The Devil You Know (4 page)

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.

THIS
WAS
TEN
YEARS
OR
MORE
AFTER
THE
DEAD
first began to 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.

“The Bonnington Archive is in Euston,” he began. “In Churchway, off the end of what used to be Drummond Street. We specialize in maps and charts and original documents—with a London provenance, of course, because a lot of our running costs are met through the Corporation of London and through the boroughs’
JMT
funding.” He translated the acronym with an automatic air, like a man used to speaking in jargon and not being understood. “Joint Museums and Trusts, an initiative of the mayor’s office. We also have a maritime artifacts collection, funded separately by the office of the Admiralty and the Seamen’s Union, and a very sizable library of first editions, somewhat haphazardly acquired . . .”

“And the ghost is haunting the archive itself?” I prompted him, alarmed at the prospect of listening to an itemized list. “Since when, exactly?”

“Since the late summer. Perhaps the middle of September, or thereabouts. There was a lull in October, but now she’s returned, and she seems to be worse than ever. Actually threatening. Violent.”

“Are the sightings clustered? I mean, does the ghost haunt any particular room?”

“Not really, no. She—she wanders around, to a large extent. But within limits. I believe she’s been seen in almost every room on the first floor and in the basement. Sometimes, less often, on the upper stories.”

That peripatetic aspect was unusual, and it piqued my interest. “You say
she
, so I assume her form is recognizably human?”

This question seemed to alarm Peele a little. “Yes. Of course. Are there some who aren’t? She appears to be a young woman, with dark hair. Dressed in a hood and a white gown or robe of some kind. It’s only her face that”—again he seemed to have a brief struggle with some word or concept that was difficult for him to get a handle on—”her face is very difficult to see,” he offered at last.

“And her behavior?” I glanced at my watch. I still had to confess to Pen that I’d screwed up badly at the party, and now there was Rafi’s letter to deal with. The quicker I got through the sympathetic-ear routine and got on my way, the better. “You said she was inoffensive until recently.”

There was a pause on the line, a long enough pause that I was opening my mouth to ask Peele if he was still there, when he finally spoke.