Tales from the Folly

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘You know what I reckon,’ said Warwick Anderson. ‘I reckon it was a poltergeist.’

  I don’t have time to talk about the nature of ghosts here, but let’s just say that like the mentally ill, they almost never pose a danger to the public. And when they do it hardly ever involves throwing physical objects about. However, according to Nightingale, when they do start flinging the furniture it can be very serious. So I arranged for us to spend the night in the, possibly, haunted bookshop.

  ‘And I have to be here because?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘So there’s corroboration if anything happens,’ I said.

  ‘And Toby?’ she asked.

  ‘To wake us up if anything happens,’ I said.

  The shop manager, a short, round and strangely asymmetrical white man in his mid-thirties also wanted to know about the dog.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘He’s specially trained.’

  ‘Oh, he’s special all right,’ said Lesley.

  The Covent Garden branch of Waterstones had been created by purchasing three shops — one medium sized one on New Row and two small ones on Garrick Street — and then knocking them together and fitting out the basement. This gave it three entrances, four till points and a very odd shape. Lots of dead space, I noticed, ideal for shoplifting.

  I asked the manager about it, and he said I’d be surprised by what got stolen.

  ‘Poetry mainly,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’ I asked.

  ‘Really,’ he said.

  I supposed that being right next to the Garrick Club they got a better class of shop lifter.

  I’d noticed an interesting windowed dome over the main till on my first visit, but when I did a cursory historical and architectural search online that afternoon, I couldn’t find any reference to it at all. I got the impression that the central section had once been a hall or a ballroom—somewhere built for display.

  The manager would have preferred to have spent the night in the shop with us, but we suggested that if he were that worried he could always wait in his car outside—he declined.

  Once he’d shown us how to lock up and set the alarm, in case we left early, and had a strained telephone conversation with his cluster manager, he departed with many a worried backward glance.

  The ground floor was an L-shaped space made up of obviously quite a large hall, the main entrance, and a similar sized section at an angle which contained the main till with the glazed dome above it. The stock room and loading bay were behind the till and at the other end two smaller wings, children’s books and travel, ended with doors out onto Garrick Street. A set of central stairs led down to the basement where Art, Self-Help, History, Politics and the ever-expanding Cookery section lay.

  We did what we’ve come to call an Initial Vestigium Assessment or IVA—which consisted of me and Lesley wandering around the shop trying to sense if anything occult had happened inside. It wasn’t easy, because books have the same effect on vestigia as those egg-box shaped bits of foam have on sound. It was a phenomena much commented on in the literature, or at least in the literature I’d managed to skim through that afternoon. Most practitioners cite the effect as the reason why it was much easier to have a nap in one of the Folly’s libraries than in the smoking room where they were supposed to.

  There was definitely something at the main till under the dome on the ground floor. A whiff of the slaughterhouse mingled with shouting, excitement, desire, disappointment and rotting straw. Downstairs, where the ‘attack’ had taken place, it was just your normal central London background of pain, joy, sweat, tears and the occasional inexplicable horse or sheep.

  According to the literature there are basically two types of ghosts, those that only show themselves when people are present and those that only come out when nobody is there. There’s Latin tags for both types but I can never remember what they are. So, the big question was whether to set up camp where the unfortunate Warwick Anderson was buried in books or to wait in the manager’s office and monitor via CCTV. In the end we decided to wait in Art where the attack took place and if nothing happened after three hours move to the office—which was closer to the staff room and the coffee in any case.

  ‘Hold on,’ said Lesley as we settled into our chairs. ‘Didn’t the children’s section used to be downstairs?’

  ‘I don’t remember getting called to a job here,’ I said.

  ‘I used to buy presents for my nieces and nephews,’ she said. ‘And the children’s section was there.’ She pointed to a square alcove whose shelves were currently labelled Street Art, Interiors and Photography. Street Art being graffiti with a dollar value on the international market.

  ‘At least that bit was where Harry Potter and Roald Dahl were,’ she said. ‘Although Tracy preferred Darren Shan to Harry Potter. I used to check the table for new stuff.’

  The display table in the alcove was currently sporting a sign which read: Never Without Art, a category which appeared to consist of big glossy books with tastefully photographed white women on the front cover.

  I rummaged around in the go-bag for the first of the snacks and Toby lay down on his back at our feet and stuck his legs in the air.

  At least we had plenty to read.

  In three hours I ate two packets of crisps, a ham sandwich and read sixty pages of Policing With Contempt by Victor Baker, the alleged pen name of a serving police officer in some force up north. Whoever he was, he really hated paperwork, political correctness and yearned for the simpler days of yore. I reckoned that if his skipper ever worked out who he was, he was going to get a close look at the good old days via the application of a telephone directory to the tender parts of his body.

  We decided it was time for coffee and a possible shift to the manager’s office.

  I’d just put the kettle on when Toby started barking.

  Me and Lesley looked at each other and then ran for the door. We would have made it back to the Art section faster if we hadn’t tripped over each other’s feet in the narrow corridor that ran past the manager’s office. By the time we got there it was all over.

  There four neat stacks of books lined up in front of our chairs.

