. ‘It’s gone. And the credit’s all yours. I was never here.’

‘The credit?’ He laughed incredulously. ‘The credit? Look at what’s left of my team!’ He came away from the wall. ‘I’ve got to get some ambulances over here,’ he muttered. He walked past me down the side of the pool but turned before he was out of earshot. ‘You think I wanted this?’ he demanded, his voice trembling slightly.

I shrugged. ‘You could have said no,’ I pointed out.

‘She doesn’t let you say no.’

‘That’s down to you.’

McClennan laughed again. It sounded even harsher than the first time. He seemed about to say something else, but whatever it was he locked it down and turned away.

I put my hand in my pocket, checking that the box was still there and unchanged. It was an involuntary reflex. A box full of Gader’el demon seemed to be identical in every way that mattered to a box full of nothing. It didn’t hum or rattle or throb with ectoplasmic energy. It didn’t even weigh any more than it had.

I’d pushed my modality to the limit, and a little bit over. I’d made the music play for me when I couldn’t play it myself, and somehow the link had held. Whatever power I tapped when I put the whistle to my lips still allowed itself to be accessed in this clumsy, second-hand and mechanical way.

What did that mean? What else could I do if I set my mind to it? I had to think about this, and soon.

But before that I had to call Trudie and make sure she was okay.

And I had to do something about Asmodeus. I had some inkling of what he was doing now, but not why he was doing it. I either had to figure it out for myself or get someone else on the case, fast. ‘I’m pretty much done here now,’ he’d said. ‘Got all the ducks in a row.’ I had a suspicion bordering on certainty that his plans were in their final phase, and I knew now who they revolved around.

I followed McClennan back through the anteroom to the reception area. He was checking his people, trying to make one of them sit up and talk to him, and I left him to it. Battlefield triage isn’t my strong suit.

Upstairs, the ambulances had already arrived, far too quickly for them to have responded to any call from Gil. Samir Devani was being loaded into one of them by two paramedics, an oxygen mask over his bloodied face. A third man was walking alongside, holding a saline drip that had already been attached to Samir’s arm.

In the midst of the ambulances, incongruous, a storm crow among doves, stood a black limousine. Its rear door was open, and Jenna-Jane Mulbridge stood beside it in a light raincoat, overseeing operations with a calm and slightly distant expression.

She turned and saw me as I approached, acknowledging me with a nod. ‘I’m glad you were able to lend a hand after all, Felix,’ she said. ‘Gilbert appears to have over-stretched his own resources rather badly.’

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ I answered. ‘Another would be to say that he led the lambs to the slaughter exactly like you told him.’

Jenna-Jane shrugged. ‘All’s well that ends well.’

‘How do you know it’s even over?’ I demanded.

She glanced towards the limo behind her. It had other occupants, who I could just about make out through the open door: the security man Dicks, now acting as chauffeur, and in the back seat, Gentle, who Jenna-Jane had introduced as her PA.

‘I didn’t commit my whole strength to this one exercise, ’ Jenna-Jane said. ‘That would be very poor strategy, Felix, even if we didn’t know that Asmodeus was still out there. Gentle tells me that the haunting here has now entirely ceased.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘We won.’ I looked past her to where more of the injured from downstairs were being loaded into the waiting ambulances. ‘Let’s see if any of these poor sods want to join us in a cheer.’

Jenna-Jane was in a good mood and refused to take offence, or maybe she just realised that letting my sarcasm wash over her would be the best way of winding me up. ‘You’ve been missing for most of the day,’ she said, ‘and not answering your phone. I gather the search for Asmodeus’ underground route was unsuccessful.’

‘It was until an hour ago,’ I corrected her. ‘The Holborn underpass – the part that was never reopened. He’s got a little hideaway tucked in at the south end that you should probably take a look at. But don’t go in half-cocked, because it’s a dead end. He almost killed me and Pax when he cornered us there.’

Jenna-Jane raised her eyebrows. ‘You should have called me before you went in,’ she said.

‘Before I went in, it was only a hunch. And then when we found the place, things kind of got away from us.’

‘Things?’

‘Asmodeus cornering us in the dark,’ I elaborated. ‘And then having to pull McClennan’s irons out of the fire over here. I told you to wait, J-J.’

‘Do you know what comes to him who waits, Felix?’ Jenna-Jane asked. ‘Other people’s leavings.’

‘Then you agree I was right to go in without you.’

