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Synopsis
Author of The Girl With All the Gifts Mike Carey presents the fifth audiobook in his hip supernatural thriller series featuring freelance exorcist Felix Castor.
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's 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.
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. But not just any demon—this one rides shotgun on Castor's best friend's soul and can't be expelled without killing him.
Looks like Felix Castor's got some tough choices to make, because expel the demon he must—or all Hell will break loose.
Release date: July 10, 2018
Publisher: Orbit
Print pages: 432
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The Naming of the Beasts
Mike Carey
“The Devil You Know is a spectacular novel, one of the best supernatural thrillers I’ve read in years.”
—Douglas Preston, New York Times bestselling author of White Fire
“Grabs you from the first out-of-nowhere nasty surprise. You’ll be up all night finishing this one.”
—Richard Morgan, award-winning author of Altered Carbon
“Engrossing.… An ingeniously multilayered tale.… Perfect.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“An imaginative spin on the hard-boiled detective … mixes horror and humor in a way that spells good omens for future Castor novels.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Carey transcends his comic roots in this quirky, dark and imaginative tale that compels the reader to keep turning pages long after they should have gotten to sleep.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
“Fast, fun, and furious.”
—Guardian
“Castor follows up his excellent debut with this even better sequel.… Genre-bending at its best.… A treat.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Hugely entertaining … Smart dialogue, good pacing, and offbeat characters keep the pages turning.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Comes at you fast and hard, with a few surprises that will smack you between the eyes, leaving your mouth hanging open and your attention glued to the page.”
—Nightsandweekends.com
“Felix offers a darkly droll take on the circumstances of his world, which is just as familiar, intricate, and morally tangled as our own.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“[A] deftly crafted, can’t-turn-the-page-fast-enough read.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
“Every bit as good as … Jim Butcher, Carey hits his stride.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Fast-paced … riveting … everything a paranormal thriller fan could want.”
—Monsters & Critics
“Fast-paced.… Grip[s] the reader from the moment the body of Gittings is interred and never slows down as every move the exorcist makes seems increasingly dangerous.”
—Midwest Book Review
“The Felix Castor novels are splashed with color and texture, their characters are larger than life (or death), and the stories are, well … out of this world. Castor is a remarkably believable character.… A wholly engaging blend of the detective and fantasy genres.”
—Booklist
“Witty, sardonic.… Leaves the readers breathless.… Irresistible.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
“The author has mastered the challenge of incorporating the paranormal into a normal urban setting, and his refusal to pull punches makes this a harder-hitting genre entry than many others.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Carey’s unique and eminently readable style, with his excellent command of concise description and dialogue lends itself perfectly to the pacing of the book, one that we found ourselves wanting to re-read as soon as we finished it.”
—SciFiNow
“Like Humphrey Bogart meets John Constantine, Felix Castor makes for an enjoyably, untrustworthy guide through the undead-filled streets of London, as painted by Mike Carey.… Huge verve and energy … engaging and vivacious.”
—SFX
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 centerpiece, 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, labeling, 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 traumatized from seeing his upstairs neighbor 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 somber 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 flavor 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 labor-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 neighbors. I can see them all rubbernecking out there, so we might as well use them while we’ve got them.” He pointed toward 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 backward to keep me out of jail that he could have won a limbo competition in Queenstown, Jamaica. It reflected badly on his judgment 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 somberly, 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.
That wasn’t what was happening here, though; if anything, this was the exact opposite. The sense of Ginny’s presence got weaker rather than stronger: those vestigial traces effaced themselves more and more, faded away gradually and inexorably, until it seemed like it was only the music that was keeping them there at all.
I kept on playing. Typically, by this time, the random notes would have modulated into a recognizable tune. But they didn’t. They remained fragmented and formless, just as she was.
