The Naming of the Beasts

Samir seemed disposed to talk on the way to the Tube, and most of his talk consisted of questions. How long had I been on the staff at the MOU? Had I really been part of the team that raised Rosie Crucis? What did I think of Peckham Steiner’s books? Was the London scene any different now than it had been ten years ago?

I fielded most of these queries with grunts and monosyllables. Sam was affable enough, but I really wasn’t in the mood. Since I’d gone to bed the previous night, I’d been stabbed by a demon, patronised by Jenna-Jane and broken back to the rank of poor bloody infantry. On top of all that, being civil seemed like way too much effort.

But in the absence of any input from me, Sam had no trouble keeping up the conversation all by himself. He told me about how the ‘shit’, as he called it, had kicked in for him: how his secondary personality, who he referred to as Turk, had shown himself first in mischievous and even destructive ways - mocking his parents, picking fights with his friends. A posse of psychiatrists had examined Sam, and after flirting briefly with Tourette’s syndrome had converged steadily on a verdict of acute psychosis. Medication of increasing ferocity failed to do anything except make him as dopey as a punched-out prizefighter. ‘I was heading for a rubber room until I saw my first ghost,’ Sam said, laughing as though he found all this genuinely funny now. ‘Then Turk started swearing and catcalling and insulting it. And it just went away. Piecemeal. As though the words blew holes in it. Exorcism by fucking verbal abuse, can you believe that, Castor?’

I said I could. The window wasn’t wide enough to say anything else.

‘My mum and dad wanted me to carry on with the meds, but I was up and out. I’d had enough of that bloody game. And Turk was easier to control now, somehow. It was like he’d found something to occupy himself. He didn’t mouth off at the living any more now he’d found the dead.’ Sam laughed again. ‘So yeah, my superpower is to tell ghosts to fuck off. It’s ridiculous, really. But Professor Mulbridge loves me because I proved a point for her. There were already loads of exorcists who did it with words, but it was always either spells or prayers. She argued that any words would do, because the modality only has to make sense to the person who’s using it.’

The modality, another of Jenna-Jane’s favourite abstract nouns. Maybe it’s easier to have theories about the way it all fits together if you can’t actually do it yourself. Then it occurred to me that this massive theoretical construct that Jenna-Jane had created served the same purpose for her that my tin whistle did for me: it enabled her to touch the invisible world, and bring it within her grasp. For some reason, that insight didn’t make me feel the slightest sense of kinship with her.

At the Stanger Care Home, Dr Webb predictably refused to see us himself, but detailed one of the male nurses to be at our disposal and give us whatever we needed. In the first instance, that meant access to Rafi’s cell.

‘We’re looking for something that was close to him,’ Sam explained. ‘Physically or emotionally, doesn’t matter which - best of all would be something that was both. Some object that he kept with him and thought about a lot. That’s what makes a good focus.’

But there was nothing in Rafi’s cell; there never had been. It was kept as bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard because you never could tell what Asmodeus would take it into his head to use as a weapon. Nothing was safe in his hands, so the only option was to make sure his hands were empty. They were dangerous enough even then.

Sam wasn’t discouraged. ‘There’s always something,’ he said, crawling across the floor on his hands and knees, nose to the ground. ‘It doesn’t have to be big.’

‘What’s the focus for, exactly?’ I asked him.

‘For Trudie,’ he explained - although in fact it explained nothing. ‘She’s got an idea. Well, it’s Gil’s idea, but she picked up on it because it fits in really well with the way she does her exorcisms normally. It’s all about psychic geography. Scrying by sympathies, Gil calls it. It was pretty much theoretical until now, but Pax is sure she can make it work.’

Well, it stood to reason that the two of them would get along, I thought, surprised at how pissed-off that made me feel. I tried to focus on the job in hand. Something close to Rafi. Something he thought about a lot. ‘We could go to Imelda Probert’s house,’ I pointed out. ‘Most of his stuff is there.’ My stomach knotted at the thought. Vivid images strobed in red and black in front of my eyes: Imelda’s torn and broken body sprawled on bare boards, her crushed head resting in the crook of her daughter’s arm. If we did go there, I might not even be able to bring myself to walk inside.