The Devil You Know

for my modesty, I don’t speak a word of Russian. She might just as well have been saying her prayers.

I released her hands, which had been tied behind her back with blue nylon washing-line string, and her legs, which were attached to the front legs of the chair by about a hundred turns of duct tape. Her body was so racked with cramps that she could only stand with my help. Slowly, patiently, I walked her back and forth across the cabin as her circulation returned. Every few seconds, she let out a moan or a sob or another curse, and after a while, she had to sit down and rest her protesting muscles. I watched her in silence. I didn’t have a clue what to say to her. But after a while, she looked up at me with a frown that was frankly suspicious.

“Why she didn’t kill you?” Rosa demanded in a sullen murmur.

Fair question, but not one I felt in any mood to answer. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I think—if this makes any sense—it was because she felt something for you. You and Snezhna.” She started at the sound of her sister’s name, and her one good eye flared wide open, but she said nothing. “Maybe it was because she was in the same position you were in. You know how you were tied to that chair with rope and tape? And Snezhna was trapped in that room after she died by fear and unhappiness and worry about you? Well, the chain Juliet wore around her ankle was the same kind of deal. I think she might actually have killed me for setting her free—that was an insult almost as great as binding her in the first place. But she saw me trying to untie you. And she saw that I wanted to untie Snezhna, too. So she thought what the fuck—she could always come back and kill me another time.”

I was saying this for my own benefit as much as Rosa’s, thinking it through as I spoke. It made as much sense as anything would. You can’t try to explain demons by reference to human emotions or human motives.

Rosa picked herself up, and since she was walking more or less normally, apart from a residual limp, we went out onto the deck. The cool night air hit us like a kiss on the cheek from God. I made her wait there while I went back inside and, picking my way around the corpses, collected everything from the cabin that I’d brought with me or that might have my fingerprints on it.

She seemed relieved when I rejoined her, although I’d only been inside for a minute at most. We both had to take the companionway stairs slowly, like two old codgers coming down from the top deck of a swaying bus.

When we were back on the terra-comparatively-firma of the wooden walkway, I turned to her.

“She wants to see you,” I said as gently as I could manage with my still-hoarse voice. “She wants to know that you’re okay. That’s why she’s still there. In that room. That’s what she’s waiting for.”

It took a second or two for Rosa to get her head around what I was saying. Then she nodded. “Yes,” she said.

“Are you ready?”

No hesitation this time. “Yes.”

I led the way.

Twenty-three

IT WAS WAY AFTER TWO A.M. BY THIS TIME, AND Eversholt Street was as silent as a necropolis. Even the night buses, rolling empty out of Euston with all their lights on, looked like catafalques bound for some funeral of princes.

Rosa flinched visibly when she saw that door, but she stood her ground. I took care of the locks using Rich’s keys, and we stepped into the upper room of the archive’s secret annex. Rosa looked around her, shook her head, and laughed without any trace of humor. I stopped still to listen, gestured to Rosa to do likewise. There was no sound from the room below.

“You’d better wait here,” I said, aware that her nerves probably couldn’t take too many more surprises tonight, and Rich would probably be a surprise of the nastiest kind.

I unlocked the door to the stairs, turned on the light, and went down. Rich was still there, but the atmosphere down in the basement didn’t seem to have agreed with him all that much. He was slumped on the floor, staring slackly at his drawn-up knees. He didn’t respond when I called his name, and his eyes didn’t move by any visible fraction when I waved my hand in front of them. The lights were on, but it was clear that, for the moment at least, nobody was home. I surmised that Snezhna had visited him again while I was gone and that she hadn’t been restful company. Well, if a guy gets what he’s been begging for, you don’t waste tears.

I went back upstairs and beckoned Rosa over to me. I explained briefly about Rich and what he was doing there. Her eyes narrowed, and her lower lip jutted out.

“I’ll kill him,” she hissed.

“To be honest,” I said, aware that I was echoing what Cheryl had said to me a week before about the ghost herself, “I think you’d be doing him a favor. But there’s been enough killing done tonight, and it’s a fucking rotten spectator sport at the best of times, so here’s the deal. You promise not to kill him, and we’ll go and see Snezhna, all merry and bright. Okay?”

But I realized as I said it that it had just become moot in any case. A familiar feeling was stealing over me, coming in on whatever extra sense I have that’s perpetually tuned in to Death FM.

I led the way down the stairs, and Rosa followed. She bared her teeth in a snarl of hatred when she saw Rich. He stared back at her, slack and invertebrate and without any sign of recognition.

I turned to look down at the stained, spavined mattress. Nothing to be seen there, but that was where she was—that was where it was coming from.

I pointed, and Rosa followed with her eyes.

“There,” I said. “Don’t be afraid.”

To do her justice, she wasn’t. Snezhna’s faceless ghost emerged from the floor like Venus from the waves, the red fringes of her ruined face waving like a silk scarf in a wind we couldn’t feel. But Rosa stood her ground, her eyes filling with tears.

When Snezhna got to ground level—or a few inches above it—she stopped, and the two women faced each other across a gap of about ten feet. The tears were rolling freely down Rosa’s face now. She said something in Russian. Snezhna nodded, then answered. Rosa shook her head in wonder.

Discretion is another virtue I’ve never really got the hang of, but I decided at that point that a breath of fresh air would do Rich and me a world of good. I untied him, hooked a hand under his arm, and pulled him, unprotesting, to his feet. I led him up the stairs, and he went as docile as a lamb. Just once his eyes half focused, and he looked at me, his gaze intensely troubled. He seemed to be about to speak, but evidently he couldn’t find the words or forgot what it was he had to say.

I stood the sofa upright again and sat Rich down on it. Then I picked up one of the remaining water bottles, unbuttoned my shirt, and slopped it over my chest, trying without much success to clean off some of the henna. It wouldn’t budge—that would take a lot of soap and water and a lot of time. In the meantime, I’d have to hope that my husky voice sounded sexy rather than just ridiculous.

I gave the sisters plenty of time, because what Rosa was doing had to be done right. I knew that better than anybody, because what she was doing was my job. It’s the other way to make a ghost move on from this place to wherever. You just give them what they want—tie up the loose ends for them, let them see that everything’s going to be okay after all.

My mind went back to Damjohn’s offer. I have knowledge that comes with a price many would consider too high. Yeah, way too high for me, sport. I’d find out in my own way. In my own time.

After half an hour or so, I went back down. I found Rosa sitting alone on the mattress, looking almost as spent and catatonic as Rich. I held out my hand, but she didn’t take it. She stood under her own steam.

“She’s gone,” she said, but with an inflection that might have made it into a question.

“Yeah,” I confirmed. “She’s gone. She just needed to know that you were out of that shit-hole. Now she’s happy.”

Rosa didn’t seem convinced. She stared at me, a solemn frown on her face. “Where has she gone?” she asked with very careful emphasis.

“I’ll get back to you on that one,” I promised. “Sometime.”