The Devil You Know fc-1 Page 3

  Anyway, things got a bit confused after that. Dodson was yelling at me to pack up my things and get out, and spitting and spluttering about a lawsuit to follow. Peter had fled from the room, pursued by Barbara, and barricaded himself in somewhere upstairs, to judge by the bangs and yells that I could hear. The party guests milled around like a decapitated squid—lots of appendages, no brain, faintly suspect smell. And Sebastian stood watching me with big, solemn eyes and never said another word as long as I was there.

  When I asked Dodson for the money he owed me for the performance, he punched me in the mouth. I took that in my stride—no teeth loosened, only a symbolic amount of bloodshed. I probably had that coming. He went for the camera next, though, and I went for it, too. Me and that Brownie went back a long way, and I didn’t want to have to go looking for another machine with such sympathetic vibes. We tussled inconclusively for a few moments for control of it, then he seemed to remember where he was—in his own living room, watched by a gaggle of his son’s best friends, whose fathers he also no doubt knew well in work or club circles.

  “Get out,” he told me, his eyes still wild. “Get out of my house, you irresponsible bastard, before I throw you out on your ear.”

  I gave up on the money. It wouldn’t be easy for me to argue that traumatizing the birthday boy was within my remit. I packed everything up laboriously into the four cases under James’s glaring eyes and stertorous breathing. He was suffering a kind of anaphylactic reaction to me now, and if I didn’t get out soon, he might crash and burn as his immune system tore itself apart in its desire to remove the irritation.

  Out into the hall, and I caught sight of Barbara on the upstairs landing. Her face was pale and tense, but I swear she threw me a nod. With four suitcases’ worth of heavy freight, I was in no position to wave back—and it might have been tactless in any case.

  It was about half past six by this time, with the November dark already settled in. Pen would be waiting for me back in her basement, eager for hard news and harder currency. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t really give her either.

  The moon was three days from the dark. Like most people these days, I kept my eye on the almanac when I was planning to be out after nightfall. The dead don’t follow the phases of the moon, of course, but there are lots of nastier things that do—and the dead I can deal with, in any case.

  So I drove around to Craven Park Road. It was somewhere to go, and I have to stop by the office once every couple of months if only to throw out the mail. Otherwise, the slowly accumulating weight of unpaid bills would threaten the structural integrity of the building.

  Harlesden isn’t the best place in the world to put up your shingle. You have to park your car out on the main road if you want to have an even chance of it being there when you get back to it. The Yardie boys tout coke out on the street and stare you down hard if you accidentally make eye contact. And the beggars who sit exhausted in the doorways, their hollow-eyed stares spearing you like the Ancient Mariner’s as you walk by, are mostly the risen-again. Not ghosts, I mean, but those who’ve come back in the body—zombies, for want of a less melodramatic word. They’re a sad bunch, on the whole, but that doesn’t stop your flesh from crawling slightly as you walk by.

  But tonight, everything was pretty quiet. Even the sign over my door was holding up pretty well. Sometimes the kids from the Stonehouse Estate come by with their airbrushes and turn the sign into something whimsical and baroque, obliterating in the process the simple, dignified face I present to the world. But tonight the words F. CASTOR ERADICATIONS stood out in all their austere clarity.

  Grambas, the proprietor of the kebab house next door, was leaning in his doorway, enjoying a roll-up cigarette whose heavy smoke hung around him like a shroud. He grinned at me as I unlocked the street door, and I shot him a wink. We’ve got an understanding: he’s promised me that he won’t lay ghosts or bind demons so long as I don’t serve greasy fried food and overmatured salads.

  My office is actually above the kebab house. Once inside the door, there’s a narrow flight of awkwardly high stairs that leads up, with a sharp, right-angled bend, to my second-floor premises. Pen says the stairs are high because the conversion was a weird one, swapping between three stories and four, depending on which of the original residents sold out and which ones stayed. I reckon the builders were working on margin; twenty high steps are quicker to throw up than thirty normal-size ones.

  I scooped up a thick handful of mail and headed on up. Even if you’re fit, you get to the top of those steps a little breathless. I’m not fit. I kicked open the office door, breathing like a dirty phone call, and flicked on the light.

  It’s not much of an office, even by Harlesden standards. Being over a kebab shop—while it has its advantages in terms of daily sustenance—tends to lend a greasy miasma to the walls, the furniture, and the air you breathe. And Pen had never made good on her promise to get me some decent furniture (although her offer still stood if I ever got even on the rent), so all I had was a Formica-topped self-assembly desk and two tubular steel chairs from IKEA. The filing cabinet was a two-drawer midget that also served as a table to hold the kettle and tea things. By way of decoration, I had six framed illustrations from Little Nemo in Slumberland, which I’d got from IKEA on the same expedition that brought me the chairs. They made clients feel relaxed and receptive. Also, they weighed in at less than four quid each.

  Yes, it was pathetic. But it was mine.

