Dead Men's Boots

by Mike Carey

  I mulled that over, couldn’t see any holes in it. But I didn’t get to be as old as I am without reading the small print before signing. ‘There were two parts to the question,’ I reminded him, my tone level and my face poker.

  The demon acknowledged the point with a curt nod. ‘Yes. Of course. I need you, Felix, to make me an entry point. With your whistle, with your lovely little party trick, you can make a hole in their defences: bind them, and distract them, and make them stumble. They’ve held me at bay for more years than I care to count: there are a great many of them, as I said, and they’re both old and strong. They’ve found ways to keep me from crossing that threshold, though I’ve tried a thousand times. Outside the crematorium they move in flesh, and in flesh I can’t touch them. But pipe me in through the door and you’ll see the carnage a fox makes in a hen house.

  Silence fell once more: the burning eyes held me in place while Moloch waited for my binding word.

  ‘It all sounds great,’ I said, tearing my own gaze away from his with an effort. The effort was largely wasted, though: magnetically, my head swivelled back around until the searchlight of his stare shone full on me again. It was like Juliet’s hypnotic fascination, but with no overlay of desire: it was naked coercion, the veils of seduction all stripped away. ‘But my music works on one ghost at a time. What you’re asking me to do – it can’t be done. I can’t play two hundred tunes all at once. You said as much yourself.’ Moloch hawked and spat, with great deliberation.

  ‘Then do whatever needs to be done,’ he said. ‘Enlist yourself an army of exorcists – or dredge your own courage up from whatever cloaca you keep it in. Invite the lady to come with us, if she’s still taking your calls. The details I’ll leave to you. The offer is exactly as I’ve stated it. That we go to Mount Grace crematorium, you and I. Together. In fact, you and I and the lady, because the odds will be against us even with her: without her we won’t prevail. You will go to avenge your friend’s death, which you’re beginning to suspect – correctly – was actually two separate deaths. I will go to feed. The lady – well, she’ll go because you’ll ask her to. Because she’s trying to pretend to be human, and in some way that makes her vulnerable to you even though she could kill you with a single flexing of her pudenda.

  ‘Say that all this will happen, and it will happen. Or say no, and I’ll find somewhere else to eat. The meal you so kindly laid on for me has given me enough strength to wait a few centuries longer.’

  So this was it. The moment of truth. Maybe the demon was bluffing about going elsewhere: on the other hand, it was clear to see that he’d changed from the walking skeleton I’d met outside Todd’s office. He probably could wait a little longer now if he had to. Okay, he was going to be as safe to be around as sweaty gelignite. But too many people had died already, and I couldn’t see where a better offer was going to come from.

  ‘All right,’ I said at last. ‘We’ll go in there. Together. We’ll wipe out the whole fucking nest of them.’

  ‘You swear this?’

  ‘I swear it.’

  ‘On what do you swear it?’

  ‘On myself, because I don’t believe in any bastard else.’

  Moloch bowed, with a faintly satirical emphasis.

  ‘Then it will be so,’ he said.

  He turned to the window again and opened it as far as it would go.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘There’s something I need to do first. Before we tackle the ghosts. I want to go and sweat the lawyer. Todd. He’s in this up to his kishkas.’

  ‘Is he?’ Moloch still had his back turned to me, so I couldn’t see his face.

  ‘Of course he is. He was the one working the angles to get John Gittings exhumed and trundled away to Mount Grace. He’s handling the legal affairs of the Palance family, which means he’s conducting the whole show. And in any case, that’s why you were hanging around outside his office. Because he’s one of them: one of the killers whose scent you’ve been following. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Possibly,’ Moloch said. ‘Again, you’ll do as you see fit. I saved your life, and I gave you information you couldn’t have obtained by any other means. I consider that, at the moment, you’re heavily in my debt. So whatever you do on your own account, don’t include me as a factor in your plans. All that’s between us is the bargain, as we’ve already agreed it. When you’re ready to make the journey to Mount Grace, just say my name – out in the open air, with silence all around, and preferably in darkness. I’ll hear you.’

