The Devil You Know

It was working—or at least it seemed to be. The needle turned, and the ghost was the force that pulled it. I surrendered totally to that pull, letting the images that the ghost responded to linger just that bit longer in my mind, and letting each of those pull the next picture along behind it in a sort of themed cascade. The bare thigh became a man’s chest, a well-muscled arm, an erect cock, and then, inexplicably, the wheel arch of a car against a curb, with fat raindrops sitting on it. More cars, on roads, on driveways, in garages full of junk, their wheels up on makeshift brick pilings.

Roads. Cities. Houses. Rooms. Another pull from the ghost, stronger this time. It didn’t like the rooms so much, so the pictures veered back out into daylight: parks, trees, a bench in some garden, the outhouse behind a pub.

The link was flowing now with frictionless ease, and with it came a sense of being a machine in someone else’s hands. If my mind was a projector, the ghost was holding the remote and clicking me on. I let it happen: no resistance, no recoil. More pub scenes, men laughing, men puking, men talking shit with messianic fervor. Another tug: take me somewhere else.

A pavement by the Thames, just down from the Oak; postpub stations of the cross in Soho, Covent Garden, Bounds Green, Spitalfields, the Albert Dock, Porte d’Orléans, Mala Strana under Prague Castle. A huge tug on that one, and now I was seeing a bridge with snow on it, spotless except for the clear double line of my footprints; an open-air smithy in some town square I’d wandered through in northern France, the owner dipping a slender ingot of red-hot metal into black, oil-slicked water; a dirt road in some place I couldn’t put a name to, wet with new rain and a little blood.

A shed door, seen from the inside, the wood splintered and torn in vertical lines as though an animal had been clawing at it; a man’s arm, gripping a shot glass and raised in salute; a piece of paper, held up to the window of a car by a much smaller and slimmer hand, and almost transparent because of the condensation on the glass, so I could see the smudged writing on the other side: .

I wasn’t feeding into this process at all anymore, and these weren’t any memories of mine. Somewhere along the way, the ghost had taken my slides out of the projector and slipped in some of its own. I didn’t know what she was getting out of it, but for me it was working—helping me to triangulate on that weak trace and build it up into a clear sense of her that I could use in an exorcism.

Meanwhile, the images kept coming. A frozen lake with the chimneys of some kind of factory rising behind it. A room with no windows and no furniture except for a shapeless sofa covered in a bright orange fabric with suspect stains on it. The curve of a woman’s shoulders and back, the woman turned away from me, her hand up as though to hide her face from my eyes. A book with a page torn out of it, held in the heavy grip of a man’s hand, his finger tracing the tear, the herringbone tracks of a stainless-steel watchband written in red across his wrist. The edge of some kind of patterned fabric, red and yellow check. A row of plastic bottles, some empty, some full of clear liquid, standing at the foot of a wall. A man’s face, cold and hard, behind his back a snowcapped mountain, one hand raised beside his head with the fingers spread wide.

That was the one that did it for me, because I knew that face—knew it better than I wanted to. My body arched backward, and the shift in balance was enough to topple the chair I was sitting in. I went crashing to the floor, and a second later, the sound was echoed in another crash from somewhere far above me.

I was so groggy and dazed for a moment as I came up from the half trance that I didn’t realize what that meant. But a single thought cut through the shit and fog that filled my brain. I’d lost her again. I’d been so close that another few seconds would have been enough to nail her down for good, and then I’d jolted myself out of the receptive state and lost her.

Then a second thought dropped into place next to the first.

There was someone else as well as me in the building.

I mean, someone else who was still alive.

Further thoughts crowded in on those first two, muddying the waters. There were any number of explanations for the noise. It could just have been the echo of my own fall or a sound from the street outside that had bounced in a weird way and come back to my ears from inside the building. And if it was another live human being, five would get you plenty it would only be Jon Tiler popping back in for his bag again, even later than last night.