The Devil You Know

Rich looked at me as though he suspected I might be taking the piss. “If I want Cheryl to stick her boot in my face, I’ll just ask her to,” he said. “Anyway, the records are stored in your own personal area while they’re being written up and messed about with. They don’t go to the general-access catalog until they’ve been signed off and approved by an A2—a senior archivist.” He scowled momentarily, probably at the injustices of the power structure and his own position in it. But he managed to keep his tone light when he spoke. “So what’s the program for today?”

My turn to scowl. “I’m going to go through every one of these letters and envelopes and birthday cards and laundry lists until I find one—or maybe more than one—that has some kind of psychic echo of your ghost. Then I’m going to use that to sharpen up the trace I’ve already got.”

Rich looked interested. “Like a sniffer dog?”

“That’s not very flattering, but yeah, like a sniffer dog—working from an object and following the trail from that object to someone who it used to belong to.”

“Cool. Is it worth watching?”

I gave a slightly sour laugh. “How many items are there in these boxes?”

“Er . . . four or five thousand. Probably more. We’re not that sure.”

“I leave you to imagine the thrilling and slightly depraved spectacle of me stroking and fondling every last one of them.”

“I’ll see you later, then.”

“Sure.”

He turned and left. I pulled the first box over and got started.

The spoor I get from touching an object isn’t the same as the instant hot news flash I get from touching a living person. It’s more subtle and less focused, and to be honest, it’s a whole lot less likely to be there at all. Think how many things you touch in the course of a day and how few of them mean anything to you. Now if someone happened to pick up a hammer, say, and used it to stave your skull in, it’s likely that the explosive charge of his anger and your agony would stay there in the wood or the vulcanized rubber of the hammer’s handle. Then, when someone like me comes along and touches the handle—bang. The charge goes off. I feel your pain, as the saying goes.

But most of the things you touch just don’t carry that same weight of significance—and to make matters worse, the same object will pass through other hands after yours. The older the thing you’re dealing with, the muddier and more smeared-out the psychic trail. And then, just for gravy, while an exorcist is trying to read the thing, his own emotions are adding yet another overlay to what’s already there. All in all, it’s like trying to take a fingerprint off a melting ice cube.

But in the right conditions, it’s something I’m pretty damn good at.

I transferred the contents of the box onto the desk and spread them out more or less evenly. Then I passed my left hand slowly over them, palm downward, as though my spread fingers were the steel loops at the business ends of five small metal detectors. I took my time over it, letting my hand wander backward and forward across the sprawled treasure trove of old letters and cards. Slowly a sense formed in my mind: a three-dimensional web, its vertical axis being time, of vague and formless feelings, bleached out and blended together almost to the point of illegibility; a tasteless soup of memory and emotion.

When I had that sense firmly in my mind, I brought my right hand into play. While the left hand still hovered, the right moved quickly, lightly touching first one sheet of paper and then another, tapping and jabbing into the stack at the points that looked most promising.

It’s not rocket science. I’d encountered the ghost twice now, and it had touched my mind both times, leaving an incomplete and fuzzy impression there. I was looking for something in this mass of documents that would match that impression so that I could complete and sharpen it. When I had a psychic fix on the ghost that was vivid enough and whole enough, I could take out my whistle and finish the job; the impression I form and hold in my mind while I play is the burden of the cantrip that I weave, and music is the medium that expresses it.

After maybe ten or fifteen minutes of this, I was more or less certain that there was nothing doing, so I carefully packed the contents of the first box away again and hauled a second box up onto the table. Once again, I unpacked and spread the old documents across the space in front of me and began to read them.

That was how I went on through the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. At a steady pace, and with my own emotions carefully held in neutral, refusing to be hurried or frustrated—it’s hard enough anyway without raising that kind of static.