The Devil You Know

I was back in the rhythm of the psychic trawl, my fingers flicking across the papers, tapping out a pianissimo signature that nobody but me could disentangle. I took it slowly, very slowly, because as I neared the bottom of the stack, I was lingering longer over each sprawl of papers, more and more reluctant to take no for an answer.

But I got to the final handful at last, and I had to admit it to myself.

Nothing. Nothing at all. Not one out of all these voices speaking faintly through faded ink and yellowed paper was the voice of the Bonnington ghost.

I stared at the last clutch of documents in dumb chagrin. I’d been so certain that the thread would be there for me to pick up; the logic of it was so clear. But logic had let me down.

For a moment I thought about going back and starting again. It was a grisly prospect, but I had no other leads to pick up. If the ghost wouldn’t appear to me directly, I’d have to rely on something it had touched while it was still alive. Something that still held the imprint of its mind and personality . . .

Sometimes I miss a trick that’s so obvious, I wonder if there’s any hope for me at all. I came bolt upright in the chair, swearing at my own stupidity. Then I reached across for my coat and started to rummage in the pockets.

I didn’t have anything that the ghost had touched during its lifetime. But I had one thing that it had definitely touched since.

I pulled out the crumpled Rolodex card and held it up to examine it in the none-too-bright BS 5454 light.

I’d never tried this before, but there was no reason why it shouldn’t work. Okay, a ghost throwing its weight around isn’t quite the same proposition as a living human being touching something, but on the other hand, the trail was that much more recent. At any rate, it had to be worth a try.

Gripping the card firmly in both hands, I closed my eyes and listened with my mind. There was nothing there, but since this was the turning after the last-chance saloon, I held on. Still nothing. But after a long, strained moment, in the dead center of the nothing, a different kind of nothing opened up—the pregnant pause of dense, focused attention. It was as though I was holding a telephone receiver and I’d made a weak connection. Now someone on the other end was waiting for me to speak.

It wasn’t what I was expecting, but like I’ve always said, if life gives you lemmings, jump off a cliff.

“Hello,” I said.

No answer. I wasn’t really expecting any; I was just showing willing. But if the link that had opened up between me and the ghost wasn’t verbal, there had to be some other way to use it.

For a while I just waited, hoping that something might come into my mind without me reaching for it—some idea or emotion flowing from the ghost into me, bringing with it the pinpoint fix that I needed for the cantrip. But it seemed like the ghost was waiting, too.

I’m not sure where inspiration came from, but it came suddenly, and in spite of the sheer ludicrousness of the idea, I went for it: twenty questions. In that game, you zero in on the answer by asking broad, general questions first and then getting more and more specific. Maybe I could coax the ghost into playing a quick round with me.

I let my mind go blank, my emotions drift back down to neutral—like tapping a compass with your thumbnail to make sure the needle is floating free.

Then I started to think without thinking.

I’d like to say that this was an eastern discipline I’d picked up in an ashram in Puna, but the truth is that I’d first learned how to do it back at Alsop Comprehensive School for Boys, when I’d been introduced to acid. I used to think of it then as turning my mind into a slide projector; I’d just allow images to form behind my eyes and watch them glide past in sequence, accompanied by whatever feelings the drug high was giving me.

The beauty of it was that I didn’t have to select the images. Once I’d got the process started, they just kept coming. Actually, it was less like a slide show, more like a DVD in fast-forward, giving microsecond stills extracted from the continuous flow of memory. They weren’t random; nothing with a human mind as the operating system ever can be. But they were random enough.

Flick. Flick. Flick. No sound, no movement, no idea, no context. Just pictures, forming and fading in my mind so quickly that I could barely identify them myself in the brief time that each one was there in front of me.

Pictures of London first: Marble Arch, the Jerusalem Tavern, a back street in Soho where I’d been mugged. And parts of places: a door I didn’t recognize, with green paint peeling from bleached wood; an aerial view of two large Dumpsters with some kid sitting in between them, sniffing glue out of a Waitrose bag; the tracks of two tires on a gravel drive, like waves in a Zen garden. Then people: faces, hands, shoulders, smiling and snarling mouths, the curve of a thigh with a hand (my hand?) touching it—abstract flesh against abstract fabric.