The Naming of the Beasts Read online

  The word ‘steady’ in that sentence was meant as sarcasm.

  The first part of an exorcism is the summoning, where you make a connection with the ghost and call it to you, but before you can even do that, you’ve got to learn its nature, its unique this-ness, so you know what it is you’re calling to. A general invitation usually doesn’t work.

  I sat to one side of the dead woman, just outside the wide circle of spilled blood, and played a halting, broken-backed tune that was more like a question than a command. I was fishing: sending out feelers through the heights and depths of some vast volume that wasn’t air or water or even space, an infinity that fitted comfortably into this pokey little rented room.

  Nothing. My hook was out there, but nothing bit.

  It wasn’t that there was nothing there. Any building that’s more than a few years old develops a sort of emotional patina, a set of resonances that an exorcist will pick up at once if he opens himself to it. There were plenty of echoes in this room: the joys and sorrows and bumps and grinds of ordinary existence lingering in the air, in the brickwork, like the unstilled vibrations of a sound that had passed outside the range of human hearing.

  But the ghost of Ginny Parris refused to come on down.

  She was there. On some level, in some form, I was aware of a presence in the room. Diffuse and weak and scattered, it hung in the ether like Morse code, discontinuous but replete with meaning: a dot of misery here, a dash of fear and confusion there, and way over here an incongruous flash-silence-flash of hope. I went on playing, a little encouraged. Normally this stage of the game is kind of a cumulative thing. You start off slow, with only the barest sense of the ghost’s presence, but you zero in on it with your talent, with whatever interface you use to make your talent work for you. You describe and define and delimit it, bring it in closer, sharpen the signal. It can come fast or it can come slow, but sooner or later you reach a tipping point where it becomes inevitable. The pattern of the ghost is imprinted on your mind, and after that it can’t get away from you. You can make it come to you, bind it to your will. You can question it, and it has to answer you if it’s able. Or you can make it go away and never come back.

  That wasn’t what was happening here, though; if anything, this was the exact opposite. The sense of Ginny’s presence got weaker rather than stronger: those vestigial traces effaced themselves more and more, faded away gradually and inexorably, until it seemed like it was only the music that was keeping them there at all.

  I kept on playing. Typically, by this time, the random notes would have modulated into a recognisable tune. But they didn’t. They remained fragmented and formless, just as she was.

  I suddenly had the terrifying conviction that a piece of Ginny Parris was clinging to the lifeline of my tune to keep from tumbling off into the abyss of whatever-comes-next. So I kept the lifeline going for as long as I could, feeling her getting further and further away from me in some direction that doesn’t really have a name. It was a strain now to maintain that contact. I felt a trickle of sweat on my forehead, and my heart was racing.

  I played her until she was gone.

  And in her absence, in the spaces through which her soul had trickled away, I sensed a second presence. It was even fainter than hers had been, but for very different reasons.

  Dogs hunt in packs, bark their lungs out and stink the place up like a roomful of wet carpets. Cats hunt alone, in silence; crouch low to let no silhouette show above the skyline; bury their droppings so the prey won’t know where they’ve been hunting. The scariest predators are the ones you don’t see until their jaws snap shut on your throat, and so it is too with the predators of the spirit world.

  I sat in the silent room, breathing in the stench of death, and waited for my heartbeat to slow back to a sustainable seventy-some beats a minute. It took a long time.

  When I felt up to it, I climbed to my feet and went to the door. There was no sign of Gary on the narrow landing or in the stairwell, but a copper at the bottom of the stairs, by the street door, had obviously been briefed to give him a shout when I surfaced. He looked out into the street and called something that I didn’t hear.

  Gary appeared shortly after and came up to join me. ‘What did you get?’ he asked bluntly. Then before I could answer he raised a hand to shush me, fished in his pocket and came up with a digital voice recorder - an Olympus DS-50, his favourite toy from last year. He clicked the record button, held it to his mouth like a telephone. ‘Witness name is Felix Castor,’ he said. ‘Time . . .’ consulting his watch ‘. . . 1.17 a.m. Place, flat 3C, 129 Cadogan Terrace, SW2. Witness - a practising exorcist - was called in by investigating officer in CI capacity.’

