Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  “They’re carrying rifles,” Moloch murmured. “They have guns in their belts. Also grenades.”

  I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could. “It makes sense,” I said. “This is when our dead-guy mafia are at their weakest—individually and as a group.”

  “In what way?” Juliet demanded.

  “They all need to tie up and gag their inner hostages again, so I’d guess at least some of their strength has to be taken up in keeping a tight hold on the bodies they’re wearing. After the ritual, they’re okay for the next month. They’re also vulnerable because they’re all here together. They know damn well that if anyone wants to take them out, this is the best time to do it. Hence the paranoid security. We should be encouraged by it, really. It shows that they’re scared.”

  “It also shows that they’re neither stupid nor blind,” Juliet pointed out. “We’d have a lot more chance of success if they were both.”

  I didn’t answer. I was looking down at the wooden planks of the scaffolding beneath my feet, which had shifted in the wind. This was where Doug Hunter’s life had taken a turn for the worse, I now knew. I’d called Jan to check the hypothesis, but I’d already known what her answer would be. This was the last place he’d worked, and on the day he sprained his ankle, he’d walked next door to the crematorium to see if he could beg, borrow, or requisition a first-aid kit. And that was the last thing he’d done as himself.

  It felt like a bad omen to be launching our own attack from a place with a history like that. I wanted to get out of here and make a start, because the sooner we made a start, the sooner the whole thing would be over.

  But as I took a step toward the ladder, Juliet put out a hand and clamped it down on my shoulder, stopping me in my tracks.

  “Castor,” she said. “There’s something you still need to do up here. You”—this was to Moloch—“go down and wait for us at the bottom. We’ll join you in about five minutes.”

  Moloch bared his teeth. “There shouldn’t be any secrets between allies,” he said. “Whatever you’ve got to say, we should all hear.”

  “I don’t have anything to say,” Juliet told him. “As far as that goes, I’m sure your ears are keen enough to pick up everything that goes on up here. But you don’t get to watch.”

  Moloch said nothing. With visible reluctance, he put his feet on the ladder and started to descend.

  I stared at Juliet. She stared back. The elevator in my stomach slipped its cables and plunged precipitately to the bottom of its shaft.

  “You’re still weak,” Juliet said.

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice sounding slightly strangled and strained in my own ears. “I’ve been better.”

  “You may not know this, Castor, but I can give as well as take.”

  I just kept staring. I was rummaging in my head for words. There were no words left. “You can—”

  “When I feed, I take the strength, the life, and the soul from the men I fuck. I started to do it to you once, so I’m sure you remember.”

  I nodded. Waking in the dark, sweat cold on my face and chest, heart hammering an overclocked suburban mambo, I remembered most nights.

  “I’m not going to make love with you. It would hurt Susan if she knew, and I prefer not to lie to her. But I am going to lend you some strength to work with. It might make the difference between you living and dying tonight.”

  Two steps brought her up close to me, and her eyes were staring directly into mine. Point-blank. Point-singularity, her pupils two black holes that dragged me in not against my will but using my will to fuel their own local gravity.

  She put one hand on the back of my neck, drawing me close. Our lips met.

  At least I assume they met. If hypnotherapy were guaranteed to help me to remember, I’d sign up for a course today and happily pay whatever it cost up to and including my right arm. But while I can summon up without even trying every agonizing detail of the night when Juliet tried to rape and devour me, the only thing I remember about that kiss is a sensation like the whole of my body being melted, rendered like tallow, blasted into steam, and then falling like molten rain back into the same place I’d been standing. I don’t even know how long it took; it wasn’t the sort of thing that had a time signature on it. It was there, it was everywhere, and then it was over. Juliet was stepping away from me toward the ladder, and I was standing there alone, each cell of my body separately and searingly aware of the cold night air touching it.

  “That should be enough,” said Juliet’s voice from some unfathomable distance. “Use it wisely.”

  With enormous reluctance, coming down from a height that was already fading out of my mind and leaving no traces, I turned to follow her. A brittle heat filled me, and it was as dry as the air in a furnace. Otherwise, I might have cried.

