The Naming of the Beasts

playing your tune. She thinks we can learn something from it.’ There was a sardonic edge to his voice.

‘You don’t agree?’ I asked mildly.

‘I think if you knew how to deal with Asmodeus, you would have done it years ago,’ Gil said. ‘The fact that you’re here at all means you’re out of ideas.’

‘And the fact that J-J took me back?’ I asked. ‘What does that mean? I got the distinct impression she’s got some shit going on that you people can’t deal with.’

The lift doors opened with a flattened pinging sound, like a bullet bouncing off a bum coin. Gil laughed with what sounded like real amusement. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You’re her favourite ghost-breaker. But it’s not because you’re any good. It’s just because you’re the one that got away.’ He pointed down the corridor. ‘Lab 3,’ he said. ‘They’re expecting you.’

I started to walk away.

‘Castor.’

I turned back. Gil was holding the lift door open with his finger on the button. ‘She hates you for that too,’ he said. ‘For leaving, I mean. So the way I see it, she’s going to fuck you into roadkill sooner or later.’

‘Thanks for the warning,’ I said.

Gil shook his head. ‘It would only be a warning if it was going to make a difference,’ he said. ‘You killed a good man, you bastard. A father. You wrecked a family.’ The lift pinged again several times, and the servos in the doors groaned as they tried to close.

‘Gabe raised a demon,’ I pointed out. ‘It killed him. All I did was get out from between them.’

‘And then the demon ended up as your partner. Watch your back, Castor. Because I will be.’

He took his finger off the button, and the doors slid shut between us. The lift mechanism whined slightly as it carried him back up to the second floor.

In Lab 3 a stolid, stocky guy who looked more like a longshoreman than a medical technician was tweaking the controls of a graphic equaliser as big as a two-car garage. ‘You’re Castor?’ he demanded. ‘Great. I’m Davey Nathan. Let’s do this thing. I got a shit-load of transcriptions piling up here.’ He hustled me into a soundproofed booth rigged up in a space that might once have been a toilet cubicle. He had a transatlantic drawl, and when I asked him where he was from he said he was on loan from the CIA. ‘Seriously,’ he added, looking at me warily in case I was going to question his word.

‘Langley?’ I asked.

‘No, not Langley exactly,’ he admitted, looking sheepish. ‘OSINT. Open Source Intelligence. We’re just geeks, really, sieving publicly available sources for useful information. Only we don’t say useful. We say actionable.’

‘How’d you wind up here?’ I asked.

Nathan shrugged morosely. ‘Pissed off the wrong people, Mister C. Pissed off all the wrong people, from God on down. But fuck, you know? A bi gezunt . . .’

‘A what?’

‘Yiddish. Means “so long as you’ve got your health . . .” But you have to look unhappy when you say it.’

We did some run-throughs for acoustics, then he locked me in and I played my ‘Etude for Hell-spawn’, the tune I’d developed to give Asmodeus a sedative when I’d first discovered that I couldn’t exorcise him. The recording sounded okay to me on playback, but Nathan wasn’t happy with it.

‘It goes way flat around 8,000 hertz,’ he grumbled. ‘This equaliser is a piece of shit. Go on back inside and hit me again. I’m gonna fuck with the RF bias.’

The second take sounded identical to the first, but Nathan liked it better. ‘Three’s the charm,’ he said. ‘Go on, we’ll nail it. Trust me.’

Apparently we nailed it. At any rate, there wasn’t a fourth take. I thanked Nathan for his efforts and asked him what the transcriptions were he was working on.

‘Fifty per cent of my time,’ he said, throwing his hands in the air in exasperation. ‘The ghost-breakers go to some place where there’s a spook – in your sense rather than the CIA sense – and they record it. Only the sound doesn’t show up on tape, right? When ghosts talk, either they don’t make the air vibrate at all or they got some way of hitting the human ear selectively. So that’s what I’m looking for – a wiretap for the fucking spirit world. I told Professor M., if we find it, it’s gonna be just white noise. A billion voices all at once. Only we won’t find it unless it propagates through the air and why the hell should it? So that’s what I’m wasting my life on. All because I missed some survivalists saying, “Let’s all make a bomb.” I didn’t think they could tie their own goddamned shoelaces.’

I was about to leave Nathan with his woes, but a few things clicked together in my mind before I got to the door, and I turned on the threshold. ‘Yeah?’ he asked.

‘The transcriptions. Fifty per cent of your time?’

He shrugged. ‘Give or take.’

‘Is the other fifty per cent Rosie Crucis?’

‘Give the man a cigar. Yeah. She gets an hour with either the professor or that McClennan guy twice a week. I tape the conversations and index them.’

‘You can keep the cigar,’ I told him, ‘but how about the combination for the keypad on her door? Rosie and me go back a long way. And it’s been a while since we got to talk.’

Nathan shook his head theatrically, as though to snap himself out of a trance. ‘Security, Castor. It’s called that because it’s meant to be secure.’

I took a long slow look around the cramped room. ‘You worried about losing your job?’ I asked.

Nathan laughed full-throatedly. ‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘You remember that battle you guys fought, against the French?’

‘Oh man. There’ve been so many . . .’

‘The one that mattered. The one where they kicked your asses all over the countryside and then moved into the big house.’

‘Hastings.’

‘Bingo. Add twenty, and that’s your magic number.’

‘Thanks, Nathan. You’re a mensch.’

His face lit up at the Yiddishism. ‘A shaynem dank dir im pupik, Castor. You’re welcome.’

I went down to street level and, after a couple of wrong turns, found Rosie’s door. I tapped the keys and the lock clicked. 1086. Jenna-Jane hadn’t had the Battle of Hastings in mind when she set that code; she was thinking of the Domesday Book. That was an enterprise after her own heart.

I opened the door and stepped inside. It was like walking into another world. Rosie’s quarters were schizophrenic in the extreme. The bed was a hospital bed, big and ugly, mounted on a hydraulic pillar for raising and lowering and adjusting of angles. And beside the bed there was a fearsome assemblage of machines with red LED readouts and old-fashioned pressure dials on their fascias. But elsewhere there was a sofa, table and chairs, a TV, cheap prints on the walls – evidence of a general effort to make this institutional space, which in reality was a prison cell, look a little like home.

Rosie was in bed, which is where she spends most of her time these days. It’s a side effect of the wards that J-J uses to keep her contained, and it’s worsened steadily over the years. She spends about half of every day asleep, and it never takes very much effort or emotion to exhaust her. The weird thing is that these symptoms persist and repeat themselves in every body she occupies.

Currently her fleshly tabernacle was male. A guy of about twenty stared back at me from the bed. He blinked a couple of times, and then a smile gradually suffused his features.

‘Felix!’ Like the exhaustion, Rosie’s deep sexy burr always sounded the same no matter whose body she had squatter’s rights in. ‘My darling! My sunbeam! Come and shine on me.’

‘Hello, Rosie,’ I said. ‘How’s your love life?’

‘Entirely . . . theoretical.’

I ambled over and sat down on the edge of the bed. She lifted her pale hand and rested it on mine. Maybe the guy was already pale when he got here, or maybe Rosie’s transformative magic was working on him, making him over subtly into her image.

The rules that govern the afterlife are unfathomable, but they seem to be pretty consistent. Whatever form