The Covenant

The flat smelled of someone who had stopped caring about the flat.

David Ash had noticed it himself, about three weeks ago, walking in from outside after a night of rain and catching it fully for the first time — old coffee, the particular staleness of rooms that weren't opened enough, the faint trace of whisky that had become so ambient he usually couldn't detect it at all. He had stood in the hallway for a moment, taken it in, and then gone through to the kitchen to make more coffee.

He was fifty-three years old. He had been a paranormal investigator for twenty-two years. He had been to Castle Comraich eight months ago, and he had not taken a case since.

The Institute had been formally dissolved in April. He had received a letter informing him of this fact, thanking him for his service, and enclosing a severance payment that was either generous or a message, depending on how you read it. He had read it both ways and cashed the cheque.

He had not spoken publicly about Comraich. He had not spoken privately about it either, to anyone who didn't already know, because there was no way to speak about what had happened at Castle Comraich that didn't sound like the testimony of a man who had lost his mind. He was aware that this was probably what they were counting on.

His phone rang.

He looked at it. The screen showed a number he didn't recognise — London prefix, a landline. He let it ring four times, then picked up.

"Mr Ash." Not a question. A young woman's voice, precise and careful in the way of someone who had rehearsed the opening. "My name is Kate Shelby. I'm a journalist. I work for the Chronicle."

"I know the paper."

"I need to meet with you. Not on the phone."

Ash was quiet for a moment. Outside, it had started to rain again. "What about?"

"I think you know what about."

He almost rang off. There was a whole category of what this could be — conspiracy blogs, amateur investigators, people who had put together scraps from the Comraich aftermath and arrived at ninety per cent of the truth and wanted the last ten per cent from him. He had learned to recognise them. They usually led with flattery.

"I've been sent something," Kate Shelby said. "Encrypted files. From inside. I can't verify them alone, and my editor won't touch them without verification."

"Inside what?"

A pause. "Inside Castle Comraich. Mr Ash, I have the registers."

He told her to come to the flat. He regretted this immediately and spent the next two hours doing something about the flat, which at least gave him something to do.

She arrived at eleven, wet from the walk from the tube, younger than she'd sounded on the phone — twenty-eight, maybe thirty, with the careful clothes and the slightly too-controlled expression of a journalist who had learned that sources responded better if you gave nothing away. She looked around the flat with the same controlled expression, which told him she had expected something like this.

"Tea," he said. It wasn't a question.

She sat at the kitchen table and opened a laptop. While he made tea he watched her in the glass of the window, not watching him.

"How did you get my number?" he asked.

"You're in the Institute's old records. The ones that weren't secured before the dissolution."

"Those records should have been —"

"Destroyed. Yes." She looked up. "They weren't. Or not all of them. The person who sent me the files also sent me a contact list. Your name was on it."

He put tea in front of her and sat down. "What's on the registers?"

She turned the laptop toward him.

The document was scanned from paper — old, the bureaucratic typeface of institutional record-keeping. The heading read: CASTLE COMRAICH — RESIDENT REGISTER. The columns were familiar in their structure if not their content: name, date of admission, sponsoring body, status.

He had seen something like this before. In a different castle, in a different context, a long time ago.

He read the names.

He recognised eleven of them.

Three were dead. Two had died during the events at Comraich. One had died last year in what had been reported as a stroke. The others were alive. Two of them were still in public life. One had received a knighthood in the June honours.

Ash looked up from the laptop.

"How many people have seen this?"

"Four. Myself, my editor, the source, and now you."

"Your editor said no."

"My editor said he needs corroboration from someone who was there. Someone who can confirm the register is authentic." She held his gaze. "Were you there, Mr Ash?"

He was quiet for a while.

Outside, the rain intensified against the window. He thought about what had happened in the east wing of Castle Comraich, in the rooms that no member of staff entered after dark. He thought about what the haunting had been, and what had caused it, and the particular faces of the men in those rooms.

He thought about the knighthood.

"Yes," he said. "I was there."

Kate Shelby had been a journalist for six years. She had covered inquiries, covered cover-ups, covered the collapse of institutions that had seemed impregnable until they weren't. She was good at reading the room and she was good at keeping the room from reading her.

But she had not expected what Ash told her next.

