The Naming of the Beasts

I leaned forward to see better. There were fewer figures in the pool than I remembered from the night before - seven or eight, where my confused memories had conjured up a crowd of several dozen. The two men in togas were arguing - one calmly, the other with a lot of emphatic gestures and striding back and forth. Another, older man watched them, majestically detached, while two women stood off to one side with their faces averted, looking sad and afraid. Two Roman soldiers with breastplates and helmets stared straight ahead, patient and impassive.

One of the women put her hand to her face. Something clutched in her fist caught my eye, and I leaned forward to see it more clearly. That was when the fear-thing fell on me like the giant foot in a Monty Python sketch. The last time I was here the process had been more gradual: an inexplicable sense of unease in the hall above, creeping paranoia on the stairs, pure, pants-wetting terror at the poolside. This was different. It was like having my brain ripped out of my skull and dropped into liquid nitrogen while it was still bleeding and pulsating.

Thought was impossible. So was movement. Fuck, so was breathing. My chest locked up as though all my ribs had twanged free and got tangled up together like one of Trudie’s cat’s cradles.

Poleaxed, and already off balance, I toppled forward into the water. I didn’t hear the splash even, but my eyes were open and I could still see as I sank down among the ghosts. They ignored me completely, playing out their pantomime around and through me in the blue-white spotlight created by their own phosphorescence.

For a moment I was staring into the face of the woman I’d been watching from above. It was a tragic face, eyes pleading and haunted, mouth tensed in a just-about-to-lose-it grimace. But I kept on sinking down and down. Now I was level with her shoulders, her chest, her arms. Her hand clutched tight around the flimsy thing she’d drawn out from the voluminous folds of her gown. It was a lace handkerchief, embroidered with the letters EC in elegant - if slightly over-elaborate - needlepoint.

Water was starting to trickle into my mouth, down my throat. Since I wasn’t breathing, it hadn’t found my airway yet, but it wouldn’t be long.

In the meantime, as my shoulder bumped against the bottom of the pool, I’d noticed that the woman’s shoes were wrong too: they were low boots made of leather, with scrimshaw buttons up the side. God damn it, she was even wearing socks.

Still unable to move a voluntary muscle, I turned slowly in the water, rolling over onto my back. The trickle of water became a torrent, and I cursed my luck silently as I prepared to say goodbye to the world.

Then something locked hard onto my ankle and hauled me upward like a hooked fish. I exploded out of the water into the cool night air, and the shock of the cold and the sudden movement started me breathing again. Okay, I was breathing water: a small detail, easily adjusted once I’d coughed and hacked and vomited myself back into equilibrium.

Juliet dumped me on the tiles without ceremony and left me to it. When I was in a state to take notice of her again, she was staring up into the light well above the pool, her knees slightly bent as though she was ready to spring. But the fear had gone - gone completely, in an instant, just as it had arrived. I was about to listen in through my death-sense to confirm my conviction that we were alone, but I stopped myself just in time. That was how the damn thing worked. That was what it responded to.

Yesterday, when I’d come here with Trudie, the pair of us had come through the door on a hair trigger, knowing - because we’d been told - that this was a woodshed with something nasty in it. We were tuned into the psychic wavelengths, using the sensitivities that made us exorcists, and the fear-thing had woken up instantly. We’d started to feel it as soon as we crossed the threshold.

Tonight, I’d let Juliet take the lead and make the running, wanting her to see for herself. My death-sense hadn’t stirred until I looked down into the pool and focused on the ghosts and what they were doing. That was when the fear-thing had pounced.

And that was why the bad shit just kept on escalating. The more exorcists Jenna-Jane sent in here, the harder she poked this thing, the harder it hit back.

I came up on one knee, groggy and hurting. Juliet hadn’t put me down any too gently, and there was an ache all the way up my right forearm and shoulder, but it felt great just to be able to think straight.

‘Did you see it?’ I asked her.

She looked down at me, seeming slightly surprised that I was still there. ‘Of course I saw it.’

‘So tell me what it is,’ I persisted.

‘Tartharuch,’ Juliet growled, her mouth twisting around the gutturals. ‘From Tartarus. Tartharuch Gader’el.’ She was still staring at me, her eyes hot coals in the darkness.

‘So it’s a demon.’

‘Yes. It’s a demon.’

‘And how do we kill it?’