by Mike Carey
It occurred to me that Peele might not have joined his troopers for lunch, so I wandered along and knocked on his door. There was no answer, so I tried the handle. The door was locked. Alice’s door was open, though, and her office—neat, clean, monastically bare—was unoccupied.
Okay, so I wouldn’t be able to get back to the room where the Russian stuff was sitting. But the ghost had manifested in the workroom, too, so it was probably worth whistling up a tune in there.
In the end I went through several old favorites, but without getting anything in response. If the ghost was still there, I couldn’t feel it anymore.
Rich, Cheryl, and Jon got back from lunch dead on one, and Cheryl’s eyes lit up when she saw me. “You gonna do me now?” she demanded.
“Absolutely,” I said. “That’s what I’m sitting here waiting for.”
“You gonna use a drippy tap and a rubber truncheon?”
“I’m on a budget. You’ll just have to smack yourself around the face while I ask the questions.”
For the sake of privacy, Rich unlocked a room for us on the main corridor opposite the workroom. Cheryl sat on the edge of a table with her legs swinging, and I prepared to play one half of the nice-cop, nasty-cop double act. But she got her question in first.
“What if ghosts started to exorcise real people?” she demanded.
I was momentarily floored. “Sorry?” I asked.
“I was just thinking. If they started to fight back, they’d start with you, wouldn’t they? They’d take out the blokes who could do them some harm. Then they’d have the rest of us at their mercy.” She warmed to her theme. “You should probably train up an apprentice, like. And then when you die, the apprentice can track down the ghosts that did you in and get revenge for you.”
“Are you volunteering?” I asked.
Cheryl laughed. “I could do it,” she said. “I quite fancy it, to be honest. Can you do it as an evening class?”
“Correspondence course only. By Ouija board.”
She made a face. “Har har har.”
“How long have you been working here?” I asked her.
“Cheryl Telemaque. Catalog editor, first class. Mainframe log-in number thirty-three.”
“How long?”
She rolled her eyes. “Forever!” she said, with a rising pitch. “Four years in February. I only came in to do some indexing work. Three months, it was meant to be.”
“So being an archivist suits you?”
“I just got stuck, I suppose.” She sounded comically morose now. Her voice was performance art, and I found it hard not to laugh. “I was good at history, at school, so I did it for my degree—at King’s. That was pretty amazing in itself, you know? Not many kids from South Kilburn High going on to uni. Not from my year, anyway.
“But I didn’t really think I was going to end up doing it for a career, you know?” She gave me the look that a center forward gives the ref when he’s holding up the red card. “I mean, there aren’t any history careers. But I couldn’t get a job, and I was gonna do postgrad, only I already owed about twelve thousand quid on my BA, so they wouldn’t give me a loan. Then this job came up—for a catalog editor, not an archivist—and my stepdad said I should go for it.” Cheryl consulted her memory, frowning. “I think he was my stepdad by then. Anyway, it was Alex—my mum’s boyfriend. Then her third husband. Currently her ex.”
“Is that important?”
“I like to keep score. You know that thing Tracey Emin did—the bed with all her lovers’ names sewn into it? Well, if my mum did it, it’d have to be a circus big top.”
For someone who had a more methodical mind or a tighter time budget, I could see where talking to Cheryl could quickly lead to homicide or madness. For now, I was happy to roll with it, because I suspected that underneath all the clowning around, she’d asked me to question her because she had something to tell me.
“So you came here four years ago,” I pursued, deadpan.
She grinned at the memory. “Eventually, yeah. I’ve got a motto, right? You’ve got no right saying you don’t like something if you haven’t tried it. But this time I just didn’t fancy. We had a big row about it. I said I’d rather be on the game than work in a bloody library, then Alex said he was going to take his belt off to me.”
“And?”
“I told him I didn’t expect to get my first customer so quick.” The grin faded abruptly, and she became brusquely matter-of-fact. “Anyway, after that I really needed a job, because my mum chucked me out. So I applied for this, and I’m still here four bloody years later.”
