The Devil You Know

Eight

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.

It was a card ripped out of a Rolodex or file-card index. On it there were four letters and seven numbers.

ICOE 7405 818.

ICOE? Was that a name? An acronym of some kind? The Institute of . . . Christ knew what. The rest of it looked to be a central London phone number, though—logical enough if this was from someone’s desk directory. Leaving aside the question of what I was meant to do with it, it represented a sort of breakthrough in a job—I almost thought case—that had otherwise brought me nothing but a day of aggravation.

I fished out my mobile phone—no time like the present. But the battery is faulty, and the damn thing is always out of charge; this time was no exception. I thrust both the phone and the card back into my pocket and carried on down the stairs.

The security office was already locked, and there was no sign of friendly Frank. I went behind the counter to pick up my coat, but of course it was shut into one of the lockers, and I didn’t have a key. I was contemplating kicking the flimsy door open when Alice came down the stairs at my back and saw me. I turned to face her, bracing myself for a bollocking, but what I read in her face wasn’t anything as straightforward as anger.

“Great show,” she observed, her voice tense. “Fun for all the family.”

“I don’t know,” I countered. “I think I need some tunes you can actually hum.”

“So how is it done?”

I considered tact and courtesy. Briefly. “You get a ghost. You drive it rat-arse crazy with a drop of blood. The recipe’s in the Iliad.” She didn’t answer, so I tried again. “Look, I didn’t expect that kind of a response. I’m sorry about the damage. I thought the ghost would come in for a low pass over the blood, but the reaction we got was completely—”

Alice wasn’t listening. She came around the counter and wielded her totemic key ring to liberate my coat. I took it from her outstretched hands, nodded a curt thanks. I thought she was going to say something else, but she didn’t. She just took her own coat and handbag out of the next locker along. Her hands hadn’t stopped trembling, and when she unhooked her big, unwieldy key ring and tried to slide it into her bag, she couldn’t manage it. With a muttered “Shit!” she thrust it into her coat pocket instead. I left her to it.

Outside, a light drizzle was falling, but the wind on my face—only a breeze, really—felt good after a day in the archive’s stingily recirculated air. I could have taken a train from Euston and changed, or hopped a bus heading north through Camden Town, but I decided to walk to King’s Cross and grab the Piccadilly line direct. I was two or three blocks away from the archive, walking head down along the Euston Road, when I realized that Alice was keeping pace with me—shivering despite her coat, her arms clasped around herself, her keys jangling audibly in her pocket.

I stopped and turned to face her, waiting for the other shoe to drop. She stared at me, her eyes sullen and haunted.

“I’m not happy about this,” she said. “I’m not happy about where it’s going.”

I carried on waiting. I thought I knew what she meant, but I needed a bigger clue than that.

“I thought—” It was a difficult admission, and she had trouble getting it out. “I thought it was all bullshit. I thought Clitheroe was lying, and everyone else was hysterical. Because if there’d been anything there, I would have seen it, too—and I didn’t see anything. Until tonight.”

I was as careful as I could be: a neutral observation, not loaded at all. “You saw Rich getting that wound on his face.”

“It wasn’t the first time—Rich hurts himself a lot. He shut his hand in a drawer a few months back. And another time he tripped and fell down the main stairs. I thought it was an accident he was too embarrassed to own up to.”

“But you saw—”

Alice cut in, her tone brittle and dangerous. “I saw him prancing around like an idiot, yelping, waving the scissors. Then he managed to cut his face, somehow. It wasn’t like tonight.”

She was staring at me, and I saw in her eyes what a heroic understatement it had been when she’d said she was not happy. I’d pigeonholed her the day before, and now I knew I was right. Alice wasn’t even a vestal; she was what we refer to in the trade—often with a certain degree of contempt—as a DT, or sometimes just as a Thomas: one of the absolute nonsensitives who stood at the opposite end of the human bell curve from wherever I was. She couldn’t see ghosts at all.

Funny. After her behavior up to now, seeing Alice so scared and unhappy should have been a feast of schadenfreude for me. But in fact, I felt a reluctant sympathy for her. I’d been there. We all have to go there, eventually. We all have to drop the shield of skepticism and bow our heads to the axe of that’s-just-how-it-fucking-is.

“I know,” I said, feeling a weight of tiredness drop onto my shoulders. “When you see one for the first time—when you realize it’s all true—you have to swallow a lot of very heavy stuff all at once. It’s hard.”

