The Devil You Know (17 page)

I went back to my work, satisfied that Jon was working off his guilt. Again, I became lost in the soft textures and fuzzy logic of the past, my mind suspended in a shapeless but compelling skein of my own making. Hours passed, undifferentiated, and I worked my way steadily through the boxes. Variations on a theme: the same old gruel of emotions, too thin to nourish, too bland to titillate.

The next time I surfaced, it was a change in the quality of the light that brought me back to a gloomy winter day that was already waning. I looked at my watch; it was well after five, and I still had about a half dozen boxes to go. More to the point, I’d totally failed to find what I was looking for. Nowhere in all the pages I’d touched was there a scent or a footprint of the ghost I’d met.

My instinct was just to slog on to the end of the road, but the bleakness of the place was soaking into me like a physical chill. Seeing the kids on their treasure hunt had boosted my psychic reserves a little, but the effect had worn off quickly. And anyway, it was nearing the end of the archive’s opening hours; if I was going to stick around any longer, I needed to make sure someone else would be around to lock up after me. So I yawned and stretched, stood up stiffly, and with some reluctance made the pilgrimage to the workroom.

Apart from Alice herself, the gang were all there: Cheryl and Jon Tiler typing away at their computer terminals, while Rich seemed to be busy copying a list of names from an old document into his notebook. There was also a red-haired guy I didn’t know, working away at the photocopier. He was another of the part-timers, and Cheryl introduced him as Will.

“Any luck?” Rich asked.

“Not so far,” I admitted. “I’m still working on it. Has there been a sighting today?”

He shook his head. “All quiet on the Western Front.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes when the normal routine of a place is disrupted, a haunting will stop for a while.” I wasn’t normally this garrulous, but I was putting off the evil moment; I wasn’t anticipating much pleasure in reporting in to Alice. “Ghosts are usually very fixed on routine—some of them will hang around the same place for centuries and show themselves bang on midnight, every night. But change the wallpaper, and they’re lost.”

Cheryl perked up at all this talk about ghosts. “What about the violent ones?” she asked. “Have they got a routine, too? I mean, do they get into it? Are there, like, serial-killer ghosts?”

Piqued, Rich brandished his wounded arm. “Hey, this is real, Cheryl,” he said. “People are getting hurt. Can we not talk about it as if it’s a role-playing game?”

Cheryl was unrepentant. “All right, but it’s interesting, though, isn’t it? Maybe that’s what sick-building syndrome is. It’s just ghosts you can’t see having a go at you.”

Rich opened his mouth to speak, but then thought better of it and just shook his head as if to clear it. He returned to his keyboard with a scowl on his face.

“Yeah,” I said to Cheryl. I was trying hard not to break into a grin. Rich had every right to feel aggrieved, but it was hard to stay serious around Cheryl when she was so determined to be sensational and flippant. I was starting to like her a lot. “Sometimes they do repeat the same sequence of behaviors, time after time. You’ve got to realize, though, that the sample is probably too small to count for anything. The number of ghosts that have ever actually attacked the living is tiny—when you weed out the folk tales and the compulsive liars.”

I suddenly realized that they were both looking past me, at the doorway. Turning to follow their eyes, I saw that Alice had sneaked up on me again, just like she’d done the day before.

“That’s the real challenge, isn’t it?” she asked, mildly.

Ingratiatingly, Tiler fed her her cue. “What is, Alice?”

“Weeding.” She didn’t even bother to look at him; it was me she’d come in here gunning for. “Have you had better luck today, Castor?”

I could have pulled against the hook, but I think she would have enjoyed reeling me in. “None at all,” I said evenly. “I’ve been working through that Russian collection, but I haven’t found anything that’s likely to be of much help.”

Alice just stared at me for a moment. She’d taken a few steps into the room, but she clearly didn’t feel much more comfortable in here than Peele did. Her mouth quirked, as though she was fighting down an urge to spit.

“You said that what you do depends on your obtaining an impression of the ghost? A fix on her?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“But you did that yesterday, didn’t you? The first time you went into the Russian room. That’s what you told me. So why is it that you’re still unable to dispel her?”

“It was a weak fix,” I said bluntly.

