The Naming of the Beasts

‘Yeah,’ Gil agreed in a detached tone. ‘It’s getting stronger. Franklin didn’t see any ghosts either, but he felt something, so he did a standard exorcism. Old school retro-me-Sathanas stuff with a bell, a book and a stub of candle. The next thing he knew, he was out on the street, bouncing off the bonnet of a Ford Mondeo. The thing hit back when it was poked - gave him the screaming shits - so he just cut and ran. Didn’t even know what he was doing. He wouldn’t go back after that. When Professor Mulbridge gave him a straight order, he quit: just gave his notice in and walked.’

‘The ghosts,’ I said. ‘When did they turn up?’

Gil scratched his chin. ‘Couple of weeks later. We’d made two more attempts to exorcise it, and they’d both been fiascos. The third man up was Etheridge, and he had to be carried out on a stretcher. You’ve seen what he’s like, right? Well, that’s all new. Before he went down into that basement, he was pretty solid.’

‘Why didn’t you warn us?’ Trudie demanded grimly.

Gil looked away, shrugged, then met Trudie’s gaze again with cool indifference. ‘I was interested in your first impressions, ’ he said. ‘If I’d briefed you, then you’d have seen what I told you to see. This way . . . you saw it cold. With your own eyes. Got a lot more out of it.’

Trudie’s shoulders were tensed and her eyes were narrowed to slits. She still hadn’t come down from the terror-rush, and Gil’s bullshit was rubbing her up all the wrong ways. ‘You lying sonofabitch,’ she snarled. ‘If you were interested in our impressions, you would have fucking asked.’

Gil dropped his half-smoked cigarette and stubbed it out with his heel. ‘So,’ he said, ‘Ms Pax, what were your impressions?’

She actually looked as though she was going to take a swing at him. Fun though that would have been to see, I stepped in to take the heat. For better or worse, I still needed the help that Jenna-Jane’s team could offer me. If they were at each other’s throats, they’d be able to offer me a whole lot less.

‘My impression is that we’re dealing with two separate phenomena,’ I said, steamrollering over whatever Trudie was starting to say. ‘The big scary one, which is invisible, and the ghosts.’

‘Crap,’ said Gil simply. ‘They’re two aspects of the same thing.’

‘Then why weren’t the ghosts in the mix to start with?’

‘Obviously they were. But there are no rules about this stuff. A lot of people can walk right through a ghost without seeing it. We’re dealing with imperfect observers who may or may not be sensitive across the full range.’

‘Yeah, but also we’re dealing with at least three exorcists. You’re telling me an exorcist could walk into a roomful of ghosts and miss them?’

The corner of Gil’s mouth twitched. ‘When they’re on Etheridge’s level? Yeah. I could believe that.’

‘You’re missing the point,’ Trudie said, still glaring at Gil as if she was hoping to gore him to death with her eyeballs. ‘Both of you. You’re saying ghosts as though you know what those things are. But they’re not what they look like. They can’t be.’

That was bothering me too. Something here was way out of whack, in fact, a lot of somethings. Apart from Rosie, nobody had ever seen or raised a ghost from more than a century ago, and the older a ghost was, the less likely it was to manifest as anything that looked remotely human. They lost their shape and their coherence as their memory of themselves, or else the residual energy left over from being alive, slowly and inexorably faded. Again, Rosie was the exception, but her resurrection had taken the sweating, straining best efforts of a dozen exorcists, and she was barely 500 years old. The spirits in the swimming pool were dressed as Roman centurions, Roman legionaries, Roman civilians in togas and sandals. I wasn’t sure exactly when the Roman empire had sold its UK holdings, but on the face of it the ghosts we’d seen had to be getting on for 2,000 years old. That was flat-out impossible.

But Trudie took that as read and went for the other impossibility. ‘Ghosts don’t team up,’ she said between gritted teeth. ‘They can haunt the same place, but they almost never acknowledge each other, even if they died at the same time. Those spirits were talking, interacting: they were replaying something they’d all been involved in. And there are at least a dozen of them. When has that ever happened before?’

‘I’ve never heard of it,’ I agreed. I was thinking of the Stanger ghosts. The three little girls who’d been Charles Stanger’s victims, and Abbie Torrington, whose death had come five decades later. They managed to interact okay, were the best of friends and seemed (allowing for the fact that that they were dead) to be having the time of their lives. But I’d had to intervene to cut them free from their past, from their place, with the help of my tin whistle. And they were young ghosts, in both senses, not beaten down and partially erased by the passage of time, whether pre- or post-mortem.