  I thought he was just going to walk out of the window into the night, but the night came to him instead. Blackness spilled into the room like a solid wave, washing over Moloch and swallowing him up. An instant later it cleared, and he was gone.

  There was a soft thump as the skull fell onto the carpet and rolled a few inches before rocking back and settling on its apex. The upside-down sockets stared vacantly at me, inviting me into the well within that used to be full to the brim with cat-thoughts and now was full of nothing.

  Normal service had been resumed.

  Almost in the same instant, the TV set gave an unsettlingly organic shudder and the screen lit up like an eye opening in the dark corner of the room.

  ‘- Don’t even know where she came from,’ a man’s voice said, sounding strained and almost tearful. The man on the screen was burly, middle-aged, dressed in what I took at first to be a police uniform. He didn’t look prone to tears. ‘She just walked right past the guard post, and we all – three of us – we all ran out after her. I was just thinking how did she get in, because there’s a wall. It’s twenty feet high, and then – there’s an overhang, with razor wire. You can’t climb it. Nobody could climb it.’

  The image switched abruptly to an external shot of one of the five wings of Pentonville, and I realised that he wasn’t a cop: he was a prison guard.

  ‘Nobody else had any clearer explanations to give,’ said a news presenter’s voice in public-solemnity mode, ‘for how a prisoner on remand for murder was able to walk out of one of London’s highest-security prisons, in what was evidently a highly planned and meticulously executed raid. The mystery woman entered here . . .’

  I shook my head to clear it, which turned out to be a mistake: the various dull aches in my neck and in the muscles of my face connected up suddenly into an all-singing, all-dancing multimedia extravaganza. On the screen, successive still photos of Pentonville were overlaid with computer graphics mapping a route through a gate, now hanging off its hinges, over an inner wall of impressive height and down through an interior space punctuated with inspection posts and barred, locked doors. The voice was still talking, but I was momentarily distracted by the pretty pictures.

  Another talking head popped up, this time wearing a suit and batting for the Home Office. He denied allegations that staff cuts had played a part in these events. ‘There were plenty of guards on the scene. Three at the first guard post and three more in D wing itself. Two of them were very seriously assaulted – hospitalised. The rest seem to have been exposed to some sort of drug – a nerve gas, or a hallucinogen – and are unable to give a clear account of what happened.’

  Cutaway to some hand-held footage of another uniformed guard sitting on the steps of an ambulance with a blanket round his shoulders. He was staring at nothing as cameras flashed all around him.

  ‘She just looked at me,’ he said. ‘She just – and then – I was – I don’t know. I don’t know. I was so-’ He hid his face in his hands, either trying to evade that remembered gaze or to relive it.

  Cut to still image of Doug Hunter: an archive shot of him walking into court, presumably on the day of his remand hearing. His face impassive, closed, giving nothing away.

  ‘This is the man who walked out of the front gate of Pentonville this evening, leaving the prison and the system it represents in chaos—’

  I’d found the remote by this time. Now I found the off switch. Moloch had made his point: Juliet was home, the fewmets had hit th
e windmill and if time had ever been on my side then it sure as hell wasn’t any more.

  I limped through into the bathroom, so overwhelmed with tiredness that I felt like my body had melted and then congealed again as a lump of undifferentiated matter. I splashed cold water in my face, stripping one layer off the exhaustion and revealing a lot more layers underneath.

  Try to forget about Juliet, at least for now. What she’d done, terrible though it was, was no surprise – and it was a big silver lining that she’d managed to do it without killing anyone. How long that would last was another question altogether. If she just let Myriam Kale walk away in Doug Hunter’s body after the jailbreak, then it was only a matter of time before Kale met some guy who pushed all the wrong buttons for her. Then there’d be another Alastair Barnard lying in a hotel room somewhere for the maid to find when she came to turn the sheets over.

  I couldn’t do anything about that. I probably shouldn’t even try: it would be like aiming the fire extinguisher at the flames, instead of at the base of the fire. Because Myriam Kale was just a symptom of something bigger and older and a lot more terrifying.