  “And now,” said Moloch with ironic emphasis when we reached the bottom of the ladder, “if you’ve adjusted your dress—” Juliet’s warning glare silenced him.

  “We’re the point men,” I said to him. “We’re going in from the front. Juliet’s going to join us when she’s done what needs to be done here.”

  He bowed, gesturing for me to take the lead. I looked around at Juliet one more time. “Luck,” I said, for want of anything better to say.

  “There’s no such thing,” she told me dispassionately, already walking away. “Trust in luck and you’ll die tonight.”

  I headed for the entrance to the yard. The gate been closed with a padlock when we turned up, but Moloch had twisted the lock between finger and thumb, and it had snapped off clean. Then he’d tossed it negligently over his shoulder. There was nothing to slow us down as we walked back out onto the street.

  The front gates of the crematorium were a much heftier proposition. They were off on our left, fifty yards away at most. I hadn’t taken the time to admire them on the day of John’s cremation, but I could see that they were built to withstand a serious siege. Where they touched, they wore a massive chain and a clutch of padlocks like a giant’s charm bracelet.

  We took our time, not wanting to get there too early. The impassive men inside stared out at us through the bars as we approached. There were three of them, all dressed in the sober black uniforms of priests or security guards, though most priests don’t have that kind of physique. I stared back. No sign of small arms—only sidewinder nightsticks in holsters at their waists. But then they wouldn’t want a chance passerby to notice anything odd and dial 999. The rifles would put in an appearance soon enough if we gave them any excuse.

  “Evening, gents,” I said, coming to a halt right in front of the gates. Juliet’s arcane energies were burning inside me. I felt slightly hysterical; it was hard not to laugh out loud.

  The guy in the middle gave me a bored, neutral look. “Anything we can do for you?” he asked in a tone that emphatically didn’t expect a yes and wouldn’t be happy to hear one.

  “Yeah,” I said equably. “We’ve come to see Uncle George. He’s in the memorial garden, right next to the stone cherub with the fascist graffiti on its arse. George Armstrong Castor. He was in the cavalry.”

  The guard didn’t answer me right away. He gave us both a harder look, his eyebrows inverting themselves into a dark V of stony disapproval. “The memorial garden is closed,” he said. “You’ll have to come back tomorrow morning.”

  I shook my head firmly. “Tomorrow morning is no use,” I said. “We’re grieving now. By tomorrow we could be feeling cynical and self-sufficient again. So would you mind opening up before I lose my temper?”

  The words hung in the air. I was smiling as I said them, a slightly crazed smile that did nothing to take away the edge of threat. But the guard’s pained expression as he scratched his ear and squared his shoulders said very eloquently that the threat wasn’t a credible one, and that he’d had more than enough of being polite.

  “Fuck off out of it, pally,” he said. “I’ve told you we’re closed.”

  Moloch stepped past me and took a two-handed gri
p on the bars, arms at full stretch. He shook the gates on their hinges, testing their weight and heft. One of the guards on the flank gave a jeering laugh. But the guy in charge wasn’t seeing the funny side. He took a step toward the gate, his hand going to the grip of his nightstick. And that, by a happy chance, was when the fun started. There was a rending crash from our right. The three guards, taken by surprise, all turned their heads to see what the noise was. We’d known it was coming, so we didn’t.

  Todd had said that the Mount Grace collective liked to keep things in the family, so what happened next was no more than the pirate souls in possession of these men deserved. I couldn’t help remembering, though, that the flesh still belonged to someone else—that each of these human bodies had a prisoner locked in an oubliette somewhere, screaming to be released. Moloch granted them their wish in a particularly hideous way.

  He pushed the gates up and in, the hinges breaking open with sharp, metallic cracks like the blows of a hammer on an anvil. Then he swung them like a giant flyswatter and brought them down on the three men, crushing them to the ground.

