Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

Rosie flexed her fingers and gave a harsh, wincing moan.

‘I’ve broken my hand,’ she lamented.

‘It’s someone else’s hand,’ I reminded her. ‘And he had it coming.’

I stepped through onto the steel platform at the head of the stairs leading down into the abyss. It was hard, as it had been the first time around, to cross that threshold, to walk into the screaming turmoil my death-sense was picking up from below, a hundred times more strident and painful than the monotone clamour of the fire alarm. But hard as it was for me, it was a lot harder for Rosie. She stopped dead in the doorway as though there was a solid barrier there, as though the steel door was locked and bolted instead of standing wide open. The wards again, the wards written on the door to keep the dead and the undead from breaking out. It kept them from breaking in too – and an axe wouldn’t be much use against die-stamped steel.

‘I can’t come through here,’ Rosie said.

‘Then watch our backs,’ I suggested. ‘And wait for us.’

‘Don’t be long, Felix.’

‘We’ll either be quick or dead,’ I muttered grimly. ‘Give it ten minutes, Rosie. One way or another, it’ll be over by then.’

She nodded tersely and set her back to the open door, a dragon in the gateway, stopping any reinforcements from the building’s upper floors from crashing our party. Probably most of the rent-a-cops were in the basement already, but every little helps.

We ran down the metal stairs, the din of our booming footsteps drowned out by the general hubbub. Down here the fire alarm’s shrill warning had to struggle to make itself heard in a chorus of bellowing and shrieking voices, metallic booms and echoes, weeping and wailing and – I strongly suspected – gnashing of teeth. The inmates of the basement Gulag seemed to be collectively going crazy.

‘Any idea where she’ll be?’ I yelled to Gil. He couldn’t hear me so I shrugged and gestured to indicate that I didn’t know where to go.

He put his mouth close to my ear to answer. ‘There’s another lab down here. A big one. That’s the room the professor was prepping this morning, so that’s where she’ll be.’

I let him take the lead again as we walked between the squat cement cell blocks. This place was terrifying even when looking down on it from above like the eye of God; when you were in the middle of it, it was indescribable.

As I think I mentioned earlier, to an exorcist every place is soaked in the residue of past emotions like the smells of old cooking. This place was saturated with fear and despair, an effluvium as rich and deep as the leaf mould in an ancient forest. Out of that rich substrate, something even more hysterical and insensate rose like some exotic bloom. I found myself breathing in shallow gulps as though that would somehow keep the emotional tsunami from entering into me.

Another patrol of three men crossed an intersection ahead of us. We flattened ourselves against the wall and they missed us in the dark.

Something was scrabbling near my ear, unnoticed in the clamour until I got right up close to it. I turned my head and saw the Judas window of one of the cell doors right beside me. I didn’t have time for this. I was here for one thing and one thing only, and getting distracted could get a lot of people I cared about dead and worse than dead. But something moved me forward in spite of myself, and I pressed my eye to the hole.

The inside of the cell was even darker than it was out here: a single red emergency light in a far corner lit up the room no more brightly than a child’s night light. The cell’s inmate was clawing at the door, and the sound or maybe just the vibration had made it through the metal to me. He was a werewolf, a loup-garou . Wolves weren’t in his genome though, so the word was a misnomer in this case. He looked more like a were-hare, ears hanging down like broken radio masts over his elongated face. A single huge eye rolled in his face; the other eye had been removed, and bare muscle twitched around the empty socket, making it expand and contract in lockstep with its neighbour.

I wanted to back away, but I just stayed there for an endless moment, staring into that sightless eye. Gil shook my shoulder. ‘Come on,’ he yelled. ‘I think it’s clear.’

Like a man coming out of a trance, I took a step back from the door, but I didn’t move to follow him.

‘Come on,’ he said again. ‘Castor, it’s this way.’

‘How do the doors open?’ I asked him.

‘On keypads,’ he said pointing. ‘What’s that got to do with anything? The lab won’t be locked. The professor will be in there now, working on your friend.’

‘But there has to be a failsafe. Some way of opening all the doors in case the building catches fire or something.’

‘I don’t think so. That’s not the way the professor’s mind works.’

I shook my head to clear it, but that just made it hurt more. I knew I had to be right. This place might be a concentration camp, but it was a concentration camp built inside a hospital: the place had to be up to code, at least on the face of it. Somewhere there was a master switch that would open all these doors.

The fire alarm stopped ringing. The abrupt silence was a huge and shocking absence, a vacuum that extinguished all the other screams and yells and moans and bangs the way a wind tunnel sucks the flame from a candle. Soon there was just a single voice screaming, an inhuman ululation of pain and rage and madness.

A moment later the lights came on.

Gil gave me a frantic look, and I nodded, waving him on. In silence now, and more slowly, we rounded the corner of the cell block and found ourselves in yet another wide corridor. Ahead of us stood a pair of locked double doors labelled with NO ADMITTANCE notices that were both large and strident. Gil broke them down with the fire axe and we strode through.

Ten or maybe twenty yards ahead of us, there was one final door. This was where the screaming was coming from. Other sounds from within, voices and footfalls and the clattering of instruments, made it clear that there was a party in progress, and that it hadn’t stopped for the fire drill.

There was a guard on this door too, of course. He shouted out for us to halt, holding his sidewinder out in front of him in an en garde stance. I knocked it aside with a whirling parry, ducked and followed through, driving my own baton into his mouth with explosive force.

The poor sod went down like a sack of potatoes, his jaw in red ruin, and we walked over him into the room. For all I knew, he could have been poor bloody infantry – one of the newbies conscripted by J-J to fill the gaps in her ranks and keep anyone from bugging her while she dismantled Juliet. He might not know the first thing about the people who signed his pay cheque or what was going on a few feet behind him. On the other hand, he presumably wasn’t deaf.

Sometimes it pays to ask the hard questions.

The room we walked into looked more like an operating theatre than anything else. Half a dozen men and women in white coats stood around a very fancy piece of apparatus – a flat surface, eight feet by four, mounted on a series of nested gimbals so that it could be adjusted to any height and any angle. The naked form strapped to it was instantly recognisable as Juliet. Her bone-white skin – right down to the absence of aureoles – and ink-black hair, the catastrophe curves of her impossibly perfect breasts, had haunted my dreams for so long I wasn’t likely to mistake them when I saw them once again in the flesh.

At any other time, seeing Juliet naked would have fused my cerebral hemispheres into unusable slag and left me running on the default systems of animal lust. Now what I felt was very different.