Dead Men's Boots

by Mike Carey

  Juliet was down on one knee, her face a mask of blood but her guard still up despite the terrible damage she’d already sustained: the loup-garou was dancing around her, looking for an opening. It danced right into my open arms and I nailed it with the flowering branch right in the kisser.

  ‘Hoc fugere,’ I snarled.

  The beast jackknifed like a sideswiped truck, its head snapping back, its eyes wide but unseeing. A ripple of pain passed through it and its feet found no purchase for a second or two as its shorted-out nerve endings popped and fizzed with agonising static. I used those precious seconds to shift my balance and slam both my fists into its throat.

  For all its wiry strength it didn’t weigh all that much, and the effect was gratifying. It hit the ground hard at an oblique angle, tumbling and rolling in a cloud of dust across the full width of the dirt track.

  My sense of triumph was short-lived, though, because it touched down on all four feet like a cat and it was suddenly heading my way again as though I’d never landed a finger on it. I knew the punch wouldn’t do much damage, but I’d had better hopes for my makeshift ward. I guess its lack of efficacy had something to do with my lack of faith: a Christian blessing spoken by an atheist isn’t likely to hit as hard as one spoken by the archbishop of wherever-the-fuck.

  The loup-garou, claws raised to rend and tear, launched itself into the air with a miawling scream that rooted me to the spot. If it had landed where it was aiming for, it would probably have excavated half my internal organs in a single blood-boltered moment. But Juliet plucked it out of the air and used its own momentum to slam it hard into the dirt once more. Really hard: this time it was seeing stars, and it was a few seconds before it moved again. By that time, Juliet was kneeling beside it. She took the loup-garou in a tight embrace as it scrambled up and slowly, almost lovingly, bent it backwards until its spine broke. It slid to the ground, its head twitching feebly, its body terribly still. Juliet raised one stilettoed foot and I looked away. I just wish I’d thought to slam my hands over my ears, too, because the sound of a skull giving way under pressure is one that’s kind of hard to forget once you’ve heard it.

  ‘Bitch took me by surprise,’ Juliet growled, wiping blood away from her eyes: actually from her eye, because the other socket was empty. There was blood bubbling at her lips, too, and pretty much everywhere else. Her right shoulder was laid open to the bone. She walked across to the edge of the track and lowered herself carefully onto a stump.

  ‘That was a neat trick with the stay-not,’ she muttered.

  I looked at the ragged clump of greenery I was still clutching in my left-hand. I opened my fingers and let it fall. ‘I got lucky,’ I said. ‘General rule is that anything that’s flowering will do the job, but you know some herbs work better than others. I never did get the hang of sympathetic magic.’

  Hand clasped to her empty eye socket, Juliet flicked a meaningful glance at the only one of our erstwhile opponents who was present, breathing and conscious: it was the man whose nose I’d broken.

  ‘So who have we been fighting?’ she asked.

  I walked over to the guy, straddled him, bent down, got a double handful of his lapels and hauled him up onto his knees. He was in a lot of pain, and his eyes took a few seconds to get focused on me.

  ‘Two words,’ I spat. ‘Who? Why? And make it convincing, or I’ll feed you to the succubus.’

  ‘S – Sate-’ he gurgled. ‘Sate—’

  ‘Not getting it. Try harder.’

  ‘Satanist Church – of the – of the Amer—’

  ‘Fuck!’ I let him fall, and he hit the dirt again. ‘You’re putting me on! Juliet, these guys are—’

  ‘I heard.’ Her voice sounded strained. ‘Don’t look around, Castor. I’m changing.’

  Once she said that, I had to fight the urge to sneak a sly peek. The van’s side mirror had popped out when it went over and was lying in the roadway at my feet. All I had to do was lean forward and look down. But the indelible sound of that splintering skull was still reverberating inside my head: I decided I didn’t want an indelible sight to go with it.

  The Satanist Church of the Americas. So these guys were nothing to do with Myriam Kale or our current fact-finding mission. They were Anton Fanke’s boys and girls: another contingent of the same bunch of arseholes I’d rumbled with in West London the year before, when I was looking for the ghost of Abbie Torrington. They must have been following us all the way from the airport. But before that?

