Mike Carey: The Devil You Know

Walk a few streets in any direction, though, until you can’t see the Thames at your back anymore, and you’re in a city that’s been a major population center ever since Gog and Magog sat down on their two hills some time around the middle of the Stone Age and put their feet up. Sacked by war, gutted by riot, razed by fire, and scoured by plague, it’s got a ratio of about twenty dead to every one living inhabitant, and that ratio is weighted most heavily in the center, where the city is oldest.

It’s not as bleak as it sounds, because not everyone you lay in the earth comes back; there are a whole lot who are content to sleep it out. And those who do come back will often stay in one place rather than wander around and inspire sphincter-loosening terror in the living. Most ghosts are tethered to the place where they died, with the place where they were buried coming in a close second (a fact that turned the blocks around inner-city cemeteries into instant slums). Zombies are just spirits even more tightly circumscribed than that, effectively haunting their own dead bodies, and as for the loup-garous , the were-kind . . . well, we’ll get to them in their place. But sometimes ghosts go walkabout, impelled by curiosity, loneliness, solicitude, boredom, mischief, a grudge, a concern, an addiction—some unfinished business, anyway, that won’t let them lie quiet until some still-distant Judgment Day.

I’m talking about the dead as if they had human emotions and human motivations. I apologize. It’s a common mistake, but any professional will give you a different point of view on the subject, whether you ask for it or not. Ghosts are reflections in fun-house mirrors—distorted echoes of past emotions, lingering on way past their sell-by date. Sometimes there’s a fragment of consciousness still there, directing them so that they can respond to you in crude and simple ways; more often not. The last thing you want to do is to make the mistake of thinking of them as people. That’s the bottom line, as the Ghostbusters count it. Sentimental anthropomorphisms aren’t exactly an asset in my line of business.

But sentient or not, a close encounter with a ghost can be an upsetting, not to say seat-wetting, experience. That’s where the exorcists come in—both the official church-sponsored ones, who are usually either idiots or fanatics, and the freelancers like me, who know what they’re doing.

My vocation had shown itself on the day after my sixth birthday, when I got tired of sharing my bed with my dead sister, Katie, who’d been run over by a truck the year before, and made her go away by screaming scatological playground rhymes at her. Yeah, I know. If ever there was a poisoned chalice that had a clearer Hazchem warning written down the side of it, it’s one I never came across.

But how many people do you know who actually get to choose what they do for a living? My careers teacher said I should go into hotel management, so exorcism it was.

Until now. Now I was on sabbatical. I’d had my fingers burned pretty badly about a year and a half before, and I was in no hurry to start playing with matches again. I told myself I’d retired. I made myself believe it for a good part of every day.

So now, as I listened to the voice of this solidly respectable citizen who was reaching out to me for help across the London night, the first thought that came into my mind was how the hell I was going to get rid of him. The second was that it was lucky he hadn’t called in person, because I was still dressed like a clown. On the other hand, the second would probably have helped with the first.

“Mr. Castor, we have a problem,” the voice announced in a convincing tone of anxiety and complaint. Was that the royal we , or did he mean himself and me? That would be a bit pushy for a first date.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” I offered. And since the best defense is a good offense, “My books are pretty much full at the moment. I don’t think I’ll be able to—”

He shot that one down well before it got to the bushes. “I find that hard to believe,” he snapped. “Very hard to believe. You never answer your phone. I’ve been calling you for four days now, and you’ve never picked up once. You don’t have an answerphone; you don’t even use a voice-mail service. So how would you be booking appointments?”

At any other time, this litany would have sounded like good news to me. A client who’s been calling for four days already has a lot invested in the deal, which makes him that much more likely to see it through.

At any other time.

Even now, as I considered my response, I felt the familiar quickening of my pulse; the familiar sensation of standing on the high diving board and looking down. Only this time I wasn’t going to let myself jump.

“I’m not taking on any new clients right now,” I repeated after slightly too long a pause. “If you tell me what your problem is, I can refer you to someone else who can help you, Mr. . . .”

“Peele. Jeffrey Peele. I’m the chief administrator at the Bonnington Archive. But I’m coming to you as the result of a personal referral. I’m not prepared to consider employing a third party who’s a complete unknown to me.”

Too bad, I thought. “It’s the best I can do.” I dumped the sheaf of letters I was still holding on top of the filing cabinet, the muffled boom testifying to how empty it was, and stood up. I wanted to wind this up and get moving; the evening was already looking problematic. “Why do you need an exorcist?” I prompted him.

This seemed to wind Mr. Peele up even tighter. “Because we have a ghost !” he said, his voice sounding slightly shrill now. “Why else would you imagine?”

I chose to let that question hang. He’d be amazed. But fireside tales didn’t seem like a very attractive option just then.

“What sort of ghost?” Getting a little more information out of Peele would probably be the quickest way of seeing him off. Depending on what he told me, I could almost certainly steer him in the direction of someone who could do the job. If it was a sympathetic someone, I might even be able to claim a finder’s fee. “I mean, how does it behave?”

“Until last week, it was entirely inoffensive,” he said, sounding only slightly mollified. “At least—in the sense that it didn’t do anything overtly hostile. It was just there. I know this sort of thing has become a fairly commonplace occurrence, but this”—he tripped on whatever he was trying to say, came back for a second pass—“I’ve never experienced anything like this before.”

For what it was worth, I commiserated. We got them often enough, even now—people who because of luck or lifestyle or straightforward reasons of geography had never met one of the risen, either ghost or zombie. Pen called people like that vestals, to distinguish them from virgins in the more conventional sense. But Peele had just lost his spectral cherry, and it was obvious that he wanted to talk about it.

“The Bonnington Archive is in Euston,” he began. “In Churchway, off the end of what used to be Drummond Street. We specialize in maps and charts and original documents—with a London provenance, of course, because a lot of our running costs are met through the Corporation of London and through the boroughs’ JMT funding.” He translated the acronym with an automatic air, like a man used to speaking in jargon and not being understood. “Joint Museums and Trusts, an initiative of the mayor’s office. We also have a maritime artifacts collection, funded separately by the office of the Admiralty and the Seamen’s Union, and a very sizable library of first editions, somewhat haphazardly acquired . . .”

“And the ghost is haunting the archive itself?” I prompted him, alarmed at the prospect of listening to an itemized list. “Since when, exactly?”