by Mike Carey
He grimaced. As I’d hoped, he swallowed this suggestion with a definite lack of relish. “No,” he said, shaking his head emphatically. “We couldn’t possibly wait that long. After the attack on Richard, I think the staff are looking to me to act—to resolve this problem. If I can’t, then . . . well, morale will suffer; it will certainly suffer. I really can’t have it said that I didn’t act. And the archive is hosting a public function on Sunday. No, it needs to be settled. The whole business needs to be settled.”
I couldn’t tell what was going on in Peele’s mind, but he’d become quite animated now. He risked another glance at me, no longer than the first one. “This is a crucial time for us in many ways, Mr. Castor,” he said. “I have a meeting in Bilbao tomorrow—at the Guggenheim Museum. A very important meeting for the archive and for me. I need to know that matters here are in train—that I’m not going to come back to chaos and recriminations. If you’re free to start now, today, then I think that’s what we should do.”
The tone of his voice was merely fretful and peevish, but the fear underneath seemed genuine. He was out of his depth, he expected dire consequences if he screwed up, and he wanted an expert to take the whole thing off his hands and make it go away.
Well, here I was. I just wished to Christ he’d look at me or acknowledge me in some way. This relentless cold shoulder reminded me disturbingly of a passive-aggressive girlfriend I’d once had. Was he autistic?
Peele seemed to guess what was going through my mind.
“You’re probably finding my body language a little disturbing,” he said. “Perhaps you’re even wondering if I have a psychological or neurological condition of some kind.”
“No, I wasn’t—”
“The answer is that I do. I’m hyperlexic. It’s a condition similar in some ways to high-functioning autism.”
“I see.”
“Do you? Perhaps not. If you’re mentally classifying me as somebody with a debilitating disease, then you don’t see. Not at all. I could read at the age of two and write just after my third birthday. I can also memorize complex texts after a single reading, even if I’m not familiar with the language they’re written in. Hyperlexia is a gift, Mr. Castor, not a curse. It does, though, make me react in unusual ways to other people’s social signals. Eye contact in particular is very uncomfortable for me. I’m sorry if you’re finding this interview disorienting or unpleasant as a result.”
“It’s fine,” I said. Embarrassed and slightly thrown, I overcompensated and spoke just to fill the silence. “In fact, it fills a hole in the jigsaw. I can understand now why you laid so much emphasis on the way the ghost stares at you. That’s probably more upsetting for you than for the rest of the staff here.”
Peele nodded. “Very perceptive,” he said without warmth. “Another aspect of my condition is that I find most metaphors . . . opaque. Confusing. Such as your reference to me as a jigsaw puzzle, for example. I hear it, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. If you could avoid metaphors when you’re speaking to me, I’d be very grateful.”
“Right.” I decided the best bet was to pull the discussion back onto a strictly business basis. “Let me just check the timetable with you again,” I said. “The sightings started in September, is that right?”
“I believe so, yes. At least, that’s the first time anything was said to me about it, and so that’s the first entry in the incident book. I didn’t see her myself for a few weeks after that.”
“Do you have an exact date? For the first sighting, I mean?”
“Of course.” Peele seemed slightly affronted at the question. He opened his desk drawer and took out a double-width ledger with a marbled hardboard cover, put it down on the blotter in front of him, and started to leaf through it. I’d assumed that “incident book” was a quaint, archaic title for a database file, but no, here was a real book with real writing in it. Maybe working in a place like this gave you an exaggerated respect for tradition.
“Tuesday, September the thirteenth,” he said. He reversed the book and offered it to me. “You can read the entry, if you like.”
I glanced down at the page. The entry for September 13 ran to most of a side, and Peele’s handwriting was very small and very dense. “No, that’s fine,” I assured him. “It’s unlikely I’ll need to refer to it in detail. In any case, the attack on Mr. Clitheroe—Rich?—happened a lot more recently?”
“Yes.” He turned the book back around to face himself and consulted it again. “Last Friday. The twenty-fifth.”
I pondered this for a moment. Active versus passive is one of the ways I tend to classify ghosts—with passive making up more than 95 percent of the total. The dead keep themselves to themselves, most of the time; they scare us just by being there, rather than by actually going out of their way to harm us. But what was even rarer than a vicious ghost was one that had started out docile and then turned.
Well, let that lie for now. What I needed more than anything was a place to start from.
“Go back to September,” I said. “Did you bring in any big acquisitions in the days or weeks before that first sighting? What else was happening in late August or early September? What else that was new?”
Peele frowned, visibly rummaging through the interior archives of his memory. “Nothing that I can think of,” he said, slowly. But then he looked up—as far as my chin, anyway—as a mild inspiration struck him. “Except for the White Russian materials. I believe they came in August, although we were expecting them as far back as June.”
My ears pricked up. White Russians? A female ghost who wore a monastic hood and a white gown? It sounded like a link worth clicking on.
“Go on,” I prompted him.
Peele shrugged. “A collection of documents,” he said. “Quite extensive, but it’s hard to tell how much of it is going to be of any use. They’re letters, mostly, from Russian émigrés living in London at the turn of the century and just after. We were very pleased to get them because the LMA—the London Metropolitan Archive, over in Islington—was showing an interest, too.”
