Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  I lurched to my feet. I couldn’t keep sitting there anymore as my mind stripped its gears trying to accommodate these new facts.

  “How do you know all this?” I asked, involuntarily shifting my weight and finding a good brace point, as though even now I was afraid that Covington might lean in and throw a punch at me.

  “Until recently,” Covington admitted, his expression turning a little grim, “I knew almost nothing. At least—I suspected that Mount Grace was a front for some kind of illegal activity. There were too many things that didn’t add up. It was odd that the trust had kept an interest in Mount Grace at all, in a portfolio that was dominated by Pacific Rim venture stocks and West African gold. There wasn’t any profit in it.”

  “Todd told me that Mr. Palance kept it on because it’s a heritage site,” I said.

  Covington snorted. “Did he? Lionel never gave a damn about that stuff. And it’s where they meet—the board, I mean; the trust’s administrators—once a month, which meant it was certainly the center of something. But I naively assumed that the something was tied in with drugs or unlicensed gambling—a nest egg the trustees were building up with an eye to their retirement. And that didn’t trouble my conscience very much at all. I’ve always believed that if you play your hand with a reasonable degree of skill, what you take proper care not to know can’t hurt you.”

  “But then?”

  “But then John Gittings came and told me some of what he’d found out about the place. That was in January. And I thought about a few things that I’d heard said at meetings of the board or seen referred to in old files. It all fell into place. I became aware that there was an organization underneath the one I knew: much older, completely invisible, with its own agenda.”

  He frowned and turned away. “I say it fell into place,” he said. “But it didn’t happen all at once. It took weeks, in fact. At the time I told Gittings he was insane and more or less threw him out of the place. Then I went away and thought, and realized that everything I’d been ignoring—it all came down to this. A reincarnation racket operating out of Mount Grace. Run not by the trustees but by the people whose ashes are kept there. It sounds insane when you put it like that, but that’s what it is all the same.”

  “So what did you do?” I asked.

  He looked at me as though I’d just done an impersonation of a duck singing the national anthem. “I didn’t do anything,” he said with an incredulous emphasis. “I still haven’t done anything. I called Gittings to warn him off, but he was already dead by then. If I needed an illustration of the shit I was potentially in, there it was. These people can kill you and make it look—not even like an accident, like something you did to yourself. I kept my mouth shut and dug in.”

  He sighed. “And I made sure never to go into the crematorium itself from that moment on. I’ve been on the grounds, as you saw. I’ve unlocked the doors and locked them up again. But I haven’t stepped inside the place itself, and I don’t intend to. If that sounds irrational, you’ll have to excuse me.”

  I said nothing. I was thinking of Doug Hunter and what he’d said when we met about his sprained ankle. That was how they’d gotten him. He’d sprained his ankle, and because there wasn’t a first-aid kit, he’d gone into “the church next door.” And when he’d came out, he’d been carrying a beast on his back that turned out to be Myriam Kale. I’d noticed the building site on Ropery Street. How could I not have made the connection?

  No. Covington’s precautions sounded anything but irrational. If anything, he was still taking unwarranted risks walking up to the door of the goddamn place.

  Abruptly, Covington looked at his watch. “Listen, I have to go and check on Lionel,” he said. “Kim will have him cleaned up now, and she’ll probably be putting him to bed. We have a routine, and he’ll sleep better if he sees me. You can wait if you want.”

  “Can I come along with you?” I asked on an impulse.

  There was a definite frosty pause.

  “He hasn’t had anything to do with Mount Grace in over a decade,” the blond man said. “There’s nothing he can tell you.”

  “There may be things I can tell without talking to him,” I countered.

  Covington looked unconvinced. “He’s very frail. And he needs his sleep. I don’t want him upset any more tonight.”

  “I won’t ask him any questions,” I promised. “Or even discuss any of this stuff while we’re with him.”

  A brusque shrug. “All right. If you insist. Five minutes. Then we’ll leave so that Kim can settle him down. When I tap you on the shoulder, we go, whether you’re ready or not.”