I suddenly had the terrifying conviction that a piece of Ginny Parris was clinging to the lifeline of my tune to keep from tumbling off into the abyss of whatever-comes-next. So I kept the lifeline going for as long as I could, feeling her getting further and further away from me in some direction that doesn’t really have a name. It was a strain now to maintain that contact. I felt a trickle of sweat on my forehead, and my heart was racing.
I played her until she was gone.
And in her absence, in the spaces through which her soul had trickled away, I sensed a second presence. It was even fainter than hers had been, but for very different reasons.
Dogs hunt in packs, bark their lungs out and stink the place up like a roomful of wet carpets. Cats hunt alone, in silence; crouch low to let no silhouette show above the skyline; bury their droppings so the prey won’t know where they’ve been hunting. The scariest predators are the ones you don’t see until their jaws snap shut on your throat, and so it is, too, with the predators of the spirit world.
I sat in the silent room, breathing in the stench of death, and waited for my heartbeat to slow back to a sustainable seventy-some beats a minute. It took a long time.
When I felt up to it, I climbed to my feet and went to the door. There was no sign of Gary on the narrow landing or in the stairwell, but a copper at the bottom of the stairs, by the street door, had obviously been briefed to give him a shout when I surfaced. He looked out into the street and called something that I didn’t hear.
Gary appeared shortly after and came up to join me.
“What did you get?” he asked bluntly. Then before I could answer he raised a hand to shush me, fished in his pocket and came up with a digital voice recorder—an Olympus DS-50, his favorite toy from last year. He clicked the record button, held it to his mouth like a telephone. “Witness name is Felix Castor,” he said. “Time …” consulting his watch “… 1:17 a.m. Place, flat 3C, 129 Cadogan Terrace, SW2. Witness—a practicing exorcist—was called in by investigating officer in CI capacity.”
He held the recorder out in my direction.
“Talk me through it, Castor.”
“You can forget your loup-garou hypothesis,” I muttered, pushing the device away again.
Gary’s interest quickened. He shot me a stare that would have cost him plenty at the poker table.
“Go on,” he said.
“She didn’t answer the summoning. There were … pieces of her all over the place, but they didn’t add up to anything. She hadn’t just been killed, she’d been shredded.”
Gary’s eyes flicked involuntarily to the corpse.
“Fuck,” I said impatiently. “Not her body, Gary. Her soul. Whatever killed her got her soul as well. It was a demon. She was killed by a demon.”
Even a couple of years ago, if I’d told him that, he would have laughed in my face. Now he took it calmly, too calmly in fact. He seemed almost to have been expecting it.
“Did you pick up anything else?” he asked.
“She didn’t die quickly,” I said. “Or at least … she did, in the end, obviously. But the thing was in here with her for a while before that. She had long enough to go through a lot of different emotions. At one point, I reckon … she thought it might let her live. I don’t know why that would be.”
“Yeah,” said Gary. “I do. Maybe.”
He turned the tape recorder off and put it back in his pocket.
“Something you’re not telling me,” I said. It was a statement, not a question. This whole situation was screaming setup at me in three-part harmony.
“Yeah,” Gary admitted. “The other reason why I came to you with this. I mean, you’re not really on the books any more, and your friend Juliet has it all over you in the eye-candy department. But I think this one’s yours, Fix.”
I waited, but he didn’t seem in any hurry to spit it out.
“Well?” I demanded. “What?”
“The name didn’t mean anything to you?”
“Ginny,” I murmured. “Ginny Parris.” Maybe it did at that. The memory wouldn’t come clear, but alarm bells started to ring, way down in my subconscious.
“Not her real name. Birth certificate has Jane, but she liked to call herself Guinevere. When that wouldn’t fly, she shortened it to Ginny.”
My heart took a ride down to my stomach, in the express elevator.
“Oh Jesus,” I said. “She was …”
Gary waited for a few seconds in case I finished the sentence myself. When I didn’t, he finished it for me. “Yeah,” he confirmed. “Rafi Ditko’s old girlfriend.”