“Where are they kept?” I asked.
“They’re still in one of the storerooms on the first floor. Until they’re fully referenced and indexed, they won’t be added to the rest of the collection.”
“I’d like to go down there and see them later, if that’s okay.”
“Later?” Peele seemed perturbed by this concept. “Is there some reason why you can’t do the exorcism straight away?”
And here we were again. But he didn’t know, of course, how closely he was echoing his senior archivist. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, there is. Mr. Peele, let me explain to you how this is going to work—what you’ll get if you decide to hire me. I’d like to go through it in a bit of detail, because it’s important to me that you understand what’s likely to happen. Is that all right?”
He nodded curtly, his face saying louder than words that he really wasn’t interested in the traveling hopefully—only in the arrival. I ploughed on anyway. It would save time and tears later, assuming this wasn’t break point in itself.
“If you’ve ever thought about the act of exorcism at all,” I said, “you’ve probably thought of it as something that goes down in sort of the same way that weddings do. The priest, or the vicar, or whoever, says, ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife,’ and there you go; it’s done. By saying it, he makes it happen.”
“I’m not naive, Mr. Castor,” Peele interjected, in my opinion a little over-optimistically. “I’m sure that what you do is a very exacting discipline.”
“Well, it can be. But that’s really not the point I’m making. Sometimes I can just walk into a place, do the job, and walk out again. Mostly, though, it’s not that straightforward—or at least, it’s not that fast. I have to get a fix on the ghost—a sense of it. That comes first. Then, when I’ve got that sense really nailed down hard in my mind, I can call the ghost to me, and I can get rid of it. But there’s no telling how long that process will
take. Exorcism isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. And if I’m going to do this job for you, I’m going to need to know right now that you won’t be drumming your fingers and looking for things to happen within an hour or a day. It will take as long as it takes.”
I waited for Peele to mull this over, but he changed the subject—I suppose as a delaying tactic while he weighed up what I’d just said. “And how much—”
“I charge a fixed price. Whether it takes me a day or a week or a month, you pay me a thousand pounds. Three hundred of that is up front.”
That “fixed price” stuff was outrageous crap, of course. I take the same approach to the prices I charge as I do to most other things, which is to say that I make it up as I go along. This time around, the main thing on my mind was the down payment; I needed some cash in hand, and three hundred was more or less the amount I needed to clear myself with Pen—plus a little danger money, since this ghost had shown that she liked to play rough.
But the opposition was stiffening. Peele didn’t like what he was hearing one bit.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Castor,” he said, his gaze making it as far as my lapels as he darted a quick glance at me, “but I’m not prepared to pay anything in advance for what seems to be such a precarious and ill-defined service. If you’re really saying that you could be here for—for as long as a month, disrupting our work, and that for all that time we’d still have to contend with the haunting, too . . . well, it’s just not acceptable. Not acceptable at all. I think I’d prefer you to work on the basis of payment by results. I think that’s the only kind of contract I’m prepared to enter into here.”
I blew out a loud breath, shook my head.
“Then I think we’re back to where we started,” I said, standing up and pushing my chair away from the desk. “I’ll let the professor know that you need a job done here, and she’ll get in touch with you at her convenience. Sorry I wasted your time.”
I headed for the door. It was only half bluff. What I’d told Peele about how I do the business was true enough, and it was also true that I needed the money now. If I’d set the bar too high, well, then that was too bad for me; but either way, he didn’t get to buy me on credit.
I got the door open, but he called out to me before I could walk through it. I turned on the threshold and looked back at him—indecisive, sullen, glaring at his desktop with bitter distaste, but obviously thinking that starting again with someone else would mean all the time he’d wasted already would just be sunk costs.
“Could it really take as long as a month?” he demanded.
“If it did, it would be a new world record. Most likely, I’ll run your ghost to ground inside of a couple of days and be out of your hair before you’ve had time to notice that I’m around. I’m not saying I’m slow, Mr. Peele—just that the work I do doesn’t proceed according to a fixed timetable.”
“Are there ways to make it proceed faster?”
That one set off a small carillon of alarm bells in my mind.
“Yes, there are,” I admitted. “But they’re not going to be my first options, because they’re—unpredictable.”
“Dangerous?”
“Potentially, yes. Dangerous.”
He nodded reluctantly. “Well, then. I presume you know your business, Mr. Castor. I think—I may have spoken too hastily before. Three hundred isn’t an unreasonable sum to ask for as a deposit. But if progress is slow, then perhaps we might consider using some of those other methods?”
“We can talk about that later,” I said firmly, wondering what I was letting myself in for here.
“Later,” Peele agreed. “Yes, very well. Perhaps you can come back at the end of the day and let me know how it’s all gone. Or tell Alice,” he amended, and he seemed to brighten at that second, better reflection. “And Alice can report back to me.”
