Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

“Is this where it happened?” I asked him.

He shook his head vigorously. “The attack? Jesus, no. That was upstairs, in the workroom—where we just were. If it had happened while I was down here on my own, I would’ve shit myself.”

I went into the room. It was warehouse size, slaughterhouse cold. My eyes flicked from the mostly bare shelves around the walls to the collection of FedEx boxes piled up on the two tables and the floor. One box was open, and it seemed to be filled with old birthday cards. A spiral-bound reporter’s notebook sat open beside it, one page half filled with scribbled notes. On the other table there was what looked to be a laptop computer connected up to an external monitor and mouse.

I turned back to face Rich, who had followed me into the room.

“This is?” I asked.

“One of the new strong rooms. One we haven’t expanded into yet—so we use it for sorting and short-term storage. This”—he indicated it with a wave of his hand—“is the Russian collection. I’m about a third of the way through it.”

I took another look around, second thoughts often being best.

“Are both the laptop and the scribble pad yours?” I asked.

“Yeah. When you’re cataloging new stuff, you start by just jotting down everything that comes into your head. Then you decide what goes into the item description and what the catalog headers should be. Some people enter it all directly into the database, but I find it’s best to go through the two stages.”

“Do you mind if I have five minutes alone in here?” I asked him. “Maybe you could go and make yourself a cup of coffee, and then come back down.”

Rich seemed a little startled, but he rolled with it. “Sure,” he said. “I don’t drink coffee, though. Here.” He squatted beside the nearest table and reached under it. I tilted my head and noticed what I’d missed—a portable fridge, about the size of one of the courier boxes. He took two bottles of Lucozade isotonic out of it, handed one to me, and put the other into his jeans pocket.

“In case of emergency,” he said with a grin, “break glass. If you don’t tell BS 5454, I won’t.”

He went out and closed the door. Nice guy, I thought. One of nature’s gentlemen. But then again, the ghost had tried to part his hair about six inches too low. I was the Seventh Cavalry, as far as he was concerned.

Putting the bottle down on the edge of the table, I reached into the box and gingerly took a handful of whatever was in there. They were just what they’d looked like from the door—birthday cards in antiquated designs. The printed greetings were in English, but the writing inside was in a dense Cyrillic script that I knew from nothing.

I screwed my eyes tight shut and listened to the cards with my hands, but they weren’t talking. After a minute or so, I opened my eyes again and took a closer look at the boxes. There were about three dozen of them, and each of them could probably hold anything up to a couple of hundred documents. They wouldn’t all be cards, of course; letters and photographs could be a lot smaller, so the total might be that much higher.

Even if the ghost was anchored to something in this room, the chances of me finding that something on a quick pass like this were close enough to zero that it wasn’t a viable option. But if the ghost itself was here now or anywhere close by, then I ought to be able to get a trace of it.

I sat down on the floor and slid the tin whistle out of my belt. Unhurried, emptying my mind as much as I could of other thoughts, I played “The Bonny Swans” right through from start to finish. This wasn’t a cantrip; I wasn’t trying to snare the ghost or even to drive it out of cover. This was just one of the tunes I used to help me focus. My own thoughts flowed out of me, riding on the music, and took a little stroll around the room, taking in textures and sounds and smells, poking their tiny, irresponsible fingers into every nook and cranny.

And there was something moving there, more or less out on the limits of what I could reach. Something very quiet; but whether that quietness was weakness or stealth or something different from either, I couldn’t really tell. I could barely sense it at all. That was strange. A violent ghost would usually stain the very air around it with its psychic spoor. They might be rare, but they were hard to miss.

I reached the last verse, reciting the words in my mind as the plangent music wailed out of the old whistle into the still air.

And yonder sits my false sister, Anne,

Fol de rol, de rally-o,

Who drowned me for the sake of a man . . .

The tenuous presence grew a little stronger, a little more vivid in my listening mind. But at the same time it grew stiller and more silent. I felt its attention slide over me like a ripple through cold water, breaking against my skin.

As if it was listening. As if the music had drawn it in, not because of any power I had but just because of something in the tune itself that it was responding to. But in any case, I knew it was close. I knew that that silence was the mark of its attention, a greedy silence swallowing the old tune and opening wide for more. Was it really going to be this easy? I let the last notes linger, drew them out into a tapering thread of sound like a fishing line, pulled gently, ever so gently . . .

. . . And she was gone. So abruptly, it was like the bursting of a soap bubble. One moment, the teasing sense of her, hovering over me, wrapping herself in the sweetness of the music. The next, nothing. Dead, empty, intransitive silence.

Skittish, I thought bitterly. I shouldn’t have reached out. Should have stayed passive and just let it happen. Fuck.

The door opened with a squeal of neglected hinges, and Rich looked in, cautious and solicitous.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“So-so,” I said flatly.

IT WAS A FRIDAY, RICH SAID, AND IT WAS ALREADY a quarter to six. His hours were from eight-thirty to five, and he didn’t get any overtime, but it was nothing special for him to be working late. Sometimes you just had a job to finish, and if you went home before it was done, then something you’d spent days or weeks putting together might fall through. In this case, he was finding and retrieving a whole stack of maps and plans on London’s hidden waterways for a group of primary-school kids who were going to be coming in on the following Monday.

“That’s part of business as usual, is it?” I asked. Just checking.

“Oh Jesus, yeah. We’re a public facility, don’t forget. Not many people wander in here off the street, but one of our official targets is throughput. We’ve got to make sure that the archive gets used by at least ten thousand people this year. And next year it’s twelve thousand, and so on. We’ve got two classrooms and an open-access library up on the third floor.”

“But taking the sessions is Jon Tiler’s job, not yours? I mean, he’s the teacher.”

“Interpretation officer. Yeah, too right—I wouldn’t take that job on for a big clock. But London rivers are one of my specialties, so I ended up doing some of the prep for this one. And there was a particular map that had it all—all the original tributaries superimposed on a surface map of the city. Only it was splitting right down the middle, on one of the folds, and I could see what was going to happen if Jon used it in that state. So I decided to fix it. I got sidetracked.

“Cheryl was up there, too, finishing off some bits and pieces of her own before the weekend. Alice was going over the next week’s schedules with Jon, and Faz—Farhat, I mean; she’s a part-timer—was doing some typing for Jon off in the corner. A worksheet or something.