The Devil You Know

Black ash began to settle on the table, on his plate, on the men he was talking to. He jumped up with a shouted curse, which made the two men he was dealing with stare at him as if he was insane. He responded aggressively—were they blind or something?—and things got unpleasant. Wilke realized that nobody except him could see the ash. Then he ran a hand through it and realized why that was.

The haunting had continued ever since. He’d never seen an actual ghost. It was just that wherever he was, the ash would start to fall, and the longer he stayed anywhere, the thicker it got. It was even in his dreams, so that avenue of escape was barred.

After a few weeks, he was thinking about suicide. After talking to a priest, he gave himself up instead. He provided the police with a list of the houses, offices, and warehouses he’d burgled, with the Blackbird Leys address at the top of the list. He told them everything they needed to know to bring a case, and when they did, standing in the dock in a rain of ash that nobody else could see, he pleaded guilty on all counts.

Wilke thought it would stop then. He thought he’d done enough to atone. But nothing changed. He knew now that nothing ever would. He was using alcohol to blunt the horror, and when alcohol stopped working, he’d probably go back to option A and top himself.

My emotions as I listened to this were ricocheting around like rubber bullets inside a Dumpster. What the man had done was horrendous. Unforgivable. Everything he’d suffered he’d deserved, ten times over. But he hadn’t set out to kill anybody. He’d just done something stupid and then tried his best to pay for it, only to discover that he was facing a life sentence without appeal. I stood over him and judged him—guilty, then innocent, then guilty again—before finally reaching the only conclusion I could: that it wasn’t my call.

“I think there’s another way out of this, Tom,” I told him. “I think we can help each other.”

It took about a week of sleeping on his floor and sitting in his death-dark room every day before I finally got a scent of the little ghost that was hiding in all that sifting ash. Such a huge weight of fear and despair from such a tiny source. I caught its attention with nursery rhymes: “The Grand Old Duke of York,” “The Old Woman Tossed Up in a Basket,” “Boys and Girls Come Out to Play.” After that, it was easy. The light broke through the ash as I played, and the room resumed its normal colors. When I finished, all that greasy, granular pain was gone. A scream that had addressed itself to the eye instead of the ear had stopped echoing at last.

I felt exhausted. I felt compromised, and sleazy, and black with ash that couldn’t be seen anymore. I got up to go, but Wilke wouldn’t let me. He was in my debt, and with gratitude as extreme as his earlier grief, he insisted on paying. He took me through every kind of lock there was, starting with simple levers and wards, then working through every kind of tumbler, pin, wafer, and disc, before finishing off with ultramodern master-keyed systems that are about as relevant to normal escapology as depleted uranium shells are to the game of darts.

I lapped it up. I was the best pupil he ever had. And the first, and the last; he got religion after that and took holy orders. I never saw him again.

I mention all this only to make a point, and the point is this: I didn’t need Alice’s keys. With enough time and with the tools I’d inherited from Tom Wilke, I could have got into any room in the archive. No, what I needed was Alice’s ID card, because the locks were all wired up to the readers on each door. A key alone would open them, but would also sound an alarm. This way, I could slip in and out with nobody the wiser. I hoped.

The place felt different at night.

I mean that in a literal sense; it had a different set of resonances, a different tonality. And since it was empty—since there was no other human presence there to dilute the effect with feelings and associations of its own—I felt the full weight of it as I walked through the darkened corridors.

It was a sad weight, even a sinister one. There was a flavor in the air like cruelty and pointless anger. Obviously, unless you’re in the business, you’ll have to just imagine that those things have flavors—for me they do.

I found my way to the Russian room, swiped myself in as Alice Gascoigne, and got stuck into the boxes again. There were only seven left, so a couple of hours at most would see me through to the end. I turned one bank of lights on; the strong room had no windows, so there was no chance of being seen from the street. After a minute or so of treading water, I got back into the flow, and time soon became suspended again in the murky laminations of the past.

On some level I was aware of a motorcycle driving by in the street outside, setting up a sympathetic vibration in the floor beneath my feet. Then there was silence again, even deeper for having been broken.