Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

I pushed the door, and it opened. Beyond was a sort of lobby space about four feet square with what looked like a folded blanket for a doormat, and beyond that was another door that was also locked. Its wood looked a lot flimsier than its metal bits, and my patience had worn out a while back, so I just kicked it open.

I stepped into a completely dark room that had a sharp-sour, organic smell to it—a smell of sweat and piss and I didn’t want to know what else. I groped on the near wall for a light switch, found one, and flicked it on. A naked hundred-watt bulb cast a harsh, clinical spotlight on a room that Mr. Bleaney would have turned down flat. Three of the walls were painted a sad shade of hospital green, while the fourth had been covered over with oppressively dark wood paneling, relieved by a few vertical slats of a lighter color. The floor was covered by a strip of paisley-patterned linoleum that had been cut for another room and didn’t reach all the way to the edges. The glass of the window was intact, but all you could see through it was the inside face of another plywood board.

The room itself was bare enough to count as empty, the only item of furniture a stained, fluorescent-orange sofa with a sort of 1970s lack of shame about itself. Against the base of one wall was a row of a dozen or so liter and two-liter bottles, some full of clear liquid, some empty. That was all.

I let the inner door fall closed behind me and advanced a little farther into the room. The shock of recognition had already hit me, followed by the reflection that it really wasn’t any shock at all. This was the room I’d seen when I’d played twenty questions with the ghost—the room she’d showed to me in the slide show of her memories. She’d remembered it and communicated it to me faithfully in every detail—except that maybe there were a couple more empty bottles now and a couple fewer full ones.

I searched the room. It took no time at all, because there was nothing to look at. Nothing under the sofa, nothing behind it. There might have been something down the back of its the cushions, but I was reluctant to touch the thing—it looked as if even casual contact could pass on communicable diseases. I unscrewed one of the bottles and sniffed, then tentatively tasted. As far as I could tell, it was just water.

What did that leave? There was a shelf above the door, but it was empty apart from a thick deposit of dust. The paneling could be covering a multitude of sins, so I pressed it in a few places to see how determined it was to stay attached to the wall. On the third push, something gave and rattled slightly. I looked closer and saw the door that was set into the wood, its verticals hidden by two of the decorative slats. Closer still, and I saw the keyhole.

This one was a Chubb of about 1960s vintage—easy enough in this context to count as wide open.

Beyond the door, a flight of stairs going down. This was the original one from the plans, which was no longer part of the archive itself—and that in turn explained why there was a newer staircase a few yards farther on from where the original had been.

The acrid smell was a lot sharper now.

Most likely this space had been separated from the building while it was government-owned, perhaps as some sort of grace-and-favor apartment for a civil servant who wasn’t senior enough to merit anything over by Admiralty Arch. Or maybe it had been hived off from the rest of the house when two ministries fought each other for lebensraum. Either way, it seemed to have been forgotten since—but clearly not by everybody.

There was another light switch on the stairwell, but when I pressed it, the light went on in the downstairs room, rather than in the stairwell itself. I went down carefully, afraid of tripping in the inadequate light.

The basement room was even bleaker than the first-floor one. Again, there was just the one item of furniture—a mattress, even fouler than the sofa, and naked except for a single checked blanket in bright red and yellow—well, formerly bright would be closer to the truth. In one corner of the room, there was a bucket full of murky liquid, which was the source of the smell. It had been used as a latrine. So, at some point, had the floor around it. On the floor right next to the bucket was an iron ring that had been inexpertly set in messily poured cement—obviously not a feature of the original room. There was a coil of rope there, too, thrown into a corner.

I know a prison cell when I see one. Someone had lived here, fairly recently, and not because they wanted to. Some of the other memories I’d absorbed from my brief psychic contact with the ghost surfaced again. The blanket had featured in there, I was damn sure of that. And Gabe McClennan’s face. What had been behind it? Snowy peaks . . . I turned and saw on the far wall, only a few feet away in this claustrophobic space, a ragged-edged poster of Mont Blanc bearing the legend L’Empire du Ski. Déjà vu ran through me like a tide of needles.

And turning my head had made me catch a near-subliminal glimpse of something else. A splash of red, under the near end of the mattress, almost at my feet. I squatted down on my haunches, feeling a mixture of reluctance and grim triumph. I was close to the answer now—the source of everything. I slid my hand under the mattress to lift it up.

And a jolt of pain slammed through me as if I’d touched a bare electric cable. From hand, to arm, to heart, to all points of the compass.

I snatched my hand back and spat out a curse.

Or rather, I tried to spit it out, but it wouldn’t come. Silence took root in my mouth, my throat, my lungs. Silence fell on me like the grubby blanket, like a bell jar slipped over my head and shoulders, like a handkerchief soaked in chloroform.

No, that was panic and overreaction. I wasn’t dizzy. I wasn’t losing consciousness. I was just completely unable to make a sound. I mouthed words, and I tried to push breath through them to bring them into the world, but nothing happened. My voice had gone.

Lifting the corner of the mattress more carefully this time, from above, I was able to see why. The red wasn’t congealed blood, after all; it was a circle, inscribed in dark red chalk, with a five-pointed star inside it and a series of painstakingly inscribed marks at each point of the star. In other words, a ward put there by an exorcist. Normally, the text written in the center of a ward like this would be ekpiptein —dismiss—or hoc fugere —get out of town. Here it was aphthegtos —speechless.

I straightened up, feeling a little shaky. I knew what Gabe McClennan had been doing here now and why nobody at the archive had reacted to the name. He’d never visited the archive itself at all. This was where he’d come, and this was what he’d been brought in to do.

But why silence the ghost instead of sending her away? That made no sense at all. It wasn’t as though McClennan would have offered a discount. If anything, the binding spell was harder than a straight exorcism.

Whatever the answer was, one thing was now explained. This was why it had been so hard for me to get a fix on the ghost, even when I’d been so close to her. She was bound by this ward, and its strictures hemmed her in like a straitjacket—a straitjacket sewn onto her soul. The change in her behavior made sense now, too—the sudden flare into what had seemed like motiveless violence. She was responding to this necromantic assault.

The ward ought to have had no power over a living human being, but the psychic sensitivity I was born with had left me wide open to it. What I was suffering now was like snow blindness or like the deadened hearing that follows after an explosion. My voice would come back, but it could take minutes or even hours.