The Devil You Know

Then, on the Tuesday, his world fell apart again. One of the part-timers came up screaming from one of the basement strong rooms. She’d seen a ghost: a woman without a face. When Rich heard those words, he fled to the gents’ toilet and threw his guts up. It was half an hour before he dared to venture out again, and he spent the rest of that day staying at the edges of all the eager discussions about the ghost, all the lurid speculation. He knew he wouldn’t be able to keep the mask up if he had to talk about it. He had to pretend to keep an austere distance from such a childish subject.

On the Wednesday, he did call in sick. He just couldn’t face the thought of meeting Snezhna in the stacks: coming face to face, or rather face to not-a-face-anymore, with her in some dark, narrow space where no one could hear him scream. He told Alice that he had gastric flu. Then he drew the curtains and hid.

Somehow, Damjohn found out. Rich got another visit from Scrub, and it was a lot more painful than the first one. Scrub wanted Rich to understand that Mr. Damjohn expected high standards of professionalism from his employees, particularly in the area of doing what they were fucking told. He made the point imaginatively, using everyday objects from Rich’s kitchen to illustrate what would happen if Rich let Mr. Damjohn down in this respect. He also reminded Rich that if he didn’t pull himself together, he’d end up facing a murder charge. He had—in Scrub’s vivid phraseology—a big bastard sod of a lot to lose.

Rich did his best, with mixed results. He was able to go back into the Bonnington the next day and get back to work—where everyone was very solicitous about him, because it was obvious that he was still a bit shaky after his illness. And he was able to put a brave face on it through the days that followed, even though he felt like a condemned man whose execution was going to be sprung on him as an impromptu party rather than being set for a fixed time and place.

When the worst happened and he finally met the ghost, not in a strong room but in the middle of a corridor, he pissed himself—literally, physically, with a great access of terror so pure that it made him forget who and where he was. When he could think again, he was sprawled on the floor behind a desk in an empty storeroom, his drenched trousers cold and clinging, his hands shaking so hard he couldn’t even pull himself upright.

As soon as he could walk, he got up and headed straight out of the building. He knew that if he met anyone and had to talk to them, he’d break into pieces.

In the evening, Rich went to see Damjohn at Kissing the Pink. To his horror, Damjohn found the whole situation vastly amusing. Oh, it had its serious side, of course: a woman in whom he’d already invested a certain amount of money and time was now dead, and he’d had to go to some degree of inconvenience in the resulting cleanup. But he was, he told Rich, a man who’d always believed that the punishment should fit the crime—and in this case, the fit was exquisite.

In short, he told Rich to live with it, and in passing he renewed the threats that Scrub had already made. If Rich found that he couldn’t live with it, there was another option that would serve just as well from Damjohn’s point of view.

“The man’s a sadist,” Rich moaned. “A fucking sadist. He liked it that I was scared. He was getting off on it.”

I didn’t comment. The sense of the ghost’s presence was palpable now, so intense that it was like a thickening of the air. Snezhna was here; she was listening. She was hanging around Rich like a shroud, and although she still hadn’t shown herself in visible form, I was amazed that he couldn’t sense her. The room was full of her.

“Where did Gabe McClennan come in?” I asked, and Rich bared his teeth in a panting snarl.

“McClennan! That bastard! That was just part of the joke, wasn’t it? I went back, and I kept my nose clean. I did everything Damjohn had fucking well told me to do. And I made it all the way through September. But can you imagine what it was like, Castor? I mean, Jesus Christ! Every time I turned around, she was there. I kept on seeing her. Everyone kept on seeing her. And whenever she showed up, she was saying the same thing: asking where Rosa was. Gdyeh Rosa? Ya potrevozhnao Rosa. Again and again and again, never fucking letting up.

“I told Damjohn he couldn’t let it carry on. She might name me. She might name him. He’d sorted out the body, but now he had to sort out—the rest. What was still left of her.

“And he agreed. And he brought McClennan in.” Rich twisted his head around to look up at me, his haggard face contorted into a look of half-insane appeal. “But McClennan didn’t exorcise her—he only put that ward on her, so she couldn’t talk. Damjohn was just protecting his own arse. He still wanted me to go on suffering!”