The Naming of the Beasts

Jenna-Jane was probably well aware that by giving Rosie a different body to possess and inhabit every week, she was allowing an old ghost to develop a terrifying and dangerous skill-set. Rosie must have worked her way through three or four hundred volunteers in the years since I’d left the MOU. She knew the ins and outs of the human nervous system better than a London cabbie knows the way to Lullington Garth, and like the cabbie she was well past the point where she needed an A to Z.

I didn’t need one either, come to that. From this close, I could have found the entrance to Jenna-Jane’s underworld with a blindfold on and my hands tied behind my back – which was probably how a lot of its current inhabitants had arrived here. I picked up one of the fallen batons in a spirit of waste-not-want-not and led the way down the corridor, Rosie and then Gil falling in beside me.

‘How are you doing this?’ Gil asked Rosie, still staring at her in horrified fascination. ‘How are you holding him when he doesn’t want you there? It’s not like it was with the volunteers. And you seemed to be getting weaker . . .’

‘It’s been a long time since I needed informed consent, my poppet,’ Rosie pointed out with wicked amusement. ‘And the weakness . . . well, a woman in my day learned the value of being underestimated.’

At another time I probably would have laughed at that. Asmodeus wasn’t the only lion who could put on a convincing limp when the need arose.

We came to the door at last. There was a single guard on duty. Rosie dropped him with a devastating haymaker as he was opening his mouth to speak. He ricocheted off the doorframe, went down hard and didn’t move.

Rosie flexed her fingers and gave a harsh, wincing moan.

‘I’ve broken my hand,’ she lamented.

‘It’s someone else’s hand,’ I reminded her. ‘And he had it coming.’

I stepped through onto the steel platform at the head of the stairs leading down into the abyss. It was hard, as it had been the first time around, to cross that threshold, to walk into the screaming turmoil my death-sense was picking up from below, a hundred times more strident and painful than the monotone clamour of the fire alarm. But hard as it was for me, it was a lot harder for Rosie. She stopped dead in the doorway as though there was a solid barrier there, as though the steel door was locked and bolted instead of standing wide open. The wards again, the wards written on the door to keep the dead and the undead from breaking out. It kept them from breaking in too – and an axe wouldn’t be much use against die-stamped steel.

‘I can’t come through here,’ Rosie said.

‘Then watch our backs,’ I suggested. ‘And wait for us.’

‘Don’t be long, Felix.’

‘We’ll either be quick or dead,’ I muttered grimly. ‘Give it ten minutes, Rosie. One way or another, it’ll be over by then.’

She nodded tersely and set her back to the open door, a dragon in the gateway, stopping any reinforcements from the building’s upper floors from crashing our party. Probably most of the rent-a-cops were in the basement already, but every little helps.

We ran down the metal stairs, the din of our booming footsteps drowned out by the general hubbub. Down here the fire alarm’s shrill warning had to struggle to make itself heard in a chorus of bellowing and shrieking voices, metallic booms and echoes, weeping and wailing and – I strongly suspected – gnashing of teeth. The inmates of the basement Gulag seemed to be collectively going crazy.

‘Any idea where she’ll be?’ I yelled to Gil. He couldn’t hear me so I shrugged and gestured to indicate that I didn’t know where to go.

He put his mouth close to my ear to answer. ‘There’s another lab down here. A big one. That’s the room the professor was prepping this morning, so that’s where she’ll be.’

I let him take the lead again as we walked between the squat cement cell blocks. This place was terrifying even when looking down on it from above like the eye of God; when you were in the middle of it, it was indescribable.

As I think I mentioned earlier, to an exorcist every place is soaked in the residue of past emotions like the smells of old cooking. This place was saturated with fear and despair, an effluvium as rich and deep as the leaf mould in an ancient forest. Out of that rich substrate, something even more hysterical and insensate rose like some exotic bloom. I found myself breathing in shallow gulps as though that would somehow keep the emotional tsunami from entering into me.

Another patrol of three men crossed an intersection ahead of us. We flattened ourselves against the wall and they missed us in the dark.

Something was scrabbling near my ear, unnoticed in the clamour until I got right up close to it. I turned my head and saw the Judas window of one of the cell doors right beside me. I didn’t have time for this. I was here for one thing and one thing only, and getting distracted could get a lot of people I cared about dead and worse than dead. But something moved me forward in spite of myself, and I pressed my eye to the hole.

The inside of the cell was even darker than it was out here: a single red emergency light in a far corner lit up the room no more brightly than a child’s night light. The cell’s inmate was clawing at the door, and the sound or maybe just the vibration had made it through the metal to me. He was a werewolf, a loup- garou. Wolves weren’t in his genome though, so the word was a misnomer in this case. He looked more like a were-hare, ears hanging down like broken radio masts over his elongated face. A single huge eye rolled in his face; the other eye had been removed, and bare muscle twitched around the empty socket, making it expand and contract in lockstep with its neighbour.

I wanted to back away, but I just stayed there for an endless moment, staring into that sightless eye. Gil shook my shoulder. ‘Come on,’ he yelled. ‘I think it’s clear.’

Like a man coming out of a trance, I took a step back from the door, but I didn’t move to follow him.

‘Come on,’ he said again. ‘Castor, it’s this way.’

‘How do the doors open?’ I asked him.

‘On keypads,’ he said pointing. ‘What’s that got to do with anything? The lab won’t be locked. The professor will be in there now, working on your friend.’

‘But there has to be a failsafe. Some way of opening all the doors in case the building catches fire or something.’

‘I don’t think so. That’s not the way the professor’s mind works.’

I shook my head to clear it, but that just made it hurt more. I knew I had to be right. This place might be a concentration camp, but it was a concentration camp built inside a hospital: the place had to be up to code, at least on the face of it. Somewhere there was a master switch that would open all these doors.

The fire alarm stopped ringing. The abrupt silence was a huge and shocking absence, a vacuum that extinguished all the other screams and yells and moans and bangs the way a wind tunnel sucks the flame from a candle. Soon there was just a single voice screaming, an inhuman ululation of pain and rage and madness.

A moment later the lights came on.

Gil gave me a frantic look, and I nodded, waving him on. In silence now, and more slowly, we rounded the corner of the cell block and found ourselves in yet another wide corridor. Ahead of us stood a pair of locked double doors labelled with NO ADMITTANCE notices that were both large and strident. Gil broke them down with the fire axe and we strode through.

Ten or maybe twenty yards ahead of us, there was one final door. This was where the screaming was coming from. Other sounds from within, voices and footfalls and the clattering of instruments, made it clear that there was a party in progress, and that it hadn’t stopped for the fire drill.

There was a guard on this door too, of course. He shouted out for us to halt, holding his sidewinder out in front of him in an en garde stance. I knocked it aside with a whirling parry, ducked and followed through, driving my own baton into his mouth with explosive force.

The poor sod went down like a sack of potatoes, his jaw in red ruin, and we walked over him into the room. For all I knew, he could have been poor bloody infantry – one of the newbies conscripted by J-J to fill the gaps in her ranks and keep anyone from bugging her while she dismantled Juliet. He might not know the first thing about the people who signed his pay cheque or what was going on a few feet behind him. On the other hand, he presumably wasn’t deaf.

Sometimes it pays to ask the hard questions.