The Devil You Know

Seven

THE DINNER PARTY WAS FLAGGING.

In fact, that was a polite word for it. It had died. Even my father, who when he’s in full flow can be silenced by nothing short of decapitation, had finally given up and was just staring at his plate. My headmistress from primary school, Mrs. Culshaw, was fiddling with her greens. The clown sitting next to my mother picked his nose forlornly, and she wagging a finger at him without any real conviction.

All around the table, faces turned to me.

“Give us a tune, Fix,” Pen said with an insinuating lift of the eyebrows. “I bet you know some amazing ones.”

I shook my head, but they were all nodding. Old school friends, old enemies, women I’d slept with, the man from the corner shop back in Arthur Street, everyone wanted some free entertainment, and I was on the spot.

Slowly, I stood up.

“Play the one your sister Katie liked,” my father said. “The one you played to her before she died.” A chuckle went around the table at his little joke. He exchanged a glance with my mother, who nodded appreciatively as if he’d scored a point in some unacknowledged game.

“Play her back to life again,” my brother Matthew suggested. He blessed me ironically with the sign of the cross.

That did it. That always did it. I wanted to make them all shut up, and the quickest way to achieve that was to do what they said. I put my whistle to my lips and blew a single note—strident, shrieking, sustained. The faces around the table went in an instant from smug challenge to dismay. Then I modulated that one high note into a wailing, skirling tune, and they gasped.

I don’t always remember what song I play in this dream, but this time it was “The Bonny Swans.” By the time I got to the first refrain, everyone was clutching their heads or their stomachs, sliding down off their chairs, collapsing across the table with moans of agony.

It was clear that the music was killing them. That made me feel a little bad, in a way, a little sick with myself, but it didn’t make me stop. They’d asked for a tune. I gave it to them, as the ones who were trying to crawl toward the door collapsed and curled in on themselves, and the ones who’d just slumped in their chairs withered and decayed in fast-motion.

I killed them all. No more embarrassment. No more demands. They asked for it, and they got it. Finally I lowered the whistle, which now felt hot to my touch, like a gun after it’s been fired. I slotted it back into my pocket, grimly satisfied.

Then there was a liquescent gurgle from behind me. It was a terrible sound—a sound of indescribable distress and pain. The sort of sound that means either pull me back or finish me off, but don’t leave me stuck here in between like a rabbit on a barbed-wire fence.

The whistle had let me down. This one I was going to have to kill with my bare hands.

I turned around slowly. I didn’t want to see, but it was my responsibility. I knew if I didn’t do this, the next time I blew into the whistle, no music would come. This was the price I had to pay for the gift that had been given to me. This was the place and time where the rent fell due.

The body slumped at my feet was twitching feebly, like a goldfish on the bathroom floor. It was too dark to perceive anything apart from that vague sense of movement. I gripped its shoulder, hauled it onto its back. It didn’t resist as my hands found its throat.

The lights came up slowly as I squeezed.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Pen asked. She padded into the kitchen in bare feet and scarlet silk dressing gown, rubbing her eyes.

I took a sip of coffee. I’d made it on the stove top, using Pen’s 1930s moka pot, and it was thick and black and lethally strong—not exactly calculated to cure insomnia, but just right to stop my hands from shaking.

“Have you ever noticed,” I asked her, “how characters in movies always sit bolt upright when they get to the scariest part of the dream? It’s like they’ve got some kind of psychic ejector-seat mechanism. They get to the money shot and boing, they’re awake.”

She poured herself a cup from what was left in the pot. It would be three sips and some sludge, but they’d be potent sips.

“You dreamed about your sister again.”

I shook my head. “This time it was Rafi,” I said glumly.

She sat down opposite me, in silence. I finished the cup, and she offered me hers.

“Nobody blames you,” she said, at last. “Nobody thinks you screwed up.”

“I did screw up.”

“You tried to help him. It didn’t work. Nobody else could have done anything.”

I was sorry I’d mentioned it. Honesty isn’t usually a vice I indulge, but with Pen, you get into the habit. She never lies—not even the white kind that spare feelings and avoid embarrassment. You tend to give her the same courtesy back.

“Maybe nothing would have been the best thing to do,” I muttered.

Exorcism is both more and less than a job. You do it because it’s something you find you can do, and because once you’ve started, there’s something about it that doesn’t let you stop. But, in the long run, it gets to you. Exorcists who live long enough to be old are very strange people indeed—like the legendary Peckham Steiner, who lived the last few years of his life on a houseboat on the Thames and wouldn’t set foot on dry land because he thought the ghosts were about to launch a blitzkrieg on the living, and he was the first target.

