The Devil You Know

“So, as you will have gathered, I need to have the place cleaned,” he said. “You can do that, I presume? Put down the vermin? Caulk and seal, so that nothing untoward pops its head up and scares the girls when they ought to be working?”

I played stupid for the hell of it—and because I always like the client to spell out exactly what it is he wants. “Do you mean cockroaches, or—”

“Please,” Damjohn said with an impatient horizontal slash of his stubby hand—an erasure mark hanging in the air between us. “I mean ghosts, Felix. Ghosts. I’m perfectly capable of stamping on cockroaches without instruction or assistance.”

“And what makes you think you’ve got a haunting, Mr. Damjohn?” I asked, bedside manner kicking in again hard.

He grimaced disapprovingly. The woman on stage slid down the pole into a precarious position, sitting back on her haunches with her legs spread wide, and the scattershot applause forced a momentary silence on us. “I don’t believe I told you what I thought,” Damjohn said when the clapping had died down again and the woman had departed. Incongruously, a wide-screen TV slid down from the ceiling over the center of the stage area, showing highlights from what looked to be a Manchester City game. “But women,” Damjohn mused, “have a very delicate sensibility. A curtain blows open or a pipe gurgles, and they think they’ve received a message from the other side.” He tapped the spine of his book, frowning momentarily as if he was pursuing that thought a little further. “For my own part, I’ve never knowingly received a message of that kind. But then, it would be a matter of complete indifference to me if I ever did. Certainly I don’t think a vengeful ghost would intimidate me at all. If some man had a grudge against me, it would be my personal preference to have him dead rather than alive, you understand? I’d see that more as a convenience than as anything else.” He looked at me again, solemn-eyed. Eyebrows like that could provide a lot of solemnity.

“A convenience,” I echoed cautiously. “Right.” I was missing a lot here, enough so I was beginning to feel irritated and hard-done-by. Rosa came back with the drinks and set them in front of us. I watched her with a certain curiosity, but this time she kept her gaze fixed on her tray and walked away briskly as soon as she was done. She did have a cute bum, despite her slim build. But she wasn’t even close to being my type. I don’t go much for the “imagine me in a school uniform” look.

I took a sip of the whisky. Single malt, and good single malt, at that. I wished I’d passed on the water.

“So you just want me to inspect the premises and see whether I can find any sign of ghost or poltergeist activity,” I summed up.

“Yes.”

“Because the girls don’t like it.”

“Again, yes.”

“Then how do they cope with Scrub?” I asked, hooking my thumb over my shoulder at the big man, who was standing behind me as impassively as one of the guards at Buck House.

Damjohn gave me a look of puzzled innocence. “Scrub? You think that Scrub is a ghost, Felix? He looks solid enough to me.”

He evidently wanted me to tell him what he already knew. “Scrub is a loup-garou,” I said. “They used to be called werewolves, although I doubt whether the animal part of Scrub is a wolf. It would have to be something the size of a bull.” I took another sip of the whisky. If the wardrobe that walked like a man decided to take offence at my tone, it would be a shame for this fine liquor to go to waste as well as my head getting broken. “You see, what happens is that a human ghost possesses an animal host, and then it sort of moves in and redecorates. The ghost reshapes the animal body according to its memories of its own original form. It sheds fur, shifts muscle tissue around . . . makes itself look more or less human again.

“It was a French scientist—Nicole David—who first nailed this, and that’s how come we use the French word for it. It’s sort of an open question how long the human shape can be maintained—depends on the strength of the ghost’s will, mainly—but the animal is always going to reassert itself whenever it can. Dark of the moon seems to be the time when the human side is weakest and the animal side is strongest. Hell of a thing. Once you’ve seen a loup-garou make the change, you never forget it. You can try, but you never forget it.”

Damjohn had been watching me keenly all the way through this speech, and I was about halfway into it before I realized that Scrub was a sort of audition piece—a hurdle for me to jump. Well, I’d jumped it, and now I sat back and waited to see what my prize was going to be.

Damjohn smiled and nodded, visibly pleased.

“That was very good,” he said. “Very good indeed. I know another man in your line of business, and he didn’t make that identification straight away—or without prompting. I can see that you’re a man of some intellect, Felix.”

“Thank you, Lucasz.”