  I leaned down and gave the guy I was still standing over another shake. ‘You put a trace on my passport?’ I demanded. ‘That’s how you knew I was coming?’

  He gave a twitch that looked as though it might have started out as an attempt to shake his head. ‘Told us,’ he slurred. His eyes were rolling on different orbits: he was probably in an even worse way than he looked.

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Friend. Friendly interest. Told us when. Where.’

  ‘Give me a name,’ I demanded.

  ‘Don’t – have—’

  ‘Give me a name or I’ll throw you to the succubus and let her finish you off.’

  He whimpered brokenly, ‘A–Ash! Said his name – was Ash!’

  ‘Someone you’ve used before?’

  Shake.

  ‘Just a call out of the blue? Word to the wise?’

  Nod.

  ‘You can turn around now,’ Juliet said quietly from right behind me. I let the guy drop again, and he twisted away in terror just from the sound of her voice – but he was too weak to move very far.

  I stood and looked her up and down. She shot me a look as if challenging me to say something, so I bit back whatever profanity had come to my lips.

  She’d done a good job, but it clearly hadn’t come easy. Her eye was back in place in its socket, and through her ripped shirt I could see that her shoulder was whole again: no tell-tale glint of bare bone. But she held herself stiffly, suggesting that she was still in pain, and she hadn’t healed the rents in her clothes or removed the bloodstains. And that sense of fading I’d got when I’d looked at her on the plane was even stronger now: she looked like a watercolour picture of herself that had been rained on. She wasn’t strong enough yet to take what she’d just done in her stride.

  ‘Shall we move on?’ she murmured.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Just give me a moment.’

  I knelt down beside Schnozzle Durante again and started going through his pockets. He was barely conscious, and in no state to put up any kind of resistance. I found a mobile phone in his trouser pocket, threw it down on the ground and stamped it into shards.

  ‘It would be easier just to kill him,’ Juliet said, at my shoulder.

  ‘Why bother if there’s no need?’ I countered. ‘He’s got no wheels, no phone, and he just screwed up what should have been a routine hit. Unless Uncle Sam’s Satanists are a lot more forgiving than the home-grown variety, he’s going to want to go off the radar for a while. Either way, we’ll be done before he gets his act together.’

  I walked on, forcing myself not to look back, tensed internally for the insinuatingly liquid smashed-skull noise I’d heard before. But either Juliet bought my reasoning or she couldn’t be bothered to have an argument about it. She appeared at my elbow a moment later and walked on past me at a fast clip.

  ‘You’re too sentimental,’ she snapped back over her shoulder.

  ‘I know. I’m all about puppy dogs and scented letters.’

  We got back into our spavined car and I turned it around with difficulty. It was hard to control with two tyres out, and the grinding noise I was hearing was probably the front axle doing something it shouldn’t. But it stayed on the road, just about; and what the hell, it was all covered on the insurance.

  We bumped and ground our way to the tiny hamlet of Caldwell, and out of it again on a road that made the previous dirt track look like a superhighway.

  ‘Someone told those guys we were coming,’ I said to Juliet.r />
  ‘I know.’

  ‘The same someone who put a tinkler on my passport number. Our card’s been marked. Not here: back in England.’

  She nodded without answering. She was looking out of the window at the rolling fields, her expression distant and cold.

  The Seaforth farm was hard to tell at first from the surrounding woodland and scrub, because its fields were a dense tangle of weeds and young trees out of which an ancient, weathered scarecrow with a face made of sun-bleached sacking protruded like a shipwrecked sailor going down for the third time. But catching a glimpse of the farmhouse through a gap in the foliage, I wrestled the uncooperative car off the road and parked it a few yards away from an iron cattle-gate whose white paint was two-thirds flaked away.

  ‘This must be the place,’ I said. ‘At least, there’s sod-all else out here. Want to go take a look?’

