The Devil You Know

The party passed its cusp and started to wind down. Cheryl went off to powder her nose, and Rich, who was a bit maudlin-drunk by this time, started in to tell me about some of his walking tours in Eastern Europe, but ran out of steam in the middle of a rambling anecdote about a club in Prague called Kaikobad, where they have transsexual strippers. His eyes seemed to defocus, which, when a guy is in his cups, either means he’s thinking deeply or he’s about to pass out. Either way, I figured it was about time to call it a night.

“Hey, mate,” Rich said, rousing suddenly. “I think you’ve made a new friend.”

“What, Cheryl?” I asked, a little thrown. He obviously couldn’t mean Jon Tiler.

Rich waved that suggestion away impatiently. “No, not Cheryl. Cheryl talks a good fuck, but she’s never been known to deliver. I meant the oversize geezer in the corner.”

He didn’t point, just rolled his eyes off to the right and then back. I followed his lead, not jerking my head around but picking up my drink and then letting my gaze traverse the bar slowly and casually.

It wasn’t hard to guess who he meant—a big, heavyset guy sitting near the door, jammed into a tight booth that made his already impressive bulk loom even larger. His oddly shapeless body was packed into an antique-looking gray herringbone suit, and whatever it said on the label, there had to be a whole lot of Xs in front of the L. His bald head glistened, and his pale, almost colorless eyes shied away as they caught my stare.

As he looked away, I experienced the sudden cessation of a feeling so tenuous, it had slipped under my guard. It was the sensation that Peele had described to me over the phone: the sensation—like a light, even pressure over the whole of my skin—of knowing that I was being looked at.

Okay. File that one for later, I guess. I didn’t know who he was, but I knew what he was well enough, and he probably knew what I was, too. That could even have been why he was watching me. Exorcists excite very real and very natural fears in certain quarters.

Cheryl came back from the loo right then, which was my cue to head on out. I made my excuses, gave the birthday girl a kiss on the cheek, and left.

I walked past Euston Station and back up Eversholt Street for reasons I can’t even remember. Maybe I just fancied a walk, although it was still cold and blustery, or maybe I was deliberately choosing a route that would take me by the archive.

I was on the other side of the road, though, so when I saw the woman standing out on the pavement next to the doorway of the Bonnington, her arms hanging at her sides and her head bowed, my first thought was that it was Alice calling it a day after a stupendous stint of unpaid overtime.

Then I registered the hood, and a moment after that, the way her body became more and more washed out and hard to distinguish from its surroundings the closer you got to the ground. And finally she raised her head to stare at me, which stopped me dead in my tracks, because the stare was being conducted without the benefit of eyes. The upper half of the woman’s face was a formless, rippling plane of undifferentiated red. Dark hair, decorously tousled, then cherry red lips and a neotenously rounded chin. Nothing, nothing but redness in between.

What she was wearing was harder to determine. She was dressed in white, the way everybody said, but white what? There was too little of her to form a judgment from. She raised an arm to point toward the building, and it was a bare arm, spectrally pale. It seemed as though she was fighting against the pull of gravity, her movements as strained and slow and full of terrible effort as the way your legs pump in dreams when you’re running away from the bogeyman.

I pulled myself together and stepped out into the road—almost into the path of a Routemaster bus; the blare of its horn floated behind it like the bellow of a wounded animal as I jerked back at the last moment, out of its path.

I thought she’d be gone now, her dramatic exit hidden by the bus in line with all the best movie clichés. But she was still there, and as I broke into a run, I tried to assemble the sense that went with the vision—the fix. I began to drop the mesh of my weird perceptions over her, dredging up notes in sequence, turning her into music. It was hard. Even though she was there in front of me, the trace was so faint, it almost wasn’t there at all. It was as though I was looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope. That wasn’t something that had ever happened to me before, and I didn’t understand it. But if she stayed where she was for just a few moments longer, it wouldn’t matter.