Dead Men's s Boots fc-3

by Mike Carey

  ‘What time is it?’ Pen asked muzzily

  I looked at my watch. ‘After five,’ I said. ‘How are you feeling? A bit more human?’

  ‘Like a limp biscuit,’ she muttered. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. ‘But go, if you need to. I’ll manage.’

  I wasn’t sure what cues I’d been giving off that told her how much of a hurry I was in to leave: we’ve known each other long enough that stuff like that reaches the level of telepathy.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, climbing to my feet. ‘Hold out for tonight. Tomorrow I’ll be back in force.’

  Pen stared up at me, shielding her eyes against the setting sun that hung over my shoulder.

  ‘If you’re back at all,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ I protested.

  ‘Yes, you did.’ She stood up too and took a step towards me almost against her will. I thought for a moment that she was going to embrace me, because she seemed to bring her arms up in synchrony but then stopped, retreated, and folded them instead.

  ‘I’ll never forgive you for what you did to Rafi,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not looking for forgiveness, Pen. But if I do, I’ll look elsewhere.’

  ‘But I don’t want you to kill yourself working some stupid case. Werewolves can eat you. Demons can blind you and rape you and suck out your soul. Almost everything out there is faster than you, and all you’ve got is that stupid whistle. Whatever it is you’ve got it in your head to do, Fix, don’t do it. I can see from here that you don’t think it’s going to work.’

  I mimed a dealer at a blackjack table. It’s a gesture I’ve used on Pen a lot of times, when she seemed to be trying to give me a tarot reading without her deck in her hands. It always irritates her, and it always pushes her away – which was where I wanted her right then because she was way too close for comfort.

  ‘Fine, then,’ she snapped. ‘Go and kill yourself. Don’t worry about the shit you’re leaving Rafi in. Let someone else pick up the bill. That’s the default setting, isn’t it?’

  ‘Reckless hedonism,’ I agreed. ‘Devil take the hindmost.’

  ‘Which devil, Fix?’

  ‘Next time I pass by, I’ll bring you a catalogue and some colour swatches.’

  I walked away quickly, before Pen could get over the irritation and tackle me from a different direction. I didn’t want to explain any more than I already had, and even more than that I didn’t want to go into this whole exercise with the feeling that there was another way that I was too stupid to see. That just gets you second-guessing yourself, and that just gets you dead. I wanted to live.

  But that’s always been my problem. I set my sights way too high.

  22

  Stoke Newington after dark: the Lubovich Hasidim and the scallies from Manor House wander the streets in feral packs, but I was in a bad enough mood by this time to take on anything I was likely to meet. God was in a bad mood, too: a strong wind was getting up, harrying plastic carrier bags and scraps of paper along the pavements, and the sky was filling up with pregnant clouds.

  The offices of Maynard, Todd and Clay were in reassuringly total darkness. I circled the outside of the building looking for the likeliest way in, deciding at last to go in from the back and on the first floor. I had my lockpicks with me and I could have taken the street door inside of a New York minute, but there was too much chance of being seen by people walking past: I couldn’t afford the time I’d lose in any brush with the forces of the law.

  On the side street behind the office there was a blind alley full of wheelie bins and old fridges, its high walls topped with broken glass set in very old cement. The only door was bolted from the inside rather than locked, but the brickwork to either side of it was old and frost-pitted and offered pretty good purchase. I shinnied up the doorway itself, using footholds in the brickwork where I found them and just bracing myself against either side where I didn’t.

  The top of the door was a couple of inches below the top of the frame. I stood on the door, wadded up my coat and laid it down on the glass. I only had to stand on it for a moment, using it to step across to a shed roof. Then I leaned out and hooked the coat across after me, only a little the worse for wear.

  The coat came into play again almost immediately. I wrapped it around my fist to break a single pane of the window at the other end of the shed and then – with gingerly care – to knock the broken glass out of the frame. It was handy that the building had never been double-glazed – although if it had I could always have dropped down into the yard and tried my luck with the back door. Safely out of view, I could have taken my time.

  As it was, though, things seemed to be going my way. Even groping around in the dark and at an odd angle, kneeling down because the pane was on a level with my knee, I found the window catch almost immediately and was able to lever it open. Then I slid the window up as far as it would go and climbed inside.

  There was carpet under my feet, but it was too dark for me to make out anything of the layout of the room I was in. Fighting the urge to blunder ahead anyway and find my way by feel, I waited for my eyes to get a little more accustomed to the dark. It was just as well I did: as the space around me resolved itself slowly out of shadows into some degree of visibility, I realised that I wasn’t in a room at all: I was in a turn of the stairwell, which was just as narrow as I remembered it. My first step would have pitched me down the stairs on my head.

  Trying to remember the layout of the building from my one and only daytime visit, I went up rather than down. I had a rough sense of where Todd’s door would be in relation to the stairs, but not how far up it was. The first door opened when I tried the handle, but the layout within was wrong – the desk was over against the far wall instead of under the window. I pulled the door to behind me and went on up.

  On the next floor up the corresponding door seemed to be locked, but then I noticed with a faint stir of surprise that it was bolted from the outside. I undid the bolt and peered in.

