The Naming of the Beasts

5

I just leaned back and waited for a few moments, trying to let that digest, but it sat in my stomach like a rock. The Anathemata. The bastards had screwed up my life every time I’d had the bad luck to run across them. And Rafi’s too. They were even more to blame for Asmodeus than I was: for his being here at all, and for his still being free. This was a sicker joke than the one about the nun and the gorilla.

‘Who are they, Fix?’ Gary demanded. ‘This is only the second time I’ve even heard of them, and both times I’ve had a case taken out of my hands and my arse smacked like I’m a kid trying to raid the sweet jar. Tell me what I’m up against.’

I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it again. Truth to tell, that wasn’t an easy one to answer.

When it comes to the whole faith thing, I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. Growing up in Liverpool in the 70s, I came to the same conclusion that L. Ron Hubbard did in Nebraska fifty years earlier: that anyone can make a religion out of ingredients they probably already have lying around the house. You just take equal parts bullshit, xenophobia and moral outrage, mix well and leave to curdle.

But on one level at least, religion works. Any religion, almost, although I’d probably have to draw the line at the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It’s as though the human soul is an iron filing, and religions are magnetic fields that get all our north and south poles lined up along the same axis. As a consequence, and please don’t ask me why, power flows.

A jobbing exorcist sees it every day of the week, and twice on Sundays. The crucifix, the shield of David, the star and crescent, the Hindu swastika and the Gnostic sun-cross all work as specifics against the undead, as long as they’ve been handled – or better yet, blessed – by somebody who actually believes in them. When Juliet first rose from Hell and tried to love me to death in my own bedroom over at Pen’s, my brother Matthew, who’s a priest, brought me through the worst of the after-effects with prayer and holy water. And the most commonly practised exorcism ritual is still the one the Benedictine monks wrote down in the Abbey of Metten in 1415. It starts with ‘Crux sancta sit mihi lux’ and becomes really hummable with ‘Vade retro, Satana’.

So in some ways, being both an exorcist and an atheist, I’m like a tightrope walker who knows the knots will hold but kind of resents it. And when I come up against religious zealots of any persuasion, I lose the cheerful, easygoing disposition that I’m widely known for and become a surly, intemperate bastard. I mean, everyone has to choose their own poison, obviously – I’m all for freedom of choice. But if you say ‘Praise the Lord’, I’ll be the one who answers ‘Pass the ammunition’.

The Anathemata Curialis, therefore, pushes all my buttons so hard they leave permanent indentations in my spine.

‘They’re a holy order,’ I told Coldwood. ‘They were founded and given their charter by Pope Paul III. The same gent who bankrolled Ignatius Loyola when he set up the Jesuits – you know, “Give me a child until he’s seven, and I’ll give you a brainwashed drone that thinks its name is Harvey Maria.” And he was doing all this in between trying to steal the wheels off the Reformation bandwagon, so he was a busy little bee. Quotable quote: “Of course there’s a God. Martin Luther just had a stroke, didn’t he?”’

I was trying to be concise and factual, but the truth was that venting all this stuff made me feel marginally better. And it was pretty fresh in my memory because I had to look it up the first time Father Gwillam waved his wedding tackle in my face.

‘Pope Paul seemed to feel that the Inquisition had gone soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime,’ I went on. ‘The Anathemata’s scarily open mission statement was to deal with anything that the Church had declared anathema – abomination – and by deal with I mean stop dead. Then a much later pope excommunicated the whole outfit, right down to the factory cat, but not before he’d voted it enough funds to keep it going to the crack of doom. Pretty neat trick, that – adding plausible deniability to the list of Christian virtues.’

Coldwood grunted. ‘If they were closed down,’ he said, ‘what are they doing working my case?’

I shook my head. ‘I never said they were closed down, Gary. The Anathemata still exists. My brother reckons they’ve got more than a thousand people on their payroll. But they’re on silent running now. They’re officially disconnected from the apparatus of the Church. They can’t receive communion, be given the last rites or be buried in hallowed ground. And they eat that shit up, in my opinion. Being all virtuous and irredeemable; chucking over the chance of grace to save the world. They think they’re the scourge of God, fighting the last crusade against the undead.’

‘And you,’ Coldwood interjected.

‘What?’

‘And against you. You seem to get right up their noses, for some reason.’

‘Yeah, well I’d love to think that. But it’s not personal, Gary. Nothing ever is with fanatics. It’s Rafi. It’s always been Rafi.’

Father Thomas Gwillam, the current head of the Anathemata, had known about Rafi Ditko’s demonic passenger right from the start; he’d probably even been tailing Rafi as one of Fanke’s votaries before he ever summoned Asmodeus. He’d considered killing Rafi, but opinions among his own exorcists differed: the death of the human host might kill the demon too, or it might simply set the demon free to be resurrected elsewhere. On the balance of odds, Gwillam had decided to do nothing as long as Rafi was safely locked up at the Charles Stanger Care Home, in a cell lined with silver and with frequent visitations from yours truly to play his inner demon to sleep whenever he got too boisterous.