I went to pieces for a while back there. It wasn’t pretty.
It began about three months ago, after the demon Asmodeus, wearing my friend Rafi’s body, broke out of the bespoke prison cell I’d run up for him at the house of the Ice-Maker, Imelda Probert, killing Imelda herself and three other people along the way, and walked out into the world to see what was new.
That was enough of a catastrophe in itself: Imelda left a teenaged daughter, Lisa, who as far as I knew had no other living relatives. Asmodeus was a monster, and his tenancy of Rafi’s flesh was an abomination. And demons being demons, I had to assume that those first four murders were only a foretaste of things to come. But what made the whole thing infinitely worse was that it was mostly my fault.
Okay, it wasn’t me who had freed Asmodeus from captivity. The honors for that fiasco went to a little-known and technically excommunicate Catholic sect known as the Anathemata and their priest-slash-general Thomas Gwillam. Gwillam wanted to exorcise Asmodeus, but the people he put on that work detail weren’t up to it. They went in half-cocked, got themselves cut to pieces, and in the process freed the demon from the psychic straitjacket I’d put him in.
But I was the reason he was there in the first place: I’d taken him to Peckham, to Imelda’s house, from the Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill, in a desperate attempt to keep him from falling into even worse hands. I was also the reason why he was strong enough to get free and fight back, because I’d allowed him to feed on part of another demon. It had all seemed to make sense at the time: feeding Asmodeus had set a young boy free from a possession that would eventually have killed him.
But then the Anathemata had stuck their oar in, everything had gone to Hell in a hand basket, and Imelda had died.
I honestly didn’t give a tinker’s fuck about Gwillam’s three exorcists. Like Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, they’d made love to their employment, and they’d only got what they’d been asking for. But Imelda …
Christ Jesus and all his angels. Imelda.
“Don’t make me regret this,” she’d said when she finally gave in to my undignified begging and let me land Rafi on her. And then when I suggested waking Asmodeus to let him feed on one of his homeys, she was horrified and enraged. She’d only agreed because she loved her own kid so much, and she couldn’t stand by and watch someone else’s kid dragged down to Hell when she had it in her power to do something about it.
I drew up the plan of attack. I led the charge. She was the Light Brigade and I was Lord fucking Cardigan.
So yeah. I took it hard. And yeah, I suppose I took the coward’s road.
I stayed with Imelda’s daughter, Lisa, until the ambulance arrived. She hadn’t said a word the whole time; just sat with her mother’s head in her lap, rocking her back and forth as though she was asleep. The only time she showed any animation at all was when the paramedics tried to separate her from the blood-boltered corpse. Even then, she didn’t fight them or cry or swear at them; she just held on tightly to Imelda’s chest, forcing them to pry her fingers loose one by one. And after that she stopped moving altogether.
I watched the ambulance go.
Then I found an off-license, bought a bottle of whatever whiskey came readiest to hand, took it to one of the wooden benches at Elephant and Castle and drank it dry.
My memories of the days and weeks that followed are a little patchy, but I know that that bottle was only the first of many. I would have taken other drugs, probably, if any had been kicking around, but booze has always been my sledgehammer of choice when I want to throw a tarp over the day and pass out fast.
Only now it wasn’t just a day I wanted to blot out. I wanted to forget I’d ever been born. I wanted to erase Felix Castor and rewind. Someone else might do a better job of taking up the space he used to occupy.
So I did my best to turn my brain into half-congealed soup, but in spite of my best efforts, a few scraps of sense input from that time manage to stand out fairly distinctly.
I remember being carried home one night by my good friend Juliet—who, being a succubus, didn’t even break a sweat—and propped up against the door like a sack of coal. She would have taken me all the way to my bed, I’m sure, except that my landlady, Pen, doesn’t allow her in the house: Pen has a “no succubi” rule that’s fairly strict.
