by Mike Carey
He held out his hand, and reflexively I took it. That was a mistake.
FLASH. They’re all lined up on the concrete apron behind the factory’s loading bay. Men in green overalls, almost like those that doctors wear in the west, but darker; women in dirty smocks, their hair bound up in scarves. They all smell faintly of vinegar, because what the factory does, in the autumn months at least, is bottle pickles. The captain is happy and strokes my hair. He has to lean down, because even for my age, I’m small. “Which one is Bozin?” he murmurs, and I show him just by looking. He nods. Bozin evidently looks as the captain thinks he should. He gestures to the soldiers, who haul the man out of the line. A middle-age man like all the others, his face stolid and stupid. The captain puts away his pistol, which he has been waving, and borrows a rifle from one of the soldiers. Then he drives the butt of the rifle three times into that stupid, belligerent face while two of the soldiers hold Bozin upright. The blows are hard. The man’s nose is smashed, his teeth driven into his throat, one eye caved in. But when he falls to the ground, he isn’t yet dead. He’s still making liquid gurgling noises in his throat. The captain turns to me, makes a gesture that means “help yourself.” I kick Bozin in the balls.
FLASH. The woman, Mercedes, has become a point of pride with me, a badge that I wear when I go out at night. Her beauty, her sophistication, the expensive gloss that covers her like a sheath, these are the signs that I’m not a boy anymore. They say to everyone who sees us “Look at me and respect me.” Her very name is the name of a luxury car, a possession that screams out your status to the world. I’m sorry, sometimes, that I have to treat her with such cold contempt, but that’s the very heart of the matter. For me to win respect, I have to show that she needs and merits none. The more I belittle her, the greater I am. At first this is hard. But then one night we quarrel. She tries to leave me, and I beat her. That beating—the inflicting of terrible and unnecessary pain on someone who has brought me so much pleasure—is an annunciation. It’s so hard to stop.
FLASH. The houses that still stand are burning. I walk through the streets at my leisure, because no more shells will fall. I had property here, but nothing that I couldn’t afford to lose; I may even be compensated when the United Nations arrives with all its democratic fanfares and its bureaucratic paraphernalia. I contemplate a house that is about to fall, and I draw this moral. Yugoslavia itself was a house, precariously built and supported by only one beam. When that beam—Tito’s Communist party—was kicked away, it was inevitable that the boisterous children fighting and playing inside would bring the house down on their heads. Their heads, not mine. The house collapses in a shower of sparks and a billowing gust of ash and smoke that envelops me and blinds me for a moment. In the wreckage, a slender hand and arm, burned black—a child’s arm, perhaps, or the arm of a woman of slender build. Of course. That was what I was smelling. I wipe a smut of ash from my alpaca coat and am annoyed to find that it smears greasily rather than flaking off. This has become an uncivilized and tainted place. I walk on, but without hurry. There’s twelve hours yet before the plane leaves.
I jerked my hand away fast, my teeth coming together with an audible clack. That touch—that subliminal data-squirt of impressions—had taken less than a second.
Damjohn stared at me for a long, wordless moment. He knew from my face that something had just happened; he wasn’t sure what. He considered asking, weighing curiosity against the loss of authority he might suffer. I saw him make up his mind.
“I’m sure we’ll meet again,” he said at last, smiling a bland, meaningless smile. Just as he’d done before, he signaled that I was dismissed by lowering his eyes to his book. Scrub, who had missed the whole thing, was already lumbering back across the stage area toward the street door. A new blonde was dancing her way through a new set of lingerie, and the ranks of the mug punters had grown mighty.
Snatching up my coat, I crossed the room in Scrub’s broad wake. I had to fight against the bitter bile that was coming up in my throat. I kept it down. I wished I could do the same with the crawling tide of images and impressions that was still washing around inside my brain. I swore to myself that I was never coming here again, even if that hairy-eyed bastard sent the French Foreign Legion to pick me up.
