The Devil You Know

We stopped at the other door—the door that looked like it didn’t lead anywhere much at all, let alone to one of the gates of Hell.

“What’s this?” Rich asked.

I climbed the three steps and pointed to the locks in their cutaway box. “This is why I asked you to bring your keys,” I told him.

He looked confused and a little scared. “But—my keys are for the archive.”

“Take a good look through the bunch. You’re looking for one that has a picture of a bird on the fob and a big, squared-off barrel. And another that says Schlage. Take your time. They’ll be there.”

Rich hauled out the big key ring and started sorting through it. In the dim light, it must have been hard for him to see what any of the keys looked like. It took him close to two minutes, but eventually he found them: first the Falcon, then the Schlage.

“Try them in these locks,” I said.

He slid the Falcon in first, turned it. We both heard the click. Then he tried the Schlage. No sound this time, but the door, loose in its frame, slid inward an inch or so under its own weight.

“I don’t get it,” said Rich, turning his head to stare at me with a guarded, questioning look.

“All the key rings are the same, right? All of them handed down from archivist to archivist through the colonnades of time? You, Alice, and Jeffrey—everyone holding a full set, and nobody using more than half of them. That’s what you told me the first day I came here.”

“Yeah, that’s true, but—”

“Take a look inside,” I suggested. “Someone’s been using these two fairly recently.”

He pushed open the door, stepped over the threshold. I followed and turned on the light. Rich cast his gaze around the squalid little room, now carpeted with shards of glass and colder than ever because of the broken windows.

“Christ on a bike,” he said. Then he sniffed and winced at the acrid smell.

“You’re not telling me Tiler keeps the stuff down here?” he asked, his voice tight. “It smells like”—his voice faltered.

“Like what?”

“Like—I don’t know.”

I walked past him into the center of the room, turned to face him. His face was pale. “This is going to sound incredible,” I said. “Crazy, crazy story. Crazy and sick. A woman died here. Not accidentally. Murdered. Before that, she was kept here for a long time—days, maybe even weeks.”

Rich’s stare went from left to right, measuring. “But this is—” he said.

“Yeah. It’s a chunk of the Bonnington, hived off maybe forty or fifty years ago. Nobody even remembers it’s here or knows who owns it. It’s not part of the real world anymore; it’s virtual geography. Terra incognita.”

Rich’s face had gone beyond pale into ashen.

“I can’t believe someone died here,” he muttered, shaking his head.

“Not here, exactly. In the downstairs room.”

His eyes flicked left, toward the wooden paneling. An instant later, they flared with alarm and looked back toward me.

The handcuff isn’t really silver; it’s ordinary stainless steel with a silver coating. It was sold as a sex toy in Hamburg, but when I use it (not all that often, thank God), I use it as a knuckle-duster. I caught Rich on the point of the chin with it—a really satisfying punch that made an audible smack, hooked him an inch into the air, and made him jackknife from the hips so that he landed heavily on his back with an impact that knocked what was left of his breath out of him.

He tried to get up, but fell back.

“Yeah,” I said grimly. “Made you look.”

Twenty

RICH TRIED TO GET UP, BUT HE DIDN’T MAKE IT VERY far, because his body wouldn’t cooperate. He gawped up at me, blood trickling down his chin from where he’d bitten his lip when the handcuff impacted on his jaw.

“F-fuck!” he protested thickly, saliva frothing out to join the blood.

“Don’t get up, Rich,” I advised him, meaning it. “If you get up, I’m only going to knock you down again. You might end up breaking something.”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, staring at me with eyes that were having to work at the moment just to focus.

“You’re frigging insane,” he bubbled.

“Yeah, Cheryl thinks so, too. But Cheryl’s no expert on sanity—not coming from that family. And Cheryl doesn’t know you like I do, does she, Rich?”

He tried again, and this time he made it into a sitting position, one arm raised protectively in case I hit him again, exploring his thickening lower lip gingerly with fingers that seemed to be shaking. He shot me another look, scared but angrily defiant. “I didn’t steal anything,” he said. “Tiler was all on his own. If you think I’m in on his bloody pilfering—”