But once I’d moved Rafi from the Stanger to Imelda’s house, all bets were off. Gwillam had let the dogs out, and eventually they’d run Asmodeus to ground in Peckham, only to fumble the ball so badly that three of their best exorcists found their insides becoming their outsides, while the demon walked out from between them onto the streets of London, and in due course back into the life of Ginny Parris.

I could see where Gwillam might feel he had some sins to atone for. But I didn’t want him paying for them with Rafi’s intestines if there was anything I could do to stop it. And there was the big question, complete with neon lights, fireworks and a bank of laser beams playing across its fifty-foot-tall letters. Was there? Was there anything I could do to head the god-botherers off at the pass?

Coldwood seemed to be brooding on the same question, which was alarming.

‘Forget it, Gary,’ I advised him. ‘You piss these guys off and you’ll spend the rest of your life as a lollipop man on the M25. They don’t play games.’

‘Neither do I,’ Coldwood growled. But it was just something to say. He couldn’t stand up for a second against Gwillam’s heavies and Gwillam’s twisted cunning. I used to think I could, and the mess I was in now just went to show how badly wrong I was.

I finished my cooling coffee in three swigs, put the cup down. Coldwood watched me in silence. ‘So you’re advising me to lie back and think of England?’ he demanded. ‘Is that what you’re planning to do?’

‘I don’t know, Gary,’ I lied. ‘I have no idea what I’m going to do.’

But the idea had already come to me, a whole lot more bitter and harder to swallow than the last dregs of the Maxwell House. When God has abandoned you and the devil is snapping at your heels, what you really need on your side is a bigger devil.

Paddington. St Mary’s Hospital. The Metamorphic Ontology Unit, or MOU for short. I hadn’t been here since the last time Asmodeus tried to break his chains. Life had seemed simpler then, in some ways. You knew who your friends were, even if you could count them on the fingers of a mutilated hand.

Today though, none of that really mattered. Today I was coming here to cosy up to one of my worst enemies.

I lost my way at first, because the place had moved. I went to the old building – the Helen Trabitch Wing, on Praed Street – only to find that it had turned back into a genito-urinary clinic and was filled with a random cross section of Sussex Gardens prostitutes, all cheerfully comparing notes on last night’s slate. A harassed young house officer with a clipboard in his hand and a look of terminal embarrassment on his face directed me around the corner and along South Wharf Road to the Paterson Building, still billed on all the signage as the Department of Psychiatry.

But it was clear as soon as I walked inside that the building had a new tenant. The steel grille across the hall, just inside the street doors, had more of the flavour of a prison than a hospital, and the guy behind the desk was a uniformed flunkey from some private security agency. He was built like a brick mausoleum, and his head seemed to get broader as your glance travelled down from crown to jaw, as though someone had jammed the open end of a tuba over his head and left it there until the bones of his skull conformed to the shape. He bared his teeth as I approached, having been told somewhere down the line to smile at the mug punters when you weren’t actually applying electrodes to their extremities. His teeth were very white and even, and not in any way filed to sharp points or stained with the blood of infants. Probably I was doing the guy a disservice: probably he was kind to children and small animals and his elderly mother, as the Krays were said to be. His uniform was very dark blue, and a single word, DICKS, was printed in grey on a sewn-in label attached to his lapel.

I pointed to it. ‘Is that your name?’ I asked. ‘Or is it a stop-me-and-buy-one kind of deal?’

The guy’s brow furrowed and his mouth quirked down, as though thinking that one out caused him mild pain. ‘Can I help you, sir?’ he said at last, letting the feeble witticism lie where it had fallen. His voice was well down into the bass register, but it had the front-of-the-mouth vowels of South African Dutch. That and his towering build activated a number of stereotypes I carry around with me, most of them centring on bound suspects mysteriously jumping out of fourth-floor windows under police questioning.

‘Felix Castor,’ I said. ‘I’m here to see Professor Mulbridge.’

‘And is she expecting you?’

‘For the last five years,’ I said.

Dicks didn’t press the point, but he seemed to decide that was a no. ‘Can I tell her what it’s regarding?’ he asked, after a slightly strained pause.

‘You can tell her it’s regarding Rafael Ditko.’

The guy nodded and tapped some keys on the small intercom to one side of his desk. ‘What is it, Dicks?’ said a voice – a woman’s voice, but not Jenna-Jane’s. It was a young voice, very precise but with a lilt of some exotic accent to it.

‘A Mister Castor,’ Dicks said. His accent almost made the two words rhyme.

