in the dream.
At the sound of the first note, the demon Asmodeus hissed and bubbled like a kettle with the lid left off and opened Rafi’s eyes wider than they were meant to go. Weakened from his long climb up from Hell, he clawed at me without strength and cursed me in languages I’d never encountered, but he couldn’t lever himself up out of the bath, and all I had to do was to step back out of his hands’ reach. I played louder to drown out the harsh gutturals that were spitting and frothing on Rafi’s lips.
And it seemed to be working. That’s the only excuse I can give for not thinking it through—not realizing what it was I was actually doing. Rafi’s body twitched and shuddered, and the steam that was boiling off him turned into roiling, curdled light. I was playing faster now, and louder, playing what I could see and feel and hear in my mind, letting the music spill out like scalpels to operate on the world. I was lost in it, mesmerized by it, part of a feedback loop that filled me up with sound as a cup is filled with sweet wine.
Then for a moment the curses stopped, and the writhing thing in the bathtub looked up at me with Rafi’s terrified, pleading eyes. “Fix,” he whispered, “please! Please don’t”—his face twisted. Asmodeus’s features surfaced through Rafi’s like oil through water, and he roared at me like a wounded animal. Except that his horns protruded in clusters through the flesh of his cheeks, and his black-on-black eyes boiled like snake pits.
Idiot though I was, the truth hit me in the face then. Rafi hadn’t been possessed by a ghost at all but by something much bigger and more terrifying. That meant that there was only one human spirit inside him, that the fix I had was on Rafi, not on his ruthless passenger. I was exorcising Rafi’s own spirit from his body.
I almost faltered into silence, but that would have been the worst thing I could possibly do. It would probably have extinguished Rafi’s soul right there and then. Instead I tried to turn the tune into something else—to break it free from the Rafi-sense that filled my head and latch it onto something else.
I played through the night, and the night was endless. The thing in the bathtub flailed and cursed, wept and moaned, laughed drunkenly and begged for mercy. Then the frosted glass of the bathroom window lit up with a dim, weary glow of yellow-pink dawn light. That seemed to be the signal for hostilities to cease. The thing closed its eyes and slept. About a half second later, the whistle fell from my mouth, and I slept, too. I didn’t surface again for eighteen hours.
I woke to the sick realization of what I’d done. I’d managed not to snuff out Rafi’s soul, but in some way I didn’t understand and couldn’t undo, I’d knotted that soul and the demon that was possessing him into one inextricable psychic tangle—turned Rafi and Asmodeus into some obscene ectoplasmic equivalent of Siamese twins.
And that was when I’d thrown my hand in—made my New Year’s resolution in midsummer and packed the tools of my trade up in a shoe box in Pen’s garage. There had to be something else I could do with my life—some job where they didn’t give you the keys to the poison cabinet until you’d learned how to mix the antidotes.
Only it turned out that keeping resolutions was another thing I couldn’t do to save my life.
“Nobody told me to let you into anything,” said Frank, rubbing his earlobe between thumb and forefinger as an adjunct to thought.
“I’m assuming that nobody told you not to, either,” I countered.
The burly security guard laughed good-naturedly, but he shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Castro,” he said. “You can use the reading room, same as anybody. And anything that’s in the public-access collections, you can get it out on a pink slip. But if I let you into the strong rooms, and then it turns out you wasn’t authorized or anything, that’s my job right there, isn’t it? No, I’ve got to have either Mr. Peele or Miss Gascoigne come down here and tell me it’s okay. Then I’ll happily take you through.”
I gave up and headed for the stairs. “You—er—you’ve got to leave your coat down here, too. Sorry.” Frank sounded genuinely embarrassed. It wasn’t in his nature to be hard-arsed, despite his scary face, but he had to walk the walk as best he could. I came back, transferring a whole lot of paraphernalia to my trouser pockets as I went. Frank stowed the greatcoat in a locker this time, because the racks were full of little macs and duffle coats in a variety of pastel shades, suggesting that somewhere in the building, Jon Tiler was up to his ears in hyperactive eight-year-olds. Good, I thought vindictively. After last night’s fuck-up, he had a lot of bad karma to burn off. I hoped piously that he’d find enough suffering to get himself back into spiritual equilibrium.
