Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

Beside me, Trudie drew a shuddering breath. Her hand sought mine for a moment, then she seemed to realise what she was doing and lowered it again with a visible effort.

‘Yeah,’ Gil agreed dryly. ‘You’re starting to feel it, aren’t you?’ He hadn’t moved from the threshold; in fact he was standing a little way back from it, which meant that he’d propped the inner door open somehow. The street door too, I noticed. Over his shoulder I saw a night bus roll by, heard the distant hoot of a garbage boat on the Thames.

‘Feel what?’ I demanded.

Gil smirked, or tried to. He had his hands in his pockets, trying for a casual pose, but I could see from their outline that both fists were clenched. ‘Well, you tell me, Castor,’ he said. ‘What are you feeling? The joys of fucking spring?’

Not bothering to answer, I waited him out. After a few moments he gave an impatient toss of the head as if he despaired of me.

‘What have you got here?’ I demanded.

‘I wouldn’t want to prejudice your professional objectivity,’ Gil said, deadpan. ‘Here. Go take a look for yourself.’ He took his right hand out of his pocket and threw something through the air to me. It smacked into my palm with a metal-on-metal clank. The bunch of keys. Gil pointed towards the far end of the corridor. ‘Check out basement level one. The swimming pool area. Pax, you and me will make a circuit of the outside of the building. Then we’ll meet back here and compare notes.’

Well, it was what we’d come here for. But before I moved, I found another bank of light switches and flicked them all on. Neon strips flash-bang-flickered into life in the room beyond the windows. It was an exercise area, reassuring in its complete banality, full of nothing more menacing than ski machines and rowing benches.

Feeling a little stupid, I walked on down the corridor and started to descend the stairs. When I got to the first bend I heard Gil yell something, followed by the sound of footsteps. I looked back as Trudie rounded the turn behind me. She passed me and kept on going, ignoring my questioning glance.

‘I thought you were meant to be doing the outside,’ I said.

‘I told Gil I wanted to get the full picture,’ she muttered. ‘He tried to pull rank and I left him to it. What’s the outside of the building going to tell us?’ I could see from the grim set of her jaw that this place had her as rattled as it had me, but that seemed to make her all the more determined not to show any fear.

Basement one was bigger than the street level – or at least the part of the street level that we’d seen. This was the gym’s reception area, with a counter in the centre of an open space, a quarry-tiled floor, a set of signs pointing away towards AEROBICS, WEIGHT TRAINING, PILATES STUDIO. With the lights blazing and the whole room deserted, it looked more like a stage set than a place in the real world – and thinking of it like that made me wonder whether someone or something was about to make an entrance. The irrational feeling of unease, even of fear, that had stolen over me upstairs came back even more strongly now. I had to fight the urge to look over my shoulder. The sense of threat was palpable. Something brushed faintly against the edges of my awareness, on the wavelength reserved for the dead.

‘There,’ said Trudie, pointing to a sign that read OLYMPIC POOL. Her voice trembled a little. Clearly I wasn’t the only one having a bad time of it down here.

We followed the sign to a double door, where there was a pause while I found the right key. Opening the door released a rush of chlorinated air. We stepped through into a smaller anteroom, with doors on either side bearing the male and female symbols and an open archway straight ahead, darkness beyond. We looked around for light switches but couldn’t find any. Somehow that seemed sinister. Why hide the light switches? What didn’t they want us to see?

Whatever it was, I had the sense that it was directly ahead of us, that what we’d come here to find was only a few steps away, on the other side of the arch. As if to confirm that, I was suddenly aware of the rhythmic slap of water against stone very close by. We’d found the pool.

‘Let’s go back,’ Trudie whispered from just behind me. I shook my head, as much to clear it as to disagree with her. This was absurd. The place was empty, and there was nothing down here to be afraid of. True, it might be haunted, but we were both exorcists. We were well placed to deal with anything that might be waiting beyond that archway.

‘We’ll just . . . take a look,’ I said with an effort. ‘And then we’ll come away.’

‘We won’t see anything,’ Trudie pointed out querulously. ‘It’s too dark.’

I put an end to the discussion by taking ten steps forward, passing under the arch and into the larger space beyond. I was walking on tiles again, hollow echoes rising with each step. A faint phosphorescence in the water showed me the edge of the pool now as my eyes began to adjust to the darkness.

In fact, it wasn’t completely dark. Even though we were below ground level, there was a light well in the centre of the room that must lead up through the centre of the building to the sky far above. Muddy radiance filtered down; seemed to hang in the air in granulated drifts.

But the light from the pool was unconnected to the light that came from above. It was stronger now, more defined, and there were eddies of movement within it. I was aware of two things: the first was that Trudie was standing at my side; the second was that my death-sense, which had been registering faint scrapes and whispers ever since we first came down the stairs, flared up now into a thousand-throated shriek like an air-raid siren.

It froze me in place for a second, and in that second Trudie walked past me to the edge of the pool. Silhouetted against that faint unsteady glow, she stared down into the depths. A strangled cry escaped her mouth. Her knees gave way and she almost fell. Lunging forward to catch her, I saw what she was seeing.

It was only incomprehension that saved me from falling myself. It took a couple of seconds for the movement below me to resolve itself into coherent shapes, and a couple of seconds more for my mind to process those shapes into meaning.

There were people moving around at the bottom of the pool, lots of them. They were visible by their own faint light, like so many Chinese lanterns burning under the water. Some wore armour. Others wore long, pale gowns that left their arms bare. All had sandals on their feet. One carried a short staff like a badge of office, which he brandished emphatically as he talked. And he was talking a lot: to the armoured soldiers, to another man dressed almost identically, to a woman whose long black hair was held back by a comb. They listened respectfully, all eyes on him as he gestured, turned, gestured again.

It was a convocation of ghosts – a caucus, a parliament of the dead – and it was impossible on a great many levels. But why did the sight of it fill me with such dread? Why was it suddenly impossible to draw a breath?

Trudie struggled free from my grip and backed away from the water’s edge, throwing up her hands as though to protect herself against some physical attack. I would have been happy to do the same thing, but I couldn’t move. Darkness was seeping in again from the edges of my vision, bringing with it an incandescent panic that swept away thought, deactivated muscles.

It was coming from above, I realised suddenly. It was hanging in the air over my head, and it was descending: falling around and over me like sand pouring into the lower half of an hourglass, burying me a grain at a time.

I tried to think through the fear, and then I tried to listen through it, which was even harder. This thing, whatever it might be, was dead, and it had an imprint, an essence that I could hear with my death-sense. It was almost drowned out by the screaming of my nerves, but it was there: the suggestion of pattern, of coherent form. If I had my whistle in my hands, I could start to play it. I’d have the beginnings of an exorcism.