Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

I called Nicky Heath at odd intervals, got him on about the third or fourth time. He’d been down in the main auditorium of the Gaumont, fucking around with the seating layout yet again. I refrained from asking what the point of that was, given that he was the only one who ever got to sit there. Instead, I asked him if he had any news for me.

‘Yeah,’ Nicky said, ‘I do. On the Ditko front, quite a lot of stuff – but it’s more quantity than quality, if you get my drift. Anyway, there’s too much to go over on the phone. Come and pick it up whenever you’re free.’

‘Anything on that ward I picked up at Pen’s place?’

‘Not so far. I did the grimoires, came up with a big zero. Now I’m feeding Tlallik and Tlullik into some weird-arsed meta-search engines, and trailing them across my favourite necromantic noticeboards, but if anyone’s ever heard of them, they sure as fuck didn’t write it down anywhere.’

‘I’ve got another one for you,’ I said. ‘Same pentagram, different payload.’

‘Shoot it on over. The more the merrier.’

Nicky’s funereal tone belied his words, but I took the invitation anyway. Then I checked my watch.

‘I’ve got to be somewhere at midnight,’ I said. ‘Is it okay if I come over after that?’

‘I don’t sleep, Castor. Night and day’s all the same to me, except at night I can take a walk round the block without going rotten.’

‘Not in this weather,’ I pointed out.

He snorted. ‘Yeah, you got that right. Come over whenever you like. My door’s always open.’

‘Your door is booby-trapped, Nicky.’

‘Well, that too.’ I was about to hang up when he spoke again. ‘Oh, wait. I won’t be here. I’ll be over in Hoe Street. Hoe Street Market.’

‘In the early hours of the morning?’ I demanded.

‘Yeah.’

‘Okay. Which end?’

‘You’ll find me, Castor. The crowds will have thinned out by then.’

So I was looking at a night on the town with Gil McClennan, followed by a visit to a dead man in a deserted street market. You can see why people don’t go into exorcism for the glamour.

When I got to Charing Cross station it was still five minutes before the hour. Midnight isn’t particularly late by West End standards, so there were a fair number of people around, even though most of the restaurants and coffee houses on the Strand had already closed their doors.

Thinking I was the first one there, I leaned against the cheap replica of the Eleanor Cross and settled in to wait for the others. Then I spotted Trudie Pax standing just inside the station entrance, nervously winding and unwinding the string on her left hand.

She saw me at the same time and headed over, saving me the trouble of deciding whether or not to join her. She was wearing a khaki army fatigue jacket, jeans and boots, but despite the urban-adventurer chic she looked tired and a little distracted.

‘So how is the mapping going?’ I asked.

She made a non-committal gesture. ‘We’ve got something, ’ she said. ‘The start of something. I’ll show you tomorrow, and you can tell me what it’s worth. You don’t know what to say to me, do you, Castor?’

‘I don’t think I’ve got anything to say to you,’ I corrected her.

‘The last time we met—’

‘The last time we met you set me up, Trudie. Without you, Gwillam wouldn’t have got to Rafi, and we wouldn’t be in this shit now.’

She scowled where I thought she might blush. ‘I didn’t know what he was planning to do,’ she pointed out coldly. ‘When I told you there’d be no bugs, I meant it. There were none on me. Gwillam managed to take you anyway, but how is that my fault? I did what I could to keep my word. But he turned me into a liar, so I quit. I left the Anathemata that same night.’

‘To join the MOU,’ I mused. ‘That’s a really principled stand. Bravo.’

Trudie sighed. ‘I’m not asking for your approval, Castor,’ she said.

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘I just want you to know that it was a two-way deal. If you were screwed over, I was screwed over too – and I trusted Father Gwillam, so it was probably a harder knock for me.’

‘Still a good Catholic girl though, yeah?’

Trudie threw out her hands, her temper getting the better of her contrition. ‘What do you want from me?’ she demanded.

‘Not a thing,’ I growled back. But it was a fair question. I was sniping at her like a jealous husband, and she was probably right that she was more screwed against than screwing. I just couldn’t unbend with her because she was a part of that night – of the blood and the horror and the guilt. My guilt, mostly, but clearly I was more than happy to spread it around.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘We’re working together, so I’ll try to be civil whenever we’re rubbing shoulders. Beyond that, we don’t really have to talk, do we?’

Trudie stared at me unblinkingly. ‘I’ll leave that up to you,’ she said with an edge in her voice. ‘I know something about Ditko – Asmodeus, rather – that I haven’t told Professor Mulbridge. I was thinking that I’d tell you, and leave it up to you who else finds out. But maybe I’m giving you the benefit of too many doubts, Castor. Maybe you’re more concerned about your own righteousness than you are about helping your friend.’

She turned to walk away and ran straight into Gil McClennan, who had somehow got up really close to us without either of us seeing him. ‘Not interrupting anything, am I?’ he asked, with an expression on his face that was the second cousin to a leer.

‘Group prayers,’ I said. ‘Where are the others?’

‘It’s just the three of us tonight.’ Gil moved his index finger round in a circle to indicate Trudie, me and himself. ‘Devani and Etheridge have already seen this, and they came up blank. You two are new, so now it’s your turn to look comically amazed. Whenever you’re ready.’

He walked on, heading away from Trafalgar Square, up the Strand. I glanced at Trudie, who shrugged and followed him. Whatever she had to tell me, it would clearly have to wait.

We walked almost the full length of the Strand, stopping just short of Aldwych. On the side of the street opposite the Savoy, a little way past the Vaudeville theatre, Gil stopped and waited for us to catch up. He was standing in front of an inconspicuous door jammed into a narrow space between a camping shop and an Italian restaurant. To one side of the door, a glassed-in display cabinet contained nothing but a poster. SUPER-SELF GYM AND FITNESS CENTER, it proclaimed, flaunting the American spelling like a visible link to a far-off land of tans and six-packs. Underneath the gilt-edged words, a sprawl of photos showed exercise bikes, treadmills, a swimming pool, a sauna.

Gil produced a bunch of keys, put one in the lock and turned. As he opened the door, a red light flashed in the darkness beyond and a siren started a two-tone sotto voce complaint. Gil tapped numbers into a keypad just inside the door until the light and noise stopped. Then he flicked some switches and the lights came on, showing a small lobby with another door directly facing us. He crossed the lobby and held the far door open for us.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Over to you.’

Pax and I moved forward in a truncated skirmish line, death-sense awake and receptive, like soldiers advancing across a minefield. The space beyond was just a corridor, but it was much wider than the lobby as well as longer. One wall was a painted frieze on the theme of physically perfect human beings running, jumping, swimming, touching their toes. The other wall was entirely of glass, with darkness beyond. Staring into that fathomless black void, I felt something like dread rising inside me, so suddenly it took me by surprise. I wasn’t scared of the dark: I was scared of how little I knew about that darkness. The unlit room, separated from me by a single thickness of glass, could be as big as a cathedral or as small as a cupboard. What would it feel like to be lost in that darkness? To have no idea how far away from you the walls were?