She chuckled and wagged a finger at me, as though slapping her in the face with her own logic was just my little joke. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ll be very careful. Thank you for all your hard work on this, Felix. And for sharing intelligence, as we agreed. I’ll go and look at this place, if you think it’s worthwhile, although I assume we’ll be unlikely to succeed in setting an ambush there now. Where is Pax? Downstairs? Perhaps she can be my guide.’

‘She was hurt when we fought the demon,’ I said, ‘and I got a passing civilian to drive her to a hospital. I’m going to go see how she’s doing.’

‘Then leave a message for me at the unit. Let the switchboard know where you are, and I’ll join you when I can.’ She cast a sombre look at the open doorway of Super-Self, from which another pair of stretcher bearers was just emerging. ‘Poor Gilbert. I think he’ll take this hard.’

I called Sue Book’s house, and got the answerphone: Sue Book’s voice, sweetly inviting me to leave a message. I explained what we’d found, tersely and probably inadequately, and asked her to call me as soon as she could. Trudie didn’t pick up when I rang either, which was a lot less surprising: I called Nicky and got him to hack into the hospital databases. A patient listed as T. Pax had been admitted to the A & E unit at University College Hospital on Grafton Way, which was only a mile and a half away.

And since I already had Nicky’s ear, I dropped the bombshell about what we’d found in the underpass. ‘You can add some names to your list,’ I said. ‘Alongside Tlallik, Ket and Jetaniul.’

‘Yeah? Shoot.’ Nicky tried to keep his tone neutral but couldn’t quite manage it. It niggled him that he hadn’t managed to solve this one yet; it was going to piss him off royally when he found out I’d got to the answer first.

‘Tsukelit,’ I said. ‘Ilalliel. Aketsulitur. Notice a pattern?’

‘Not so much.’

‘Think about Juliet, Nicky.’

‘You think these names all belong to succubi?’

‘No, I think they all belong to her.’

There was dead silence at the other end of the line.

‘I would’ve seen it sooner,’ I went on, ‘except that I’m an arrogant sod, and the first ward I found was at Pen’s place, not at Juliet’s. I’d forgotten about Juliet bringing me home after one of my drunks. Asmodeus probably put them everywhere he thought she might turn up, including your place. I’ll bet there are a couple taped to the underside of her car. A few more spread around Willesden Green Library. In her sock drawer, maybe. I don’t know. There could be hundreds of the fucking things.’

Still no answer from Nicky’s end of the line, which probably meant he was thinking.

‘You remember the passage you showed me back when Gabriel first raised her up?’ I reminded him. ‘“She is of Baphomet the sister, and the youngest of her line, though puissant still and not easily to be taken with words or symbols of art. But with silver will you bind her and with her name, anagrammatised, appease her.” You explained that to me. Every name she takes on Earth – including Juliet Salazar – is a subset of the sounds or symbols that make up her real name. I think Asmodeus has been invoking Juliet by all her old, cast-off names. That’s why Foivel Grazimir had Tlallik down as a dead number. It was a name she wasn’t using any more, even way back then.’

‘Holy mother of fuck,’ Nicky intoned, his voice dropping to the limit of audibility as he forgot to breathe.

‘So what I’m asking you now is why anyone would want to do that? What’s he planning? Can one demon bind another demon? Get me some answers, Nicky, before this blows up in my face even worse than it already has. And get a message through to Juliet, somehow. I’ve dialled her a couple of times, but nobody’s picking up. She needs to know about all this shit.’

‘I’m onto it.’ For once Nicky didn’t carp or haggle about terms. His pride was on the line here, and he was only too keen to make a start. He hung up on me without another word.

When I got to the hospital, they stonewalled me. A nurse explained that Trudie was already under anaesthetic and about to go into theatre. The damage not just to the bone but to the muscle of her shoulder was spectacular. They were going to try to sew her back together before any of the tissue started to necrotise.

I called the MOU, as Jenna-Jane had suggested, to tell them where I was. Then I sat and waited for news. I called Pen too, but there was still no answer from her house – or her mobile. Both she and Sue were probably asleep by now. I left a message on her voicemail, asking her to call me, but I thought it was likely I’d get home before she got the message.

I dozed intermittently while I waited, recharging my batteries slightly. They seemed to need it. The last three days felt like a waking dream, shot through with hallucinatory moments. My three encounters with Asmodeus ran together in my mind, so that they seemed like just the one conversation, interspersed with pregnant pauses while the two of us played a prolonged game of hide-and-seek across the face of the city. I’d found him, but that didn’t feel like much of a victory, not now I knew he’d been working on Juliet the whole time, driving her crazy for reasons I couldn’t even begin to guess.