I thought about Rafi as he was when I first met him: elegant, selfish, and beautiful, a dancer with a thousand delighted partners. Then I thought about him steaming in that bathtub full of ice water, his eyes shining in the dark, looking as though the fire that was inside him was about to break out through his skin at any moment and leave nothing but black ash.

It wasn’t that I convinced myself I knew what I was doing. I didn’t. I’d never seen anything like this, and it made me literally piss my pants. But it didn’t seem possible to just sit there while Rafi burned; it seemed like I had to do something, and there was only one thing I knew how to do. So I took out my whistle and I closed my eyes for a moment, looking for the sense of him, the fix. Easy. The place was saturated with it. So I started to play—just like in the dream.

At the sound of the first note, the demon Asmodeus hissed and bubbled like a kettle with the lid left off and opened Rafi’s eyes wider than they were meant to go. Weakened from his long climb up from Hell, he clawed at me without strength and cursed me in languages I’d never encountered, but he couldn’t lever himself up out of the bath, and all I had to do was to step back out of his hands’ reach. I played louder to drown out the harsh gutturals that were spitting and frothing on Rafi’s lips.

And it seemed to be working. That’s the only excuse I can give for not thinking it through—not realizing what it was I was actually doing. Rafi’s body twitched and shuddered, and the steam that was boiling off him turned into roiling, curdled light. I was playing faster now, and louder, playing what I could see and feel and hear in my mind, letting the music spill out like scalpels to operate on the world. I was lost in it, mesmerized by it, part of a feedback loop that filled me up with sound as a cup is filled with sweet wine.

Then for a moment the curses stopped, and the writhing thing in the bathtub looked up at me with Rafi’s terrified, pleading eyes. “Fix,” he whispered, “please! Please don’t”—his face twisted. Asmodeus’s features surfaced through Rafi’s like oil through water, and he roared at me like a wounded animal. Except that his horns protruded in clusters through the flesh of his cheeks, and his black-on-black eyes boiled like snake pits.

Idiot though I was, the truth hit me in the face then. Rafi hadn’t been possessed by a ghost at all but by something much bigger and more terrifying. That meant that there was only one human spirit inside him, that the fix I had was on Rafi, not on his ruthless passenger. I was exorcising Rafi’s own spirit from his body.

I almost faltered into silence, but that would have been the worst thing I could possibly do. It would probably have extinguished Rafi’s soul right there and then. Instead I tried to turn the tune into something else—to break it free from the Rafi-sense that filled my head and latch it onto something else.

I played through the night, and the night was endless. The thing in the bathtub flailed and cursed, wept and moaned, laughed drunkenly and begged for mercy. Then the frosted glass of the bathroom window lit up with a dim, weary glow of yellow-pink dawn light. That seemed to be the signal for hostilities to cease. The thing closed its eyes and slept. About a half second later, the whistle fell from my mouth, and I slept, too. I didn’t surface again for eighteen hours.

I woke to the sick realization of what I’d done. I’d managed not to snuff out Rafi’s soul, but in some way I didn’t understand and couldn’t undo, I’d knotted that soul and the demon that was possessing him into one inextricable psychic tangle—turned Rafi and Asmodeus into some obscene ectoplasmic equivalent of Siamese twins.

And that was when I’d thrown my hand in—made my New Year’s resolution in midsummer and packed the tools of my trade up in a shoe box in Pen’s garage. There had to be something else I could do with my life—some job where they didn’t give you the keys to the poison cabinet until you’d learned how to mix the antidotes.

Only it turned out that keeping resolutions was another thing I couldn’t do to save my life.

“Nobody told me to let you into anything,” said Frank, rubbing his earlobe between thumb and forefinger as an adjunct to thought.

“I’m assuming that nobody told you not to, either,” I countered.

The burly security guard laughed good-naturedly, but he shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Castro,” he said. “You can use the reading room, same as anybody. And anything that’s in the public-access collections, you can get it out on a pink slip. But if I let you into the strong rooms, and then it turns out you wasn’t authorized or anything, that’s my job right there, isn’t it? No, I’ve got to have either Mr. Peele or Miss Gascoigne come down here and tell me it’s okay. Then I’ll happily take you through.”

