The Naming of the Beasts

‘The two blocks right at the far end,’ he said, deciding to give me the inventory anyway, ‘are just zombies. Alpha block is decay parameter experiments; Bravo is toxicology. You can poison the DMWs, amazingly, if you get the right mix of shit. Stuff that accelerates cellular breakdown, or attacks the muscles.

‘Charlie through Echo are loup-garous. We run through a lot of them, because the main thrust of the research is incompatibility vectors – ways of forcing the human spirit out of the animal flesh so it reverts to being just an animal. It tends to be irreversible, so every werewolf we get is a non-renewable asset.

‘Foxtrot and Golf are a real circus. We keep all the unclassifieds there. Our resident vampire – if he is a vampire. A few referrals from other departments who’ve got the souls of people they used to know anchored inside them somehow and come here for a ghost-ectomy. Partially transformed loup-garous that got jammed halfway and can’t get in or out. The minor demons we’ve managed to raise.

‘And when we get to Hotel, well fuck . . .’

I walked away, leaving him to slam the door and cycle the locks. That took a while, so I was able to walk all the way up to the second floor by myself, taking my time so that the ringing in my ears had stopped and my pulse rate had returned to normal by the time I got back to Jenna-Jane’s office.

She was alone this time, and busy typing an email, but she looked up and swivelled her chair to face me as I walked in. She gave me another of those smiles. This time I could see the flames of Armageddon behind it.

‘It’s taken a certain amount of arranging,’ she said. ‘Father Gwillam was rather hoping that the MOU’s resources would be at his disposal for the duration of this little skirmish. But I’ve had to disappoint him. My answer is yes, Felix. I’ll work with you on bringing Ditko in.’

‘I changed my mind,’ I answered grimly. ‘Do what you like as far as Gwillam is concerned. Rafi would be better off dead than here.’

‘We won’t keep him here, Castor.’

I blinked. I must still be disoriented from the basement and the full-frontal assault on my death-sense. ‘What?’

‘We’ll return him to the Stanger. Your friend will be safe. We’ll even help you, as far as we can, in removing the demon from him.’

I laughed a little hollowly. ‘J-J, I just saw your zoo, so I know you didn’t turn into Mother Teresa while I wasn’t looking.’

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘This isn’t altruism. We help you, and you help us. I give you Rafael Ditko, and you give me . . .’

She paused as if this was a game of some kind, as if she wanted me to guess.

‘What?’ I demanded.

‘Yourself, Felix. You come and work for me again.’

6

‘The Usual Suspects,’ said Nicky Heath. ‘Three Days of the Condor. And Costa Gavras’s Missing.’

Nicky smelled of Old Spice over other, more astringent chemicals, and the dark patches within his death- white pallor were more noticeable than they usually are. He was five years dead and doing pretty well, all things considered, but the loss of Imelda Probert’s professional services had hit him hard. Before Asmodeus killed her, the Ice-Maker was a faith healer for the dead: by a laying on of hands, she claimed to be able to lower a zombie’s core temperature and slow the processes of decay. Sounded like bullshit to me, when I first heard about it, but Nicky used her regularly and Nicky was unliving proof that whatever she did actually worked. Now though, he’d been thrown back on his own resources.

Nicky makes sure that the Walthamstow Gaumont, the long-disused and recently renovated cinema he’s made his home, is as cold as an Eskimo’s sock drawer; and he flushes his system with ferociously potent chemical cocktails every few days, effectively pickling his flesh to keep it from going bad. But from the look of things, he was facing some kind of a crisis on the preservation front. I decided the tactful thing was to avoid mentioning it, and since I’d walked in on him in the middle of setting up a late-night triple bill, another subject was ready to hand.

‘You’re slipping, Nicky,’ I said. ‘I can actually see a link between those three movies.’

‘So?’ Nicky was even more pugnacious than usual. Something was eating him, so to speak, but if it was my complicity in Imelda’s death, I wasn’t feeling up to that conversation just yet. I felt – for about the twentieth time that day – an overwhelming, almost crippling desire to get rat-arse drunk. Nicky had one of the best wine cellars in London, but he limited himself to inhaling the breath of the wine: the perfect companion for a boozy voyage into oblivion, in that he stayed sober and could be the designated driver on the return journey. But it was a joyride I couldn’t afford right then.

‘So, normally when you go for a triple bill it’s, like, they all had Filboyd Studge as key grip or something. It’s nice to see you go for something as obvious as conspiracy thrillers.’

‘Meta-conspiracy thrillers,’ Nicky said, clipping the film reel onto the projector’s massive horizontal spindle. We were up in the projection room, which was so cold that my breath wasn’t just visible, it hung in the air like a thickening fog and refused to dissipate. Nicky ignored the cold. He didn’t exactly enjoy it, but it didn’t bother him, whereas bright sunshine made him duck and run for cover. If you’re serious about the zombie lifestyle, you have to become as narcissistic as a professional bodybuilder. You’re sailing into eternity in a leaky boat, so it helps to have an obsessive nature. Nicky was born and bred for the gig.

‘Meta-conspiracy thrillers,’ I repeated, deadpan, inviting him to hit me with the punchline.

‘They’re all movies where the conspiracy is part of a bigger conspiracy,’ he said. ‘Where you think you’ve worked it out, but all you did was tear away the first layer of wallpaper. Like those dreams where you wake up sweating but, hey, you’re still asleep and it’s just another dream.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I get it. Is that how you see the world, Nicky?’

‘That’s how the world is, Castor. You just didn’t figure out yet who’s dreaming you. Maybe it’s Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, because the psycho-bitch-queen certainly seems to have a soft spot in her heart for you.’

I grunted non-commitally. That wound was still a little raw. But Nicky seemed happy to stick with the subject.

‘So what did you tell her?’ he demanded. ‘Did you use adjectives? Gestures? I want a slow-motion action replay.’

‘I just walked out,’ I said, which was the truth. I hadn’t trusted myself to answer Jenna-Jane without going for her throat, which would have brought her pet Nazis down on me in all their goose-stepping fury. So I just turned round and headed for the door, walking past Gil McClennan, whose face as he stared at me was full of contemptuous amusement. J-J let me go without a word. At least when demons try to steal your soul they snarl and slaver and make a show out of it.

Nicky was looking disappointed. He was clearly hoping for something more in the way of dramatic byplay. To forestall any further questions I held up my phone, which was displaying the chunk of grey stone I’d found in Pen’s front garden, with the red pentagram flaring on its upper face. Nicky squinted at it for a second, then waved it away. ‘My eyes don’t resolve down that far,’ he said. ‘You got anything bigger?’

‘I’ve just got this,’ I said. ‘Can’t you scale it up?’

Nicky returned his attention to the film, which he was threading through the projector’s complex series of spools and rollers. ‘Probably,’ he admitted grudgingly. ‘Send it on to my phone. I’ll see what I can do.’

While he was still working on the film, I composed a message with the photo as an attachment and forwarded it to Nicky’s mobile. It took a long time, because I’m far from slick with technology, but finally his phone buzzed and he reached into his back pocket to turn it off. Then I had to wait until he threw the mains power switch and turned on the projector to let it warm up. He leaves that to the last moment for reasons already given: warm isn’t good in Nicky’s world.

He didn’t bother to look at the display on his own phone, because the screen-size problem would still apply;