by Mike Carey
It was ironic, Rich said with a sobbing laugh. He was suddenly like one of the girls in the flats: told what to do and what to say and how to behave; having to choke down his own emotions and put on a performance that he thought might actually tear him apart.
But he forced himself to do it—to shower, shave, get dressed, go to work. He felt as though he was walking through some kind of fucked-up hallucination based on his own previous life, but nobody looked at him twice or seemed to sense anything odd about him. He went down to the reading room at lunchtime and went through the papers from cover to cover—nothing about a female body with a ruined face being found in Somers Town or anywhere else in London.
As always, normality began to work its healing spell on Rich. He got through the day with no slipups, no sign that he was anything other than himself. He even managed to enact a fake “accident” with a drawer that would explain his injured hand and allow him to keep it bandaged until it healed. He was keeping it together: riding out the waves of insane discontinuity that the murder had set off in his life.
At five-thirty (half an hour’s overtime—safely within the usual parameters), he went home, ate, watched TV, and drank a beer. Okay, he flaked out at about ten, exhausted by the emotional intensity of the eventless day, but still, he’d made it. If he could do it once, he could do it as many times as he had to.
Then, on the Tuesday, his world fell apart again. One of the part-timers came up screaming from one of the basement strong rooms. She’d seen a ghost: a woman without a face. When Rich heard those words, he fled to the gents’ toilet and threw his guts up. It was half an hour before he dared to venture out again, and he spent the rest of that day staying at the edges of all the eager discussions about the ghost, all the lurid speculation. He knew he wouldn’t be able to keep the mask up if he had to talk about it. He had to pretend to keep an austere distance from such a childish subject.
On the Wednesday, he did call in sick. He just couldn’t face the thought of meeting Snezhna in the stacks: coming face to face, or rather face to not-a-face-anymore, with her in some dark, narrow space where no one could hear him scream. He told Alice that he had gastric flu. Then he drew the curtains and hid.
Somehow, Damjohn found out. Rich got another visit from Scrub, and it was a lot more painful than the first one. Scrub wanted Rich to understand that Mr. Damjohn expected high standards of professionalism from his employees, particularly in the area of doing what they were fucking told. He made the point imaginatively, using everyday objects from Rich’s kitchen to illustrate what would happen if Rich let Mr. Damjohn down in this respect. He also reminded Rich that if he didn’t pull himself together, he’d end up facing a murder charge. He had—in Scrub’s vivid phraseology—a big bastard sod of a lot to lose.
Rich did his best, with mixed results. He was able to go back into the Bonnington the next day and get back to work—where everyone was very solicitous about him, because it was obvious that he was still a bit shaky after his illness. And he was able to put a brave face on it through the days that followed, even though he felt like a condemned man whose execution was going to be sprung on him as an impromptu party rather than being set for a fixed time and place.
When the worst happened and he finally met the ghost, not in a strong room but in the middle of a corridor, he pissed himself—literally, physically, with a great access of terror so pure that it made him forget who and where he was. When he could think again, he was sprawled on the floor behind a desk in an empty storeroom, his drenched trousers cold and clinging, his hands shaking so hard he couldn’t even pull himself upright.
As soon as he could walk, he got up and headed straight out of the building. He knew that if he met anyone and had to talk to them, he’d break into pieces.
In the evening, Rich went to see Damjohn at Kissing the Pink. To his horror, Damjohn found the whole situation vastly amusing. Oh, it had its serious side, of course: a woman in whom he’d already invested a certain amount of money and time was now dead, and he’d had to go to some degree of inconvenience in the resulting cleanup. But he was, he told Rich, a man who’d always believed that the punishment should fit the crime—and in this case, the fit was exquisite.
In short, he told Rich to live with it, and in passing he renewed the threats that Scrub had already made. If Rich found that he couldn’t live with it, there was another option that would serve just as well from Damjohn’s point of view.
