by Mike Carey
“Alice Gascoigne,” she said. “I’m the senior archivist.” Her hand came out automatically as she said it, like a cuckoo when the clock hits the hour. I took the hand and gave it a firm, lingering shake, which in theory gave me a chance to add a little more depth to those first impressions. I’m not psychic, at least not the kind with all the ribbons and bells, the kind who can read people’s thoughts as easily as picking up a newspaper or get newsflashes from their possible futures. But I am sensitive. It goes with the job. I’ve got my antennae out on wavelengths that other people don’t use all that much or don’t consciously monitor, and sometimes skin contact gets me tuned in strongly enough to take an instant reading of mood, a flash of surface thought, an elusive flavor of personality. Sometimes.
Not from Alice, though. She was sealed up tight.
“Jeffrey is in his office,” she said, taking her hand back at the earliest opportunity. “He’s actually busy with some month-end reports, and he won’t be able to see you. He says you should go ahead and do the job, and then you can send your bill in to him whenever it’s convenient.”
My smile took on a slightly pained tilt. We were really getting off on the wrong foot here.
“I think,” I said, picking my words with care, “that Jeffrey—Mr. Peele—may have a mistaken impression of how exorcism works. I am going to need to talk to him.”
Alice stood her ground, and her tone dropped a few degrees closer to zero.
“I’ve told you that won’t be possible. He’ll be tied up all day.”
I shrugged. “Then would you like to suggest a day that will be more convenient?”
Alice stared at me, caught between perplexity and outright annoyance.
“Is there some reason why you can’t just do the job right now?” she demanded.
“Actually,” I said, “there are a lot of reasons. Most of them are fairly technical. I’d be happy to explain them to you and then wait while you relay them to Mr. Peele. But that seems like a very roundabout way of doing things. It would be better if I could talk you both through it together—along with anyone else who needs to know.”
Alice considered this. I could see it didn’t sit well with her. Also—although this was just a guess—that her initial urge to tell me to sod off was tempered by the reluctant conclusion that she lacked the full authority to back it up.
“All right,” she said at last. “You’re the expert.” The emphasis on the last word fell a fraction of an inch this side of sarcasm.
She pointed toward the lockers opposite. “You’ll have to leave your coat here,” she said. “There’s a rule about personal effects. Frank, could you please take Mr. Castor’s coat and give him a ticket?”
“Okey-dokey.” The guard unhooked a hanger from one of the racks and laid it on the counter. I considered making an issue of it, but I could see I was going to have a bumpy enough ride with Alice as it was without going out of my way to make things difficult. I transferred my tin whistle to my belt, where it fits snugly enough, and handed the greatcoat over the counter to the guard. He’d been watching my exchange with Alice without any visible reaction, but he gave me a smile and a nod as he took the coat from me. He hung it up on the otherwise empty rack and gave me a plastic tag into which the number 022 had been die-cut. “Two little ducks,” he said. “Twenty-two.” I nodded my thanks.
Alice stood aside to let me walk up the stairs in front of her, no doubt mindful of how short her skirt was and of the consequent need to maintain the dignity of her station. I went on up with her heels clattering on the stone steps behind me all the way.
On the second floor there was a set of glass-paneled swing doors. Alice stepped past me to open them and walk through. I followed her into a large room that looked something like a public lending library, but with more sparsely furnished shelves. In the center of the space, there were about a dozen wide tables with six or eight chairs arranged around each. Most of the tables were empty, but at one of them a man was turning over the pages of what looked like an old parish register, making notes in a narrow, spiral-bound notebook as he went; at another, two women had spread a map and were laboriously copying part of it onto an A3 sheet; at a third, another, older man was reading The Times. Maybe The Times gets to jump the queue and become history straight away. Elsewhere there were shelves full of what looked to be encyclopedias and reference books, a few spinner racks loaded with magazines, a couple of large map chests, a bank of about eight slightly battered-looking PCs ranged along one wall, and at the end farthest away from us a six-sided librarians’ station, currently staffed by one bored-looking young man.