  ‘Symmetrical book stacking,’ I said. ‘Just like the British Library in 1896.’

  ‘You’re right, Peter,’ said Lesley. ‘No human being would stack books like this.’

  Having established that some sort of weird shit was going on, step two, in the as yet completely theoretical Modern Procedure Guide for Supernatural Police Officers, was to try and categorise what it is you’re dealing with. With ghosts, the easiest way was to pump a bit of magic into them and see what form they take.

  I conjured up a werelight which caused Toby to take refuge behind the till counter—he’s a veteran of many of my practise sessions.

  Shadows flickered amongst the shelves as the werelight dimmed and took on a crimson hue.

  ‘Definitely something,’ said Lesley.

  ‘I can’t see a figure,’ I said.

  Usually a ghost would have manifested by that stage.

  ‘Give it some welly,’ said Lesley.

  I upped the intensity of the werelight until it practically gave off lens flare. Then suddenly it shrank down to a small sapphire blue star and winked out.

  ‘Uh oh,’ said Lesley and we both dived for the safety of the till counter just in time for the shop to explode.

  Well, not explode exactly. As far we could reconstruct it later fully half the books in the basement shot off their shelves and would have sailed across the shop if they hadn’t met the books from the opposite shelves coming the other way, with a rattling sound of collision.

  Strangely, some areas were untouched, not one Nigella Lawson book left its shelf but every single copy of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist was found jammed into an air conditioning vent.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ asked Lesley once the noise had died down.

  ‘That didn’t feel like a ghost,’ I said.

  Tob
y licked my face, which was disgusting, but there was no way I was sticking my head above the level of the till just yet.

  Lesley cautiously took her hands off her head and risked a peep over the countertop. When nothing bad happened, I joined her.

  ‘What did it feel like?’ she asked.

  It had felt a bit like the first time I’d met Mama Thames or when Beverley Brook kissed me, or the Old Man of the River had turned his gaze upon me. Like the smell of blood and the taste of Plasticine, liked crossed legs and chicken feathers.

  ‘Definitely not a ghost,’ I said. ‘I want to check something.’

  We tiptoed over the books on the floor and up the stairs, which were fortunately clear of books, although a display case full of Dan Brown’s had been flung into the travel section.

  A drift of brightly coloured volumes for toddlers and early readers stretched out from the Children’s section towards the stairwell. I motioned Lesley towards the area under the dome.

  ‘Tell me what you sense,’ I said.

  Even without her mask on it can be hard to tell what Lesley’s thinking. The damage to her face had stripped it of the markers that we rely on to read the expressions of others. Still, I was getting better at interpreting what I did see and what she showed under the dome was puzzlement, then disgust and then recognition.

  ‘Cock fighting ring,’ she said.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ I said. ‘All that excitement, activity and on top of that the power that gets released at the point of death.’

  ‘Chicken ghost?’ said Lesley. ‘No, wait, you said it wasn’t a ghost.’

  ‘Do you know how gladiator fights got started?’ I asked.

  Lesley indicated that not only did she not know this interesting historical fact, but that she would like me to impart it sometime before old age and death.

  ‘They started as part of a religious ceremony at grand Roman funerals,’ I said.

  ‘And you know this because?’

  ‘Horrible Histories,’ I said.

  ‘So you’re thinking what?’

  I told her.

  ‘You’re kidding me,’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Say something bad about books.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Say something disparaging about books and reading,’ I said.

  ‘Why me?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Because it will be more convincing coming from you,’ I said.

  Lesley looked around self-consciously and then said: ‘Nobody ever learnt anything from a book.’

  I thought I heard a rustle downstairs—so did Lesley.

  ‘Books are for losers,’ she said.

  Definitely movement, and it wasn’t us. I checked and it wasn’t Toby either.

  ‘Oh my god,’ said Lesley as we went downstairs.

  ‘Exactly,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, well don’t sound so smug,’ she said. ‘Look at this place. It’s a mess.’

  ‘I have a plan for that,’ I said and told her.

  ‘Not me again,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve got a better voice,’ I said.

  Lesley agreed and, after a moment’s thought, went upstairs to fetch a book from the Children’s section. She waved it at me when she came back down.

  ‘Harry Potter,’ I said. ‘Really?’

  ‘Since I’m reading,’ she said. ‘It’s my choice’

  I created another werelight, a nice gentle one, and addressed the bookshop at large.

  ‘Hello,’ I said in my brightest voice. ‘My name’s Peter Grant and tonight we’re going to play a game called ‘put all the books back in order.’ And if you’re especially good and well behaved, my friend Lesley’s going to read you a story.’

  * * *

  Lesley, the coward, claimed she had a medical appointment and left me to explain it to the manager the next morning.

  ‘There’s a god living in my branch,’ said the manager when I was finished.

  ‘A Genius Loci,’ I said. ‘A spirit of place. And it’s more accurate to say that it is the shop—in a metaphysical sense. A god or goddess of books and reading.’

  ‘But why here?’ he asked plaintively.

  ‘Well, it’s a book shop,’ I said.

