The Naming of the Beasts

She was there. On some level, in some form, I was aware of a presence in the room. Diffuse and weak and scattered, it hung in the ether like Morse code, discontinuous but replete with meaning: a dot of misery here, a dash of fear and confusion there, and way over here an incongruous flash-silence-flash of hope. I went on playing, a little encouraged. Normally this stage of the game is kind of a cumulative thing. You start off slow, with only the barest sense of the ghost’s presence, but you zero in on it with your talent, with whatever interface you use to make your talent work for you. You describe and define and delimit it, bring it in closer, sharpen the signal. It can come fast or it can come slow, but sooner or later you reach a tipping point where it becomes inevitable. The pattern of the ghost is imprinted on your mind, and after that it can’t get away from you. You can make it come to you, bind it to your will. You can question it, and it has to answer you if it’s able. Or you can make it go away and never come back.

That wasn’t what was happening here, though; if anything, this was the exact opposite. The sense of Ginny’s presence got weaker rather than stronger: those vestigial traces effaced themselves more and more, faded away gradually and inexorably, until it seemed like it was only the music that was keeping them there at all.

I kept on playing. Typically, by this time, the random notes would have modulated into a recognisable tune. But they didn’t. They remained fragmented and formless, just as she was.

I suddenly had the terrifying conviction that a piece of Ginny Parris was clinging to the lifeline of my tune to keep from tumbling off into the abyss of whatever-comes-next. So I kept the lifeline going for as long as I could, feeling her getting further and further away from me in some direction that doesn’t really have a name. It was a strain now to maintain that contact. I felt a trickle of sweat on my forehead, and my heart was racing.

I played her until she was gone.

And in her absence, in the spaces through which her soul had trickled away, I sensed a second presence. It was even fainter than hers had been, but for very different reasons.

Dogs hunt in packs, bark their lungs out and stink the place up like a roomful of wet carpets. Cats hunt alone, in silence; crouch low to let no silhouette show above the skyline; bury their droppings so the prey won’t know where they’ve been hunting. The scariest predators are the ones you don’t see until their jaws snap shut on your throat, and so it is too with the predators of the spirit world.

I sat in the silent room, breathing in the stench of death, and waited for my heartbeat to slow back to a sustainable seventy-some beats a minute. It took a long time.

When I felt up to it, I climbed to my feet and went to the door. There was no sign of Gary on the narrow landing or in the stairwell, but a copper at the bottom of the stairs, by the street door, had obviously been briefed to give him a shout when I surfaced. He looked out into the street and called something that I didn’t hear.

Gary appeared shortly after and came up to join me. ‘What did you get?’ he asked bluntly. Then before I could answer he raised a hand to shush me, fished in his pocket and came up with a digital voice recorder - an Olympus DS-50, his favourite toy from last year. He clicked the record button, held it to his mouth like a telephone. ‘Witness name is Felix Castor,’ he said. ‘Time . . .’ consulting his watch ‘. . . 1.17 a.m. Place, flat 3C, 129 Cadogan Terrace, SW2. Witness - a practising exorcist - was called in by investigating officer in CI capacity.’

He held the recorder out in my direction.

‘Talk me through it, Castor.’

‘You can forget your loup-garou hypothesis,’ I muttered, pushing the device away again.

Gary’s interest quickened. He shot me a stare that would have cost him plenty at the poker table.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘She didn’t answer the summoning. There were . . . pieces of her all over the place, but they didn’t add up to anything. She hadn’t just been killed, she’d been shredded.’

Gary’s eyes flicked involuntarily to the corpse.

‘Fuck,’ I said impatiently. ‘Not her body, Gary. Her soul. Whatever killed her got her soul as well. It was a demon. She was killed by a demon.’

Even a couple of years ago, if I’d told him that, he would have laughed in my face. Now he took it calmly, too calmly in fact. He seemed almost to have been expecting it.

‘Did you pick up anything else?’ he asked.

‘She didn’t die quickly,’ I said. ‘Or at least . . . she did, in the end, obviously. But the thing was in here with her for a while before that. She had long enough to go through a lot of different emotions. At one point, I reckon . . . she thought it might let her live. I don’t know why that would be.’

‘Yeah,’ said Gary. ‘I do. Maybe.’

He turned the tape recorder off and put it back in his pocket.