The Devil You Know (3 page)

I hadn’t loaded the Autographic for more than a decade, but all the stuff I needed was right there in the box, and my hands knew what to do. I lined up a new plate, peeled away one corner of the waxed cover sheet, then slammed it into place and tore the cover free in one smooth movement. It wasn’t what a professional would have done, partly because there was bound to be some seepage of light if you loaded the camera like that in an ordinarily lit room—but mostly because I was loading print paper rather than negative film. We were cutting out one stage of the normal photographic process. Again, it didn’t matter, but I noticed as I was tightening the screws up again that James and Barbara Dodson had wandered in and were standing at the back of the room. That was going to mean a louder eruption, but by this stage I didn’t really give a monkey’s chuff; Peter had gotten quite seriously under my skin.

I got Sebastian into position, steering him with my hand on his shoulders. Peter was getting bored and restive, but we were almost done. I could have ratcheted up the tension a bit more, but since the outcome was still in doubt, I thought I might as well just suck it and see. Either it would work or it wouldn’t. “Okay, on my mark. Peter—smile. Nice try, but no. Kids in the front row, show Peter what a smile is. Sebastian—three, two, one, now!”

Sebastian pressed the bulb, and the shutter made a slow, arthritic
whuck-chunk
sound. Good. I’d been half afraid that nothing would happen at all.

“Now, we don’t have any fixative,” I announced as my memory started to kick in again, piecemeal. “So the image won’t last for long. But we can make it clearer with a stop bath. Lemon juice will do, or vinegar, if you . . . ?” I looked hopefully at the two grown-ups, and Barbara slipped out of the room again.

“What about developing fluid?” James asked, looking at me with vague but definite mistrust.

I shook my head. “We’re not using light,” I said again. “We’re photographing the spirit world, not the visible one, so the film doesn’t have to develop; it has to translate.”

James’s face showed very clearly what he thought of this explanation. There was an awkward silence, broken by Barbara as she came back in with a bottle of white-wine vinegar, a plastic bowl, and an apologetic smile. “This is going to stink,” she warned me as she retreated again to the back of the room.

She was right. The sweet-sour tang of the vinegar hit and held as I poured out about two-thirds of the bottle, which covered the bowl to half an inch or so deep. Then, with Sebastian still standing next to me, I slipped the plate out of the camera, very deliberately blocking with my body the audience’s line of sight. “Sebastian,” I said, “you’re still the cameraman here. That means you’re the medium through which the spirits are working. Please, dip the print paper in the vinegar, and slosh it around so that it’s completely soaked. An image should form on the paper as you do this. Do you see an image, Sebastian?”

Peter hadn’t even bothered to move from his place over by the wall. In fact, he was leaning against it now, looking more sullen and bored than ever. Sebastian stared first in consternation and then in amazement at the paper as he sluiced it round and round in the bowl.

“Do you see an image?” I repeated, knowing damn well that he did.

“Yeah!” he blurted. Everyone in the room was picking up on his tension and astonishment now; I didn’t need to go for any verbal buildup.

“And what
is
that image?”

“A boy. It’s—I think it’s—!”

“Of course you can see a boy,” I interrupted. “We just took a photo of your brother, Peter. Is that who you can see, Sebastian?”

He shook his head, his wide eyes still staring down at the muddy photograph. “No. Well, I mean, yeah, but—there’s somebody else, too. It’s—”

I cut across him again. Everything in its place. “Somebody you recognize?”

Sebastian nodded emphatically. “Yeah.”

I like to see what I was doing here as siding with the underdog, but if there had been no element of sadism in it, I wouldn’t have been looking at Peter as I said the next few words. “And does he have a name, this other boy? What dark wonders from the spirit world have we captured and pinned to the wall, Sebastian? Tell us his name.”

Sebastian swallowed hard. It was genuine nerves rather than showmanship, but the strained pause was better than anything I could have choreographed myself.

“Davey Simmons,” Sebastian said, his voice a little too high.

The effect on Peter was electrifying. He yelled in what sounded like honest, naked terror, coming away from the wall with a jerk and then lurching across to the bowl in three staccato strides. But I was too quick for him. “Thank you, Sebastian,” I said, whipping the print out of the bowl and waving it in the air as though to dry it—and as though keeping it out of Peter’s reach was only accidental.

