Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  “At ten Lionel was left to himself for a while. They lost interest. But it was too late by then. The cognitive centers in the brain—I don’t know. I’ve heard it explained in four or five different ways. At the crucial points in his brain development, he’d been—asleep. A prisoner in his own body, bludgeoned into eight years of unconsciousness. He was never going to be normal. It turned out that you couldn’t put those years back.”

  He took a deep, ragged breath. “So we had a hard choice,” he said. “Lionel was still the legal possessor of a lot of land—a big chunk of our assets. He was a ward of the court, in my legal custody, but there’d be problems if I administered his property as though it were mine. That would look like malfeasance. It was exactly what we wanted to avoid.

  “We took the low road instead. Carried on possessing Lionel, carried on using him as our puppet, working on a strictly enforced rota, because the novelty had worn off by this stage and nobody was very keen to go through puberty again. We kept up the whole routine until he came of age. After that, he was as viable a suit to wear as anybody else, and it didn’t matter so much. The job was done.

  “But so was the damage. Now that it was too late, I could see—could really see for the first time—how monstrous a thing we were doing. How big an obscenity we were.

  “I couldn’t save Lionel. I’d even been part of what was done to him. What I could do was decide that there wouldn’t be any more Lionels. That the operation would finally be shut down. And when they lost interest in him—when he got too old and they let him go at last—I brought him here. I’ve tried to make him comfortable, at least. I was trying for happy, but most of the time, comfortable is what we can manage. He doesn’t remember much, but he has nightmares, and he’s always confused. Always a little bit panicky, as though he’s forgotten something important and something awful is about to happen and it’ll be his fault.

  “So you see, it wasn’t Myriam. They all think it was, and maybe for them, that was the real crisis. For me—the camel’s back was already well and truly fucked. Whatever they let me do for Myriam, or tried to stop me from doing, I was done. I was all done.”

  He looked at me bleakly. “Another drink?”

  “No.”

  “No. Not for me, either, I guess. I can see the way you’re looking at me, Castor. I would have killed you for that once.”

  “It’s your party, Aaron. It’s been your party all along.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, it has. What time is it?”

  “About five-thirty.”

  “The next shift of nurses comes in at six. I need to make sure they all clock in. If someone doesn’t make it, I have to call the service. After that, I’m yours. We’ll go where Myriam is. We’ll sort this out.”

  “Fine.” I pulled myself wearily to my feet. Covington could have saved his effort. Breaking the window hadn’t done anything to clear the air. I crossed to the bar, found the hammer wrapped in bubble plastic behind it, and hefted it onto my shoulder. “I’ll wait for you in the car. Come on out whenever you’re ready.”

  Retracing my steps through the maze, I came out onto the driveway and climbed into the car. The form-fitted leather was way too comfortable, and I dozed off into uneasy dreams. John Gittings was in them; so was Gary Coldwood. When a hand on my shoulder—the one that Todd had stabbed me in earlier that evening—woke me back into the world, cold sweat slicked my body from head to foot.

  It was Covington, and he was already in the passenger seat. “Nice car,” he said without much enthusiasm. “Did it belong to the dead woman in the backseat?”

  “Demon,” I corrected him. “Yeah, it’s hers. And the rumors of her death are usually exaggerated.”

  “Whenever you’re ready, Castor.”

  I turned the key in the ignition. I didn’t think I’d ever be ready. But even in the cold, damp, misty predawn after a night of bloodletting and pain, you can always rely on Italian engineering. The Maserati started the first time, and I eased her out through the gates.

  Twenty-six

  SUE BOOK GREETED THE SIGHT OF HER FALLEN LOVER with a wail of anguish, then she wrested Juliet’s body out of my hands and took her away from me into another room—even Sue could carry Juliet’s negligible bulk without strain—and kicked the door shut behind her. I took that to mean that if we wanted tea and biscuits, we’d have to rustle them up for ourselves.

  But Covington was hungry for something else entirely, and he wasn’t in the mood for delayed gratification. “Where is she?” he demanded, looking peremptorily around the small hall. “Is she here?”