“The man’s a sadist,” Rich moaned. “A fucking sadist. He liked it that I was scared. He was getting off on it.”
I didn’t comment. The sense of the ghost’s presence was palpable now, so intense that it was like a thickening of the air. Snezhna was here; she was listening. She was hanging around Rich like a shroud, and although she still hadn’t shown herself in visible form, I was amazed that he couldn’t sense her. The room was full of her.
“Where did Gabe McClennan come in?” I asked, and Rich bared his teeth in a panting snarl.
“McClennan! That bastard! That was just part of the joke, wasn’t it? I went back, and I kept my nose clean. I did everything Damjohn had fucking well told me to do. And I made it all the way through September. But can you imagine what it was like, Castor? I mean, Jesus Christ! Every time I turned around, she was there. I kept on seeing her. Everyone kept on seeing her. And whenever she showed up, she was saying the same thing: asking where Rosa was. Gdyeh Rosa? Ya potrevozhnao Rosa. Again and again and again, never fucking letting up.
“I told Damjohn he couldn’t let it carry on. She might name me. She might name him. He’d sorted out the body, but now he had to sort out—the rest. What was still left of her.
“And he agreed. And he brought McClennan in.” Rich twisted his head around to look up at me, his haggard face contorted into a look of half-insane appeal. “But McClennan didn’t exorcise her—he only put that ward on her, so she couldn’t talk. Damjohn was just protecting his own arse. He still wanted me to go on suffering!”
Rich lapsed into silence, twitching slightly from time to time, his head once more clasped in his hands. I thought through everything I already knew in the light of what he’d just told me. It seemed to fit. And the emotional commentary track that I’d accessed by gripping the back of Rich’s neck had agreed with the words on every major point. He was telling the truth, as far as he knew it and believed it.
“What about the documents?” I asked. “The Russian collection? Where did it really come from?”
He rubbed snot and tears away from his face with a hand that still shook.
“One of the girls—not Snezhna, one of the earlier ones—had that stuff in her flat. Family heirloom sort of thing. I saw it, and I thought—yeah, that lot’s worth something. I could sell it to the archive. So I said I’d bring it over for her and get it valued. I used one of Damjohn’s flats—a vacant one—as a postal address, and I set the whole thing up. I said I was liaising with this old man, but it was just me.”
That was something else I should have worked out sooner. Scrub and McClennan hadn’t turned up in Bishopsgate by accident. Rich had probably phoned Damjohn as soon as he’d hung up from talking to me.
“And Rosa?” I asked him. “Did you ever see her again?”
Rich shook his head miserably without looking up. “Damjohn wouldn’t let me. He told me not to go back into the club or any of his other places. And he’s only used me on the talent run once since then. He says I’m on probation. He says I’ve got to wait, and he’ll call me when he needs me.”
Bizarrely, after all I’d heard, it was then that my stomach chose to turn over. It’s not likely that I’d have felt much pity for Rich in any case, given what he’d done. But the fact that he’d been able to go back to his old routine of picking up girls put him outside the human race, as far as my categories went—into some other conceptual space that he shared with the likes of Asmodeus.
But I still needed him for one thing more.
“Listen to me, Rich,” I told him. “R
osa’s gone missing. Damjohn’s got her hidden somewhere, in case she talks to me and helps me to put two and two together. She knows that her sister’s dead. Maybe he told her, or maybe she found out in some other way—but she must know, because she attacked me with a knife, thinking that I’d exorcised Snezhna’s ghost. So she’s in the same boat as you—she knows enough to bring the police down on Damjohn. He’ll probably kill both of you once the dust has settled on all of this—and the only reason you’re running around free right now is because you disappearing would be too damn suspicious.
“So your only chance of coming out of this alive is to cooperate with me. Do you understand?”