At 4.00 a.m. I was woken up by my own phone ringing. It was Jenna-Jane.

‘Felix, this is remarkable,’ she said. ‘You saw the sigils in the demon’s lair?’

‘I couldn’t take my eyes off them, J-J,’ I said, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.

‘Are you aware of what they represent?’

‘Yeah. Are you?’

‘They’re steganographic homonyms. They all denote the same entity. It appears to be the succubus who is referred to in late-medieval grimoires as Ajulutsikael.’

‘Yeah. That was my conclusion too.’

‘Which means that Asmodeus is trying to summon her simultaneously in multiple aspects or incarnations.’ She paused as if she expected me to say something. When I didn’t, she went on with sardonic emphasis. ‘Despite the fast that she’s already been definitively summoned.’

I’d never been sure exactly how much Jenna-Jane knew about Juliet. She’d sounded me out on a few occasions in a way that made me think she was fishing for more information based on guesswork or rumour. I sure as Hell wasn’t going to play join-the-dots for her now.

‘Multiple aspects?’ I mused.

‘Each name would correspond to a stage of the demon’s life cycle,’ Jenna-Jane went on, her tone heavy and resigned, as though she was letting me off the hook for now. ‘One theory is that they change their names in much the same way that insects moult: sloughing off old traits and aspects, redefining and reshaping themselves through the morphic power of a new name. That’s why necromancers use the demon’s name to summon and command it. Castor, if you know anything more than you’ve told me about this, now would be a very good time to put your cards on the table.’

‘I don’t know anything,’ I lied.

‘About a succubus passing for human?’

‘There’s always talk,’ I admitted. ‘Mostly you stop believing in that stuff after you hit puberty.’

A pause on the other end of the line, then Jenna-Jane’s voice again. ‘Where are you now?’

‘I’m still in town, but I’m probably not going to be here much longer. I’m just waiting to hear how Pax is.’

‘Very well. Another early meeting, I think.’

I responded to that with a profanity. I’d had enough of turning out of bed at dawn to present myself at J-J’s door. ‘I’ll call you in the morning,’ I offered by way of compromise and hung up.

I took a stroll around the hospital’s ground floor, found a coffee machine that actually worked and – more surprisingly – enough coins in my greatcoat’s many pockets to make it work. Sipping the rat’s piss that passed for black unsweetened, I made my way back to the A & E waiting room. The nurse I’d met earlier was waiting for me there.

Trudie was out of surgery and awake, she told me. The surgery had seemed to go well, but it was too early to tell whether or not there’d be any lasting loss of function in the right arm and hand. I could talk to Trudie if I wanted, but only for a few minutes and only if I promised to keep it low key. I agreed docilely and was led to a ward, where Trudie lay on one of a dozen beds, her upper body propped up nearly vertical. She was shockingly pale, and her expression slack and drained. She roused when she saw me though, and twitched her left hand in a feeble wave. Her right arm was swathed in thick bandages, and her neck was in a cast.

‘How’s it hanging, Pax?’ I asked, trying for a tone of brusque camaraderie.

‘By a thread,’ she murmured. ‘Can’t feel my fucking fingers, Castor. They’re still there, right?’

I looked down. ‘They look to be,’ I reported. ‘You want me to count?’

She shook her head weakly, her eyes bright with unshed tears. ‘Can’t do it one-handed,’ she said in the same low monotone. ‘I’m useless if I don’t get it back.’

The fingers of her left hand flickered, manipulating a loop of string that wasn’t there. Of course, she meant the the cat’s cradles: the way she touched the spirit world and worked her will on it. If she didn’t get the full use of her right arm and hand back, she’d be crippled in more ways than one.

‘You’ll be fine as soon as the anaesthetic wears off,’ I promised – a guarantee with nothing to back it except my overdrawn account at the bank of optimism. I only said it to offer her a crumb of comfort, and I could see from her face that she took no comfort from it at all.

‘What happened at Super-Self?’ she asked me.

By way of answer, I took the music box out of my pocket and held it out to her. She took it in her good hand and stared at it for a few seconds, at first without seeming to realise what it was. Then she got the feel of the thing in her death-sense and swore softly.

‘You caught it,’ she said, awed even through the drug haze. ‘In a fucking box.’

