by Mike Carey
The Naming of the Beasts
( Felix Castor - 5 )
Mike Carey
The fifth dynamic outing for freelance London exorcist Felix Castor resolves a long-running arc, and finds Castor making a brutal choice
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but if you ask Castor he'll tell you there's quite a bit of arrogance and reckless stupidity lining the streets as well. He should know. There are only so many times you can play both sides against the middle and get away with it. Now, the inevitable moment of crisis has arrived and it’s left Castor with blood on his hands. Well, not his hands—it’s always someone else who pays the bill: friends, acquaintances, and bystanders. So Castor drowns his guilt in cheap whiskey, while an innocent woman lies dead and her daughter comatose, his few remaining friends fear for their lives and there’s a demon loose on the streets. It's not just any demon—this one rides shotgun on his best friend’s soul and can’t be expelled without killing him. It seems that Felix Castor’s got some tough choices to make, because expel the demon he must or all Hell will break loose—literally.
The Naming of the Beasts
(The fifth book in the Felix Castor series)
A novel by Mike Carey
To Ade – for music, Brick Lane curries,
Bunhill Fields, Masonic temples, Old Brewery
and attendant conversations
Acknowledgements
All my knowledge of the Rickety Twins comes from my wife, Lin, and from the Theatrelands section of the London Metropolitan Archive’s website. I’m grateful to both. For the internal geography of the Paterson Building, and my own visualisation of Jenna-Jane Mulbridge’s little empire, I have to thank Ade Brown: he took the time and trouble to give me a guided tour, and fed me background information as I needed it. Castor’s comments on alcoholism carry echoes from the same source. Thanks also to my agent, Meg, for unfailing support, and to my editor, Darren, for a Spiro Agnew joke that’s better than the one I used.
1
It’s strange how other people’s deaths can take you, sometimes. You can build up as much scar tissue as you like – and I’d say I’ve got more than the average allocation, one way and another – but death can still sneak up on you from an unexpected angle and twist your guts.
The murdered woman had been trying to get out of her tiny little studio flat by means of the window. She’d probably been surprised in bed: woken from sleep to find the intruder already in her room. At any rate, the sheets and the duvet had spilled onto the floor, spread out along a more or less straight line between the bed and the point where she’d died.
A lot of the woman had spilled onto the floor, too. A crude wooden javelin of some kind – most likely the broken-off leg of a table – had passed through her lower abdomen with enough force to drive itself several inches into the plaster of the wall below the window. She remained impaled on it, slumped forward against the glass, one hand dangling at her side. The other hand was raised as though to reach for the latch, but it had come to rest on the sill instead.
A carpet of blood spread out from the body on all sides across the cheap yellow linoleum, setting off the death scene from the rest of the room.
She was a Caucasian woman, as the papers would no doubt put it, in her thirties, with a consciously retro-styled white Afro: tall but very slender of build, to the point where some of her friends might have worried that she was anorexic. The tabloids would probably add, with their usual eye for salacious detail, that she was naked except for a pink baby-doll nightie too short to hide her modesty. She looked vulnerable and pathetic, transformed into a tableau in the course of her undignified flight, brought down from behind by whatever it was she was running from.
Apart from that disconcerting centrepiece, the room was pretty forgettable. The decor was of the kind that says in many subtle ways, ‘I rent this room and I couldn’t give a toss what it looks like.’ The Georgian-green paint was okay, if you like goose turds, but the dirty, smudged aureoles around the light switches and plug sockets gave a reliable measure of how long ago the paint job had been done, and how many indifferent tenants had passed this way since. The only picture on the wall was a washed-out sub-Constable landscape of haystacks at harvest time, standing underneath a cloudless blue sky. A handsome young farmer walked away from the viewer, his pitchfork resting lightly on his shoulder, the muscles of his bare arms artlessly exaggerated. Give him a pair of chaps, pull his pants down a notch to show some arse cleavage and it could be gay porn.