I remember Pen standing in the doorway of my room, cursing me out. “You selfish, self-pitying bastard!” she was saying. “He’s out there. He’s out there on the streets right now, and all you’re doing about it is lying here in your own vomit! Well fuck you, Fix! I’ll find him myself, if you won’t help.”
I re
—Douglas Preston, New York Times bestselling author of White Fire
“Grabs you from the first out-of-nowhere nasty surprise. You’ll be up all night finishing this one.”
—Richard Morgan, award-winning author of Altered Carbon
“Engrossing.… An ingeniously multilayered tale.… Perfect.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“An imaginative spin on the hard-boiled detective … mixes horror and humor in a way that spells good omens for future Castor novels.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Carey transcends his comic roots in this quirky, dark and imaginative tale that compels the reader to keep turning pages long after they should have gotten to sleep.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
“Fast, fun, and furious.”
—Guardian
“Castor follows up his excellent debut with this even better sequel.… Genre-bending at its best.… A treat.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Hugely entertaining … Smart dialogue, good pacing, and offbeat characters keep the pages turning.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Comes at you fast and hard, with a few surprises that will smack you between the eyes, leaving your mouth hanging open and your attention glued to the page.”
—Nightsandweekends.com
“Felix offers a darkly droll take on the circumstances of his world, which is just as familiar, intricate, and morally tangled as our own.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“[A] deftly crafted, can’t-turn-the-page-fast-enough read.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
“Every bit as good as … Jim Butcher, Carey hits his stride.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Fast-paced … riveting … everything a paranormal thriller fan could want.”
—Monsters & Critics
“Fast-paced.… Grip[s] the reader from the moment the body of Gittings is interred and never slows down as every move the exorcist makes seems increasingly dangerous.”
—Midwest Book Review
“The Felix Castor novels are splashed with color and texture, their characters are larger than life (or death), and the stories are, well … out of this world. Castor is a remarkably believable character.… A wholly engaging blend of the detective and fantasy genres.”
—Booklist
“Witty, sardonic.… Leaves the readers breathless.… Irresistible.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
“The author has mastered the challenge of incorporating the paranormal into a normal urban setting, and his refusal to pull punches makes this a harder-hitting genre entry than many others.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Carey’s unique and eminently readable style, with his excellent command of concise description and dialogue lends itself perfectly to the pacing of the book, one that we found ourselves wanting to re-read as soon as we finished it.”
—SciFiNow
“Like Humphrey Bogart meets John Constantine, Felix Castor makes for an enjoyably, untrustworthy guide through the undead-filled streets of London, as painted by Mike Carey.… Huge verve and energy … engaging and vivacious.”
—SFX
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 centerpiece, 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, labeling, 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 traumatized from seeing his upstairs neighbor 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 somber 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 flavor 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 labor-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 neighbors. I can see them all rubbernecking out there, so we might as well use them while we’ve got them.” He pointed toward 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 backward to keep me out of jail that he could have won a limbo competition in Queenstown, Jamaica. It reflected badly on his judgment 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 somberly, 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.
That wasn’t what was happening here, though; if anything, this was the exact opposite. The sense of Ginny’s presence got weaker rather than stronger: those vestigial traces effaced themselves more and more, faded away gradually and inexorably, until it seemed like it was only the music that was keeping them there at all.
I kept on playing. Typically, by this time, the random notes would have modulated into a recognizable tune. But they didn’t. They remained fragmented and formless, just as she was.
I suddenly had the terrifying conviction that a piece of Ginny Parris was clinging to the lifeline of my tune to keep from tumbling off into the abyss of whatever-comes-next. So I kept the lifeline going for as long as I could, feeling her getting further and further away from me in some direction that doesn’t really have a name. It was a strain now to maintain that contact. I felt a trickle of sweat on my forehead, and my heart was racing.
I played her until she was gone.