The weasel man, Arnold, was now sitting at the desk in the foyer. Scrub muttered the words “Two ton” as he walked by, then took up his station on the pavement outside. I found it hard to believe that his presence would encourage the passing trade, although the club didn’t seem to be having any trouble in that regard. The rain had slackened off now, and the evening was once again fresh and blustery. Maybe that helped.
Arnold paid me out in fives and tens with silent, laborious concentration, his lips moving as he counted. I took it in silence and stuffed it into my back pocket. I’m not averse to dirty money, up to a point, but I wasn’t feeling very happy with myself right then. I came out onto the street, hoping but not expecting to see the BMW roll smoothly around the corner and pull up right in front of me. No such luck; there wasn’t the same urgency about getting me home as there had been about bringing me here. Scrub’s heavy hand fell on my shoulder.
I turned. He was looking down at me with a sort of ponderous calculation.
“You use music,” he pointed out, basso profundo.
I knew what he meant. “Yeah, I use music.”
“You play a little tune.”
“Right.”
He touched me lightly on the Adam’s apple with the tip of his forefinger.
“I could rip your throat out before you got to the second note.”
His point made, he lumbered back inside.
I headed off into the night, the chill wind cutting into me and a writhing nest of worms inside my head. I was restless, I was wet, and I was a long way from home. Okay, not geographically, maybe, but psychologically. The weird encounter with Damjohn had got to me and unsettled me—the contents of his head clinging to me like half-dried vomit. In pure self-defence, I pulled my thoughts around to the situation at the Bonnington. That didn’t make me any happier, but at least it exercised my mind in a different way.
I was down to the last knockings of the Russian collection, and if I came up blank, I’d have nothing to cover my embarrassment. Could I be wrong about the ghost being linked to those documents? I’d taken a few swipes with Occam’s razor, and that was what I’d ended up with, but that didn’t make it so. I really didn’t want to have to retreat and regroup with Peele and Alice breathing down my neck on either side.
There were still those last few boxes, though. It was possible that Sod’s Law was operating, and that the ghost’s anchor was just going to turn out to be one of the documents at the very bottom of the stack.
I shrugged into my coat, slid my hand into the pocket by reflex, and felt the spiky, angular mass of Alice’s keys.
Ten
I GOT INTERESTED IN LOCKS BACK WHEN I WAS working up the magic act at university. I had the idea that I could build in some escapology as well, so I went down to London looking for a shop that would sell me a pair of handcuffs. I learned a lot from that exercise, but more about the outer limits of consensual sex than about escapology.
Then Jimmy, the barman at the Welsh Pony on Gloucester Green, mentioned a guy he knew: Tom Wilke, the Banbury Bandit, who’d just finished a two-year stretch for breaking and entering. “They did him on two dozen specimen counts, with about a hundred more taken into consideration. He’d be your man,” Jimmy said. “Any kind of lock. He says he can do them blindfolded.”
I was young enough to find the thought of chatting to a career criminal appealing, so I asked Jimmy for the guy’s address. Jimmy said he’d have to set it up first and left me to stew for about a week. I went in there every night to ask him if he’d seen Wilke and if he’d asked him, but the answer was always no.
Then one night, there was a different answer; it was sod off.
“Sorry, Fix,” Jimmy said apologetically. “He’s not
himself since he got out of Bullingdon. He’s gone very quiet. Doesn’t want to talk to anyone or have anyone round. Maybe it’s just something he’s going through. I’ll ask him again in a few months.”
But I couldn’t wait that long; I had to be doing it now. I worked on Jimmy until he gave me Wilke’s address just to get rid of me, and I went round to see him myself.
Tom Wilke lived in a flat on some grubby estate off the ring road, three floors up with no lift. It was eerily silent, as if the whole place was empty: no kids on the stairs, no music blaring out of open windows, even though it was high summer. I knocked on the door and waited, knocked and waited some more. When it was clear that no one was going to answer, I turned around to leave.
Just as I got to the stairs, I heard a sound that made me turn.
