The Devil You Know Read Online Free PDF

TALK TO ME BEFORE YOU MAKE A MISTAKE YOU NEED TO TALK TO ME NOW

    I was still staring at the letter, unsure whether to put it into my pocket or let it fall into the basket, when the phone rang. Picking it up was a reflex action; if I’d thought about it, I would have let it lie, because it was bound to get me into a conversation that I didn’t want or need.
    “Mr. Castor?”
    It was a male voice, dry and harsh with an overtone of stern disapproval. It conjured up an image of a preacher with a Bible in his hand and his finger pointing at your heart.
    “Yes?”
    “The exorcist?”
    I considered lying, but since I’d confessed to my name, there wasn’t any point. Anyway, it was entirely my own fault. Nobody had made me pick up the frigging phone; I’d done it of my own free will, as a consenting adult.
    And now I had a customer.

Two
    THIS WAS TEN YEARS OR MORE AFTER THE DEAD first began to rise—I mean, to rise in sufficient numbers that it wasn’t an option anymore just to ignore them.
    They’d always been there, I guess. Certainly as a kid I was seeing them on and off whenever I was in any place that was quiet or where the light was dim. An old man standing in the street, staring at nothing as the mothers pushed their strollers right through him and kept on walking; a little girl hovering irresolute by the swings in the local playground, through all the watches of the night, and never clambering on for a ride; a shadow in the deeper shadows of a narrow alley that didn’t move quite in sync when a car went by. It wasn’t ever much of a problem, though, even for people like me, who could actually see them; most ghosts keep themselves to themselves, and it’s not like you have to feed them or clean up after them. Ninety-nine out of a hundred will never give you any trouble at all. I learned not to mention them to anybody and not to look at them directly in case they cottoned on to me and started talking. It was only bad when they talked.
    But something happened a few years before the page turned on the old millennium, as though some cosmic equivalent of a big, spiteful kid had come along and poked a stick into the graveyards of the world, just to see what would happen.
    What happened was that the dead swarmed out like ants—the dead, and a few other things.
    Nobody had any explanation for it, at least not unless you counted the many variations on “we are living in the last days, and these are the signs and wonders that were foretold.” That was an argument that played fairly well, up to a point. The Christians and the Jews had put their money on a bodily resurrection, and that was what some people seemed to be getting. But the Bible is strangely coy on the subject of the were-kind, hedges its bets on demons, and draws a big fat blank on ghosts, so the Christians and the Jews didn’t really seem to be any better placed than the rest of us to call the toss.
    The theological arguments raged like brush fires, and under the smoke that they threw up, the world changed—not overnight, but with the slow, irrevocable progress of an eclipse, or ink soaking into blotting paper. The promised apocalypse didn’t come, but new testaments were written anyway, and new religions kick-started. New and exciting careers opened up for people like me. Even the map of London got redrawn, which as far as I was concerned was the hardest thing to believe and accept.
    I was born elsewhere, you have to understand—up North, two hundred miles from the Smoke—and my view of London is an outsider’s view, assembled in easy pieces over the last twenty years. When I picture the city in my mind, I tend to see it in simplified, schematic terms—like the cageful of snakes, orange on green on blue, that you see on the inside cover of the A-Z . Where the biggest snake—the king python, the Thames—runs right through the middle, that’s the null zone. Ghosts can’t cross running water, and they don’t even like the sound of it all that