The Devil You Know

Sixteen

TWENTY-FOUR FEET IS EIGHT PACES, ROUGHLY, SO COUNT them off. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Good. Then do a ninety-degree turn and count again, to ten this time. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.

Then I bumped into the wall and whistled softly and tunelessly in the dark.

Cheryl was right.

Despite my earlier fears, it had been easy enough to break into the Bonnington with my lock picks. Their internal security was as spiky as hell, but the front door rolled over and played dead for me after only a modicum of manual stimulation. All the alarms were on the strong room doors, thank God, and I wouldn’t be visiting any of those. The reinforced door at the back of the reading room that led through into the staff-only part of the building was a lot harder and took me ten anxious, sweaty minutes. As a fallback, I had Cheryl’s ID card in my back pocket, but I was hoping not to have to use it, because the card readers on the doors probably had some kind of an internal memory.

I’d come alone. Pen was going to be my alibi in case things got nasty, and Cheryl didn’t need to be anywhere nearby while I was breaking into her place of work. But it would have been useful to have her all the same. It was hard enough making sense of the plans in a well-lit kitchen; standing in a dark corridor, working by filtered moonlight, it was frankly a bit of a bastard.

But all I was doing was pacing out distances, after all; once you got past the logistical problems, it wasn’t exactly complicated. Fifteen minutes bumping and shambling in the dark brought me to the only conclusion that made any sense.

There was a room missing. The corridor doglegged around it in a way that made it obvious, once you knew that something had been there and had been excised.

I tried again in the basement floor and found the same thing—another lacuna, more or less exactly underneath the first—now with the added mystery of a staircase that had been moved six yards along the corridor. Why would anyone go to that degree of trouble to take a modest-size slice out of a huge public building?

When the answer came to me, I went back up to the first floor and let myself out as carefully as I’d entered. Back on the street, I counted my steps again, but I already knew where I was going to end up.

Which was at the other door: the one I’d walked past on the first day, because it was silted up with old rubbish and covered with a crudely hewn slice of hardboard. Because it was so obviously disused and didn’t lead anywhere. It was an appendix, a forgotten and useless by-product of the building’s inorganic evolution. And that was what I found myself staring at now—with new eyes.

The rubbish cleared away really easily—suspiciously easily, if you were already in that frame of mind. It was basically only a couple of empty boxes and an old blanket—the minimalist signifiers for a stage set of “a place where homeless people sleep at night.”

The plywood sheet that had been nailed to the door had a cut-out rectangle where the keyholes were—another sign that this place wasn’t quite as disused as it looked. The two locks here were a Falcon and a Schlage, and they made the archive’s front door look like a bead curtain. I struggled with the Schlage for half an hour, and I was about half a breath away from quitting when I finally heard the click that meant the cylinders were all in a line.

I pushed the door, and it opened. Beyond was a sort of lobby space about four feet square with what looked like a folded blanket for a doormat, and beyond that was another door that was also locked. Its wood looked a lot flimsier than its metal bits, and my patience had worn out a while back, so I just kicked it open.

I stepped into a completely dark room that had a sharp-sour, organic smell to it—a smell of sweat and piss and I didn’t want to know what else. I groped on the near wall for a light switch, found one, and flicked it on. A naked hundred-watt bulb cast a harsh, clinical spotlight on a room that Mr. Bleaney would have turned down flat. Three of the walls were painted a sad shade of hospital green, while the fourth had been covered over with oppressively dark wood paneling, relieved by a few vertical slats of a lighter color. The floor was covered by a strip of paisley-patterned linoleum that had been cut for another room and didn’t reach all the way to the edges. The glass of the window was intact, but all you could see through it was the inside face of another plywood board.

The room itself was bare enough to count as empty, the only item of furniture a stained, fluorescent-orange sofa with a sort of 1970s lack of shame about itself. Against the base of one wall was a row of a dozen or so liter and two-liter bottles, some full of clear liquid, some empty. That was all.

