Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

‘Neither do I,’ Coldwood growled. But it was just something to say. He couldn’t stand up for a second against Gwillam’s heavies and Gwillam’s twisted cunning. I used to think I could, and the mess I was in now just went to show how badly wrong I was.

I finished my cooling coffee in three swigs, put the cup down. Coldwood watched me in silence. ‘So you’re advising me to lie back and think of England?’ he demanded. ‘Is that what you’re planning to do?’

‘I don’t know, Gary,’ I lied. ‘I have no idea what I’m going to do.’

But the idea had already come to me, a whole lot more bitter and harder to swallow than the last dregs of the Maxwell House. When God has abandoned you and the devil is snapping at your heels, what you really need on your side is a bigger devil.

Paddington. St Mary’s Hospital. The Metamorphic Ontology Unit, or MOU for short. I hadn’t been here since the last time Asmodeus tried to break his chains. Life had seemed simpler then, in some ways. You knew who your friends were, even if you could count them on the fingers of a mutilated hand.

Today though, none of that really mattered. Today I was coming here to cosy up to one of my worst enemies.

I lost my way at first, because the place had moved. I went to the old building – the Helen Trabitch Wing, on Praed Street – only to find that it had turned back into a genito-urinary clinic and was filled with a random cross section of Sussex Gardens prostitutes, all cheerfully comparing notes on last night’s slate. A harassed young house officer with a clipboard in his hand and a look of terminal embarrassment on his face directed me around the corner and along South Wharf Road to the Paterson Building, still billed on all the signage as the Department of Psychiatry.

But it was clear as soon as I walked inside that the building had a new tenant. The steel grille across the hall, just inside the street doors, had more of the flavour of a prison than a hospital, and the guy behind the desk was a uniformed flunkey from some private security agency. He was built like a brick mausoleum, and his head seemed to get broader as your glance travelled down from crown to jaw, as though someone had jammed the open end of a tuba over his head and left it there until the bones of his skull conformed to the shape. He bared his teeth as I approached, having been told somewhere down the line to smile at the mug punters when you weren’t actually applying electrodes to their extremities. His teeth were very white and even, and not in any way filed to sharp points or stained with the blood of infants. Probably I was doing the guy a disservice: probably he was kind to children and small animals and his elderly mother, as the Krays were said to be. His uniform was very dark blue, and a single word, DICKS, was printed in grey on a sewn-in label attached to his lapel.

I pointed to it. ‘Is that your name?’ I asked. ‘Or is it a stop-me-and-buy-one kind of deal?’

The guy’s brow furrowed and his mouth quirked down, as though thinking that one out caused him mild pain. ‘Can I help you, sir?’ he said at last, letting the feeble witticism lie where it had fallen. His voice was well down into the bass register, but it had the front-of-the-mouth vowels of South African Dutch. That and his towering build activated a number of stereotypes I carry around with me, most of them centring on bound suspects mysteriously jumping out of fourth-floor windows under police questioning.

‘Felix Castor,’ I said. ‘I’m here to see Professor Mulbridge.’

‘And is she expecting you?’

‘For the last five years,’ I said.

Dicks didn’t press the point, but he seemed to decide that was a no. ‘Can I tell her what it’s regarding?’ he asked, after a slightly strained pause.

‘You can tell her it’s regarding Rafael Ditko.’

The guy nodded and tapped some keys on the small intercom to one side of his desk. ‘What is it, Dicks?’ said a voice – a woman’s voice, but not Jenna-Jane’s. It was a young voice, very precise but with a lilt of some exotic accent to it.

‘A Mister Castor,’ Dicks said. His accent almost made the two words rhyme.

There was a click as the intercom channel was closed at the other end. It stayed closed for a good long time. Then the same voice came on again. ‘You did say Castor? Felix Castor?’

Dicks glanced at me, and I nodded.

‘Yeah. Shall I send him up?’

Another click, and another long pause. This time, when the voice came back, it had a definite edge to it. ‘Absolutely not. We’ll send someone down. Mister Castor gets an escort.’

The line went dead with a short burst of static. Dicks gave me unfriendly look number 23, as taught in the barracks and prison yards of the world. I don’t think he appreciated the implied reprimand in that ‘Absolutely not’. Children and small animals notwithstanding, I seemed to have got off on the wrong foot with Mr Dicks. ‘You see?’ I told him, trying to break the ice with small talk. ‘I’m a VIP.’ He stared at me thoughtfully. It was a look that said louder than words, ‘Sooner or later, I may have to damage you.’

Two more gentlemen cut from the same cloth as Mr Dicks appeared on the other side of the steel grille; in fact they all but goose-stepped up to it, walking side by side in near-perfect synchrony. Dicks pressed a button and there was a metallic clank as the lock released. One of the two newcomers held it open and I stepped through, then the other led the way to the lifts.

The Paterson must have been an architectural treasure once. It’s got really striking porthole windows about three feet wide, in a formal nod to the art deco school, and very high ceilings for a modern building. Right now though, it looked like a bomb site. There was building work going on both on the ground floor, as we stepped into the lift, and on the second floor, where we got off. A small army of men in orange overalls, interspersed with the occasional woman, were stripping panels, laying electrical cable and nailing up plasterboard. The dominant colour was a chill, neutral blue, so evidently Jenna-Jane was remaking the building in her own image.

I hate hospitals, all exorcists do. A lot of people die there, and a significant percentage of them die scared, confused, angry or in desperate pain. Ghosts in various states from new to badly eroded congregate thickly, shouting and begging and sobbing for attention. A psychiatric unit isn’t as bad as, say, a general surgery wing or a terminal ward, but it’s plenty bad enough. I whistled tunelessly as I followed the two uniformed heavies. The tune was a mild stay-not, pushing the ghosts back from my immediate vicinity and giving me some room to breathe.

Jenna-Jane’s office was at an intersection of two corridors. It had probably been a nurses’ station at one time because two adjacent walls of it were solid glass from floor to ceiling, commanding a panoramic view in both directions. Austere white vertical blinds hung over them now, but the blinds were open.

The office was sparsely furnished. There was something monastic about Jenna-Jane’s dedication to her cause. Probably she and Father Gwillam would have found a lot to talk about if they’d ever met, even though her religion of science was the antithesis of his old-school apocalyptic fundamentalism. There was only an antique roll-top desk against one wall, a number of office chairs on castors, a phalanx of five four-drawer filing cabinets in battleship grey, and a bookcase filled with formularies and medical textbooks. Jenna-Jane didn’t read for pleasure. Classical music was a vice she admitted to, but most of her passions were tied up in her work. In tribute to that jealous god, a statuette standing on one of the filing cabinets – a stylised human figure with its back arched, like the Oscar statue yawning and stretching – was inscribed on its wooden base with the words EXCEPTIONAL ACHIEVEMENT IN EMPIRICAL RESEARCH. Josef Mengele probably had one of those on his desk too.