There was a click as the intercom channel was closed at the other end. It stayed closed for a good long time. Then the same voice came on again. ‘You did say Castor? Felix Castor?’

Dicks glanced at me, and I nodded.

‘Yeah. Shall I send him up?’

Another click, and another long pause. This time, when the voice came back, it had a definite edge to it. ‘Absolutely not. We’ll send someone down. Mister Castor gets an escort.’

The line went dead with a short burst of static. Dicks gave me unfriendly look number 23, as taught in the barracks and prison yards of the world. I don’t think he appreciated the implied reprimand in that ‘Absolutely not’. Children and small animals notwithstanding, I seemed to have got off on the wrong foot with Mr Dicks. ‘You see?’ I told him, trying to break the ice with small talk. ‘I’m a VIP.’ He stared at me thoughtfully. It was a look that said louder than words, ‘Sooner or later, I may have to damage you.’

Two more gentlemen cut from the same cloth as Mr Dicks appeared on the other side of the steel grille; in fact they all but goose-stepped up to it, walking side by side in near-perfect synchrony. Dicks pressed a button and there was a metallic clank as the lock released. One of the two newcomers held it open and I stepped through, then the other led the way to the lifts.

The Paterson must have been an architectural treasure once. It’s got really striking porthole windows about three feet wide, in a formal nod to the art deco school, and very high ceilings for a modern building. Right now though, it looked like a bomb site. There was building work going on both on the ground floor, as we stepped into the lift, and on the second floor, where we got off. A small army of men in orange overalls, interspersed with the occasional woman, were stripping panels, laying electrical cable and nailing up plasterboard. The dominant colour was a chill, neutral blue, so evidently Jenna-Jane was remaking the building in her own image.

I hate hospitals, all exorcists do. A lot of people die there, and a significant percentage of them die scared, confused, angry or in desperate pain. Ghosts in various states from new to badly eroded congregate thickly, shouting and begging and sobbing for attention. A psychiatric unit isn’t as bad as, say, a general surgery wing or a terminal ward, but it’s plenty bad enough. I whistled tunelessly as I followed the two uniformed heavies. The tune was a mild stay-not, pushing the ghosts back from my immediate vicinity and giving me some room to breathe.

Jenna-Jane’s office was at an intersection of two corridors. It had probably been a nurses’ station at one time because two adjacent walls of it were solid glass from floor to ceiling, commanding a panoramic view in both directions. Austere white vertical blinds hung over them now, but the blinds were open.

The office was sparsely furnished. There was something monastic about Jenna-Jane’s dedication to her cause. Probably she and Father Gwillam would have found a lot to talk about if they’d ever met, even though her religion of science was the antithesis of his old-school apocalyptic fundamentalism. There was only an antique roll-top desk against one wall, a number of office chairs on castors, a phalanx of five four-drawer filing cabinets in battleship grey, and a bookcase filled with formularies and medical textbooks. Jenna-Jane didn’t read for pleasure. Classical music was a vice she admitted to, but most of her passions were tied up in her work. In tribute to that jealous god, a statuette standing on one of the filing cabinets – a stylised human figure with its back arched, like the Oscar statue yawning and stretching – was inscribed on its wooden base with the words EXCEPTIONAL ACHIEVEMENT IN EMPIRICAL RESEARCH. Josef Mengele probably had one of those on his desk too.

Two other people were in the room, besides Jenna-Jane – a man and a woman – but I didn’t know either of them, and my attention flicked over them to land on the vivid, self-contained figure behind the desk. Jenna-Jane stood, closing the lid of her laptop with an automatic gesture. ‘Felix,’ she said, a warm smile on her face. She held out her hand, and I took it because there was no use straining at gnats considering the camel I’d come here to chow down on. ‘You’re looking really well, as always. And as always, it’s very, very much a pleasure. You find us at sixes and sevens, so you’ll have to excuse us: the move occupies so much of my time right now.’

Jenna-Jane is like one of those trompe l’oeil paintings where you think you’re looking down a long corridor and in fact it’s a solid wall. That’s the only way I know to describe her, because nothing else in nature is so absolutely impenetrable while seeming so entirely wide open. You look at her small frame, her grandmotherly face, her straight, dignified bearing, and you feel an instinctive swell of affection and respect. Unless you know her; in which case the more she smiles the more you find yourself thinking about what happened to the young lady of Riga. She was dressed down today, in blue jeans and a gingham shirt. That degree of homespun camouflage boded bad news for someone, and it was probably going to be me.

I took my hand back, suppressing the urge to count the fingers and make sure they were all still there.

‘This is Karin Gentle, my PA,’ said J-J, indicating the woman, who stood as her name was mentioned. She had a ring-bound reporter’s notebook in her right hand, but she transferred it to her left so we could shake. As we did, she bobbed her head in a subliminal echo of a formal bow. She was Asian, in her mid-twenties, and handsome despite a slightly pockmarked face.