I let the words hang in the air. Yes, I was sorry for her, but I had troubles of my own, and she was one of them. Did I really want to help her dry her eyes and square her shoulders? No.

But some things come with the job.

“I’m going home,” I said gracelessly. “I’ve got ten minutes. If you want my version of Metaphysics 101, you can have it.”

Alice nodded, probably as reluctantly as I’d made the offer.

“Better make it somewhere inside,” she said. “Otherwise I don’t think I’ll last that long.”

The nearest “somewhere inside” was Saint Pancras’s church. It was open and empty. We sat down in the back row of pews. It was almost as cold as it was outside, but at least it was dry.

“Metaphysics 101,” Alice prompted me, her voice shaky.

“Right. Blake hit the nail bang on the head, didn’t he? ‘What is now proved was once only imagined.’” Thanks for that one, Pen. “If ghosts are real, then a whole raft of things that you were happy to think of as metaphors, or folk myths, or medieval clutter left behind in the wake of the Enlightenment turn out to be sober truth. You start wondering about Heaven. And Hell. You start asking yourself what’s going to happen to you when you turn your toes up. Are you going to be stuck in some dismal pit of a place just because you lived there or worked there or died there? Is the afterlife like this one, only with no sex, no drugs, and no time off for good behavior?”

Alice nodded, slowly and unhappily.

“Well, the answer is nobody knows. If you’re religious, you could talk to a priest about it. Or a rabbi, or whatever flavor you favor. But I’ll tell you how I get through it.”

She was watching me, expectantly. Someone else was watching, too. I felt that prickle again; that pressure on my skin lighter than touch. I glanced into the shadows near the door, thought that maybe I saw someone moving there.

“I stick with Blake,” I said, “and I draw a line. Between what’s proved and what’s just jerking off—premature reification. If I see my Aunt Emily get decapitated in a freak piano-tuning accident, and then a bodiless shape that looks just like Auntie Em comes walking through my bedroom wall at three in the morning with its head tucked underneath its arm, I don’t just jump for the nearest conclusion—which is that whatever is on the label has to be in the box. You know the Navajo?”

“The Navajo Indians?” Her expression was blank, nonplussed.

“Yeah, them. They see ghosts as some kind of evil force of nature. Chindi, they call them. They’re the part of the soul that can’t go on to something better—all the nasty impulses you don’t usually follow up on. All your selfishness and greed and stupidity. They’re not you; they’re just a sort of negative afterimage you leave behind you when you trade up to eternal life.”

Alice didn’t look convinced; it was probably a bad example.

“All I mean is, there’s no automatic assumption that ghosts are people trapped in some fuck-awful repetition of what they used to do when they were alive. We don’t know what they are. We don’t have any way of finding out.”

Her uncertainty was hardening into something else.

“And that makes it okay for you to destroy them?” she asked, her voice almost too low to hear.

I shrugged. “Is that what I do? That’s another unknown.”

“Not to you.”

“Yes, to me.”

“I don’t see that. You must know what it is you’re doing.”

This was novel. I was meant to be talking Alice through this very sudden existential crisis—and instead I found myself being asked to justify my own existence. It must say something profound and worrying about me that I didn’t just leave her to it.

“At first necromancy was something I did by accident,” I told her. It was the easiest way to put it, but accident was a pretty pale word for it all the same.

“Accident?”

“Yeah. I mean, without wanting to do it. Without deciding.” I looked toward the door again, then back to meet her unblinking gaze. “It’s easy to summon ghosts. Easier than sending them away, I mean. If you’re in the right place, and there are a lot of them around, it can be enough just to start talking to them. Or look at them. Or lift your hand and beckon. With me, it’s music.”

“What is? How do you mean?”

“The trigger. The thing I use to bring them and then to bind them. I play a tin whistle.”

She laughed incredulously.

“You don’t!”

I slipped my hand into my coat and brought it out.

“Jesus,” said Alice with a sort of pained wonder. “The magic flute!” I let her take it from me, and she sighted along it at my face as though it was a tiny rifle. That reminded me of Ditko pretending to fire bullets at my feet to make me dance—and then of the way the whistle felt hot in my dream after I’d played it. A shiver of genuine unease passed over me. I took the whistle back from her and replaced it where it belonged: ready to hand, and only to my hand.

“But exorcising the ghosts is harder?” she prompted, giving me that look again.

“Usually a lot harder. But you can’t make any kind of a rule about it—each one’s different.” I changed my tack. “Are you good at maths?”

