Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

Below us was a space like the floor of a vast warehouse, sub-divided not by shelves or storage bins but by multi-storey structures like sturdier versions of the temporary offices that spring up on building sites. These weren’t portakabins though: they were breeze-block ramparts with steel doors but no windows – and the doors were close enough together to give some sense of what the spaces behind them might look like: there’d just about be room to swing a cat, so long as you kept the arc really tight.

Steel steps and walkways connected the blocks, and the spaces in between them – broad corridors with steel-grille floors – were interrupted about every ten feet by chain-link barriers with gates inset. Nobody seemed to be manning these checkpoints, and all the gates were currently open: presumably they slammed shut automatically if one of the cell doors was compromised, to ensure that any occupant who got out of its tomb-with-a-view wouldn’t be able to wander too far.

‘Two hundred and forty cells,’ Gil said, ‘in case you were trying to count. But some of them are two and three-berth. And every single one of them is silver-lined – three hundred thousand square feet of silver sheeting in a one-to-three steel laminate mix that Professor Mulbridge designed personally. You know what that does to the undead and the Hell-kin. This space is actually as large as the entire building. And it didn’t even exist until we acquired the building. That’s how much we’ve got rolling for us now, Castor. You walked out of this operation just as it was getting big.’

The jagged power chords of the dead and undead in their cells below us were still scraping against my nervous system, and my throat dried out in the space of three abortive swallows as I surveyed the bargain-basement Alcatraz. ‘Yeah,’ I croaked. ‘I’m kicking myself.’

Gil turned to look at me with his lip curled.

‘My God,’ he said, ‘why are you still in this business?’

There was no sense wasting any breath answering him.

‘You want to see what we’ve got,’ he asked, ‘or shall we go back upstairs so Professor Mulbridge can fan your face with a damp flannel?’

‘I’m good,’ I said. I turned my back on the screaming room and walked back out through the bunker door into the main corridor. But Gil didn’t follow me, and with the door still open the virtual uproar didn’t stop.

This is the downside of being an exorcist. Our dark-adapted senses let us see an upside-down rainbow where the doubting Thomases see undifferentiated black; but we can’t turn them off. Closing your eyes and covering your ears just doesn’t cut it.

Gil was enjoying my discomfort. He leaned against the doorframe, arms folded, and watched me sweat.

‘The two blocks right at the far end,’ he said, deciding to give me the inventory anyway, ‘are just zombies. Alpha block is decay parameter experiments; Bravo is toxicology. You can poison the DMWs, amazingly, if you get the right mix of shit. Stuff that accelerates cellular breakdown, or attacks the muscles.

‘Charlie through Echo are loup-garous . We run through a lot of them, because the main thrust of the research is incompatibility vectors – ways of forcing the human spirit out of the animal flesh so it reverts to being just an animal. It tends to be irreversible, so every werewolf we get is a non-renewable asset.

‘Foxtrot and Golf are a real circus. We keep all the unclassifieds there. Our resident vampire – if he is a vampire. A few referrals from other departments who’ve got the souls of people they used to know anchored inside them somehow and come here for a ghost-ectomy. Partially transformed loup-garous that got jammed halfway and can’t get in or out. The minor demons we’ve managed to raise.

‘And when we get to Hotel, well fuck . . .’

I walked away, leaving him to slam the door and cycle the locks. That took a while, so I was able to walk all the way up to the second floor by myself, taking my time so that the ringing in my ears had stopped and my pulse rate had returned to normal by the time I got back to Jenna-Jane’s office.

She was alone this time, and busy typing an email, but she looked up and swivelled her chair to face me as I walked in. She gave me another of those smiles. This time I could see the flames of Armageddon behind it.

‘It’s taken a certain amount of arranging,’ she said. ‘Father Gwillam was rather hoping that the MOU’s resources would be at his disposal for the duration of this little skirmish. But I’ve had to disappoint him. My answer is yes, Felix. I’ll work with you on bringing Ditko in.’

‘I changed my mind,’ I answered grimly. ‘Do what you like as far as Gwillam is concerned. Rafi would be better off dead than here.’

‘We won’t keep him here, Castor.’

I blinked. I must still be disoriented from the basement and the full-frontal assault on my death-sense. ‘What?’

‘We’ll return him to the Stanger. Your friend will be safe. We’ll even help you, as far as we can, in removing the demon from him.’

I laughed a little hollowly. ‘J-J, I just saw your zoo, so I know you didn’t turn into Mother Teresa while I wasn’t looking.’

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘This isn’t altruism. We help you, and you help us. I give you Rafael Ditko, and you give me . . .’

She paused as if this was a game of some kind, as if she wanted me to guess.

‘What?’ I demanded.

‘Yourself, Felix. You come and work for me again.’

‘ The Usual Suspects ,’ said Nicky Heath. ‘ Three Days of the Condor . And Costa Gavras’s Missing .’

Nicky smelled of Old Spice over other, more astringent chemicals, and the dark patches within his death-white pallor were more noticeable than they usually are. He was five years dead and doing pretty well, all things considered, but the loss of Imelda Probert’s professional services had hit him hard. Before Asmodeus killed her, the Ice-Maker was a faith healer for the dead: by a laying on of hands, she claimed to be able to lower a zombie’s core temperature and slow the processes of decay. Sounded like bullshit to me, when I first heard about it, but Nicky used her regularly and Nicky was unliving proof that whatever she did actually worked. Now though, he’d been thrown back on his own resources.

Nicky makes sure that the Walthamstow Gaumont, the long-disused and recently renovated cinema he’s made his home, is as cold as an Eskimo’s sock drawer; and he flushes his system with ferociously potent chemical cocktails every few days, effectively pickling his flesh to keep it from going bad. But from the look of things, he was facing some kind of a crisis on the preservation front. I decided the tactful thing was to avoid mentioning it, and since I’d walked in on him in the middle of setting up a late-night triple bill, another subject was ready to hand.

‘You’re slipping, Nicky,’ I said. ‘I can actually see a link between those three movies.’

‘So?’ Nicky was even more pugnacious than usual. Something was eating him, so to speak, but if it was my complicity in Imelda’s death, I wasn’t feeling up to that conversation just yet. I felt – for about the twentieth time that day – an overwhelming, almost crippling desire to get rat-arse drunk. Nicky had one of the best wine cellars in London, but he limited himself to inhaling the breath of the wine: the perfect companion for a boozy voyage into oblivion, in that he stayed sober and could be the designated driver on the return journey. But it was a joyride I couldn’t afford right then.

‘So, normally when you go for a triple bill it’s, like, they all had Filboyd Studge as key grip or something. It’s nice to see you go for something as obvious as conspiracy thrillers.’