‘It’s a pleasure to meet you,’ she said, confirming my suspicion that it was her voice I’d heard over the intercom. ‘You’re the man who survived the embrace of the succubus Ajulutsikael, and then tamed her. Isn’t that right?’

‘You think she’s tame?’ I asked. ‘I should introduce you.’

It was just a flippant comment, but the Asian woman’s eyes widened. ‘Then it’s true? She stayed on Earth? She went native? I could meet her?’

The eagerness in her stare was unsettling. Maybe she was younger than she looked: no exorcist should be that happy at the thought of tangling with a demon. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ I advised her. She blinked, looking a little hurt.

‘And I believe you know Gil,’ J-J went on smoothly, indicating with a nod of her head the man sitting in the corner of the office. Unlike J-J and Gentle, he didn’t bother to stand. He just looked me over, toe to head and then back down to toe, without finding anything that he liked on either leg of the journey.

I was pretty sure J-J was wrong on that one: I didn’t know the guy. He looked to be a few years younger than me, which put him just over thirty, with a slightly ratty physique, watery blue eyes, and brown hair with oddly placed blond highlights. Something about those blond tufts raised echoes in my mind, but I would have needed a quieter place to hear what they were whispering.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever—’

‘My name is McClennan,’ the guy said. ‘Gilbert McClennan. You knew my uncle.’

I nodded slowly, wondering how to respond to that one. Gabriel McClennan had been the biggest rat’s arse I’d ever had the misfortune of working with. Based in Soho, he’d systematically lied and cheated and stolen his way out of the good graces of the entire ghost-breaking community. We’d never had a whole lot in common, even before I’d accidentally got him killed.

Since then I’d met a McClennan daughter, Dana, and now here was a McClennan nephew. It seemed to bear out my theory that exorcism was a hereditary trait. Too bad it couldn’t have chosen a better field to sow its seeds in.

‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘I knew your uncle. How’s he doing?’

‘He’s dead,’ Gil said. The words were voiced way back in his throat, and he bared his teeth on the final consonant.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I meant since then. Do you keep in touch?’

Gil stared at me hard for a second or two, not saying a word. But I knew the answer in any case, and it was no. Gabe McClennan had run into Juliet back when she was still going by her old name. Physically and spiritually, he’d been chewed up, swallowed down and shat out a long time ago.

‘Gil is a very valued member of our in-house team,’ Jenna-Jane said, gesturing me to a chair as she sat down again herself. ‘Doing your old job, Felix. The job of pontifex and psychopomp. Do you miss it at all? We’d love to have you back.’

The pontifex and psychopomp thing was one of J-J’s favourite lines. They were two of the pope’s official titles: builder of bridges between this world and the next, and chief dispatcher of human souls to their eternal reward. An exorcist wasn’t really either of those things, but pride was always J-J’s besetting sin. If even her servants held the power of life and death, then what did that make her?

‘I don’t have the stomach for that stuff any more,’ I said, knowing as I said it that it was the kind of half-truth that everyone takes to be a lie. But Jenna-Jane nodded as though I’d confirmed a suspicion she already had.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was the moral dimension that made you feel you had to leave us in the first place. Your concerns over our Rosie.’

Our Rosie. She meant Rosie Crucis, the oldest ghost in captivity. But she said it in such an affectionate tone that the horror and cruelty of Rosie’s capture were momentarily occulted by the homely phraseology.

‘You won on that one,’ I reminded her, since I couldn’t say that my feelings on the subject had changed in the years since.

‘Nobody wins when friends quarrel, Felix,’ Jenna-Jane chided me seriously. ‘No, I think it’s true that our work induces a certain . . . narrowness of vision. Inevitably, I’m afraid. Morality reveals itself on the macroscopic scale, but is invisible in the detail work.’

‘I have no idea what that means,’ I said.

‘It means we’re serving the greater good,’ Gil McClennan chipped in, offering his opinion like an apple for the teacher and getting a smile and a nod in return.

‘Yes,’ said J-J. ‘The greatest good. I have something more to say to you on that subject, Felix, but I’d like to let it sit a little while. What was it you wanted to talk to me about?’

The crunch point. Probably better to get it over with quickly, because the longer I sat here the more likely I was to do something irrevocable – possibly involving the EMPIRICAL RESEARCH statuette.

‘Rafi Ditko,’ I said tersely. ‘I think maybe it’s time we collaborated.’

J-J affected surprise, although presumably it was the mention of Rafi’s name that had got me in through the door. She glanced at Gil, who made a non-committal gesture, and then at Gentle, who nodded. ‘I’m familiar with the case, Professor Mulbridge,’ she murmured.

