by Mike Carey
So it was official. They were all in it together. I just wished I had the faintest clue what “it” actually was.
Thirteen
THERE’S A PLACE WHERE I GO SOMETIMES TO retrench and regroup—to dredge up a bit of strength when I’m feeling weak and to find some silence in the city’s remorseless polyphonic shit-storm. Bizarrely enough, it’s a cemetery: Bunhill Fields, off the City Road close to Old Street Station. It ought to be the last place in the world I’d want to be, but somehow it suits me down to the ground—and then about six feet farther.
One factor is just that it’s old and disused. The last burial there was more than a century ago; all the original ghosts clocked off and headed elsewhere long before I ever found the place, and no newer spirits have come along to set up shop. There’s a quiet and a peace there that I’ve never found anywhere else.
And then again, there’s the fact that it’s not hallowed ground. It’s a dissenters’ graveyard, full of all the bolshie bastards who played the game by their own rules back when doing that could get you the pre-Enlightenment equivalent of cement overshoes. William Blake is dreaming of Jerusalem under that sod, and Daniel Defoe is probably dreaming about something a fair bit earthier. You’ve also got John Owen and Isaac Watts, the reservoir dogs of eighteenth-century theology. What can I tell you? I just feel at ease in their company.
So that’s where I was, and that’s why. I needed to think. When I walked back into the Bonnington, I wanted to feel that I wasn’t going in there completely naked, without any kind of a plan.
Disengage and reassess, I told myself. Go through what you already know, and see if it builds up into a picture of what you thought you didn’t.
I take on this job, and on the first day I’m already being followed by Scrub. Bearing in mind the toolbox that Lucasz Damjohn must have at his command, it said a lot that he’d pick out such a big and powerful item. Scrub must normally be reserved for putting the frighteners on rival whoremasters; applied to me, he was just overkill.
Damjohn then goes out of his way to get to meet me, but doesn’t try to lean on me in any way or even particularly pump me for information about what I’m doing.
Then it turns out that McClennan and Damjohn are old cronies.
And the archive ghost has met Gabe McClennan—a shit-hot exorcist, whatever else he might be. So why the hell is she still there?
That was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. I’d really started to sell myself on the idea that Damjohn might have something to hide, but that kite just wouldn’t fly. If McClennan had been sent in to burn the Bonnington ghost, she’d be toast. Like he said, he would have gone in, done the job, and drawn his pay. But he hadn’t, unless the job he’d been sent in to do was something different.
And someone had raised a succubus to burn me out—an exotic and dangerous weapon, but one that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow with the police or anyone else, given what I did for a living. What had I done that was worth that kind of attention? Or what was I doing now?
Answers on a postcard. None of it made any sense at all, and the more you looked at it, the more it fell apart. Pretty much the only thing I was certain of was that I wasn’t going to be playing any tunes at the Bonnington until I had some answers.
I gave it up at last. Whatever power Bunhill Fields normally exerts on my highly suggestible mind, it wasn’t working right then. I was feeling as though my eyeballs had been scooped out, roughly polished with a sanding wheel, and then shoved back more or less into their right places. My head was full of gray cheese instead of brains. If I’d had brains, I would have gone back home to Pen’s, boarded up the window with yesterday’s Independent, and slept for twelve hours.
Gray cheese took me to the Bonnington instead.
Frank looked at me with grave concern. “You look rough,” he said as I dumped my coat down on the counter—and his face as he said it was slightly awestruck. “What happened to you?”
“You should see the other guy,” I said, falling back on cliché.
“Was he a professional wrestler?”
“No, he was a girl. Where’s Jeffrey?”
“I believe Mr. Peele is in his office. I’ll call him and tell him you’re—”
“I prefer to come as a surprise,” I said, and walked on toward the stairs. Frank could have stopped me, but he didn’t. I guess having been chewed up, spat out, and left for dead had some sort of meaning in his moral framework. Cheers, Frank. I owe you one.
I made a point of looking in at the workroom. Rich, Jon, and Cheryl and a couple of people I didn’t know all glanced up as I appeared in the doorway—glanced, and then kept looking.
“Mate, you should be in bed,” Rich said after a pause so heavy it wasn’t just pregnant but ready to break its waters and deliver.
“Yeah,” Cheryl agreed. “A hospital bed. You look like you picked your teeth with a chainsaw, man.”
Jon Tiler said nothing, but he suddenly seemed to be sitting very still. He’d been reaching for a pen; now both of his hands were flat on the desk, and he was just staring at my face. He looked unhappy. I opened a mental file drawer and dropped that look right into it.
“I used to juggle chainsaws,” I said conversationally. “It looks dangerous, but you just have to keep at it. Rich, have you got a pen and paper?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. He found the pen in his desk tidy and a sheet of scrap lying next to his printer. He pushed them across the desk to me. Taking the pen, I wrote down the symbols that the ghost had shown me in that remembered image—scrawled on the torn-out page of a book and held up to the inside of a car window. .
I reversed it and pushed it back across to Rich.