“Is this the collection?” I hazarded, prepared to be polite.
Alice gave a short, harsh laugh.
“This is the reading room,” she said with what seemed like slightly exaggerated patience. “The area that we keep open to the public. The collection is stored in the strong rooms, which are mostly in the new annex.”
She launched out across the room without bothering to look back and make sure I was still following. She was heading for an ugly steel-reinforced door that stood diagonally opposite us on the other side of the big open space. To either side of it there were two scanning brackets—the kind you get at the exits of large stores to discourage technologically challenged shoplifters.
Alice opened the door not with one of the keys that she wore on her belt but with a card that she ran through a scanner to the left of the door, making a small, inset red light wink to green. She held the door open for me, and I stepped through into a corridor that was narrow and low-ceilinged. She closed the door again behind us, pushing against the slam guard until the lock clicked audibly, and then slid past me again—it required a little maneuvering—to lead the way.
There were doors on both sides of the corridor, all of them closed. Narrow glass panels crisscrossed with wire mesh showed me rooms lined with filing cabinets or full of bookshelves from floor to ceiling. In some cases, the windows had black sugar paper pasted up over them, graying with age.
“What does a senior archivist do?” I asked by way of polite conversation.
“Everything,” Alice said. “I’m in overall charge here.”
“And Mr. Peele?”
“He’s responsible for policy. And funding. And external liaison. I’m in charge when it comes to actual day-to-day running.” She was testy, seeming to resent being questioned. But like I said, it’s an automatic thing with me. You can only decide what’s useful information and what’s trivia when you see it in the rearview mirror.
So I pressed on. “Is the archive’s collection very valuable?”
Alice shot me a slightly austere glance, but this was clearly something she was more disposed to talk about. “That’s really not a question that has a meaningful answer,” she responded slightly condescendingly, the keys jingling at her waist. “Value is a matter of what the market will bear. You understand? An item is only worth what you can sell it for. A lot of the things we’ve got are literally priceless, because there’s no market anywhere where they could be sold. Others really have no value at all.
“We’ve got seventy-five miles of shelving here—and we’re eighty percent full. The oldest documents we hold are nine centuries old, and those don’t ever come out to the public except when we mount an exhibition. But the bulk of the collection consists of stuff that’s much more mundane. Really, they’re not the sort of thing that people pay a fortune for. We’re talking about bills of lading from old ships. Property deeds and company incorporation deeds. Letters and journals—masses of those—but most of them not written by anyone very famous, and in a lot of cases not even all that well preserved. If you knew what you were looking for, theoretically, you could steal enough to keep yourself very comfortably. But then you’d have a lot of trouble selling them on. You’d never get an auction house to take them, because they’re ours and they’re known. Any auction house, any dealer who cared about his reputation, they’d check provenance as a matter of course. O
nly fences buy blind.”
We turned a corner as she talked, and then another. The interior of the building had clearly gone through as baffling and messy a conversion as my office. It seemed we were detouring around rooms or weight-bearing walls that couldn’t be shifted, and after the austere splendor of the entrance hall, the shoddiness and baldness of all this made a bleak impression on the eye. We came at last to another staircase, which was a very poor relation to the one Alice had descended before. It was of poured concrete, with chevroned antitrip tape crudely applied to the edges of each step. Again, Alice hung back to let me go up first.
“You’ve seen the ghost?” I asked as we climbed.
“No.” Her tone was guarded, clipped. “I haven’t.”
“I thought everybody—”
She came abreast of me again at the top of the stairs, and she shook her head firmly. “Everybody apart from me. I always seem to be somewhere else. Funny, really.”
“So you weren’t there when she attacked your colleague?”
“I said I haven’t seen her.”