‘Good.’ Jenna-Jane returned her attention to me, looking a little perturbed. ‘If you’ll forgive me for being blunt, Felix,’ she said, ‘Rafael Ditko is the very last subject on which I’d expect us to find common ground.’

J-J sets the bar high, but that was a miracle of understatement even by her standards. We’d been fighting an undeclared war over Rafi for the best part of a year now. I’d only taken him from the Stanger Care Home in the first place to keep him out of her eager, grasping little fingers, and I’d told her more than once that if it came to a choice between shooting Rafi in the head and letting the MOU have him, I’d probably end up having to toss a coin.

It’s funny how your own words come around to drop their pants and moon you sometimes.

‘Yeah,’ I said flatly. ‘Times change. But the common ground was always there, Jenna-Jane. We both want Rafi alive. For different reasons, admittedly, but alive is alive. So I’m prepared to work with you to bring him in, in return for a guarantee that you won’t bow to any outside pressure you might get to pull the plug on him.’

J-J frowned. ‘Outside pressure? You intrigue me, Felix. But tell me, have you ever known me to bow to pressure? From any source?’

I had to admit that I hadn’t. The idea had kind of a whimsical sound to it, like Jack the Ripper holding a door open for a little old lady and saying, ‘No, after you . . .’

Jenna-Jane clasped her hands together under her chin with just the index fingers extended, pressed to her pursed lips. She considered for a few moments in silence while – out of a lack of other viable options – I sat and waited for the wheels to turn.

‘Do you know where Ditko is?’ she asked at last.

‘No,’ I admitted, ‘I don’t. But I bumped into him in Brixton last night and got close enough to touch him.’ I didn’t see any need to explain that it was Asmodeus who’d been doing the touching, and that I was the hunted rather than the hunter in the whole scenario.

‘He’s got nothing to offer us, Professor,’ Gil McClennan said, his voice dripping with contempt. ‘Our teams are close to finding Ditko already. We don’t need Castor to close this net.’

Jenna-Jane closed her eyes momentarily. I sympathised. Just by telling me that she was already looking for Asmodeus, McClennan had weakened her bargaining position. It must be a trial to be surrounded by idiots and yes-men the whole time: it’s a cross that all tyrants have to bear.

‘There might, it’s true, be ways in which we could be helpful to each other,’ Jenna-Jane said, as though Gil hadn’t spoken. ‘But – you’ll forgive me for this, Felix, I’m sure – I remain to be convinced that you’re negotiating in good faith. When we find Mr Ditko, why would you hand him over to me instead of absconding with him yourself – as you absconded once before, when he was confined at the Stanger Care Home.’

‘Nobody knows, Jenna-Jane,’ I said blandly, ‘who was responsible for springing Rafi from the Stanger. It seems to have been a team effort though. Two men and a woman, from what I heard. And as you know, I work alone.’

‘Of course.’ J-J’s smile was cold and tight. ‘Nonetheless, the question stands.’

‘The authorities want Rafi dealt with,’ I said, ‘and they don’t really care how it’s done. They’ve given the Anathemata Curialis total freedom to close the case in any way they like, and that almost certainly means they’ll kill Rafi in the course of destroying or banishing Asmodeus.’

Jenna-Jane considered this for a moment in silence. ‘Go on,’ she said at last.

‘I’ll work with your people. You’ll make the decisions and call the shots. I’ll advise and give you my skills where necessary, and leave you to choose the when and where. You’ll be in control the whole time.’

‘Your skills,’ Gil repeated, with a derisive emphasis.

Jenna-Jane glanced at him momentarily, as though slightly pained by his bluntness. Then she delivered her verdict. ‘I’ll need to think about it,’ she said, opening her palms as though to show how even-handedly she’d do that. ‘Gil, why not give Mr Castor a little tour of our new facilities while I mull his proposal over?’

McClennan looked like he’d swallowed a wasp, but a yes-man has to stick to the script or else retrain as a yes-and-no-man. ‘Very well, Professor,’ he managed. ‘Just the top floors or . . . ?’

‘Everything,’ Jenna-Jane said. ‘We’re publicly audited, Gil. Nothing we do here is a secret.’

Gil crossed to the door and opened it. I lingered for a moment, staring at J-J. ‘I’ll give you my answer when you come back,’ she said.

It was the best I was going to get, obviously. But I had to wonder, as I followed McClennan out through the door, what it was that was preventing her from giving me a straight answer on the spot. As the office door closed, she was deep in murmured consultation with Gentle, who was nodding and scribbling rapidly in her notebook.