“Better than I am at Navajos. I took it to A level—and I can multiply four-digit numbers in my head.”

“Okay, then. David Hilbert. Prussian mathematician in the late nineteenth century. He reckoned you could make a mathematical model of anything—a chair, a sentence, the swirl of cream in a coffee cup, which side your balls will hang down when you put your pants on, whatever.”

“Okay.”

“Well, that’s a way of looking at it that sort of works. I play a tune, and the tune is a model. I’m modeling the ghost. I’m . . . describing it in sound. But then after that—if I’ve done it right—it cuts both ways. I’ve made a link of some kind; I’ve tied the ghost to the sound.”

I stopped. Words weren’t adequate for what I did; I always got myself twisted round and upside down when I tried to explain it. But Alice was running with the idea.

“Something like a voodoo doll,” she said tentatively. “I mean, a voodoo doll is a model that’s intended to work in exactly that way. You make it represent a real person, either with a spell or with a fetish, like a lock of their hair or something. Then when you stick pins in the doll, the person who the doll is meant to be feels the pain.”

I was impressed. That was a much better analogy than the one I’d been aiming for.

“Right,” I agreed. “Well, that’s what I do. I make the tune represent the ghost. I knit them together—I make them become two parts of the same thing. Then when I stop playing . . .”

I let the sentence hang. Again, I’d reached the point where language couldn’t take me any further. What did happen to the loose spirits I packaged up and shipped out? Where was I sending them? Did they go on to greener pastures or just stop existing? I didn’t know. I’d never found an explanation that didn’t sound like bullshit.

“When you stop playing?” Alice pressed.

“Then the ghost stops being there. It goes away.”

“Where to?”

“Wherever music goes when it’s not being played.”

It wasn’t what she’d expected to hear, and it left her if anything even more unhappy than before. I should have known it would.

What could I tell her? My own definition of life extended from cradle to grave, and what came after that I saw as something else. If you could find your way to Heaven or Hell, all well and good. If you couldn’t, you had no damn business hanging around the local chip shop or in your wife’s sock drawer. In other words, if there was a natural order at all, then I was part of it—a moving finger that never wrote anything down but was really good for canceling things out.

“Try a priest,” I suggested again, all out of homespun wisdom. “Or just someone you love and trust. Try Jeffrey, maybe. Talk it through. Don’t run away from it. In my experience, there’s nowhere to run to.”

I suddenly realized at that point that Alice was staring at me in a sort of pained bewilderment.

“Jeffrey?” she said with an incredulous emphasis.

“What?”

“‘Try Jeffrey’? Is that what you said?”

I thought about it, and it was.

“I meant,” I tried again, “that you should talk to someone who—”

“I know what you meant, Castor. I want to know why the hell you meant it. You think Jeffrey and I are attached? Romantically attached? Did I do or say anything that would lead you to that conclusion?”

“You seem to have a good working relationship,” I temporized.

“Bullshit.” Alice was really angry now. “Nobody has a good working relationship with Jeffrey. The relationship that I have with him is that I do the work, and he hides behind my skirt.”

“Okay.” I spread my hands, offering surrender.

It was rejected. “Not okay. Not okay at all. Some whingeing creep told you I slept my way into this job, right? I knew the rumor was circulating, but I didn’t know it had reached light speed. For the record, I’m senior archivist because I do the job really efficiently. And Rich isn’t, because nobody except him thought he could handle it.”

“Okay,” I said again. I didn’t want to argue with her. It wasn’t like it was any of my business, after all.

She stood up, glaring down at me. “In my opinion, it’s you that needs to have that talk, not me,” she said. “And I don’t mean with a priest or a rabbi. I mean with yourself. God helps those who help themselves, Castor. I suggest you start by taking a good, hard look at what you do for a living.”

Alice grabbed her bag and left, not exactly storming out, but certainly leaving it clear that she didn’t want to be followed. And I sure as hell didn’t want to follow her right then. Even Good Samaritans will give up the habit if you smack them hard enough, and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice in one evening—of doing the wrong thing because the right one wasn’t available.

But as I got up, I noticed that she’d left something behind her. The heavy key ring had fallen out of her pocket onto the wooden bench, and she hadn’t noticed it in the near dark of the church’s interior. I picked it up, hefted the impressive weight of it. Alice wore it like a totem. She’d be really upset when she missed it—not least because it had her ID card attached to it by a bobble-chain, and she wouldn’t be able to open any of the doors at the archive without it. Changing my mind, I sprinted after her.

