Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

Juliet stared at me as though I was something she’d found crawling in her armpit. ‘No, Castor. I don’t know what they say about barn owls.’

‘They call twice when they’re hunting – the first time loud, the second time soft. It puts the prey off its guard. Makes it sound like they’re heading away from you when they’re about to drop out of the sky and put their claws through your eye sockets.’

‘The “you” in this sentence being a mouse or a rabbit,’ Juliet observed with cold amusement. ‘I don’t find it easy to identify with prey, Castor. It’s interesting that you do. Now, given that you could have asked me these questions by phone and not disturbed my sleep, why am I here?’

There was a pause – barely perceptible – before the word ‘sleep’. It made me hope that relations between Juliet and Sue might have improved somewhat, but since I’ve got a well-developed sense of self-preservation I didn’t ask. ‘Come and see,’ I said.

The invitation had an unintentionally biblical ring. Wasn’t that what the angel said to John when the Book of Revelation was opened? Thinking of apocalypses, I unlocked Super-Self’s front door and stood aside for Juliet to enter.

Super-Self felt different tonight. Juliet stepped inside, casting her gaze to right and left. She opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue to taste the air.

‘Nothing,’ she said at last, her vivid red eyes narrowing slightly.

‘We’re not there yet,’ I said.

I walked past her to the stairs, expecting to hear after a moment or two the clack of her heels as she fell in behind me. Nothing. Despite the stiletto heels of her blood-red shoes, she walked as silently as a cat. I knew she was there, because she was a radarblip in my awakened death-sense, and the back of my neck prickled from the near-physical pressure of her stare. Otherwise I would have felt like Orpheus. Orpheus on the downward leg of the journey, heading into Hades on a busker’s prayer.

The reception area was silent and pitch black. I went to turn on the lights, but Juliet’s hand blocked mine. ‘Hurts my eyes,’ she murmured absently.

‘I can’t see in the dark,’ I pointed out.

‘You’ll adjust.’

She was right. There was a little light filtering down the stairs – the street lamps shining in through Super-Self’s open doors. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to show me the outlines of objects. Paradoxically, despite the vivid scarlet tones of her outfit, now Juliet was darker than the darkness, a silhouette against solid black. Even her eyes had stopped glowing, as though their light had shifted into a part of the spectrum I couldn’t see.

‘Show me this thing,’ she said again. The playfulness in her tone was the most terrifying thing I’d ever heard.

Moving slowly to avoid falling over any low-lying items of furniture, I crossed the dark space to the far door, which opened not onto the pool but onto its anteroom.

I put my hand to the door, bracing myself for what was on the other side. I was a little surprised that I hadn’t felt it already, but perhaps this was how it worked: sitting like a spider in a web, dormant, almost asleep, until something touched one of the threads and woke it.

Juliet pushed me aside impatiently and walked into the anteroom ahead of me. There was more light here: the phosphorescence from the pool beyond cast shifting blue highlights onto the walls. Juliet tilted her head back, seeming to listen, but there was no sound except the arrhythmic lapping of the water against the tiles.

‘If we go a little closer—’ I began. Juliet made a brusque gesture, silencing me.

‘Yes,’ she murmured at last, her voice husky. Her lips peeled back from her teeth in a feral grin. ‘That’s what it wants. Go on, Castor. Move in closer.’

I hesitated. Juliet’s mood was hard to read, but those bared teeth were unsettling. I was suddenly more afraid of her than I was of the thing in the swimming pool beyond.

‘Closer,’ she said again. ‘It won’t show itself until you do. It’s hidden itself, used the souls of the dead to break up its outline. I won’t see it clearly until it moves, and it won’t move unless we throw out some bait. I’ll be right behind you.’

Yeah, that was very reassuring.

I went on through the arch to the water’s edge. The moving lights below me resolved themselves again into human shapes – became men and women in the depths of the water, circling and gesturing in an endless dumb show. At that moment I felt an aching solidarity with them. They’d lived and breathed once, been fully human, unlike either the thing that crouched invisible in the darkness above me or the siren at my back.

I leaned forward to see better. There were fewer figures in the pool than I remembered from the night before – seven or eight, where my confused memories had conjured up a crowd of several dozen. The two men in togas were arguing – one calmly, the other with a lot of emphatic gestures and striding back and forth. Another, older man watched them, majestically detached, while two women stood off to one side with their faces averted, looking sad and afraid. Two Roman soldiers with breastplates and helmets stared straight ahead, patient and impassive.

One of the women put her hand to her face. Something clutched in her fist caught my eye, and I leaned forward to see it more clearly. That was when the fear-thing fell on me like the giant foot in a Monty Python sketch. The last time I was here the process had been more gradual: an inexplicable sense of unease in the hall above, creeping paranoia on the stairs, pure, pants-wetting terror at the poolside. This was different. It was like having my brain ripped out of my skull and dropped into liquid nitrogen while it was still bleeding and pulsating.

Thought was impossible. So was movement. Fuck, so was breathing. My chest locked up as though all my ribs had twanged free and got tangled up together like one of Trudie’s cat’s cradles.

Poleaxed, and already off balance, I toppled forward into the water. I didn’t hear the splash even, but my eyes were open and I could still see as I sank down among the ghosts. They ignored me completely, playing out their pantomime around and through me in the blue-white spotlight created by their own phosphorescence.

For a moment I was staring into the face of the woman I’d been watching from above. It was a tragic face, eyes pleading and haunted, mouth tensed in a just-about-to-lose-it grimace. But I kept on sinking down and down. Now I was level with her shoulders, her chest, her arms. Her hand clutched tight around the flimsy thing she’d drawn out from the voluminous folds of her gown. It was a lace handkerchief, embroidered with the letters EC in elegant – if slightly over-elaborate – needlepoint.

Water was starting to trickle into my mouth, down my throat. Since I wasn’t breathing, it hadn’t found my airway yet, but it wouldn’t be long.

In the meantime, as my shoulder bumped against the bottom of the pool, I’d noticed that the woman’s shoes were wrong too: they were low boots made of leather, with scrimshaw buttons up the side. God damn it, she was even wearing socks.

Still unable to move a voluntary muscle, I turned slowly in the water, rolling over onto my back. The trickle of water became a torrent, and I cursed my luck silently as I prepared to say goodbye to the world.

Then something locked hard onto my ankle and hauled me upward like a hooked fish. I exploded out of the water into the cool night air, and the shock of the cold and the sudden movement started me breathing again. Okay, I was breathing water: a small detail, easily adjusted once I’d coughed and hacked and vomited myself back into equilibrium.

Juliet dumped me on the tiles without ceremony and left me to it. When I was in a state to take notice of her again, she was staring up into the light well above the pool, her knees slightly bent as though she was ready to spring. But the fear had gone – gone completely, in an instant, just as it had arrived. I was about to listen in through my death-sense to confirm my conviction that we were alone, but I stopped myself just in time. That was how the damn thing worked. That was what it responded to.