Metamorphic ontology, a phrase that’s both resonant and anodyne, hiding itself coyly behind Ancient Greek polysyllables like a coquette peeping out from behind her fan. It means the study of the undead: science’s sheepish and undignified scramble to catch up with recent developments in the afterlife, especially as they impact on this one. Ontology ferrets into the nature of being; metamorphosis is change. Translation: ‘When they’re dead, people change into some bloody scary things. Let’s talk some serious Latin about it.’

Jenna-Jane was the leader in the field, and her MO unit at St Mary’s had been the first to set up anywhere in the world. It had been much copied since, and J-J now ran a lucrative sideline in advising other hospitals on how to do it – what staff and resources they’d need, how many tasers, how many shackles, how many metric tons of therapeutic narcotics, and of course how thick the soundproofing would need to be.

If I sound a bit sour on the whole enterprise, it’s because I was part of it once and I know what it looks like from the inside. Consequently I wasn’t looking forward to this tour at all, but I was going to roll with it anyway, and keep my eyes open the whole way through. Know your enemy, as the saying goes, especially if you’re planning to be friends.

‘This floor is staff offices and admin,’ Gil said sullenly, as we walked back down the corridor towards the lifts and the stairwell.

‘How many exorcists on staff?’ I asked.

‘Thirty.’

I gave a low whistle. In my day it had varied between two and six. J-J had called in extra help when she needed it, but strictly on a jobbing basis. Her budget must be colossal now. I wondered whether any of the permanent staff were people I knew. I hoped not. Maybe they were all McClennans.

We passed a number of offices, all empty. Most were larger than J-J’s and better furnished: it seemed like she was taking her monastic pretensions to new extremes. One of them, squeezed into a corner between the toilets and the water cooler, bore a terse white-on-black sign that read GILBERT MCCLENNAN, VOLUNTEER LIAISON & FIELD COORDINATOR.

‘Liaison?’ I asked, pointing.

Gil shrugged. ‘Rosie,’ he grunted, grimacing slightly. ‘Organising the meat train.’

‘Delicate choice of words.’

‘What do you want me to call it, Castor? She’s burning them out faster and faster. I don’t even know why we keep her around.’

Because she brings in the money, I thought but didn’t say. Because academics come from far and wide to see the fifteenth-century ghost you’ve caught and pressed between two glass slides. And that brings the headlines, and the headlines grease the baking tin. But that was only half the answer. For J-J, the money was only ever a means to an end.

Gil led the way down to the first floor. There was building work going on here too, but not so much. Massive pieces of equipment were being welded to walls and floors in labs that looked like something out of Victor Frankenstein’s wet dreams. I did the sums in my head. The MOU had only had two floors at the Helen Trabitch, and it was a smaller building. This move must have more than doubled the scale of Jenna-Jane’s operation.

‘Analytics,’ Gil said. ‘Technical and lab support. This is where blood and tissue sampling gets done. X-rays. Computer imaging . . .’ We’d come to a door beyond which an autopsy slab stood in the centre of a small bare room, surrounded by shelves of chemicals and porcelain drainage troughs. The tiled floor gleamed whiter than white, and the heady smell of formaldehyde hung in the air. ‘And autopsies,’ said Gil, ‘as required.’

‘Where is everyone?’ I asked. ‘It’s a weekday morning. Shouldn’t this place be humming?’

‘The official move is next week. There’s only a skeleton staff here right now.’

It was such an easy straight line that I didn’t lower myself to touch it.

‘Everything here,’ Gil said, warming up a little now that he was getting the chance to show off all these shiny toys, ‘is dedicated. These facilities only serve the MOU – we’re hands-off to the rest of the hospital.’

‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘God forbid you get your CAT scanner all crowded out with sick people when you’ve got a new werewolf to play with.’

Gil shrugged, indifferent to my sarcasm. ‘We’re healing a deeper sickness, Castor,’ he said. ‘But by all means, you just sit up there on the moral high ground and watch the waters rise. Bring a picnic.’

I almost laughed out loud. It was J-J’s rhetoric, barely changed from the arguments I’d had with her before I walked out of here for what I thought was the last time. The end days were coming. Gwillam would call it Armageddon; J-J would call it a disequilibrum event, but they meant the same thing. The dead would fight the living for the top spot in Earth’s wobbly ecosystem, and it would be a fight that would leave the world we knew looking like New Orleans after Katrina. Laws are silent in times of war, Cicero said; J-J thinks they should shut up for the preliminary heats too. She can’t do her job with all that human rights garbage dinning in her ears.

I turned away from the door, my breakfast churning slowly and queasily in my stomach. Gil hadn’t said anything about the leg and arm restraints, or why they should be needed on an autopsy table. I didn’t bother to ask because I already knew the answer.