  “Sure,” I agreed.

  We walked along more miles of eight-lane corridor, up a staircase that wasn’t the one I’d seen in the front hall, and into a bedroom that looked more like a hospital ward. Mostly, that was the bed, which was one of those electrically controlled multiposition efforts for people with mobility problems. But I also noticed the pharmacopeia of pill packets and medicine bottles on a night table next to the bed, the oxygen cylinder discreetly positioned along one wall, and the flotilla of wheelchairs parked just inside the door: motorized and manual, folding and solid, solid steel and lightweight aluminum, something for every occasion. In other respects, it resembled a child’s nursery. There were toys on the floor, including an ancient-looking Hornby train set with a perfect circle of track, and a bookcase full of very big books with very brightly colored spines.

  Kim—the nurse I’d seen earlier—was adjusting the bed as we walked in. Lionel Palance was lying back on the high-banked pillows, breathing through a nebulizer that a male nurse held to his face. The old man’s gaze rolled over me without seeming to see me, but his eyes focused on Covington and he smiled. Lionel’s lips moved and made a muffled noise that might have been a greeting.

  “Hello, Lionel,” Covington said gently, sitting on the bed. “Taking your medicine. That’s what I like to see.”

  The nurse took the nebulizer away and laid it down on the night table.

  “Peter,” the old man said in his high, fragile voice. And then, “Taking—my medicine.”

  Covington nodded, pantomiming approval. “Yeah, I saw. And Kim’s going to read to you until you go to sleep. The Just So Stories, yeah? You’re still on that one?”

  “Noddy,” Kim murmured. “We’re back to Noddy.”

  Covington winced. “Noddy’s too young for him,” he said with an edge in his voice, as though they were parents disagreeing for the thousandth time about a child they had ambitions for.

  Kim wasn’t cowed. “But he likes it,” she said. “It comforts him.”

  Covington raised his hands in surrender, I thought more because I was there than because he accepted the argument. “Anyway,” he said, “you’re going to have your story, and you’re going to go to sleep, aren’t you? You’re going to be good now.”

  “All right, Peter,” the old man agreed.

  “Good night, Lionel. God bless. See you in the morning, please God.” He recited this quickly, as though it were a formula.

  “Good night, Peter,” the old man fluted. “God bless. See you in the morning. Please God.”

  Covington stood up and made to move away, but the old man was still looking at him, still trying to speak, although he’d temporarily run out of breath. “We played hi—hide-and-seek.”

  The big blond hunk turned around and looked down at his nominal employer, dwarfed by the ultra-technological bed as he was by the ultra-luxurious house. Something in Covington’s face changed, and for a moment he looked as though he’d taken a punch to the jaw. He blinked twice, the second longer than the first. When his eyes opened again, they were wet.

  “Yeah,” he said with an effort. “We did, Lionel. We played.”

  He walked out of the room quickly, without looking at me. I lingered, listening to the silence. Not really silence: Lionel Palance’s breathing was hoarse and hesitant and clearly audible, and the two nurses were bustling off to one side of me, K
im stacking the medications back in the right places on the table while the male nurse bundled up the old man’s soiled pajamas and put them in a plastic laundry bin. Something beeped in a vaguely emergency-room tone, but I couldn’t see what or where it was.

  Not really silence, but then I wasn’t really listening, at least to any of that stuff. I was listening to Lionel—to the rhythm of his soul and self, the music I’d play if I ever wanted to summon him or send him away.

  It was very faint, but it was there. More to the point, it was right: The key and the tone and the chords and the pace and the nuance all felt like they belonged there. He was himself, not a ghost riding flesh it had no claim to; not a demon playing with a meat puppet. Just a frail old man living out his last days in a second childhood, surrounded by all the luxuries that money could buy.

