by Mike Carey
“Then let’s go.”
We made a start, but Cheryl was right—it wasn’t easy. The building had changed so damn much over the years, and the plans—even the recent ones—looked so different from the baroque, three-dimensional maze that the archive had become. But on the other hand, Peele’s notes were meticulous, and he always gave chapter and verse. I felt a grudging respect for the man. After two dozen ghost sightings, a lot of people would have started using ditto marks, but not Jeffrey. Every damn time, he recorded the when and the where and the who in the same amount of rich, unnecessary detail.
And one by one, we plotted them out on the plans.
As we worked, I thought about that missing page—a blank space surrounded by information—information that up to now I hadn’t even tried to use. But there was a pattern hidden in the random flux of things going bump in the tail end of the afternoon. There had to be. And the incident book was still the key.
Every sighting became a cross, and the plans slowly took on a fly-specked appearance as Cheryl marked each one down. Basement. First floor. Second floor. Basement. First floor. Third. Fourth. She’d almost never shown up on the fourth floor—only twice in eighty or so appearances—and never in the attic. Visits to the third floor were rare, too, and they were always in strong room K or the corridor outside. On the second floor, she’d turned up in half a dozen rooms and in the corridor, and on the first floor and in the basement, she was even more ubiquitous.
We sat back, staring at the fruits of our labors. The silence was the silence of revelations not arriving. In droves.
“She’s all over the place,” said Cheryl.
“Yeah,” I agreed in a slightly dead tone. “She is.”
“No, she’s not.” Pen’s voice was a little slurred, but there was a weight of certainty in it. We both looked at her.
She shrugged. “She’s on a running rope.”
“Explain,” I said.
Pen bent over the plans. “Okay,” she said, “suppose this cross here was a bit farther over—I mean, suppose she was in the corner of this room, not out in the middle. And this one—she could easily have been ten yards or so farther down the corridor.”
She rubbed out two of the crosses as she spoke; drew in two more. A third she moved only half an inch or so, to place it closer to a cluster that was already there. She looked at me expectantly.
“Straight lines,” I said. “She works in straight lines.”
Pen tutted. “They’re not straight, Fix. They’re curved!”
I started to feel a tingling in the back of my neck as my hairs rose—not from a ghostly visitation but from the gathering, inescapable sense of something opaque becoming obvious.
“Fuck me sideways,” I murmured.
Cheryl was looking from one of us to the other and back again. “Is someone gonna tell me the news?”
My eyes flicked backward and forward, from basement, to first floor, to second floor, third, fourth.
“Okay,” I said, “so I’m an idiot. I don’t have a good visual imagination. It’s like—the Milky Way.”
“It’s like what?” Cheryl demanded. But Pen was nodding excitedly.
“The Milky Way. We see it as a line in the sky because we’re looking at it from the wrong angle. But it’s not a line, it’s a disc. And these aren’t lines, either. Put the vertical dimension back in, and it’s right there. It’s—”
“—a running rope,” Pen finished.
“I’m gonna sulk,” Cheryl warned.
I put the plans one on top of another and held them up to show her. She squinted at them doubtfully. Now that I’d seen what Pen was driving at, I couldn’t believe that Cheryl was still missing it.
“Look—on each floor, she turns up in a whole lot of different places, but they make a rough circle. A really big circle in the basement, then a slightly smaller one on the first floor. Smaller still on the second, but still with more or less the same center. On the third floor, you’ve just got a scattering of points, all very close together. But suppose you mapped all of this in three dimensions. What would you get?”
“A headache,” said Cheryl bitterly.
“You’d get a hollow hemisphere.”
“The higher she gets in the building,” I said, pointing, “the less room she’s got to move in horizontally. Don’t you get it? Think of a dog on a leash. If its owner beats it with a stick, what’s it going to do?”
“Run away,” said Cheryl. “I think I’m being patronized now.”