He spoke for forty minutes. He did not use notes. He spoke about the Psychical Research Institute, about its real function, about the organisation behind Castle Comraich, about the categories of person who had been admitted there and what they had been protected from and what the protection had cost. He spoke about the nature of the haunting — carefully, qualified at every turn, aware of how it sounded and saying it anyway. He spoke about what he had witnessed in the cellars beneath the east wing.

Kate had recorded it from the moment he began speaking. She had not asked permission. She suspected he had noticed and had decided not to care.

When he finished she was quiet for a moment.

"The men named in the register," she said. "The ones who are still alive. The ones still in public life."

"Yes."

"They know you survived."

It was not a question, but he answered it. "Yes."

"Have they — has anyone —"

"No. Not directly." He picked up his cup, found it empty. "There was an incident in February. I can't prove it was connected. I chose to interpret that as a warning rather than an attempt."

"What kind of incident?"

"The kind that would sound, reported to the police, like an accident."

She closed the laptop slowly. "Mr Ash. The files I was sent — the registers — they're not the whole of it. There was a second file. Encrypted separately. I haven't been able to open it. The source told me it contains what they called the ledger." A pause. "Do you know what that means?"

Ash set down the cup.

The ledger was what the organisation had called its record of transactions. Not money — they had been beyond the vulgarity of money, mostly. What they had traded in was favour, in access, in the particular currency of powerful people who wanted things that couldn't be obtained through ordinary means.

The ledger would contain names. Not just residents.

Facilitators. Beneficiaries. The people who had known, who had arranged, who had looked the other way in exchange for something they had wanted more than they had wanted their own conscience.

The ledger would reach into every institution he could name and several he probably couldn't.

"Yes," he said quietly. "I know what that means."

He stood up and went to the window. The street below was empty in the rain. He looked at it for a moment in the way he had caught himself looking at streets since February — for things that didn't belong, for the particular stillness of someone who was being paid to be patient.

Nothing.

"I'll help you," he said. "But you need to understand something first."

"What?"

He turned from the window.

"The haunting at Comraich — the paranormal events — they didn't stop when the castle was closed. I've had reason to believe, in the eight months since, that whatever was there followed the men who left." He paused. "I don't know if that's a warning. I don't know if it's justice. But I know that at least two of the names on your register have reported things, through private medical channels, that they cannot explain. Things that are consistent with what I witnessed at Comraich."

Kate stared at him.

"You're telling me the haunting moved."

"I'm telling you what I believe. Whether you use it is your decision."

She was quiet for a long moment.

"My source," she said slowly. "The person who sent me the files. They told me one more thing before they went dark. They said that one of the residents — one of the men on the register — had been found in his room three weeks ago."

"Found how?"

"Screaming. Facing the corner. He'd been there for six hours. He wouldn't turn around. He said —" She stopped. Looked down at the closed laptop. "He said there was something behind him. He said it had been standing behind him since midnight and if he turned around it would be real."

Ash said nothing.

"They've had him sedated since. His family is saying it's a breakdown. The press hasn't got it yet." She looked up. "The name on the register, Mr Ash. The one in the corner. He's the one who got the knighthood."

Ash walked her to the door at half past twelve.

She paused at the threshold. "I'll need you on record. Corroborating the register."

"I know."

"That means your name attached to this. Publicly."

"I know what it means."

"There will be — these aren't people without resources, Mr Ash."

"I know that too." He looked out at the landing. "Go home a different way than you came. Tube, then bus, not the other way around. Don't go directly."

She looked at him. "You think —"

"I don't know. But it costs nothing to be careful and it might cost a great deal not to be."

She nodded once and left.

He stood in the doorway until he heard the building's outer door close below. Then he went back inside and sat down at the kitchen table, and he did not make more coffee, and he did not pour whisky, and he sat for a long time looking at the place on the table where the laptop had been.

The register. The ledger. The knighthood.

Eight months of silence, and now this.

He thought about the man in the corner. About what it cost, to be stood behind by something for six hours in the dark. About what it said — that the haunting had followed them, that the dead had gone with their tormentors rather than staying in the place where they had suffered.

That was not how hauntings worked. In his experience, in twenty-two years of investigation, the dead stayed where they had died. They were defined by place. They did not travel. They did not pursue.

Unless the connection was not to the place.

He picked up his phone. Looked at it. Put it down.

Then he picked it up again and called the only person he trusted completely, and when she answered he said: "I need to come back. I think it's started again."

To be continued — Chapter Two coming soon