Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

Lisa Probert was in a side ward, by herself. A single bouquet of white lilies stood at the foot of the bed, in a plastic bucket serving as a makeshift vase. She looked worse than I remembered – she’d always been a big, loud-mouthed, sassy kid – unconscious, tied up with tubes and gauze, fed by drips and drained by catheters. She’d already lost enough body mass for it to show. She looked like a bird that had crashed into a kitchen window and fallen half-broken to the ground. On the dark skin below her eyes, which were only three-quarters closed, darker semicircles showed like bruises. Her lips glistened with gelatine, but the skin was dry and cracked just the same.

I sat beside her for a while, listening to her. I can do this with the living as well as the dead: open the doors of perception and catch the spoor of some immaterial essence, a soul or atman or whatever you want to call it, distilled into music. Lisa’s music was a riotous polyphonic jumble. Its strength didn’t depend on the strength of her body, and it didn’t correlate in any direct way with what she was like as a person. It was just there, propagating outward from her at an acute angle to the world we know.

When I had the music fixed in my head, I took out my whistle and started to play it. It sounds stupid, but it’s been known to work. I did it for Juliet once, when she was almost killed in a fight against the demon Moloch, and the tune had given her strength. It’s the summoning, essentially: the first part of an exorcism, when you raise the spirit up and make it attend you. I was calling Lisa back into herself, or trying to. But after ten or fifteen minutes of playing she hadn’t moved and there was no visible difference in her condition.

‘Could you please tell me what you’re doing here.’ The voice yanked me out of the half-trance I sink into when I play. I looked up to see a ruddy-faced man in a white doctor’s coat standing over me. The badge on his chest read DR SULLIVAN. He didn’t look happy.

‘The door was open,’ I lied. ‘I’m Felix Castor. I made the call to the emergency services the night Lisa was brought in here. I think you’ve got me down as next of kin.’

The doctor’s expression changed, but it didn’t soften. ‘Oh,’ he grunted. ‘That’s you, is it? We’ve tried to contact you a dozen times.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve been away.’ It was as good an explanation as any – as good as I felt like giving him, anyway. ‘I understand you want me to sign some permissions.’

‘We did,’ Doctor Sullivan corrected me. ‘But we decided we couldn’t wait any longer. Since Lisa has no living relatives, we were able to have her declared a ward of court. It went through yesterday, in your absence since you didn’t respond to the court summons.’ I remembered the large brown envelope on Pen’s hall table. ‘So there’s nothing more we need from you now, Mr Castor, and your visiting rights are at my discretion. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’

‘I’d prefer to stay a while,’ I said. ‘I’ll stop playing, if that will make a difference.’ What I meant was that I’d hum under my breath. The tin whistle is a conduit for the power and helps to keep it focused, but it’s not an essential part of the process.

‘It won’t,’ said Doctor Sullivan. ‘I’m asking you to leave right now. If you refuse, I’ll call security.’

I weighed up the pros and cons, found that there weren’t any pros. If I pissed this guy off, he could shut me out of here altogether. I had to be meek and mild now if I wanted to come back another time and try this stunt again.

‘Visiting hours,’ I said. ‘When would they be?’

‘Two o’clock until eight o’clock, seven days a week.’ He remained in the doorway of the room, staring in at me. He obviously wasn’t going to leave before I did. He didn’t seem to trust me to find my own way out.

I gave it up, and let him escort me to the door. ‘Is she responding at all?’ I asked him on the way. ‘Has there been any change in her condition?’

‘None,’ he said bluntly.

‘And . . . the prognosis . . . ?’

‘It’s too early to say. There are lots of different physical and psychological mechanisms that can induce this kind of extreme fugue. Until we understand the aetiology of Lisa’s condition, we can only treat the symptoms.’

‘The aetiology? She saw her mother murdered . . .’

‘And that was certainly a factor. Probably the dominant factor. But we can’t assume it’s the only one, and we’re not in the habit of prescribing treatment on the basis of unsupported opinion.’ He went on talking about brain chemistry and traumatic shock, but I’d stopped listening because something had begun niggling at the back of my mind. Since Lisa has no living relatives . . .

I stopped dead in my tracks. ‘Who left the flowers?’ I demanded.

‘What?’ Doctor Sullivan looked mystified.

‘The lilies!’ I didn’t wait for an answer. I was already striding back down the corridor and into the small room where Lisa lay. ‘Mr Castor!’ the doctor yelled at my back. ‘I’m calling security! I’m doing it right now.’

There was a note with the flowers, in a white envelope about three inches square, but since Lisa couldn’t read it, nobody had bothered to open it. It was still tucked into the white ribbon that bound the stems of the flowers together. Lilies. White lilies for the dead.

The card inside the envelope bore a bloody thumbprint and ten words written in a tortured, angular hand so large that they filled the available space and in places overlapped each other.

I haven’t forgotten her. All things in their place.

A

I remember a game we used to play as kids at school, a conceptual game which consisted of endless variations on the same question. If it was a choice between doing X or dying, which would you do? X might be buggering a dog, or killing your mum, or pissing in the communion wine. Usually the game started with stuff like that and then veered slowly but inexorably into even more fantastical waters. If it was a choice between having a third eyeball or dying, which would you do? If you were stuck on a tiny rock in the middle of outer space and it was a choice between eating a bucket of cockroaches or starving to death, which would you do? The fun part was comparing answers and picking holes in each other’s code of ethics. We all knew that some things were so bad that dying was preferable, but we didn’t always agree on what they were. You’d be amazed, for example, how many people found the cockroach diet a sticking point. I always said I’d tuck right in. I suspect that when it comes to the crunch, if I can put it that way, most people would.

But here I was, standing on the lonely heights of my own personal moral watershed. And I was frozen like a rabbit in headlights, dazzled by the appalling vista that presented itself on either hand.

Asmodeus had made it clear that he wasn’t going to stop until everyone who knew Rafi was dead. The Anathemata could stop him, I was pretty sure, but they’d kill Rafi in the process – then go to confession, have their sins washed away and go out on the razzle.

Somewhere in the middle was Jenna-Jane Mulbridge. The devil at the crossroads.

The phone rang three times. The static on the line sounded like claws scratching at the bottom of a door: something scrabbling to be let in, or out.

Jenna-Jane picked up on the fourth ring. ‘Hello?’

‘I’m calling your bluff,’ I said.

‘Felix!’ That same tone of simple and sincere delight that she always used whenever I was dragged kicking and thrashing back into her life. ‘You left so suddenly this afternoon, I was afraid I’d offended you.’