“What does a catalog editor do?” I asked.
“Almost everything. Sorting new collections. Data input. User support. Most of the time, though, it’s bloody retroconversion.” Cheryl pronounced the word as if it was a kind of toxic waste. “Putting the old printed catalogs onto the database. See, lots of collections are still on these really nasty old printed lists that haven’t even been looked at for a million years. I copy them across. Hundreds of thousands of them. It’d drive you frigging well mad. Sylvie’s the only excitement we ever get around here.”
“Sylvie? Is she another part-timer?”
Cheryl laughed, short and loud. “No, you pillock. Sylvie’s the ghost.”
“That’s—”
“Just my name for her. Yeah. You’ve got to call her something, haven’t you?”
“Why? Does she talk to you?”
She shook her head, a frown appearing and then disappearing again on her expressive face. “Not anymore. She used to be nattering on all the time when she first come round. Now you don’t hear a peep out of her.”
I pricked up my ears. “What sort of thing did she talk about?” I asked, trying to keep my tone casual.
“I don’t know, do I?” Cheryl said, looking severe and slightly affronted. “I don’t speak the language. She talked in Russian or Swedish or German or something, and I didn’t understand a word of it. Except when she went on about roses. I got that.”
Russian or Swedish or German. Or something. Quite a wide range. “So you see a lot of her?” I pursued, giving that one up for now.
Cheryl nodded. “Oh yeah. I see her every day, more or less. I think I’m on her wavelength.”
“And you’re not afraid of her? Even after what happened to Rich?”
“Nah. She wouldn’t hurt me. You get a feeling if you’re safe with someone, and I feel safe with her. She just stands there and watches me work—for ages, sometimes. I’m the only one who doesn’t freak out about her, so I reckon she’s more comfortable with me. Or maybe she just doesn’t like men.”
Cheryl paused and thought for a moment, staring at me with a forbidding seriousness.
“I ought to hate you,” she said. “Because you’re coming in to get rid of her. That’s almost like murder, isn’t it? Like she’s already dead, and you’re killing her again.”
There was a long enough break that I thought she’d finished. “Well, obviously I don’t see it like—”
“But the truth is, I think she’s really, really sad.”
She traced a line on the desk with her fingertip and frowned at it, her expressive face solemn, almost somber.
“I think you’d be doing her a favor.”
Jon Tiler was almost as reluctant to talk to me as Alice was—but Alice had reappeared by this time, and she hypocritically told him that Peele had insisted on everyone’s full cooperation. I was taking against Alice, which was something I’d have to watch. I didn’t like the way she threw Peele’s weight about.
In the interview room, Tiler was terse and monosyllabic. But then he’d been terse and monosyllabic in the workroom, too. Had he been at the Bonnington long? No. Did he like it there? Sort of. Had he seen the ghost? Yes. Often? Yes. Did it scare him? No.
I was only doing this for the sake of form. I felt like I already had the beginnings of a handle on the ghost—or at least an idea of how it had come to be here—so I probably didn’t need a
ny additional insights from Tiler. It just goes against the grain with me to leave stones unturned. I guess I am the anally retentive Ghostbuster, after all.
So I stirred up the pot a little.
“Do you have any idea,” I asked him, “what ghosts really are?”
“No,” Tiler answered with something like a sneer. “That’s your thing, isn’t it? Not mine.”
“Most of the time they’re not the spirits of the dead but emotional recordings of the dead. Imprints that just persist in the places where a strong emotion was felt for reasons that we don’t understand.”
I watched him for a moment or two, and he watched a spot on the ceiling somewhere behind my left shoulder. His expression was a glum deadpan.
“So you see,” I said, “I’d normally expect to find evidence of some kind of strong emotion associated with this ghost’s appearance at the archive. Something intense enough to leave a psychic echo.” Pause for effect. Still nothing. “And the only strong emotions I’ve experienced here so far are yours.”