  ‘So what?’ asked the manager. ‘My last branch didn’t have a local god in it. None of the other managers have ever mentioned anything like this—I’m sure I would have remembered. Why here?’

  Because, I thought, the cockfighting ring on your top floor provided a reservoir of vestigia which interacted with all those young minds reading books downstairs, and a spirit of place formed like a pearl around a bit of grit. Only I wasn’t going to tell him that. Because not only couldn’t I prove any of it, it was also a bloody dreadful simile.

  Then the children’s section had been moved upstairs and the poor little deity started to feel unloved.

  ‘Just one of those things,’ I said.

  ‘But what am I supposed to do about it,’ he asked. ‘Sacrifice a goat?’

  ‘About once a week somebody has to sit down and read it a book,’ I said.

  ‘What kind of book?’

  ‘It’s not the book that’s important,’ I said. ‘It’s the reading.’

  Introduction: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Granny

  (Takes place just after Foxglove Summer)

  There’s something haunting about a motorway service station at night, it might be the melancholy rumble and swish of traffic or that they exist as islands of fluorescent light amongst the rural darkness. Jasper Fforde used one as a metaphor for the transition between life and death and I’d be lying if I didn’t have that, and the final story of Sapphire and Steel, in my mind when I wrote this story.

  I know it can be hard to keep track of all the characters in a long running series so to help out I’d like to remind you that not-Nicole is the human changeling child whose mum tried to send her back to Faerie.

  The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Granny

  There’s something uniquely dangerous about a motorway services station in the dead hours of the night. You can feel it as you pull off the slip road and cruise through the sodium wastes of the empty car park to stop by the sad little strip of landscaping that separates the vehicles from the children’s play area. You get out of the car to silence except for the washing machine rumble of passing traffic and usually something tinny and corporately approved echoing out of the main entrance.

  You can have some seriously weird and melancholy thoughts at a motorway service station, about your mortality, about the doomed future of the human race and just who thinks it’s justified to charge 10p over the odds for petrol. It’s a bloody crime is what it is.

  I try not to drive at night but if you do you’ve got to stop regularly or risk the chance of waking up with a face full of airbag. Therefore, the best thing is to get in and out of the service station as fast as possible - before the blues come creeping around your shoulder.

  Still, had I been alone I would have kept driving until I was safe in the embrace of the city, but I wasn’t on my own.

  ‘Sick,’ said not-Nicole as we pulled up. Beverley jumped out, opened the passenger door and made sure not-Nicole got a good three metres from the Asbo before she threw up.

  She hadn’t eaten much in the last day or two, so it was mostly fluid. They don’t have a lot in the way of chocolate, refined sugar or carbonated beverages in faerie land, so she’d gone a bit mad for her first seven days amongst people and then spent the last three days bringing it all back up.

  While she did that, I did a fast scan of the car park. A couple of mid-range saloons, one Chelsea tractor and a Mercedes with its bonnet up. A white man leant over the engine calling instructions to another person in the driver’s seat. I couldn’t hear any engine noises, not even the starter, and the tone indicated that tempers were being lost. One part of my mind idly tagged them a potential problem and moved on.

  Not-Nicole straightened up.

  ‘You’ve got to be e
mpty by now,’ said Beverley who really had no sympathy at all.

  ‘Water,’ said not-Nicole

  ‘What’s the magic word?’’ asked Beverley.

  ‘Water please,’ said not-Nicole and Beverley rewarded her with a warm bottle of Evian.

  ‘That was the last,’ said Beverley. ‘We need to stock up.’

  The core of the service station was your standard one size fits all redbrick mini mall with a glass pyramid roofette in the middle and the aesthetic appeal of a rural bus shelter.

  And like a bus shelter there were certain circumstances in which one was very glad to see it and its cornucopia of 24-hour shops and fast food outlets. While Beverley took not-Nicole to the toilets I hit WH Smith for bottled water and enough Haribo to get me safely back to London. The white girl behind the counter must have been dying of boredom because she perked up as soon as I walked in. She wanted to know where I was coming from.

  ‘Herefordshire,’ I said which led to an explanation as to why we were on the M4. In the fluorescent light her skin looked pale and unhealthy and there were smudges under her eyes. I remembered feeling as bad as she looked doing late shifts during my probation. She was wearing a badge that announced her name was Suzanne.

  Just as Suzanne was half-heartedly trying to tempt me with a special offer on a bar of chocolate the size of a paperback book, a low moan sounded from the far side of the building. She froze and we both listened to see if it came again.

  A glass smashed in the distance and there was the distinctive sound of stacked furniture falling over followed by swearing in a foreign language. Suzanne relaxed.

  ‘It’s just Cornel,’ she said. ‘The security guard.’ And then, as if it explained everything, said, ‘He’s Romanian.’

  I paid up and wished Suzanne good luck for the rest of the shift at which she smiled wanly. As I left the building there was another crash, a long moan in Romanian.

  As I was walking back to the Asbo one of the white men by the stalled car attracted my attention.

  ‘Excuse me, mate,’ he called. ‘Do you know anything about engines?’

  As it happens I don’t really, but I like to show willing and I wouldn’t have joined the police if I didn’t like sticking my nose in other people’s business.