The Naming of the Beasts

references. ’ Knowing all about Trudie’s references, I decided the safest bet under the circumstances was to nod and say nothing.

‘I’m not counting you as new, Felix,’ Jenna-Jane went on, in a teasing voice that set my teeth on edge. ‘I see you more in the light of a lost sheep who’s come back into the fold.’ She turned her attention to the two remaining strangers, who’d also stood. Gil McClennan remained resolutely seated. ‘This is Victor Etheridge,’ Jenna-Jane said, and the younger of the two gave me a nod. He had sandy-coloured hair, a slightly exophthalmic stare and a physique that made a hatstand look broad in the beam. He was wearing a jet-black suit over a jet-black T-shirt, which had the effect of making him fade into the background of his own outfit.

‘Felix Castor,’ he said. And then he winced, his head jerking to the side as though someone had punched him in the mouth. His eyes clenched shut, then opened again and looked at me sidelong. ‘I’m really . . . very . . . I’m pleased, because . . . Pleased to meet you. Because . . . Peckham . . . Peckham Steiner always spoke of you with respect.’

The kid’s head swung round again so that he could look at me full on. His expression was wide-eyed, expectant, as though he’d brought out the big guns and expected to see an appropriate response; but even leaving aside his curious delivery, dropping Steiner’s name didn’t impress me all that much. The crazed millionaire godfather of the London ghost-breaking scene had lost his marbles long before he died, and if this Etheridge character had been his protégé, he might be more of a liability than an asset.

‘You were a friend of Steiner’s?’ I asked, keeping my tone as neutral as I could.

Etheridge stared at me, looking slightly perplexed as though the question was a tough one that he hadn’t expected. ‘He was my patron,’ he said at last. ‘He . . . yeah . . . was going to start a school, if you . . . For exorcists. A school. To teach his own skills to a younger generation. It never really got off the ground, but there were . . . he . . . three or four of us . . .’ He tailed off, looking to Jenna-Jane like an actor asking for a prompt. She said nothing.

I resorted to the dumb nod again. I’d heard of that school before, and I knew damn well why it had never happened. In the last years of his life Steiner had had a million schemes. Some of them had come to pass – like the Oriflamme, the exorcists-only club on Castlebar Hill, and the exorcists’ hostel that had become known as the Thames Collective (built as a houseboat, because ghosts can’t cross running water) – but most had fallen by the wayside, forgotten, as Steiner moved on to the next big thing.

What was the matter with Etheridge? Finding no comfort or support from Jenna-Jane, he ducked his head again, slight tremors shaking his shoulders. He looked like a naughty schoolboy dragged up in front of the class to explain his misdemeanours and promise never to do it again. No, more than that: he looked damaged. A sort of faint, fuzzy-edged misery came off him in waves.

‘And this is Samir Devani,’ Jenna-Jane said. I shook hands with the last man. He had a book in his other hand, his thumb between the pages to mark his place: Kurt Vonnegut’s Man Without a Country. He was Asian, well built and surprisingly tall, maybe a year or so younger than me but in much better shape. And, like everyone else in the room except Jenna-Jane and Etheridge, he was dressed down – as befitted a dirty job, in a denim shirt, slate-grey chinos and well-worn DMs. He gave me a thoughtful, appraising look, his eyes narrowing slightly, as if he was trying to remember where he’d seen me before.

‘Looks like you’ve been in the wars,’ he said. ‘You’re favouring that left arm. It’s Sam, by the way.’

‘Fix.’ I said it automatically, and cursed myself silently as soon as the word was out of my mouth. I didn’t intend to be on first-name terms with anyone here. Unlike me, they’d presumably chosen to be in Jenna-Jane’s employ. I didn’t owe any one of them the air to breathe, let alone civility. ‘It’s just an old war wound,’ I finished tersely.

‘We tend to work in groups of four or five,’ Jenna-Jane said, forestalling any further getting-to-know-you chit-chat. ‘I make the allocations myself, balancing different techniques so that each team can deal with a broad spectrum of supernormal phenomena. Trudie performs her bindings and exorcisms via a purely physical- manipulative modality, Samir by channelling a second personality, Gil by means of spirit drawing and Victor through actual prayer.’

