The Naming of the Beasts

‘Two o’clock until eight o’clock, seven days a week.’ He remained in the doorway of the room, staring in at me. He obviously wasn’t going to leave before I did. He didn’t seem to trust me to find my own way out.

I gave it up, and let him escort me to the door. ‘Is she responding at all?’ I asked him on the way. ‘Has there been any change in her condition?’

‘None,’ he said bluntly.

‘And . . . the prognosis . . . ?’

‘It’s too early to say. There are lots of different physical and psychological mechanisms that can induce this kind of extreme fugue. Until we understand the aetiology of Lisa’s condition, we can only treat the symptoms.’

‘The aetiology? She saw her mother murdered . . .’

‘And that was certainly a factor. Probably the dominant factor. But we can’t assume it’s the only one, and we’re not in the habit of prescribing treatment on the basis of unsupported opinion.’ He went on talking about brain chemistry and traumatic shock, but I’d stopped listening because something had begun niggling at the back of my mind. Since Lisa has no living relatives . . .

I stopped dead in my tracks. ‘Who left the flowers?’ I demanded.

‘What?’ Doctor Sullivan looked mystified.

‘The lilies!’ I didn’t wait for an answer. I was already striding back down the corridor and into the small room where Lisa lay. ‘Mr Castor!’ the doctor yelled at my back. ‘I’m calling security! I’m doing it right now.’

There was a note with the flowers, in a white envelope about three inches square, but since Lisa couldn’t read it, nobody had bothered to open it. It was still tucked into the white ribbon that bound the stems of the flowers together. Lilies. White lilies for the dead.

The card inside the envelope bore a bloody thumbprint and ten words written in a tortured, angular hand so large that they filled the available space and in places overlapped each other.

I haven’t forgotten her. All things in their place.

A

7

I remember a game we used to play as kids at school, a conceptual game which consisted of endless variations on the same question. If it was a choice between doing X or dying, which would you do? X might be buggering a dog, or killing your mum, or pissing in the communion wine. Usually the game started with stuff like that and then veered slowly but inexorably into even more fantastical waters. If it was a choice between having a third eyeball or dying, which would you do? If you were stuck on a tiny rock in the middle of outer space and it was a choice between eating a bucket of cockroaches or starving to death, which would you do? The fun part was comparing answers and picking holes in each other’s code of ethics. We all knew that some things were so bad that dying was preferable, but we didn’t always agree on what they were. You’d be amazed, for example, how many people found the cockroach diet a sticking point. I always said I’d tuck right in. I suspect that when it comes to the crunch, if I can put it that way, most people would.

But here I was, standing on the lonely heights of my own personal moral watershed. And I was frozen like a rabbit in headlights, dazzled by the appalling vista that presented itself on either hand.

Asmodeus had made it clear that he wasn’t going to stop until everyone who knew Rafi was dead. The Anathemata could stop him, I was pretty sure, but they’d kill Rafi in the process - then go to confession, have their sins washed away and go out on the razzle.

Somewhere in the middle was Jenna-Jane Mulbridge. The devil at the crossroads.

The phone rang three times. The static on the line sounded like claws scratching at the bottom of a door: something scrabbling to be let in, or out.

Jenna-Jane picked up on the fourth ring. ‘Hello?’

‘I’m calling your bluff,’ I said.

‘Felix!’ That same tone of simple and sincere delight that she always used whenever I was dragged kicking and thrashing back into her life. ‘You left so suddenly this afternoon, I was afraid I’d offended you.’

It was a tempting phrase, just hanging there in the crackling void. But there was no point taking the cheap shots, not if I was dining from the à la carte menu. ‘You’ve been after Asmodeus for years,’ I said. ‘We do it my way, and I promise you, you’ll get him. Yes or no. Which is it going to be?’

‘That’s not something you can guarantee, Felix,’ Jenna-Jane chided me, using another tone I knew well from times past - the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger one. ‘From my point of view, you’re asking me to divert a lot of the resources of my department into a hunt that might not bear any fruit at all. I’m asking you, in return, to shore up those resources by offering me your own professional services - not in the longer term, but just while this operation is in progress. Just until we have Asmodeus under restraint.’