The Devil You Know fc-1 Page 18

  On some level I was aware of a motorcycle driving by in the street outside, setting up a sympathetic vibration in the floor beneath my feet. Then there was silence again, even deeper for having been broken.

  I was back in the rhythm of the psychic trawl, my fingers flicking across the papers, tapping out a pianissimo signature that nobody but me could disentangle. I took it slowly, very slowly, because as I neared the bottom of the stack, I was lingering longer over each sprawl of papers, more and more reluctant to take no for an answer.

  But I got to the final handful at last, and I had to admit it to myself.

  Nothing. Nothing at all. Not one out of all these voices speaking faintly through faded ink and yellowed paper was the voice of the Bonnington ghost.

  I stared at the last clutch of documents in dumb chagrin. I’d been so certain that the thread would be there for me to pick up; the logic of it was so clear. But logic had let me down.

  For a moment I thought about going back and starting again. It was a grisly prospect, but I had no other leads to pick up. If the ghost wouldn’t appear to me directly, I’d have to rely on something it had touched while it was still alive. Something that still held the imprint of its mind and personality . . .

  Sometimes I miss a trick that’s so obvious, I wonder if there’s any hope for me at all. I came bolt upright in the chair, swearing at my own stupidity. Then I reached across for my coat and started to rummage in the pockets.

  I didn’t have anything that the ghost had touched during its lifetime. But I had one thing that it had definitely touched since.

  I pulled out the crumpled Rolodex card and held it up to examine it in the none-too-bright BS 5454 light.

  I’d never tried this before, but there was no reason why it shouldn’t work. Okay, a ghost throwing its weight around isn’t quite the same proposition as a living human being touching something, but on the other hand, the trail was that much more recent. At any rate, it had to be worth a try.

  Gripping the card firmly in both hands, I closed my eyes and listened with my mind. There was nothing there, but since this was the turning after the last-chance saloon, I held on. Still nothing. But after a long, strained moment, in the dead center of the nothing, a different kind of nothing opened up—the pregnant pause of dense, focused attention. It was as though I was holding a telephone receiver and I’d made a weak connection. Now someone on the other end was waiting for me to speak.

  It wasn’t what I was expecting, but like I’ve always said, if life gives you lemmings, jump off a cliff.

  “Hello,” I said.

  No answer. I wasn’t really expecting any; I was just showing willing. But if the link that had opened up between me and the ghost wasn’t verbal, there had to be some other way to use it.

  For a while I just waited, hoping that something might come into my mind without me reaching for it—some idea or emotion flowing from the ghost into me, bringing with it the pinpoint fix that I needed for the cantrip. But it seemed like the ghost was waiting, too.

  I’m not sure where inspiration came from, but it came suddenly, and in spite of the sheer ludicrousness of the idea, I went for it: twenty questions. In that game, you zero in on the answer by asking broad, general questions first and then getting more and more specific. Maybe I could coax the ghost into playing a quick round with me.

  I let my mind go blank, my emotions drift back down to neutral—like tapping a compass with your thumbnail to make sure the needle is floating free.

  Then I started to think without thinking.

  I’d like to say that this was an eastern discipline I’d picked up in an ashram in Puna, but the truth is that I’d first learned how to do it back at Alsop Comprehensive School for Boys, when I’d been introduced to acid. I used to think of it then as turning my mind into a slide projector; I’d just allow images to form behind my eyes and watch them glide past in sequence, accompanied by whatever feelings the drug high was giving me.

  The beauty of it was that I didn’t have to select the images. Once I’d got the process started, they just kept coming. Actually, it was less like a slide show, more like a DVD in fast-forward, giving microsecond stills extracted from the continuous flow of memory. They weren’t random; nothing with a human mind as the operating system ever can be. But they were random enough.

  Flick. Flick. Flick. No sound, no movement, no idea, no context. Just pictures, forming and fading in my mind so quickly that I could barely identify them myself in the brief time that each one was there in front of me.

