The Devil You Know

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.