“No, you’re not. Just see it in your mind. The dog will run away as far as the leash will let it. And then it will keep running, but it will only be able to go in a circle, right? A circle with the owner—and the stick—right in the middle.”
“Okay.”
“But suppose it was a space dog. With a jet pack. It would still go out to the full extent of the leash, but it wouldn’t be a circle anymore—because the dog would be free to move up and down and all around . . .”
“So it’d be a sphere.”
“Exactly!”
Cheryl looked again at the overlaid plans. The black crosses showed clearly through: concentric circles, narrowing as they went up through the building.
“There is a fixed place,” I said. “A tether of some kind—but she’s not haunting it. She’s getting as far away from it as she can. She’s running on the end of a leash.”
“And the man with the stick—”
“Is at the center. The place where she doesn’t want to go. The place where she’s never been seen.”
Cheryl took the plans from me and laid them down on the table again. “It’s got to be on the first floor,” she murmured. Then she glanced at Pen and me to double-check her logic. “The first floor or the basement. I mean, she’ll have the widest circle where she’s on the same level as . . . the thing. The place. Whatever.”
Pen nodded emphatically. “So where is it?” I asked. “What’s at the center of the sphere?”
Cheryl traced the line of the main corridor, muttering to herself. “That’s the front desk. These are the first-floor strong rooms. A, B, C. Ladies’ toilet . . .”
She tailed off into silence, but her fingers still moved over the map. Finally she looked up at me, her face a picture of bemusement. “It doesn’t work,” she said. “You’re wrong.”
“Why?” I demanded.
“Well, this room here—that’s the dead center, right? That’s smack in the middle of the circle, in the basement. That’s what she’s avoiding. It’s called SECOND CONFERENCE ROOM on here.”
“Yes? So?” I pressed her with a slight sense of unease. “What’s it called now?”
“It’s not called anything now, Felix.” Cheryl’s tone was flat. “Because it isn’t bloody there.”
Sixteen
TWENTY-FOUR FEET IS EIGHT PACES, ROUGHLY, SO COUNT them off. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Good. Then do a ninety-degree turn and count again, to ten this time. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
Then I bumped into the wall and whistled softly and tunelessly in the dark.
Cheryl was right.
Despite my earlier fears, it had been easy enough to break into the Bonnington with my lock picks. Their internal security was as spiky as hell, but the front door rolled over and played dead for me after only a modicum of manual stimulation. All the alarms were on the strong room doors, thank God, and I wouldn’t be visiting any of those. The reinforced door at the back of the reading room that led through into the staff-only part of the building was a lot harder and took me ten anxious, sweaty minutes. As a fallback, I had Cheryl’s ID card in my back pocket, but I was hoping not to have to use it, because the card readers on the doors probably had some kind of an internal memory.
I’d come alone. Pen was going to be my alibi in case things got nasty, and Cheryl didn’t need to be anywhere nearby while I was breaking into her place of work. But it would have been useful to have her all the same. It was hard enough making sense of
the plans in a well-lit kitchen; standing in a dark corridor, working by filtered moonlight, it was frankly a bit of a bastard.
But all I was doing was pacing out distances, after all; once you got past the logistical problems, it wasn’t exactly complicated. Fifteen minutes bumping and shambling in the dark brought me to the only conclusion that made any sense.
There was a room missing. The corridor doglegged around it in a way that made it obvious, once you knew that something had been there and had been excised.
I tried again in the basement floor and found the same thing—another lacuna, more or less exactly underneath the first—now with the added mystery of a staircase that had been moved six yards along the corridor. Why would anyone go to that degree of trouble to take a modest-size slice out of a huge public building?
When the answer came to me, I went back up to the first floor and let myself out as carefully as I’d entered. Back on the street, I counted my steps again, but I already knew where I was going to end up.
Which was at the other door: the one I’d walked past on the first day, because it was silted up with old rubbish and covered with a crudely hewn slice of hardboard. Because it was so obviously disused and didn’t lead anywhere. It was an appendix, a forgotten and useless by-product of the building’s inorganic evolution. And that was what I found myself staring at now—with new eyes.