I let the inner door fall closed behind me and advanced a little farther into the room. The shock of recognition had already hit me, followed by the reflection that it really wasn’t any shock at all. This was the room I’d seen when I’d played twenty questions with the ghost—the room she’d showed to me in the slide show of her memories. She’d remembered it and communicated it to me faithfully in every detail—except that maybe there were a couple more empty bottles now and a couple fewer full ones.

I searched the room. It took no time at all, because there was nothing to look at. Nothing under the sofa, nothing behind it. There might have been something down the back of its the cushions, but I was reluctant to touch the thing—it looked as if even casual contact could pass on communicable diseases. I unscrewed one of the bottles and sniffed, then tentatively tasted. As far as I could tell, it was just water.

What did that leave? There was a shelf above the door, but it was empty apart from a thick deposit of dust. The paneling could be covering a multitude of sins, so I pressed it in a few places to see how determined it was to stay attached to the wall. On the third push, something gave and rattled slightly. I looked closer and saw the door that was set into the wood, its verticals hidden by two of the decorative slats. Closer still, and I saw the keyhole.

This one was a Chubb of about 1960s vintage—easy enough in this context to count as wide open.

Beyond the door, a flight of stairs going down. This was the original one from the plans, which was no longer part of the archive itself—and that in turn explained why there was a newer staircase a few yards farther on from where the original had been.

The acrid smell was a lot sharper now.

Most likely this space had been separated from the building while it was government-owned, perhaps as some sort of grace-and-favor apartment for a civil servant who wasn’t senior enough to merit anything over by Admiralty Arch. Or maybe it had been hived off from the rest of the house when two ministries fought each other for lebensraum. Either way, it seemed to have been forgotten since—but clearly not by everybody.

There was another light switch on the stairwell, but when I pressed it, the light went on in the downstairs room, rather than in the stairwell itself. I went down carefully, afraid of tripping in the inadequate light.

The basement room was even bleaker than the first-floor one. Again, there was just the one item of furniture—a mattress, even fouler than the sofa, and naked except for a single checked blanket in bright red and yellow—well, formerly bright would be closer to the truth. In one corner of the room, there was a bucket full of murky liquid, which was the source of the smell. It had been used as a latrine. So, at some point, had the floor around it. On the floor right next to the bucket was an iron ring that had been inexpertly set in messily poured cement—obviously not a feature of the original room. There was a coil of rope there, too, thrown into a corner.

I know a prison cell when I see one. Someone had lived here, fairly recently, and not because they wanted to. Some of the other memories I’d absorbed from my brief psychic contact with the ghost surfaced again. The blanket had featured in there, I was damn sure of that. And Gabe McClennan’s face. What had been behind it? Snowy peaks . . . I turned and saw on the far wall, only a few feet away in this claustrophobic space, a ragged-edged poster of Mont Blanc bearing the legend L’Empire du Ski. Déjà vu ran through me like a tide of needles.

And turning my head had made me catch a near-subliminal glimpse of something else. A splash of red, under the near end of the mattress, almost at my feet. I squatted down on my haunches, feeling a mixture of reluctance and grim triumph. I was close to the answer now—the source of everything. I slid my hand under the mattress to lift it up.

And a jolt of pain slammed through me as if I’d touched a bare electric cable. From hand, to arm, to heart, to all points of the compass.

I snatched my hand back and spat out a curse.

Or rather, I tried to spit it out, but it wouldn’t come. Silence took root in my mouth, my throat, my lungs. Silence fell on me like the grubby blanket, like a bell jar slipped over my head and shoulders, like a handkerchief soaked in chloroform.

No, that was panic and overreaction. I wasn’t dizzy. I wasn’t losing consciousness. I was just completely unable to make a sound. I mouthed words, and I tried to push breath through them to bring them into the world, but nothing happened. My voice had gone.

Lifting the corner of the mattress more carefully this time, from above, I was able to see why. The red wasn’t congealed blood, after all; it was a circle, inscribed in dark red chalk, with a five-pointed star inside it and a series of painstakingly inscribed marks at each point of the star. In other words, a ward put there by an exorcist. Normally, the text written in the center of a ward like this would be ekpiptein—dismiss—or hoc fugere—get out of town. Here it was aphthegtos—speechless.