I couldn’t ask Alice, but that was no fault of Frank’s. She’d taken advantage of Peele’s trip to Bilbao to call a meeting, and all the archive staff except for the SAs and the security team (which seemed to consist of Frank all by himself) were closeted with her for the whole morning. Which left me cooling my heels.
Up in the reading room, several large boxes had appeared overnight and were now piled up in front of the librarians’ station, forming an additional cordon sanitaire between the staff and the sparse sprinkling of end users. There was a young Asian woman on the desk this morning, and she gave me what seemed to be a sincere smile over the barricade of boxes. But when I asked if she could let me into the strong rooms, she gave an incredulous laugh.
“I’m not a key-holder,” she said. “Sorry. I’m only a clerical assistant. I don’t have any access to the collection at all.”
I thanked her anyway, and we introduced ourselves. She, it turned out, was Faz, the part-timer who had the thankless task of helping out Jon Tiler. What did she think about that? “He’s a little bit strange,” she said cautiously. “Not very forthcoming, you know? Hard to read. But we don’t have that much to say to one another, really. I just get on with it, and he gets on with it, and when he doesn’t need me anymore—or when I can get him to admit it—I go and do something else. Like this. A change is as good as a rest.”
I remembered that Rich had listed Faz as being there when the ghost attacked him, and I asked her about that. She was very happy to talk about the ghost, but with everyone else crowding around, she hadn’t seen very much of the drama.
“I’ve seen her in the stacks, though,” she said with a little more enthusiasm. “Three times. Once very early on, and then twice last week—two days running. I’m in the sweepstakes, but I’ll need to pick up the pace a bit to be in with a chance. Elaine’s seen her six times, and Andy’s on eleven.”
I asked her the same questions I’d asked the archivists, about what the ghost looked like and what impression she’d got of it. Faz hit the same beats as everyone else, more or less, but she had a few ideas of her own, too.
“She’s young,” she said judiciously. “And I think she’s pretty, only you can’t see because she’s got that red misty stuff in front of her face. She just looks as though she’d have pretty features—I suppose because she’s got such a nice, neat little chin. I thought she might be in her wedding dress at first, because she’s all in white, but a wedding dress doesn’t have a hood—and anyway, her hair’s all wild. You’d do your hair up on your wedding day, wouldn’t you?”
“What do you mean, wild?” I asked, curious. This was a new slant. My own view of the ghost, from across the street and in the dark, hadn’t been clear enough for details like that.
“Like she’s been standing on a hill, and it’s been blown about a bit.” Faz thought about this. “Only she’s wearing a hood, so obviously it’s not that. But you know what I mean. Like she’s just woken up, maybe. I don’t know.”
“Did you ever hear her speak?”
Faz looked a little distressed. “Yeah,” she said, unhappily. “I did the first time. She just kept saying ‘roses.’ Going on and on about roses. And she held out her hand to me. It was like she was begging. She’s different now. Quieter. But I don’t think she had a happy life, poor thing.”
I changed the subject. Emotional outpourings about ghosts make me uncomfortable.
“What’s in the boxes?” I asked, pointing. “New acquisitions?”
Faz glanced down as if she’d forgotten the makeshift ramparts that had been piled up around her.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s bunting, I think.”
“Bunting?”
“And glasses, and cutlery, and stuff. For the reception on Sunday. Cheryl’s mum is getting married again.”
“So I hear,” I said. “I’m lucky to be here at a time of such joy and laughter.”
Faz looked sidelong at me to make sure I was being sarcastic, then grinned conspiratorially. “It doesn’t get any better,” she said in a low voice that wasn’t meant to carry. “Maybe it will when Mr. Peele goes off to work for the Gug. Maybe Rich Clitheroe will take over. I reckon he’d be a bit more human.”
“I heard Alice was the front-runner.”