I let it go. It was obvious I was going to have him breathing down my neck whatever I said. “Fine, I’ll do that. First, though, I’d like to talk to Rich Clitheroe about the incident where the ghost attacked him. And I’d also like to take a look at those Russian letters you were talking about—or rather, the room where you’re keeping them.”
“Certainly. Ah—I’ll have to get the money signed out of the safe, which means waiting until after lunch, when I do the financial review with Alice. But I hope you won’t wait until then to get under way?”
“Mr. Peele,” I assured him gravely, “I was under way as soon as I walked in the door.”
Peele didn’t go back into the workroom with me; he just picked up the phone and summoned Alice. I had to wonder if he was trying to distance himself from the decision to hire me—or was this just another aspect of his condition? Was he so uncomfortable around other people that he preferred to rule by proxy?
Peele broke the news that I’d be around for a while. Alice took it on the chin, but it was clear that she viewed this prospect with about as much enthusiasm as root-canal work. If I were sensitive about stuff like that, I could have got my feelings hurt. Before I let myself be led away, though, I decided to clear up one thing.
“The incident in which Rich Clitheroe was attacked,” I said, as Alice held the door open for me to walk on through. “You told me you weren’t present for that, right?”
“No.” Alice’s tone was exasperated. “That’s not what I said. I said I didn’t see the ghost. I saw what happened to Rich, but there wasn’t any ghost there. As far as I’m concerned, there never has been.”
“So you just saw the scissors—what? Levitate? Move themselves through the air?”
Alice shot a look at Peele before replying. He was staring at the desk, but seemed to be listening closely. I don’t know what cue she was looking for or what she got. “His hand twisted around,” she said. “The scissor blade scraped along his arm and then came up and grazed his face. You should be asking him about this, not me.”
“Yeah, well, I will ask him, of course. But I wanted to establish—”
Alice cut across my words, speaking past me to Peele. “Jeffrey,” she said. “If you give me a direct instruction to cooperate with this, then I’ll do it. If I’m free to refuse to be questioned, I’m going to refuse.”
There was a strained pause.
“Alice has strong feelings about this,” Peele said very quietly. He stared at his computer monitor as he said it, so the only clue I had that he was talking to me was that he referred to her in the third person.
“I can see,” I acknowledged.
“If you can work around her . . . it would probably be best. I’m sure everyone else will be happy to tell you what they know.”
I looked at Alice, who was glowering at me now, making no attempt to hide her resentment.
“Fine,” I said, after a moment. She nodded curtly, her point established, and her lines drawn. I followed her out to the workroom, and the door closed on Peele, no doubt to his immense relief.
It wasn’t fine; it was thick, lumpy bullshit. But the cardinal fact hadn’t changed—I still needed the money.
Back in the workroom, I gave the Exorcism 101 speech again, with minor modifications, for the benefit of Rich and Cheryl, who ate it up, and Jon, who pretended I wasn’t happening.
“So I’ll be asking all of you to tell me what you’ve seen and what you’ve experienced,” I wound up. “You, and any other colleagues who’ve been involved in all this. And I’ll start with what happened to you, Rich, because that’s obviously the most extreme incident and probably the one that will give me the best launch point for what I need to do. First off, though, I was wondering if someone could show me the Russian stuff that came through in August. Letters from émigrés, that kind of thing?”
Rich gave me a double thumbs-up. “We can do both things at the same time,” he said. “It’s me that’s cataloging all that stuff.”
“What about me?” Cheryl demanded, pretending to be hurt at being left out. “When are you gonna interview me?”
“Straight afterward,” I promis
ed. “You’re second on my list.”
She brightened. “Go to hell, copper. I won’t talk.”
“I’ll make you talk,” I promised. I wondered if all conversations with Cheryl had this surreal edge.
Rich glanced at Alice as if for permission, and she made a gesture that was the hybrid offspring of a shrug and a nod. “Don’t take all day about it,” was all she said.
The building was even more of a maze than I’d thought. Our route to the storeroom where the Russian materials were being kept led us back down the rough-and-ready cement staircase, but then up another and through a fire door held shut by a spring hinge stiff enough to constitute a serious risk to outlying body parts. After a minute or so of similar twists and turns, I felt like a country mouse being given the runaround by a London cab driver.
“Is there a shortcut?” I asked, slightly out of breath.
“This is the shortcut,” Rich called out from up ahead of me. “See, we’re going to the new annex. The other way is back out through the entrance hall and around.”
He stopped and pointed in through an open door. Inside, I saw when I joined him, there was another open-plan space, a fair bit smaller than the workroom I’d already seen, and made more cramped still by half a dozen library trolleys parked along one wall. A carrot-haired man who looked to be still in his teens wheeled one of these trolleys past us, getting up a good turn of speed so that we had to stand aside smartly or be run down. In among some shelf units at the back of the room, two other figures, indistinct in the half gloom, were transferring books and boxes from shelf to trolley or vice versa, exuding an air of focused haste. They didn’t look up.
“SAs,” said Rich. “Services Assistants. The keepers of the Location Index. They’re the ones who collect all the stuff that’s been requested and take it up to the reading room—then put it back again afterward. It’s a bastard of a job. Will you want to talk to them, too?”
