The Naming of the Beasts

‘My Lord, Felix, you look exhausted!’ Jenna-Jane’s face was the picture of concern. Maybe someone had hung the picture a little crooked; the effect was subtle enough that you had to look twice to see it.

‘Long night,’ I said, stating the obvious.

‘And productive, I hope.’ J-J was standing, I was sitting, which gave the meeting the flavour of an interrogation, even though she hadn’t asked me any questions yet. Slowly and deliberately, she pulled the cords that angled the slatted blinds to their closed position. She had to lean over Gil McClennan to do it, because the cords were in the corner where he was sitting. She treated him as part of the furniture, which to be fair was probably nothing personal. I was sure it was how she thought of all of us deep down.

‘You don’t mind if Gil sits in, do you?’ she asked me belatedly. ‘His experiences of the Super-Self entity will make a useful double check against yours, assuming’ - a momentary hesitation - ‘you’re able to take us beyond what we know already.’

It was the next morning, although for me it was continuous with the night before. I was contending not just with physical tiredness but also with a lingering feeling of disconnectedness which had hung over me ever since I walked into the pool area at Super-Self. At some point during the day I was going to have to find or make the time to crash, if only for half an hour. I’d probably wake up more exhausted than ever, but I’d be back in the real world, not floating a few feet above it.

‘What do you know already?’ I asked Jenna-Jane. The best defence is sometimes a pre-emptive strike, but it was her game and her rules. There was no way she’d ever play with an open hand. She didn’t even bother to answer; McClennan did it for her.

‘Everyone on my team has already filed a report on this. We’re here to listen to yours.’

I shrugged, giving it up. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Start with the obvious. It’s not what it looks like.’

Gil sneered nastily, and Jenna-Jane favoured me with an austere frown. ‘It’s an apparition, Felix, with no physical substance. It can be perceived by the naked eye but fails to register on any recording medium and is opaque to every other human sense. Surely by its very nature, it is exactly what it looks like.’

‘So a layman might think, Professor Mulbridge,’ I said solemnly. ‘But a woman of science and erudition like yourself knows the difference between phenomenon and epi-phenomenon - between the causal and the merely collateral.’

Jenna-Jane actually smiled, but only for a second, acknowledging both the distinction and the fact that I was slapping her in the face with her own overblown technical register. ‘Go on,’ she said.

‘The ghosts in the pool,’ I said. ‘They’re so weird and inexplicable, everyone looks at them first and assumes that they’re what needs to be explained. I did that myself. But then I went away and thought about it, and on second thoughts they’re pretty much beside the point.’ Nobody interrupted me, so I went on. ‘The bigger mystery - and certainly the bigger danger - is the one you can’t see. There’s something in that room that makes everyone who goes in there experience sudden, blind terror. You’ - I flicked a glance at Gil, who I was ignoring for the most part - ‘said that some of the other exorcists who’ve been into Super-Self have actually had mental breakdowns as a result of contact with that thing. You took them into the pool and made them stay long enough to attempt an exorcism. They failed, and they were fucked over. It broke them. Am I right?’

There was a moment’s silence. ‘You put the situation very dramatically,’ Jenna-Jane chided me, ‘but yes, we have had casualties. Poor Victor Etheridge, to name but one. And it’s true that this is a peculiarly tenacious haunting.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘it isn’t. Call it that, and you’re never going to get anywhere - because you’ll be charging off to battle in the wrong direction.’

‘Meaning . . . ?’ Jenna-Jane asked.

‘What I said. It’s not a haunting at all. It’s something else that has a haunting as part of its furniture. The ghosts aren’t the thing we need to be looking at. Whatever lives in that room, and makes grown men and women want to piss themselves and run under moving cars - that’s what we need to be looking at.’

Gil had been having trouble sitting still through this sermon. ‘I disagree,’ he said now, emphatically. ‘Both with the reasoning and with the conclusion. What we know, Castor - the only thing we know - is that those ghosts break all the rules we thought couldn’t be broken. They’re more than a thousand years older than any other ghost we’ve found, and yet they show no signs of morphological decay; and they acknowledge each other’s presence, talk to each other, even seem to hand each other objects. Physical objects.’