Part of the problem was that the law was still running to catch up with the way the world had changed. Vast edifices of legislation had been carved out over centuries to protect the rights of the living. Now we had the dead and the undead to worry about too, and the courts were barely scratching the surface of what that meant. If you died and then came back, either in the flesh or as a ghost, who owned your house, your money, your CD collection? Were you still married to the wife or husband you’d had before? Did you have the right to expect them to welcome you with open arms when you didn’t have a pulse any more? Could you give evidence in court? Maybe finger the guy who’d murdered you, or sue the doctor who’d botched your heart op?

The test cases were being brought, and the questions were being asked in the parliaments of the world. In a few years’ time, there might be all sorts of legal restraints on what someone like Jenna-Jane could get away with. For now, a loup-garou enjoyed all the legal protections that a lab rat does, and a zombie had the same civil rights as roadkill.

We descended to the ground floor. ‘This is mostly therapy and interview suites,’ Gil said.

‘Interrogation rooms,’ I translated.

‘If you like.’

I didn’t. But as we walked along the main drag, my death-sense picked up the faint echo of a familiar tune.

‘We take security pretty seriously,’ Gil was saying. ‘Especially here and in the basement levels. There are alarm pulls in every room and every twenty feet along the corridors. The CCTV hook-ups have a hundred-per-cent overlap, and they’re monitored in real time by a team of three. Or they will be, once we’re up and running. There are weapons lockers on this floor and the one above, equipped with Mace and tasers and pepper sprays.’

‘Who provides the muscle?’ I asked. ‘Does J-J order in? They look like Nazi stormtroopers.’

‘They’re not regular hospital security, if that’s what you mean,’ Gil grunted. ‘Use your sense, Castor. You know what we get coming through here. How long do you think the average retired store detective would last against a loup-garou?’

He had a point, but again I was aware of what he wasn’t saying: that the nature of Jenna-Jane’s work called for more serious and more unscrupulous muscle than a regular security firm would be likely to countenance. Judging from the look of the guys I’d seen at the front desk, they straddled the bruised and tender line that separates private cops from mercenaries.

Gil was still talking – something about the locks and the pass codes – but his words were drowned out as that elusive sense became stronger with each step. Finally I stopped in front of a heavy windowless door with a keypad lock. A sign on the door read NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS, and another, below that, WITH ESCORT ONLY.

Gil walked on, then looked back at me impatiently. ‘What?’ he said.

I pointed at the door. ‘I was thinking I might pop in and say hello,’ I said.

‘To who?’

‘To Rosie Crucis. This is where you’ve got her stashed, isn’t it?’

By way of answer, Gil walked back to join me and tapped the NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS sign with the knuckle of his index finger.

‘So authorise me,’ I suggested.

‘Eat me,’ Gil counter-offered. That sounded like an impasse to me.

We walked on, rounded a few corners and found ourselves in a wider corridor. But the main drag ended in a huge vault-like metal door which at first glance seemed to have more hazchem warnings on it than the staff canteen at Sellafield. At second glance it was obvious that they weren’t hazchem warnings at all; they were wards of the pentagram variety, stamped onto steel, painted in high-contrast colours and riveted to the metal of the door. They were all stay-nots, carrying in a dozen dead languages their many playful variations on the theme ‘One more step and you’re deader than you already were.’

The door had a whole lot of locks too – a keypad like Rosie’s door, a card-scan lock and two high-end ASSA Abloys. Gil unlocked them one by one, then turned to me with his hand on the bare steel pull-bar that the door had by way of a handle.

‘Smell anything?’ he asked me, with a nasty smile on his face.

‘Like what?’ I asked.

‘Well, you were so spot on with Rosie,’ he said, ‘I thought you were going to say something.’ He swung the door open, and it hit me. Not a smell; that was just Gil’s way of saying we were in the presence of the dead, and the undead. From the dark space beyond the door a cacophony the like of which I’d never heard before rose up to assault my death-sense.

I took an involuntary step back, and then another, raising a hand in front of my face as though to ward off a physical assault. After the second step, the corridor wall jostled me in the back and there was nowhere else to go. Swallowing hard, I tried to cope with the madness, while Gil watched me with a certain satisfaction.

‘It takes you that way the first time,’ he said. ‘The second time too. Come and take a look.’

He walked ahead of me into the dark, not bothering to look back to see if I was following. It was a taunt, and a challenge. It cost me a real effort to walk into that space behind him, a bigger effort not to clap my hands to my ears in a futile attempt to block out the sounds that weren’t coming in via my ears at all.

We stood on a metal platform, our footsteps echoing like the thudding of a drum in a space much, much larger than a normal room. It was pitch black until Gil threw a lever on the wall just beside the door, and then a couple of dozen spots came up, stabbing down from above us to illuminate a vast cement-grey bunker.

Gil crossed to a railing, leaned against it nonchalantly and looked out. I followed after a couple of seconds, my head still so full of thunderous dissonance that I could barely isolate Gil’s voice – the only real sound in the psychic tumult.