It seemed as though that was all I was getting. Well, okay. I’m pretty good, most of the time, at knowing when to push and when to fold. Another bend in the corridor, and now it joined a wider one that seemed to be more in the spirit of the original building. We followed this wider hallway for about twenty yards, until it passed the first open doorway I’d seen. It looked into a large room that was being used as an open-plan office: six desks, roughly evenly spaced, each with its own PC and its own set of shelves piled high with papers and files. One man and one woman glanced up as we went past—the man giving me a slighly grim fish-eye, the woman looking a lot more interested. A second man was on the phone, talking animatedly, and so he missed us.
The sound of his voice followed us as we walked on. “Yeah, well as soon as possible, to be honest. I’m not that great with the language, and I can’t—yeah. Just to establish authenticity, if nothing else.”
A few yards farther on, Alice abruptly stopped and turned to face me.
“Actually,” she said, “you’d probably better wait in the workroom. I’ll come and get you.”
“Fine,” I said. With a curt nod, she walked on. I swiveled on my heel and went into the room that we’d just passed, and this time all three of its occupants gave me the once-over as I walked in.
“Hello there,” said the man who’d been on the phone before. “You must be Castor.” He was about my age or slightly older—midthirties, free-falling toward the big four-oh. He had a fading tan, made more uneven by freckles, and light brown hair that was as wild as if he’d just woken up. He was dressed down, to put it politely: torn jeans, a Damageplan T-shirt, and flop-top trainers. But the bundle of keys he carried at his belt was as big as Alice’s own. On his left cheek, there was a square surgical dressing.
He gave me an affable grin and held out his hand. I shook it and read a certain tension behind the smile—tension and perhaps expectation. He wasn’t sure how to take me yet, but he had hopes that I could live up to my billing. Of course, this was the guy who had the most reason to want the ghost cleared out of here.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Clitheroe,” I said. Behind me, the woman whistled appreciatively and then hummed the opening bars of the X-Files theme tune. Clitheroe laughed.
“It’s just Rich,” he said. “You knew because of the bandage, right? I mean, that wasn’t some sort of—emanations from the ectoplasm—kind of thing?”
“Who you gonna call?” the woman drawled. “Gho-o-ostbusters!”
I turned to face her, and Rich made the introduction on cue. “This is Cheryl. Cheryl Telemaque—our IT specialist.” Cheryl was very compact, very striking, and very dark-skinned—the shade of brown that can legitimately be called black. She looked to be in her early twenties, and her taste in clothes clearly ran to rhinestone-studded Von Dutch tops and a weight of chunky jewelry that skirted the glittery borders of bling.
“Which one are you?” she demanded with a cheerfully piss-taking grin. “The nerdy one, the cute one, or the anally retentive one?”
“I’m amazed you have to ask,” I said. Again, I shook hands. Her grip was firm and strong, and I got an instantaneous flash of warmth and amusement and mischief—Cheryl was a real live wire, clearly. Exact voltage yet to be determined.
“Do you have to use pentagrams and candles and stuff?” she asked me eagerly.
“Not usually. A lot of that palaver is just for window dressing. I skip the candles and pass the benefits on to the customer.”
“And this is Jon Tiler,” said Rich. I turned again. Rich’s arm was thrown out to indicate the other man—the one who’d followed me with a cold-eyed stare when I walked past earlier. The youngest of the three, I guessed, and the least prepossessing physically—he was five six in height, overweight by about forty pounds or so, and his flushed face was replete with burst blood vessels. He wore a short-sleeve shirt with some kind of floral design on it in shades of orange and pink and green—as if he was dressed for jungle operations in a fruit salad.
“Hi,” I said, holding out my hand. He gave me a curt nod, but he didn’t take the hand, and he didn’t speak.
“Jon teaches all the little kiddies,” said Cheryl, in a tone that—though jokey—seemed slightly loaded.
“I’m the interpretation officer,” said Jon with a sullen emphasis.
The soft answer turneth away a whole heap of wrath and makes people take you for a pliable idiot into the bargain. “Interpreting what, exactly?” I asked.
“The collection,” Jon said. “People come in. I do sessions for them. And it’s not just kids, Cheryl. We lay on plenty of programming for adults, too.”
