The Naming of the Beasts

The fire alarm stopped ringing. The abrupt silence was a huge and shocking absence, a vacuum that extinguished all the other screams and yells and moans and bangs the way a wind tunnel sucks the flame from a candle. Soon there was just a single voice screaming, an inhuman ululation of pain and rage and madness.

A moment later the lights came on.

Gil gave me a frantic look, and I nodded, waving him on. In silence now, and more slowly, we rounded the corner of the cell block and found ourselves in yet another wide corridor. Ahead of us stood a pair of locked double doors labelled with NO ADMITTANCE notices that were both large and strident. Gil broke them down with the fire axe and we strode through.

Ten or maybe twenty yards ahead of us, there was one final door. This was where the screaming was coming from. Other sounds from within, voices and footfalls and the clattering of instruments, made it clear that there was a party in progress, and that it hadn’t stopped for the fire drill.

There was a guard on this door too, of course. He shouted out for us to halt, holding his sidewinder out in front of him in an en garde stance. I knocked it aside with a whirling parry, ducked and followed through, driving my own baton into his mouth with explosive force.

The poor sod went down like a sack of potatoes, his jaw in red ruin, and we walked over him into the room. For all I knew, he could have been poor bloody infantry - one of the newbies conscripted by J-J to fill the gaps in her ranks and keep anyone from bugging her while she dismantled Juliet. He might not know the first thing about the people who signed his pay cheque or what was going on a few feet behind him. On the other hand, he presumably wasn’t deaf.

Sometimes it pays to ask the hard questions.

The room we walked into looked more like an operating theatre than anything else. Half a dozen men and women in white coats stood around a very fancy piece of apparatus - a flat surface, eight feet by four, mounted on a series of nested gimbals so that it could be adjusted to any height and any angle. The naked form strapped to it was instantly recognisable as Juliet. Her bone-white skin - right down to the absence of aureoles - and ink-black hair, the catastrophe curves of her impossibly perfect breasts, had haunted my dreams for so long I wasn’t likely to mistake them when I saw them once again in the flesh.

At any other time, seeing Juliet naked would have fused my cerebral hemispheres into unusable slag and left me running on the default systems of animal lust. Now what I felt was very different.

She was twisting and writhing on the table. Tight leather restraints at neck and wrist and ankle held her in place, but from shoulder to coccyx her back rose and fell, filled out like a sail on winds of pure agony.

They were painting Asmodeus’ wards onto her body, but Jenna-Jane loves to push the envelope - to extend her researches into different modalities. They were incising the designs into her skin with scalpels too, and something like a Zeiss engine set up directly over the operating table was projecting a light show of overlaid pentagrams directly onto her bare flesh.

The white-coated figures paused in their work and looked up as we entered, startled and affronted, but the projected images still slid over Juliet’s skin, merging and dividing, and the high, inhuman screaming went on. One of them - not Jenna-Jane - came forward to block our path, all bluster and outrage. He was a little man, about forty or so, with the craggy authority of a senior consultant.

‘This is a restricted area!’ he stormed. ‘You have no right to be here!’

‘Are you right-handed or left-handed?’ I asked him.

‘What?’ he blinked. ‘What do you—’

Odds favoured the right. I remembered reading somewhere that a survey in America didn’t find a single southpaw surgeon. I hit his right elbow with the sidewinder, using a figure-of-eight manoeuvre that Gary Coldwood had shown me once, the one that riot cops use when they want to do some real damage. There was an audible crack as the whip-thin wood connected. The little man gave a hoarse, choking cry. He staggered and fell, folding up around his now-useless arm.

‘Anyone else here interested in practising medicine one-handed? ’ I asked politely.

The white coats retreated from the operating table and from their grisly work in a scared gaggle, like snow geese. All but one: Jenna-Jane pulled down her surgical mask, an affectation I hadn’t even noticed until now, and skirted the table to stand right in front of me.

‘Felix,’ she said, more in sorrow than in anger. ‘And Gilbert too. You’ve both gone mad. The succubus has no rights in law; the man you’ve just assaulted most definitely does. You’ll both go to prison for this.’

‘I’m not looking that far ahead, Professor,’ McClennan said glumly. ‘I don’t think either of us is. You can take this as my letter of resignation, by the way.’

‘One of you untie those restraints,’ I called over Jenna-Jane’s shoulder to the gaggle. ‘Now.’