The Devil You Know

“Sunday?” I asked.

“My mum’s getting married,” said Cheryl. “Again. At the Brompton Oratory. Fourth time around the track, this is. They don’t say ‘Till death us do part’ for my mum; they say ‘Who’s holding ticket number twenty-three?’ Anyway, I had a brain wave. I asked Jeffrey if we could have the reception in the reading room at the archive, and he said yeah, we could. So everyone’s invited.”

“So you don’t hold it against your mum that she threw you out on the street?” I asked, more surprised at that than at the ghost story—I already suspected it would take a lot to shake Cheryl.

She laughed. “We tear pieces off each other, and then we’re all right again. We’ve always been like that. I’ve got no time for all her bloody boyfriends and fiancés and husbands, though. They’re a right shower. This latest one’s worse than Paulus and Alex put together, if you ask me. But he won’t last. They never do.”

“What about your dad?” I inquired.

“Nothing about my dad,” Cheryl answered shortly. She made a face and shook her head.

“Here,” said Rich, trying to pull the agenda back onto safe ground. “Joke about ghosts, right. This big expert on paranormal phenomena is doing a lecture tour of the UK, and he gets to Aberystwyth on a Friday night. And he goes into the hall, and it’s packed. Shuffles his notes, clears his throat, and says, ‘Let’s just see where we stand. How many people here believe in ghosts?’ Every hand in the room goes up. ‘Excellent,’ says the professor. ‘That’s what I value. Truly open minds. Okay, how many of you have actually seen a ghost?’ Half the hands go down, half stay up. ‘Good enough,’ says the professor. ‘And out of you lot, how many have spoken to a ghost?’ Maybe twenty hands stay up, and the professor nods. ‘Yes, that takes some courage, doesn’t it? And how many of you have touched a ghost?’ All but three hands go down. ‘Finally,’ the professor says, ‘how many of you have made love with a ghost?’ Two hands go down, but one right at the back of the room stays up. It’s a little old guy in a grubby mac. ‘Sir, you amaze me,’ says the professor. ‘I’ve asked that question a thousand times, and nobody has ever answered yes to it. I’ve never met anybody before you who’s had sex with a ghost.’

“‘Ghost?’ says the old guy. ‘Oh, sorry, I thought you said goat . . .’”

Cheryl guffawed, and Jon said he’d heard it. Jokes about goats followed, and for a while, we all tried to think of one that was clean. It turns out there aren’t any.

Rich bought the next lot of drinks, and I took care of the one after that. Jon downed his third vodka breezer with indecent haste and claimed a prior engagement. Rich gave him a meaningful look, but he clearly wasn’t going to be shamed into standing his round. He wished us all good night and left without a backward glance.

“Tight bugger,” muttered Rich.

“Oh, leave him alone,” said Cheryl. “He can’t help it. You’ve seen what he buys himself for lunch. He just gets off on counting his pennies, that’s all.”

“What are his politics?” I asked, casually.

“His politics?” Cheryl repeated blankly. “I haven’t got the foggiest. I don’t think he’s got any, unless supporting Fulham counts. Why?”

“He looked really unhappy to see me. I wondered if he was a Breather.”

“Ohh.” She saw what I was getting at then, and her eyes widened as she considered the possibility. “I don’t know. Maybe. He’s never seemed to give much of a toss for his fellow man, to be honest, but they’re an odd bunch, aren’t they? My flatmate where I lived before was one of them, and she used to go along to the cemetery at Waltham Abbey at weekends and read aloud from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall—I suppose because she thought the ghosts might need the intellectual stimulation. It always seemed a bit cruel to me.”

The Breath of Life movement—or the Breathers, as most people refer to them—are a grassroots pressure group campaigning for changes in the law governing the risen dead. Ghosts and zombies, they say, are still people; they have rights that need to be recognized and defined in law. Some of them feel the same way about the more colorful groups among the undead, but there’s a certain amount of controversy there. What rights do the possessed have, for example, and who gets to enjoy them? Host body or invading spirit? And what about the were? It had all turned into a bit of a circus. The government—New Labour, but with a bit of the shine gone—had made some cautious statements about legally recognizing the dead, causing the Tories to point dramatically quivering fingers at the law of inheritance. How could it be expected to work if it turns out that you can take it with you after all? What about criminal trials? Could a dead man give evidence against his murderer or stand trial for murder himself? And if he were found guilty, how in hell are you supposed to punish him? And so on, and so on.

