Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

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.”

I BEAT THE KIND OF RETREAT THAT COULD BE CALLED either hasty or strategic, depending on which side of the line you were watching it from. I was helped by the fact that Alice seemed unable even to frame, let alone speak, the many harsh words that she wanted to say to me. I assured her that I’d taken more from that brief encounter than just a confirmation of what we already knew, and I promised her definite progress tomorrow. Then I was out of there.

The lights in the corridor had already been turned off, but there was a strip light on in the stairwell. By its subliminally flickering glare, I reached into my pocket, took out the offering that the ghost had thrown at me, and examined it. It was card, not paper: a white rectangle about five inches by three, printed with pale blue lines and perforated close to one of the long edges by a single circular hole. This hole had once been about half an inch away from the edge, but was now joined to it by a ragged tear.

It was a card ripped out of a Rolodex or file-card index. On it there were four letters and seven numbers.

ICOE 7405 818.

ICOE? Was that a name? An acronym of some kind? The Institute of . . . Christ knew what. The rest of it looked to be a central London phone number, though—logical enough if this was from someone’s desk directory. Leaving aside the question of what I was meant to do with it, it represented a sort of breakthrough in a job—I almost thought case —that had otherwise brought me nothing but a day of aggravation.

I fished out my mobile phone—no time like the present. But the battery is faulty, and the damn thing is always out of charge; this time was no exception. I thrust both the phone and the card back into my pocket and carried on down the stairs.

The security office was already locked, and there was no sign of friendly Frank. I went behind the counter to pick up my coat, but of course it was shut into one of the lockers, and I didn’t have a key. I was contemplating kicking the flimsy door open when Alice came down the stairs at my back and saw me. I turned to face her, bracing myself for a bollocking, but what I read in her face wasn’t anything as straightforward as anger.

“Great show,” she observed, her voice tense. “Fun for all the family.”

“I don’t know,” I countered. “I think I need some tunes you can actually hum.”

“So how is it done?”

I considered tact and courtesy. Briefly. “You get a ghost. You drive it rat-arse crazy with a drop of blood. The recipe’s in the Iliad .” She didn’t answer, so I tried again. “Look, I didn’t expect that kind of a response. I’m sorry about the damage. I thought the ghost would come in for a low pass over the blood, but the reaction we got was completely—”

Alice wasn’t listening. She came around the counter and wielded her totemic key ring to liberate my coat. I took it from her outstretched hands, nodded a curt thanks. I thought she was going to say something else, but she didn’t. She just took her own coat and handbag out of the next locker along. Her hands hadn’t stopped trembling, and when she unhooked her big, unwieldy key ring and tried to slide it into her bag, she couldn’t manage it. With a muttered “Shit!” she thrust it into her coat pocket instead. I left her to it.

Outside, a light drizzle was falling, but the wind on my face—only a breeze, really—felt good after a day in the archive’s stingily recirculated air. I could have taken a train from Euston and changed, or hopped a bus heading north through Camden Town, but I decided to walk to King’s Cross and grab the Piccadilly line direct. I was two or three blocks away from the archive, walking head down along the Euston Road, when I realized that Alice was keeping pace with me—shivering despite her coat, her arms clasped around herself, her keys jangling audibly in her pocket.

I stopped and turned to face her, waiting for the other shoe to drop. She stared at me, her eyes sullen and haunted.

“I’m not happy about this,” she said. “I’m not happy about where it’s going.”

I carried on waiting. I thought I knew what she meant, but I needed a bigger clue than that.

“I thought—” It was a difficult admission, and she had trouble getting it out. “I thought it was all bullshit. I thought Clitheroe was lying, and everyone else was hysterical. Because if there’d been anything there, I would have seen it, too—and I didn’t see anything. Until tonight.”

I was as careful as I could be: a neutral observation, not loaded at all. “You saw Rich getting that wound on his face.”

“It wasn’t the first time—Rich hurts himself a lot. He shut his hand in a drawer a few months back. And another time he tripped and fell down the main stairs. I thought it was an accident he was too embarrassed to own up to.”

“But you saw—”

Alice cut in, her tone brittle and dangerous. “I saw him prancing around like an idiot, yelping, waving the scissors. Then he managed to cut his face, somehow. It wasn’t like tonight.”

She was staring at me, and I saw in her eyes what a heroic understatement it had been when she’d said she was not happy. I’d pigeonholed her the day before, and now I knew I was right. Alice wasn’t even a vestal; she was what we refer to in the trade—often with a certain degree of contempt—as a DT, or sometimes just as a Thomas: one of the absolute nonsensitives who stood at the opposite end of the human bell curve from wherever I was. She couldn’t see ghosts at all.

Funny. After her behavior up to now, seeing Alice so scared and unhappy should have been a feast of schadenfreude for me. But in fact, I felt a reluctant sympathy for her. I’d been there. We all have to go there, eventually. We all have to drop the shield of skepticism and bow our heads to the axe of that’s-just-how-it-fucking-is.

“I know,” I said, feeling a weight of tiredness drop onto my shoulders. “When you see one for the first time—when you realize it’s all true—you have to swallow a lot of very heavy stuff all at once. It’s hard.”

I let the words hang in the air. Yes, I was sorry for her, but I had troubles of my own, and she was one of them. Did I really want to help her dry her eyes and square her shoulders? No.

But some things come with the job.

“I’m going home,” I said gracelessly. “I’ve got ten minutes. If you want my version of Metaphysics 101, you can have it.”

Alice nodded, probably as reluctantly as I’d made the offer.

“Better make it somewhere inside,” she said. “Otherwise I don’t think I’ll last that long.”

The nearest “somewhere inside” was Saint Pancras’s church. It was open and empty. We sat down in the back row of pews. It was almost as cold as it was outside, but at least it was dry.