The Naming of the Beasts

What was eating Juliet? Over the past couple of years she’d perfected her ‘nobody here but us human beings’ act to the point where you could almost forget what she was and mistake her for just another unfeasibly beautiful woman whose very existence impugned your manhood and left you feeling hollow and worthless. But now she was as bad as when she first came up on the express elevator from Hell, maybe worse. She’d sworn never to take another soul, but tonight I’d felt about three heartbeats away from oblivion. And those eyes . . . This wasn’t the Juliet I knew. And I didn’t like the glow-in-the-dark model one bit.

I was meant to be heading home, that was what I was telling myself. But somehow, without ever making an actual decision, I found myself taking the Northern Line and getting out at Archway. Whittington’s Hospital is a short walk back up Highgate Hill, its new frontage looking cool and suave in white and blue.

Visiting hours must have wrapped up long ago, but nobody challenged me as I walked in off the street. Running the gauntlet of the restless dead for the second time in one day, I made my way to the coma ward. Once there though, I was faced with a locked door. Access to the ward was determined by a buzzer and intercom system - or in my case by waiting until an inattentive nurse came out and walked past me, then catching the door again before it swung closed.

Lisa Probert was in a side ward, by herself. A single bouquet of white lilies stood at the foot of the bed, in a plastic bucket serving as a makeshift vase. She looked worse than I remembered - she’d always been a big, loud-mouthed, sassy kid - unconscious, tied up with tubes and gauze, fed by drips and drained by catheters. She’d already lost enough body mass for it to show. She looked like a bird that had crashed into a kitchen window and fallen half-broken to the ground. On the dark skin below her eyes, which were only three-quarters closed, darker semicircles showed like bruises. Her lips glistened with gelatine, but the skin was dry and cracked just the same.

I sat beside her for a while, listening to her. I can do this with the living as well as the dead: open the doors of perception and catch the spoor of some immaterial essence, a soul or atman or whatever you want to call it, distilled into music. Lisa’s music was a riotous polyphonic jumble. Its strength didn’t depend on the strength of her body, and it didn’t correlate in any direct way with what she was like as a person. It was just there, propagating outward from her at an acute angle to the world we know.

When I had the music fixed in my head, I took out my whistle and started to play it. It sounds stupid, but it’s been known to work. I did it for Juliet once, when she was almost killed in a fight against the demon Moloch, and the tune had given her strength. It’s the summoning, essentially: the first part of an exorcism, when you raise the spirit up and make it attend you. I was calling Lisa back into herself, or trying to. But after ten or fifteen minutes of playing she hadn’t moved and there was no visible difference in her condition.

‘Could you please tell me what you’re doing here.’ The voice yanked me out of the half-trance I sink into when I play. I looked up to see a ruddy-faced man in a white doctor’s coat standing over me. The badge on his chest read DR SULLIVAN. He didn’t look happy.

‘The door was open,’ I lied. ‘I’m Felix Castor. I made the call to the emergency services the night Lisa was brought in here. I think you’ve got me down as next of kin.’

The doctor’s expression changed, but it didn’t soften. ‘Oh,’ he grunted. ‘That’s you, is it? We’ve tried to contact you a dozen times.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve been away.’ It was as good an explanation as any - as good as I felt like giving him, anyway. ‘I understand you want me to sign some permissions.’

‘We did,’ Doctor Sullivan corrected me. ‘But we decided we couldn’t wait any longer. Since Lisa has no living relatives, we were able to have her declared a ward of court. It went through yesterday, in your absence since you didn’t respond to the court summons.’ I remembered the large brown envelope on Pen’s hall table. ‘So there’s nothing more we need from you now, Mr Castor, and your visiting rights are at my discretion. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’

‘I’d prefer to stay a while,’ I said. ‘I’ll stop playing, if that will make a difference.’ What I meant was that I’d hum under my breath. The tin whistle is a conduit for the power and helps to keep it focused, but it’s not an essential part of the process.

‘It won’t,’ said Doctor Sullivan. ‘I’m asking you to leave right now. If you refuse, I’ll call security.’

I weighed up the pros and cons, found that there weren’t any pros. If I pissed this guy off, he could shut me out of here altogether. I had to be meek and mild now if I wanted to come back another time and try this stunt again.

‘Visiting hours,’ I said. ‘When would they be?’