Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

“So are you going to—”

“Come and meet my landlady,” I said. “You’ll like her.”

Pen doesn’t cook much, but when she does, three things happen. The first is that the kitchen becomes a sort of domestic vision of Hell, complete with roiling smoke and acrid smells, in which pans have their bottoms burned out of them, glasses are shattered by casual immersion in boiling water, and gravel-voiced harpies (or Edgar and Arthur, anyway) mock the whole endeavor from the tops of various cupboards while Pen curses them with bitter imprecations. The second is that you get a meal that emerges from this Vulcanic stithy looking like a photo in Good Housekeeping and tasting like something Albert Roux would knock up to impress the neighbors. The third is that Pen herself is purged by the ordeal, refined in the fire, and radiates a Zen-like calm for hours or even days afterward.

Tonight’s effort—in Cheryl’s honor—was a lamb cassoulet. Hugely impressed, Cheryl worked her way through seconds and then through thirds.

“This is amazing,” she enthused. “You gotta give me the recipe, Pam!”

“Call me Pen, love,” said Pen warmly. “I’m afraid there isn’t a recipe. I cook holistically—and half pissed—so nothing ever comes out the same way twice.”

She refilled Cheryl’s glass. It was something Australian with an eagle on the label. The Aussies always seem to go for raptors rather than marsupials on their wine bottles; if it was me, I’d be pushing the unique selling point. I held out my own glass for a top-up. As a party piece, I can sometimes be persuaded to recite the whole of that Monty Python routine about Australian table wines. “A lot of people in this country . . .” The hard part is finding anyone to do the persuading.

“So you live with Felix?” Cheryl asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Not in the Biblical sense,” said Pen, shaking her head. “Although there is something a bit Old Testament about him, isn’t there?”

“Like, something out of Sodom and Gomorrah, you mean?”

“I am still sitting here, you know,” I interjected.

“No,” said Pen, ignoring me, “I was thinking Noah. Very fond of himself. Big, insane projects that he always drags everyone else into. Chasing after anything in a skirt . . .”

“I didn’t hear that about Noah.”

“Oh yeah, he was a horny old bugger. They all were. Never turn your back on a patriarch.”

For our unjust desserts, she wheeled out a supermarket chocolate torte. She also got the brandy out, but I wrested it from her hands and put it back in the boot locker where she keeps it. “We’re going to need clear heads for this next bit,” I admonished her.

“What next bit?”

“We’ve got work to do.”

“‘Big, insane projects,’” Cheryl quoted.

“I warned you,” Pen said, shaking her head. Cheated of her brandy, she poured herself another glass of wine.

I cleared all the dirty dishes to one end of the massive farmhouse table and spread open the plans that I’d copied at the town hall. Then I went and got the incident book, which had landed flat when Cheryl had bunged it out of the window and so had survived its fall without visible damage. I cracked it open at September 13, the missing page again making it easy to find.

“What are we gonna do?” Cheryl asked.

“Well, seeing as Jeffrey has gone to the trouble of specifying the time, place, and date for each of the ghost’s appearances, we’re going to plot them against the building plans.”

Cheryl’s expression said that wasn’t much of an answer. “Because I need to know what exactly it is that she’s haunting,” I explained. “I thought it was the Russian artifacts, but it isn’t. So it’s something else.”

“Does it have to be that specific?”

“No, but it usually is. Most ghosts have a physical anchor. It can be a place or it can be an object—from time to time it can even be another person. But there’s nearly always something. Some specific thing that they’re clinging to.”

Neither of them looked convinced. “This archive of yours counts as a place, doesn’t it?” Pen demanded. “Can’t she just be haunting the whole building?”

“I’m talking more specific than that, Pen. Within the building, or maybe close by, there should be an area that’s uniquely hers. An area that she associates herself with and that she hangs around in most of the time. Or a particular thing that she owned in life, maybe, and still has strong feelings for.”

“How is that gonna help you?” asked Cheryl.

“Because once I know what it is, I may have a better idea who she was and how she died.”

Cheryl nodded. She got it. So now I could tell her the bad news.

“And you’re going to have to put the crosses in, because you’re the resident expert.”

I handed her a magic marker. It took two tries, because she didn’t want to take it. She was looking at the plans with a deeply pained expression. “I suck at this stuff,” she wailed. “This is almost maths. I’m a humanities graduate, yeah?”

“We’ll work it out together,” I promised. “Pen, you read aloud from the book. Not all the entries—just the ones that mention the ghost.”

“Should I add voices?” Pen asked hopefully.

“There’s just the one voice. Think of Sourdust from Titus Groan , and you’ll be on the right lines.”

That seemed to appeal to her. “I can do that,” she said approvingly.

“Then let’s go.”

We made a start, but Cheryl was right—it wasn’t easy. The building had changed so damn much over the years, and the plans—even the recent ones—looked so different from the baroque, three-dimensional maze that the archive had become. But on the other hand, Peele’s notes were meticulous, and he always gave chapter and verse. I felt a grudging respect for the man. After two dozen ghost sightings, a lot of people would have started using ditto marks, but not Jeffrey. Every damn time, he recorded the when and the where and the who in the same amount of rich, unnecessary detail.

And one by one, we plotted them out on the plans.

As we worked, I thought about that missing page—a blank space surrounded by information—information that up to now I hadn’t even tried to use. But there was a pattern hidden in the random flux of things going bump in the tail end of the afternoon. There had to be. And the incident book was still the key.

Every sighting became a cross, and the plans slowly took on a fly-specked appearance as Cheryl marked each one down. Basement. First floor. Second floor. Basement. First floor. Third. Fourth. She’d almost never shown up on the fourth floor—only twice in eighty or so appearances—and never in the attic. Visits to the third floor were rare, too, and they were always in strong room K or the corridor outside. On the second floor, she’d turned up in half a dozen rooms and in the corridor, and on the first floor and in the basement, she was even more ubiquitous.

We sat back, staring at the fruits of our labors. The silence was the silence of revelations not arriving. In droves.

“She’s all over the place,” said Cheryl.

“Yeah,” I agreed in a slightly dead tone. “She is.”

“No, she’s not.” Pen’s voice was a little slurred, but there was a weight of certainty in it. We both looked at her.

She shrugged. “She’s on a running rope.”

“Explain,” I said.

Pen bent over the plans. “Okay,” she said, “suppose this cross here was a bit farther over—I mean, suppose she was in the corner of this room, not out in the middle. And this one—she could easily have been ten yards or so farther down the corridor.”

She rubbed out two of the crosses as she spoke; drew in two more. A third she moved only half an inch or so, to place it closer to a cluster that was already there. She looked at me expectantly.