‘Who’s on drums?’ I asked. Samir laughed, and Jenna-Jane looked pained.

‘We all deal with the emotional stresses of our peculiar line of work in our own individual ways,’ she said dryly. ‘Felix chooses to do so through inappropriate levity. He is, however, a very fine exorcist, and we can all be grateful that he’s been unable, thus far, to push his comedy career to the professional level.’

I took the rap on the knuckles like a man.

‘Okay,’ I said, getting down to brass tacks. ‘I’m thinking we’ll start from what we know. Asmodeus has been staking out the house where I live, in Turnpike Lane. We need someone watching the house on a rota. Two someones, ideally. The rest of us can spread out across the city and scry towards the cardinal points until we get an echo. If we do that enough times, and if he’s not moving around too much, we’ll be able to zero in on him a bit at a time. Then when we think we’ve got it narrowed down enough, Jenna-Jane can bring in the heavies. We’ll use nerve gas first – OPG, assuming you’ve got enough to go around. Soften him up with that, because in my experience he won’t sit still long enough for us to try anything fancy. If we play our cards right, nobody ends up dead.’

The silence that met my little Agincourt speech was deafening. By turns, everyone looked to Jenna-Jane, who glanced at Gil and nodded. ‘Mr McClennan,’ she said.

‘Everyone’s already briefed,’ said Gil, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘I’ll be briefing Castor on the Strand haunting later, but there’s nothing we can do there until after dark, so the order of the day is Asmodeus. Pax and Etheridge are staying here to work on the raw data from the sightings. Pax is going to apply her own techniques to the map I was setting up. I’m still working through the grimoires with Klee and Middleton, so Sam and Castor can go over to the Stanger and grab us a focus. Sam’s in charge on that little outing, Castor, and you speak when you’re spoken to. Dr Webb, who’s in charge over there, made it clear to me when we spoke that he hates your guts, and the only reason he’s letting you back into the place at all is because of the respect he’s got for Professor Mulbridge. Does anyone have any questions?’

I had one, but since it was ‘What the fuck?’ I didn’t ask it. I didn’t have to; J-J answered it anyway.

‘You don’t just walk in and head a team, Felix,’ she pointed out reasonably. ‘You’ve been away from the unit for a long time, and our operating methods have changed very significantly. Gil has my complete confidence, and I’m sure you’ll find him an inspirational leader.’

She turned on her heel and left, with a final nod to my new colleagues.

‘Any questions?’ Gil asked again, in a voice that expected the answer no. ‘Okay, then get moving, people. There’ll be time enough to sleep when we’re dead.’

‘Or possibly not,’ Samir observed scrupulously as we headed for the lift.

8

Samir seemed disposed to talk on the way to the Tube, and most of his talk consisted of questions. How long had I been on the staff at the MOU? Had I really been part of the team that raised Rosie Crucis? What did I think of Peckham Steiner’s books? Was the London scene any different now than it had been ten years ago?

I fielded most of these queries with grunts and monosyllables. Sam was affable enough, but I really wasn’t in the mood. Since I’d gone to bed the previous night, I’d been stabbed by a demon, patronised by Jenna-Jane and broken back to the rank of poor bloody infantry. On top of all that, being civil seemed like way too much effort.

But in the absence of any input from me, Sam had no trouble keeping up the conversation all by himself. He told me about how the ‘shit’, as he called it, had kicked in for him: how his secondary personality, who he referred to as Turk, had shown himself first in mischievous and even destructive ways – mocking his parents, picking fights with his friends. A posse of psychiatrists had examined Sam, and after flirting briefly with Tourette’s syndrome had converged steadily on a verdict of acute psychosis. Medication of increasing ferocity failed to do anything except make him as dopey as a punched-out prizefighter. ‘I was heading for a rubber room until I saw my first ghost,’ Sam said, laughing as though he found all this genuinely funny now. ‘Then Turk started swearing and catcalling and insulting it. And it just went away. Piecemeal. As though the words blew holes in it. Exorcism by fucking verbal abuse, can you believe that, Castor?’