The Devil You Know

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.

“Most of the time, when people saw her, she’d just be standing there—especially at the end of the day. You’d feel something, like the gust of air when a door opens, and you’d look around and see her. Watching you.” There was a very meaningful pause before those last two words; Peele was reliving an experience in his mind as he spoke, and it wasn’t a pleasant one. “Never from close by. From the other end of the room or the bottom of a staircase. We have a lot of stairs. The building has a very distinctive design, with a great many . . .” He pulled himself back to the point, with some effort. “We have thirty people on staff, including several part-timers, and I believe everyone has seen her at least once. It was very frightening at first. As I said, she tended to favor the end of the afternoon, and at this time of year, it’s often dark by four. It was very disconcerting to be looking for a book in the stacks and then to look up and see her standing at the end of the aisle. Staring at you. With her feet a few inches above the floor or her ankles sinking into it.”

“Staring at you.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You said that twice,” I pointed out. “That she looks at you. But I believe you also mentioned that her face is indistinct. How do you know what it is she’s looking at?”