I straightened up, feeling a little shaky. I knew what Gabe McClennan had been doing here now and why nobody at the archive had reacted to the name. He’d never visited the archive itself at all. This was where he’d come, and this was what he’d been brought in to do.

But why silence the ghost instead of sending her away? That made no sense at all. It wasn’t as though McClennan would have offered a discount. If anything, the binding spell was harder than a straight exorcism.

Whatever the answer was, one thing was now explained. This was why it had been so hard for me to get a fix on the ghost, even when I’d been so close to her. She was bound by this ward, and its strictures hemmed her in like a straitjacket—a straitjacket sewn onto her soul. The change in her behavior made sense now, too—the sudden flare into what had seemed like motiveless violence. She was responding to this necromantic assault.

The ward ought to have had no power over a living human being, but the psychic sensitivity I was born with had left me wide open to it. What I was suffering now was like snow blindness or like the deadened hearing that follows after an explosion. My voice would come back, but it could take minutes or even hours.

A feeling of claustrophobia crashed down on me and made my heart race. Even my breath was making no sound in my chest or in my mouth. A voiceless pall hung over and around me. I turned the other corners of the mattress over, not expecting to find anything. But at the far end, closest to the wall, there was a broad, dark brown stain on the underside. The color was pretty much unmistakable. So was the bitter almond smell of stale blood, which had been masked until I got this close by the sharper ammonial reek of the piss bucket.

I was conscious that anyone finding the upstairs door open could cross the room above me, see the light on down here, and lock me in with a single turn of the key—assuming that this was an anyone who had the key in his pocket. It wasn’t an idea I liked all that much. I retreated to the stairs, cast one more look around the grim place, and headed back up to street level.

The upper door had swung to. I opened it and stepped out into the first-floor room. Just the one step, then I stopped dead. The room was dark; the light from the basement cell barely made it up the stairwell, creating only a strip of fuzzy gray in front of me, sandwiched between broader areas of indelible black. While I was in the basement, someone had turned the upstairs light off.

All I had by way of a weapon was my dagger. It was intended for exorcisms, not for self-defense, and I didn’t bother to keep it sharp, but it might make someone think twice if I waved it around. Standing stock-still in the dark, and grateful now for the absolute silence of my breath, I slid it out of my pocket and held it down at waist height, ready.

Then I smelled her perfume—that terrible, polecat’s-arse musk that bullied its way into your brain and reprogrammed you so that you loved it.

And I heard her laugh—soft, mocking, utterly without mercy.

“It won’t help you,” Ajulutsikael murmured almost caressingly, and I knew she was right. She was faster than me, and stronger. She could see in the dark. She could take the knife out of my hand and pick her teeth with it before slamming it back into my guts, and there wouldn’t be a damn thing I could do about it.

Hoping to throw her off balance and maybe postpone the inevitable, I tossed the knife casually away into the dark and took out my whistle. It wouldn’t work; the aphthegtos ward would stop any sound at all from coming from my mouth. But such as it was, the pathetic bluff was all I had.

She wasn’t fooled. Either she could sense the magic of McClennan’s sigils hanging on me or she could just tell from my face that it was a bluff. I heard her heels click on the floor as she strolled unhurriedly toward me. She knew there was nothing to fear from the whistle this time.

“There was a woman chained here,” Ajulutsikael said. Her voice was the same throaty murmur, but it was from a lot closer this time. She was a couple of steps away from me and just right of center. If I ducked her first charge, I could fake left and make a run for the door. But there was no way I’d ever reach it. There was a moment of terrifying silence during which I tensed and got ready to move. Then she spoke again, from even closer. “Did you chain her?”

I shook my head.

“Did you keep her as your pet until you tired of her? Alone? In the dark? Was the stink of her fear sweet to you?”

All I could do was shake my head again, more urgently. Who rips my head off gets trash, more or less, or at least takes their own chances with the resale value—but dead or alive, I didn’t want to be associated with this hell-hole.