‘Yeah. I did. I was thinking of tossing it in the Thames, but I may not even have to. Being separated from the Super-Self ghosts seems to have made it switch itself off. There hasn’t been a peep out of it.’

‘Throw it away anyway,’ Trudie advised me. ‘You don’t want to be around it when it wakes up.’

I took it back and returned it to my pocket. ‘What I want even less than that is for Jenna-Jane to get wind of it,’ I said. ‘It’s a neat trick, but for the time being I want it to be our little secret. Deal?’

Trudie shrugged, and then winced because her wrecked shoulder made shrugging a hazardous proposition. ‘If you say so, Castor,’ she grunted. ‘I suppose I’m lucky you confided in me. You seem to see all other exorcists as the enemy.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I don’t see the dead as the enemy. If the MOU find out you can trap ghosts in boxes, that’s going to be a bad day for ghosts.’

‘But you’re alive, so what do you care?’

‘I’m alive,’ I agreed, ‘but I’m planning to be dead one day. You think I want to spend eternity in an afterlife made out of plywood and screws?’

‘Castor, you’re a hopeless case!’ Trudie was getting exasperated, and her raised voice brought the nurse at a run to remove the source of the irritation. ‘You know how many dead people there are to every one living person? And how many people die in any given day? If this does come to a fight, we’re going to need all the help we can get.’

‘If it comes to a fight, Trudie, we’ve lost.’

The nurse manhandled me unceremoniously toward the door.

‘You can’t believe that, Castor,’ Trudie implored me, her face twisted in almost visceral dismay. ‘You can’t.’

‘It’s just a matter of time,’ I said. ‘Living versus dead? Sooner or later, we all defect to the other side.’

The door slammed in my face.

I walked home, just as I had on the night of Ginny Parris’s murder, mulling all this stuff over in my mind. Maybe Trudie was right about me. I did seem to be pretty comfortable in the company of the dead, and the undead, and the never born. Was I a traitor to the living? A fifth columnist in an undeclared war? Could I really be the only one who saw how self-defeating that concept was?

I was still kicking those thoughts around in my head when I turned into Pen’s road and saw a deeply unwelcome sight. Parked in front of her door, a hundred yards away, was the same black limousine I’d seen outside Super-Self.

Jenna-Jane had decided not to wait for that early-morning conference call.

With a sinking heart, I trudged toward that mortal rendezvous. But when I was close enough to see the house itself, that dejection was washed away in an instant by a rush of pure panic.

The ground-floor window was smashed, and the upright piano that had once belonged to Pen’s grandmother was lying at a crazy angle on the lawn, with a gaping rent in its polished wooden frame and its peg-and-string intestines spilled out onto the grass.

I ran up the path to the door. Dicks was standing in the hall. He made to block me, which could have had unfortunate consequences for both of us, but as I clenched my fists and lowered my head a voice from inside the house called, ‘Let him come, Dicks!’ He stood aside with bad grace, at the last moment, and glared at me as I passed.

Jenna-Jane was at the head of the stairs that led down into the basement. She gave me a look of profound commiseration.

‘Where are they?’ I demanded, my mouth so dry I could hardly get the words out. ‘Where are they?’

‘Felix,’ she said gently, ‘if you’d only listened to me at the outset—’

Without waiting to hear how that one finished, I ran on down the stairs. Pen’s basement looked as though a pack of hyenas had come through in a steam train, stopped to party a little, and then moved on. Every piece of furniture had been smashed to matchwood. Broken glass crunched underfoot, and the rich, bitter-sweet reek of spilled brandy was everywhere. The computer had been driven into the TV – an ancient behemoth – hard enough to leave the two buckled plastic casings inextricably crushed together, each partially embedded in the other so they looked like lovers in the midst of a French kiss that had got way out of hand.

Amidst the wreckage of the desk lay something like a shot-silk scarf, its glittering black flecked and crossed with deep red. It was Edgar the raven, twisted and broken and casually thrown aside. There was no sign of Arthur.

Jenna-Jane’s assistant, Gentle, was rummaging through the debris with an intent frown on her face. ‘The question I’m asking myself,’ she remarked without looking up, ‘is why the wards kept him out for so long.’

‘Are you seriously that stupid?’ I spat out, harshly enough to make her look up in surprise. ‘They didn’t. They didn’t keep him out for one blind fucking second.’

You know why the lion limps?

So gormless gazelles will think they’re safe, and come on down to the waterhole.

Then you can pick the luckless little fuckers off whenever you’ve a mind to.