  And yet he was part of all this, part of whatever was happening at Mount Grace. How could he not be when he was the owner of the place? Covington had said that Palance hadn’t had anything to do with the crematorium for over a decade, but we were looking at events that had played out for over a century, so a few years more or less were no more than a drop in the ocean.

  I couldn’t question Palance, obviously, and it looked like I’d gotten all I was going to get from Covington. But I knew beyond any doubt that when I finally got the full story of Mount Grace and the born-again killers, it would turn out to be Palance’s story, too. And—less than a conviction, but a very strong feeling—it was going to be a story lacking a happily-ever-after ending.

  I backed quietly out of the room and rejoined Covington on the landing. There was nothing in his face or manner to indicate that he’d been moved or upset a few minutes earlier. He was cold and functional, almost brusque.

  “What do you think you’ll do?” he asked me as we walked back down the stairs. “I mean, you came here for a reason, didn’t you? You’re looking into this, and it’s not just because you want John’s widow to have closure.”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I came here for a reason. Too many people have died, Covington. Three more yesterday. I’m going to Mount Grace, and since I’m going to be outnumbered a hundred to one, I’m taking the reconnaissance pretty fucking seriously.”

  “It won’t be enough,” he said flatly. “Whatever you find out, and however you play it, you’re not going to be able to do it alone.”

  “Are you offering to help?” I asked.

  He laughed without the smallest trace of humor. “No. Absolutely not. I’m just saying, that’s all. No point putting the gun in your mouth if suicide’s not what you’re after. Get yourself some backup—expert help. Maybe some other people in your profession.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” I muttered. “Is there anything you can do from this end? Get me a plan of the building, maybe. And a list of who’s been cremated there over the past fifty or sixty years, say.”

  “It might be possible. But I’d have to ask Todd, and I doubt he’d cooperate. He doesn’t like me very much.”

  “Todd the lawyer?”

  “Todd the lawyer, Todd the son, and Todd the holy ghost. Todd the president of the board of trustees.”

  Chunk chunk chunk.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “I’ll ask him myself.”

  I walked down to the North Circular, hoping to catch another cab, but the night bus came along first, and I rode it around to New Southgate, all alone for most of the way but sharing it with a small crowd of friendly drunks on the last stretch. Their old man, anachronistically enough, said follow the van. I wanted to invite them to jump under a fucking van, but they were mostly big drunks, so I closed my eyes and let the crumbling brickwork of the wall of sound break over me.

  Half past two in the morning. I walked down toward Wood Green with my head aching. Most of that was from where Juliet had done the laying on of hands, but some of it was from what Nicky and Covington had told me. I’d have to go to Mount Grace, but if I walked in off the street, I’d be outgunned and easy meat. After all, I had no idea what I’d be facing there or even if they’d know I was coming. I had to map the terrain, and I didn’t know how.

  I was bone-weary and not my usual happy-go-lucky self as I got back to the block and trudged up the endless stairs—lifts were all still out, inevitably—to Ropey’s flat. Maybe the tiredness was why I didn’t notice that the door unlocked on a single turn of the key, when I’d double-locked it on my way out, as I always did.

  But as soon as I stepped over the threshold, I knew even in the pitch dark that I wasn’t alone. My scalp prickled, and then the rest of me, too. I was being watched in the dark by something that was neither wholly alive nor wholly dead.

  I stepped hastily away from the door so I wouldn’t be silhouetted against the light from the corridor outside, but whatever was in here had dark-adapted eyes already, and it could pick me off at leisure if that was what it wanted. Slowly, silently, I snaked my hand into my coat and slid out the tin whistle. The silent presence had a distinct feel, and it was starting to resolve into notes—fragmented, for now, but the links would come if I could stay alive long enough.

  “You might as well turn on the light,” said a dry, brittle, utterly inhuman voice. “If I was going to rip your throat out, I’d have done it as soon as you walked in.”

  I didn’t need to turn on the light. That voice was imprinted on my mind almost as powerfully as Juliet’s scent.

  “Moloch,” I snarled.

