Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

One of the houses he’d done, just before he’d gone inside, had been a semi down on Blackbird Leys. A shabby-looking place, but a mate who worked for UPS had told him the bloke who lived there took orders for his hi-fi shop at home sometimes. There was a chance of a good take, and he’d borrowed a van for the night.

It took Wilke ages to find the place. It was on one of those godforsaken estates that seem to be built on some sort of fractal system, with endless identical streets opening off each other and feeding into each other so that you’re lost before you start.

But he found it at last, and getting inside was a piece of cake. It would have been sweet as a nut after all, except that there was nothing there; not just no hi-fi kit, nothing worth taking at all. In one of the bedrooms, a kid in a cot, heavily asleep all by itself—no jewelry, no money, no portable electronic stuff. Even the TV had a cracked casing, so nobody was going to touch it.

So he left again, as quietly as he’d come, pissed off and bitter and rehearsing the words he was going to have with this UPS wallah. He was basically running on automatic. He locked the front door behind him, forgetting that it had been unlocked when he arrived. He wrote the night off. He went home. He went to bed.

The next morning, in the Oxford Mail , he read that a two-year-old had burned to death in a house on Blackbird Leys. The address, which he’d spent so long trying to find the night before, jumped out at him from the page. There couldn’t be any possibility of a mistake.

“They couldn’t get in,” Wilke mumbled, his rambling despair going on and on in an endless loop. “They came back, and the house was on fire. How the fuck? Nothing. Don’t understand it. I didn’t touch anything, did I? They couldn’t get in. Door was locked, and nobody had the key. When they got there, it was all burned down . . .”

He whined like a wounded animal. The whisky bottle fell out of his hand and rolled across the floor as Wilke covered his eyes and rocked and moaned through clenched teeth.

It was about a week—maybe as long as two—before it started to happen. He wasn’t even in his own place the first time; he was at a café, eating a bacon sandwich and talking to a couple of likely lads about a possible warehouse job. Pretending it was business as usual, when inside he kept hearing a kid crying in an empty house, and he couldn’t concentrate on what anyone was saying for more than a sentence or two at a time.

Black ash began to settle on the table, on his plate, on the men he was talking to. He jumped up with a shouted curse, which made the two men he was dealing with stare at him as if he was insane. He responded aggressively—were they blind or something?—and things got unpleasant. Wilke realized that nobody except him could see the ash. Then he ran a hand through it and realized why that was.

The haunting had continued ever since. He’d never seen an actual ghost. It was just that wherever he was, the ash would start to fall, and the longer he stayed anywhere, the thicker it got. It was even in his dreams, so that avenue of escape was barred.

After a few weeks, he was thinking about suicide. After talking to a priest, he gave himself up instead. He provided the police with a list of the houses, offices, and warehouses he’d burgled, with the Blackbird Leys address at the top of the list. He told them everything they needed to know to bring a case, and when they did, standing in the dock in a rain of ash that nobody else could see, he pleaded guilty on all counts.

Wilke thought it would stop then. He thought he’d done enough to atone. But nothing changed. He knew now that nothing ever would. He was using alcohol to blunt the horror, and when alcohol stopped working, he’d probably go back to option A and top himself.

My emotions as I listened to this were ricocheting around like rubber bullets inside a Dumpster. What the man had done was horrendous. Unforgivable. Everything he’d suffered he’d deserved, ten times over. But he hadn’t set out to kill anybody. He’d just done something stupid and then tried his best to pay for it, only to discover that he was facing a life sentence without appeal. I stood over him and judged him—guilty, then innocent, then guilty again—before finally reaching the only conclusion I could: that it wasn’t my call.

“I think there’s another way out of this, Tom,” I told him. “I think we can help each other.”

It took about a week of sleeping on his floor and sitting in his death-dark room every day before I finally got a scent of the little ghost that was hiding in all that sifting ash. Such a huge weight of fear and despair from such a tiny source. I caught its attention with nursery rhymes: “The Grand Old Duke of York,” “The Old Woman Tossed Up in a Basket,” “Boys and Girls Come Out to Play.” After that, it was easy. The light broke through the ash as I played, and the room resumed its normal colors. When I finished, all that greasy, granular pain was gone. A scream that had addressed itself to the eye instead of the ear had stopped echoing at last.

I felt exhausted. I felt compromised, and sleazy, and black with ash that couldn’t be seen anymore. I got up to go, but Wilke wouldn’t let me. He was in my debt, and with gratitude as extreme as his earlier grief, he insisted on paying. He took me through every kind of lock there was, starting with simple levers and wards, then working through every kind of tumbler, pin, wafer, and disc, before finishing off with ultramodern master-keyed systems that are about as relevant to normal escapology as depleted uranium shells are to the game of darts.

I lapped it up. I was the best pupil he ever had. And the first, and the last; he got religion after that and took holy orders. I never saw him again.

I mention all this only to make a point, and the point is this: I didn’t need Alice’s keys. With enough time and with the tools I’d inherited from Tom Wilke, I could have got into any room in the archive. No, what I needed was Alice’s ID card, because the locks were all wired up to the readers on each door. A key alone would open them, but would also sound an alarm. This way, I could slip in and out with nobody the wiser. I hoped.

The place felt different at night.

I mean that in a literal sense; it had a different set of resonances, a different tonality. And since it was empty—since there was no other human presence there to dilute the effect with feelings and associations of its own—I felt the full weight of it as I walked through the darkened corridors.

It was a sad weight, even a sinister one. There was a flavor in the air like cruelty and pointless anger. Obviously, unless you’re in the business, you’ll have to just imagine that those things have flavors—for me they do.

I found my way to the Russian room, swiped myself in as Alice Gascoigne, and got stuck into the boxes again. There were only seven left, so a couple of hours at most would see me through to the end. I turned one bank of lights on; the strong room had no windows, so there was no chance of being seen from the street. After a minute or so of treading water, I got back into the flow, and time soon became suspended again in the murky laminations of the past.

On some level I was aware of a motorcycle driving by in the street outside, setting up a sympathetic vibration in the floor beneath my feet. Then there was silence again, even deeper for having been broken.

I was back in the rhythm of the psychic trawl, my fingers flicking across the papers, tapping out a pianissimo signature that nobody but me could disentangle. I took it slowly, very slowly, because as I neared the bottom of the stack, I was lingering longer over each sprawl of papers, more and more reluctant to take no for an answer.