The Devil You Know

I lost track of time, not because of the endless repetition but because the impressions I was taking from the old papers, faint as they were, exerted a sort of hypnotic pull of their own. Floating in that fuzzy palimpsest, I found it hard to stay anchored in the chilly afternoon in November that had been my starting point. It was still there, and I was still there, but my awareness of it was dulled. Gradually, I stopped hearing the gurgling of pipes and the opening and closing of distant doors. I was somewhere else, somewhere outside the normal flow.

Just once I thought I had something; the image of a weeping woman came through to me very clearly when I touched a particular photograph. She was young, and she was heartbroken—but her face was intact, her hair was ash blonde, and most of all, she wasn’t here. This was just an afterimage, with no sense of presence behind it. The photo was of a street, presumably in the Eastern Bloc somewhere—a residential street in a small town, drab and anonymous and more or less timeless.

Half roused out of my trance by the effort of conscious thought, I was suddenly aware of the sound of dozens of shrill, piping voices all talking over each other and the vibrations under my feet of a beast with sixty or so short but serviceable legs. I pulled myself together—pulled myself out of the psychic web I’d been weaving and back into my own flesh—and rubbed my eyes. Then, as the noises got louder, I stepped to the door and looked out. The corridor was alive with children, all in blue blazers with red badges on the pockets, and all clutching crumpled sheets of paper in their hands. They seemed to be working in pairs and sticking very closely together, as though this was some kind of three-legged race that worked on an honor system. “That’s not a plaster molding!” one little blonde girl was shouting indignantly at the boy next to her, who had a shell-shocked air. “That’s just where they put the fire extinguisher! We’ve still got to find a plaster molding!”

They ebbed and flowed along the corridor, staring intently at walls, floor, ceiling; swept around a corner; and were gone, trailing a few stragglers as any stampede will. In the distance I heard Jon Tiler’s voice shouting, “No, stay on this floor! Stay on this floor! I’ll tell you when you can go up the stairs!” He sounded only a half inch away from hysteria.

One of the kids had dropped his sheet of paper, so I picked it up and examined it. THE BONNINGTON ARCHIVE ARCHITECTURAL TREASURE HUNT, it said in a font that declared aggressively, “This is fun you’re having now—have some fun, damn you.” Underneath there was a list of architectural items, with the playful challenge HOW MANY CAN YOU FIND? DADO RAIL, CEILING ROSE, GABLE, WINDOW BAY, and so on. Next to each item was a box to tick. The first item, already ticked, was MY PARTNER.

I went back to my work, satisfied that Jon was working off his guilt. Again, I became lost in the soft textures and fuzzy logic of the past, my mind suspended in a shapeless but compelling skein of my own making. Hours passed, undifferentiated, and I worked my way steadily through the boxes. Variations on a theme: the same old gruel of emotions, too thin to nourish, too bland to titillate.

The next time I surfaced, it was a change in the quality of the light that brought me back to a gloomy winter day that was already waning. I looked at my watch; it was well after five, and I still had about a half dozen boxes to go. More to the point, I’d totally failed to find what I was looking for. Nowhere in all the pages I’d touched was there a scent or a footprint of the ghost I’d met.

My instinct was just to slog on to the end of the road, but the bleakness of the place was soaking into me like a physical chill. Seeing the kids on their treasure hunt had boosted my psychic reserves a little, but the effect had worn off quickly. And anyway, it was nearing the end of the archive’s opening hours; if I was going to stick around any longer, I needed to make sure someone else would be around to lock up after me. So I yawned and stretched, stood up stiffly, and with some reluctance made the pilgrimage to the workroom.

Apart from Alice herself, the gang were all there: Cheryl and Jon Tiler typing away at their computer terminals, while Rich seemed to be busy copying a list of names from an old document into his notebook. There was also a red-haired guy I didn’t know, working away at the photocopier. He was another of the part-timers, and Cheryl introduced him as Will.

“Any luck?” Rich asked.

“Not so far,” I admitted. “I’m still working on it. Has there been a sighting today?”

He shook his head. “All quiet on the Western Front.”