The Naming of the Beasts

‘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.