old papers, faint as they were, exerted a sort of hypnotic pull of their own. Floating in that fuzzy palimpsest, I found it hard to stay anchored in the chilly afternoon in November that had been my starting point. It was still there, and I was still there, but my awareness of it was dulled. Gradually, I stopped hearing the gurgling of pipes and the opening and closing of distant doors. I was somewhere else, somewhere outside the normal flow.
Just once I thought I had something; the image of a weeping woman came through to me very clearly when I touched a particular photograph. She was young, and she was heartbroken—but her face was intact, her hair was ash blonde, and most of all, she wasn’t here. This was just an afterimage, with no sense of presence behind it. The photo was of a street, presumably in the Eastern Bloc somewhere—a residential street in a small town, drab and anonymous and more or less timeless.
Half roused out of my trance by the effort of conscious thought, I was suddenly aware of the sound of dozens of shrill, piping voices all talking over each other and the vibrations under my feet of a beast with sixty or so short but serviceable legs. I pulled myself together—pulled myself out of the psychic web I’d been weaving and back into my own flesh—and rubbed my eyes. Then, as the noises got louder, I stepped to the door and looked out. The corridor was alive with children, all in blue blazers with red badges on the pockets, and all clutching crumpled sheets of paper in their hands. They seemed to be working in pairs and sticking very closely together, as though this was some kind of three-legged race that worked on an honor system. “That’s not a plaster molding!” one little blonde girl was shouting indignantly at the boy next to her, who had a shell-shocked air. “That’s just where they put the fire extinguisher! We’ve still got to find a plaster molding!”
They ebbed and flowed along the corridor, staring intently at walls, floor, ceiling; swept around a corner; and were gone, trailing a few stragglers as any stampede will. In the distance I heard Jon Tiler’s voice shouting, “No, stay on this floor! Stay on this floor! I’ll tell you when you can go up the stairs!” He sounded only a half inch away from hysteria.
One of the kids had dropped his sheet of paper, so I picked it up and examined it. THE BONNINGTON ARCHIVE ARCHITECTURAL TREASURE HUNT, it said in a font that declared aggressively, “This is fun you’re having now—have some fun, damn you.” Underneath there was a list of architectural items, with the playful challenge HOW MANY CAN
I went back to my work, satisfied that Jon was working off his guilt. Again, I became lost in the soft textures and fuzzy logic of the past, my mind suspended in a shapeless but compelling skein of my own making. Hours passed, undifferentiated, and I worked my way steadily through the boxes. Variations on a theme: the same old gruel of emotions, too thin to nourish, too bland to titillate.
The next time I surfaced, it was a change in the quality of the light that brought me back to a gloomy winter day that was already waning. I looked at my watch; it was well after five, and I still had about a half dozen boxes to go. More to the point, I’d totally failed to find what I was looking for. Nowhere in all the pages I’d touched was there a scent or a footprint of the ghost I’d met.
My instinct was just to slog on to the end of the road, but the bleakness of the place was soaking into me like a physical chill. Seeing the kids on their treasure hunt had boosted my psychic reserves a little, but the effect had worn off quickly. And anyway, it was nearing the end of the archive’s opening hours; if I was going to stick around any longer, I needed to make sure someone else would be around to lock up after me. So I yawned and stretched, stood up stiffly, and with some reluctance made the pilgrimage to the workroom.
Apart from Alice herself, the gang were all there: Cheryl and Jon Tiler typing away at their computer terminals, while Rich seemed to be busy copying a list of names from an old document into his notebook. There was also a red-haired guy I didn’t know, working away at the photocopier. He was another of the part-timers, and Cheryl introduced him as Will.
“Any luck?” Rich asked.
“Not so far,” I admitted. “I’m still working on it. Has there been a sighting today?”
He shook his head. “All quiet on the Western Front.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes when the normal routine of a place is disrupted, a haunting will stop for a while.” I wasn’t normally this garrulous, but I was putting off the evil moment; I wasn’t anticipating much pleasure in reporting in to Alice. “Ghosts are usually very fixed on routine—some of them will hang around the same place for centuries and show themselves bang on midnight, every night. But change the wallpaper, and they’re lost.”
Cheryl perked up at all this talk about ghosts. “What about the violent ones?” she asked. “Have they got a routine, too? I mean, do they get into it? Are there, like, serial-killer ghosts?”
Piqued, Rich brandished his wounded arm. “Hey, this is real, Cheryl,” he said. “People are getting hurt. Can we not talk about it as if it’s a role-playing game?”
Cheryl was unrepentant. “All right, but it’s interesting, though, isn’t it? Maybe that’s what sick-building syndrome is. It’s just ghosts you can’t see having a go at you.”
Rich opened his mouth to speak, but then thought better of it and just shook his head as if to clear it. He returned to his keyboard with a scowl on his face.
“Yeah,” I said to Cheryl. I was trying hard not to break into a grin. Rich had every right to feel aggrieved, but it was hard to stay serious around Cheryl when she was so determined to be sensational and flippant. I was starting to like her a lot. “Sometimes they do repeat the same sequence of behaviors, time after time. You’ve got to realize, though, that the sample is probably too small to count for anything. The number of ghosts that have ever actually attacked the living is tiny—when you weed out the folk tales and the compulsive liars.”
I suddenly realized that they were both looking past me, at the doorway. Turning to follow their eyes, I saw that Alice had sneaked up on me again, just like she’d done the day before.
“That’s the real challenge, isn’t it?” she asked, mildly.
Ingratiatingly, Tiler fed her her cue. “What is, Alice?”
“Weeding.” She didn’t even bother to look at him; it was me she’d come in here gunning for. “Have you had better luck today, Castor?”
I could have pulled against the hook, but I think she would have enjoyed reeling me in. “None at all,” I said evenly. “I’ve been working through that Russian collection, but I haven’t found anything that’s likely to be of much help.”
Alice just stared at me for a moment. She’d taken a few steps into the room, but she clearly didn’t feel much more comfortable in here than Peele did. Her mouth quirked, as though she was fighting down an urge to spit.
“You said that what you do depends on your obtaining an impression of the ghost? A fix on her?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“But you did that yesterday, didn’t you? The first time you went into the Russian room. That’s what you told me. So why is it that you’re still unable to dispel her?”
“It was a weak fix,” I said bluntly.
“Does that mean it’s useless?”
I clenched my teeth on a word that probably didn’t appear in any of the archive’s seventy-five miles of shelving.
To tell the truth, I was a little frustrated myself. The ghost had been right there with me twice now. The first time, I’d screwed the contact up for myself; the second time, Tiler had done it for me. If I could have held either one for just half a minute longer, I could be shaking the dust of the Bonnington off my feet and walking home with a grand in my pocket—at that moment, a consummation very fucking devoutly to be wished. Instead, I was providing sleeve notes for Alice, who I knew by now was one of those people who never stop asking until they get the answer they want.
So I did something a little stupid. I went on when I should have stopped and got out of there.
“No. I didn’t say that. A weak fix is a good start—and I was lucky to get one so fast. You can turn a weak fix into a strong fix, if you know what you’re doing.”
I could still have walked away at that point. I was going to. I’d already decided. But she was looking at me with scorn and skepticism, clearly measuring my lackluster performance against the three hundred pounds I’d already been paid.
“In fact,” I said, “there’s something we could try right now, if Rich is up for it.”
“Eh?” Rich had had his head down all this time, either working or pretending to. The idea that he might get drawn into the action obviously filled him with alarm.
“It’s a trick I’ve used a couple of times,” I said. “It might pull the ghost in if it’s close by. And even if it