  Pictures of London first: Marble Arch, the Jerusalem Tavern, a back street in Soho where I’d been mugged. And parts of places: a door I didn’t recognize, with green paint peeling from bleached wood; an aerial view of two large Dumpsters with some kid sitting in between them, sniffing glue out of a Waitrose bag; the tracks of two tires on a gravel drive, like waves in a Zen garden. Then people: faces, hands, shoulders, smiling and snarling mouths, the curve of a thigh with a hand (my hand?) touching it—abstract flesh against abstract fabric.

  It was working—or at least it seemed to be. The needle turned, and the ghost was the force that pulled it. I surrendered totally to that pull, letting the images that the ghost responded to linger just that bit longer in my mind, and letting each of those pull the next picture along behind it in a sort of themed cascade. The bare thigh became a man’s chest, a well-muscled arm, an erect cock, and then, inexplicably, the wheel arch of a car against a curb, with fat raindrops sitting on it. More cars, on roads, on driveways, in garages full of junk, their wheels up on makeshift brick pilings.

  Roads. Cities. Houses. Rooms. Another pull from the ghost, stronger this time. It didn’t like the rooms so much, so the pictures veered back out into daylight: parks, trees, a bench in some garden, the outhouse behind a pub.

  The link was flowing now with frictionless ease, and with it came a sense of being a machine in someone else’s hands. If my mind was a projector, the ghost was holding the remote and clicking me on. I let it happen: no resistance, no recoil. More pub scenes, men laughing, men puking, men talking shit with messianic fervor. Another tug: take me somewhere else.

  A pavement by the Thames, just down from the Oak; postpub stations of the cross in Soho, Covent Garden, Bounds Green, Spitalfields, the Albert Dock, Porte d’Orléans, Mala Strana under Prague Castle. A huge tug on that one, and now I was seeing a bridge with snow on it, spotless except for the clear double line of my footprints; an open-air smithy in some town square I’d wandered through in northern France, the owner dipping a slender ingot of red-hot metal into black, oil-slicked water; a dirt road in some place I couldn’t put a name to, wet with new rain and a little blood.

  A shed door, seen from the inside, the wood splintered and torn in vertical lines as though an animal had been clawing at it; a man’s arm, gripping a shot glass and raised in salute; a piece of paper, held up to the window of a car by a much smaller and slimmer hand, and almost transparent because of the condensation on the glass, so I could see the smudged writing on the other side: .

  I wasn’t feeding into this process at all anymore, and these weren’t any memories of mine. Somewhere along the way, the ghost had taken my slides out of the projector and slipped in some of its own. I didn’t know what she was getting out of it, but for me it was working—helping me to triangulate on that weak trace and build it up into a clear sense of her that I could use in an exorcism.

  Meanwhile, the images kept coming. A frozen lake with the chimneys of some kind of factory rising behind it. A room with no windows and no furniture except for a shapeless sofa covered in a bright orange fabric with suspect stains on it. The curve of a woman’s shoulders and back, the woman turned away from me, her hand up as though to hide her face from my eyes. A book with a page torn out of it, held in the heavy grip of a man’s hand, his finger tracing the tear, the herringbone tracks of a stainless-steel watchband written in red across his wrist. The edge of some kind of patterned fabric, red and yellow check.
A row of plastic bottles, some empty, some full of clear liquid, standing at the foot of a wall. A man’s face, cold and hard, behind his back a snowcapped mountain, one hand raised beside his head with the fingers spread wide.

  That was the one that did it for me, because I knew that face—knew it better than I wanted to. My body arched backward, and the shift in balance was enough to topple the chair I was sitting in. I went crashing to the floor, and a second later, the sound was echoed in another crash from somewhere far above me.

  I was so groggy and dazed for a moment as I came up from the half trance that I didn’t realize what that meant. But a single thought cut through the shit and fog that filled my brain. I’d lost her again. I’d been so close that another few seconds would have been enough to nail her down for good, and then I’d jolted myself out of the receptive state and lost her.