A sob. Somebody crying. I listened for a minute or so and it came again, from behind the door I’d just knocked on. A heartbroken, strangled sob.
I went back and tried the door. It opened. Fortune favors the pure of heart and the brassy of bollock.
Inside, a hallway just two steps wide, then an open door that led through into a poky living room—cramped despite the fact that there was almost no furniture there. A middle-age man with a shock of white hair and a build so spare he looked malnourished was sitting in a spavined G-plan chair by the light of a bare bulb, with tears running down his cheeks.
I thought at first that the curtains were drawn, but they weren’t. It was just that the windows were covered in smeary black ash so thick that even the light from a streetlamp right outside could barely filter through them. Floor, walls, furniture—everything else in the room except for the man himself was all similarly covered.
Tom Wilke was so drunk that he couldn’t even stand up, and when I knelt down next to the chair, his eyes could barely focus on me. He had no idea who I was, but my sudden appearance didn’t seem to faze or anger him. He pleaded with me, his free hand pawing at my sleeve. In the other hand he was gripping a bottle of Grant’s with about a quarter of its contents left. His breath stank like a distillery.
“I always lock the door,” he said, “so they don’t notice I’ve been. Takes them longer. Always lock the door . . .”
Since his own door hadn’t been locked or bolted, that puzzled me for a moment. Then I realized he wasn’t talking about his own door.
“Never hurt anyone,” Wilke was mumbling now, shaking his head in pained disbelief. “Never carry a knife, a gun, anything. Colin said keep five quids’ worth of change in a sock. Tap them on the head if they get bolshie. No. Never did it. Never needed to. In and out, me. Every time.”
I ran my hand along the arm of the chair, which was as greasily filthy with ash as everything else in the room. Then I looked at the tips of my fingers. Clean.
I went and made some coffee, but it was for me, not for Wilke. He finished off the whisky, and I pieced together the story from his stop-start ramblings, although sometimes his tears made him completely incomprehensible.
One of the houses he’d done, just before he’d gone inside, had been a semi down on Blackbird Leys. A shabby-looking place, but a mate who worked for UPS had told him the bloke who lived there took orders for his hi-fi shop at home sometimes. There was a chance of a good take, and he’d borrowed a van for the night.
It took Wilke ages to find the place. It was on one of those godforsaken estates that seem to be built on some sort of fractal system, with endless identical streets opening off each other and feeding into each other so that you’re lost before you start.
But he found it at last, and getting inside was a piece of cake. It would have been sweet as a nut after all, except that there was nothing there; not just no hi-fi kit, nothing worth taking at all. In one of the bedrooms, a kid in a cot, heavily asleep all by itself—no jewelry, no money, no portable electronic stuff. Even the TV had a cracked casing, so nobody was going to touch it.
So he left again, as quietly as he’d come, pissed off and bitter and rehearsing the words he was going to have with this UPS wallah. He was basically running on automatic. He locked the front door behind him, forgetting that it had been unlocked when he arrived. He wrote the night off. He went home. He went to bed.
The next morning, in the Oxford Mail, he read that a two-year-old had burned to death in a house on Blackbird Leys. The address, which he’d spent so long trying to find the night before, jumped out at him from the page. There couldn’t be any possibility of a mistake.
“They couldn’t get in,” Wilke mumbled, his rambling despair going on and on in an endless loop. “They came back, and the house was on fire. How the fuck? Nothing. Don’t understand it. I didn’t touch anything, did I? They couldn’t get in. Door was locked, and nobody had the key. When they got there, it was all burned down . . .”
He whined like a wounded animal. The whisky bottle fell out of his hand and rolled across the floor as Wilke covered his eyes and rocked and moaned through clenched teeth.
It was about a week—maybe as long as two—before it started to happen. He wasn’t even in his own place the first time; he was at a café, eating a bacon sandwich and talking to a couple of likely lads about a possible warehouse job. Pretending it was business as usual, when inside he kept hearing a kid crying in an empty house, and he couldn’t concentrate on what anyone was saying for more than a sentence or two at a time.