Tiler’s eyes widened and his stare jerked back to meet mine.
“What do you mean?” he yelped. “That’s not true. I didn’t show any emotion at all. I didn’t do anything!”
“You radiate hostility,” I said.
“I don’t!” He was indignant. “I don’t like all this stuff going on around me, that’s all. I like to do my job and just”—he groped for words—“be left to get on with it. This is nothing to do with me. I just want it sorted.”
“Well, that’s what I’m here for,” I said. “And the more I can find out about the ghost, the quicker I’ll be done. So for starters, why don’t you tell me about your encounters with it? When was the most recent?”
“On Monday. As soon as I came in.” Tiler was still truculent, but something in him had loosened up. He went on without being prompted. “I was down in the stacks, and I felt her. I mean, you know, I felt she was there. And I was a bit rattled because of what had happened to Rich, so I got out of there fast. She was coming toward me, and it got—it felt cold, suddenly. Really cold. I could see my breath in front of me. I don’t know if that was because of her, or if it was just . . .” his voice tailed off. “I got out fast,” he repeated glumly, and his gaze flicked down to the floor.
“What does the ghost look like?” I asked him.
He looked at me again, surprised.
“She doesn’t look like anything,” he said. “Her face has gone. The top half of it, anyway. There’s nothing there.”
“When Mr. Peele described the ghost to me, he said that it wore a veil . . .”
Tiler snorted. “It’s not a veil. It’s just red. All her face except for her mouth is just red. She looks like one of those people who talk on TV programs and they want to stay anonymous so they get their heads blurred out. It’s just a big red blob with her real face hidden behind it.”
“And the rest of the body?”
He thought about this for a moment. “There’s only the top half of her. She’s all white. Shiny. You can see through her. And she sort of gets fainter the farther down you go, so from here”—he gestured vaguely at his own torso—“you can’t see her anymore.”
“Clothes?”
He shrugged. “She’s got a hood on. And she’s all in white. She keeps fading out. You can’t see much.”
After a few more questions, I let Tiler go. He didn’t seem to be holding out on me, but all the same, it was still like drawing teeth.
And after that I went for a wander. Every cubic inch of the building had been turned into usable space, but it had obviously been done piecemeal, with no overall plan, and with a willingness to punch a new door through any wall that got in the way or to build a corridor around or a staircase over anything that couldn’t be made to move. And it seemed that the work was ongoing; on the attic level, the rooms were mostly empty shells, and there was some builders’ stuff piled up on the stairwell. The balcony railings had been removed to allow a block and tackle to be put in, and several palletloads of bricks had already been hauled up.
My tour of the building took about an hour and fetched me up back at the first-floor room where the Russian collection was stacked up. Rich met me there by prior arrangement and let me in again. “You can just slam the door behind you,” he said. “When you’re ready to go, I mean. It will lock automatically, and you won’t be able to get back in. Happy trails, partner.” He headed for the door. There was something I wanted to ask him about, but for a moment I couldn’t remember what it was. Then it came to me just before he disappeared.
“Rich,” I called. “Did the ghost ever talk to you?”
He shook his head emphatically. “No, mate. She never says a word to me.”
“Cheryl said it used to talk a lot. Then it stopped.”
Rich nodded. “That sounds right. A few people said they heard her talk in the first couple of weeks. Now she just goes at people with scissors. Better than bottling it up, isn’t it?”
He let the door swing to behind him, and I was alone. That was annoying. If I was right about there being some kind of link between the ghost and this room, this collection, then she’d probably have been speaking Russian, and Clitheroe could have confirmed that. But if God had meant us to climb the mountain in a day, he would have put in a chairlift.
I tried a few more tunes to lure the ghost; it didn’t bite. There was an obvious alternative, but I was reluctant to start on that just yet. Searching through all those thousands of cards and letters for an elusive emotional footprint wasn’t a very attractive prospect. And it wouldn’t even work unless I got a more vivid sense of the ghost itself first. As things stood, even if I found what I was looking for, I probably wouldn’t recognize it.
