The Devil You Know

by Mike Carey

  I had three places on my itinerary, and I’d budgeted the whole day. That may sound a bit pessimistic, given that they were all in North London, but my first port of call was the Camden Town Hall planning department. You don’t exactly abandon hope, but you certainly slip it into a back pocket.

  Back at King’s Cross again; it felt like I’d never left. The town hall building looks like a set from an old Doctor Who episode, and to some extent, that gives a fair impression of the experience you’re likely to have when you go in there: meeting strange, not-quite-human creatures, burning your way through vast swathes of time, that sort of thing. I went in through the Judd Street entrance and was sent straight back out again; planning was at the other end of the building and was entered via Argyle Street. The gods of local government would be angry if I walked straight through, and I’d end up with my resident’s parking permit revoked and a council-tax bill for seven grand and my immortal soul.

  Actually, the system worked surprisingly well, at least to begin with. I knew I was being set up for a fall, but I took it for what it was worth. The planning department had partly gone over to computerized records. There were half a dozen terminals set up in the foyer where you could just sit down, type in an address, and get a planning history. Thinking about Cheryl, I spared a brief moment of pity for whoever was sitting in the bowels of the building, retroconverting.

  “You won’t get everything,” I was told by an arrogant, acned young clerk who looked less like a Doctor Who villain and more like the kid in a teen gross-out comedy who doesn’t get the girl but does lose his trousers at the graduation ceremony. “There’ll only be an entry where there’ve been changes to the building since the late 1940s—that’s when the planning-application system came in. If you don’t know your dates, you could be here for a long time.”

  But I wasn’t choosy, and it turned out that there were a whole fistful of documents on file for 3 Churchway, Somers Town, one of them going all the way back to 1949. That one was an application to repair bomb damage to the roof, frontage, and right exterior wall. Back then, the building was listed as belonging to the war office, but by the mid-1950s, when an application was put in to extend it to the rear, it had become an “annex to the British Library.” Then nothing until 1983, when there was a further extension and a change-of-use certificate; now number 23 was going to come under local authority control and house an unemployment claims office and a job center. Well, that was the Thatcher era—unemployment was a growth industry. One final application, from 1991, was for interior works. I suppose that was when they put in all the bare, brutalist staircases, the fake walls, and the dead ends. Nothing on file for the work that was going on now, but maybe current work was filed elsewhere.

  That was as far as I could get online. Now I had to fill in some request slips and hand them in at a small counter in the main planning office. This was a large room on the second floor, cut in two by a long Formica counter, and it was as busy as a cattle auction. Most of the people there were men in overalls who were looking to get official stamps on hastily scrawled documents, but there was also a leavening of clerks from other parts of the building filing forms or retrieving forms or maybe just exchanging pheromones like worker ants.

  I waited for almost an hour and a half before a stern, middle-age lady with a face out of a Far Side cartoon came back with a package for me. It was a set of photocopies of the oldest plans they had for 23 Churchway—the ones that had been filed back in 1949—and the newest ones from the 1990s. I figured that with those fixed points to work from, I could fill in the gaps.

  So far so good. I genuflected to the dark gods and got out of there fast. My next stop was the British Newspaper Library, out in Colindale. A Thameslink train from King’s Cross took me to Mill Hill, and on the way out there, I took a look at the building plans. As I’d expected, the ones from 1991 had all the new staircases and corridors and fire doors marked in and were so small and so complicated, they looked like a maze in a kids’ puzzle book: help Uncle Felix get from the office to the haunted strong room—but look out for that nasty Mr. Peele. By contrast, the 1949 plans were austere and simple and clear, and showed fewer than half as many rooms. The place had grown and mutated to the point where the original architect would probably need the plans just to find the street door.