  “Up the stairs,” I said, and he was taking them three at a time almost before the word was out of my mouth. I didn’t follow straightaway. The energy Juliet had lent me had all drained away, and the events of the last few hours were taking their inevitable toll. I felt like a piece of windblown crud that had fetched up out of the night at the foot of these stairs and couldn’t be expected to go any farther. Windblown crud doesn’t defy gravity. It knows its place.

  But eventually, I summoned the willpower from somewhere and started to climb. From the bedroom facing me, I heard Covington’s murmured voice and then a crazed laugh from Doug Hunter’s throat.

  I hesitated on the top step, not sure whether this was a private party. Covington’s “We’ll sort this out” gave me no clue at all as to what he had planned, or even whom the “we” referred to.

  Leaning my back against the wall, I enjoyed the momentary sensation of weightlessness that comes with having carried something very heavy for a long time and finally been allowed to set it down. Tomorrow there was more shit still to come, but tomorrow was another day—technically, anyway, even though it was probably less than half an hour to sunup.

  The weightlessness passed, but I still felt curiously detached from my own emotions. The guilt that had bitten into me when I heard about Gary Coldwood’s death was mercifully dulled, but there was no sense of triumph or satisfaction in having dealt with his would-be killers. If anything, Covington’s account had left me feeling as though there was mourning still to be done; but I couldn’t make a start on it yet.

  Covington’s voice rose and fell in the bedroom, his words never quite becoming audible. I could hear Kale’s replies, though.

  “No. I didn’t see you. I looked for you and didn’t see you. You left me!”

  Murmuring from Covington.

  “Oh, that’s fine! That’s wonderful! Whatever you want to call it. Fucking—cocks! Cocks talking, calling themselves men! Love me? Oh yeah, I’ll bet you do. I’ll bet you do!”

  Murmur.

  “Well, this is me now. It’s not him anymore, it’s me.”

  Murmur.

  “I don’t even know the way. But if I knew the way, I couldn’t do it. Not on my own, Les! Not—not all that way on my own. Don’t make me. Don’t ask me to.”

  Murmur.

  “No.”

  Murmur.

  “You can’t. Don’t lie to me! I won’t even have a fucking hand to hold.”

  Murmur.

  Long silence.

  Kale laughed, and the laugh turned into a sob. “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me, Les. I’m so scared.”

  For the first time I heard him answer her. “I’m going, Mimi. I’ve made up my mind. And you can’t keep a hold on this body anymore without me and the others to help you. Come now, with me, or come later, on your own. That’s the only choice you’ve got.”

  Another long silence.

  Covington appeared in the doorway. “We need you,” he said.

  At any other time, I might have balked at the thought of playing two souls at the same time, but I’d just played two hundred and come out of it with my mind intact, so this didn’t feel too hard. And Covington didn’t want a full exorcism, only an unbinding. Something that would lift them both out of their flesh and leave them free to move.

  Embarrassingly, though, it was awhile before the music would come. I’d flogged my talent pretty hard that night, and th
e sense of dissociation still hung around me like the wooziness after anesthesia. Covington had untied Kale’s arms and upper body, and they sat together on the bed, his arms around her—or rather, Doug’s—shoulders protectively. She clung to him so hard that I could see the whitening of her knuckles. The two of them stared at me wordlessly, like already condemned prisoners waiting to hear the outcome of some last appeal.

  At last I ventured a note, and I knew when I heard it that it wasn’t right. I held it anyway, then modulated down the scale until I locked in to something that felt like it was alive and moving. I let it find its own way out through the bore, almost unstopped, using breath control alone to shape it. It wasn’t a tune; it was an incoherent wail pretending to be music.

  Covington kissed Myriam Kale on Doug Hunter’s forehead, whispered something that I couldn’t hear over the sound of the whistle, and then slid sideways off the bed. Kale lasted a few moments longer before slumping back onto the pillow, her eyes glazing over before they closed.

  Covington’s ghost was a smudgy blur hovering over his body. Maybe that was a side effect of the protective camouflage that the risen dead of Mount Grace had used in the days of their ascendancy—or maybe it was a side effect of being so damn old and having slid and elided through so many different flesh houses over the last hundred years. Maybe he’d distilled down into this minimal placeholder for a human shape.

