The Devil You Know fc-1 Page 19

  The sickening jolt as I stopped falling turned the scream into a voiceless bullet of breath that shot through my clenched teeth and ricocheted away into the darkness. I dangled for a moment like the bob on the end of a pendulum telling borrowed time. Then the rope loosened and unraveled from around me, and I fell the remaining few feet to the ground.

  I landed heavily on the cold tiles, unable for a moment even to suck breath back into my lungs. Someone ran past me, and I got a blurry view of his back as he sped through the open door.

  By the time I could get back on my feet and stagger to the door, there was no sign of anybody out on Churchway. A sudden gust of cold wind blew newspaper pages and Styrofoam burger boxes along the pavement, and that was the only movement. After a few moments to get my breath back to normal, I went back inside and climbed the stairs back up to the attic. This time, though, I turned on the lights—so this time, I saw the short dogleg at the end of the corridor, off to the left, that I’d missed the first time around.

  There was another door there, too, off the end of the dogleg, and so on the same line as the other left-hand rooms, but maybe slightly smaller. This was where my attacker had hidden—after pushing open another door on the main corridor so that I’d be that bit more likely to turn my back on him before I reached him. Clever guy. Clever and scared and just a bit desperate. Someone who had taken advantage of the archive being open after hours to slip back inside and . . . well, and what?

  I tried the door. It opened like all the others, and there was a functional light switch just inside. It showed me a room no different from any of the ones I’d already seen. No shelves this time, but a big bundle of flat-packed storage boxes tied with string stood propped against one wall. On the floor there was a roll of brown parcel tape and a plastic supermarket bag that, on inspection, proved to be stuffed with a great many other plastic supermarket bags. No big revelations here. Maybe the guy had just retreated in front of me as I came up the stairs until he ran out of space to retreat into and came out fighting. They say you ought to be careful when you corner rats.

  But there was a cupboard. I only saw it as I turned to leave, because it was a low, squat sort of cupboard, and it was completely hidden behind the door. I pulled on the handle: locked. I probably had the key that would open it sitting right there on Alice’s key ring, but my hands were shaking from my recent air-miss, and it could take me a long time to find it—with the risk that someone down below would see the light where no light should be and draw the wrong conclusion. All in all, it was probably better to wait.

  I went downstairs, let myself out, and locked up. I was about to post Alice’s keys and ID card back through the mail slot, but I yielded to a wicked temptation and put them back in my pocket instead. You never knew.

  I was intending to go home, but somehow I found myself heading south instead of north. Just down from Russell Square, I found a late-night bar that was still open, went in, and ordered a whisky sour.

  I was bone weary, and I wasn’t thinking all that straight, but coming to the archive by night had succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. It wasn’t some freak accident that had tangled me up in the ropes of the builders’ pulley. It wasn’t the air that had held me and stopped me from falling. It was her. And in wrapping herself around me like that, she’d come in so close that I couldn’t possibly fail to get what I needed. I had her now, had her mapped out in my mind in many dimensions—a vivid sensory snapshot of her essence and her parameters that was untranslatable except into music and that I could no more forget than I could forget my own name.

  I toasted myself in silence. They think it’s all over, said Ken Wolstenholme’s voice from deep within the dusty archive of my head.

  Well, it is now.

  Eleven

  OVER THERE,” WHISPERED JOHN GITTINGS. “IN THE corner, behind the hedge.”

  I looked where he was pointing and saw nothing. But then a second later, the leaves of the box hedge rustled again, although there wasn’t the slightest breath of wind. One of the keepers raised his rifle, and I pushed it right back down again.

  “You don’t even know what you’d be hitting,” I muttered. “You’d look pretty bloody stupid if it was a peacock.”

  John and I exchanged a glance as the keeper shipped his rifle again with obvious resentment. “Pincer movement?” John asked.

