Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

I looked around for somewhere I could play undisturbed, but nothing much suggested itself. Just as the speech wrapped up to loud applause, I ducked behind a pillar that at least would shield me from a casual glance. I slipped my whistle out of my pocket and put it to my lips.

Right here in the heart of her territory, my sense of the ghost was as sharp and as clear as it was ever going to be, but this still wasn’t going to be easy. Too much going on, too many competing sounds and stimuli. I closed my eyes to block out at least one source of distraction and tried to focus only on the feel of her in my mind—the sense that for me was more like hearing than anything else, but still impossible to dissect or describe.

The groom was speaking now, and all other conversation in the room had stilled. I waited, seething with impatience, for the background hum to start up again. He talked for what seemed like an hour—about what a difference Eileen had made to his life, about how lucky he was, about how much he was looking forward to being a father to Cheryl. I wondered if he’d seen the job description.

When the applause came again, I squeezed out the first notes. I tried to keep it low, and I managed at first, but the tune goes where it wants to go. If you push it into a different pattern, you get a different result.

My mind narrowed to the succession of notes, the inscape of the ghost’s music. Part of it was “The Bonny Swans,” but most of it was new, hers and nobody else’s, the sound that was the space she occupied in the world, the song that sang her.

Suggestive gaps in the skein of voices from around me told me that the guests closest to me had heard the music now. They were probably looking around for its source. I carried on playing, not hurrying, not slowing—I was tied to the wheel now, and I had to go where it took me.

The silence spread, and footsteps were coming toward me, but it was almost done. A few more bars would take me there. A hand clamped on my shoulder. Eyes tight shut, I ignored it, wound down through a plaintive diminuendo to a single note, which bounced up again into an unexpectedly defiant closing trill.

The whistle was snatched out of my hand. I opened my eyes to find myself staring into the eyes of the Tonka Toy—the burly one of Cheryl’s two cousins. He held the whistle up in front of me, his face a scowling mask. Other faces clustered behind him, looking at me curiously or resentfully.

“Is this a joke?” the thickset man demanded aggressively.

“No,” I answered. “It’s an invitation.”

There were gasps from the back of the crowd and then a scream. All heads turned in that direction, including the Tonka Toy’s. As he gawped along with the rest of them, I took my whistle back from his hand and pocketed it carefully. All hell was about to break loose, so I wanted the instrument safely stowed.

The archive ghost was walking through the center of the room and through the people in the room, who scrambled to get some distance from her. Ghosts may be fairly common phenomena now, but some ghosts have more presence than others, and the faceless woman had a grimness of purpose about her that saturated the room.

She stopped and stared about her without eyes. She was more solid now, and you could see that the white garment she wore ended at the waist. From the waist down, she wore a plain black skirt, and her arms were bare.

“Gdyeh Rosa?” she said with a keening, complaining emphasis. “Ya nye znayo gdyeh ona. Vi dolzhni pomogitye menya naiti yeyo.”

At various points in the crowd, people cried out.

“Ya potrevozhnao Rosa.”

I shoved the usher aside and plunged into the crowd, my head darting from side to side as I went. It had to be now, while the shock of the ghost’s speaking aloud was still fresh and raw in people’s minds. I’d gone to a lot of trouble to set this up, and I was damned if I was going to let it go to waste.

Alice and Jeffrey were still over by the drinks table, but they were heading for the door as quickly as they could without Jeffrey actually being forced to touch somebody. Alice was leading the way, savagely determined, with Peele enclitically lodged just behind her. I stepped into their path, and she came to an abrupt halt, staring at me in affronted astonishment.

“Now this is what I call a party,” I said with bumpkin jocularity.

“Castor,” Alice said, and there was a hard catch in her voice that took me by surprise—a look in her eye that was something like hatred.

I put out my hand and took hers, and though she pulled back sharply, I kept hold. The first time I’d touched her, I’d listened pretty hard, but I hadn’t picked up a damn thing. But this was different. She was angry and shaken, and any guard she had was down. If I couldn’t get a reading from her now, I never would.

“You’re looking radiant, Alice,” I said, squeezing her hand and smiling inanely into her face. “You must be pregnant.”

FLASH. I felt the stab of her fury and indignation, followed by an all-but-submerged twinge of real fear. Fear of the ghost, certainly, but another fear rising out of that so steeply that all perspective was lost. Alice really didn’t want to be pregnant. And she really didn’t want me pawing at her. As she wrestled to get her hand free, I saw in quick succession within her mind a child’s-eye view of a huge, looming man shaving at an oval mirror; a dead daffodil in a slender rose vase, the last inch of water turned to brown ullage; her desk at the archive, pristine and empty, the mail trays lined up hospital-corner fashion with the desk’s far right-hand edge. It took me a moment to realize that although it was her desk, it was in Peele’s narrow, oddly shaped office. The boss’s desk, in other words, but with her name on the door instead of his.

Alice got her hand free from mine with some effort. I thought she was going to use it to slap me, but she only swore at me under her breath—a word I wouldn’t have expected her to know, the last two syllables of which were “bubble.” I ignored her and lunged past her at Jeffrey.

Being autistic, Jeffrey had a much stronger and more deeply rooted objection to being touched by me than Alice did. Where she was merely fastidious, he was pathological. So I didn’t have to do anything to raise the emotional temperature. He stiffened as I grabbed his wrist, and then he actually jumped, his feet leaving the ground momentarily.

“Don’t!” he yelped. “Mr. Castor!”

FLASH. I got a microsecond glimpse of a corridor in the archive—the ghost standing there, sideways on but with her face turned toward him—before raw, flaring panic obliterated all images and left his mind pure white: the white of white noise.

Peele was physically struggling to get away from me, and people were staring at us in amazement. I let go too suddenly, and he stumbled backward, crashing into the people behind him and sending them sprawling. Alice did slap me now—a stinging backhander that would probably leave a visible mark. Jon Tiler loomed up out of nowhere to help Jeffrey get back on his feet. As he reached forward, I intercepted him and grabbed both his wrists, making him stop and stare at me in astonishment.

A moment later, I arced backward like an epileptic suffering from a grand mal seizure. I hit the ground like a badly packed sack of ballast.

I hadn’t touched Tiler at all on my first day at the archive. It was probably just as well. He was a supersender—an emotional foghorn—and I would have made a bad first impression, losing control of my limbs in front of a whole lot of people I’d only just been introduced to.

I fell heavily but somehow managed to keep one hand in contact with Tiler’s wrist as I hit the ground and jackknifed. The images and impressions I was getting were sluicing and scouring their way through my mind as though they’d come from a high-pressure hose. I couldn’t keep them out, and I couldn’t sort them. Visions of the ghost came through strongest, in all the rooms and hallways where he’d seen her—but the floodgates were open, and the rising tide of recollection broke over them, washed them away. I saw most of Tiler’s childhood, got to know his mother from a baby’s-eye view (his interest at that age had centered mainly on her left breast), relived potty training and bedtime stories and an abusive relationship with the family cat, and Christ knew what else. It wasn’t chronological, though. I saw him sitting in a cinema, crying at Gone With the Wind ; at home, pouring boiling water into a Pot Noodle; and at the archive, carefully swathing an old leather-bound book in bubble wrap. It was a parish register, labeled March to June 1840. He looked over his shoulder as he worked to make sure nobody saw. He protected the corners with cardboard brackets, laboriously cut out and taped together. He knew what he was doing; he’d done it a thousand times before, always with the same warm tingle in his lower abdomen. It was like ascending toward an orgasm that never came—and that feeling, that endless rising scale, was the anchor of his life.