Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

‘Where’d you get it?’ I demanded.

‘Where do you think?’ Nicky countered. It was a fair question: it wasn’t as though he had a jet-setting lifestyle.

‘At your place.’

‘Up on the roof. So what’s the common denominator?’

I didn’t bother to ask him what he was doing up on the roof. Nicky is the kind of paranoiac who other paranoiacs feel should lighten up a little. I didn’t bother to answer his question, either, because it was clearly meant to be rhetorical.

‘They’re all in London,’ I mused.

Nicky rolled his eyes. ‘Yeah, right. Well done. What are you waiting for? Until you find one shoved up your arse? They’re aimed at you, Castor.’

‘Maybe,’ I allowed. ‘Maybe not. But yeah, so far I’m the common denominator.’

‘The first one was in Pen’s drive?’ Nicky demanded.

‘Yeah,’ I confirmed. And what was it that was scratching at the back door of my mind as I said that, begging to be let in? Whatever it was, it was playing games with me, because when I opened the door there was nothing there.

‘Second?’

‘Sue Book’s garden.’

‘And the third was tucked in behind my satellite dish. So whoever it was didn’t come inside any at any point. Suggesting maybe they couldn’t, because they’re dead or undead and don’t like to get tangled up in whatever wards are on the buildings. Anyway, they’re all summonings, and they’re all done in the same style. I was right about that much.’

‘All petitioning the same entity? This Tlallik?’

‘No. As I’m sure you noticed, all three of them carry different names. So now, in addition to Tlallik we’ve got demons named Ket and Jetaniul. And I can’t find word one about any of them.’

‘Nothing?’ I was both amazed and disconcerted.

‘Almost nothing,’ Nicky qualified. ‘There’s a passage in Foivel Grazimir’s Enaxeteleuton that includes Tlallik, but the context makes it completely useless. Crazy Foivel is talking about demons that are worth dealing with as opposed to demons that aren’t. I could do it from memory, but here.’

He’d taken a second, much larger sheet of paper from the same pocket, which he unfolded now before handing it to me with a ceremonial flourish.

‘Nicky,’ I said, ‘if this is from one of the Russian hermetics it’s in fucking old Cyrillic.’

‘You can transliterate though, right? Look.’ He ran his finger down the right-hand side of the page. ‘Agathonou. Dyspex. Idionel. Tlallik.’

‘Yeah, but what is that? Grazimir’s Christmas card list?’

‘Probably not, Castor. He was Jewish. I can give you the rough sense of it. He’s been saying “bespeak this name for wealth” and “this demon can set you up with some female company for the weekend”. Then he goes “but you must know from lore, or else learn it by hard experiment, that some names thought to be potent don’t do Jack shit” – I’m paraphrasing, you understand – “so call not on these, for though they be of great renown and great power, they don’t pick up when you call”.’

I pondered this, looking down the list for some other names I recognised. There weren’t any.

‘Grazimir is writing when?’ I asked.

‘Thirteenth century. About the same time as Honorius and Ghayat al-Hakim.’

‘So, way early?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And he’s got Tlallik pegged as a has-been.’

‘Exactly. And as far as I can tell, none of the high medievals mention him at all. Whoever drew those circles, Castor, they’re either dipping into some very old magic or else they’re so far behind the curve they’re staring up their own arseholes.’

I breathed out heavily – almost a sigh – and tucked the list into my pocket along with Jovan Ditko’s contact details. ‘Thanks again,’ I said. ‘Feel like adding another chore to the list?’

‘Not so much.’

‘It’s an easy one.’

‘Then try me. But don’t be surprised if I tell you to go fuck yourself. I’ve got a new line of business now; I don’t have to worry so much about pissing you off.’

‘Like you ever did. I need some information about a place. An area of London.’ I told him about Super-Self, and what I’d seen there. He listened in silence until I got to the part with the ghosts in the swimming pool.

‘No fucking way,’ he said then.

‘I’m telling you what I saw, Nicky.’

‘Then you were stoned. Roman ghosts? In togas? Please! Were there any ghost-cavemen there, throwing spears at ghost-mammoths?’

‘The Aldwych end of the Strand,’ I repeated doggedly. ‘Close to what used to be Wych Street. Apparently there was some work done there around the turn of the century. The twentieth century, I mean.’

‘Some work done?’ Nicky snorted. ‘They levelled the whole area to build Aldwych. Which is Anglo-Saxon, by the way – it means “old settlement”. From a logistical point of view, you could take that as a hint that there might have been buildings of some sort there when the Romans came through. But it’s still ridiculous.’

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why is it ridiculous? Give me the reasons.’

He didn’t even have to pause for thought. ‘First off, ghosts don’t last that long. You know that as well as I do. Second, ghosts don’t interact with other ghosts. I know you’ve got that weird little dead-girl posse, but I never heard of anything like that anywhere else. Ghosts interact with the living, or else they’re locked in on themselves and they just replay their death. What they don’t do is have kaffee-klatches with other ghosts. And third, the ground level would have been a good thirty feet lower back then. I know you were in the basement, so that’s a few feet below the street, but it still wouldn’t have been low enough.’

‘Suppose their anchor isn’t a physical place. It could be something that was used in the building. Some of the stonework behind the tiles of the swimming pool, say. Maybe they moved because their anchor was moved.’

‘And they end up twenty feet closer to God, still playing out whole conversations like scenes from a silent movie? Why doesn’t that explanation convince me? Face it, Castor, the behaviour you’re describing doesn’t fit with anything you’ve ever seen before.’

‘That’s precisely the point,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t. So whatever the explanation turns out to be, it’s going to be new. I don’t want to rule anything out just because it sounds weird.’

‘Or insane,’ Nicky added. ‘Yeah, I hear you. But even Sherlock Holmes liked to eliminate the impossible before he got moving. Otherwise he would’ve fingered a lot more leprechauns and unicorns than he did.’

I was too tired to argue. ‘Just check the site out,’ I asked him. ‘Tell me if anything weird has happened there before now.’

Nicky shrugged irritably. ‘Castor, that’s what libraries are for. Seriously. Don’t use me to research stuff that’s in the public domain. It’s fucking insulting.’

‘Why do you care, if I’m paying?’ I asked, exasperated in my turn. ‘What, you have to have job satisfaction too?’

He gave me a sour look. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I do. Because what you pay me, frankly, it’s symbolic. It’s stuff I like to get, but I can get it elsewhere. I work with you because it’s interesting. You start treating me like Wikipedia, we’re done.’

He was serious, so I backed off. I knew damn well how many favours I owed him, and how much more I needed his digging skills than he needed the old sounds and rare reds I trawled for him. But since our relationship is based on a foundation of solid bullshit, I backed off bullshitting all the way.

‘Sorry to injure your professional pride, Nicky,’ I said. ‘I’ll make sure only to use you for big, philosophical stuff in future. And since the payment’s symbolic, I’ll switch to IOUs.’