The Naming of the Beasts

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.

17

‘The names build,’ said Gentle. ‘One syllable at a time.’

She had rough-and-ready photo printouts of the wards we’d found underground, laid out on the table in front of her. Her hand went from one photo to the next, and she pronounced each name as she pointed to it, slowly, like a primary school teacher mouthing kuh-ah-tuh.

‘Ket. Tlallik. Tsukelit. Illaliel. Jetaniul. Aketsulitur. Ajulutsikael.’

‘Illaliel and Jetaniul are the same length,’ Jenna-Jane pointed out.

Gentle shrugged. ‘The same length to us, but if you elide the medial “i” in either word there could be a difference that our ears don’t register.’

It was an hour and a half later, and we hadn’t moved. Well, that wasn’t strictly true: we’d relocated to the first floor, where there was a room that was still more or less intact. The furniture was under dust covers, the ornaments wrapped in plastic bags hailing from defunct supermarket chains like Gateway and Victor Value. Nobody had set foot in this room since Pen’s mother died.

My first instinct had been to go back to Asmodeus’ underground lair and storm the place, but Jenna-Jane said her people had it staked out and he hadn’t shown there. There was no way of knowing where he was. We couldn’t even use Trudie’s map. She’d torn it to pieces before she left the MOU, and in any case she was out of action for now, maybe for good.