Black ash began to settle on the table, on his plate, on the men he was talking to. He jumped up with a shouted curse, which made the two men he was dealing with stare at him as if he was insane. He responded aggressively—were they blind or something?—and things got unpleasant. Wilke realized that nobody except him could see the ash. Then he ran a hand through it and realized why that was.
The haunting had continued ever since. He’d never seen an actual ghost. It was just that wherever he was, the ash would start to fall, and the longer he stayed anywhere, the thicker it got. It was even in his dreams, so that avenue of escape was barred.
After a few weeks, he was thinking about suicide. After talking to a priest, he gave himself up instead. He provided the police with a list of the houses, offices, and warehouses he’d burgled, with the Blackbird Leys address at the top of the list. He told them everything they needed to know to bring a case, and when they did, standing in the dock in a rain of ash that nobody else could see, he pleaded guilty on all counts.
Wilke thought it would stop then. He thought he’d done enough to atone. But nothing changed. He knew now that nothing ever would. He was using alcohol to blunt the horror, and when alcohol stopped working, he’d probably go back to option A and top himself.
My emotions as I listened to this were ricocheting around like rubber bullets inside a Dumpster. What the man had done was horrendous. Unforgivable. Everything he’d suffered he’d deserved, ten times over. But he hadn’t set out to kill anybody. He’d just done something stupid and then tried his best to pay for it, only to discover that he was facing a life sentence without appeal. I stood over him and judged him—guilty, then innocent, then guilty again—before finally reaching the only conclusion I could: that it wasn’t my call.
“I think there’s another way out of this, Tom,” I told him. “I think we can help each other.”
It took about a week of sleeping on his floor and sitting in his death-dark room every day before I finally got a scent of the little ghost that was hiding in all that sifting ash. Such a huge weight of fear and despair from such a tiny source. I caught its attention with nursery rhymes: “The Grand Old Duke of York,” “The Old Woman Tossed Up in a Basket,” “Boys and Girls Come Out to Play.” After that, it was easy. The light broke through the ash as I played, and the room resumed its normal colors. When I finished, all that greasy, granular pain was gone. A scream that had addressed itself to the eye instead of the ear had stopped echoing at last.
I felt exhausted. I felt compromised, and sleazy, and black with ash that couldn’t be seen anymore. I got up to go, but Wilke wouldn’t let me. He was
in my debt, and with gratitude as extreme as his earlier grief, he insisted on paying. He took me through every kind of lock there was, starting with simple levers and wards, then working through every kind of tumbler, pin, wafer, and disc, before finishing off with ultramodern master-keyed systems that are about as relevant to normal escapology as depleted uranium shells are to the game of darts.
I lapped it up. I was the best pupil he ever had. And the first, and the last; he got religion after that and took holy orders. I never saw him again.
I mention all this only to make a point, and the point is this: I didn’t need Alice’s keys. With enough time and with the tools I’d inherited from Tom Wilke, I could have got into any room in the archive. No, what I needed was Alice’s ID card, because the locks were all wired up to the readers on each door. A key alone would open them, but would also sound an alarm. This way, I could slip in and out with nobody the wiser. I hoped.
The place felt different at night.
I mean that in a literal sense; it had a different set of resonances, a different tonality. And since it was empty—since there was no other human presence there to dilute the effect with feelings and associations of its own—I felt the full weight of it as I walked through the darkened corridors.
It was a sad weight, even a sinister one. There was a flavor in the air like cruelty and pointless anger. Obviously, unless you’re in the business, you’ll have to just imagine that those things have flavors—for me they do.
I found my way to the Russian room, swiped myself in as Alice Gascoigne, and got stuck into the boxes again. There were only seven left, so a couple of hours at most would see me through to the end. I turned one bank of lights on; the strong room had no windows, so there was no chance of being seen from the street. After a minute or so of treading water, I got back into the flow, and time soon became suspended again in the murky laminations of the past.