The Devil You Know (42 page)

The cars rolled up about half an hour later. I gave them a quarter of an hour after that and then went sauntering along after them.

The doors of the Bonnington were open. No sign of the ushers from the Oratory, but an MC in a red tux gave me a welcoming smile that congealed into something a lot less cordial when he saw how I was dressed. I flashed the invite at him and walked on by.

There was no receiving line, so when I got up to the reading room, my entrance went unnoticed. I looked around at a scene of untrammeled joy and innocent celebration; it made me feel just a little bit awkward about what I was going to do next.

Some trestle tables had been set up at one end of the room and draped with long white tablecloths that trailed to the floor. Champagne cocktails were being served, and waitresses dressed in vaguely period black and white were tacking around the room with silver trays full of elegant finger foods. All very refined. More annoyingly, the shelving units and the librarians’ station had all been pushed back against the wall and camouflaged with white sheeting; there was no natural cover that I could use for the next stage of the proceedings, which was the truly fiddly one.

It didn’t help that I stuck out like a rabbi at a hoedown. The only reason nobody had noticed me so far was because there was a speech going on, and all eyes were turned on the man—a complete stranger to me—who was giving it. I scanned the crowd, saw Rich dressed in an immaculate gray morning suit with a sky blue waistcoat, talking with Jon Tiler off at the edge of the crowd on the far side of the room from me. Cheryl was up at the front, her arm linked in her mother’s. After a little casting around, I located Alice and Jeffrey by the drinks table, Alice holding out her champagne flute to be refreshed while Jeffrey talked to a fat woman in a voluminous red dress. His face set in a tight, pained smile, he looked like a man trying hard to have a good time at his own lynching party.

I looked around for somewhere I could play undisturbed, but nothing much suggested itself. Just as the speech wrapped up to loud applause, I ducked behind a pillar that at least would shield me from a casual glance. I slipped my whistle out of my pocket and put it to my lips.

Right here in the heart of her territory, my sense of the ghost was as sharp and as clear as it was ever going to be, but this still wasn’t going to be easy. Too much going on, too many competing sounds and stimuli. I closed my eyes to block out at least one source of distraction and tried to focus only on the feel of her in my mind—the sense that for me was more like hearing than anything else, but still impossible to dissect or describe.

The groom was speaking now, and all other conversation in the room had stilled. I waited, seething with impatience, for the background hum to start up again. He talked for what seemed like an hour—about what a difference Eileen had made to his life, about how lucky he was, about how much he was looking forward to being a father to Cheryl. I wondered if he’d seen the job description.

When the applause came again, I squeezed out the first notes. I tried to keep it low, and I managed at first, but the tune goes where it wants to go. If you push it into a different pattern, you get a different result.

My mind narrowed to the succession of notes, the inscape of the ghost’s music. Part of it was “The Bonny Swans,” but most of it was new, hers and nobody else’s, the sound that was the space she occupied in the world, the song that sang her.

Suggestive gaps in the skein of voices from around me told me that the guests closest to me had heard the music now. They were probably looking around for its source. I carried on playing, not hurrying, not slowing—I was tied to the wheel now, and I had to go where it took me.

The silence spread, and footsteps were coming toward me, but it was almost done. A few more bars would take me there. A hand clamped on my shoulder. Eyes tight shut, I ignored it, wound down through a plaintive diminuendo to a single note, which bounced up again into an unexpectedly defiant closing trill.

The whistle was snatched out of my hand. I opened my eyes to find myself staring into the eyes of the Tonka Toy—the burly one of Cheryl’s two cousins. He held the whistle up in front of me, his face a scowling mask. Other faces clustered behind him, looking at me curiously or resentfully.

“Is this a joke?” the thickset man demanded aggressively.

“No,” I answered. “It’s an invitation.”

There were gasps from the back of the crowd and then a scream. All heads turned in that direction, including the Tonka Toy’s. As he gawped along with the rest of them, I took my whistle back from his hand and pocketed it carefully. All hell was about to break loose, so I wanted the instrument safely stowed.

The archive ghost was walking through the center of the room and through the people in the room, who scrambled to get some distance from her. Ghosts may be fairly common phenomena now, but some ghosts have more presence than others, and the faceless woman had a grimness of purpose about her that saturated the room.