  I looked away as I stepped across the ad hoc drawbridge, trying not to see the red ruin of blood and bone under my feet. I told myself we had no choice. I thought about John Gittings, and Vince Chesney, and Gary Coldwood. It didn’t help: Nothing was ever going to make these scales balance.

  Moloch was striding on ahead, not bothering to look back and see whether I was following. I took out my whistle and put it to my lips.

  The wall isnt a wall, John’s letter had said. In other words, the ghosts of Mount Grace weren’t constrained by physical barriers, and anyone who thought he could hold his fire until he got to the front door or the furnace room or wherever he reckoned ground zero might be probably wasn’t going to make it.

  I started to play. There was no fumbling or feeling my way into it this time, partly because the music was still fresh in my mind from when I’d wielded it like a scalpel to slice spirit from flesh back in Maynard Todd’s office, but mainly because whatever juice Juliet had charged me up with when we kissed was fizzing and burning through my blood. It didn’t feel like a current running through me; it was more visceral than that. It was as though I were current, running through the world.

  Another crash, and as we rounded the long curve of the driveway, I saw the earthmover breaking cover a hundred yards ahead. Juliet’s driving skills hadn’t improved, but a bulldozer is a simple enough thing to control so long as you don’t care what you hit. The first avalanche of sound—the one that had distracted the guards at the gate—had been when she rammed the fence and broke through from the building site into the crematorium ground. Now she was cutting diagonally across the path ahead of us, leaving in her wake a ruin of desecrated urns and mangled fence posts. Running men took potshots at her while trying to keep from falling under the massive Caterpillar treads that bore her on. She ignored the shots, both the ones that missed and the occasional ones that found their mark.

  And she drew the pursuit away from us, into and through the decorative hedge of privet on the far side of the drive, bending before her in a wind that was one notch down from a hurricane, and still there hadn’t been a single drop of rain. Moloch and I walked on, more or less unmolested, and the doors of the building loomed ahead of us.

  The doors weren’t going to be fun, though. The black-uniformed men stationed on the steps had seen us coming, and they were already kneeling to take aim. Moloch took off toward them at a run, and I veered off the path into the trees, not even missing a note, part of my mind working out the likely trajectories of any bullets that might miss him and find their way to me.

  I circled wide, hearing the impact of flesh on flesh and the choked-off screams of the men on the steps as the demon landed among them, undeterred by their bullets and so eager for the feast still to come that even sadism had temporarily lost its charm. By the time I came out of the stand of trees, he was already turning to look for me, rigid with impatience, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides. Men lay around him like fallen leaves, unconscious or dead.

  I was still playing, and by now the music had taken on its own momentum, as it had in Todd’s office. It was playing itself through me, so I felt like all I had to do was keep the whistle to my lips and let myself be a conduit for it. Otherwise, the buildup of pressure would probably burst my brain like a big, overfilled water balloon.

  I crossed the drive and ascended the steps, my feet thumping arrhythmically on the ground to create the complex, out-of-phase back-beat the music needed to do its stuff. I was aware of resistance, but it wasn’t coming in the form I’d expected. I’d thought the evil dead would try to possess me and that I’d feel the same dizziness and weakness I’d experienced on the day of John’s cremation. But it wasn’t like that at all, not at first. It began as a sense of drag, as though I were up to my thighs in cold water and had to push myself through it, my steps slowing involuntarily.

  Moloch turned as I joined him, squared his shoulders, and kicked the doors wide open, then strode across the threshold without looking back. Two more guards were waiting just inside, and they shot him in the chest and head. He picked up one of the two—left hand on the throat, right gripping the crotch—and swung him in a tight semicircle so that his skull met the other man’s with appalling, unstoppable force. It was a single movement, a single missed beat, and then Moloch was walking on, leaving the bodies slumped together under the angel of Saint Matthew, whose robes were stained with their blood and brains.