  “Makes sense,” I said. “I’m going to go around the zebra house and use the back wall for cover. You come in along the line of the hedge on this side, but don’t get in too close. When I round that corner, we should see each other. I’ll give you the high sign, and we both start playing at once.”

  John nodded tersely. I turned to the head keeper, a guy named Savage. He wasn’t carrying a rifle, and he seemed to be the only one of the zoo staff who didn’t want to play Buffalo Bill. “The music should drive him out toward you,” I said. “He won’t be able to stick to the hedge because he’ll be hurting too much. If we’re lucky, he’ll just break across the grass, and you can pop him at your leisure.”

  “That seems easy enough,” Savage acknowledged.

  “Yeah, it does, doesn’t it? Only if we hit the wrong key, he’ll turn around and tear our throats out.”

  “He” was a loup-garou, and I was moonlighting. John’s call had come in at seven in the morning, when I was just surfacing from shallow sleep and another set of very nasty dreams. Pen had relayed the message, expecting me to say some pithier equivalent of “No, thank you”—and was amazed when I passed back the answer that I’d be there inside of an hour.

  It’s a character flaw, I know. When I’m unhappy about something, I pick a fight, and that morning, I was in such a lousy mood, I’d have taken a swing at John “The Quietman” Ruiz. So all things considered, the other John’s invitation to come and help him corner a werewolf at Dunstable Zoo had come as something of a relief.

  Were-something, anyway. They didn’t know exactly what they had, because all they’d seen were the savaged carcasses of five animals: three wallabies, a zebra, and most recently a lion. So we were talking about something vicious and fast that didn’t care what it killed, and now they thought they had it cornered in a stand of trees at the back of the site between the rhino enclosure and a high wall that backed onto the main A-road beyond. The keepers had closed in with tranquilizer guns, but they couldn’t flush the loup-garou, and they didn’t want to go in blind.

  So here I was. It was therapy, really—a way of keeping busy without facing the things that were really bugging me. If it left me alive and in one piece, I’d be laughing.

  I skirted the back of the zebra house, staying in close. I wasn’t worried that he’d see me—there wouldn’t be any line of sight until I got to the corner—but the rank zebra-shit smell ought to hide my scent from him while I got in closer.

  When I got to the corner, I peered cautiously around it, scanning the distant line of the hedge. After a moment or two, I made out Gittings; he was padding silently along, zeroing in on the area where we’d seen the suspicious rustling of leaves.

  I waved to him, and he waved back. But when I started the countdown on my raised fingers, he made a negative sign with his left hand, the right gripping his tabor. John’s a music man, like me: strictly percussion, but it still puts us close enough in our exorcism technique that we can work well together. Now he was signaling that he wanted to get in closer. I shook my head emphatically. We were only trying to flush the beast with generalized psychic static, not to exorcise the spirit that was animating whatever flesh we had here. We didn’t need to be right on top of the damned thing.

  But John had other ideas, obviously. Ignoring my vote of no confidence, he took another few steps forward along the hedge. Then he went down on one knee, pointed to me, and indicated that he’d do the countdown himself. I wasn’t happy about it, but I didn’t have any choice. I shrugged and nodded.

  On zero, I started to pipe. I opened low and soft, let the wind pick it up, and then started to layer in the dips and ri
ses that ought to get the loup-garou’s ghost-passenger hurting.

  For a minute, and then a minute more, nothing. But patience was the key. I glided up and down the scale, confident that sooner or later, I was going to hit a nerve. John knelt, nodding encouragement to me, his left hand dancing like a conductor’s baton. But he still hadn’t started to play.

  There was movement in the box hedge: branches trembling, then bending, seemingly only a foot away from where John was kneeling.

  I was expecting something to burst out of the hedge. The thing leapt over it and hit the ground already running—running toward me. Rifles popped, but the keepers had been aiming low to the ground; I could actually see the scatter and swirl of leaves as most of the darts ripped harmlessly into the hedge.