“That’s Russian?” I asked.
He stared at it, his eyes widening slightly. “Yeah,” he said.
“What does it mean?”
He looked up at me—a puzzled, searching look. “SOS,” he said. “It means ‘Help me.’”
“Thanks. That’s what I needed to know.”
I gave them all a nod and walked back out, then on down the hall to Peele’s office.
Peele was on the phone when I walked in, talking about productivity and different ways of defining it. I sat down opposite him and stared at him in silence as he went on. The stare and the silence did their job; he wasn’t looking directly at me, of course, but a good stare communicates itself by means other than sight. After less than a minute, he made a clumsy excuse and said that he’d call back. Then he hung up and shot me an exasperated microsecond glare.
“You’ve got a problem,” I said. “And I think it might be a different problem from the one you think you’ve got.”
“Mr. Castor!” he blurted. “That was the Joint Museums Trust! I was taking an important—I was engaged on”—words momentarily failed him, and he almost met my stare—“I don’t appreciate you coming in here unannounced and simply presuming on my time!”
“Well, I’m really sorry,” I said with nothing in my voice that could be read as sincerity. “I assumed you’d want an update on the ghost situation.”
If I thought that would stop his mouth, I was wrong. Peele was full of indignation, and it needed to find a vent.
“This isn’t proceeding as I expected,” he said, sounding near-terminally agitated. “Jon Tiler was in here yesterday morning, determined to file a formal complaint against you after the damage you caused on Tuesday night. I persuaded him not to, but it was a very unpleasant interview. I hope you have some positive progress to report.”
“No,” I said. “But I do have some negative progress to report—in other words, I’ve been able to rule a few things out. You see, I was operating under some mistaken assumptions about your ghost. Like that she had to be tied to the Russian collection in some way. But that’s not true, is it?”
Now Peele really did look at me—for the barest fraction of a second, then his gaze fell to his desktop again. “Isn’t it?” he asked, after a pause long enough to count to three in.
“No, it isn’t. She dates from a much later period—viz the present day—and that puts a whole new complexion on her being here. I’m looking for a different kind of explanation now.”
That was meant to sound vaguely threatening and maybe to sweat some additional information out of Peele, if there was anything there to be sweated. But as strategies go, it sort of blew up in my face. His lips set in a tight line. “Mr. Castor,” he demanded, “why are you looking for an explanation at all?”
I tried to parry that question rather than answer it. “I’m a professional,” I said, deadpan. “I don’t just come in and clean up. I have to understand the context for—”
Peele cut across me. “You made no mention of context when I took you on,” he pointed out coldly. “You promised to carry out a specific service, and now you’re making caveats that seem to me to have nothing to do with the matter in hand. I also have to ask, since you raise the issue of professional standards, whether your objectivity has been compromised in some way.”
It was my turn to look blank. “My objectivity?” I repeated. “Do you want to explain that?”
“Certainly. On every occasion up to now, when we’ve talked about ghosts, you have used the impersonal pronoun—‘it’—to refer to them. This has been consistent and at times almost aggressive—as though you felt a need to establish a point of some kind. Now, overnight, the ghost you’re meant to be exorcising for us here has become a ‘she.’ I have to ask why that is.”
Damn. Fairly caught. I could dodge the kick, but the stable door was already down—and I hadn’t even realized it until I saw the splinters.
“You’re an academic,” I said in a good imitation of offhand. “Words matter a lot to you; they’re part of your stock-in-trade. I don’t have the leisure to look for nuances like that. I just get the job done.”
“That, Mr. Castor,” Peele answered scathingly, “is what I should very much like to see.”
I leaned across the desk. The best defence is a good smack in the face. “Then work with me,” I snapped. “You can start by showing me your incident book again. If the ghost didn’t come in with the Russian stuff, then where did she come from? What else was happening back in early September that could explain her popping up here?”
Peele didn’t answer for a moment. It was clear that he was asking himself the same question and not getting any good answers.
“And finding this out will help you to complete the exorcism?” he demanded at last.
“Of course,” I said, not even flinching at the flat lie. I wasn’t about to explain that I could do the exorcism right there and then—probably while standing on my head and juggling three oranges.
With obvious reluctance, Peele opened his desk drawer and took out the ledger that I’d seen a few days previously. He started leafing through the pages himself, but I reached over and blocked him by putting a hand on the cover and closing the book again.
“You’d better let me,” I said. “I may not know what I’m looking for, but I’ve got more chance of recognizing it if I see it for myself.”
Peele handed me the book with a look on his face that said he was keen to get rid of it—that he was sick of the entire subject of the haunting. Funny. For me, now that someone was apparently trying to kill me because of it, it was starting to develop a visceral fascination.
The book fell open at Tuesday, September 13, which I took to be just a happy coincidence. That was the date of the first sighting, I remembered. And I also remembered how long the entry had looked when I’d last seen it. It looked even longer now, and Peele’s tiny handwriting even more impenetrable. To put off the moment, I flicked ahead through the pages to the most recent entry, which of course was only two days old; it concerned Jon Tiler’s complaint about the indoor tornado I’d whipped up when I’d tried to use Rich’s blood to raise the ghost.