  This time the darkness was absolute, even when I pushed the door wide open. More unsettlingly, the room was emitting a soft bass rumble, almost more vibration than sound. Under the circumstances, there were close on a million good reasons for not turning the light on, but that was what I did. It was almost automatic: groping on the wall to my left to see if there was a switch there and, once I found it, flicking it on.

  Outside of the movies, I’ve never seen an assassin dismount and dismantle his sniper rifle and put the pieces carefully away in the sculpted foam receptacles in a sleek black suitcase. I assume it does happen, but with no personal experience to go on I have to take it on trust. But I am now in a position to comment if I’m ever in a conversation about dismantled werewolves; because when the light clicked on, that was what I was looking at.

  The room was full of cats, and they were all asleep: on the floor, on the furniture, on the shelves, covering every surface in sight. The deep vibration was caused by their combined synchronous purring. I took an involuntary step backwards, recoiling from the implications of what I was seeing. And in that queasy moment, as I hovered on the cusp of a decision, a cat in the centre of the room, a big white-furred Persian lying on top of an antique roll-top escritoire, opened its eyes.

  Then the cats around it did too, and then their neighbours and so forth, out from the centre in a spreading wave, like one vast creature sending a single instruction via an old and creaky nervous system that took its own sweet time getting the message through.

  A hundred or more cats stared at me now, with ancient and inscrutable malevolence in their eyes. It was deeply, viscerally nasty, but there was worse to come. The Persian mewled on a rising tone, and the two cats to either side of it pressed in and nuzzled its cheeks as if to comfort it. But that gentle contact became a firmer pressure, held for too long, and the flesh and fur of the three cats’ faces started to run together into a repulsive amorphous mass. The bodies followed, and more cats were crowding in now, jumping down from the dusty shelves fu
ll of old books of legal precedents or leaping up from the floor to join the press.

  With a single muttered ‘Fuck!’ I pulled my coat wide open and hooked my whistle out of the inside pocket. It occurred to me – fleetingly – to back out and bolt the door again, but what good would that do? When these cats coalesced into the creature they were going to become, doors weren’t going to hold it.

  The three cats in the centre were gone now. The spherical mound of pulpy flesh they’d become had a rudimentary face. The mound rose from the desk as more cats added themselves to the base of it, deliquescing more quickly all the time as though the process was gaining its own momentum. Working from memory, I found the whistle’s stops and started to play.

  I’d long ago forgotten the tune I’d composed to get the drop on Scrub the last time we’d met, and in any case I couldn’t be sure that this creature was the same loup-garou that had once worn that name and shape. Like Juliet said, if one werewolf could organise itself as a colony creature, then probably they all could if they got the inspiration.

  I had one thing going for me, and one thing only. As the loup-garou in front of me assembled itself by inches and ounces, the sense of it grew stronger in my second sight, or rather my second hearing: the tune of the loup-garou strengthened and strengthened, became more vivid and inescapable from moment to moment. I let the plangent notes fill me; and then I let them ooze out of me through my lungs and my throat and my fingertips and the fragile piece of moulded metal in my hands.

  The coagulating mass in front of me roared in anger. It was much bigger already, and its disconcertingly liquid substance spilled down from the desk onto the floor, allowing the remaining cats a much bigger surface area to adhere to and be absorbed into. A stumpy appendage reached out towards me, developed blisters on its outer surface: the blisters grew into recognisable fingers which opened and closed spasmodically. Rapier claws grew out from the fingertips.

  I was fighting panic now: I wanted to hurry, but the logic of the tune was pulling me in the opposite direction, making me slow down, hold the notes as long as I could and let them glide out into the room on a descending scale. The tower of matter quivered, ripples chasing each other across its surface. Each ripple was like the pass of a magician’s hand, leaving behind first fur, then bare, disquietingly pink flesh, then fur again. The limbs were forced out from the main mass like meat from a mincing machine, and as soon as the legs were able to stand they began to lurch towards me. The face rose and was extruded from the top of the tower like an obscene bubble, the flesh below it crimping and narrowing, creating a head and neck by default. It was all of a piece, the eyes the same colour and texture as the flesh of the face, but they were starting to clear as I watched. The face leered, and my feeling of panic grew.

  But the tune was right, and I was wrong. Slow and steady, note upon skirling note, it laid itself on the nascent thing in front of me like chains. It was working: the only question was whether it was working fast enough to keep me from being eaten alive. The loup-garou slowed, its back bent as though under a heavy weight, but it didn’t stop. It took another step forward, the clutch of scimitars at the end of its arm flexing and clashing in front of my face. Its toothless mouth gaped open and grew fangs that solidified from doughy pink to gleaming white. I lurched back involuntarily and the door frame banged my left elbow, almost knocking the whistle out of my hands. That would have been the end of the story, but I recovered with only a brief slur on one note of the tune.