  The beast was a nightmare. Even now that it was out in the daylight, I couldn’t see what animal it had been. The ghost inside it had bulked out the torso and the legs and turned the gape-mouthed head into a tooth-bristling, mythical obscenity. Of course it didn’t help that I was seeing it full-on; teeth filled most of my line of sight.

  Gittings was standing now, and his fingers on the tabor made a loud, rapid stutter of sound like machine-gun fire. The beast didn’t slow, and it was coming in so quickly, it would be on me in seconds. I had two choices: run and be brought down from behind, or stand my ground and get my throat ripped out.

  I went for option C. Since the thing could jump like a flea, that was probably what it was going to do. When its upper body came down low to the ground, tensing for the spring, I dropped and rolled forward. Its flying leap took it over me while I finished my roll on my back and got in a lucky kick that caught its hind leg and made a mess of its landing trajectory.

  Didn’t do me much good, though. Okay, I was up and running before it could get all its legs in their right places again and turn around, but the bastard thing went from zero to sixty in three seconds. With me these days, it’s more like three weeks’ notice and a friendly push-start. The thing’s whole weight hit me solidly in the middle of the back, and my feet went out from under me. I hit the ground heavily, face slamming hard into the grass. Stenching furnace breath billowed over me, and I ducked and covered only just in time to hear massive jaws snapping closed an inch from my ear.

  They only closed once, I’m happy to say. Five sharp cracks sounded closely enough together to be mistaken for one, and the thing collapsed on top of me. A moment later, the keepers were hauling me out from underneath the loup-garou’s stinking, slumbering mass.

  God, it was even worse this close up. The basic shape was canine, but the claws were recurved like sickle blades, and there were additional spurs of bone at elbows and haunches. Splotchy fur like a hyena’s covered its overmuscled shoulders, but its hind quarters were bare and leprous. It must have massed about two hundred and fifty pounds.

  “Old soul,” said Savage with something like respect. He meant that this was a ghost that had been around the track a few times and had picked up some neat tricks where the molding of its host flesh was concerned. Even now, it was impossible to tell what kind of dog this monster had started out as.

  “Have you got a cage to put it in?” I asked.

  He shot me a glance; shook his head. “We couldn’t keep this here. The smell of it would make the other animals run mad. No, this goes to Professor Mulbridge down in London. And good riddance.”

  Gittings came up panting. “Sorry, Fix,” he said. “I thought this way would work better.”

  I gave him a high-octane glare. “What way is that?” I demanded. “You sit on your hands, I lose my head?”

  “No. I wanted you to get its attention and then, while it was focused on you, I thought I’d have time to do a full exorcism. That’s why I got in so close. Rip the ghost out of the flesh, and you’ve just got an animal, after all. Much easier to deal with.”

  I poked him in the chest. “Don’t change the plan on the ground when it’s me that’s in the line of fire, John. Next time, you find another piece of raw meat to dangle, okay?”

  He was contrite. “Sorry, Fix. You’re right. It just seemed like a good idea.”

  I simmered down. It had been a bad call, but it wasn’t really Gittings that was jangling my nerves, and taking it out on him wouldn’t make me feel any better.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  “Breakfast’s on me,” said John recklessly. But my churned-up stomach wouldn’t let me eat, so that was a really cheap round.

  Driving back into London, I thought about the various reversals that last night had brought. I asked myself why the hell I was out in the Bedfordshire sticks doing a good impersonation of live bait instead of in the Bonnington, whistling the faceless lady back to her grave.

  And the only answer I could come up with was that I was still unhappy.

  Pen needed the car, so I dropped it back around to her. Walking down Turnpike Lane, I called Peele to tell him I had some things to do that would keep me away from the archive for most of the day.

  “What’s left of the day, you mean,” he corrected me prissily. “It’s almost noon now.”

  Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself. “I had some other matters to attend to,” I said.

  “Other matters?” He was suitably scandalized. “You mean you’re taking on more commissions before you’ve finished here?”

  “No, I went to the zoo.”