  I didn’t know the building well enough yet to pinpoint the room where the Russian stuff was being kept, but the first floor as a whole seemed to have been made over according to a crude but workable plan. Each of the original rooms had been split down the middle, so every second wall was a new plasterboard partition. The original doors, too wide for the new, smaller rooms, had been bricked in, and new, narrower doorways had been put through. A secondary staircase that showed on the original plans had been torn down, the space cannibalized to make small cubicles that were probably toilets or store cupboards. At the same time, the cramped stairways that I’d seen in situ had been created, wedged into the new ground plan wherever there was a gap too narrow to become an actual room. The overall effect was really depressing—it was like reading the tactical projections for the rape of a corpse.

  From Mill Hill overground, I walked the rest of the way—but then I overshot and found myself walking past the grounds of the Metropolitan Police Training Academy, which were filled with primary-school kids learning how to ride bikes. A young woman was looking wistfully through the chain-link fence at all the children zooming and zigzagging through a maze sketched out in orange plastic bollards. She turned to look at me; there was an unhealthy bloom to her skin, and I caught the faint sweet-sour whiff of decay wafting off her. She was one of the returned. Her mud-stained jeans and sweatshirt and the occasional strand of dry grass in her hair gave a fairly clear indication of where she’d slept last night.

  “I’m still waiting,” she said.

  I should have just walked on by, but her face had that Ancient Mariner quality. I was the one in three.

  “Waiting for what?” I asked her.

  “For the children. I said I’d be here when they got back.” A spasm passed across her slack face—annoyance, or unease, or maybe something purely physiological. “Mark said something about a car. There was a car. They didn’t get the number.” A leaden pause. “I told them I’d wait here.”

  With the sound of happy shouts and laughter ringing in my ears, I trudged on my way. I looked back once. She was staring through the fence again, her arms hanging at her sides, her face a solemn mask, trying to read the runes of a life that wasn’t hers anymore.

  Two minutes later, I entered the cathedral-like silence of the Newspaper Library, which smells like a worldful of armpits and is illuminated by five-watt strip lights guaranteed not to damage old newsprint by allowing it to be read.

  I was probably wasting my time here, but I needed to rule out the obvious before I started looking for more esoteric answers. If the Bonnington Archive was built on an old Indian burying ground, or if someone had slaughtered the entire staff in an obscene necromantic ritual back in the 1960s, when that stuff counted as hip, I’d feel pretty damn stupid to have missed it.

  You can get most of this material from other, more salubrious places now, but the Colindale Library has still got the fullest index of anywhere I know and a stack of old papers on microfiche that goes way back into the mists of antiquity—probably to headlines like ONE IN THE EYE FOR HAROLD.

  But Churchway, Somers Town, hadn’t made the headlines once in all those many years. It seemed to be a place where nothing much had ever happened. No penny dreadfuls. No Victorian melodramas. No threads to follow, which only helped insofar as it offered no more blind alleys for me to walk down—and threw me back on my own resources. That was okay. I still had some.

  When I came back out onto the sunlit street, blinking in a brightness that seemed somehow unreal after that half-lit world, the risen woman I’d met on my way in was loitering on the well-tended patch of lawn just outside the library’s side door. Her eyes were closed, and her li
ps were working silently.

  I had to pass her, but I gave her a wide berth this time; I didn’t want to get sucked into her private world of unresolved crises and suspended time. I got about ten yards farther down the street.

  “Felix.” The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. I spun round. Nothing in the zombie’s expression or posture had changed. It might not even have been her voice; one congealed mumble sounds much like another.

  But then her eyes flicked open. She looked up and around, fixed me with a slightly dazed stare.

  “He says you’re closer now than you were,” she whispered. “Even though you think you’re lost. He says this is where it starts getting hot.”

  Another spasm crossed her sallow face. Her eyes closed again, and she went back to her silent recital. There was nothing to say, so I didn’t say it.

  One more stop to make, and it wasn’t exactly on my way.