He looked up slowly and nodded. “And you’ll keep it quiet?” he asked, his tone approaching a whine. “You won’t tell anybody about—”
I exploded with all the pent-up emotion of the past half hour. “Jesus, of course I won’t keep it quiet!” I shouted. “What, are you sick in the fucking head or something?” He flinched at the caustic contempt in my voice, shrank back against the wall. I brandished his keys in his face. “The only choice I’m giving you is between serving time for murder and hitting the wall right now. And make it fast, Rich. I’ve got other places to be.”
But Rich was shaking his head. I’d pushed him too far, and he was finally pushing back. “No,” he said. “No. I can’t do it. I can’t go to prison.”
“I think you’ll like it better than the other option,” I assured him grimly.
“I can’t!” he moaned, groveling on his hands and knees with his head bent under him, “I can’t!”
I stood back, realizing that I wouldn’t get any more sense out of him until he’d got over this whelming flood of panic. I was itching to get moving, only too aware of how much might hinge on me getting to Rosa before Damjohn’s nerve failed. But I had to contain myself. There was no way of applying any more pressure to Rich without him breaking altogether.
No way for me, anyway. At that moment, the darkness in the corners of the room began to stretch and flow. Rich hadn’t noticed, because he was incapable of noticing anything, but whatever was happening, he was the focus of it. The shadows ran toward him, circled him like water circles a drain, darkening and deepening. It didn’t look like her, but I’d been waiting for her to make her move for ten minutes or more, so I knew it when it came.
I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me. Okay, she’d been fighting against the pull of this room ever since she’d died, but Rich’s churning emotion was a beacon burning through the darkness and confusion of death. She had to come.
Only she didn’t come as herself. No woman stood over Rich as he rocked and moaned. It was just the darkness, curdling and thickening.
When he did finally realize that something was wrong, he looked up at me, startled, as if it was some trick that I was trying to pull on him. Then he raised his hands and tried to swat the shadows away. That was as futile as it sounds. He gave a little shriek and rolled away toward the wall. The darkness followed him, zeroed on his face, sank into and through him.
“Castor!” Rich screamed. “Get it—get it off—don’t—”
I didn’t make a move. There probably wouldn’t have been much I could have done in any case. Not now. The shadows sank into and through Rich’s skin, drawn in by some psychic osmosis. His scream became muffled, liquid, inhuman. His hands flailed, groping blindly at his own face.
Except that he didn’t actually have a face—not much of one, anyway. From forehead to upper lip was just a red, rippling curtain of flesh. Chestnut-brown hair hung in lank ringlets over it, and the mouth that gaped formlessly underneath was rimmed by blood-red lips.
The illusion—if that’s what it was—held for the space of a long-drawn-out breath. Then it was gone, as if someone had thrown a switch, and it was just Rich there again, screaming and babbling, his fingers gripping his face as if he was trying to tear it off his skull. I waded in and stopped him from blinding himself in his panic.
“I’ll help,” he promised, raising his hand as if to ward off a blow. “Please! I’ll help, Castor. I’ll cooperate! You can tell her I cooperated. Don’t let her touch me! Please!”
“That’s great, Rich,” I said. “But I’m going to need you to get your breath back first.”
That took a while. When his breathing was close enough to normal that I thought he might be able to talk, I took out my mobile phone and threw it into his lap.
“Make a call,” I told him. “There’s another emergency.”
Twenty-one
RICH TURNED THE PHONE ON, WAITED FOR IT TO LIGHT up and find a network. Nothing happened. He stared at it nonplussed, robbed of all initiative by the psychic gut-punch he’d just taken. He looked at me with a mute appeal.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I snapped. “Hand it over.”
It was the usual problem: no charge. With an inward curse, I flicked through some unworkable alternatives and then had a sudden inspiration. In my inside breast pocket, I found the mobile phone I’d taken from Arnold after I’d coldcocked him in the toilet at the Runagate in Chelsea. I gave that to Rich instead.