And in her absence, in the spaces through which her soul had trickled away, I sensed a second presence. It was even fainter than hers had been, but for very different reasons.
Dogs hunt in packs, bark their lungs out and stink the place up like a roomful of wet carpets. Cats hunt alone, in silence; crouch low to let no silhouette show above the skyline; bury their droppings so the prey won’t know where they’ve been hunting. The scariest predators are the ones you don’t see until their jaws snap shut on your throat, and so it is, too, with the predators of the spirit world.
I sat in the silent room, breathing in the stench of death, and waited for my heartbeat to slow back to a sustainable seventy-some beats a minute. It took a long time.
When I felt up to it, I climbed to my feet and went to the door. There was no sign of Gary on the narrow landing or in the stairwell, but a copper at the bottom of the stairs, by the street door, had obviously been briefed to give him a shout when I surfaced. He looked out into the street and called something that I didn’t hear.
Gary appeared shortly after and came up to join me.
“What did you get?” he asked bluntly. Then before I could answer he raised a hand to shush me, fished in his pocket and came up with a digital voice recorder—an Olympus DS-50, his favorite toy from last year. He clicked the record button, held it to his mouth like a telephone. “Witness name is Felix Castor,” he said. “Time …” consulting his watch “… 1:17 a.m. Place, flat 3C, 129 Cadogan Terrace, SW2. Witness—a practicing exorcist—was called in by investigating officer in CI capacity.”
He held the recorder out in my direction.
“Talk me through it, Castor.”
“You can forget your loup-garou hypothesis,” I muttered, pushing the device away again.
Gary’s interest quickened. He shot me a stare that would have cost him plenty at the poker table.
“Go on,” he said.
“She didn’t answer the summoning. There were … pieces of her all over the place, but they didn’t add up to anything. She hadn’t just been killed, she’d been shredded.”
Gary’s eyes flicked involuntarily to the corpse.
“Fuck,” I said impatiently. “Not her body, Gary. Her soul. Whatever killed her got her soul as well. It was a demon. She was killed by a demon.”
Even a couple of years ago, if I’d told him that, he would have laughed in my face. Now he took it calmly, too calmly in fact. He seemed almost to have been expecting it.
“Did you pick up anything else?” he asked.
“She didn’t die quickly,” I said. “Or at least … she did, in the end, obviously. But the thing was in here with her for a while before that. She had long enough to go through a lot of different emotions. At one point, I reckon … she thought it might let her live. I don’t know why that would be.”
“Yeah,” said Gary. “I do. Maybe.”
He turned the tape recorder off and put it back in his pocket.
“Something you’re not telling me,” I said. It was a statement, not a question. This whole situation was screaming setup at me in three-part harmony.
“Yeah,” Gary admitted. “The other reason why I came to you with this. I mean, you’re not really on the books any more, and your friend Juliet has it all over you in the eye-candy department. But I think this one’s yours, Fix.”
I waited, but he didn’t seem in any hurry to spit it out.
“Well?” I demanded. “What?”
“The name didn’t mean anything to you?”
“Ginny,” I murmured. “Ginny Parris.” Maybe it did at that. The memory wouldn’t come clear, but alarm bells started to ring, way down in my subconscious.
“Not her real name. Birth certificate has Jane, but she liked to call herself Guinevere. When that wouldn’t fly, she shortened it to Ginny.”
My heart took a ride down to my stomach, in the express elevator.
“Oh Jesus,” I said. “She was …”
Gary waited for a few seconds in case I finished the sentence myself. When I didn’t, he finished it for me. “Yeah,” he confirmed. “Rafi Ditko’s old girlfriend.”
I went to pieces for a while back there. It wasn’t pretty.
It began about three months ago, after the demon Asmodeus, wearing my friend Rafi’s body, broke out of the bespoke prison cell I’d run up for him at the house of the Ice-Maker, Imelda Probert, killing Imelda herself and three other people along the way, and walked out into the world to see what was new.