  I followed along behind, but even though we were out of the wind, the going was getting harder. The feeling of resistance was growing now that we were inside the building. The cold water was up above my waist, and it was congealing into ice, counteracting the fever heat that Juliet had gifted me with. Without knowing exactly when it had started, I became aware of a noise almost beyond the limits of hearing: an atonal skirl that was picking at the stitches of my skein of music, undoing the spell I was trying to weave by infinitesimal increments.

  The last time I’d walked down this hall, it had seemed barely twenty paces long. It seemed a lot longer now, and every step added to the distance rather than taking away from it. One. Two. Three. Perspective bowed and buckled, space surrendered, hemorrhaged. I raised my left foot and felt the agonized pause, the gap in time before it fell again, as a hole in the music through which my own mind was starting to bleed out. Seven. Eight. I was trudging along a subway tunnel, the air closing in, the ground pulling away and away into unfathomable distance.

  Nine.

  The mosquito whine of unheard voices enfolded me. I knew them for what they were: the unsepulchered dead, defending their inner sanctum with the single-minded viciousness that had been their hallmark in life. I could even distinguish the different voices in the insect chorus as my death sense kicked in like passive radar, analyzing and identifying the cold, cruel intelligences that were bent on killing me.

  Up ahead of me, Moloch stumbled, but my perceptions were so attenuated that he seemed to do it in slow motion. Another security guard was standing at the doors of the chapel, a handgun in his fist aimed at Moloch’s torso, his finger pumping the trigger. Ragged holes blossomed in the taut black leather stretched across Moloch’s back, and green ichor flowed from them like tears: incidental details, both to me and to him. But the air was thickening and curdling around the demon’s head and shoulders, the evil dead rallying to keep him out. He slowed, his head bowing under an invisible weight.

  I felt that weight, too. The tenth step was going to be my last. My foot was coming down as heavy as a sack full of spanners, and I doubted I’d have the strength to lift it up again. And even if I did, what then? Another step, and another, like Sisyphus’s boulder, with nothing more to show for it than another yard gained—a slight shift in position that would be more than offset by the endless organic growth of the hallway. Better to stop and rest and see what came next. Maybe nothing. Nothing would be good.

  Moloch wa
s reaching out with both hands toward the man who was shooting him, again and again, in the chest, but he was groping like a blind man, and like mine, his feet were rooted to the spot. I understood the blindness, dimly. Something foul was silting in my head, too, swallowing up my faltering concentration in its feculent, liquid depositions, piling up behind my eyes like mud on a riverbed.

  I found myself drawing the note that was in my mouth into a sighing out breath that had nowhere to go but down. I had no idea what would follow it. It was hard even to care. My mind was a slender filament of light and the filament was flickering, stuttering, stop start stop.

  Juliet saved me—Juliet and our rough-and-ready timing. There was another apocalyptic crash from outside that shook the foundations of the building, and simultaneously, my consciousness bobbed to the surface again, yawing and pitching so that the world lurched drunkenly around me and I almost fell to my knees. The hypersonic whine in my ears dropped a notch and became a hollow, keening moan.

  Moloch laughed, harsh and triumphant.

  Outside, although I couldn’t see it, I knew that Juliet had just piloted the bulldozer, blade lowered and ready, through the picturesque glades and paths of the garden of remembrance. Funereal urns were exploding like ripe fruit under the Caterpillar tracks, spilling dry and ancient dust into the hungry wind. And feeling their earthly tabernacles defiled, feeling the other wind that blew from eternity plucking at them million-fingered, the dead men were afraid. They faltered in their attack, because they hadn’t expected to be counterattacked in such a viciously intimate way. It was the advice that John had passed on to me inside the case of the pocket watch, as it had been passed on to him by his mysterious informant. Remember you can still threaten them. Physically, I mean. If you pull your foot back to kick, a man is going to cover his balls. I hadn’t realized what that meant until Todd had told me that he and his dead pals used their own ashes as the medium of transference when they leapfrogged into new bodies. That was when I saw the rough outline of what we’d have to do. And when we got to the building site, and Moloch found the keys to the bulldozer in the site hut inside a safe whose walls were barely three inches thick… well, it seemed like destiny.