The Devil You Know

Leaving aside the question of what I was meant to do with it, it represented a sort of breakthrough in a job—I almost thought case—that had otherwise brought me nothing but a day of aggravation.

I fished out my mobile phone—no time like the present. But the battery is faulty, and the damn thing is always out of charge; this time was no exception. I thrust both the phone and the card back into my pocket and carried on down the stairs.

The security office was already locked, and there was no sign of friendly Frank. I went behind the counter to pick up my coat, but of course it was shut into one of the lockers, and I didn’t have a key. I was contemplating kicking the flimsy door open when Alice came down the stairs at my back and saw me. I turned to face her, bracing myself for a bollocking, but what I read in her face wasn’t anything as straightforward as anger.

“Great show,” she observed, her voice tense. “Fun for all the family.”

“I don’t know,” I countered. “I think I need some tunes you can actually hum.”

“So how is it done?”

I considered tact and courtesy. Briefly. “You get a ghost. You drive it rat-arse crazy with a drop of blood. The recipe’s in the Iliad.” She didn’t answer, so I tried again. “Look, I didn’t expect that kind of a response. I’m sorry about the damage. I thought the ghost would come in for a low pass over the blood, but the reaction we got was completely—”

Alice wasn’t listening. She came around the counter and wielded her totemic key ring to liberate my coat. I took it from her outstretched hands, nodded a curt thanks. I thought she was going to say something else, but she didn’t. She just took her own coat and handbag out of the next locker along. Her hands hadn’t stopped trembling, and when she unhooked her big, unwieldy key ring and tried to slide it into her bag, she couldn’t manage it. With a muttered “Shit!” she thrust it into her coat pocket instead. I left her to it.

Outside, a light drizzle was falling, but the wind on my face—only a breeze, really—felt good after a day in the archive’s stingily recirculated air. I could have taken a train from Euston and changed, or hopped a bus heading north through Camden Town, but I decided to walk to King’s Cross and grab the Piccadilly line direct. I was two or three blocks away from the archive, walking head down along the Euston Road, when I realized that Alice was keeping pace with me—shivering despite her coat, her arms clasped around herself, her keys jangling audibly in her pocket.

I stopped and turned to face her, waiting for the other shoe to drop. She stared at me, her eyes sullen and haunted.

“I’m not happy about this,” she said. “I’m not happy about where it’s going.”

I carried on waiting. I thought I knew what she meant, but I needed a bigger clue than that.

“I thought—” It was a difficult admission, and she had trouble getting it out. “I thought it was all bullshit. I thought Clitheroe was lying, and everyone else was hysterical. Because if there’d been anything there, I would have seen it, too—and I didn’t see anything. Until tonight.”

I was as careful as I could be: a neutral observation, not loaded at all. “You saw Rich getting that wound on his face.”

“It wasn’t the first time—Rich hurts himself a lot. He shut his hand in a drawer a few months back. And another time he tripped and fell down the main stairs. I thought it was an accident he was too embarrassed to own up to.”

“But you saw—”

Alice cut in, her tone brittle and dangerous. “I saw him prancing around like an idiot, yelping, waving the scissors. Then he managed to cut his face, somehow. It wasn’t like tonight.”

She was staring at me, and I saw in her eyes what a heroic understatement it had been when she’d said she was not happy. I’d pigeonholed her the day before, and now I knew I was right. Alice wasn’t even a vestal; she was what we refer to in the trade—often with a certain degree of contempt—as a DT, or sometimes just as a Thomas: one of the absolute nonsensitives who stood at the opposite end of the human bell curve from wherever I was. She couldn’t see ghosts at all.

Funny. After her behavior up to now, seeing Alice so scared and unhappy should have been a feast of schadenfreude for me. But in fact, I felt a reluctant sympathy for her. I’d been there. We all have to go there, eventually. We all have to drop the shield of skepticism and bow our heads to the axe of that’s-just-how-it-fucking- is.

“I know,” I said, feeling a weight of tiredness drop onto my shoulders. “When you see one for the first time —when you realize it’s all true—you have to swallow a lot of very heavy stuff all at once. It’s hard.”

I let the words hang in the air. Yes, I was sorry for her, but I had troubles of my own, and she was one of them. Did I really want to help her dry her eyes and square her shoulders? No.

But some things come with the job.

“I’m going home,” I said gracelessly. “I’ve got ten minutes. If you want my version of Metaphysics 101, you can have it.”

Alice nodded, probably as reluctantly as I’d made the offer.

“Better make it somewhere inside,” she said. “Otherwise I don’t think I’ll last that long.”

The nearest “somewhere inside” was Saint Pancras’s church. It was open and empty. We sat down in the back row of pews. It was almost as cold as it was outside, but at least it was dry.

“Metaphysics 101,” Alice prompted me, her voice shaky.

“Right. Blake hit the nail bang on the head, didn’t he? ‘What is now proved was once only imagined.’” Thanks for that one, Pen. “If ghosts are real, then a whole raft of things that you were happy to think of as metaphors, or folk myths, or medieval clutter left behind in the wake of the Enlightenment turn out to be sober truth. You start wondering about Heaven. And Hell. You start asking yourself what’s going to happen to you when you turn your toes up. Are you going to be stuck in some dismal pit of a place just because you lived there or worked there or died there? Is the afterlife like this one, only with no sex, no drugs, and no time off for good behavior?”

Alice nodded, slowly and unhappily.

“Well, the answer is nobody knows. If you’re religious, you could talk to a priest about it. Or a rabbi, or whatever flavor you favor. But I’ll tell you how I get through it.”

She was watching me, expectantly. Someone else was watching, too. I felt that prickle again; that pressure on my skin lighter than touch. I glanced into the shadows near the door, thought that maybe I saw someone moving there.

“I stick with Blake,” I said, “and I draw a line. Between what’s proved and what’s just jerking off—premature reification. If I see my Aunt Emily get decapitated in a freak piano-tuning accident, and then a bodiless shape that looks just like Auntie Em comes walking through my bedroom wall at three in the morning with its head tucked underneath its arm, I don’t just jump for the nearest conclusion—which is that whatever is on the label has to be in the box. You know the Navajo?”

“The Navajo Indians?” Her expression was blank, nonplussed.

“Yeah, them. They see ghosts as some kind of evil force of nature. Chindi, they call them. They’re the part of the soul that can’t go on to something better—all the nasty impulses you don’t usually follow up on. All your selfishness and greed and stupidity. They’re not you; they’re just a sort of negative afterimage you leave behind you when you trade up to eternal life.”

Alice didn’t look convinced; it was probably a bad example.

“All I mean is, there’s no automatic assumption that ghosts are people trapped in some fuck-awful repetition of what they used to do when they were alive. We don’t know what they are. We don’t have any way of finding out.”

Her uncertainty was hardening into something else.

“And that makes it okay for you to destroy them?” she asked, her voice almost too low to hear.

I shrugged. “Is that what I do? That’s another unknown.”

“Not to you.”

“Yes, to me.”

“I don’t see that. You must know what it is you’re doing.”

This was novel. I was meant to be talking Alice through this very sudden existential crisis—and instead I found myself being asked to justify my own existence. It must say something profound and worrying about me that