Police forensics officers wearing white plastic disposables over their street clothes, white gloves on their hands and white masks on their faces were measuring, sampling, dusting, scraping, labelling, correlating, flower-arranging: the room was a hive of activity, as though the dead woman was hosting a party where all the guests were pallid ghosts.
I turned away from the corpse, set my back to it resolutely, although that didn’t still the toxic stew of contradictory emotions that was slopping around inside me. It was a hot, moist armpit of a night, from which the heat of the day had barely begun to fade, and the small room was filled like a cup with the stink of spilled blood and split bowels.
Gary Coldwood, a copper to his fingertips, fixed me with an expectant glance. I shook my head. I knew what it was that he was expecting and I wasn’t up to it just yet.
‘Who found her?’ I asked him.
‘Bloke in the flat below,’ Gary said. ‘Nervous type. Highly strung. The call-in was mainly him screaming for the best part of a minute before the switchboard operator could get the address out of him. We’ve got him downstairs now. The Basilisk is taking his statement.’
The Basilisk. That would be Coldwood’s sometime partner, sometime nemesis, Ruth Basquiat: Miss Blonde Ambition. Not the first person I’d have chosen to take a statement from a poor sod who was still traumatised from seeing his upstairs neighbour crucified against her own bedroom wall.
‘Anyone see anything?’ I pursued. ‘Hear anything?’
Gary breathed out loudly: it was almost a snort. ‘Welcome to Brixton,’ he said. ‘Home of the three wise monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil and I fought the law. Even the gent downstairs didn’t pick up the phone until the blood started dripping through his ceiling.’
‘So who was she?’
Gary consulted his notes. He knew I was stalling, but he also knew when to push and when it was best just to lead me to water and wait for me to drink. He was looking tired, his bristling unibrow wilting on his forehead like a caterpillar caught on bare scrub. There was a downward set to his broad, muscular frame, as though the local gravity where he was standing was two or three times Earth normal. I guessed it had already been a long night, and wasn’t likely to end any time soon.
‘Ginny Parris,’ he said, reading aloud, ‘with two Rs. She was a hooker who worked the backstreets off Atlantic Road. Bit of a local landmark, by all accounts. “She didn’t use nothing any more – she was clean for six months now. She used to work for Red Paul, but since he went down she looks after herself, doesn’t she? She’s not stupid.” That ringing endorsement brought to you courtesy of Pauline “Exotique” O’Malley, Miss Parris’s former colleague, at her business address behind the Mercury cab rank on the Brixton Road.’
He put the notebook back in his pocket, his sombre face contrasting with the flippant tone of his summary.
‘It wasn’t a man who did this,’ I said, stating the obvious.
‘No,’ Gary agreed. ‘It wasn’t. Not unless he put that thing through her with a siege catapult.’ He was momentarily distracted by a uniformed constable who was about to move a table out of the way of a bunch of white-coated lab-rats. The table was probably the source of the
murder weapon, because one of its legs had been broken off. It lay at an oblique angle, reminding me faintly of a dying horse in a Sam Peckinpah Western. ‘Oi!’ Gary yelled at the plod. ‘Don’t touch a bloody thing until it’s been dusted and logged. Didn’t your mum teach you anything, you plukey little gobshite?’
The constable blanched, mumbled an apology and backed hurriedly out of Gary’s line of sight, where he probably relieved his feelings with an obscene gesture or two.
‘No,’ Gary said again, returning his attention to me. ‘The working hypothesis is a loup-garou. Which is one reason why you’re here, Castor. If whoever did this was undead, you can presumably tell us what size, brand and flavour it was. And then you can toddle off home to bed, which is obviously where you’ve come from.’
I put a hand up defensively to my stubbled chin. Okay, so I looked like I’d been rolled up wet and put away dry. But I wasn’t on the force, I was just a civilian adviser, so Gary could go fuck himself. He couldn’t exactly put me on a charge for letting the side down.