“A pity. It would have been more enjoyable then. But I’m going to eat you anyway.” A kind of anger came growling and graveling up from under the feline playfulness. “I’m going to make you pay, man, for the indignity of this summoning. For being made to dance on a chain at the whim of these stinking bags of meat. I’m going to take you slowly. You will love me as you die, and you will despair.”

I could actually see her now; my eyes had adjusted to the point where she showed as a darker splodge of shape against the background darkness. A fluid blur of black, as deep as midnight.

I threw out my arms in a sort of shrug—the closest I could get to pleading for my life. Her hand fell on my shoulder, turned me round to face her. I hit out, and my fist was caught. I pulled away, and she drew me close—then threw me effortlessly across the room so that I slammed into the sofa, toppling it, and rolled over and over across the floor until I hit the base of the wall beyond.

“Let’s make ourselves comfortable,” she whispered.

I was winded and stunned, but I braced myself to make some kind of a fight of it. I got up on one knee, which was as much as I could manage.

What happened next I can only describe in sound, because that was all that I was aware of. There was a series of heavy impacts, as though a bunch of guys with hammers had hit the far wall on the same command, but slightly out of synch. Ajulutsikael grunted in surprise and pain, and the window shattered. Not just the window, in fact. With a loud, indiscreet crash, a corner of the plywood panel snapped clean away and tumbled out into the street. Yellow light from a streetlamp flooded into the room.

It showed Ajulutsikael in a defensive crouch, hands raised in front of her face. A bottle came whipping through the air toward her, and her right arm came across in a blur of motion. She smashed it out of the air in an explosion of glinting glass and incandescent drops. It didn’t help her. The jagged shards of glass slowed as they fell, turned and leapt back up at her, slicing at her flesh, stinging her like brittle bees. As I stared, trying to process what I was seeing into some kind of sense, a shard from the broken window, a triangular wedge about eight inches long, parted the air like a dart and buried itself in her back.

Spasmodically, only marginally under my conscious control, my head jerked around. The ghost was standing at the head of the stairs, the scarlet veils of her face billowing and rippling like sheets left out to dry in a stiff wind. She didn’t move, and her head was slightly bowed, but she faced Ajulutsikael full-on. Her head turned, and her gaze swept the room from left to right, right to left—and the storm of shattered glass danced in time.

Ajulutsikael had seen her, too. She moved toward the ghost, fingers curved into claws. But the storm of glass moved with her, arced around her, broke on her like a wave, only to bend and recurve almost instantly for another pass. Her clothes hung off her in shreds—her clothes and strips of her flesh. Black streaks of blood crisscrossed her face, and her eyes were wide and mad.

A feral growl began deep in her throat, built to an ear-hurting bellow in which consonants I couldn’t have reproduced even if I hadn’t been gagged by McClennan’s ward smashed against each other like calving icebergs. The ghost trembled and flickered. The glass fragments fell to the floor like prismatic rain.

Discretion is the better part of staying alive. I lurched to my feet, crunched and staggered through broken glass to the door, and fled into the night.

When I was a hundred yards down the street, my feet pumping like pistons, I heard a rending crash from behind me. I risked one glance over my shoulder. Ajulutsikael was out on the street, straddling the saw-edged wreckage of the hardwood door. Then she saw me and came after me at a dead run. With each loping stride, her stiletto heels struck sparks from the cold stones she ran on.

I came out onto Euston Road and tacked left. Traffic was still heavy and fast enough to form a serious blockade, so getting across the road and losing myself in the alleys around Judd Street wasn’t going to be an option. She’d be on me before I found a gap. But up ahead there was a skip truck stopped at a red light, with a loaded skip on board.

I didn’t have time to make a conscious decision. If I had, I might have hesitated—it was chancing everything on one throw of the dice. And if I’d hesitated, she would have punched my heart out through my ribs as I ran.

As it was, I grabbed for a loop of chain that was hanging off the back of the skip and missed it as the light went green and the truck lurched forward. Hearing the rasp of the succubus’s heels behind me, like a knife on a strop, I forced myself into one last spurt of speed and snatched at the chain again. This time, I just managed to snag it as the truck’s gathering momentum made the trailing end of it snake out toward me. Dragged half off my feet, I staggered, righted myself, got one foot back under me, and jumped.