  Or, at least, it had been.

  I sat down in one of the chairs, put my feet up on the filing cabinet, and started to flick through the post. For each piece of real mail, there were two curry-house fliers and a great investment opportunity, which made progress fairly fast; not many envelopes actually needed to be opened before making the fall of shame into the already-overflowing wastepaper basket. An electricity bill, black, and a phone bill, red . . . these colors change with the seasons and are a gentle reminder of time’s passing.

  I stopped short. The next envelope in the stack was pale gray and bore a return address that I recognized: the Charles Stanger Care Facility, Muswell Hill. My name was written on the front of the envelope in a pained, cramped hand in which curved lines were approximated by collections of short, angular jags. It was fractal handwriting; looking at it, you imagined that under a microscope, every stroke of the pen would open up into a thousand angled flecks of tortured ink.

  Rafi. Nobody else wrote like that. Nobody sane could write like that.

  I opened the envelope carefully, peeling back the gummed flap rather than just tearing off one end and running my finger along. Rafi had caught me with a razor blade once, taped into the corner of the envelope. I’d almost lost the top joint of my thumb. This time, though, there was nothing except a single sheet of paper torn from a notepad. On it, in very different handwriting from that which had addressed the envelope (but still Rafi’s hand—he had several), there was a message that, if nothing else, was admirable in its brevity.

  YOURE GOING TO MAKE A MISTAKE YOU NEED TO TALK TO ME BEFORE YOU MAKE A MISTAKE YOU NEED TO TALK TO ME NOW

  I was still staring at the letter, unsure whether to put it into my pocket or let it fall into the basket, when the phone rang. Picking it up was a reflex action; if I’d thought about it, I would have let it lie, because it was bound to get me into a conversation that I didn’t want or need.

  “Mr. Castor?”

  It was a male voice, dry and harsh with an overtone of stern disapproval. It conjured up an image of a preacher with a Bible in his hand and his finger pointing at your heart.

  “Yes?”

  “The exorcist?”

  I considered lying, but since I’d confessed to my name, there wasn’t any point. Anyway, it was entirely my own fault. Nobody had made me pick up the frigging phone; I’d done it of my own free will, as a consenting adult.

  And now I had a customer.

  Two

  THIS WAS TEN YEARS OR MORE AFTER THE DEAD first began t
o rise—I mean, to rise in sufficient numbers that it wasn’t an option anymore just to ignore them.

  They’d always been there, I guess. Certainly as a kid I was seeing them on and off whenever I was in any place that was quiet or where the light was dim. An old man standing in the street, staring at nothing as the mothers pushed their strollers right through him and kept on walking; a little girl hovering irresolute by the swings in the local playground, through all the watches of the night, and never clambering on for a ride; a shadow in the deeper shadows of a narrow alley that didn’t move quite in sync when a car went by. It wasn’t ever much of a problem, though, even for people like me, who could actually see them; most ghosts keep themselves to themselves, and it’s not like you have to feed them or clean up after them. Ninety-nine out of a hundred will never give you any trouble at all. I learned not to mention them to anybody and not to look at them directly in case they cottoned on to me and started talking. It was only bad when they talked.

  But something happened a few years before the page turned on the old millennium, as though some cosmic equivalent of a big, spiteful kid had come along and poked a stick into the graveyards of the world, just to see what would happen.

  What happened was that the dead swarmed out like ants—the dead, and a few other things.

  Nobody had any explanation for it, at least not unless you counted the many variations on “we are living in the last days, and these are the signs and wonders that were foretold.” That was an argument that played fairly well, up to a point. The Christians and the Jews had put their money on a bodily resurrection, and that was what some people seemed to be getting. But the Bible is strangely coy on the subject of the were-kind, hedges its bets on demons, and draws a big fat blank on ghosts, so the Christians and the Jews didn’t really seem to be any better placed than the rest of us to call the toss.

  The theological arguments raged like brush fires, and under the smoke that they threw up, the world changed—not overnight, but with the slow, irrevocable progress of an eclipse, or ink soaking into blotting paper. The promised apocalypse didn’t come, but new testaments were written anyway, and new religions kick-started. New and exciting careers opened up for people like me. Even the map of London got redrawn, which as far as I was concerned was the hardest thing to believe and accept.

  I was born elsewhere, you have to understand—up North, two hundred miles from the Smoke—and my view of London is an outsider’s view, assembled in easy pieces over the last twenty years. When I picture the city in my mind, I tend to see it in simplified, schematic terms—like the cageful of snakes, orange on green on blue, that you see on the inside cover of the A–Z. Where the biggest snake—the king python, the Thames—runs right through the middle, that’s the null zone. Ghosts can’t cross running water, and they don’t even like the sound of it all that much. Lesser demons and were-things will usually balk at it, too, although that’s not so widely known. So the river’s a good place to be, unless for any reason communing with the dead is something that you actually want to do.

  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.