‘This is all new,’ he said.

Below us was a space like the floor of a vast warehouse, sub-divided not by shelves or storage bins but by multi-storey structures like sturdier versions of the temporary offices that spring up on building sites. These weren’t portakabins though: they were breeze-block ramparts with steel doors but no windows – and the doors were close enough together to give some sense of what the spaces behind them might look like: there’d just about be room to swing a cat, so long as you kept the arc really tight.

Steel steps and walkways connected the blocks, and the spaces in between them – broad corridors with steel-grille floors – were interrupted about every ten feet by chain-link barriers with gates inset. Nobody seemed to be manning these checkpoints, and all the gates were currently open: presumably they slammed shut automatically if one of the cell doors was compromised, to ensure that any occupant who got out of its tomb-with-a-view wouldn’t be able to wander too far.

‘Two hundred and forty cells,’ Gil said, ‘in case you were trying to count. But some of them are two and three-berth. And every single one of them is silver-lined – three hundred thousand square feet of silver sheeting in a one-to-three steel laminate mix that Professor Mulbridge designed personally. You know what that does to the undead and the Hell-kin. This space is actually as large as the entire building. And it didn’t even exist until we acquired the building. That’s how much we’ve got rolling for us now, Castor. You walked out of this operation just as it was getting big.’

The jagged power chords of the dead and undead in their cells below us were still scraping against my nervous system, and my throat dried out in the space of three abortive swallows as I surveyed the bargain-basement Alcatraz. ‘Yeah,’ I croaked. ‘I’m kicking myself.’

Gil turned to look at me with his lip curled.

‘My God,’ he said, ‘why are you still in this business?’

There was no sense wasting any breath answering him.

‘You want to see what we’ve got,’ he asked, ‘or shall we go back upstairs so Professor Mulbridge can fan your face with a damp flannel?’

‘I’m good,’ I said. I turned my back on the screaming room and walked back out through the bunker door into the main corridor. But Gil didn’t follow me, and with the door still open the virtual uproar didn’t stop.

This is the downside of being an exorcist. Our dark-adapted senses let us see an upside-down rainbow where the doubting Thomases see undifferentiated black; but we can’t turn them off. Closing your eyes and covering your ears just doesn’t cut it.

Gil was enjoying my discomfort. He leaned against the doorframe, arms folded, and watched me sweat.

‘The two blocks right at the far end,’ he said, deciding to give me the inventory anyway, ‘are just zombies. Alpha block is decay parameter experiments; Bravo is toxicology. You can poison the DMWs, amazingly, if you get the right mix of shit. Stuff that accelerates cellular breakdown, or attacks the muscles.

‘Charlie through Echo are loup-garous. We run through a lot of them, because the main thrust of the research is incompatibility vectors – ways of forcing the human spirit out of the animal flesh so it reverts to being just an animal. It tends to be irreversible, so every werewolf we get is a non-renewable asset.

‘Foxtrot and Golf are a real circus. We keep all the unclassifieds there. Our resident vampire – if he is a vampire. A few referrals from other departments who’ve got the souls of people they used to know anchored inside them somehow and come here for a ghost-ectomy. Partially transformed loup-garous that got jammed halfway and can’t get in or out. The minor demons we’ve managed to raise.

‘And when we get to Hotel, well fuck . . .’

I walked away, leaving him to slam the door and cycle the locks. That took a while, so I was able to walk all the way up to the second floor by myself, taking my time so that the ringing in my ears had stopped and my pulse rate had returned to normal by the time I got back to Jenna-Jane’s office.

She was alone this time, and busy typing an email, but she looked up and swivelled her chair to face me as I walked in. She gave me another of those smiles. This time I could see the flames of Armageddon behind it.

‘It’s taken a certain amount of arranging,’ she said. ‘Father Gwillam was rather hoping that the MOU’s resources would be at his disposal for the duration of this little skirmish. But I’ve had to disappoint him. My answer is yes, Felix. I’ll work with you on bringing Ditko in.’

‘I changed my mind,’ I answered grimly. ‘Do what you like as far as Gwillam is concerned. Rafi would be better off dead than here.’

‘We won’t keep him here, Castor.’

I blinked. I must still be disoriented from the basement and the full-frontal assault on my death-sense. ‘What?’

‘We’ll return him to the Stanger. Your friend will be safe. We’ll even help you, as far as we can, in removing the demon from him.’

I laughed a little hollowly. ‘J-J, I just saw your zoo, so I know you didn’t turn into Mother Teresa while I wasn’t looking.’

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘This isn’t altruism. We help you, and you help us. I give you Rafael Ditko, and you give me . . .’

She paused as if this was a game of some kind, as if she wanted me to guess.

‘What?’ I demanded.

‘Yourself, Felix. You come and work for me again.’