The Devil You Know

“It’s me,” I hazarded. The only response this got was dead silence, punctuated by the complaint of a tenor sax at being inexpertly played. “From the archive,” I added for the hell of it.

More silence. “Wait a moment,” the man murmured. I waited. The sax had been shut off now, which meant either there’d been a mercy killing or the guy had his hand over the phone receiver.

That was all I got. He hung up.

Discovering another few twenty-pence pieces in a trouser pocket, I made a follow-on call. This time around, nobody even answered. If there was a magic word, then “archive” wasn’t it. My next line was going to be “A ghost asked me to call you. Do you know why that might be?” So on the whole, it was probably all for the best.

I got back to Pen’s house a little after seven and found it empty. Her basement rooms were locked up, and the first and second floors where she was meant to live but didn’t were as chill and damp as always. I went on up to my own room in the old house’s sprawling roof space.

I was aware as I unlocked the door of a heavy, slightly musty smell. That should have alerted me that something was wrong, but then again, when you live with Pen and her magic menagerie, you have to accept that earthy smells are going to be frequent houseguests.

I threw the door open.

He was sitting on the bed, and he was heavy enough so that the springs bowed under him, making a broad hollow around his broad backside. It was the guy from the pub the night before—and he didn’t look any better from this close up. Worse, in fact. His face was so deeply lined that it looked as though it had been assembled from snap-together pieces, and his pale eyes had a watery gleam in them that looked somehow unhealthy. That didn’t make him any less scary, though. He might be diseased, but a diseased ox can do a lot of damage.

I took a quick look around the room. The window was open a crack, but this was three flights up, and nobody of this guy’s heft had any business shinnying up a drainpipe. If he’d parachuted in from a passing plane, there should have been a hole in the ceiling. That left the obvious.

“Pretty good,” I acknowledged. “But at the same time, strangely pointless. Or is this performance art? You break into people’s houses and then sit around waiting for a round of applause?”

A slow, pained frown crossed his slow, pained face.

“I’m Scrub,” he said, as if that explained everything. “I got a job.” His voice was so throaty a growl that it was barely audible at all. He sounded like he needed surgery—or maybe like he’d just had some and it hadn’t taken all that well.

“That’s great.” I shrugged my coat off and threw it over the back of a chair. Ordinarily, I would have hung it up on the bed, but there wasn’t much room around the edges of this behemoth—and I suspected that the springs were already operating at the limits of their tolerance. “Let me guess. Ballet dancer? Manicurist? Jockey?”

It wasn’t a small room, but between me and him, it definitely felt crowded. I walked around the bed to the rolltop desk that I use mainly as a liquor cabinet. I threw the top back, found a glass that wasn’t too grimy to see through, and poured myself a stiff whisky. It wasn’t that I really felt like drinking, it was to cut the smell, which now that I was inside the room was too strong to ignore. It was a smell of things rotten and sick and ripe, left out in the open long after they should have been buried. A smell you instinctively wanted to move a long way away from.

“I got a job,” he expanded, getting garrulous now, “for you.”

I slugged the whisky and let it swill around my mouth before swallowing.

“Thank you,” I said, “for the thought. You don’t look like you’ve got that many to spare.”

This time the frown came quicker—the patented Castor mental workout was already bearing fruit.

“That’s not polite,” Scrub said.

“I tend more toward brutal honesty.”

His face lit up like a baggy old armchair soaked in kerosene. “Brutal? Oh, I can do brutal.” He stood up, towering over me without having to make much of a big deal out of it. The look in his pale eyes was unnervingly cheerful all of a sudden. “Brutal’s what I like best. ’Specially with the likes of you.”

I tallied up my options and got to two. I could play nice and save myself a spectacular beating, or I could bluff.

It was unfortunate that I tallied them up in that order. There was nothing to counter the lingering echoes of my favorite word.

“Listen, you big, thick bastard,” I said harshly, tilting my head back to keep eye contact with him. “You were following me all around the West End—last night, and again tonight. You just broke into my room. And you’ve probably fucked up my bed beyond all hope of unfucking just by dumping your big fat arse on it. So don’t think you can get away with threatening me, too. Say what you’ve got to say, and then sod off to the black pits of fucking Tartarus, okay?”