The rubbish cleared away really easily—suspiciously easily, if you were already in that frame of mind. It was basically only a couple of empty boxes and an old blanket—the minimalist signifiers for a stage set of “a place where homeless people sleep at night.”
The plywood sheet that had been nailed to the door had a cut-out rectangle where the keyholes were—another sign that this place wasn’t quite as disused as it looked. The two locks here were a Falcon and a Schlage, and they made the archive’s front door look like a bead curtain. I struggled with the Schlage for half an hour, and I was about half a breath away from quitting when I finally heard the click that meant the cylinders were all in a line.
I pushed the door, and it opened. Beyond was a sort of lobby space about four feet square with what looked like a folded blanket for a doormat, and beyond that was another door that was also locked. Its wood looked a lot flimsier than its metal bits, and my patience had worn out a while back, so I just kicked it open.
I stepped into a completely dark room that had a sharp-sour, organic smell to it—a smell of sweat and piss and I didn’t want to know what else. I groped on the near wall for a light switch, found one, and flicked it on. A naked hundred-watt bulb cast a harsh, clinical spotlight on a room that Mr. Bleaney would have turned down flat. Three of the walls were painted a sad shade of hospital green, while the fourth had been covered over with oppressively dark wood paneling, relieved by a few vertical slats of a lighter color. The floor was covered by a strip of paisley-patterned linoleum that had been cut for another room and didn’t reach all the way to the edges. The glass of the window was intact, but all you could see through it was the inside face of another plywood board.
The room itself was bare enough to count as empty, the only item of furniture a stained, fluorescent-orange sofa with a sort of 1970s lack of shame about itself. Against the base of one wall was a row of a dozen or so liter and two-liter bottles, some full of clear liquid, some empty. That was all.
I let the inner door fall closed behind me and advanced a little farther into the room. The shock of recognition had already hit me, followed by the reflection that it really wasn’t any shock at all. This was the room I’d seen when I’d played twenty questions with the ghost—the room she’d showed to me in the slide show of her memories. She’d remembered it and communicated it to me faithfully in every detail—except that maybe there were a couple more empty bottles now and a couple fewer full ones.
I searched the room. It took no time at all, because there was nothing to look at. Nothing under the sofa, nothing behind it. There might have been something down the back of its the cushions, but I was reluctant to touch the thing—it looked as if even casual contact could pass on communicable diseases. I unscrewed one of the bottles and sniffed, then tentatively tasted. As far as I could tell, it was just water.
What did that leave? There was a shelf above the door, but it was empty apart from a thick deposit of dust. The paneling could be covering a multitude of sins, so I pressed it in a few places to see how determined it was to stay attached to the wall. On the third push, something gave and rattled slightly. I looked closer and saw the door that was set into the wood, its verticals hidden by two of the decorative slats. Closer still, and I saw the keyhole.
This one was a Chubb of about 1960s vintage—easy enough in this context to count as wide open.
Beyond the door, a flight of stairs going down. This was the original one from the plans, which was no longer part of the archive itself—and that in turn explained why there was a newer staircase a few yards farther on from where the original had been.
The acrid smell was a lot sharper now.
Most likely this space had been separated from the building while it was government-owned, perhaps as some sort of grace-and-favor apartment for a civil servant who wasn’t senior enough to merit anything over by Admiralty Arch. Or maybe it had been hived off from the rest of the house when two ministries fought each other for lebensraum. Either way, it seemed to have been forgotten since—but clearly not by everybody.
There was another light switch on the stairwell, but when I pressed it, the light went on in the downstairs room, rather than in the stairwell itself. I went down carefully, afraid of tripping in the inadequate light.