“Does that mean it’s useless?”

I clenched my teeth on a word that probably didn’t appear in any of the archive’s seventy-five miles of shelving.

To tell the truth, I was a little frustrated myself. The ghost had been right there with me twice now. The first time, I’d screwed the contact up for myself; the second time, Tiler had done it for me. If I could have held either one for just half a minute longer, I could be shaking the dust of the Bonnington off my feet and walking home with a grand in my pocket—at that moment, a consummation very fucking devoutly to be wished. Instead, I was providing sleeve notes for Alice, who I knew by now was one of those people who never stop asking until they get the answer they want.

So I did something a little stupid. I went on when I should have stopped and got out of there.

“No. I didn’t say that. A weak fix is a good start—and I was lucky to get one so fast. You can turn a weak fix into a strong fix, if you know what you’re doing.”

I could still have walked away at that point. I was going to. I’d already decided. But she was looking at me with scorn and skepticism, clearly measuring my lackluster performance against the three hundred pounds I’d already been paid.

“In fact,” I said, “there’s something we could try right now, if Rich is up for it.”

“Eh?” Rich had had his head down all this time, either working or pretending to. The idea that he might get drawn into the action obviously filled him with alarm.

“It’s a trick I’ve used a couple of times,” I said. “It might pull the ghost in if it’s close by. And even if it doesn’t do that, it should still give me a clearer sense of where the ghost is hanging out—what part of this building is its anchor, or its home.”

I cleared a space on the layout table. This involved shoving aside some of Jon Tiler’s pencils and worksheets, which he snatched out of my hands indignantly.

“Has she got to have an anchor?” Alice asked, stubbornly insisting on the personal pronoun.

“No,” I admitted. “But most of them do. We’re playing the odds.”

I turned to Rich.

“Rich,” I said, “how would you feel about being wounded again? Just very slightly this time, and in the name of science?”

He hesitated again, searching my face for a clue to what I meant. When I took out the diabetes blood-testing kit from my pocket, he looked even more doubtful—but Tiler looked downright sick.

“It’s okay,” I reassured him. “It’s not surgery, it’s just—sympathetic magic. The ghost spilled Rich’s blood. That’s unusual in itself. Most ghosts, even the ones in the angry brigade, they’re happy just to chuck stuff around. Smash a window or two, maybe, leave scratch marks on the furniture—that sort of number. Actual violence, though, that’s rare. Wounding you is probably the most intense experience this spirit has had since it crossed over.”

I had their full attention now. Opening up the test kit, I took out the disinfectant and unscrewed the lid. Then I picked up a bubble pack and tore it open. It contained a sharp—a thin strip of stainless steel with a short but keen point at one end. I anointed this end with the antiseptic.

“Nobody knows,” I said, “whether ghosts are made out of emotions or just drawn to them. Either way, it’s pretty much an accepted fact that they’ll usually choose to hang around in places where they experienced strong emotions in life. Fear. Love. Pain. Whatever. But there’s another side to the equation. If they become involved in strong emotions
after
they’ve died—because they’ve seen or been part of intense or violent events—then that’s got a powerful draw for them, too. When this ghost stabbed Rich with the scissors, the experience must have been incredibly powerful. Incredibly vivid. Pleasant or unpleasant, or most likely both. What Rich felt, and what the ghost felt, would have been all tangled together, and all screwed up to a pitch of intensity—like being caught in a nail-bomb blast and having an orgasm at the same time.”

Alice put on a sour, disapproving face at the sexual metaphor, but I think they all got it.

“So we can use that now,” I concluded, simply. “If Rich reenacts the wound, the ghost may respond. It ought to feel the ripples from the original event stirred up again by the replay. If we’re lucky, it won’t be able to help itself. It might be drawn right here, in which case I’ll probably be able to finish the job tonight. But whether it comes or not, it should look in this direction; it should be pulled toward us. And I’ll sense it. I’ll be able to triangulate on where it is.”

All eyes turned to Rich, who shrugged as nonchalantly as he could.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m not scared of a little prick with a needle.”

In the tense, expectant atmosphere, nobody touched the straight line. Rich held out his hand, and without preamble, I jabbed him once with the sharp, on the ball of his forefinger. He had enough self-control not to wince.