I gave up and headed for the stairs. “You—er—you’ve got to leave your coat down here, too. Sorry.” Frank sounded genuinely embarrassed. It wasn’t in his nature to be hard-arsed, despite his scary face, but he had to walk the walk as best he could. I came back, transferring a whole lot of paraphernalia to my trouser pockets as I went. Frank stowed the greatcoat in a locker this time, because the racks were full of little macs and duffle coats in a variety of pastel shades, suggesting that somewhere in the building, Jon Tiler was up to his ears in hyperactive eight-year-olds. Good, I thought vindictively. After last night’s fuck-up, he had a lot of bad karma to burn off. I hoped piously that he’d find enough suffering to get himself back into spiritual equilibrium.

I couldn’t ask Alice, but that was no fault of Frank’s. She’d taken advantage of Peele’s trip to Bilbao to call a meeting, and all the archive staff except for the SAs and the security team (which seemed to consist of Frank all by himself) were closeted with her for the whole morning. Which left me cooling my heels.

Up in the reading room, several large boxes had appeared overnight and were now piled up in front of the librarians’ station, forming an additional cordon sanitaire between the staff and the sparse sprinkling of end users. There was a young Asian woman on the desk this morning, and she gave me what seemed to be a sincere smile over the barricade of boxes. But when I asked if she could let me into the strong rooms, she gave an incredulous laugh.

“I’m not a key-holder,” she said. “Sorry. I’m only a clerical assistant. I don’t have any access to the collection at all.”

I thanked her anyway, and we introduced ourselves. She, it turned out, was Faz, the part-timer who had the thankless task of helping out Jon Tiler. What did she think about that? “He’s a little bit strange,” she said cautiously. “Not very forthcoming, you know? Hard to read. But we don’t have that much to say to one another, really. I just get on with it, and he gets on with it, and when he doesn’t need me anymore—or when I can get him to admit it—I go and do something else. Like this. A change is as good as a rest.”

I remembered that Rich had listed Faz as being there when the ghost attacked him, and I asked her about that. She was very happy to talk about the ghost, but with everyone else crowding around, she hadn’t seen very much of the drama.

“I’ve seen her in the stacks, though,” she said with a little more enthusiasm. “Three times. Once very early on, and then twice last week—two days running. I’m in the sweepstakes, but I’ll need to pick up the pace a bit to be in with a chance. Elaine’s seen her six times, and Andy’s on eleven.”

I asked her the same questions I’d asked the archivists, about what the ghost looked like and what impression she’d got of it. Faz hit the same beats as everyone else, more or less, but she had a few ideas of her own, too.

“She’s young,” she said judiciously. “And I think she’s pretty, only you can’t see because she’s got that red misty stuff in front of her face. She just looks as though she’d have pretty features—I suppose because she’s got such a nice, neat little chin. I thought she might be in her wedding dress at first, because she’s all in white, but a wedding dress doesn’t have a hood—and anyway, her hair’s all wild. You’d do your hair up on your wedding day, wouldn’t you?”

“What do you mean, wild?” I asked, curious. This was a new slant. My own view of the ghost, from across the street and in the dark, hadn’t been clear enough for details like that.

“Like she’s been standing on a hill, and it’s been blown about a bit.” Faz thought about this. “Only she’s wearing a hood, so obviously it’s not that. But you know what I mean. Like she’s just woken up, maybe. I don’t know.”

“Did you ever hear her speak?”

Faz looked a little distressed. “Yeah,” she said, unhappily. “I did the first time. She just kept saying ‘roses.’ Going on and on about roses. And she held out her hand to me. It was like she was begging. She’s different now. Quieter. But I don’t think she had a happy life, poor thing.”

I changed the subject. Emotional outpourings about ghosts make me uncomfortable.

“What’s in the boxes?” I asked, pointing. “New acquisitions?”

Faz glanced down as if she’d forgotten the makeshift ramparts that had been piled up around her.

“Oh,” she said. “That’s bunting, I think.”

“Bunting?”

“And glasses, and cutlery, and stuff. For the reception on Sunday. Cheryl’s mum is getting married again.”

“So I hear,” I said. “I’m lucky to be here at a time of such joy and laughter.”

Faz looked sidelong at me to make sure I was being sarcastic, then grinned conspiratorially. “It doesn’t get any better,” she said in a low voice that wasn’t meant to carry. “Maybe it will when Mr. Peele goes off to work for the Gug. Maybe Rich Clitheroe will take over. I reckon he’d be a bit more human.”

“I heard Alice was the front-runner.”

Faz made a sour face.

“That’ll be it for me, then,” she said. “Enough is enough.”

I sat up in the workroom with my feet up on Tiler’s desk and waited for the meeting to break up. While I was waiting, I reached out with my mind and tried to get another whiff of the ghost—again with no results. I pondered that paradox without wringing any sense out of it; a ghost that had done the things that this one had ought to have left a stronger trail and be a hell of a lot easier to find.

