The Devil You Know

“Yeah, well, sometimes when the normal routine of a place is disrupted, a haunting will stop for a while.” I wasn’t normally this garrulous, but I was putting off the evil moment; I wasn’t anticipating much pleasure in reporting in to Alice. “Ghosts are usually very fixed on routine—some of them will hang around the same place for centuries and show themselves bang on midnight, every night. But change the wallpaper, and they’re lost.”

Cheryl perked up at all this talk about ghosts. “What about the violent ones?” she asked. “Have they got a routine, too? I mean, do they get into it? Are there, like, serial-killer ghosts?”

Piqued, Rich brandished his wounded arm. “Hey, this is real, Cheryl,” he said. “People are getting hurt. Can we not talk about it as if it’s a role-playing game?”

Cheryl was unrepentant. “All right, but it’s interesting, though, isn’t it? Maybe that’s what sick-building syndrome is. It’s just ghosts you can’t see having a go at you.”

Rich opened his mouth to speak, but then thought better of it and just shook his head as if to clear it. He returned to his keyboard with a scowl on his face.

“Yeah,” I said to Cheryl. I was trying hard not to break into a grin. Rich had every right to feel aggrieved, but it was hard to stay serious around Cheryl when she was so determined to be sensational and flippant. I was starting to like her a lot. “Sometimes they do repeat the same sequence of behaviors, time after time. You’ve got to realize, though, that the sample is probably too small to count for anything. The number of ghosts that have ever actually attacked the living is tiny—when you weed out the folk tales and the compulsive liars.”

I suddenly realized that they were both looking past me, at the doorway. Turning to follow their eyes, I saw that Alice had sneaked up on me again, just like she’d done the day before.

“That’s the real challenge, isn’t it?” she asked, mildly.

Ingratiatingly, Tiler fed her her cue. “What is, Alice?”

“Weeding.” She didn’t even bother to look at him; it was me she’d come in here gunning for. “Have you had better luck today, Castor?”

I could have pulled against the hook, but I think she would have enjoyed reeling me in. “None at all,” I said evenly. “I’ve been working through that Russian collection, but I haven’t found anything that’s likely to be of much help.”

Alice just stared at me for a moment. She’d taken a few steps into the room, but she clearly didn’t feel much more comfortable in here than Peele did. Her mouth quirked, as though she was fighting down an urge to spit.

“You said that what you do depends on your obtaining an impression of the ghost? A fix on her?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“But you did that yesterday, didn’t you? The first time you went into the Russian room. That’s what you told me. So why is it that you’re still unable to dispel her?”

“It was a weak fix,” I said bluntly.

“Does that mean it’s useless?”

I clenched my teeth on a word that probably didn’t appear in any of the archive’s seventy-five miles of shelving.

To tell the truth, I was a little frustrated myself. The ghost had been right there with me twice now. The first time, I’d screwed the contact up for myself; the second time, Tiler had done it for me. If I could have held either one for just half a minute longer, I could be shaking the dust of the Bonnington off my feet and walking home with a grand in my pocket—at that moment, a consummation very fucking devoutly to be wished. Instead, I was providing sleeve notes for Alice, who I knew by now was one of those people who never stop asking until they get the answer they want.

So I did something a little stupid. I went on when I should have stopped and got out of there.

“No. I didn’t say that. A weak fix is a good start—and I was lucky to get one so fast. You can turn a weak fix into a strong fix, if you know what you’re doing.”

I could still have walked away at that point. I was going to. I’d already decided. But she was looking at me with scorn and skepticism, clearly measuring my lackluster performance against the three hundred pounds I’d already been paid.

“In fact,” I said, “there’s something we could try right now, if Rich is up for it.”

“Eh?” Rich had had his head down all this time, either working or pretending to. The idea that he might get drawn into the action obviously filled him with alarm.

“It’s a trick I’ve used a couple of times,” I said. “It might pull the ghost in if it’s close by. And even if it doesn’t do that, it should still give me a clearer sense of where the ghost is hanging out—what part of this building is its anchor, or its home.”

I cleared a space on the layout table. This involved shoving aside some of Jon Tiler’s pencils and worksheets, which he snatched out of my hands indignantly.

“Has she got to have an anchor?” Alice asked, stubbornly insisting on the personal pronoun.

“No,” I admitted. “But most of them do. We’re playing the odds.”

I turned to Rich.