  “Very amusing, Mr. Castor. The things that you’re doing today, can you honestly tell me that they relate to us? To our problem here?”

  “Yes,” I said, which was true enough. “A lot of it is about getting more background information. I’m on the case. I feel like I’m really moving forward.” And now I was stretching the truth more or less to breaking point. “But if I can use a military metaphor, Mr. Peele, sometimes when you move forward too fast, you leave your flanks exposed. I just want to make sure that I’m not missing something.”

  He gave in sullenly and indicated that there was a conversation that needed to be had about an incident in the workroom the day before. I told him I’d be at his disposal either later that day or first thing tomorrow. Then, before he could hang up, I hit him with the little sting in the tail I’d been holding back all this time.

  “Oh, just one more thing before you go, Mr. Peele,” I said like Columbo’s understudy. “Why didn’t you tell me I was the second name on your list?”

  “I’m sorry?” Peele sounded surprised and coldly affronted—as if I’d accused him of marital infidelity.

  I rephrased. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d already used another exorcist? Gabriel McClennan has been in the Bonnington, and he’s met your ghost. I like to know if I’m unpicking someone else’s work rather than doing a job from scratch.”

  There was a long silence. “I don’t understand,” Peele said at last. “Who told you that? Nobody else has been at the archive. I came to you first.”

  He sounded sincere, but I couldn’t let it go. I knew what I’d seen when the ghost was flashing pictures into my head. “You came to me first. Okay. Why was that, exactly? You said it was a personal referral. Who from?” I should have asked him before. Nothing to plead in my own defence there except ego, because it was an obvious question.

  “I did say that,” Peele admitted, sounding annoyed now. “I’m afraid it was an overstatement. What I meant to say was that I’d done the research myself—chosen you on the basis of my own efforts, rather than—”

  “You saw one of my ads,” I suggested.

  “Yes.” Reluctantly, with a slightly sullen undertone—the voice of an honest man who’s been caught out in a trivial lie. “I believe it was in the classified section of the Hendon Times . . .”

  My ad had been in the Wembley Times, but all of the North London free sheets are basically the same paper with a different masthead. After what had happened with Rafi, though, I’d never renewed the standing order. The ad wouldn’t have been in there for over a year.

  Bachelor flat. Stack of newspaper
s getting taller and taller in a corner of the kitchen or a hall cupboard.

  “This was an old copy, right?”

  “Perhaps. I looked through several issues, but more or less at random.”

  It made sense, but I was still suspicious.

  “My office is in Harlesden. This other man, Gabriel McClennan, he’s local talent. You’ve probably walked past his office on your way to work—”

  “I told you, I’ve never heard of an exorcist named McClennan!” Peele sounded irritated and indignant now—and it didn’t have the hallmarks of the anger you use to cover up a lie, with which I’m more than familiar. But I couldn’t have mistaken that face. The archive ghost had met Gabe McClennan at close quarters. Another exorcist had already worked the place, and yet she was still there. So if it wasn’t Peele, somebody else was trying to exorcise the ghost. Now why would that be?

  “Okay, skip it,” I told Peele brusquely. I’d follow up in my own sweet time, but it didn’t look as though I was going to find out any more right then—and I knew better than to clutch at straws purely so that I could flog dead horses with them. “How did your meeting in Bilbao go?” I asked to change the subject.

  Peele was aware of the discontinuity but unable to resist the red herring. “Very well, thank you. Very successfully indeed. I hope to hear good news within the next few days—news that will strengthen the links between the Bonnington and the Guggenheim Museum and be good for both institutions. But Mr. Castor, I need to know more about the progress you’ve made. Alice says—”

  “Excellent progress, Mr. Peele. Better than I’d expected. In fact, I’ve just been able to eliminate a false trail that might have tied up a lesser exorcist for two whole days. Sorry to disrupt your morning. I’ll check in with you later on.”

  “A false trail?” he echoed, bemused. But I hung up before he could shape that into an actual question.