  A faint snicker ratcheted out of the darkness like a rusty thumbscrew being laboriously turned.

  “I thought it was time we pooled our resources,” the demon said.

  Twenty

  I TURNED ON THE LIGHT, SHRUGGED OFF MY COAT, AND threw it over the back of the sofa, then stepped out of my shoes as I advanced into the room. I managed to do all of this stuff fairly matter-of-factly. After all, like the fiend-in-the-shape-of-a-man said, he’d already had an open goal and refused to take the shot. Whatever this turned out to be, it wasn’t a straightforward ambush.

  “So how was your trip?” Moloch asked in the same tone of metal grinding against bone.

  I made a so-so gesture. “Too many satanists,” I said.

  He nodded sympathetically, but his smile showed way too many teeth to be reassuring. “Our little fifth column. Yes. If it’s any consolation, they all get eaten in the end.”

  He was sitting in the swivel chair, a seventies relic that was Ropey’s most prized possession, after his music collection. Moloch was looking well: There was a ruddier tinge to his skin, and he’d even gained a little weight. His dress sense had improved, too. In place of the rags he’d been wearing when I first saw him outside the offices of Ruthven, Todd and Clay, he was dressed in black trousers, calf-length black boots, and a black granddad shirt with red jeweled studs at the neck and cuffs. He would have looked like some eighteenth-century priest playing a game of “my benefice is bigger than yours” if it weren’t for the full-length leather coat. As it was, he looked like someone who’d taken The Matrix a little too seriously. The fingers of his two hands were cat’s cradled around something small that gleamed white. He turned it slightly every now and then, the only move he made. When he saw that my gaze had turned to it, he opened his fingers and let me see what it was: a tiny skull, about the size of a human baby’s but longer in the jaw, picked clean of flesh. I was willing to bet that it was a cat’s skull.

  “First things first,” Moloch said briskly. “We don’t want to be interrupted, so let’s draw the curtains around our tent. Keep out the riffraff.”

  He spread his fingers with a flourish, letting the skull tumble off his palm. It made it most of the way to the floor, then it stopped in the air, six inches or so above the shag pile.

  “Normal service will be resumed,” Moloch murmured. “Eventually. Until then the walls will have no ears, and nobody can drop in on us unannounced.”

  Unable to take my eyes off the weirdly suspended skull, I sat at the farthest edge of the sofa, putting as much di
stance between me and the demon as I could—and keeping the whistle firmly gripped in my left hand, ready for use.

  Moloch noticed and affected to be hurt. “I saved your life the other night,” he reminded me reproachfully. “We’re fighting the same fight, Felix.”

  “Are we?” I asked bluntly.

  He gave me a slow, emphatic nod. “Oh, yes. Trust me on this.”

  “And who are we fighting against, exactly?”

  “The immortals. The killers who found the exit door on the far side of hell. You remember I spoke to you about rhythm. Sequence. Cadence. I know the end of the story, and you know its start. Shall we embrace like brothers and share?”

  “No,” I suggested. “Let’s not. Tell me what you want out of me and what you can give me, with no bullshit, and I’ll tell you if I’m interested.”

  The demon pursed his lips. “I confess,” he said, “I prefer a certain degree of commitment at the outset. A promise, at least. It doesn’t need to be sealed in blood. If I tell you what I know, you’ll use it to further my interests as well as your own. Just swear on something you care about. The formalities aren’t important.”

  I stared him out.

  “Felix.” He made a sound like the desiccated, risen-from-the-tomb-unnaturally-alive mummy of a sigh. “We have to roll a boulder up a very large hill together. Without some basis of trust between us, it’s going to be hard work.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t even know what the boulder is,” I pointed out. “I’m not likely to get my shoulder under it anytime soon—not on blind faith, anyway.”

  “Faith?” The demon made a terse, faintly obscene gesture. “No. I wouldn’t advise you to deal with me on that basis. Did you mention me to the lady at all?”

  “To Juliet? Yeah, I did.”