Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

“Straight lines,” I said. “She works in straight lines.”

Pen tutted. “They’re not straight, Fix. They’re curved!”

I started to feel a tingling in the back of my neck as my hairs rose—not from a ghostly visitation but from the gathering, inescapable sense of something opaque becoming obvious.

“Fuck me sideways,” I murmured.

Cheryl was looking from one of us to the other and back again. “Is someone gonna tell me the news?”

My eyes flicked backward and forward, from basement, to first floor, to second floor, third, fourth.

“Okay,” I said, “so I’m an idiot. I don’t have a good visual imagination. It’s like—the Milky Way.”

“It’s like what ?” Cheryl demanded. But Pen was nodding excitedly.

“The Milky Way. We see it as a line in the sky because we’re looking at it from the wrong angle. But it’s not a line, it’s a disc. And these aren’t lines, either. Put the vertical dimension back in, and it’s right there. It’s—”

“—a running rope,” Pen finished.

“I’m gonna sulk,” Cheryl warned.

I put the plans one on top of another and held them up to show her. She squinted at them doubtfully. Now that I’d seen what Pen was driving at, I couldn’t believe that Cheryl was still missing it.

“Look—on each floor, she turns up in a whole lot of different places, but they make a rough circle. A really big circle in the basement, then a slightly smaller one on the first floor. Smaller still on the second, but still with more or less the same center. On the third floor, you’ve just got a scattering of points, all very close together. But suppose you mapped all of this in three dimensions. What would you get?”

“A headache,” said Cheryl bitterly.

“You’d get a hollow hemisphere.”

“The higher she gets in the building,” I said, pointing, “the less room she’s got to move in horizontally. Don’t you get it? Think of a dog on a leash. If its owner beats it with a stick, what’s it going to do?”

“Run away,” said Cheryl. “I think I’m being patronized now.”

“No, you’re not. Just see it in your mind. The dog will run away as far as the leash will let it. And then it will keep running, but it will only be able to go in a circle, right? A circle with the owner—and the stick—right in the middle.”

“Okay.”

“But suppose it was a space dog. With a jet pack. It would still go out to the full extent of the leash, but it wouldn’t be a circle anymore—because the dog would be free to move up and down and all around . . .”

“So it’d be a sphere.”

“Exactly!”

Cheryl looked again at the overlaid plans. The black crosses showed clearly through: concentric circles, narrowing as they went up through the building.

“There is a fixed place,” I said. “A tether of some kind—but she’s not haunting it. She’s getting as far away from it as she can. She’s running on the end of a leash.”

“And the man with the stick—”

“Is at the center. The place where she doesn’t want to go. The place where she’s never been seen.”

Cheryl took the plans from me and laid them down on the table again. “It’s got to be on the first floor,” she murmured. Then she glanced at Pen and me to double-check her logic. “The first floor or the basement. I mean, she’ll have the widest circle where she’s on the same level as . . . the thing. The place. Whatever.”

Pen nodded emphatically. “So where is it?” I asked. “What’s at the center of the sphere?”

Cheryl traced the line of the main corridor, muttering to herself. “That’s the front desk. These are the first-floor strong rooms. A, B, C. Ladies’ toilet . . .”

She tailed off into silence, but her fingers still moved over the map. Finally she looked up at me, her face a picture of bemusement. “It doesn’t work,” she said. “You’re wrong.”

“Why?” I demanded.

“Well, this room here—that’s the dead center, right? That’s smack in the middle of the circle, in the basement. That’s what she’s avoiding. It’s called SECOND CONFERENCE ROOM on here.”

“Yes? So?” I pressed her with a slight sense of unease. “What’s it called now?”

“It’s not called anything now, Felix.” Cheryl’s tone was flat. “Because it isn’t bloody there.”

TWENTY-FOUR FEET IS EIGHT PACES, ROUGHLY, SO COUNT them off. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Good. Then do a ninety-degree turn and count again, to ten this time. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.

Then I bumped into the wall and whistled softly and tunelessly in the dark.

Cheryl was right.

Despite my earlier fears, it had been easy enough to break into the Bonnington with my lock picks. Their internal security was as spiky as hell, but the front door rolled over and played dead for me after only a modicum of manual stimulation. All the alarms were on the strong room doors, thank God, and I wouldn’t be visiting any of those. The reinforced door at the back of the reading room that led through into the staff-only part of the building was a lot harder and took me ten anxious, sweaty minutes. As a fallback, I had Cheryl’s ID card in my back pocket, but I was hoping not to have to use it, because the card readers on the doors probably had some kind of an internal memory.

I’d come alone. Pen was going to be my alibi in case things got nasty, and Cheryl didn’t need to be anywhere nearby while I was breaking into her place of work. But it would have been useful to have her all the same. It was hard enough making sense of the plans in a well-lit kitchen; standing in a dark corridor, working by filtered moonlight, it was frankly a bit of a bastard.

But all I was doing was pacing out distances, after all; once you got past the logistical problems, it wasn’t exactly complicated. Fifteen minutes bumping and shambling in the dark brought me to the only conclusion that made any sense.

There was a room missing. The corridor doglegged around it in a way that made it obvious, once you knew that something had been there and had been excised.

I tried again in the basement floor and found the same thing—another lacuna, more or less exactly underneath the first—now with the added mystery of a staircase that had been moved six yards along the corridor. Why would anyone go to that degree of trouble to take a modest-size slice out of a huge public building?

When the answer came to me, I went back up to the first floor and let myself out as carefully as I’d entered. Back on the street, I counted my steps again, but I already knew where I was going to end up.

Which was at the other door: the one I’d walked past on the first day, because it was silted up with old rubbish and covered with a crudely hewn slice of hardboard. Because it was so obviously disused and didn’t lead anywhere. It was an appendix, a forgotten and useless by-product of the building’s inorganic evolution. And that was what I found myself staring at now—with new eyes.

The rubbish cleared away really easily—suspiciously easily, if you were already in that frame of mind. It was basically only a couple of empty boxes and an old blanket—the minimalist signifiers for a stage set of “a place where homeless people sleep at night.”

The plywood sheet that had been nailed to the door had a cut-out rectangle where the keyholes were—another sign that this place wasn’t quite as disused as it looked. The two locks here were a Falcon and a Schlage, and they made the archive’s front door look like a bead curtain. I struggled with the Schlage for half an hour, and I was about half a breath away from quitting when I finally heard the click that meant the cylinders were all in a line.