  Why had I agreed? Why had I decided to dance with the devil? I’d known Asmodeus for long enough to know what kind of moves demons favour and where I was likely to end up after the dance was done. But I didn’t have any choice. Even if Juliet hadn’t left me in the lurch, Moloch was right about the kind of help we needed: a specialist, adapted to the terrain and the situation by whatever passed in Hell for Darwinian pressures. The forces of supernature.

  That left at least one question unanswered. How in the name of Christ and all his bloody saints was I going to hold up my end of the bargain? John Gittings had tried, and he seemed to have an informer on the inside – someone who was writing him briefing notes and giving him tips on strategy. Take back-up: take lots of back-up. Exactly what Covington had advised me to do – and exactly what John had been calling me to arrange. Me, and maybe Stu Langley too. But I didn’t pick up, Stu Langley got himself a fatal concussion and John had had to go in alone.

  I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, water pouring down my battered face and dripping onto my bloody, rumpled shirt. I was looking for cracks in the famous Castor façade, but I saw someone else’s face staring back at me: John’s face, from my dream on the night before the cremation. What had he said to me? That he was supposed to give me something. And when I told him I’d already found the letter inside the pocket watch, he’d shaken his head as though that didn’t matter at all.

  ‘Not the letter. The score. The final score, after the whistle blew.’

  ‘The whistle?’

  ‘Or the drums. I forget. It’s like a skeleton, Fix. The skeleton of a song.’

  Maybe I had some back-up already: maybe John could pitch in for me in just the way I’d refused to do for him.

  Feeling slightly light-headed, I went back into the living room and rummaged around under the sofa cushions – my favoured location for all flat valuables – until I found the sheet music I’d taken from the left-luggage locker at Victoria. I took it over to the table, laid it down and smoothed out the worst of the creases.

  The skeleton of a song. I hadn’t even bothered to try to work out what that meant: begging to differ from Sigmund, I’d never believed that dreams were the royal road to anywhere very much. But John was a drummer, and drummers are different from normal people. The skeleton of a song: not what was left when the substance of the song had rotted away, but the framework, the scaffolding, on which the rest of the song could be built.

  That might be how a drummer felt about rhythm.

  The notations on the sheet music were as opaque to me now as they had been when I’d first seen them: vertical flecks of ink densely but as far as I could see randomly spaced across the lines of the stave and the width of the page. Occasionally a few marks interspersed that might have been letters or symbols: a vertical line with a horizontal slash near the top that could be a ‘T’ or a plus sign; another that looked like a crude asterisk. Nothing to indicate how any of it fitted together or how it could be translated into sound.

  Part of the problem was that I could never be arsed with reading sheet music even when I was trying to learn my own instrument: I picked out tunes in a rough-andready way, already listening more to whatever was going on in my head than to anything else. So now I didn’t even have much to compare this gibberish with.

  If I was going to have a hope in hell of deciphering it, I was going to need an expert.

  I picked up the phone and dialled from memory. Got some irate old man out of bed because I was one step away from falling over and my thread-stripped brain transposed two digits.

  Tried again.

  ‘Hello?’ A woman’s voice, fuzzy with sleep.

  ‘Louise?’ I said.

  The same voice, a little sharper. ‘Yeah. Who’s this?’

  ‘Felix Castor.’

  ‘Fix. Fuck your mother, look at the goddamn time. Are you on something?’

  ‘What’s the name of your band, Lou?’

  ‘My band?’ she echoed with pained incomprehension.

  ‘You still play, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So what’s the name of-?’

  ‘The Janitors of Anarchy. Fix, you didn’t call me up in the middle of the night to ask—’

  ‘No,’ I interrupted her, ‘I didn’t. I just want to meet the drummer.’