  Then a second thought dropped into place next to the first.

  There was someone else as well as me in the building.

  I mean, someone else who was still alive.

  Further thoughts crowded in on those first two, muddying the waters. There were any number of explanations for the noise. It could just have been the echo of my own fall or a sound from the street outside that had bounced in a weird way and come back to my ears from inside the building. And if it was another live human being, five would get you plenty it would only be Jon Tiler popping back in for his bag again, even later than last night.

  My mind was pulled back to the images that had just flicked through it. They were still vividly there, hanging in front of my eyes in the dark—vivid enough to obliterate my dim surroundings if I let them. The car, the factories, the wristwatch—these were things from the modern world, so they shot to pieces any idea that the ghost was a turn-of-the-century Russian whose spirit had become entangled in some old love letters or a promissory note.

  And with that realization came another. Bare arms with a hood? The ghost wasn’t wearing any kind of full-length cloak or ecclesiastical robe; it was most likely to be a hoodie. Like I said, sometimes I’m so corkscrew sly and subtle that I miss what’s right in front of my face.

  But it was the last image that had left me reeling. Like I said, I knew the man, and if he’d been here at the archive before me, then I needed to have words with Peele sooner than soon—some of which would be of the kind that you’re not liable to read in the Bible.

  I pulled myself together, which took a bit of an effort. Wherever I went next, I was all done here. The room didn’t have any more revelations to offer me, because the ghost had nothing to do with any of the stuff in these boxes. In the chagrin and frustration of that moment, my thoughts went back to the crash, which was a welcome diversion from the clutter and confusion that the rest of my mind was now filled with.

  There was another explanation for that sound. It could be the ghost itself, stirred up by our little two-handed game and throwing another tantrum. If it was, then I might have a chance of collecting the last coffin nail, the last tiny sliver of her psychic fingerprint that would allow me to do my stuff. Something to report to Alice—besides “I’ve been barking up the wrong tree and now I’ve got splinters”—would be very useful.

  Well, I sure as hell had nothing to lose. I picked myself up off the floor, stepped out of the room, and headed on down the hallway. I’d been through this maze a few times now, but in the dark, I still managed to miss my way. Somehow when I should have come to the bottom of the first set of stairs, I came to a dead end instead and had to retrace my steps. Strange. That blind-ended corridor had the worst vibes of all: a headache-inducing sludge of sorrow. Something really unpleasant must have happened there once, or maybe it was just that the tumble I’d taken had bent my psychic tuning fork all out of shape.

  Second time lucky. I found my way to the stairs and walked up quickly, my footsteps filling the unpeopled silence like the marching of a clumsy ghost army. Up, down, in, out. I threaded my way through the nearly dark corridors by feel, with the occasional help of a patch of dirty yellow white light from the street outside. I passed the workroom, which was silent and empty, Alice’s office, then Peele’s. Everything here was silent, dark, and deserted. If it was the ghost who’d made the sound, it seemed she was taking a breather.

  I walked on until I came to the main stairwell—the stone one that led down to the lobby—and there I stopped and listened. This place was an echo chamber; if anything moved in the building, my best chance of hearing it was probably from right there.

  But there was nothing to hear except for the blood drumming in my own ears. Perhaps I’d got it wrong in the first place; that thunderous bang that had followed the sound of my chair falling over could have come from almost anywhere. I was about to give up on it when suddenly there was a quick rustle of movement from the dark above me, instantly stilled. I waited, but nothing followed on from this flurry of sound. Interesting. There’s a kind of silence that just has the overwhelming feel of someone trying desperately not to break it, and that was the kind of silence I was breathing in right then. From my earlier wanderings, I remembered that the fourth floor was mainly additional office space and nonsecure storage, and above that there were the empty shells of rooms where the building work was still going on.