  A morbid paralysis was seizing the loup-garou, but it was coming from the feet on up: its upper body still had a lot of flexibility and it leaned forward, aiming a raking slash at my throat. I ducked back on my trailing foot and the wicked claws turned the front of my coat into confetti: a sharp pain and a sudden rush of warmth down my chest told me that one at least had drawn blood. Shuffling like a blind man, I backed out onto the landing an inch at a time until the wooden stair-rail was pressing against the small of my back and I knew there was nowhere else to run. My options had narrowed to two: play or die.

  I played, forcing the other option out of my mind. The loup-garou’s legs buckled, and it crashed down onto its knees, but it was still trying to reach me. When the claws of the thing’s outstretched arm slashed at my ankle, I ducked to the side and kicked it away. The loup-garou roared again, but the sound had a sloughing, sucking fall to it: it was the sound of something falling apart from the inside out.

  The face, now fully formed, stared at me with indelible hatred. It was Scrub’s face at first; then another wave crossed the surface of that flesh ocean and it was the face of Leonard the copy boy. Struggling to form words, it spewed out blood and black bile instead. A few fragments of sound bubbled through the liquid decay.

  ‘C – Cas – Cast—’

  The eyes became opaque again, and the fluid in the gaping mouth congealed all at once into something that looked as shiny and vitreous as setting tar. The loup-garou was probably dead by this point, but strange movements from this or that part of the massive, slumped body made me wary of stepping in close to check. I just left it there, sprawled on the landing like something huge and unwanted left out for the dustman.

  Maynard Todd’s office was on the next turn of the stairs. I knew it when I saw the light already on. I didn’t see anything was particularly to be gained by subtlety: my fight with Scrub had made enough noise to wake the dead, assuming there were any more of them around, so anybody in there knew I was coming. I could always turn and walk away, but that didn’t seem like an option. So I pushed the door wide and went on in.

  Todd was sitting at his desk, the chair tilted back slightly so that he could lean on the shelves behind him. The gun in his hand was pointing at my chest, and his posture was completely relaxed.

  ‘Mister Castor,’ he said, pushing the chair on the client side of the desk out towards me with his foot. ‘How is it that you can never rely on religious cultists even to get a simple murder right? Take away their pentagrams and their mystic sigils, they’re like little kids. I was very disappointed to hear that you’d survived your little trip to Alabama. But I try to treat every setback as an opportunity. Come on in and sit down.’

  I walked on into the room, but I didn’t take the chair: so long as I was standing, there was a chance I might get the drop on him at some point. Sitting down I was dead meat.

  ‘Working late,’ I commented.

  Todd’s gaze flicked towards the corner of the room. Looking in that direction myself, I saw a fold-out bed. ‘I sleep here these days,’ he said, sounding a little flat and resigned. ‘Mrs Todd has filed divorce papers. She says I’m not the man she married. And you know what? She has a point. I asked you to sit down, Mister Castor. A bullet through your kneecap would force the issue.’

  I sat down. I wondered why he hadn’t killed me already, if that was the plan. Maybe because he was worried about getting blood on the carpet: if that was it, his night was going to be ruined when he saw what was on the first-floor landing.

  ‘You’ve come a long way in a short while,’ Todd went on. ‘That’s a tribute to your detective skills.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Except that you’re not a detective.’ Todd’s tone hardened, and he gave me a look of actual dislike. ‘You’re just a man who gets rid of unwanted ghosts. One step up from a backstreet abortionist. What they do at the start of the life cycle, you do at the end. And, like them, you’re just doing it for the money. You don’t have either the brains or the motivation to figure us out.’

  I didn’t bother to give him an answer, because he didn’t seem to need one. There was a photo of a beautiful if slightly austere-looking brunette on his desk. I picked it up and inspected it thoughtfully.

  ‘So who did Mrs Todd marry?’ I asked.

  ‘An ambulance-chaser with a death wish.’

  ‘Whereas you . . . ?’

  ‘I’m nobody you’ve heard of. The way I see it, if a criminal gets a name for himself, it’s because he’s stupid
enough to get noticed. But this isn’t a conversation we’re having here, Mister Castor. It may look like one, but that’s only because it’s hard to shake off the veneer of civilisation. I’m a bit out of practice when it comes to actually hurting people. That was a conscious decision on our part – switching over to legitimate enterprises as far as possible – but it’s got its drawbacks. You lose the professional edge.’ He leaned forward, putting the front legs of his chair back on the carpet, and stood up. ‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, coming around the desk, ‘back in Mile End I always preferred a knife to a gun. So I’ll probably start with a knife, if that’s all right with you. Just while I’m easing myself back in. You get more control that way, too. It would annoy me if you bled to death or went into shock before you tell me what I need to know.’

  Aha. So that was how it was. I tensed as he approached, looking for a window of opportunity into which I could shove a low blow or a kick to the balls. But he stayed carefully out of my reach as he rummaged in his pocket. I expected his hand to come out with a knife in it, but it didn’t: he was holding a sturdy, slightly scuffed pair of police handcuffs. That was worse news, in a way.

  ‘Pass your hands through the bars of the chair back,’ Todd ordered me.

  ‘Tell me what you need to know,’ I temporised, meeting his cold, stern gaze. ‘Maybe we can do this the easy way.’