The Devil You Know

I tried again in the basement floor and found the same thing—another lacuna, more or less exactly underneath the first—now with the added mystery of a staircase that had been moved six yards along the corridor. Why would anyone go to that degree of trouble to take a modest-size slice out of a huge public building?

When the answer came to me, I went back up to the first floor and let myself out as carefully as I’d entered. Back on the street, I counted my steps again, but I already knew where I was going to end up.

Which was at the other door: the one I’d walked past on the first day, because it was silted up with old rubbish and covered with a crudely hewn slice of hardboard. Because it was so obviously disused and didn’t lead anywhere. It was an appendix, a forgotten and useless by-product of the building’s inorganic evolution. And that was what I found myself staring at now—with new eyes.

The rubbish cleared away really easily—suspiciously easily, if you were already in that frame of mind. It was basically only a couple of empty boxes and an old blanket—the minimalist signifiers for a stage set of “a place where homeless people sleep at night.”

The plywood sheet that had been nailed to the door had a cut-out rectangle where the keyholes were—another sign that this place wasn’t quite as disused as it looked. The two locks here were a Falcon and a Schlage, and they made the archive’s front door look like a bead curtain. I struggled with the Schlage for half an hour, and I was about half a breath away from quitting when I finally heard the click that meant the cylinders were all in a line.

I pushed the door, and it opened. Beyond was a sort of lobby space about four feet square with what looked like a folded blanket for a doormat, and beyond that was another door that was also locked. Its wood looked a lot flimsier than its metal bits, and my patience had worn out a while back, so I just kicked it open.

I stepped into a completely dark room that had a sharp-sour, organic smell to it—a smell of sweat and piss and I didn’t want to know what else. I groped on the near wall for a light switch, found one, and flicked it on. A naked hundred-watt bulb cast a harsh, clinical spotlight on a room that Mr. Bleaney would have turned down flat. Three of the walls were painted a sad shade of hospital green, while the fourth had been covered over with oppressively dark wood paneling, relieved by a few vertical slats of a lighter color. The floor was covered by a strip of paisley-patterned linoleum that had been cut for another room and didn’t reach all the way to the edges. The glass of the window was intact, but all you could see through it was the inside face of another plywood board.

The room itself was bare enough to count as empty, the only item of furniture a stained, fluorescent-orange sofa with a sort of 1970s lack of shame about itself. Against the base of one wall was a row of a dozen or so liter and two-liter bottles, some full of clear liquid, some empty. That was all.

I let the inner door fall closed behind me and advanced a little farther into the room. The shock of recognition had already hit me, followed by the reflection that it really wasn’t any shock at all. This was the room I’d seen when I’d played twenty questions with the ghost—the room she’d showed to me in the slide show of her memories. She’d remembered it and communicated it to me faithfully in every detail—except that maybe there were a couple more empty bottles now and a couple fewer full ones.

I searched the room. It took no time at all, because there was nothing to look at. Nothing under the sofa, nothing behind it. There might have been something down the back of its the cushions, but I was reluctant to touch the thing—it looked as if even casual contact could pass on communicable diseases. I unscrewed one of the bottles and sniffed, then tentatively tasted. As far as I could tell, it was just water.

What did that leave? There was a shelf above the door, but it was empty apart from a thick deposit of dust. The paneling could be covering a multitude of sins, so I pressed it in a few places to see how determined it was to stay attached to the wall. On the third push, something gave and rattled slightly. I looked closer and saw the door that was set into the wood, its verticals hidden by two of the decorative slats. Closer still, and I saw the keyhole.

This one was a Chubb of about 1960s vintage—easy enough in this context to count as wide open.

Beyond the door, a flight of stairs going down. This was the original one from the plans, which was no longer part of the archive itself—and that in turn explained why there was a newer staircase a few yards farther on from where the original had been.

The acrid smell was a lot sharper now.