Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

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.