  Nicky’s current place of residence is the old EMD cinema in Walthamstow. That gives him loads of room—more than he actually needs, if he’s honest. The place has been closed and boarded up since 1986. Entrance is via a second-floor window, but that’s less inconvenient than it sounds, because there’s a shed at the back of the building with a flat roof. It’s just a case of shinnying up a drainpipe, which, if you’ve learned it as a kid, is a trick you never really forget.

  Nicky was in the projection room, as always, at his computer, as always. And, as always, the cold bit into me right through my tightly buttoned-up coat. The air-conditioning units are standard industrial ones, but Nicky has been over them himself, taken them to pieces and rebuilt them to his own more exacting specifications. The blast they put out now is like a wind sweeping off the South Pole across the Larsen B ice shelf.

  Nicky was pleased to see me, because I usually bring him something to feed two of his three addictions—say, a bottle of some really good French red and a couple of jazz singles of 1940s vintage. Today I was short-changing him slightly; I only had the wine. All the same, he was cordial. He’d noticed some new pattern in the ephemeral ripples that stir the surface of the material world, and he wanted someone to bounce it off.

  “Here, Fix,” he said eagerly, swiveling his monitor to face me. “Check this out. Look where it spikes.”

  With his Mediterranean tan and his extensive (if largely shoplifted) wardrobe, Nicky doesn’t look like a walking corpse; he looks like a fashion model who’s hit hard times. That’s a tribute to his absolute dedication—his obsessive attention to detail. Most of the dead who’ve risen in the body tend to wander around in an unhappy and aimless way, getting further and further past their sell-by date, until the battle between decomposition and willpower shifts inexorably past a certain balance point. Then they fall down and don’t get up. In rare cases, the spirit freed from its flesh-house will find another vacant cadaver and start all over again. Mostly they just give up the ghost, as it were.

  But that wasn’t Nicky’s style. Back when he was still alive—which was when I’d first met him—he’d been one of the most dangerous lunatics I’d ever met outside of a secure institution, and what made him dangerous was his ability to focus on one idea and squeeze it until it bled. He was a tech-head conspiracy theorist who cut open the Internet to read its entrails; a paranoiac who thought every message ever sent, every word ever written was ultimately about him. He thought of the world in terms of a web—a communal web devised by a great agglomeration of spiders. If you were a fly, he said, the only way to stay alive was to avoid touching any of the sticky threads, to leave no trail that anyone could follow back to you. Of course, he wasn’t alive anymore—a heart attack at the ripe young age of thirty-six had taken care of that—but his opinions were unchanged.

  “Right. What am I looking at?” I demanded, stalling for time as I looked at the graph on his computer monitor. There was a red line, and there was a green line. There was a horizontal axis, marked out in years, and a vertical axis not marked at all. The two lines did seem to be in rough synchrony.

  “This is the FTSE 100 share index,” Nicky said, tracing the green line with the tip of his finger. His fingernail was caked with black dirt. It was probably oil; he had his own generator, which he’d half-inched from a building site. He didn’t like drawing power directly from the national grid for reasons given above. In Nicky’s world, invisibility is the great, maybe the only, virtue.

  “And the red line?” I asked, setting down the bottle of Margaux I’d picked up for him at Oddbins. Nicky doesn’t drink the wine. He doesn’t manufacture any stomach enzymes anymore, so he wouldn’t be able to metabolize it. He says he can still smell it, though—and he’s built up a nose for the expensive stuff.

  He shot me a slightly defensive look. “The red line is a bit of an artifact,” he admitted. “It plots the first and final readings of pro-EU legislation, or a statement by any government front-bencher in favor of greater European integration.”

  I bent low to get a better look. Nicky smelled of Old Spice and embalming fluid—not of decay, because his body was not so much a temple as a fortress, and no crack in a fortress can be considered small. All the same, I liked it better when he had his rig set up down in the cinema’s main auditorium, which has better through-drafts.

  “Okay,” I said. “The red line is a little out of phase. It spikes earlier.”