“Sorry, Jon,” said Cheryl, casting her gaze down like a chidden schoolgirl.
Rich jumped into the pause that followed before it could get awkward. “We’ve got a remit from the Education Department,” he said. “They’re one of our funding streams, and they set us targets. We’re supposed to run one-day courses for kids in National Curriculum stages two, three, and four, and outreach sessions for adult learners. Alice oversees, Jon delivers. With help from a couple of the part-timers.”
Jon went back to what he’d been doing, which was photocopying pages from a book on an oversized and slightly antiquated printer/copier. He turned his back on me fairly pointedly, and I wondered what it was about me he objected to so strongly. A possible answer suggested itself at once, and I made a mental note to check it out when I got the chance—assuming that I was still on the job after my interview with Peele.
There was still no sign of Alice, so I decided there was no harm in starting to collate a bit of information.
“Rich,” I said, “if you don’t mind talking about it, how did you come to get hurt?”
Cheryl jumped in before he could answer. “I’ve got the film rights,” she said cheerfully. “He signed them over to me on a beer mat, so you’re too late.”
Rich grinned, a little sheepishly. “It was really weird. I was just wrapping up for the night, right? Three-quarters of an hour late, as per usual.”
“Who else was around to see this?”
He thought about that for a moment. “Everyone,” he said. “Cheryl. Jon. Alice. Farhat must have been around, too, because Friday’s the day when she comes in. She’s one of Jon’s assistants.”
“Alice?” I repeated. “Alice saw what happened?”
“Oh yeah.” He gave a short laugh. “It was hard to miss. Everyone saw it—and heard it, too. Cheryl reckons I screamed like a—”
“Mr. Castor,” said Alice. “Would you like to come through?”
Quite an impressive display of ninja stealth. She was standing in the doorway with her arms folded, and Rich tailed off when he saw her. For a moment I thought of asking her to clarify the mystery: she said she wasn’t there; Rich said she was. But it might come across badly to bring it out in public—like a challenge or a taunt. It was probably better to let that one keep for now. “W
ell, I look forward to hearing the whole story,” I said blandly. “Go over it in your mind; the more detail you can give me, the better. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
“Sure, man,” said Rich.
Nodding to the pair of them, I joined Alice and she led the way down the corridor, around another odd bend. The doors here were open, all but one, and some even had windows onto the corridor. At the same time there was a subtle change in the background feel of the place, like the silence when a fridge cuts out, making you aware for the first time that you were hearing a sound. I suspected that we’d just passed into the new annex.
Just beyond the bend in the corridor there were two doors. One was tersely labeled SENIOR ARCHIVIST, and the other had Peele’s name on it, above the emblazoned words CHIEF ADMINISTRATOR.
“He’s very busy,” Alice said, making it sound almost like an accusation. “Please keep this as short as you can.” She knocked on the door, then walked in.
The name plaque on Peele’s door may have been impressive, but his office was barely wide enough to fit his desk into. You’d have thought a man with that big a title could have finagled himself a bit more elbow room.
Peele himself was sitting not exactly behind the desk—because this was a corner room with some odd angles to it, and the desk was against a wall—but in as commanding a position as logistics allowed. He looked up as I came in and closed a window on his computer’s desktop. Probably Minesweeper, judging by how hastily and jerkily he did it.
The man who swiveled his chair toward me was in his late forties; tall and cadaverous in build, with a great ruddy hawk bill of a nose spoiling what would otherwise have been the handsome and ascetic face of a Methodist minister. He had red worry-marks on either side of his nose, but he wasn’t wearing spectacles. His thinning hair was brown grizzled with gray, and his suit, which was dark blue, shimmered with a faint and incongruous two-tone effect.
I say he swiveled his chair toward me. Actually, he only made it through a few degrees of arc, and when he stopped, he was still only three-quarters on to me. His gaze made contact with mine for all of a second, then darted back down to the desk.
