The Naming of the Beasts

In the lining of the Russian army greatcoat which is my work uniform there’s a sewn-in pocket just big enough to house my tin whistle within easy reach of my left hand. I put my hand in now and drew it out. Putting it to my lips I played a few random notes as place-holders for a tune that didn’t exist yet.

The room darkened around me. The world of flesh and blood and words and meanings went away.

Exorcism is a peculiar way to earn a living. The pay is shit, the hours are appalling, there’s no career structure and the work itself can shade from same old same old to lethally dangerous inside of a heartbeat. But I’ll say this for it: it’s a vocation. To do it at all, you’ve got to be born to it.

It’s got nothing to do with religious faith. If it did, I’d be out of a job because, despite my Catholic upbringing, me and God haven’t been on speaking terms since I was six. It’s just an extra sense, or maybe an extra set of senses. An exorcist knows when the dead are around, and he can reach out and touch them in various ways: specifically, he can bind them and he can banish them.

And the dead are always around. You’ve probably noticed yourself how bad it’s got just lately. Chances are, some time in the last few years you bought a house or rented a flat and found that it was haunted; or else someone you knew clawed their way up out of the grave and decided to renew an old acquaintance; or, God help you, maybe you had a run-in with a loup-garou - werewolf, to use the vernacular - or one of the lesser Hell-kin. In which case, you can be thankful that you’re even alive to read this.

Maybe the huge spike in the supernatural population created its own Darwinian pressures. Or maybe not. It seems just as likely to me that the potentiality for exorcism as an innate skill was always part of the human genome, but most people who had it lived and died without ever finding out that it was there. These days . . . well, you tend to find out pretty fast.

We’ve all got our own ways of doing the job. Some people do it the old-fashioned way, with the traditional props: a bell, a book and a candle, a dagger and a chalice, maybe a bit of an incantation in hacked-up medieval Latin. I’ve even done it that way myself on occasion, but only to impress the mug punters. Any kind of pattern will do to hold a ghost: a sequence of words or sounds, lines on a piece of paper, the movements of a dance, even a hand of playing cards. If you’ve got the knack, you can choose your own tools, your own gimmick. Although in my experience it’s closer to the truth to say that it chooses you.

I do it with music. My second sight is more like second hearing, which means that I experience ghosts, demons and the undead as tunes. With my trusty tin whistle (Clarke’s Original, key of D) I can reproduce the tune, and tangle the ghost up in the music so it can’t get free. When I stop playing, it goes to wherever music goes when it’s not being played. Problem solved. It’s not so straightforward with demons, because they tend to fight back, but that’s the basis of what I do right there: a natural talent that I’ve turned into a steady job.

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.