The basement room was even bleaker than the first-floor one. Again, there was just the one item of furniture—a mattress, even fouler than the sofa, and naked except for a single checked blanket in bright red and yellow—well, formerly bright would be closer to the truth. In one corner of the room, there was a bucket full of murky liquid, which was the source of the smell. It had been used as a latrine. So, at some point, had the floor around it. On the floor right next to the bucket was an iron ring that had been inexpertly set in messily poured cement—obviously not a feature of the original room. There was a coil of rope there, too, thrown into a corner.
I know a prison cell when I see one. Someone had lived here, fairly recently, and not because they wanted to. Some of the other memories I’d absorbed from my brief psychic contact with the ghost surfaced again. The blanket had featured in there, I was damn sure of that. And Gabe McClennan’s face. What had been behind it? Snowy peaks . . . I turned and saw on the far wall, only a few feet away in this claustrophobic space, a ragged-edged poster of Mont Blanc bearing the legend L’Empire du Ski. Déjà vu ran through me like a tide of needles.
And turning my head had made me catch a near-subliminal glimpse of something else. A splash of red, under the near end of the mattress, almost at my feet. I squatted down on my haunches, feeling a mixture of reluctance and grim triumph. I was close to the answer now—the source of everything. I slid my hand under the mattress to lift it up.
And a jolt of pain slammed through me as if I’d touched a bare electric cable. From hand, to arm, to heart, to all points of the compass.
I snatched my hand back and spat out a curse.
Or rather, I tried to spit it out, but it wouldn’t come. Silence took root in my mouth, my throat, my lungs. Silence fell on me like the grubby blanket, like a bell jar slipped over my head and shoulders, like a handkerchief soaked in chloroform.
No, that was panic and overreaction. I wasn’t dizzy. I wasn’t losing consciousness. I was just completely unable to make a sound. I mouthed words, and I tried to push breath through them to bring them into the world, but nothing happened. My voice had gone.
Lifting the corner of the mattress more carefully this time, from above, I was able to see why. The red wasn’t congealed blood, after all; it was a circle, inscribed in dark red chalk, with a five-pointed star inside it and a series of pa
instakingly inscribed marks at each point of the star. In other words, a ward put there by an exorcist. Normally, the text written in the center of a ward like this would be ekpiptein—dismiss—or hoc fugere—get out of town. Here it was aphthegtos—speechless.
I straightened up, feeling a little shaky. I knew what Gabe McClennan had been doing here now and why nobody at the archive had reacted to the name. He’d never visited the archive itself at all. This was where he’d come, and this was what he’d been brought in to do.
But why silence the ghost instead of sending her away? That made no sense at all. It wasn’t as though McClennan would have offered a discount. If anything, the binding spell was harder than a straight exorcism.
Whatever the answer was, one thing was now explained. This was why it had been so hard for me to get a fix on the ghost, even when I’d been so close to her. She was bound by this ward, and its strictures hemmed her in like a straitjacket—a straitjacket sewn onto her soul. The change in her behavior made sense now, too—the sudden flare into what had seemed like motiveless violence. She was responding to this necromantic assault.
The ward ought to have had no power over a living human being, but the psychic sensitivity I was born with had left me wide open to it. What I was suffering now was like snow blindness or like the deadened hearing that follows after an explosion. My voice would come back, but it could take minutes or even hours.
A feeling of claustrophobia crashed down on me and made my heart race. Even my breath was making no sound in my chest or in my mouth. A voiceless pall hung over and around me. I turned the other corners of the mattress over, not expecting to find anything. But at the far end, closest to the wall, there was a broad, dark brown stain on the underside. The color was pretty much unmistakable. So was the bitter almond smell of stale blood, which had been masked until I got this close by the sharper ammonial reek of the piss bucket.
I was conscious that anyone finding the upstairs door open could cross the room above me, see the light on down here, and lock me in with a single turn of the key—assuming that this was an anyone who had the key in his pocket. It wasn’t an idea I liked all that much. I retreated to the stairs, cast one more look around the grim place, and headed back up to street level.