It had come out pretty well. In black and white, of course, and darkened around the edges where the light had got in at the paper, but nice and clear where it needed to be. It showed Peter as a sort of grainy blur, only recognizable by his posture and by the darker splodge of his hair. By contrast, the figure that stood at his elbow was very distinct indeed—sad, washed out, beaten down by time and loneliness and the fact of his own death, but not to be mistaken for marsh gas, cardboard cutout, or misapplied imagination.

“Davey Simmons,” I mused. “Did you know him well, Peter?”

“I never fucking heard of him!” Peter yelled, throwing himself at me with desperate fury. “Give me that!” I’m not hefty by any means, but for all his solidity, Peter was just a kid; holding him off while I showed the print to his friends wasn’t hard at all. They were all staring at it with expressions that ran the gamut from sick horror to bowel-loosening panic.

“And yet,” I mused, “he stands beside you as you eat, and work, and sleep. In his death, he watches you living, night into day into night. Why do you suppose that is?”

“I don’t know,” Peter squealed, “I don’t know! Give it to me!”

Most of the audience were on their feet now, some surging forward to look at the print, but most pulling back as if they wanted to get some distance from it. James Dodson waded through them like a battleship through shrimp boats, and it was he who took the print out of my hands. Peter immediately turned his attentions to his father and tried again to snatch the photo, but James pushed him back roughly. He stared down at the print in perplexity, shaking his head slowly from side to side. Then, with his face flushing deep red, he tore it up, very deliberately, into two pieces, then four, then eight. Peter gave a whimper, caught somewhere between misery and the illusion of relief, but from where I was standing, it looked like he’d be living with this for a while to come.

Dodson was working on thirty-two pieces when I turned to Sebastian and solemnly shook his hand.

“You’ve got a gift,” I said. He met my gaze, and understanding passed between us. What he had was a lever. Peter wasn’t going to be as free in the future with his elbows, or his fists, or his feet—not now that everyone had seen his guilt and his weakness. There wasn’t any extra charge for this; I work on a fixed rate.

I’d noticed the miserable little ghost hovering around Peter as soon as he’d come into the room. They’re harder to spot in daylight, but I’ve got a lot of experience on top of a lot of natural sensitivity, and I know what to expect in a house where they don’t keep their rowan sprigs up to date. I didn’t know what the connection was, but unless Davey Simmons had no family at all, there had to be a damn good reason why he was haunting this house rather than his own. He couldn’t get away from Peter; his soul was tangled up in him like a bird in a briar patch. You could read that in any number of ways, but Peter’s violent reaction had ruled out some of them, changed the odds on others.

Anyway, things got a bit confused after that. Dodson was yelling at me to pack up my things and get out, and spitting and spluttering about a lawsuit to follow. Peter had fled from the room, pursued by Barbara, and barricaded himself in somewhere upstairs, to judge by the bangs and yells that I could hear. The party guests milled around like a decapitated squid—lots of appendages, no brain, faintly suspect smell. And Sebastian stood watching me with big, solemn eyes and never said another word as long as I was there.

When I asked Dodson for the money he owed me for the performance, he punched me in the mouth. I took that in my stride—no teeth loosened, only a symbolic amount of bloodshed. I probably had that coming. He went for the camera next, though, and I went for it, too. Me and that Brownie went back a long way, and I didn’t want to have to go looking for another machine with such sympathetic vibes. We tussled inconclusively for a few moments for control of it, then he seemed to remember where he was—in his own living room, watched by a gaggle of his son’s best friends, whose fathers he also no doubt knew well in work or club circles.

“Get out,” he told me, his eyes still wild. “Get out of my house, you irresponsible bastard, before I throw you out on your ear.”

I gave up on the money. It wouldn’t be easy for me to argue that traumatizing the birthday boy was within my remit. I packed everything up laboriously into the four cases under James’s glaring eyes and stertorous breathing. He was suffering a kind of anaphylactic reaction to me now, and if I didn’t get out soon, he might crash and burn as his immune system tore itself apart in its desire to remove the irritation.

