The Devil You Know

movements as strained and slow and full of terrible effort as the way your legs pump in dreams when you’re running away from the bogeyman.

I pulled myself together and stepped out into the road—almost into the path of a Routemaster bus; the blare of its horn floated behind it like the bellow of a wounded animal as I jerked back at the last moment, out of its path.

I thought she’d be gone now, her dramatic exit hidden by the bus in line with all the best movie clichés. But she was still there, and as I broke into a run, I tried to assemble the sense that went with the vision—the fix. I began to drop the mesh of my weird perceptions over her, dredging up notes in sequence, turning her into music. It was hard. Even though she was there in front of me, the trace was so faint, it almost wasn’t there at all. It was as though I was looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope. That wasn’t something that had ever happened to me before, and I didn’t understand it. But if she stayed where she was for just a few moments longer, it wouldn’t matter.

Then a door opened about twenty feet behind her, and bright white light stabbed through her. She turned away, and as she turned, she disappeared. I found myself staring at Jon Tiler, who was looking at me with a startled-rabbit expression on his face. He had a satchel in his hand, which he lifted up by way of explanation—or protection, because he looked like he was expecting to be spanked.

“I went back for my bag,” he said. “Was that . . . Shit, were you—”

I ran through a range of answers in my mind, most of them revolving around the word fuckwit. But none of them would achieve anything beyond the immediate emotional catharsis.

So “Lock the door behind you” was all I said over my shoulder as I walked away.

Seven

THE DINNER PARTY WAS FLAGGING.

In fact, that was a polite word for it. It had died. Even my father, who when he’s in full flow can be silenced by nothing short of decapitation, had finally given up and was just staring at his plate. My headmistress from primary school, Mrs. Culshaw, was fiddling with her greens. The clown sitting next to my mother picked his nose forlornly, and she wagging a finger at him without any real conviction.

All around the table, faces turned to me.

“Give us a tune, Fix,” Pen said with an insinuating lift of the eyebrows. “I bet you know some amazing ones.”

I shook my head, but they were all nodding. Old school friends, old enemies, women I’d slept with, the man from the corner shop back in Arthur Street, everyone wanted some free entertainment, and I was on the spot.

Slowly, I stood up.

“Play the one your sister Katie liked,” my father said. “The one you played to her before she died.” A chuckle went around the table at his little joke. He exchanged a glance with my mother, who nodded appreciatively as if he’d scored a point in some unacknowledged game.

“Play her back to life again,” my brother Matthew suggested. He blessed me ironically with the sign of the cross.

That did it. That always did it. I wanted to make them all shut up, and the quickest way to achieve that was to do what they said. I put my whistle to my lips and blew a single note—strident, shrieking, sustained. The faces around the table went in an instant from smug challenge to dismay. Then I modulated that one high note into a wailing, skirling tune, and they gasped.

I don’t always remember what song I play in this dream, but this time it was “The Bonny Swans.” By the time I got to the first refrain, everyone was clutching their heads or their stomachs, sliding down off their chairs, collapsing across the table with moans of agony.

It was clear that the music was killing them. That made me feel a little bad, in a way, a little sick with myself, but it didn’t make me stop. They’d asked for a tune. I gave it to them, as the ones who were trying to crawl toward the door collapsed and curled in on themselves, and the ones who’d just slumped in their chairs withered and decayed in fast-motion.

I killed them all. No more embarrassment. No more demands. They asked for it, and they got it. Finally I lowered the whistle, which now felt hot to my touch, like a gun after it’s been fired. I slotted it back into my pocket, grimly satisfied.

Then there was a liquescent gurgle from behind me. It was a terrible sound—a sound of indescribable distress and pain. The sort of sound that means either pull me back or finish me off, but don’t leave me stuck here in between like a rabbit on a barbed-wire fence.

The whistle had let me down. This one I was going to have to kill with my bare hands.

I turned around slowly. I didn’t want to see, but it was my responsibility. I knew if I didn’t do this, the next time I blew into the whistle, no music would come. This was the price I had to pay for the gift that had been given to me. This was the place and time where the rent fell due.

The body slumped at my feet was twitching feebly, like a goldfish on the bathroom floor. It was too dark to perceive anything apart from that vague sense of movement. I gripped its shoulder, hauled it onto its back. It didn’t resist as my hands found its throat.

The lights came up slowly as I squeezed.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Pen asked. She padded into the kitchen in bare feet and scarlet silk dressing gown, rubbing her eyes.

I took a sip of coffee. I’d made it on the stove top, using Pen’s 1930s moka pot, and it was thick and black and lethally strong—not exactly calculated to cure insomnia, but just right to stop my hands from shaking.

“Have you ever noticed,” I asked her, “how characters in movies always sit bolt upright when they get to the scariest part of the dream? It’s like they’ve got some kind of psychic ejector-seat mechanism. They get to the money shot and boing, they’re awake.”

She poured herself a cup from what was left in the pot. It would be three sips and some sludge, but they’d be potent sips.

“You dreamed about your sister again.”

I shook my head. “This time it was Rafi,” I said glumly.

She sat down opposite me, in silence. I finished the cup, and she offered me hers.

“Nobody blames you,” she said, at last. “Nobody thinks you screwed up.”

“I did screw up.”

“You tried to help him. It didn’t work. Nobody else could have done anything.”

I was sorry I’d mentioned it. Honesty isn’t usually a vice I indulge, but with Pen, you get into the habit. She never lies—not even the white kind that spare feelings and avoid embarrassment. You tend to give her the same courtesy back.

“Maybe nothing would have been the best thing to do,” I muttered.

Exorcism is both more and less than a job. You do it because it’s something you find you can do, and because once you’ve started, there’s something about it that doesn’t let you stop. But, in the long run, it gets to you. Exorcists who live long enough to be old are very strange people indeed— like the legendary Peckham Steiner, who lived the last few years of his life on a houseboat on the Thames and wouldn’t set foot on dry land because he thought the ghosts were about to launch a blitzkrieg on the living, and he was the first target.

I thought about Rafi as he was when I first met him: elegant, selfish, and beautiful, a dancer with a thousand delighted partners. Then I thought about him steaming in that bathtub full of ice water, his eyes shining in the dark, looking as though the fire that was inside him was about to break out through his skin at any moment and leave nothing but black ash.

It wasn’t that I convinced myself I knew what I was doing. I didn’t. I’d never seen anything like this, and it made me literally piss my pants. But it didn’t seem possible to just sit there while Rafi burned; it seemed like I had to do something, and there was only one thing I knew how to do. So I took out my whistle and I closed my eyes for a moment, looking for the sense of him, the fix. Easy. The place was saturated with it. So I started to play—just like