Just before eleven, Cheryl ambled into the room. Her frankly lovely face lit up when she saw me. “Yo, Ghostbuster,” she called, pointing at me with both hands.

“Yo, Cheryl.”

She stood over me, made a comic business out of squaring up to me.

“I’m on Sylvie’s side,” she said. “You’ll have to take both of us on.”

“Necromantic troilism. That sounds like it might be fun.”

“I’ll smack you,” she warned, grinning all over her face.

“S&M, too? It gets better.”

The mild flirtation had to stop there, as everyone else filed in through the door—Rich, Tiler, Alice, and several other people I hadn’t met yet.

“That’s my desk!” Tiler protested indignantly. “Get your feet off it!”

I made a “mean you no harm” gesture and stood. He took possession with a warning glare.

“Alice,” I said, “I need to get back into the strong room where the Russian collection is being sorted.”

“Rich will take you,” she said, barely sparing me a glance. “I’ve got a lot on today. Assuming the job isn’t finished by the end of the day, you’d better come up and tell me what you’ve done and how it’s going. When Mr. Peele comes in tomorrow, he’ll want to know where things stand.”

Which was masterfully understated, I thought.

“You reckon that’s what it is, then?” Rich asked as he collected his keys. Cheryl waved good-bye with a cheeky grin. I waved back, but with professional gravitas. “That the ghost came in with that Russian stuff?”

“It’s the most likely scenario, yeah,” I said. “The ghost moves around a lot, but the biggest cluster of sightings is down on the first floor, which is in the right ballpark. It made its first appearance shortly after the Russian collection came in here, and it dresses in what you could loosely call a Russian style. I’m not ruling anything out, but that’s where I’m starting today, anyway.”

“Fair enough,” said Rich.

We walked up hill and down dale until we reached our destination, where Rich unlocked the door.

“There’s plenty of Lucozade in the fridge,” he said. “In case of emergency”—he paused and shrugged.

“—break glass,” I finished.

“Exactly.”

“Any vodka?”

He looked a question at me.

“More authentic,” I explained.

Rich grinned. “I’ll have to try that one on Jeffrey.”

I pulled up a chair. The massive task in front of me filled me with inertia. I glanced desultorily around the stuff that was already lying on the table, and I remembered what Cheryl had said about retroconversion. “Why the notebook?” I asked Rich, pointing. “Can’t you just enter everything up directly into the computer?”

He shook his head emphatically. “Some people do, but it’s a mug’s game. Better to make notes by hand first, until you know what you’re dealing with. Going through a load of database entries that you’ve already keyed in to change one piddling detail on all of them—I don’t even want to think about it.”

“Couldn’t you get someone else to do that? A catalog editor, maybe?”

Rich looked at me as though he suspected I might be taking the piss. “If I want Cheryl to stick her boot in my face, I’ll just ask her to,” he said. “Anyway, the records are stored in your own personal area while they’re being written up and messed about with. They don’t go to the general-access catalog until they’ve been signed off and approved by an A2—a senior archivist.” He scowled momentarily, probably at the injustices of the power structure and his own position in it. But he managed to keep his tone light when he spoke. “So what’s the program for today?”

My turn to scowl. “I’m going to go through every one of these letters and envelopes and birthday cards and laundry lists until I find one—or maybe more than one—that has some kind of psychic echo of your ghost. Then I’m going to use that to sharpen up the trace I’ve already got.”

Rich looked interested. “Like a sniffer dog?”

“That’s not very flattering, but yeah, like a sniffer dog—working from an object and following the trail from that object to someone who it used to belong to.”

“Cool. Is it worth watching?”

I gave a slightly sour laugh. “How many items are there in these boxes?”

“Er . . . four or five thousand. Probably more. We’re not that sure.”

“I leave you to imagine the thrilling and slightly depraved spectacle of me stroking and fondling every last one of them.”

“I’ll see you later, then.”

“Sure.”

He turned and left. I pulled the first box over and got started.

The spoor I get from touching an object isn’t the same as the instant hot news flash I get from touching a living person. It’s more subtle and less focused, and to be honest, it’s a whole lot less likely to be there at all. Think how many things you touch in the course of a day and how few of them mean anything to you. Now if someone happened to pick up a hammer, say, and used it to stave your skull in, it’s likely that the explosive charge of his anger and your agony would stay there in the wood or the vulcanized rubber of the hammer’s handle. Then, when someone like me comes along and touches the handle—bang. The charge goes off. I feel your pain, as the saying goes.