That was enough of a catastrophe in itself: Imelda left a teenaged daughter, Lisa, who as far as I knew had no other living relatives. Asmodeus was a monster, and his tenancy of Rafi’s flesh was an abomination. And demons being demons, I had to assume that those first four murders were only a foretaste of things to come. But what made the whole thing infinitely worse was that it was mostly my fault.
Okay, it wasn’t me who had freed Asmodeus from captivity. The honors for that fiasco went to a little-known and technically excommunicate Catholic sect known as the Anathemata and their priest-slash-general Thomas Gwillam. Gwillam wanted to exorcise Asmodeus, but the people he put on that work detail weren’t up to it. They went in half-cocked, got themselves cut to pieces, and in the process freed the demon from the psychic straitjacket I’d put him in.
But I was the reason he was there in the first place: I’d taken him to Peckham, to Imelda’s house, from the Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill, in a desperate attempt to keep him from falling into even worse hands. I was also the reason why he was strong enough to get free and fight back, because I’d allowed him to feed on part of another demon. It had all seemed to make sense at the time: feeding Asmodeus had set a young boy free from a possession that would eventually have killed him.
But then the Anathemata had stuck their oar in, everything had gone to Hell in a hand basket, and Imelda had died.
I honestly didn’t give a tinker’s fuck about Gwillam’s three exorcists. Like Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, they’d made love to their employment, and they’d only got what they’d been asking for. But Imelda …
Christ Jesus and all his angels. Imelda.
“Don’t make me regret this,” she’d said when she finally gave in to my undignified begging and let me land Rafi on her. And then when I suggested waking Asmodeus to let him feed on one of his homeys, she was horrified and enraged. She’d only agreed because she loved her own kid so much, and she couldn’t stand by and watch someone else’s kid dragged down to Hell when she had it in her power to do something about it.
I drew up the plan of attack. I led the charge. She was the Light Brigade and I was Lord fucking Cardigan.
So yeah. I took it hard. And yeah, I suppose I took the coward’s road.
I stayed with Imelda’s daughter, Lisa, until the ambulance arrived. She hadn’t said a word the whole time; just sat with her mother’s head in her lap, rocking her back and forth as though she was asleep. The only time she showed any animation at all was when the paramedics tried to separate her from the blood-boltered corpse. Even then, she didn’t fight them or cry or swear at them; she just held on tightly to Imelda’s chest, forcing them to pry her fingers loose one by one. And after that she stopped moving altogether.
I watched the ambulance go.
Then I found an off-license, bought a bottle of whatever whiskey came readiest to hand, took it to one of the wooden benches at Elephant and Castle and drank it dry.
My memories of the days and weeks that followed are a little patchy, but I know that that bottle was only the first of many. I would have taken other drugs, probably, if any had been kicking around, but booze has always been my sledgehammer of choice when I want to throw a tarp over the day and pass out fast.
Only now it wasn’t just a day I wanted to blot out. I wanted to forget I’d ever been born. I wanted to erase Felix Castor and rewind. Someone else might do a better job of taking up the space he used to occupy.
So I did my best to turn my brain into half-congealed soup, but in spite of my best efforts, a few scraps of sense input from that time manage to stand out fairly distinctly.
I remember being carried home one night by my good friend Juliet—who, being a succubus, didn’t even break a sweat—and propped up against the door like a sack of coal. She would have taken me all the way to my bed, I’m sure, except that my landlady, Pen, doesn’t allow her in the house: Pen has a “no succubi” rule that’s fairly strict.
I remember Pen standing in the doorway of my room, cursing me out. “You selfish, self-pitying bastard!” she was saying. “He’s out there. He’s out there on the streets right now, and all you’re doing about it is lying here in your own vomit! Well fuck you, Fix! I’ll find him myself, if you won’t help.”
I re
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The Naming of the Beasts
Mike Carey
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