The Devil You Know

“Why she didn’t kill you?” Rosa demanded in a sullen murmur.

Fair question, but not one I felt in any mood to answer. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I think—if this makes any sense—it was because she felt something for you. You and Snezhna.” She started at the sound of her sister’s name, and her one good eye flared wide open, but she said nothing. “Maybe it was because she was in the same position you were in. You know how you were tied to that chair with rope and tape? And Snezhna was trapped in that room after she died by fear and unhappiness and worry about you? Well, the chain Juliet wore around her ankle was the same kind of deal. I think she might actually have killed me for setting her free—that was an insult almost as great as binding her in the first place. But she saw me trying to untie you. And she saw that I wanted to untie Snezhna, too. So she thought what the fuck—she could always come back and kill me another time.”

I was saying this for my own benefit as much as Rosa’s, thinking it through as I spoke. It made as much sense as anything would. You can’t try to explain demons by reference to human emotions or human motives.

Rosa picked herself up, and since she was walking more or less normally, apart from a residual limp, we went out onto the deck. The cool night air hit us like a kiss on the cheek from God. I made her wait there while I went back inside and, picking my way around the corpses, collected everything from the cabin that I’d brought with me or that might have my fingerprints on it.

She seemed relieved when I rejoined her, although I’d only been inside for a minute at most. We both had to take the companionway stairs slowly, like two old codgers coming down from the top deck of a swaying bus.

When we were back on the terra-comparatively-firma of the wooden walkway, I turned to her.

“She wants to see you,” I said as gently as I could manage with my still-hoarse voice. “She wants to know that you’re okay. That’s why she’s still there. In that room. That’s what she’s waiting for.”

It took a second or two for Rosa to get her head around what I was saying. Then she nodded. “Yes,” she said.

“Are you ready?”

No hesitation this time. “Yes.”

I led the way.

Twenty-three

IT WAS WAY AFTER TWO A.M. BY THIS TIME, AND Eversholt Street was as silent as a necropolis. Even the night buses, rolling empty out of Euston with all their lights on, looked like catafalques bound for some funeral of princes.

Rosa flinched visibly when she saw that door, but she stood her ground. I took care of the locks using Rich’s keys, and we stepped into the upper room of the archive’s secret annex. Rosa looked around her, shook her head, and laughed without any trace of humor. I stopped still to listen, gestured to Rosa to do likewise. There was no sound from the room below.

“You’d better wait here,” I said, aware that her nerves probably couldn’t take too many more surprises tonight, and Rich would probably be a surprise of the nastiest kind.

I unlocked the door to the stairs, turned on the light, and went down. Rich was still there, but the atmosphere down in the basement didn’t seem to have agreed with him all that much. He was slumped on the floor, staring slackly at his drawn-up knees. He didn’t respond when I called his name, and his eyes didn’t move by any visible fraction when I waved my hand in front of them. The lights were on, but it was clear that, for the moment at least, nobody was home. I surmised that Snezhna had visited him again while I was gone and that she hadn’t been restful company. Well, if a guy gets what he’s been begging for, you don’t waste tears.

I went back upstairs and beckoned Rosa over to me. I explained briefly about Rich and what he was doing there. Her eyes narrowed, and her lower lip jutted out.

“I’ll kill him,” she hissed.

“To be honest,” I said, aware that I was echoing what Cheryl had said to me a week before about the ghost herself, “I think you’d be doing him a favor. But there’s been enough killing done tonight, and it’s a fucking rotten spectator sport at the best of times, so here’s the deal. You promise not to kill him, and we’ll go and see Snezhna, all merry and bright. Okay?”

But I realized as I said it that it had just become moot in any case. A familiar feeling was stealing over me, coming in on whatever extra sense I have that’s perpetually tuned in to Death FM.

I led the way down the stairs, and Rosa followed. She bared her teeth in a snarl of hatred when she saw Rich. He stared back at her, slack and invertebrate and without any sign of recognition.

I turned to look down at the stained, spavined mattress. Nothing to be seen there, but that was where she was—that was where it was coming from.

I pointed, and Rosa followed with her eyes.

“There,” I said. “Don’t be afraid.”