He dialed clumsily, taking three goes before he managed to get the number right. Then we both waited, eavesdropping on some etheric limbo while the call wound its way through cyberspace. I was listening in, my head right up close to his. I didn’t trust Rich to fly straight on this unless he had a copilot. In my mind’s eye I saw the phone ringing in the foyer of Kissing the Pink, Weasel-Face Arnold picking up.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Rich Clitheroe,” Rich said. “I’ve got to speak to Mr. Damjohn.” There was a pregnant pause, and then he added, “It’s about Castor.”
“Hold on,” the voice muttered.
They kept him hanging. Damjohn wouldn’t make himself immediately available to anyone, let alone to someone as lowly as Rich. As the pause lengthened, though, I wondered if they were having trouble reaching Damjohn. Maybe he was somewhere else altogether.
After about a minute, Arnold came back on. “He’s on the boat,” he said, sounding slightly disgruntled—as if, maybe, he’d been torn off a strip for disturbing his boss’s repose. “He said you should call him there.” He rattled off the number, and Rich made a pretence of writing it down while we both did our best to commit it to memory. Rich made the follow-on call, his shaking hands causing a number of false starts. We got the ring tone, and it went on for what seemed like forever. Then, finally, someone picked up.
“Hello?” Damjohn’s voice. “Clitheroe?”
“Mr. Damjohn, I’ve got to talk to you. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do here.” I had to admit, Rich sounded suitably scared and agitated, but I guess that was mostly because he was. You couldn’t fake that degree of abject terror.
“Calm down, Clitheroe,” Damjohn said, his tone clipped. “You shouldn’t even be trying to contact me, but since you have, tell me what the problem is. And please—no hysteria.”
Rich flicked a frightened glance at me, looked away again quickly.
“It’s Castor,” he said. “He just came to my house.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. Then Damjohn’s voice said, “Why? What does he know?”
I shook my head silently at Rich. We’d already rehearsed this whole conversation, but I wanted to make sure he didn’t ad-lib. I didn’t want Damjohn panicked enough to do anything to Rosa.
“Nothing,” Rich said. “He doesn’t know anything. But he’s—he’s asking a lot of questions.”
“And who is he talking to? Just you, or everybody?”
“I don’t know.” Rich put a convincing edge of anguish in his voice. “Look, I don’t think I can take any more of this. I’m facing a murder charge already—a fucking murder charge. Mr. Damjohn, where’s Rosa? She knows about me, doesn’t she? Where is she now? If she goes to the police, I’m fucked. Unless I go there first and get my story in. I can tell them it was an accident, because it was.”
I heard Damjohn
’s breath hissing between his teeth.
“Killing someone while you’re trying to rape them doesn’t count as an accident, Clitheroe,” he said with icy calm. “Even on a manslaughter plea, you’d draw down twenty years and end up serving at least ten of them. That’s what you’re facing if you can’t keep your nerve. Rosa isn’t talking to anyone, and neither are you.”
I made a winding-up motion with my index finger—get to the point—and Rich nodded, showing me he understood.
“Where is she?” he repeated.
“What?” Damjohn’s tone was pained.
“Where’s Rosa? I want to talk to her.”
“I’ve already told you that that’s impossible.”
Rich’s voice rose an octave or so. “That was before Peele called in his own fucking exorcist, man. I’m sweating this. I’m sweating it. Okay, maybe I don’t need to talk to her. But I want to make fucking sure nobody else can. You’ve got her out of the way, right? I mean, she’s not still turning tricks? Castor could just walk right in there and—”
“She’s here with me,” Damjohn snapped. “At the boat. I’m looking at her right now. And she’ll stay here until Castor is dealt with. How long ago did he leave you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe a bit longer.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Where?”
Rich blinked twice, on the spot, realizing that he’d painted himself into a corner. I made the “it’s a book” sign from charades. “To the—back to the archive,” Rich stammered. “I think. I think that’s what he said.”
Another pause. “It’s Sunday,” Damjohn pointed out, his tone gentle but precise. “Isn’t the archive closed now?”