Free The Devil You Know by Mike Carey Page A

but that’s mainly because it isn’t a place anymore. It’s more like the stump of an amputated limb—every street you walk down is sliced off clean by a railway cutting or an underpass, or a blank wall that usually turns out to be part of the gray, moldering hide of Euston Station.
    The Bonnington Archive was on one of those truncated avenues, off the main north-south drag of Eversholt Street, which connects Camden Town with Bloomsbury. The rest of the street was mainly warehouses and office spaces and discount print shops, with dust-blinded windows and the occasional exoskeleton of scaffolding; but in the distance, on the far side of the railway lines, there was a block of flats of 1930s vintage, all brown brick and rust-burned wrought iron, its crumbling balconies set with lines of drying knickers like flags of surrender—and bizarrely enough, bearing a white stone virgin and child just above the portico of the main entrance, the name of the block being Saint Mary’s.
    The Bonnington Archive itself stood out from the low-rise concrete monstrosities around it like a spinster among sprawling drunks. It looked to be early nineteenth century, in dark brick, four stories high, with meticulous patterns set into the brickwork underneath each row of windows, like vertical parquet. I liked it. It had the look of a palace that had been built at the whim of some senior civil servant who wanted a fiefdom, but then had died, like Ferdinand the First before he could walk across the threshold of his Belvedere. Close up, though, it was clear that this palace had long ago been divided and conquered: one of the first-floor windows was covered by a nailed-up slab of hardboard, and a doorway close by was choked with rubbish and old, sodden boxes. The real entrance to the archive, although it looked to be part of the same building, was twenty yards farther on.
    The four-paneled double doors were made of varnished mahogany, liberally scarred with dents and scuff marks at the bottom, but obviously real and solid all the same. There was a brass plate beside the door that proclaimed with serifed formality that this was the Bonnington Archive, maintained by the Corporation of London and affiliated to the Joint Museums and Trusts Commission. There were opening hours listed, too, but this didn’t look like the sort of place that had the world beating a path to its door.
    I stepped through into a very large and very impressive entrance hall.
    Maybe I was a decade or so out in my estimation of how old this place was—the stark black and white tiling on the floor had the moral seriousness of Her black-and-white Majesty, Victoria. There was a countertop on my left-hand side made of gray marble, currently unoccupied, but as long and as impregnable as the wall of wood at Rorke’s Drift and looking as if it came from the same school of defensive fortification. Behind it, though, there were half a dozen wardrobe rails where rows of coat hangers clustered thickly. They were all empty, but at least this showed willing. The comfort and convenience of any rampaging hordes that might come through here had already been taken into account. There was an inner office farther back, on the other side of the desk, with a sign that bore the single word SECURITY . In conjunction with the deserted desk, that struck me as slightly ironic.
    On my right-hand side, there was a broad, gray-flagged staircase, and above my head, a vaulted skylight with an impressive stained-glass rose emblazoned on it, struggling to shine through dust and pigeon shit. At the foot of the stairs, there were three modern office chairs covered in bright red fabric, that looked badly out of place.
    I stood very quiet and still in that tired, grimy light, waiting, listening, feeling. Yes. There was something there—a gradient in the air, so subtle it took a few moments to register. My eyes defocused as I let the indefinable sense that I’ve honed through a couple of hundred exorcisms slowly