Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

Cheryl nodded. “Oh yeah. I see her every day, more or less. I think I’m on her wavelength.”

“And you’re not afraid of her? Even after what happened to Rich?”

“Nah. She wouldn’t hurt me. You get a feeling if you’re safe with someone, and I feel safe with her. She just stands there and watches me work—for ages, sometimes. I’m the only one who doesn’t freak out about her, so I reckon she’s more comfortable with me. Or maybe she just doesn’t like men.”

Cheryl paused and thought for a moment, staring at me with a forbidding seriousness.

“I ought to hate you,” she said. “Because you’re coming in to get rid of her. That’s almost like murder, isn’t it? Like she’s already dead, and you’re killing her again.”

There was a long enough break that I thought she’d finished. “Well, obviously I don’t see it like—”

“But the truth is, I think she’s really, really sad.”

She traced a line on the desk with her fingertip and frowned at it, her expressive face solemn, almost somber.

“I think you’d be doing her a favor.”

Jon Tiler was almost as reluctant to talk to me as Alice was—but Alice had reappeared by this time, and she hypocritically told him that Peele had insisted on everyone’s full cooperation. I was taking against Alice, which was something I’d have to watch. I didn’t like the way she threw Peele’s weight about.

In the interview room, Tiler was terse and monosyllabic. But then he’d been terse and monosyllabic in the workroom, too. Had he been at the Bonnington long? No. Did he like it there? Sort of. Had he seen the ghost? Yes. Often? Yes. Did it scare him? No.

I was only doing this for the sake of form. I felt like I already had the beginnings of a handle on the ghost—or at least an idea of how it had come to be here—so I probably didn’t need any additional insights from Tiler. It just goes against the grain with me to leave stones unturned. I guess I am the anally retentive Ghostbuster, after all.

So I stirred up the pot a little.

“Do you have any idea,” I asked him, “what ghosts really are?”

“No,” Tiler answered with something like a sneer. “That’s your thing, isn’t it? Not mine.”

“Most of the time they’re not the spirits of the dead but emotional recordings of the dead. Imprints that just persist in the places where a strong emotion was felt for reasons that we don’t understand.”

I watched him for a moment or two, and he watched a spot on the ceiling somewhere behind my left shoulder. His expression was a glum deadpan.

“So you see,” I said, “I’d normally expect to find evidence of some kind of strong emotion associated with this ghost’s appearance at the archive. Something intense enough to leave a psychic echo.” Pause for effect. Still nothing. “And the only strong emotions I’ve experienced here so far are yours.”

Tiler’s eyes widened and his stare jerked back to meet mine.

“What do you mean?” he yelped. “That’s not true. I didn’t show any emotion at all. I didn’t do anything!”

“You radiate hostility,” I said.

“I don’t!” He was indignant. “I don’t like all this stuff going on around me, that’s all. I like to do my job and just”—he groped for words—“be left to get on with it. This is nothing to do with me. I just want it sorted.”

“Well, that’s what I’m here for,” I said. “And the more I can find out about the ghost, the quicker I’ll be done. So for starters, why don’t you tell me about your encounters with it? When was the most recent?”

“On Monday. As soon as I came in.” Tiler was still truculent, but something in him had loosened up. He went on without being prompted. “I was down in the stacks, and I felt her. I mean, you know, I felt she was there. And I was a bit rattled because of what had happened to Rich, so I got out of there fast. She was coming toward me, and it got—it felt cold, suddenly. Really cold. I could see my breath in front of me. I don’t know if that was because of her, or if it was just . . .” his voice tailed off. “I got out fast,” he repeated glumly, and his gaze flicked down to the floor.

“What does the ghost look like?” I asked him.

He looked at me again, surprised.

“She doesn’t look like anything,” he said. “Her face has gone. The top half of it, anyway. There’s nothing there.”

“When Mr. Peele described the ghost to me, he said that it wore a veil . . .”

Tiler snorted. “It’s not a veil. It’s just red. All her face except for her mouth is just red. She looks like one of those people who talk on TV programs and they want to stay anonymous so they get their heads blurred out. It’s just a big red blob with her real face hidden behind it.”

“And the rest of the body?”

He thought about this for a moment. “There’s only the top half of her. She’s all white. Shiny. You can see through her. And she sort of gets fainter the farther down you go, so from here”—he gestured vaguely at his own torso—“you can’t see her anymore.”

“Clothes?”

He shrugged. “She’s got a hood on. And she’s all in white. She keeps fading out. You can’t see much.”

After a few more questions, I let Tiler go. He didn’t seem to be holding out on me, but all the same, it was still like drawing teeth.

And after that I went for a wander. Every cubic inch of the building had been turned into usable space, but it had obviously been done piecemeal, with no overall plan, and with a willingness to punch a new door through any wall that got in the way or to build a corridor around or a staircase over anything that couldn’t be made to move. And it seemed that the work was ongoing; on the attic level, the rooms were mostly empty shells, and there was some builders’ stuff piled up on the stairwell. The balcony railings had been removed to allow a block and tackle to be put in, and several palletloads of bricks had already been hauled up.

My tour of the building took about an hour and fetched me up back at the first-floor room where the Russian collection was stacked up. Rich met me there by prior arrangement and let me in again. “You can just slam the door behind you,” he said. “When you’re ready to go, I mean. It will lock automatically, and you won’t be able to get back in. Happy trails, partner.” He headed for the door. There was something I wanted to ask him about, but for a moment I couldn’t remember what it was. Then it came to me just before he disappeared.

“Rich,” I called. “Did the ghost ever talk to you?”

He shook his head emphatically. “No, mate. She never says a word to me.”

“Cheryl said it used to talk a lot. Then it stopped.”

Rich nodded. “That sounds right. A few people said they heard her talk in the first couple of weeks. Now she just goes at people with scissors. Better than bottling it up, isn’t it?”

He let the door swing to behind him, and I was alone. That was annoying. If I was right about there being some kind of link between the ghost and this room, this collection, then she’d probably have been speaking Russian, and Clitheroe could have confirmed that. But if God had meant us to climb the mountain in a day, he would have put in a chairlift.

I tried a few more tunes to lure the ghost; it didn’t bite. There was an obvious alternative, but I was reluctant to start on that just yet. Searching through all those thousands of cards and letters for an elusive emotional footprint wasn’t a very attractive prospect. And it wouldn’t even work unless I got a more vivid sense of the ghost itself first. As things stood, even if I found what I was looking for, I probably wouldn’t recognize it.

Sometime after four o’clock, Alice came looking for me.