“Squeeze out a drop of blood,” I said. “On the desk, preferably.”

“I can’t authorize the cleaners to wipe up blood,” Alice objected, but Rich was already doing it. Clenching his right forefinger in his left hand, he tightened his grip, and a pearl of blood welled up from the tiny wound. It reached critical mass and fell onto the desk with a slight but audible splat.

I handed Rich a swab of cotton wool from the kit, and he reached out his good hand to take it. But before he could, both the cotton wool and the sharp were swatted from my fingers by an invisible force. Rich gave a yelp of shock as his hand was flicked away, too. All the heads present, including mine, snapped around—to stare at empty air.

Then the entire room went crazy.

It was as though there was a wind—a whirlwind—that we couldn’t feel: a whirlwind that flesh was immune to, but that swept all other substances before it with implacable fury. Both doors to the room slammed deafeningly shut; books and files leaned over, tumbled, and fell to the floor; and papers flew from every desk and shelf to envelop us in an instant A4 blizzard. At the same time, the floor shuddered to a series of pounding thuds, the vibrations so powerful that my jaws clacked shut on the tip of my tongue. Cheryl swore, and Alice screamed. Rich gave a choking cry, backing away from the swirl of papers and striking ineffectually at the air. Jon Tiler and the other guy whose name I’d already forgotten both hit the floor in best
Protect and Survive
style, with their arms over their heads as though they were expecting a nuclear attack.

As for me, I just stood and watched as maps and posters and fire-drill charts hauled themselves off the walls and added themselves to the general melee. It was instinctive: not arrogant, or defiant, or particularly brave. It was just that this was information, and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t miss anything that might turn out to be important.

So when one small piece of paper or card came fluttering toward me, sailing against the storm, I noticed it at once. Unlike most of the diabolically animated paperwork, it was a lot smaller than A4. More to the point, it was dancing to the beat of a different drum, almost hovering, its short feints to left and right keeping it more or less directly in front of my face. I reached up and grabbed it out of the air. I couldn’t look at it because file folders and envelopes and catalogs and worksheets were beating against me and wrapping around me. I closed my hand on it instead, used the other hand to shield my face until, only a few seconds later, the tempest stopped. It didn’t slacken or falter, it just died, and everything that had been snatched up into the air fell simultaneously to the ground. Except for the scrap of card that I was holding—that went into my trouser pocket.

The archive staff blinked and looked around them, shell-shocked and disbelieving. Only Alice and Rich were still on their feet; Cheryl had ducked under her desk to join Jon Tiler and the other guy on the floor. Nobody said a word as they all got up again and stared around at the debris.

“Well, that was what we call a positive result,” I said into the silence.

“The—the damage!” Tiler stuttered. “Look at this! What have you done, Castor? What the fuck have you done?” Alice was just staring at me, and I saw that her hands were trembling.

“I don’t think anything much is broken, Jon,” Cheryl offered. “It’s a terrible mess, but look—most of it’s just paper.”

“Just paper? It’s my worksheets,” Tiler howled. “I’ll never get them sorted out again.”

“Looking on the bright side,” I said, “it worked. I got a really strong line on the ghost. I can pinpoint more or less exactly where it came from.”

They all looked at me expectantly.

“The first floor,” I admitted. “Just as we thought.”

I
BEAT
THE
KIND
OF
RETREAT
THAT
COULD
BE
CALLED
either hasty or strategic, depending on which side of the line you were watching it from. I was helped by the fact that Alice seemed unable even to frame, let alone speak, the many harsh words that she wanted to say to me. I assured her that I’d taken more from that brief encounter than just a confirmation of what we already knew, and I promised her definite progress tomorrow. Then I was out of there.

The lights in the corridor had already been turned off, but there was a strip light on in the stairwell. By its subliminally flickering glare, I reached into my pocket, took out the offering that the ghost had thrown at me, and examined it. It was card, not paper: a white rectangle about five inches by three, printed with pale blue lines and perforated close to one of the long edges by a single circular hole. This hole had once been about half an inch away from the edge, but was now joined to it by a ragged tear.