  He held the recorder out in my direction.

  ‘Talk me through it, Castor.’

  ‘You can forget your loup-garou hypothesis,’ I muttered, pushing the device away again.

  Gary’s interest quickened. He shot me a stare that would have cost him plenty at the poker table.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘She didn’t answer the summoning. There were . . . pieces of her all over the place, but they didn’t add up to anything. She hadn’t just been killed, she’d been shredded.’

  Gary’s eyes flicked involuntarily to the corpse.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said impatiently. ‘Not her body, Gary. Her soul. Whatever killed her got her soul as well. It was a demon. She was killed by a demon.’

  Even a couple of years ago, if I’d told him that, he would have laughed in my face. Now he took it calmly, too calmly in fact. He seemed almost to have been expecting it.

  ‘Did you pick up anything else?’ he asked.

  ‘She didn’t die quickly,’ I said. ‘Or at least . . . she did, in the end, obviously. But the thing was in here with her for a while before that. She had long enough to go through a lot of different emotions. At one point, I reckon . . . she thought it might let her live. I don’t know why that would be.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Gary. ‘I do. Maybe.’

  He turned the tape recorder off and put it back in his pocket.

  ‘Something you’re not telling me,’ I said. It was a statement, not a question. This whole situation was screaming set-up at me in three-part harmony.

  ‘Yeah,’ Gary admitted. ‘The other reason why I came to you with this. I mean, you’re not really on the books any more, and your friend Juliet has it all over you in the eye-candy department. But I think this one’s yours, Fix.’

  I waited, but he didn’t seem in any hurry to spit it out.

  ‘Well?’ I demanded. ‘What?’

  ‘The name didn’t mean anything to you?’

  ‘Ginny,’ I murmured. ‘Ginny Parris.’ Maybe it did at that. The memory wouldn’t come clear, but alarm bells started to ring, way down in my subconscious.

  ‘Not her real name. Birth certificate has Jane, but she liked to call herself Guinevere. When that wouldn’t fly, she shortened it to Ginny.’

  My heart took a ride down to my stomach, in the express elevator.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ I said. ‘She was . . .’

  Gary waited for a few seconds in case I finished the sentence myself. When I didn’t, he finished it for me. ‘Yeah,’ he confirmed. ‘Rafi Ditko’s old girlfriend.’

  2

  I went to pieces for a while back there. It wasn’t pretty.

  It began about three months ago, after the demon Asmodeus, wearing my friend Rafi’s body, broke out of the bespoke prison cell I’d run up for him at the house of the Ice-Maker, Imelda Probert, killing Imelda herself and three other people along the way, and walked out into the world to see what was new.

  That was enough of a catastrophe in itself: Imelda left a teenaged daughter, Lisa, who as far as I knew had no other living relatives. Asmodeus was a monster, and his tenancy of Rafi’s flesh was an abomination. And demons being demons, I had to assume that those first four murders were only a foretaste of things to come. But what made the whole thing infinitely worse was that it was m
ostly my fault.

  Okay, it wasn’t me who had freed Asmodeus from captivity. The honours for that fiasco went to a little-known and technically excommunicate Catholic sect known as the Anathemata and their priest-slash-general Thomas Gwillam. Gwillam wanted to exorcise Asmodeus, but the people he put on that work detail weren’t up to it. They went in half-cocked, got themselves cut to pieces, and in the process freed the demon from the psychic straitjacket I’d put him in.

  But I was the reason he was there in the first place: I’d taken him to Peckham, to Imelda’s house, from the Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill, in a desperate attempt to keep him from falling into even worse hands. I was also the reason why he was strong enough to get free and fight back, because I’d allowed him to feed on part of another demon. It had all seemed to make sense at the time: feeding Asmodeus had set a young boy free from a possession that would eventually have killed him.