Ajulutsikael jumped, too, and something whipped past my trailing leg before I could pull it in. The sudden chill of its passing was followed instantly by a sudden wash of warmth. She’d drawn blood.

For a moment I was braced by one foot against the back of the truck. Then it slipped, and I was just dangling on the chain like an overlarge air freshener whimsically hung up on the outside of the vehicle instead of in the cab. The chain whipped around on its pivot, unbalanced by my weight, so that I saw the road behind me in quick, dizzying glimpses. Ajulutsikael was still pounding along behind the truck tirelessly, not gaining but keeping pace with it. The next time we hit a light that was against us, I was dead meat.

With a desperate effort, I hauled myself up the chain until I could hook one hand over the rim of the skip. At the same time, my feet got a purchase on the edge of the truck’s bed, so my hands weren’t carrying my full weight by themselves anymore. That was as secure a perch as I could get, but it left me one hand free to grope around inside the skip. After a moment or two, I found and pulled free a jagged piece of white porcelain from a sink or a toilet. It was about the right weight and heft, but unless I chose my moment, Ajulutsikael would see it coming.

We got to an underpass, and we went down. The succubus’s view of me was momentarily eclipsed by the rising edge of the road’s surface. I counted down from three and lobbed the chunk of bathroom debris just as we took a sharp right turn.

It was perfect. The sudden angular momentum as we turned made my arm into a kind of slingshot. The porcelain payload hit the succubus squarely in the chest, and she went down in a skidding tangle of limbs. A human would have been killed outright. But then, a human wouldn’t have been able to hit that speed in the first place.

I kept staring back along the road as we bumped onward in case she reappeared, but there was no sign of her. After that, the ride felt almost luxurious. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to see split-second, disconnected glimpses of London while freezing half to death and fighting off clinical shock.

Of course, it was a long walk back from Brixton. But you can’t have everything.

It’s a logical inference that I made it home in one piece, because I can remember Pen cleaning the messy wound on my leg with antiseptic while Cheryl stood behind her, fist pressed to her mouth, saying “Shit” often enough for it to have become a meaningless sound.

“You stink,” Pen said severely.

“I’ll shower,” I said groggily. I didn’t know what I meant by it. It was just sounds, but it was still a novelty to be able to make sounds again after my brush with McClennan’s ward of silence. And Pen wasn’t listening anyway, so I was under no obligation to make any sense.

“It’s the same smell that was in your room after that thing ripped the window out,” she said. “You’ve seen her again, haven’t you?”

I winced involuntarily as I thought back to the dark room, the overpowering smell, the mocking voice from the deep shadows. “I didn’t see all that much of her, to be honest.”

“He’s always been attracted to the wrong kind of women,” Pen said acidly, over my head, to Cheryl.

“Yeah, I’m the same with blokes,” Cheryl answered morosely. “You think you know what you’re getting into, but you never do.”

They carried on talking, but my mind slipped onto another frequency, and I wasn’t really hearing them anymore. The ghost couldn’t talk. She’d been silenced—deliberately, sorcerously silenced by Gabe McClennan, presumably acting on orders from—Damjohn? Why? What could she have said that represented a danger to him? If he’d had her killed, if she could incriminate him in any way at all, then why not just exorcise her and have done with it?

And how was Damjohn linked to the archive? What blindingly obvious point was I missing? Did the pimp and sleaze-king have a sideline in stolen artifacts?

ICOE 7405 818. That was the only solid thing I had to go on. Someone at the Bonnington had the number of Damjohn’s club, Kissing the Pink, in his Rolodex, ready to hand in the event of—what? Was it just intended as a last resort? For regular briefings and progress reviews? To cover some unforeseen crisis, like an outsider nosing around in places where he wasn’t meant to?

I probably got a glimpse of it then. Not the who and certainly not the why, but the broad shape of what the answer had to be. I couldn’t articulate it yet, but I think I could have played the tune of it, as though it was a ghost I was going to raise and then render. Right then, that wasn’t much of a consolation.