Out into the hall, and I caught sight of Barbara on the upstairs landing. Her face was pale and tense, but I swear she threw me a nod. With four suitcases’ worth of heavy freight, I was in no position to wave back—and it might have been tactless in any case.

It was about half past six by this time, with the November dark already settled in. Pen would be waiting for me back in her basement, eager for hard news and harder currency. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t really give her either.

The moon was three days from the dark. Like most people these days, I kept my eye on the almanac when I was planning to be out after nightfall. The dead don’t follow the phases of the moon, of course, but there are lots of nastier things that do—and the dead I can deal with, in any case.

So I drove around to Craven Park Road. It was somewhere to go, and I have to stop by the office once every couple of months if only to throw out the mail. Otherwise, the slowly accumulating weight of unpaid bills would threaten the structural integrity of the building.

Harlesden isn’t the best place in the world to put up your shingle. You have to park your car out on the main road if you want to have an even chance of it being there when you get back to it. The Yardie boys tout coke out on the street and stare you down hard if you accidentally make eye contact. And the beggars who sit exhausted in the doorways, their hollow-eyed stares spearing you like the Ancient Mariner’s as you walk by, are mostly the risen-again. Not ghosts, I mean, but those who’ve come back in the body—zombies, for want of a less melodramatic word. They’re a sad bunch, on the whole, but that doesn’t stop your flesh from crawling slightly as you walk by.

But tonight, everything was pretty quiet. Even the sign over my door was holding up pretty well. Sometimes the kids from the Stonehouse Estate come by with their airbrushes and turn the sign into something whimsical and baroque, obliterating in the process the simple, dignified face I present to the world. But tonight the words F.
CASTOR
ERADICATIONS
stood out in all their austere clarity.

Grambas, the proprietor of the kebab house next door, was leaning in his doorway, enjoying a roll-up cigarette whose heavy smoke hung around him like a shroud. He grinned at me as I unlocked the street door, and I shot him a wink. We’ve got an understanding: he’s promised me that he won’t lay ghosts or bind demons so long as I don’t serve greasy fried food and overmatured salads.

My office is actually above the kebab house. Once inside the door, there’s a narrow flight of awkwardly high stairs that leads up, with a sharp, right-angled bend, to my second-floor premises. Pen says the stairs are high because the conversion was a weird one, swapping between three stories and four, depending on which of the original residents sold out and which ones stayed. I reckon the builders were working on margin; twenty high steps are quicker to throw up than thirty normal-size ones.

I scooped up a thick handful of mail and headed on up. Even if you’re fit, you get to the top of those steps a little breathless. I’m not fit. I kicked open the office door, breathing like a dirty phone call, and flicked on the light.

It’s not much of an office, even by Harlesden standards. Being over a kebab shop—while it has its advantages in terms of daily sustenance—tends to lend a greasy miasma to the walls, the furniture, and the air you breathe. And Pen had never made good on her promise to get me some decent furniture (although her offer still stood if I ever got even on the rent), so all I had was a Formica-topped self-assembly desk and two tubular steel chairs from
IKEA
. The filing cabinet was a two-drawer midget that also served as a table to hold the kettle and tea things. By way of decoration, I had six framed illustrations from[_ Little Nemo in Slumberland_], which I’d got from
IKEA
on the same expedition that brought me the chairs. They made clients feel relaxed and receptive. Also, they weighed in at less than four quid each.

Yes, it was pathetic. But it was mine.

Or, at least, it had been.

I sat down in one of the chairs, put my feet up on the filing cabinet, and started to flick through the post. For each piece of real mail, there were two curry-house fliers and a great investment opportunity, which made progress fairly fast; not many envelopes actually needed to be opened before making the fall of shame into the already-overflowing wastepaper basket. An electricity bill, black, and a phone bill, red . . . these colors change with the seasons and are a gentle reminder of time’s passing.

I stopped short. The next envelope in the stack was pale gray and bore a return address that I recognized: the Charles Stanger Care Facility, Muswell Hill. My name was written on the front of the envelope in a pained, cramped hand in which curved lines were approximated by collections of short, angular jags. It was fractal handwriting; looking at it, you imagined that under a microscope, every stroke of the pen would open up into a thousand angled flecks of tortured ink.