She stopped and stared about her without eyes. She was more solid now, and you could see that the white garment she wore ended at the waist. From the waist down, she wore a plain black skirt, and her arms were bare.

“Gdyeh Rosa?”
she said with a keening, complaining emphasis.
“Ya nye znayo gdyeh ona. Vi dolzhni pomogitye menya naiti yeyo.”

At various points in the crowd, people cried out.

“Ya potrevozhnao Rosa.”

I shoved the usher aside and plunged into the crowd, my head darting from side to side as I went. It had to be now, while the shock of the ghost’s speaking aloud was still fresh and raw in people’s minds. I’d gone to a lot of trouble to set this up, and I was damned if I was going to let it go to waste.

Alice and Jeffrey were still over by the drinks table, but they were heading for the door as quickly as they could without Jeffrey actually being forced to touch somebody. Alice was leading the way, savagely determined, with Peele enclitically lodged just behind her. I stepped into their path, and she came to an abrupt halt, staring at me in affronted astonishment.

“Now this is what I call a party,” I said with bumpkin jocularity.

“Castor,” Alice said, and there was a hard catch in her voice that took me by surprise—a look in her eye that was something like hatred.

I put out my hand and took hers, and though she pulled back sharply, I kept hold. The first time I’d touched her, I’d listened pretty hard, but I hadn’t picked up a damn thing. But this was different. She was angry and shaken, and any guard she had was down. If I couldn’t get a reading from her now, I never would.

“You’re looking radiant, Alice,” I said, squeezing her hand and smiling inanely into her face. “You must be pregnant.”

FLASH
. I felt the stab of her fury and indignation, followed by an all-but-submerged twinge of real fear. Fear of the ghost, certainly, but another fear rising out of that so steeply that all perspective was lost. Alice really didn’t want to be pregnant. And she really didn’t want me pawing at her. As she wrestled to get her hand free, I saw in quick succession within her mind a child’s-eye view of a huge, looming man shaving at an oval mirror; a dead daffodil in a slender rose vase, the last inch of water turned to brown ullage; her desk at the archive, pristine and empty, the mail trays lined up hospital-corner fashion with the desk’s far right-hand edge. It took me a moment to realize that although it was her desk, it was in Peele’s narrow, oddly shaped office. The boss’s desk, in other words, but with her name on the door instead of his.

Alice got her hand free from mine with some effort. I thought she was going to use it to slap me, but she only swore at me under her breath—a word I wouldn’t have expected her to know, the last two syllables of which were “bubble.” I ignored her and lunged past her at Jeffrey.

Being autistic, Jeffrey had a much stronger and more deeply rooted objection to being touched by me than Alice did. Where she was merely fastidious, he was pathological. So I didn’t have to do anything to raise the emotional temperature. He stiffened as I grabbed his wrist, and then he actually jumped, his feet leaving the ground momentarily.

“Don’t!” he yelped. “Mr. Castor!”

FLASH
. I got a microsecond glimpse of a corridor in the archive—the ghost standing there, sideways on but with her face turned toward him—before raw, flaring panic obliterated all images and left his mind pure white: the white of white noise.

Peele was physically struggling to get away from me, and people were staring at us in amazement. I let go too suddenly, and he stumbled backward, crashing into the people behind him and sending them sprawling. Alice did slap me now—a stinging backhander that would probably leave a visible mark. Jon Tiler loomed up out of nowhere to help Jeffrey get back on his feet. As he reached forward, I intercepted him and grabbed both his wrists, making him stop and stare at me in astonishment.

A moment later, I arced backward like an epileptic suffering from a grand mal seizure. I hit the ground like a badly packed sack of ballast.

I hadn’t touched Tiler at all on my first day at the archive. It was probably just as well. He was a supersender—an emotional foghorn—and I would have made a bad first impression, losing control of my limbs in front of a whole lot of people I’d only just been introduced to.