  Juliet glanced at me, her expression suggesting that that wasn’t a question in need of an answer. We got out and approached the gate. The heavy chain and rusting padlock made it clear that it wasn’t in daily use. Juliet climbed over without preamble, and I followed more slowly, leaning out past the overgrown hedge to get a better look at the house.

  It was in as bad a state of repair as the gate: the wood of the boards warped and dry, the shingled roof settled into a lazy concave bowl. An old mattress lay flopped over the porch rail like a heaving drunk, next to a wooden swing that looked as though it had seen better centuries. Hard to believe that anyone still lived here.

  It was tough going through the shoulder-high weeds: somewhere there had to be another gate and an actual driveway, but Juliet was already striding ahead so I followed, letting her break the trail for me. That was a good idea in theory, but Juliet seemed to walk around the brambles and devil’s-claw rather than through them, squeezing herself through gaps that were unfeasibly narrow for a grown woman, so I still found myself struggling. By the time we got to the porch I was scratched and dishevelled and in a fairly uneven temper.

  There was no bell or knocker. I banged a tattoo on the screen door while Juliet turned three hundred and sixty degrees, surveying the devastation. From here, no other man-made structure was visible. We might have dropped out of the sky along with the farmhouse, into the merry, merry land of Oz.

  I hit the screen door again, harder this time. There was no answer, and the echoes of the banging had that hollow finality that suggests an empty house. I was about to turn away, but then I caught a movement off on my left-hand side and turned.

  It turned out the porch went around to the side of the house. At the far end of it, having just turned the corner and come into our line of sight, stood a very old woman dressed in a white dress whose hem was stained with dirt. Her face was almost as pale as Juliet’s, but that was the only point of resemblance. Her hair was wispy silver, so thin that her scalp showed through. Her bare arms hung like lengths of string, her elbows awkward knots. Her feet were bare, too, and I noticed that one of them was turned at an odd angle so that she walked on its outer edge. She was carrying an orange plastic bowl, and she had a frown deeply etched into her face.

  ‘Who are you people?’ she said. Her voice had the broadest Southern twang I’d heard since we touched down, but it was so quiet that a lot of the vivid effect was lost. It was barely louder than a sigh.

  ‘Miss Seaforth?’ I said, approaching her as slowly and unthreateningly as I could. I held out my hand. ‘My name is Felix Castor, and this is Juliet Salazar. I’m sorry to just barge in here like this, but we were hoping you might be prepared to talk to us about your sister—’

  I broke off. Ruth Seaforth’s eyes had grown big and round. She sat down suddenly on the porch swing, making it shudder and creak.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ she said, staring at me as though I was a telegram bearing a whole raft of politely coded bad news. ‘Oh . . .’ Words seemed to fail her, although her mouth still worked, offering up speechless syllables.

  Juliet went and sat down next to her. ‘We didn’t mean to startle you,’ she said. The old woman was still staring at me, and I was finding that hollow, stunned, rabbit-inthe-headlights gaze pretty unsettling. Juliet put her hand on Ruth’s and gave her a reassuring pat. That at least had the effect of making her finally take her stare off me. ‘We’ve come from London,’ Juliet said. ‘A man was murdered there, in the way your sister Myriam used to murder people. That’s why we’ve come.’

  Brutal honesty seemed to do the trick. Ruth visibly pulled herself together, moved her head in a tremulous nod, and with Juliet’s gentle assistance got to her feet again. She blinked, three or four times: probably not blinking away tears, but that was what it looked like.

  ‘I haven’t seen my sister since she died,’ she said. In other circumstances it might have seemed an odd thing to announce, but as it was I was grateful to have that clarified.

  ‘We have,’ Juliet said. ‘We saw her and spoke to her only a few days ago.’ She was still holding the old woman’s hand, and it was just as well because at that point she buckled and almost fell. Juliet had to put her other hand across Ruth’s shoulders to support her until the moment passed.

  ‘You saw her?’

  ‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘We did. She . . . looked very different from the way she looked when she was alive, but it was her, all the same.’

  Ruth Seaforth looked from me to Juliet and then back again. After a long, strained silence she said, ‘Would you like some cookies and lemonade?’