‘Didn’t have to be were-kin,’ I mused aloud. ‘Could be a geist, or a zombie.’ Neither of those options sounded right, though. A poltergeist powerful enough to do something like this would have left the air saturated with its presence. Even the Thomases – exorcist hate-speak for rationalist sceptics – on the Met would feel like they were breathing cold shit soup. And most zombies are weaker than humans, not stronger: they can push themselves a little harder, because their pain-pleasure wiring collapses after a while, along with the rest of their nervous system, but this was way outside the normal range of activity for a dead-man-walking.
At that point, belatedly, I registered something else that Gary had said. ‘One reason why I’m here?’ I echoed. ‘Why? What’s the other?’
‘All in good time,’ Coldwood said, his expression studiously neutral. ‘There’s another wrinkle to this one, but I don’t want to prejudice your findings. Now are you going to do that voodoo that you do tolerably well, or shall we all stand around while you carry on throwing guesses at the fucking wall?’
‘Oh, handle me roughly, Detective Sergeant,’ I said in a bored drawl. Gary and me have a certain amount of history now: we’re even friends, in a way, although it’s a friendship with arcane rules about when we cut each other slack and when we don’t. We have default roles and positions that we tend to fall into when we meet. Right now, that was a useful bulwark against the splatter-shot blood-red reality behind me.
I looked round at the busy-bee forensics team, who were still doing their labour-intensive thing on all sides of us, and the small herd of uniformed constables loitering around the doorway.
‘You’ll need to clear the room,’ I told Gary. ‘I won’t be able to pick up a blind thing with this lot going on.’
Gary hesitated, then nodded. ‘Mandatory fag break,’ he called out to his team. ‘Collins, work on the stairwell for a bit. Webb, get some of your mob taking statements from the neighbours. I can see them all rubbernecking out there, so we might as well use them while we’ve got them.’ He pointed towards the door. ‘Everybody out.’
They left in dribs and drabs, the forensics guys packing up their kit with finicky care and looking glumly frustrated, as though they’d been smacked in the head with a wet fish in the middle of some promising sexual foreplay. A case like this doesn’t come along every day: although as far as that goes, they probably only had to wait. Things were changing around us, faster and faster. The world wasn’t a sphere any more, or at least it didn’t feel that way a lot of the time; it felt like an inclined plane.
Gary was the last to leave, and he lingered in the doorway. ‘I don’t have to tell you not to touch anything, do I, Fix?’ he asked, his expression hovering somewhere between wary and apologetic.
I looked him squarely in the eyes. I knew what he was thinking. I used to work for the detective branch in an official capacity, under Coldwood’s tutelage: consulting exorcist, by appointment, with all the privileges a civilian informant gets from the boys in blue. Then twice in the last two years I’d been the main suspect in a murder investigation, and Gary had had to bend over so far backwards to keep me out of jail that he could have won a limbo competition in Queenstown, Jamaica. It reflected badly on his judgement that I kept landing up to my neck in shit.
‘I know the drill,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I’m sure you do.’ He gave up the point. ‘Give me a shout when you’re done.’
He left at last, and I was alone with the body. I circled the broken table and stared down at her sombrely, feeling compromised and shamed in some indefinable way by her vulnerability, her violation.
But I had a job to do, and Gary would already be looking at his watch. ‘Meter’s running,’ as he liked to say, still searching for that Hollywood tough-guy persona that always eluded him because he could never quite bring himself to be a big enough bastard.
In the lining of the Russian army greatcoat which is my work uniform there’s a sewn-in pocket just big enough to house my tin whistle within easy reach of my left hand. I put my hand in now and drew it out. Putting it to my lips I played a few random notes as place-holders for a tune that didn’t exist yet.
The room darkened around me. The world of flesh and blood and words and meanings went away.
Exorcism is a peculiar way to earn a living. The pay is shit, the hours are appalling, there’s no career structure and the work itself can shade from same old same old to lethally dangerous inside of a heartbeat. But I’ll say this for it: it’s a vocation. To do it at all, you’ve got to be born to it.
