Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me. Okay, she’d been fighting against the pull of this room ever since she’d died, but Rich’s churning emotion was a beacon burning through the darkness and confusion of death. She had to come.

Only she didn’t come as herself. No woman stood over Rich as he rocked and moaned. It was just the darkness, curdling and thickening.

When he did finally realize that something was wrong, he looked up at me, startled, as if it was some trick that I was trying to pull on him. Then he raised his hands and tried to swat the shadows away. That was as futile as it sounds. He gave a little shriek and rolled away toward the wall. The darkness followed him, zeroed on his face, sank into and through him.

“Castor!” Rich screamed. “Get it—get it off—don’t—”

I didn’t make a move. There probably wouldn’t have been much I could have done in any case. Not now. The shadows sank into and through Rich’s skin, drawn in by some psychic osmosis. His scream became muffled, liquid, inhuman. His hands flailed, groping blindly at his own face.

Except that he didn’t actually have a face—not much of one, anyway. From forehead to upper lip was just a red, rippling curtain of flesh. Chestnut-brown hair hung in lank ringlets over it, and the mouth that gaped formlessly underneath was rimmed by blood-red lips.

The illusion—if that’s what it was—held for the space of a long-drawn-out breath. Then it was gone, as if someone had thrown a switch, and it was just Rich there again, screaming and babbling, his fingers gripping his face as if he was trying to tear it off his skull. I waded in and stopped him from blinding himself in his panic.

“I’ll help,” he promised, raising his hand as if to ward off a blow. “Please! I’ll help, Castor. I’ll cooperate! You can tell her I cooperated. Don’t let her touch me! Please!”

“That’s great, Rich,” I said. “But I’m going to need you to get your breath back first.”

That took a while. When his breathing was close enough to normal that I thought he might be able to talk, I took out my mobile phone and threw it into his lap.

“Make a call,” I told him. “There’s another emergency.”

RICH TURNED THE PHONE ON, WAITED FOR IT TO LIGHT up and find a network. Nothing happened. He stared at it nonplussed, robbed of all initiative by the psychic gut-punch he’d just taken. He looked at me with a mute appeal.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I snapped. “Hand it over.”

It was the usual problem: no charge. With an inward curse, I flicked through some unworkable alternatives and then had a sudden inspiration. In my inside breast pocket, I found the mobile phone I’d taken from Arnold after I’d coldcocked him in the toilet at the Runagate in Chelsea. I gave that to Rich instead.

He dialed clumsily, taking three goes before he managed to get the number right. Then we both waited, eavesdropping on some etheric limbo while the call wound its way through cyberspace. I was listening in, my head right up close to his. I didn’t trust Rich to fly straight on this unless he had a copilot. In my mind’s eye I saw the phone ringing in the foyer of Kissing the Pink, Weasel-Face Arnold picking up.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Rich Clitheroe,” Rich said. “I’ve got to speak to Mr. Damjohn.” There was a pregnant pause, and then he added, “It’s about Castor.”

“Hold on,” the voice muttered.

They kept him hanging. Damjohn wouldn’t make himself immediately available to anyone, let alone to someone as lowly as Rich. As the pause lengthened, though, I wondered if they were having trouble reaching Damjohn. Maybe he was somewhere else altogether.

After about a minute, Arnold came back on. “He’s on the boat,” he said, sounding slightly disgruntled—as if, maybe, he’d been torn off a strip for disturbing his boss’s repose. “He said you should call him there.” He rattled off the number, and Rich made a pretence of writing it down while we both did our best to commit it to memory. Rich made the follow-on call, his shaking hands causing a number of false starts. We got the ring tone, and it went on for what seemed like forever. Then, finally, someone picked up.

“Hello?” Damjohn’s voice. “Clitheroe?”

“Mr. Damjohn, I’ve got to talk to you. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do here.” I had to admit, Rich sounded suitably scared and agitated, but I guess that was mostly because he was. You couldn’t fake that degree of abject terror.

“Calm down, Clitheroe,” Damjohn said, his tone clipped. “You shouldn’t even be trying to contact me, but since you have, tell me what the problem is. And please—no hysteria.”

Rich flicked a frightened glance at me, looked away again quickly.

“It’s Castor,” he said. “He just came to my house.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. Then Damjohn’s voice said, “Why? What does he know?”

I shook my head silently at Rich. We’d already rehearsed this whole conversation, but I wanted to make sure he didn’t ad-lib. I didn’t want Damjohn panicked enough to do anything to Rosa.

“Nothing,” Rich said. “He doesn’t know anything. But he’s—he’s asking a lot of questions.”

“And who is he talking to? Just you, or everybody?”

“I don’t know.” Rich put a convincing edge of anguish in his voice. “Look, I don’t think I can take any more of this. I’m facing a murder charge already—a fucking murder charge. Mr. Damjohn, where’s Rosa? She knows about me, doesn’t she? Where is she now? If she goes to the police, I’m fucked. Unless I go there first and get my story in. I can tell them it was an accident, because it was.”

I heard Damjohn’s breath hissing between his teeth.

“Killing someone while you’re trying to rape them doesn’t count as an accident, Clitheroe,” he said with icy calm. “Even on a manslaughter plea, you’d draw down twenty years and end up serving at least ten of them. That’s what you’re facing if you can’t keep your nerve. Rosa isn’t talking to anyone, and neither are you.”

I made a winding-up motion with my index finger—get to the point—and Rich nodded, showing me he understood.

“Where is she?” he repeated.

“What?” Damjohn’s tone was pained.

“Where’s Rosa? I want to talk to her.”

“I’ve already told you that that’s impossible.”

Rich’s voice rose an octave or so. “That was before Peele called in his own fucking exorcist, man. I’m sweating this. I’m sweating it. Okay, maybe I don’t need to talk to her. But I want to make fucking sure nobody else can. You’ve got her out of the way, right? I mean, she’s not still turning tricks? Castor could just walk right in there and—”

“She’s here with me,” Damjohn snapped. “At the boat. I’m looking at her right now. And she’ll stay here until Castor is dealt with. How long ago did he leave you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe a bit longer.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Where?”

Rich blinked twice, on the spot, realizing that he’d painted himself into a corner. I made the “it’s a book” sign from charades. “To the—back to the archive,” Rich stammered. “I think. I think that’s what he said.”

Another pause. “It’s Sunday,” Damjohn pointed out, his tone gentle but precise. “Isn’t the archive closed now?”

“No, there’s a function on there today. A wedding.”

“At midnight?”

“He—he’s got my keys.”

A longer pause. “You let him take your keys?”

“It’s all right,” Rich blurted. “I already took the keys to the safe room off the ring. He’s only got the archive keys.”