Sometime after four o’clock, Alice came looking for me.
“Jeffrey wants to know how far you’ve got,” she said, remaining in the doorway. She seemed to like doorways—or perhaps that was only when I was in the room.
“I’m still doing the groundwork,” I said.
“Which means?”
“I’m trying to find out what exactly the ghost is haunting.”
Alice cocked her head, innocently inquiring. “I thought she was haunting us,” she said. “Did I get that wrong?”
I nodded, playing straight man. “It’s not that simple,” I said. “Not usually. I think it may have come in with these”—waving my hand over the cards and letters on the table—“but even if it did, it’s not going to be easy to find out exactly where its fulcrum is. It’s obviously wandering around the building a lot—but the first floor is its favorite stamping ground. That means we can probably assume that it’s tied to something down here. I’m trying to find out—”
“So can I tell him you’ve made some actual progress?” Alice broke in. “Or just that you’re still looking?”
“I’ve met the ghost,” I answered, and I was gratified to see her narrowed eyes widen slightly. “That’s a useful start, but it was a very brief contact, and I’ve only got the barest beginnings of a sense of her. Like I said, it’s still early days.”
She stepped into the room and put six fifty-pound notes down onto the table in front of me, along with a receipt for me to sign and a pen for me to sign it with.
“Enjoy,” she said sourly. “No one can say you haven’t earned it.”
I called it a day a little after half past five. The ghost was still being coy, and the building was getting colder by the minute; the heating was evidently on a timer, even if the staff weren’t.
Alice escorted me back through the maze to the lobby, where Frank liberated my coat from the rail where he’d stowed it that morning. He handed Alice a couple of FedEx packages, and she stopped long enough to sign her name in the mail book. As I was transferring my whistle back into its rightful place, the others came past in a huddle. Cheryl paused in passing.
“It was my birthday on Saturday,” she said.
“Many happy returns.”
“Cheers. So I’m
standing drinks. D’you want to come?”
It seemed churlish to refuse, so I said yes. It was only after that that Cheryl seemed to notice Alice, still signing for her packages at the other end of the counter.
“Sorry, Alice,” she said. “You’re welcome, too, if you want to come.”
Even I could hear the insincerity. “No, thanks,” said Alice, her face setting into an inexpressive blank. “I’m going to be tied up here for an hour yet. Have a good time.”
Six
RICH AND JON WERE ALREADY WAITING OUT ON the street, and they fell into step with us. Jon didn’t react to my being there, but I didn’t imagine he was thrilled at the prospect.
We went to a free house on Tonbridge Street that didn’t seem to know quite what its freedom was for, at least if the choice of beers was anything to go by. I opted for a pint of Spitfire, which shone out from among the otherwise lackluster options.
Cheryl got the drinks in while Rich, Jon, and I found a table. It wasn’t hard; the after-work crowd were just starting to trickle in, only sluggishly drawn to the plastic gilt and the sandwich menu, and completely indifferent to the two ranks of fruit machines giving their synchronized salutes off in the far corner.
“What do you think of the Bonnington?” Rich asked with a sardonic grin.
I think he was hoping for an extreme response—one that he could savor. I temporized. “Well, it’s an office,” I said. “The more you see of them, the more they come to look alike.”
“Have you ever worked in one?” Tiler asked pointedly.
“I’ve always done what I do now,” I said, glossing over the fact that for the past year and a half, I hadn’t been working anywhere. “So apart from the odd vacation job back when I was a student, no. But I’ve been called into a fair few.”
“Well, I’ve seen loads,” said Rich. “But I’ve never seen anything like this place.”
“It’s a bit of a swamp of fear and loathing,” I allowed. “What’s with Alice? Is she always like that?”
He raised his eyebrows. “No. She’s always been a bit of a bitch, but now she’s fallen out with Jeffrey, hasn’t she? She probably hasn’t had breakfast in bed all week.”