I fell heavily but somehow managed to keep one hand in contact with Tiler’s wrist as I hit the ground and jackknifed. The images and impressions I was getting were sluicing and scouring their way through my mind as though they’d come from a high-pressure hose. I couldn’t keep them out, and I couldn’t sort them. Visions of the ghost came through strongest, in all the rooms and hallways where he’d seen her—but the floodgates were open, and the rising tide of recollection broke over them, washed them away. I saw most of Tiler’s childhood, got to know his mother from a baby’s-eye view (his interest at that age had centered mainly on her left breast), relived potty training and bedtime stories and an abusive relationship with the family cat, and Christ knew what else. It wasn’t chronological, though. I saw him sitting in a cinema, crying at
Gone With the Wind
; at home, pouring boiling water into a Pot Noodle; and at the archive, carefully swathing an old leather-bound book in bubble wrap. It was a parish register, labeled March to June 1840. He looked over his shoulder as he worked to make sure nobody saw. He protected the corners with cardboard brackets, laboriously cut out and taped together. He knew what he was doing; he’d done it a thousand times before, always with the same warm tingle in his lower abdomen. It was like ascending toward an orgasm that never came—and that feeling, that endless rising scale, was the anchor of his life.

“I think he’s dead.”

“Don’t be stupid, Jon. He just fainted.”

“Yeah, but did you hear that crack when his head hit the ground?”

“That wasn’t his head. It was a metallic sound. It was something in his pocket.”

“Tin whistle. Look. It’s bent into an L shape.”

Oh no. No fucking way. A cold gust of sorrow and remorse brought me the rest of the way up into full consciousness. My whistle. My sword and my shield through all the half-arsed vicissitudes of life. It was the same as a million others, and it was absolutely unique. And all that was left of it now was the jagged pain in my side where the broken end of it was digging into my third rib.

I opened my eyes halfway and found myself staring up into a wide range of startled, suspicious, and resentful faces. Cheryl’s was right in the middle of them, and although she looked relieved to see me conscious again, I could tell from the hard set of her mouth that her membership in the Felix Castor fan club had lapsed forever. That was two body blows inside of twenty seconds.

A silver hip flask was pressed into my hand. Feeling numb and cold and strangely removed from myself, I took a swig without checking what it was and found myself coughing noisily on some raw but excellent bourbon. A lot of it went down the front of my coat, but the rest of it did the trick. I turned to see who it was I had to thank; Rich Clitheroe was looking down at me with a surreptitious eyebrow flash of sympathy and solidarity. I handed the flask back to him with a nod, flashing back to his secret stash of Lucozade in the traveling fridge down in the strong room. Well, “Be Prepared” is the Boy Scouts’ marching song, and some things just stay with you. But that wasn’t the phrase he’d used in any case; it was something like that, only different.

In case of emergency . . .

Domino nudged domino nudged domino, and everything fell into a pattern that had been there all along, unseen. I sat up, feeling an odd sense of weightlessness. I was like a thrown ball at the top of its arc, when it’s stopped rising but hasn’t begun to fall—freed from gravity, freed from the necessity of choice. Cheryl helped me to my feet, and our gazes met, furiously accusing on her side, God only knew what on mine. There was no sign of the ghost now. The summons I’d sent out to her would have broken when I lost consciousness, and there was nothing to keep her in this confusing, exposed, overbright space.

“I’m sorry,” I told Cheryl, leaning in close so that nobody else could hear.

She didn’t bend. “I bet you always are, afterward. I bet it even works sometimes.”

“I hope it will work with Sylvie,” I murmured. “I owe her the biggest apology of all.”

Other voices were breaking in now, and other hands were taking hold of me. Jeffrey Peele was saying, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” and Alice was interjecting comments like “It’s all right” and “You’re fine now” without any noticeable effect. Someone else—a woman—was asking whether she should call the police, and one of the ushers—the barge pole this time—muscled in between me and Cheryl to suggest that I might want to go out into the street and get some fresh air. His nose wrinkled, no doubt smelling the booze.

I let myself be shepherded away toward the door with his hand gripping my collar, but then I stopped again before he could get any real momentum going. I turned back, found Rich in the crowd. He stared at me, a little startled, as I made the universally recognizable gesture that meant he should phone me. I pointed to Jeffrey, meaning that Jeffrey had my phone number.