But most of the things you touch just don’t carry that same weight of significance—and to make matters worse, the same object will pass through other hands after yours. The older the thing you’re dealing with, the muddier and more smeared-out the psychic trail. And then, just for gravy, while an exorcist is trying to read the thing, his own emotions are adding yet another overlay to what’s already there. All in all, it’s like trying to take a fingerprint off a melting ice cube.

But in the right conditions, it’s something I’m pretty damn good at.

I transferred the contents of the box onto the desk and spread them out more or less evenly. Then I passed my left hand slowly over them, palm downward, as though my spread fingers were the steel loops at the business ends of five small metal detectors. I took my time over it, letting my hand wander backward and forward across the sprawled treasure trove of old letters and cards. Slowly a sense formed in my mind: a three-dimensional web, its vertical axis being time, of vague and formless feelings, bleached out and blended together almost to the point of illegibility; a tasteless soup of memory and emotion.

When I had that sense firmly in my mind, I brought my right hand into play. While the left hand still hovered, the right moved quickly, lightly touching first one sheet of paper and then another, tapping and jabbing into the stack at the points that looked most promising.

It’s not rocket science. I’d encountered the ghost twice now, and it had touched my mind both times, leaving an incomplete and fuzzy impression there. I was looking for something in this mass of documents that would match that impression so that I could complete and sharpen it. When I had a psychic fix on the ghost that was vivid enough and whole enough, I could take out my whistle and finish the job; the impression I form and hold in my mind while I play is the burden of the cantrip that I weave, and music is the medium that expresses it.

After maybe ten or fifteen minutes of this, I was more or less certain that there was nothing doing, so I carefully packed the contents of the first box away again and hauled a second box up onto the table. Once again, I unpacked and spread the old documents across the space in front of me and began to read them.

That was how I went on through the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. At a steady pace, and with my own emotions carefully held in neutral, refusing to be hurried or frustrated—it’s hard enough anyway without raising that kind of static.

I lost track of time, not because of the endless repetition but because the impressions I was taking from the old papers, faint as they were, exerted a sort of hypnotic pull of their own. Floating in that fuzzy palimpsest, I found it hard to stay anchored in the chilly afternoon in November that had been my starting point. It was still there, and I was still there, but my awareness of it was dulled. Gradually, I stopped hearing the gurgling of pipes and the opening and closing of distant doors. I was somewhere else, somewhere outside the normal flow.

Just once I thought I had something; the image of a weeping woman came through to me very clearly when I touched a particular photograph. She was young, and she was heartbroken—but her face was intact, her hair was ash blonde, and most of all, she wasn’t here. This was just an afterimage, with no sense of presence behind it. The photo was of a street, presumably in the Eastern Bloc somewhere—a residential street in a small town, drab and anonymous and more or less timeless.

Half roused out of my trance by the effort of conscious thought, I was suddenly aware of the sound of dozens of shrill, piping voices all talking over each other and the vibrations under my feet of a beast with sixty or so short but serviceable legs. I pulled myself together—pulled myself out of the psychic web I’d been weaving and back into my own flesh—and rubbed my eyes. Then, as the noises got louder, I stepped to the door and looked out. The corridor was alive with children, all in blue blazers with red badges on the pockets, and all clutching crumpled sheets of paper in their hands. They seemed to be working in pairs and sticking very closely together, as though this was some kind of three-legged race that worked on an honor system. “That’s not a plaster molding!” one little blonde girl was shouting indignantly at the boy next to her, who had a shell-shocked air. “That’s just where they put the fire extinguisher! We’ve still got to find a plaster molding!”

They ebbed and flowed along the corridor, staring intently at walls, floor, ceiling; swept around a corner; and were gone, trailing a few stragglers as any stampede will. In the distance I heard Jon Tiler’s voice shouting, “No, stay on this floor! Stay on this floor! I’ll tell you when you can go up the stairs!” He sounded only a half inch away from hysteria.

One of the kids had dropped his sheet of paper, so I picked it up and examined it. THE BONNINGTON ARCHIVE ARCHITECTURAL TREASURE HUNT, it said in a font that declared aggressively, “This is fun you’re having now—have some fun, damn you.” Underneath there was a list of architectural items, with the playful challenge HOW MANY CAN YOU FIND? DADO RAIL, CEILING ROSE, GABLE, WINDOW BAY, and so on. Next to each item was a box to tick. The first item, already ticked, was MY PARTNER.

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.”