Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

But Trudie took that as read and went for the other impossibility. ‘Ghosts don’t team up,’ she said between gritted teeth. ‘They can haunt the same place, but they almost never acknowledge each other, even if they died at the same time. Those spirits were talking, interacting: they were replaying something they’d all been involved in. And there are at least a dozen of them. When has that ever happened before?’

‘I’ve never heard of it,’ I agreed. I was thinking of the Stanger ghosts. The three little girls who’d been Charles Stanger’s victims, and Abbie Torrington, whose death had come five decades later. They managed to interact okay, were the best of friends and seemed (allowing for the fact that that they were dead) to be having the time of their lives. But I’d had to intervene to cut them free from their past, from their place, with the help of my tin whistle. And they were young ghosts, in both senses, not beaten down and partially erased by the passage of time, whether pre- or post-mortem.

‘Something about the place,’ I mused. ‘About the history of the place. Maybe it’s got unusual properties. Has anyone researched that angle?’

‘I already told you we pulled the records,’ Gil pointed out with exaggerated patience. ‘All the way back to when the block was built. It was part of a big land-clearance project some time in the 1890s, when they built Aldwych. There used to be a road cutting through from the Strand to the market back then – Wych Street – right around here. But it was a shithole and they knocked it down. So yeah, before it was a building it was a street. A street with kind of a bad rep, but not in any way that would matter to us. It was just thieves’ rookeries, gin dives, that kind of thing.’

‘Do we know what it was like during the Roman occupation? ’ I pondered.

‘Probably harder to get a smoke,’ Gil said. ‘Listen, my brief was to bring you here and show you that thing. I’ve done it. The professor wants to hear your thoughts tomorrow morning at eight. Me, I couldn’t care less. I’m not expecting you to see anything I’ve missed. So unless you want to tell me you’ve cracked this thing, and pour forth your enlightenment on the grateful masses, I’m out of here.’

He gave me a sardonic look. I shrugged, and he nodded, satisfied. He held out his hand.

‘Keys,’ he demanded.

‘I’d like to hold on to them,’ I countered. ‘I think it might be useful to get some measurements. Maybe take another look into that swimming pool.’

Gil’s eyes boggled. I was bullshitting him about going back down to the pool: there was no way I was up for that just yet. But I was serious about wanting to take another look at Super-Self. Probably in daylight though, and probably not alone.

‘I keep the keys,’ Gil said.

‘I’ll give you them back first thing in the morning.’

‘I keep the keys.’

‘It would be really helpful to—’

‘Castor, give me the fucking keys!’

I shrugged and handed them over. ‘Thanks, Gil,’ I said. ‘Don’t let us keep you.’

Still bristling, giving us both a bare nod of acknowledgement, he walked away. I gave him a cheery wave. Trudie looked at me with scorn and exasperation then laughed incredulously as she saw what was sitting between my index and forefinger. It was the key to Super-Self’s front door, which I’d slipped off the ring and palmed, one-handed, as soon as it was clear Gil was going to be awkward.

‘Smooth,’ Trudie said.

‘My middle name.’

We looked at each other. ‘What was this thing you had to tell me?’ I asked.

She gave me an appraising stare. ‘Buy me a drink?’

‘At this hour? Where?’

‘I know a place.’

‘I’m skint.’

‘I’ll spot you a tenner.’

‘Then yeah,’ I allowed. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’

The place that Trudie had in mind was the Bridge that Fell, on Victoria Embankment directly behind the Savoy. It was a hot and cold bar: in other words, an establishment where the living and the dead were equally welcome. Like I said, zombies really shouldn’t eat or drink at all, because they don’t have functioning digestive systems any more and the stuff just sits in their stomachs and rots, hastening the final collapse of their bootstrapped bodies. But some go ahead and do it anyway, and others like Nicky Heath like the smell of booze even when they don’t actually drink it. Bars that take that kind of custom tend to stay open way past midnight, because their daytime trade is virtually non-existent.

We sat in the first-floor bar with a view over the river, in a room that smelled of cheap incense, embalming chemicals and organic decay. Most of the other patrons were zombies, and they were keeping themselves to themselves, nursing half-pints of beer through the watches of the night and dreaming of long-gone glories in the days when their hearts still pumped blood. I wondered as I got the drinks in how the place kept going. DMWs aren’t big spenders, after all. It’s hard for them to hold down a job, and since they can’t legally own property they mostly don’t succeed in taking any of their wealth with them when they die.

I realised the answer as a large party came in – three men and four women – talking in hushed, excited voices and taking photographs of anything that moved. Yeah, of course. The tourist dollar must subsidise a lot of places like this, the same way it did the London theatre.

That thought glanced off something else in my recent memory, something that seemed important but refused to come clear. I left it alone, knowing that chasing it wouldn’t work.

Trudie took her whisky and water out of my hand before I’d even sat down, and emptied a good half of it in a single, prolonged swig. She shuddered as the alcohol went down, shaking her head as if to clear it. ‘Cheers,’ she said belatedly, clinking glasses.

‘Cheers,’ I agreed. ‘Super-Self still in your system?’

‘Yeah. Yours too?’

‘More than somewhat.’

The tourists ambled past our table, saw that we were alive and kept on going. They didn’t bother to take any photos of us.

‘How did you first get into this business?’ Trudie asked.

‘By not being any good at anything else,’ I said. ‘How about you?’

She thought about it for a second before answering. ‘The redemption train,’ she said at last.

‘Which is what, exactly?’

Trudie swirled the liquid in her glass, staring down into it like my mum reading tea leaves. ‘What it sounds like. You try to make up for something bad you’ve done. Balance the books. That’s how a lot of people get into the order. It makes a lot of sense, at first, even though it’s never that easy. Atonement’s got its own built-in logic. But you, Castor . . . you’re a mystery to me.’

‘Yeah?’ I asked. ‘In what way?’

Trudie shook her head. ‘You’ve been through all this shit – Ditko’s possession, the White City Riot, the insanity at the Salisbury – but you never seem to put two and two and two and two and two together.’

‘Meaning . . . ?’

‘Meaning that it’s not just isolated incidents. So why do you pretend it is? “Nothing is at stake.” Do you remember saying that to me? I remember it. It was the night when the Salisbury burned and Asmodeus got free.’

‘The night when you and Gwillam carved me up,’ I reminded her – not to pick a fight, just to keep things clear.

She rolled her eyes. ‘If you like. But my point is that you said it, even when the world was coming to pieces all around us. You’re like some anti-Chicken Licken, running around telling everyone the sky isn’t falling, when you ought to be able to see that it damn well is.’

Some of the things that had happened since that night flashed through my mind like a slide show, things that weren’t on Trudie’s list but made her point, if anything, even stronger.