Going back through November, there seemed to be an entry for every day—most of them fairly terse. “Richard Clitheroe saw the ghost in stack room 3.” “Farhat Zaheer saw the ghost in the first-floor corridor.” Nothing in October after the first week, though; there was a lull, Peele had said. There was a lull and then when she came back, she didn’t talk anymore.
But as I continued to flick through the pages, I saw the pattern start up again: dozens of sightings, scarcely a day without at least something, going all the way back through September to the thirteenth. Okay, not everything that was going on was ghost-related. On September 30, there’d been a leak in the women’s toilet: “Petra Gleeson slipped in the water but seems not to have been injured.” And on September 21, someone named Gordon Batty had had “another migraine headache.”
I was so lost in this fascinating saga of everyday life among archiving folk that when I got to the dense block of text for September 13, I carried on turning the pages. That was when I realized why the book had fallen open at that particular page in the first place—it was because the previous one had been torn out.
I reversed the book and showed the gap to Peele.
“Did you make a blot?” I asked.
He stared in astonishment at the mismatched dates and then at me.
“That’s impossible,” he protested, bemused. “I’d never take a page out of the incident book. It’s an official record. It’s audited every year by the JMT. I don’t know how this could possibly have happened . . .”
Better try to rule out the obvious, in any case. I pulled the book open in the center of a signature and showed Peele that they were stitched in already folded. “Sometimes with a book that’s stitched like this, you tear a page out from the back to write a note or something, and then its partner falls out from the front a while later. Could that have happened here?”
“Of course not,” he insisted a little shrilly. “I would never do that. Not from the incident book. It would show up the next time—”
“—the next time the auditors did their rounds. It’s okay, Mr. Peele, I’m not accusing you of anything. I just wanted to make sure we weren’t dealing with a random accident. Assuming we’re not, the other working hypothesis is that someone came in here and tore the page out on purpose, to remove some reference that he or she didn’t want to become common knowledge.”
“But if I wrote it up in the book, it was already common knowledge!”
“Then perhaps what they wanted to avoid was someone drawing a link between two things that happened around the same time.”
“Such as?”
“Such as I have to say I don’t have the faintest idea.” I looked at the point where the incident book’s dry narrative line was broken. The last entry that was present in full was for July 29; August must have been a slow month. Then the dates resumed with a brief entry for September 12 (Gordon Batty’s first migraine, chronologically speaking), followed by the epic details of September 13.
“Something in August,” I prompted Peele. “Or it could have been around the start of September. Maybe even just a few days before the ghost was first seen. What else was happening then? Does anything stick in your mind?”
“August is slow,” Peele said, ruminating. “The school visits stop altogether, so all we do is collate, repair, catalog new acquisitions . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t remember anything. Nothing that stands out.”
“Well, do you mind if I question your staff again?”
He flared up again. “Yes, Mr. Castor. To be honest, I do. Why would that be necessary?”
“Like I said—to establish a context for the haunting.”
Peele thought for a while, then shook his head firmly.
“No. I’m sorry, but no. I don’t want any further disruption to the running of the archive. If you can do your job without getting in the way of the people who actually work here, then do it. If you can’t, then give me back the deposit I’ve already paid you, and I’ll bring in somebody who can do it.”
“The deposit is nonrefundable, Mr. Peele.”
“Now see here, Castor—”
“Those were t
he terms you agreed to. But I don’t think the issue here is whether or not you get your money back. You’ve got a dead woman in your archive, and she didn’t die all that long ago. You need to know why she’s here and why she’s so full of rage and misery that she’s attacking the living. If you don’t get answers to those questions, exorcising her could be just the start of your problems.”
“I don’t understand the logic of that statement.”
“Then think about it. It’ll come to you.”
I left him fulminating. There seemed no point in staying. In fact, the longer I hung around, the bigger the risk that he might actually talk himself into throwing me out. And I wasn’t ready to go, not yet.
I stuck my head into the workroom. “Peele wants someone to open doors for me,” I said. “Any volunteers?” This lying thing—once you got into it, it was really a fantastic labor-saving device.
Rich opened his mouth to speak, but Cheryl got there first. “I’ll go,” she said. “Sign the keys over, Rich.” Rich closed his mouth again and shrugged. There was a brief transaction in which Cheryl swapped her signature for a turn with the big key ring. Then we headed for the door.
I walked on down the corridor, and Cheryl fell in beside me. “The Russian room?” she asked.
“No. The attic.”
“The attic? But there’s nothing up there.”
“I know. My brother says nothing can be a real cool hand.”
Two nights ago, dressed in opaque shadows, the attic had looked numinous and threatening. By daylight, it just looked empty.
We went to the end room, and Cheryl followed me inside. I pointed to the cupboard.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
Cheryl shook her head. “I haven’t got a clue,” she confessed. “Why?”