  The living room of the Seaforth farm was very wide and very low-ceilinged; an odd combination which, along with the fact that there were shutters up over most of the windows, made me feel like I’d just descended into somebody’s cellar. I’d been expecting the place to be as much of a ruin inside as out, but the room was very neat and tidy: the floorboards were warped and shrunken, just as they were out on the porch, but a peach-coloured rug disguised that fact fairly effectively except at the corners of the room, where it didn’t stretch. There was a coffee table, only very slightly ring-stained at the edges, a three-piece suite and an upright piano, and three lovebirds gossiping softly in a cage hooked to a sturdy metal stand. On top of the piano was an old framed photograph of a family – presumably the Seaforths – posed awkwardly for a cameraman they didn’t know and who had done nothing to put them at their ease.

  ‘Please sit down,’ Ruth Seaforth said, and she disappeared through another door. I crossed to the photo instead and examined it. If it was the Seaforths, the period had to be the mid-1950s. Father and mother at the back, arm in arm but with no real suggestion of intimacy: the man smiling, although the look in his eyes was a little stern and serious.

  Three teenaged boys, then, forming the middle row: all much of a muchness, all broad, boisterous, manly self-satisfaction, looking as though they’d been caught in a rare moment of stillness and balance.

  Then Ruth and Myriam, gazing solemnly up from where they sat in the front row. I was probably imagining things, but they didn’t look happy. The look in the eyes of the girl on the left, particularly, was like a message in a bottle: Help, I am stranded on a desert island and I need to be rescued. They were dressed in identical blue crinolines: Sunday best. They looked like dolls, and that wasn’t a comparison I was happy with right then.

  Juliet had sat down on the three-piece’s sofa: I went and joined her on it.

  ‘Feeling any better?’ I asked.

  She gave me a sour look. ‘Castor, the next time you ask me how I feel I’m going to break the little finger on your right hand.’

  ‘I’m left-handed,’ I pointed out.

  ‘I need to be able to escalate for repeat offences.’

  Ruth Seaforth came in with a tray on which there were three glasses, a jug, a plate of biscuits and a neatly folded stack of napkins. She set it down on the table in front of us, poured the lemonade and then sat down in one of the chairs. ‘Help yourselves,’ she said, indicating the refreshments with a slightly trembling hand.

  I picked up a bis
cuit, took a bite – it was about as tasty as dried Polyfilla – and washed it down with a sip of lemonade which was ice-cold and refreshing and so sour that my lips were sucked down into my throat. Juliet ignored both food and drink.

  ‘It must have been devastating,’ she said, ‘when Myriam was executed.’

  I winced at the bluntness, but Ruth took it on the chin. She nodded. ‘It was hardest for my father,’ she said. ‘He had to meet people every day, and he felt as though they were all looking at him differently now: as though they saw Myriam when they spoke to him. He said –’ she hesitated, shook her head as though denying the words even as she spoke them ‘– he said that it would have been better if she’d never been born.’

  ‘That’s a terrible thing for a father to say,’ Juliet observed. I made a mental note to ask her in a calmer moment if she’d ever had one herself: after all, if she was somebody’s sister then presumably she was somebody’s daughter. A baby Juliet was a scary thing to contemplate.

  ‘Yes,’ Ruth answered, still sounding calm and almost detached. ‘It was a terrible thing. But it was like him. My father was a very cold man.’

  I stepped in on cue. ‘Some men are cold to strangers, but to their family they’re entirely different.’

  Ruth smiled a pained smile. She bent down to pick up a biscuit, but her eyes remained locked on mine. ‘My father was very cordial with strangers,’ she said. ‘It was to his wife and his children that he was – hard.’

  ‘Does it hurt you to talk about this?’ Juliet asked, as direct as ever.

  Ruth shook her head. ‘Not any more,’ she said. ‘No. It used to hurt, when he and my brothers were still alive. Now that I’m the only one left – now that I know all this is going to die with me – it doesn’t seem to matter so much. I’d like to know, though, why you need to find out these things. And I’d like to know where you saw Myriam.’