  21

  His real name was Luke Pomfret, Louise had said, but he played under the assumed splendour of Speedo Plank. I’d arranged to meet him at noon, allowing a generous seven hours for restorative unconsciousness. When I woke up, my head banging and my throat feeling like someone had tamped a couple of bagfuls of silica down into it, it was one-thirty. I called Louise again, getting a livelier and more varied torrent of abuse this time because she was properly awake. I apologised profusely, swore to God and a bunch of other guys that I’d never pull this shit on her again, and got her to call up Mister Plank and reschedule.

  Then I called Juliet’s house, but it was Susan who picked up. She sounded cheerful enough until I told her where I was and asked her if she’d heard from her other half. ‘But Jules is with you,’ Susan protested, confused.

  ‘Not any more,’ I admitted. I told her about my little difference of opinion with Juliet at the Golden Coffee House in Brokenshire, omitting some of the more colourful details like her kicking my arse around the room. Susan got more and more unhappy as she listened.

  ‘But how will she get home!’ she protested. ‘Felix, you shouldn’t have just left her there. She doesn’t know how to behave without scaring or upsetting people. She’s going to get into trouble.’

  The anxiety in her voice made me ashamed, even though there hadn’t been any point in the proceedings where I’d felt like I had a choice. ‘She just walked out on me,’ I said, hearing the words as I said them and realising how lame and evasive they sounded. ‘She was really angry and she warned me not to follow her. Which I wasn’t in any position to do in any case: long story, don’t ask.’

  ‘But does she have her ticket? Her passport?’

  ‘Susan,’ I said, trying to head off her alarm and anger, ‘she’s back in the country already. She got back before I did. If she hasn’t come home, that’s because she’s been . . . well, busy with other things. I was just hoping she might have got in touch with—’

  ‘What kind of other things, Felix? What do you mean?’

  I hedged. I didn’t want to tell Susan Book that the woman [sic] she loved had been involved in a jailbreak – to free another woman (although one who was forty years dead and very convincingly disguised as a man) so that she wouldn’t have to stand trial for murder. It was probably a conversation that the two of them needed to have between themselves at some point, maybe over a glass of wine and a candlelit supper for two.

  ‘It’s something to do with the work she was doing for the Met,’ I said. Truth as far as it goes. ‘I’m sure
she’s fine, but it was something she felt very strongly about and she didn’t want to wait. That’s what I need to talk to her about, in fact. I’ve got some new information that I want to go over with her. If she comes home, or gets in touch, could you tell her to call me?’

  Susan said she’d pass the message along, but her tone was cold. She was blaming me for all this, in spite of my weasel words: as far as she was concerned, she’d invited me over for dinner and I’d dragged a big bag of crap and chaos in with me and dumped it all over her floor. Even without knowing the whole story, she knew that much: and she was right.

  I fixed myself a quick breakfast of toast and dry cereal – the milk in the fridge having transubstantiated into something green and malevolent. My neck and back ached so badly that I was moving like an arthritic grandad. The day was off to a great start.

  Nicky said they had Gary Coldwood in traction over at the Royal Free. A hop, a skip and a jump and I was treading the streets of Hampstead, a place where I’ve always felt as welcome as a slug in a salad. It didn’t help that I’d forgotten to shave. Or maybe it did: at least people didn’t seem inclined to intrude on my privacy.

  There were two uniformed cops on duty outside the private ward where Coldwood was holed up, but they didn’t stop me going in or ask to take my name or anything: I wasn’t sure whether they were there to stop Gary leaving – in which case they should probably have had more faith in his broken legs – or if they’d been assigned to protect him from his screaming fans. Either way, they were earning their overtime fairly painlessly.

  Coldwood wasn’t feeling any pain either, but that was because he was doped up to the eyeballs and only about one-tenth conscious. I sat there for ten minutes or so, wondering if he was going to surface far enough to realise that he wasn’t alone. I wasn’t even sure why I was there: or at least where the balance lay between apologising and debriefing.

  Eventually I admitted defeat and got up to leave. Coldwood mumbled something, but it wasn’t to me and it wasn’t intelligible. As I headed for the door, though, a nurse walked briskly in and cut off my escape. She was about forty and built like a Victorian wardrobe: a solid trapezoid with a single undifferentiated mound of breast like a continental shelf.