It’s got nothing to do with religious faith. If it did, I’d be out of a job because, despite my Catholic upbringing, me and God haven’t been on speaking terms since I was six. It’s just an extra sense, or maybe an extra set of senses. An exorcist knows when the dead are around, and he can reach out and touch them in various ways: specifically, he can bind them and he can banish them.
And the dead are always around. You’ve probably noticed yourself how bad it’s got just lately. Chances are, some time in the last few years you bought a house or rented a flat and found that it was haunted; or else someone you knew clawed their way up out of the grave and decided to renew an old acquaintance; or, God help you, maybe you had a run-in with a loup-garou – werewolf, to use the vernacular – or one of the lesser Hell-kin. In which case, you can be thankful that you’re even alive to read this.
Maybe the huge spike in the supernatural population created its own Darwinian pressures. Or maybe not. It seems just as likely to me that the potentiality for exorcism as an innate skill was always part of the human genome, but most people who had it lived and died without ever finding out that it was there. These days . . . well, you tend to find out pretty fast.
We’ve all got our own ways of doing the job. Some people do it the old-fashioned way, with the traditional props: a bell, a book and a candle, a dagger and a chalice, maybe a bit of an incantation in hacked-up medieval Latin. I’ve even done it that way myself on occasion, but only to impress the mug punters. Any kind of pattern will do to hold a ghost: a sequence of words or sounds, lines on a piece of paper, the movements of a dance, even a hand of playing cards. If you’ve got the knack, you can choose your own tools, your own gimmick. Although in my experience it’s closer to the truth to say that it chooses you.
I do it with music. My second sight is more like second hearing, which means that I experience ghosts, demons and the undead as tunes. With my trusty tin whistle (Clarke’s Original, key of D) I can reproduce the tune, and tangle the ghost up in the music so it can’t get free. When I stop playing, it goes to wherever music goes when it’s not being played. Problem solved. It’s not so straightforward with demons, because they tend to fight back, but that’s the basis of what I do right there: a natural talent that I’ve turned into a steady job.
The word ‘steady’ in that sentence was meant as sarcasm.
The first part of an exorcism is the summoning, where
you make a connection with the ghost and call it to you, but before you can even do that, you’ve got to learn its nature, its unique this-ness, so you know what it is you’re calling to. A general invitation usually doesn’t work.
I sat to one side of the dead woman, just outside the wide circle of spilled blood, and played a halting, broken-backed tune that was more like a question than a command. I was fishing: sending out feelers through the heights and depths of some vast volume that wasn’t air or water or even space, an infinity that fitted comfortably into this pokey little rented room.
Nothing. My hook was out there, but nothing bit.
It wasn’t that there was nothing there. Any building that’s more than a few years old develops a sort of emotional patina, a set of resonances that an exorcist will pick up at once if he opens himself to it. There were plenty of echoes in this room: the joys and sorrows and bumps and grinds of ordinary existence lingering in the air, in the brickwork, like the unstilled vibrations of a sound that had passed outside the range of human hearing.
But the ghost of Ginny Parris refused to come on down.
She was there. On some level, in some form, I was aware of a presence in the room. Diffuse and weak and scattered, it hung in the ether like Morse code, discontinuous but replete with meaning: a dot of misery here, a dash of fear and confusion there, and way over here an incongruous flash-silence-flash of hope. I went on playing, a little encouraged. Normally this stage of the game is kind of a cumulative thing. You start off slow, with only the barest sense of the ghost’s presence, but you zero in on it with your talent, with whatever interface you use to make your talent work for you. You describe and define and delimit it, bring it in closer, sharpen the signal. It can come fast or it can come slow, but sooner or later you reach a tipping point where it becomes inevitable. The pattern of the ghost is imprinted on your mind, and after that it can’t get away from you. You can make it come to you, bind it to your will. You can question it, and it has to answer you if it’s able. Or you can make it go away and never come back.
