“Now this is what I call a party,” I said with bumpkin jocularity.
“Castor,” Alice said, and there was a hard catch in her voice that took me by surprise—a look in her eye that was something like hatred.
I put out my hand and took hers, and though she pulled back sharply, I kept hold. The first time I’d touched her, I’d listened pretty hard, but I hadn’t picked up a damn thing. But this was different. She was angry and shaken, and any guard she had was down. If I couldn’t get a reading from her now, I never would.
“You’re looking radiant, Alice,” I said, squeezing her hand and smiling inanely into her face. “You must be pregnant.”
FLASH. I felt the stab of her fury and indignation, followed by an all-but-submerged twinge of real fear. Fear of the ghost, certainly, but another fear rising out of that so steeply that all perspective was lost. Alice really didn’t want to be pregnant. And she really didn’t want me pawing at her. As she wrestled to get her hand free, I saw in quick succession within her mind a child’s-eye view of a huge, looming man shaving at an oval mirror; a dead daffodil in a slender rose vase, the last inch of water turned to brown ullage; her desk at the archive, pristine and empty, the mail trays lined up hospital-corner fashion with the desk’s far right-hand edge. It took me a moment to realize that although it was her desk, it was in Peele’s narrow, oddly shaped office. The boss’s desk, in other words, but with her name on the door instead of his.
Alice got her hand free from mine with some effort. I thought she was going to use it to slap me, but she only swore at me under her breath—a word I wouldn’t have expected her to know, the last two syllables of which were “bubble.” I ignored her and lunged past her at Jeffrey.
Being autistic, Jeffrey had a much stronger and more deeply rooted objection to being touched by me than Alice did. Where she was merely fastidious, he was pathological. So I didn’t have to do anything to raise the emotional temperature. He stiffened as I grabbed his wrist, and then he actually jumped, his feet leaving the ground momentarily.
“Don’t!” he yelped. “Mr. Castor!”
FLASH. I got a microsecond glimpse of a corridor in the archive—the ghost standing there, sideways on but with her face turned toward him—before raw, flaring panic obliterated all images and left his mind pure white: the white of white noise.
Peele was physically struggling to get away from me, and people were staring at us in amazement. I let go too suddenly, and he stumbled backward, crashing into the people behind him and sending them sprawling. Alice did slap me now—a stinging backhander that would probably leave a visible mark. Jon Tiler loomed up out of nowhere to help Jeffrey get back on his feet. As he reached forward, I intercepted him and grabbed both his wrists, making him stop and stare at me in astonishment.
A moment later, I arced backward like an epileptic suffering from a grand mal seizure. I hit the ground like a badly packed sack of ballast.
I hadn’t touched Tiler at all on my first day at the archive. It was probably just as well. He was a supersender—an emotional foghorn—and I would have made a bad first impression, losing control of my limbs in front of a whole lot of people I’d only just been introduced to.
I fell heavily but somehow managed to keep one hand in contact with Tiler’s wrist as I hit the ground and jackknifed. The images and impressions I was getting were sluicing and scouring their way through my mind as though they’d come from a high-pressure hose. I couldn’t keep them out, and I couldn’t sort them. Visions of the ghost came through strongest, in all the rooms and hallways where he’d seen her—but the floodgates were open, and the rising tide of recollection broke over them, washed them away. I saw most of Tiler’s childhood, got to know his mother from a baby’s-eye view (his interest at that age had centered mainly on her left breast), relived potty training and bedtime stories and an abusive relationship with the family cat, and Christ knew what else. It wasn’t chronological, though. I saw him sitting in a cinema, crying at
“I think he’s dead.”
“Don’t be stupid, Jon. He just fainted.”
“Yeah, but did you hear that crack when his head hit the ground?”
“That wasn’t his head. It was a metallic sound. It was something in his pocket.”
“Tin whistle. Look. It’s bent into an L shape.”
Oh no. No fucking way. A cold gust of sorrow and remorse brought me the rest of the way up into full consciousness. My whistle. My sword and my shield through all the half-arsed vicissitudes of life. It was the same as a million others, and it was absolutely unique. And all that was left of it now was the jagged pain in my side where the broken end of it was digging into my third rib.
I opened my eyes halfway and found myself staring up into a wide range of startled, suspicious, and resentful faces. Cheryl’s was right in the middle of them, and although she looked relieved to see me conscious again, I could tell from the hard set of her mouth that her membership in the Felix Castor fan club had lapsed forever. That was two body blows inside of twenty seconds.
A silver hip flask was pressed into my hand. Feeling numb and cold and strangely removed from myself, I took a swig without checking what it was and found myself coughing noisily on some raw but excellent bourbon. A lot of it went down the front of my coat, but the rest of it did the trick. I turned to see who it was I had to thank; Rich Clitheroe was looking down at me with a surreptitious eyebrow flash of sympathy and solidarity. I handed the flask back to him with a nod, flashing back to his secret stash of Lucozade in the traveling fridge down in the strong room. Well, “Be Prepared” is the Boy Scouts’ marching song, and some things just stay with you. But that wasn’t the phrase he’d used in any case; it was something like that, only different.
Domino nudged domino nudged domino, and everything fell into a pattern that had been there all along, unseen. I sat up, feeling an odd sense of weightlessness. I was like a thrown ball at the top of its arc, when it’s stopped rising but hasn’t begun to fall—freed from gravity, freed from the necessity of choice. Cheryl helped me to my feet, and our gazes met, furiously accusing on her side, God only knew what on mine. There was no sign of the ghost now. The summons I’d sent out to her would have broken when I lost consciousness, and there was nothing to keep her in this confusing, exposed, overbright space.
“I’m sorry,” I told Cheryl, leaning in close so that nobody else could hear.
She didn’t bend. “I bet you always are, afterward. I bet it even works sometimes.”
“I hope it will work with Sylvie,” I murmured. “I owe her the biggest apology of all.”
Other voices were breaking in now, and other hands were taking hold of me. Jeffrey Peele was saying, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” and Alice was interjecting comments like “It’s all right” and “You’re fine now” without any noticeable effect. Someone else—a woman—was asking whether she should call the police, and one of the ushers —the barge pole this time—muscled in between me and Cheryl to suggest that I might want to go out into the street and get some fresh air. His nose wrinkled, no doubt smelling the booze.
I let myself be shepherded away toward the door with his hand gripping my collar, but then I stopped again before he could get any real momentum going. I turned back, found Rich in the crowd. He stared at me, a little startled, as I made the universally recognizable gesture that meant he should phone me. I pointed to Jeffrey, meaning that Jeffrey had my phone number.
Rich hesitated for a moment—probably trying to work out what the hell I was trying to say—then nodded. The thickset usher loomed up on my other side, hooked one hand under my arm, and I was off, my feet barely touching the floor as I went.
It was probably just as well. I get all emotional at weddings.
Nineteen
