Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

It’s funny how your own words come around to drop their pants and moon you sometimes.

‘Yeah,’ I said flatly. ‘Times change. But the common ground was always there, Jenna-Jane. We both want Rafi alive. For different reasons, admittedly, but alive is alive. So I’m prepared to work with you to bring him in, in return for a guarantee that you won’t bow to any outside pressure you might get to pull the plug on him.’

J-J frowned. ‘Outside pressure? You intrigue me, Felix. But tell me, have you ever known me to bow to pressure? From any source?’

I had to admit that I hadn’t. The idea had kind of a whimsical sound to it, like Jack the Ripper holding a door open for a little old lady and saying, ‘No, after you . . .’

Jenna-Jane clasped her hands together under her chin with just the index fingers extended, pressed to her pursed lips. She considered for a few moments in silence while – out of a lack of other viable options – I sat and waited for the wheels to turn.

‘Do you know where Ditko is?’ she asked at last.

‘No,’ I admitted, ‘I don’t. But I bumped into him in Brixton last night and got close enough to touch him.’ I didn’t see any need to explain that it was Asmodeus who’d been doing the touching, and that I was the hunted rather than the hunter in the whole scenario.

‘He’s got nothing to offer us, Professor,’ Gil McClennan said, his voice dripping with contempt. ‘Our teams are close to finding Ditko already. We don’t need Castor to close this net.’

Jenna-Jane closed her eyes momentarily. I sympathised. Just by telling me that she was already looking for Asmodeus, McClennan had weakened her bargaining position. It must be a trial to be surrounded by idiots and yes-men the whole time: it’s a cross that all tyrants have to bear.

‘There might, it’s true, be ways in which we could be helpful to each other,’ Jenna-Jane said, as though Gil hadn’t spoken. ‘But – you’ll forgive me for this, Felix, I’m sure – I remain to be convinced that you’re negotiating in good faith. When we find Mr Ditko, why would you hand him over to me instead of absconding with him yourself – as you absconded once before, when he was confined at the Stanger Care Home.’

‘Nobody knows, Jenna-Jane,’ I said blandly, ‘who was responsible for springing Rafi from the Stanger. It seems to have been a team effort though. Two men and a woman, from what I heard. And as you know, I work alone.’

‘Of course.’ J-J’s smile was cold and tight. ‘Nonetheless, the question stands.’

‘The authorities want Rafi dealt with,’ I said, ‘and they don’t really care how it’s done. They’ve given the Anathemata Curialis total freedom to close the case in any way they like, and that almost certainly means they’ll kill Rafi in the course of destroying or banishing Asmodeus.’

Jenna-Jane considered this for a moment in silence. ‘Go on,’ she said at last.

‘I’ll work with your people. You’ll make the decisions and call the shots. I’ll advise and give you my skills where necessary, and leave you to choose the when and where. You’ll be in control the whole time.’

‘Your skills,’ Gil repeated, with a derisive emphasis.

Jenna-Jane glanced at him momentarily, as though slightly pained by his bluntness. Then she delivered her verdict. ‘I’ll need to think about it,’ she said, opening her palms as though to show how even-handedly she’d do that. ‘Gil, why not give Mr Castor a little tour of our new facilities while I mull his proposal over?’

McClennan looked like he’d swallowed a wasp, but a yes-man has to stick to the script or else retrain as a yes-and-no-man. ‘Very well, Professor,’ he managed. ‘Just the top floors or . . . ?’

‘Everything,’ Jenna-Jane said. ‘We’re publicly audited, Gil. Nothing we do here is a secret.’

Gil crossed to the door and opened it. I lingered for a moment, staring at J-J. ‘I’ll give you my answer when you come back,’ she said.

It was the best I was going to get, obviously. But I had to wonder, as I followed McClennan out through the door, what it was that was preventing her from giving me a straight answer on the spot. As the office door closed, she was deep in murmured consultation with Gentle, who was nodding and scribbling rapidly in her notebook.

Metamorphic ontology, a phrase that’s both resonant and anodyne, hiding itself coyly behind Ancient Greek polysyllables like a coquette peeping out from behind her fan. It means the study of the undead: science’s sheepish and undignified scramble to catch up with recent developments in the afterlife, especially as they impact on this one. Ontology ferrets into the nature of being; metamorphosis is change. Translation: ‘When they’re dead, people change into some bloody scary things. Let’s talk some serious Latin about it.’

Jenna-Jane was the leader in the field, and her MO unit at St Mary’s had been the first to set up anywhere in the world. It had been much copied since, and J-J now ran a lucrative sideline in advising other hospitals on how to do it – what staff and resources they’d need, how many tasers, how many shackles, how many metric tons of therapeutic narcotics, and of course how thick the soundproofing would need to be.

If I sound a bit sour on the whole enterprise, it’s because I was part of it once and I know what it looks like from the inside. Consequently I wasn’t looking forward to this tour at all, but I was going to roll with it anyway, and keep my eyes open the whole way through. Know your enemy, as the saying goes, especially if you’re planning to be friends.

‘This floor is staff offices and admin,’ Gil said sullenly, as we walked back down the corridor towards the lifts and the stairwell.

‘How many exorcists on staff?’ I asked.

‘Thirty.’

I gave a low whistle. In my day it had varied between two and six. J-J had called in extra help when she needed it, but strictly on a jobbing basis. Her budget must be colossal now. I wondered whether any of the permanent staff were people I knew. I hoped not. Maybe they were all McClennans.

We passed a number of offices, all empty. Most were larger than J-J’s and better furnished: it seemed like she was taking her monastic pretensions to new extremes. One of them, squeezed into a corner between the toilets and the water cooler, bore a terse white-on-black sign that read GILBERT MCCLENNAN, VOLUNTEER LIAISON & FIELD COORDINATOR.

‘Liaison?’ I asked, pointing.

Gil shrugged. ‘Rosie,’ he grunted, grimacing slightly. ‘Organising the meat train.’

‘Delicate choice of words.’

‘What do you want me to call it, Castor? She’s burning them out faster and faster. I don’t even know why we keep her around.’

Because she brings in the money, I thought but didn’t say. Because academics come from far and wide to see the fifteenth-century ghost you’ve caught and pressed between two glass slides. And that brings the headlines, and the headlines grease the baking tin. But that was only half the answer. For J-J, the money was only ever a means to an end.

Gil led the way down to the first floor. There was building work going on here too, but not so much. Massive pieces of equipment were being welded to walls and floors in labs that looked like something out of Victor Frankenstein’s wet dreams. I did the sums in my head. The MOU had only had two floors at the Helen Trabitch, and it was a smaller building. This move must have more than doubled the scale of Jenna-Jane’s operation.

‘Analytics,’ Gil said. ‘Technical and lab support. This is where blood and tissue sampling gets done. X-rays. Computer imaging . . .’ We’d come to a door beyond which an autopsy slab stood in the centre of a small bare room, surrounded by shelves of chemicals and porcelain drainage troughs. The tiled floor gleamed whiter than white, and the heady smell of formaldehyde hung in the air. ‘And autopsies,’ said Gil, ‘as required.’