“Shouldn't there be a log?”
Eda looked up from her book for the first time. She had the expression of someone whose patience had been tested by centuries of existence and was now being tested by something more annoying.
But it wasn't Greg's fault that security here was so criminally lax.
Someone needed to bring that up.
“Young man,” Eda said. “Nobody has visited this room in six years. The last person who did was looking for the bathroom. Do you want to see the files or do you want to discuss my security protocols?”
“The files,” Greg said quickly. Maybe the person who reviewed the security protocols didn't need to be him after all. “I want the files. Thank you. Sorry.”
He fled to row fourteen.
He found it toward the back of the room.
Greg carefully set his clipboard on the edge of a shelf and pulled out the first box full of files he could reach. Itwas labeled 1600–1650 and the cardboard was soft with age. Inside, the folders were…
Well…
They were not, as far as Greg could tell, organized by anything. The first file was written in script so old he had to squint. The second was a printed memo from 1987 about refrigerator etiquette in the break room. The third was a noise complaint involving a poltergeist.
He went back to Eda's desk.
“The files in row fourteen aren't in order.”
“No,” Eda agreed, turning a page.
“They're labeled by decade, but the contents are from completely different time periods.”
“Yes.”
“Some of them aren't even interdepartmental cases. There's a memo about the refrigerator.”
“Norbert in Spectral Disputes used to borrow our filing cabinets,” Eda explained. “He didn't always return things to the correct location.”
“That's—” Greg struggled. “How does anyone find anything?”
Eda looked up for the second time. She seemed to be wondering why Greg was wasting her time like this. “They don't,” she said. “That's why nobody comes here.”
Unbelievable.
Greg returned to row fourteen, seething.
He would have to go through every box and every misfiled, disorganized, incorrectly shelved document in this section until he found what he was looking for.
And the whole time he would have to resist the urge to reorganize the entire archive from scratch. That was the worst part. He didn't have the time to clean up this mess.
He could onlystart digging.
The first hour was an exercise in bureaucratic archaeology. He found case files mixed in with performance reviews, lunch orders, a strongly worded complaint about a haunting in Zurich that had been filed under “Miscellaneous,” and two cases of “divine interference” that had nothing to do with demons.
He found a folder that contained only a single sheet of paper on which someone had written “Find Norbert” and underlined it twice.
He did not find Norbert. He was beginning to develop strong feelings about Norbert.
But between the refrigerator memos and the misfilings, he started pulling actual cases that involved demonic pacts.
He opened the first relevant file.
