The Naming of the Beasts

‘Ditko only stayed there for a few weeks, didn’t he?’ Sam answered over his shoulder, sounding indifferent. ‘He was stuck in here for years. Got to be a better bet.’ He was combing the floor inch by inch with his fingertips. Trying to get into the game, I scanned the wall before me from floor to ceiling, right to left, then did a quarter-pirouette and started in on the next wall.

The walls were pure white - or rather impure white, disfigured by a million ancient and mercifully unidentifiable stains, but they shone with a silver lustre here and there where the demon had hammered at the plaster hard enough for the undercoat of metal to show through. Asmodeus didn’t like silver. Proximity to silver weakened him and made him sluggish. Enough of it could hurt him, perhaps even kill him, but probably only if you heated it to 961 degrees Celsius and poured it in through the bastard’s ear - which wouldn’t do Rafi a whole lot of good either.

A particularly damaged area of the wall’s surface caught and held my gaze. There were rucks and gouges in the plaster, near-vertical jags where it had come away in narrow strips. Maybe my mental picture was inaccurate. Maybe Asmodeus hadn’t hammered on the walls at all. Maybe he’d attacked them in a different way.

Moving in closer, I traced the line of one of the gouges down to groin level and - unbelievably - hit the jackpot first time. Something pale and slightly curved protruded from the bottom end of the furrow where it tapered slightly to a point. The something was about a quarter of an inch long and shaped like a gibbous moon.

‘Is it okay to touch the focus?’ I asked Sam, who was still genuflecting in the far corner.

He looked up, surprised, responding to the suppressed excitement in my tone. ‘It’s better not to. What have you got?’

I pointed. ‘Rafi’s fingernail. He was clawing at the wall, and he tore it off clean.’

Sam swore loudly, or maybe that was Turk, rejoicing that the game was afoot. He came over to examine the prize, then gave me a ringing slap on the back. ‘You clever bastard, Castor,’ he said. ‘We’re in business.’

He fished the nail out with a pair of tweezers and dropped it into a ziplock bag, both items taken from a small kit in his jacket pocket. Watching this manoeuvre closely, I noticed that he was wearing a Spiro Agnew watch: the punchline to the ancient joke What does Mickey Mouse wear on his wrist? and as far as I knew the only public memorial Richard Nixon’s VP had ever earned.

He took out his mobile, flicked it open, and was instantly immersed in a long technical discussion with Gil McClennan. ‘Fingernail. Yeah. Well there’s no way of telling that, is there, but it was a fucking part of him. About three millimetres wide and eight long. Yeah, exactly. Well there’s nothing else here. The nurse said they incinerated all his clothes after he escaped . . .’

The words washed over me, became abstract sounds as I stopped listening. I was feeling hot, light-headed and more than a little claustrophobic in the ten-by-ten-by-ten cube where my friend had spent three years of his life. I stepped out of the cell into the corridor. It wasn’t much better, but right then I preferred the sour institutional stink and the yells and moans of distressed patients in the middle distance to the oppressive silence and stillness of Rafi’s cell. I breathed in and then out, slowly, releasing a tension I hadn’t felt building.

With immaculate timing, a young girl ran through the solid wall to my left, passed straight through me and kept on going, vanishing into the solid wall to my right. I’m not normally startled by ghosts, but the suddenness of her appearance and the fizz of psychic static as we intersected made me stiffen and shudder. Three more phantom girls streaked past, hot on the tail of the first and not even seeming to notice me as they pelted through me. My hair prickled, the neon tube above my head flickered once, and they were gone. The faintest echo of a giggle hung in the air for a moment, distorting as it faded.

I leaned against the wall, my heart beating fast and my momentary calm well and truly shattered. ‘We already asked,’ Sam’s voice came from inside Rafi’s room. ‘No, they didn’t keep anything . . .’

I knew those ghosts well. Three of them had died more than half a century ago, murdered by the psychopath after whom the Charles Stanger Care Home was named. The fourth - the one in the lead - had only been dead a little more than a year. Abigail Torrington. I’d been hired to find her when she went missing - already deceased - from her parents’ house, but there had been a lot more to that commission than met the eye, and a lot of blood under the bridge before I had the light-bulb moment and introduced dead Abbie to her new posse. The Stanger ghosts had welcomed her with open arms, and she fitted right in here.