The Naming of the Beasts

taste in the air, a hot metal tang that stung the back of my throat and made my eyes start to water. More to the point, it made me want to run and hide. I had to force myself to keep walking into that solid wall of terror. Every step was like the moment when you launch yourself off a diving board for the first time as a kid – when you come to the edge and almost can’t make your body do something that stupid and hazardous.

I gripped the smooth-sided box in my pocket, reminding myself that I was armed and dangerous. I wasn’t the hunted here, I was the hunter, and this bloated spider, sitting in the dark in its invisible web, was going to learn that not all flies are created equal.

But all that macho talk flew out of my head when I got to the top of the stairs and saw two more of Gil McClennan’s exorcists trying to crawl up them to safety. The fly analogy came back into my head full force, because that was what they looked like: dying flies, crawling blindly, trying to escape the poison that was killing them and failing because it was already inside them.

I don’t know where the idea came from. I had slowed almost to a halt, fighting so hard against the instinct to turn on my heel and flee that my muscles were starting to lock. Walking down those stairs one at a time was going to be like climbing Everest without oxygen. So I just let my legs stop dead, which was what they wanted more than anything else to do, and leaned far out over that gulf of poisoned air.

There’s an art to falling without being hurt: you have to tuck your head and arms in, concentrate your weight, and lean into the fall so that it turns into a controlled roll. I didn’t do any of those things, because my mind was screaming and squalling inside my skull like a cat in a box as it got closer and closer to the epicentre of this psychic storm front.

At the bottom of the stairs, I climbed doggedly to my feet again. There were more bodies here, some of them moving, some of them not. I took one step forward, then another. Close enough. It would have to be close enough because a third step was beyond me.

My arms jerking and twitching like the detached legs of one of Signor Galvani’s frogs, I fought to get the box out of my pocket. This was my sheet anchor, my ace in the hole, my grail. This would show the thing in the darkness who was boss.

I pressed the tiny toggle switch, and threw the box end over end towards the gaping doors that led to the changing rooms and the swimming pool beyond. It rolled, clattered, came to a halt.

And nothing happened.

Caldessa hadn’t wound the keys.

I made a mewling sound in the back of my throat. I’d thrown the box a good ten feet. To get it back, I’d have to walk ten feet toward the pool, ten feet into that storm of terror.

But looking on the bright side, my trip-hammering heart would probably explode before I’d covered half that distance.

I tried the falling down thing again, but this time it didn’t work. I just sank to my knees without moving an inch further forward. I couldn’t even throw myself flat on the ground. My body was rebelling one joint at a time, closing shop.

Ironically, it was Juliet who gave me the strength to move. The image of her rose suddenly in my mind, as she’d looked when we’d stood here the night before. Perhaps it was because this overmastering, hectoring, screaming fear was like the equally devastating, hectoring lust that she inspired. I used the one as a bulwark against the other, raising my libido as a battered sleazy shield against the slings and arrows of outrageous, pants- wetting, heart-stopping dread.

On hands and knees I shuffled inch by inch towards the box, across the no-man’s-land of my own fractured personality. When my fingers closed on it, it felt like the climax to a lifetime’s questing. And then the closing of the switch was like another lifetime, and the winding of the keys an etiolated eternity of running in a lonely place.

The last, tiny, desolate nub of Felix Castor thought, Now eat this, you little fucker, as I threw the switch again.

The mechanism inside the box whirred and clicked into action, and a tinny, hollow tune filled the room. Actually, to call it a tune was far too generous; it was a wayward sequence of notes that bounced and bucked and sprawled gracelessly out onto the tainted air. But, my God, what a dying fall it had. And how perfectly, how suddenly, the fear-thing stopped its own game to listen to mine.

The summoning is only the first part of an exorcism, but it’s the most important. Shut up and listen to me, it says. Heel, Fido, and don’t move another fucking inch until I tell you to. It was the part I’d never managed to get right for Asmodeus, despite all the years of trying. For this monster, by contrast, it had come almost at once. The trick was getting the tune out there when my own frozen heart was faltering in my chest and the lights were going out all over Europe.

Like all music boxes, this one mangled the tune, turning it into a stylised, flattened parody of itself. That didn’t seem to matter though. Like Noël Coward said, it’s amazing how potent cheap music can be. The pressure in the air lifted, and my heart came down from DEFCON 2 to something more sustainable. I drew in a tremulous breath, feeling as though vast curtains of rotting muslin were being hauled up on all sides of me.

The fear-thing was in trouble, which was gratifying to know. What’s harder to explain is how I knew it. There was nothing to see, and less and less to feel. The sense of it – the way the invisible monstrosity impinged on the radar of my death-sense – turned on some notional ectoplasmic axis, and diminished as it turned.

It turned to face the music box. As the notes of the summoning tumbled out into the dark, the fear-thing’s own attack faltered and died. It obeyed the summons. Overlaid and gathered in on itself in pleats and rucks of dimensionless emotion, it was pulled into the box like the endless scarves and ribbons that a conjuror folds into the palm of his hand before spreading his fingers to show that the hand is empty.

After a minute or so, I found I was able to stand. I closed the switch on the music box, killing the tune in the middle of a phrase. I waited, tense, for a moment or two, in case the fear-thing broke free again now that the music had stopped. What I’d played hadn’t been a full exorcism, only a summoning. But the orders seemed to stand. As in the game of musical chairs, the entity was staying where it had been when the music stopped, its focus swapped from the swimming pool to the box. More importantly, cut off from the ghosts in the pool and the skein of old emotions it had woven there, it seemed to be quiescent now – dormant, at least for the time being.

I turned on all the lights and checked out the three people closest to hand, making sure they were all still breathing. One of them had blood trickling down her face from a deep gash in her forehead, but none of them had suffered in the way Devani had. Post-traumatic stress aside, they’d all recover from this.

Once I went through into the pool though – taking the music box with me – I could see that not everyone was going to be so lucky. Two of McClennan’s exorcists were lying face down in the pool, and a third was sprawled at the edge of it with his head at a crazy angle that suggested a broken neck. The remaining stalwarts of the Jenna-Jane Irregulars – more than a dozen of them – were scattered around the room twitching and moaning and writhing. I remembered news footage I’d seen of the aftermath of a suicide bombing. There were no detached limbs here, but in other ways it was pretty close.

Gil McClennan had led from the front, I’ll say that much for him. He was in the pool too: not one of the floaters, but up to his chest at the far end, holding onto another man who had obviously collapsed against him. He was keeping the guy’s head out of the water with a loose armlock around his neck, although his own eyes were so wide I could see white all around the pupils. He was shouting incoherent phrases – exhortations to his team, maybe, or fragments of prayer. Whatever they were, they’d kept him alive and upright through the maelstrom. Now he was starting to retreat towards the pool’s edge.

I walked around to join him, and helped him manhandle the other man – who was profoundly unconscious – up out of the water. After a moment’s hesitation I gave Gil a hand up too. It seemed petty to keep up old enmities when we’d just survived death by blind panic.

McClennan got slowly to his feet, using the wall for support and then turning to lean his back against it when he was fully upright. His chest was working hard, but he was getting his breath back and starting to come down from the fear-high. He threw me a look, curious and slightly bitter.

‘What did you do?’ he demanded.

I’d stowed the music box back in my pocket by this time. As far as I was concerned, Gil was one end of an open mike that led straight back to Jenna-Jane, and there was no way I wanted her to know about this before I’d had time to think through the implications.