  I climbed up the next flight of steps slowly, with laborious stealth. There was no sign of anyone or anything there. I waited for another long, uneventful while and was rewarded by another microscopic fragment of sound from just above my head: a floorboard protesting as someone shifted his weight. I climbed again, into the attic level, where the palletloads of bricks waited in the dark like the ghosts of strong rooms yet to be born. I trod carefully here; the ropes of the block and tackle hanging down into the stairwell had reminded me that the railings had been removed from the top landing. One foot out of place, and I’d be doing a vertical quick step.

  The building got less extensive horizontally the farther up you went; most of the extensions had been to the first and second floors. Up here in the roof space, there was a single straight corridor with half a dozen rooms leading off it, three to each side. The great rose window was directly over my head here, and through it I could see a few stars breaking cover as a mass of black cloud shifted off westward. They did nothing to relieve the darkness, though; it was even more dense and opaque up here than it had been on the floor below. I squinted down the corridor. Nothing to see, but that didn’t mean there was nothing there.

  I walked down the corridor, trying each door in turn. They all opened, and they all gave onto empty rooms. Those on the right-hand side were completely bare, just dusty floorboards and nailed-up plasterboard, without even electric sockets or lights. Those on the left were in a more finished state, but turned out, when I flicked on the shadeless lights, to hold nothing more interesting than a few boxes and stacks of old papers.

  But the last door on the left was already slightly ajar. I pushed the door fully open and scanned the room from the corridor without trying to walk in. I found the light switch to the right of the door and pressed it. Nothing happened. Either the bulb had given out already, or more likely nobody had bothered to put one in the socket yet. It was too dark to see much, but the room seemed to be little more than a cupboard; shelves extended from floor to ceiling on the wall facing me, which was only about six feet away. More box files and stacked papers: a smell of sour, unbreathed air.

  I took a single step forward, over the threshold. I just about had time to take a paranoid glance behind the door before someone barged me hard from behind, sending me staggering forward into the room. I slammed painfully into the shelving before I could even fall. One of the shelves tipped under my weight, but I got my balance back and turned around.

  The light from a torch dazzled me momentarily—and then the torch itself, wielded in a more blunt-instrument kind of way, smacked me on the side of the head. But since the light of the torch telegraphed the movement, I was moving with it; instead of being brained, I just got a clip to the side of the head
, and then I was up and fighting.

  Fighting someone who seemed a fair bit more solid than me and who took my body punch in his stride. He hit me again, with his fist this time instead of the torch, and I went down on my back.

  I heard the door slam to; that got me up again fast. If my attacker had a key, I could be locked in here. I got both hands around the door handle and leaned down and in. I pulled, and he pulled back against me. I braced myself with one foot on the wall, the other on the floor, and pulled harder.

  When the door flew inward, I staggered back and almost went down again—but for the second time I hit the shelves and managed to stay upright. As my attacker’s footsteps retreated along the corridor, I was out of the door and after him. I couldn’t see him up ahead, but I could hear him, his feet crashing on the bare boards. I came out onto the landing at a flat run, registering about a second too late that those pounding footfalls had stopped.

  I just about caught a blur of movement from off to my right-hand side, and I started to turn. His shoulder hit me midchest, knocking the breath right out of me and sending me backward in a drunken, flailing stagger. One step, two . . . I would probably have managed to get my balance back if there’d been anything under me on step three. Instead, my trailing foot stepped out into nothingness, and I tipped and fell without a sound off the edge of the landing.

  I’m too introspective, maybe, to make a good man of action. Certainly on that short fall, I didn’t have enough time even to react to what was happening. I remember throwing out my arms as if there might be something conveniently placed for me to catch hold of. Only empty air rushed through my fingers, and I closed my eyes, bracing myself—metaphorically speaking—for a solid chunk of marble tiling to rush through my head.

  But something writhed out of the shadows to one side of me like the business end of a lash, thwacking solidly against my chest and the side of my head and then snaking around me once, twice, three times. Along the line where it touched me, fire ate its way inward from my skin to my core, and I opened my mouth to scream.