No sign of anyone in the doorway or outside the church. By now, the drizzle had turned into steady rain. London in the wet smells like an incontinent dog, but in other ways, it’s not so endearing. I gave it up and just carried on walking down toward King’s Cross. I didn’t even know which direction she’d taken, and in any case, it wasn’t the end of the world. I’d just have to be there when the place opened the next morning to hand the keys back to her.

As I was about to go down into the Underground by the steps outside King’s Cross Station, I passed a phone booth that was miraculously both intact and unused. Well, we do live in an age of signs and wonders, after all. Remembering the card in my pocket, I stopped and fished it out. I had just enough coins on me to feed the meter and get a dial tone.

7405 818. I vaguely knew the code, and I had an idea that it was somewhere fairly central. Close to the West End, if not actually in it. I dialed, and the phone at the other end rang just once.

“Hello?” A man’s voice, low and smooth—slightly bored. Music was playing in the background somewhere—louche synthetic jazz. Someone laughed loudly in a way that suggested there were a lot of other people hanging around whatever place the phone was in.

“It’s me,” I hazarded. The only response this got was dead silence, punctuated by the complaint of a tenor sax at being inexpertly played. “From the archive,” I added for the hell of it.

More silence. “Wait a moment,” the man murmured. I waited. The sax had been shut off now, which meant either there’d been a mercy killing or the guy had his hand over the phone receiver.

That was all I got. He hung up.

Discovering another few twenty-pence pieces in a trouser pocket, I made a follow-on call. This time around, nobody even answered. If there was a magic word, then “archive” wasn’t it. My next line was going to be “A ghost asked me to call you. Do you know why that might be?” So on the whole, it was probably all for the best.

I got back to Pen’s house a little after seven and found it empty. Her basement rooms were locked up, and the first and second floors where she was meant to live but didn’t were as chill and damp as always. I went on up to my own room in the old house’s sprawling roof space.

I was aware as I unlocked the door of a heavy, slightly musty smell. That should have alerted me that something was wrong, but then again, when you live with Pen and her magic menagerie, you have to accept that earthy smells are going to be frequent houseguests.

I threw the door open.

He was sitting on the bed, and he was heavy enough so that the springs bowed under him, making a broad hollow around his broad backside. It was the guy from the pub the night before—and he didn’t look any better from this close up. Worse, in fact. His face was so deeply lined that it looked as though it had been assembled from snap-together pieces, and his pale eyes had a watery gleam in them that looked somehow unhealthy. That didn’t make him any less scary, though. He might be diseased, but a diseased ox can do a lot of damage.

I took a quick look around the room. The window was open a crack, but this was three flights up, and nobody of this guy’s heft had any business shinnying up a drainpipe. If he’d parachuted in from a passing plane, there should have been a hole in the ceiling. That left the obvious.

“Pretty good,” I acknowledged. “But at the same time, strangely pointless. Or is this performance art? You break into people’s houses and then sit around waiting for a round of applause?”

A slow, pained frown crossed his slow, pained face.

“I’m Scrub,” he said, as if that explained everything. “I got a job.” His voice was so throaty a growl that it was barely audible at all. He sounded like he needed surgery—or maybe like he’d just had some and it hadn’t taken all that well.

“That’s great.” I shrugged my coat off and threw it over the back of a chair. Ordinarily, I would have hung it up on the bed, but there wasn’t much room around the edges of this behemoth—and I suspected that the springs were already operating at the limits of their tolerance. “Let me guess. Ballet dancer? Manicurist? Jockey?”

It wasn’t a small room, but between me and him, it definitely felt crowded. I walked around the bed to the rolltop desk that I use mainly as a liquor cabinet. I threw the top back, found a glass that wasn’t too grimy to see through, and poured myself a stiff whisky. It wasn’t that I really felt like drinking, it was to cut the smell, which now that I was inside the room was too strong to ignore. It was a smell of things rotten and sick and ripe, left out in the open long after they should have been buried. A smell you instinctively wanted to move a long way away from.

“I got a job,” he expanded, getting garrulous now, “for you.”

I slugged the whisky and let it swill around my mouth before swallowing.

“Thank you,” I said, “for the thought. You don’t look like you’ve got that many to spare.”

This time the frown came quicker—the patented Castor mental workout was already bearing fruit.

“That’s not polite,” Scrub said.

“I tend more toward brutal honesty.”