  But then the Anathemata had stuck their oar in, everything had gone to Hell in a hand basket, and Imelda had died.

  I honestly didn’t give a tinker’s fuck about Gwillam’s three exorcists. Like Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, they’d made love to their employment, and they’d only got what they’d been asking for. But Imelda . . .

  Christ Jesus and all his angels. Imelda.

  ‘Don’t make me regret this,’ she’d said when she finally gave in to my undignified begging and let me land Rafi on her. And then when I suggested waking Asmodeus to let him feed on one of his homeys, she was horrified and enraged. She’d only agreed because she loved her own kid so much, and she couldn’t stand by and watch someone else’s kid dragged down to Hell when she had it in her power to do something about it.

  I drew up the plan of attack. I led the charge. She was the Light Brigade and I was Lord fucking Cardigan.

  So yeah. I took it hard. And yeah, I suppose I took the coward’s road.

  I stayed with Imelda’s daughter, Lisa, until the ambulance arrived. She hadn’t said a word the whole time; just sat with her mother’s head in her lap, rocking her back and forth as though she was asleep. The only time she showed any animation at all was when the paramedics tried to separate her from the blood-boltered corpse. Even then, she didn’t fight them or cry or swear at them; she just held on tightly to Imelda’s chest, forcing them to pry her fingers loose one by one. And after that she stopped moving altogether.

  I watched the ambulance go.

  Then I found an off-licence, bought a bottle of whatever whisky came readiest to hand, took it to one of the wooden benches at Elephant and Castle and drank it dry.

  My memories of the days and weeks that followed are a little patchy, but I know that that bottle was only the first of many. I would have taken other drugs, probably, if any had been kicking around, but booze has always been my sledgehammer of choice when I want to throw a tarp over the day and pass out fast.

  Only now it wasn’t just a day I wanted to blot out. I wanted to forget I’d ever been born. I wanted to erase Felix Castor and rewind. Someone else might do a better job of taking up the space he used to occupy.

  So I did my best to turn my brain into half-congealed soup, but in spite of my best efforts, a few scraps of sense input from that time manage to stand out fairly distinctly.

  I remember being carried home one night by my good friend Juliet - who, being a succubus, didn’t even break a sweat - and propped up against the door like a sack of coal. She would have taken me all the way to my bed, I’m sure, except that my landlady, Pen, doesn’t allow her in the house: Pen has a ‘no succubi’ rule that’s fairly strict.

  I remember Pen standing in the doorway of my room, cursing me out. ‘You selfish, self-pitying bastard!’ she was saying. ‘He’s out there. He’s out there on the streets right now, and all you’re doing about it is lying here in your own vomit! Well fuck you, Fix! I’ll find him myself, if you won’t help.’

  I remember crawling on my hands and knees on the floor of my room, groping under my bed for a bottle that had fallen and rolled. When I found it, most of the contents had spilled out. Heartbroken from the loss, I cried. Then drank what was left in a single gulp, and coughed and hacked and wheezed for five minutes because the neck of the bottle had attracted enough dust and fluff to choke a horse.

  I remember being called to the hospital to talk about Lisa’s condition. I’d given myself as next of kin because I didn’t know any other name to put down. So I had to go, wishing all the while that I’d given the paramedics a false name and address. She was still completely unresponsive, and the doctors wanted to know if she had any history of catatonia or neural disorders. They also wanted me to sign a shit-load of papers. I started in blithely enough, until my eyes came briefly into focus and I realised what some of the consent forms were for. Anti-psychotics. Electroshock. Surgical interventions. I fled, pursued by shouted assurances that most of the permissions were ‘just in case’.

  I remember sitting in a car park late at night, my back up against the rear tyre of a truck, playing my whistle. I was trying to reproduce a note I’d never heard before. Something totally new: an ostinato that had sneaked its way into the world without my noticing, and that only my legless, almost mindless state was allowing me to hear right then. As I moved my fingers to half-block the stops and hit painfully elided semitones, ribbons of nearly invisible nothingness like the ghosts of tapeworms drifted past me and through me, seeking the music as though it was a form of sustenance.