And my own profession, of course, had come in for a whole lot of attention. If the dead had rights, then presumably one of those rights was not to be blasted into the void by a cheerful tune from a tin whistle—or by a poem, a mechanical drawing, a series of complicated hand gestures, or whatever other form of cantrip the exorcist happened to favor as he slashed and burned his way through the natural order of things.

I let all this wash over me as far as I could, but the Breathers were getting to be something of a worry for me—as the other, earlier right-to-lifers had been for the staff at abortion clinics.

However, neither Rich nor Cheryl remembered Jon Tiler ever saying anything on the subject one way or the other, which made it more or less certain that he wasn’t part of the movement. You could never get them to shut up about it short of gagging them with moldering grave cloths.

The party passed its cusp and started to wind down. Cheryl went off to powder her nose, and Rich, who was a bit maudlin-drunk by this time, started in to tell me about some of his walking tours in Eastern Europe, but ran out of steam in the middle of a rambling anecdote about a club in Prague called Kaikobad, where they have transsexual strippers. His eyes seemed to defocus, which, when a guy is in his cups, either means he’s thinking deeply or he’s about to pass out. Either way, I figured it was about time to call it a night.

“Hey, mate,” Rich said, rousing suddenly. “I think you’ve made a new friend.”

“What, Cheryl?” I asked, a little thrown. He obviously couldn’t mean Jon Tiler.

Rich waved that suggestion away impatiently. “No, not Cheryl. Cheryl talks a good fuck, but she’s never been known to deliver. I meant the oversize geezer in the corner.”

He didn’t point, just rolled his eyes off to the right and then back. I followed his lead, not jerking my head around but picking up my drink and then letting my gaze traverse the bar slowly and casually.

It wasn’t hard to guess who he meant—a big, heavyset guy sitting near the door, jammed into a tight booth that made his already impressive bulk loom even larger. His oddly shapeless body was packed into an antique- looking gray herringbone suit, and whatever it said on the label, there had to be a whole lot of Xs in front of the L. His bald head glistened, and his pale, almost colorless eyes shied away as they caught my stare.

As he looked away, I experienced the sudden cessation of a feeling so tenuous, it had slipped under my guard. It was the sensation that Peele had described to me over the phone: the sensation—like a light, even pressure over the whole of my skin—of knowing that I was being looked at.

Okay. File that one for later, I guess. I didn’t know who he was, but I knew what he was well enough, and he probably knew what I was, too. That could even have been why he was watching me. Exorcists excite very real and very natural fears in certain quarters.

Cheryl came back from the loo right then, which was my cue to head on out. I made my excuses, gave the birthday girl a kiss on the cheek, and left.

I walked past Euston Station and back up Eversholt Street for reasons I can’t even remember. Maybe I just fancied a walk, although it was still cold and blustery, or maybe I was deliberately choosing a route that would take me by the archive.

I was on the other side of the road, though, so when I saw the woman standing out on the pavement next to the doorway of the Bonnington, her arms hanging at her sides and her head bowed, my first thought was that it was Alice calling it a day after a stupendous stint of unpaid overtime.

Then I registered the hood, and a moment after that, the way her body became more and more washed out and hard to distinguish from its surroundings the closer you got to the ground. And finally she raised her head to stare at me, which stopped me dead in my tracks, because the stare was being conducted without the benefit of eyes. The upper half of the woman’s face was a formless, rippling plane of undifferentiated red. Dark hair, decorously tousled, then cherry red lips and a neotenously rounded chin. Nothing, nothing but redness in between.

What she was wearing was harder to determine. She was dressed in white, the way everybody said, but white what? There was too little of her to form a judgment from. She raised an arm to point toward the building, and it was a bare arm, spectrally pale. It seemed as though she was fighting against the pull of gravity, her