His face lit up like a baggy old armchair soaked in kerosene. “Brutal? Oh, I can do brutal.” He stood up, towering over me without having to make much of a big deal out of it. The look in his pale eyes was unnervingly cheerful all of a sudden. “Brutal’s what I like best. ’Specially with the likes of you.”

I tallied up my options and got to two. I could play nice and save myself a spectacular beating, or I could bluff.

It was unfortunate that I tallied them up in that order. There was nothing to counter the lingering echoes of my favorite word.

“Listen, you big, thick bastard,” I said harshly, tilting my head back to keep eye contact with him. “You were following me all around the West End—last night, and again tonight. You just broke into my room. And you’ve probably fucked up my bed beyond all hope of unfucking just by dumping your big fat arse on it. So don’t think you can get away with threatening me, too. Say what you’ve got to say, and then sod off to the black pits of fucking Tartarus, okay?”

It took a moment for Scrub to process this much information, but in the meantime, his default options kicked in. He reached out one ham-size hand and closed it on a big fistful of my shirt. Buttons popped and fabric tore as he lifted me off the ground.

His strength was incredible. He didn’t even have to brace himself. My feet dangled, and my back arched involuntarily as he dragged me in close to his face. The bunched-up cloth of the shirt rode up into my armpits and pushed my arms away from my sides so that I looked as though I was trying to fly.

“Which bits of you do you need?” he asked me, his voice rasping like a saw—which by coincidence was what his breath cut like, too. “To do your stuff, I mean?”

“Every last one of them.” I got the answer out somehow, in a choking gasp, but it was a struggle to keep my debonair tone. “It’s a holistic thing. I lose one body part, and I’m out of tune.”

“I could beat out a tune with you on that fucking wall,” Scrub growled, pointing with his free hand. Even in this embarrassing predicament, with my legs treading air and my lungs unable to fill because of the way my weight was lying on the impromptu yoke of my bunched-up shirt, I was amazed. He’d picked up my metaphor and elaborated on it. He was only as stupid as a bag full of spanners, not a hat full of arseholes.

“Do it—myself—,” I wheezed with the last of my breath. I let the whistle drop out of my sleeve, where I’d palmed it when I took my coat off, and held it up in front of Scrub’s smirking, lumpy face.

“Bluff” was the wrong word for it. It was an educated guess.

He smacked the whistle out of my hand so fast and so hard that he almost took the hand with it. Then in one effortless wave of motion, he lifted me and slammed me down onto the rolltop desk, where his heavy hand, with his full weight bearing down on it, held me pinned. My head slammed against the wood, which was cherry with a brass inlay. I saw stars, bells, and tweeting baby birds. Scrub’s meaty forefinger prodded my cheek.

“You ever,” he said with a calm that was a lot scarier than his earlier bluster, “raise that thing near me again, and you will live out your frigging life with nothing between your legs except a ragged hole.”

“Just kidding,” I said when I could say anything. There was a ringing in my ears, and I couldn’t hear my own voice. “But now we know where we stand, eh? So what’s this job you were talking about?”

“You fucking scumbag!” Scrub spat. But he lifted his hand away and took a step back, giving me room to haul myself off the desk and get on my feet again.

“Yeah, right,” I agreed, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand and finding that the warmth there was blood; I must have bitten my tongue when he threw me down. There was a sharp ache across my shoulders and a dull one in my head. To make a point, though, I turned my back on him and retrieved the whistle from where it lay against the far wall. I had him taped now, although in the process, I suspected I’d made an enemy for life. I couldn’t resist prodding the bruise one more time, though, for the sake of my self-respect. “What sort of a face did you have before this one, then, Scrub? And what sort of a name? Rover, was it?”

I half expected him to hit me anyway and take the consequences later, but he didn’t. Just as well, because a punch from one of Scrub’s hands would end most fights before they’d even got started and probably lay me out for what was left of the night—assuming I ever woke up from it at all. I think that was what stopped him, to be honest. He had his orders, and he took them very seriously.

“The gentleman who employs me wants some cleaning done,” he said at last, after a range of scary emotions had passed across his face. “Couple of hours’ work. Couple of ton in your hand.”

“When and where?” I asked, pulling back the chair that went with the desk and sitting down—carefully, because of the pain in my upper back.

“Down Clerkenwell. Now. He’s waiting.”

“Not now,” I said. “Can’t be done. I’m finished for the night.”

Scrub, in two giant steps, crossed the room.

“You want to be finished, I’ll finish you,” he rasped. “Otherwise, you come now.”

I’d taken it as far as I could, so I gave it up. Some men have greatness thrust upon them.