  “Earlier, right, right,” Nicky agreed, nodding excitedly. “Two to three days earlier in most cases. Up to a week, sometimes. If you plot the recession line, the correspondence is even closer. Every time, Fix. Every fucking hail-Mary-full-of-grace time.”

  I tried to get my head around this. “So you’re saying—”

  “That there’s a causal link. Obviously.”

  I frowned, trying to look like I was giving this serious thought. Nicky was watching me, hairy-eyed and eager. “How does that work?” I asked.

  He was only too happy to explain. “It works like this. Satan is in favor of federalism, because that’s his preferred method of working. It’s like, you know”—he gestured vaguely but emphatically—“engineering the Fall of Man just by corrupting Adam and Eve. The more the nations of the world are brought under one rule, the easier it is for the infernal powers to assert direct control over the whole show—just by attacking and subduing one soul. Or a couple of hundred souls, if we’re talking about the EU Council of Ministers. So when the government pushes a European agenda, it’s because they’re in thrall to Satan and they’re doing his will.”

  I chewed this over. “And the share prices?”

  “That’s their reward from Satan for obeying orders. Whenever they push the whole plan forward, he makes their shares go up in value. He gives them the earthly paradise he’s always promised his servants.”

  He was still looking at me, waiting for a reaction. “I don’t know, Nicky,” I said, temporizing. “The FTSE—that’s a composite figure, isn’t it? You’ve got a lot of companies there, with their own chief execs and their own business plans. And you’ve got a lot of investors with their own axes to grind . . .”

  Nicky was disgusted. “Oh for fuck’s sake, Fix. Of course it’s a composite figure. I’m not saying that Satan can just wave his hand and make the share index go up and down. Obviously he works through human proxies. That’s why the lag time varies. If it was a perfect, frictionless system, it would be immediate, wouldn’t it? You’re proving my point.”

  “I hadn’t thought it through that far,” I said cautiously. I sat down on the table where the printer rested; it was a heavy, old-fashioned laser jobbie, and I had to balance my buttocks precariously on about an inch of free space. “Nicky, I was wondering if you could help me with something.”

  “With what?” He was instantly suspicious. He knows I don’t come around just to sniff wine and swap gossip, but he hates the fact that our relationship is mutually abusive. Like all conspiracy nuts, he’s a romantic at heart.

  “A job I’m doing.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “The u
sual kind.”

  Very pointedly, Nicky picked up the bottle of wine and examined the label. It was a ’97, and it wasn’t anything like cheap.

  “Thought you’d given up that ghost-toasting shit,” he observed.

  “I’m back.”

  “Obviously.” The wine had mollified him, but only up to a point. “I’ll need another two of these,” he said. “And you mentioned some guy in Portobello Road who had Al Bowlly and Jimmy Reese together on some old Berliner hard rubber?”

  I winced. “Yeah, I did say that, Nicky, but I’m not in the government, and Satan isn’t sexing up my share options just yet. The wine or the disk—not both.”

  Nicky played hard to get. “Tell me what you’re looking for,” he said.

  “A young woman. In her early twenties, most likely. Dark-haired. Possibly Russian or East European. The area around Euston Station. Murder or accident, could’ve been either, but violent. And sudden.”

  “Time frame?”

  “I don’t really know. Maybe summer. July or August.”

  He snorted. “Congratulations, Fix. That’s probably the vaguest brief you’ve ever given me. Toss me a bone, here. Eye color? Complexion? Distinguishing marks?”

  I thought about the blurry red veil that stood in for the ghost’s face. “That’s all I’ve got,” I said. And then, more to myself than to him, “Maybe . . . maybe her face was injured in some way.”

  “The disk.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll go for the Berliner disk. But it better be fucking genuine. And it better be fucking Al Bowlly, not Keppard doing an Al Bowlly impression. I’ll know.”

  “It’s the real thing,” I assured him. They were just names to me; my tastes run to classical, home-grown punk, and the raw end of alt dot country. I’ve got exactly enough savvy about jazz to know what to look for when I’m in need of a bribe.