  I remember lying with my cheek pressed against cold stone, thinking with something like relief that it might all be over at last. This might be a mortuary slab that I was sprawled out on. But it wasn’t. It was just another stinking, sticky pavement strewn with broken glass, just another station of the booze-hound’s cross.

  Alcohol is a curious thing: an arcane and complex thing that opens up its mysteries to you in successive layers. At the very heart of its cruelty, there’s a dark and terrible compassion, which is this: after it’s poisoned you, you can take it as medicine. You can get into a cycle where you’re drinking to carry your body through the pains and wrenches of withdrawal, and in the short term it actually works.

  I rode that horse for a while. Then I fell off it and it trampled me. Then it pissed on me as I lay in the gutter.

  Coming back was slow, and at first almost accidental. I woke up in my lightless room, stewed in my own sweat and feeling like someone had magically transformed my tongue into a size-10 army boot. I was on fire with the ague of chemical need, alternately too hot and too cold inside my skin, on which salamanders were crawling with hooked claws, and snakes with rasping scales.

  I couldn’t find the light switch, couldn’t even remember the layout of my own room. I staggered to the bathroom in the dark, filled the bath with cold water and fell into it, fully clothed. Well, the clothes smelled like they needed a wash in any case, so it counted as economy of effort.

  By the time the sun came up, I’d ridden out the worst of the shakes. I stood up on wobbly legs, stripped the sodden clothes from my body and washed properly. Shaving was harder, because my hands were still about as steady as the plastic mule in the game of Buckaroo, but I persevered.

  I staggered downstairs about an hour later, wearing a pair of clean underpants that I’d providentially found down the back of a radiator and one of Pen’s 200 or so T-shirts with Celtic knot designs on them. On the table in the hall there was a stack of mail for me, including a brown envelope in legal quarto size which had come recorded delivery and had bad news written all over it. I ignored it for now. First things first.

  I rehydrated myself with a couple of litres of water, and zapped my nervous system with about the same amount of strong black coffee. I still felt like the walking dead, but I’m not prejudiced: some of my best friends belong to that fraternity. And at least my brain was starting to work again.

  The first thing it did was play me back those few snippets of memory, like answerphone messages. The worrying one was Pen saying, ‘I’ll find him
myself.’ I needed to have a word with her about that, but she wasn’t in her basement sitting room when I went down there to check.

  The rats were, though, prowling restlessly round their rat-habitat. So were the ravens, Edgar and Arthur, one of them sitting on an actual perch, the other on Pen’s computer monitor. They clacked their beaks when I entered, and Arthur cawed intimidatingly.

  I make a point of feeding the ravens whenever I see them, because it doesn’t make sense to piss off birds whose beaks are strong enough to open tin cans, but it’s occurred to me recently that I’m only making a Pavlovian connection in their minds between Castor and food which may one day come back to bite me in the arse, either figuratively or literally. I took some frozen liver from Pen’s fridge, thawed it out in the microwave and split it between the two of them. They fell on it like a pair of blood-crazed maniacs. It looked like they hadn’t been fed in a while. To be on the safe side, I fed the rats too. Then I went upstairs and fed myself, saved from the agonies of indecision by the fact that the kitchen was empty except for a tin of baked beans and a packet of Ryvita crackers. Well, okay, there was a half-finished bottle of Janneau Armagnac too, but I made myself look away. I didn’t want to go on another bender until I was sure Pen was okay.

  So I fixed myself some weight-conscious beans on toast and ate them slowly with Radio 4 playing in the background. That told me what day of the week it was and who was prime minister; the fine detail I could fill in for myself later.

  In the meantime, that bottle of brandy was still making indecent suggestions to me from the kitchen. I decided to get some distance from it before I found myself in a compromising situation.