  But Kale was magnificent. I saw then, for the first time, what the photos had failed to capture: the energy and the feral grace that had drawn in so many men and made the great Aaron Silver linger and be lost.

  The two spirits—the one so painfully vivid, the other so nearly not there—came together in the air over the bed and then started to waver as though in some kind of heat haze. It was something I’d never seen before: self-exorcism, a willed and wanted abdication. She smiled as she faded, but then apes smile when they’re afraid, and there was something of blind terror about her eyes. Still, she was looking at him—at the man who’d been born Aaron Berg and then worn so many other names—and I thought the expression was softening into something else as it sublimed out of my visible spectrum altogether.

  Doug Hunter came around after only a few minutes. I was afraid he might draw entirely the wrong conclusion from finding himself tied to a bed in a room in a strange house with a guy he didn’t recognize sitting on a chair next to the bed, but that was one complication I didn’t have to worry about. He was too weak and too sick to care much about where he was, and his memories came back with his strength.

  Peter Covington—assuming that was the blond man’s original name—wasn’t so lucky. Like Maynard Todd, he’d been ridden for much longer by the Mount Grace dead, and it had damaged him more deeply. He lay on the floor, conscious but unable or unwilling to stir, his lips moving silently.

  I helped Doug to untie himself, and then I helped him to stand. “Where’s—Jan?” he slurred.

  “Waiting for you at home,” I told him. “You want to go there now?”

  He tried to speak but couldn’t get the word out. He nodded instead.

  “You’re still wanted for murder, Doug. You probably want to give yourself up rather than let them catch you and bring you in.”

  He nodded again. “To-tomorrow.”

  Yeah. There’s always tomorrow.

  Twenty-seven

  THE WORLD TURNED UNDER ME, AND I TURNED WITH IT.

  These things harrowed me with fear and wonder at the time, but you know how it is. With the endless repetitions of memory, they lost a lot of their impact. You’ve probably had similar weeks yourself.

  With Sue Book guarding her lover like a tenderhearted rottweiler, Juliet recovered almost 100 percent in the space of a couple of weeks—but there’s a world of meaning in that “almost.” Moloch had wounded her on a level deeper than flesh, and there was only so much that flesh could do to mend it. She refused to talk about the details, and when I kept pressing anyway, prurient bastard that I am, she handed me an invitation in a dinky, girly little envelope with a silver border. I stopped when I got to the line that read CEREMONY OF CIVIL UNION. I’m still hoping that the names, when I get to them, will be those of two people I don’t know from Eve.

  Gary Coldwood recovered, too. He endured six months’ suspension from duty, but he was reinstated at his original rank when the evidence of a fit-up piled up so high it was in danger of toppling over and hurting someone. The engine block of his car had been tampered with, and likewise the brakes. There were rope burns on his hands, and his upper lip had been split wide open by whoever force-fed him the booze; they even found some broken glass from a Bacardi bottle in his upper palate. He used his half a year of enforced leisure to finish his forensics course, and now you can’t have a conversation with him without coagulation, postmortem artifacts, or stellate wound patterns getting a mention. But he’s got the limp, and he’s got the scar, and there’s an unspoken something in the air whenever we meet. He doesn’t expect me to apologize; it wouldn’t help if I did. Maybe we’ll meet less and less often until either the something or the friendship goes away.

  Jan Hunter came and found me at my office in Harlesden one bleak Tuesday afternoon shelving dangerously into evening. She tried to pay me the rest of the money we’d agreed on when she hired me. I kept my hands in my pockets.

  “I do read the papers, Jan,” I said. “Doug got off on the murder charge because they finally decided to allow that hammer in as evidence. But he still got three years for the jailbreak. You don’t owe me a thing.”

  “You know exactly what I owe you, Mr. Castor,” she insisted. “Whoever did the crime, it’s my husband who’s going to serve that sentence, and it’s my husband who’ll come out—next year, if he keeps his nose clean—to find me waiting for him. If it wasn’t for you, I might never have seen him again.”

  I knew that was a lie, but it was a hard one to explain. Alone, without the Mount Grace trust to carry out the monthly reinscription, Myriam Kale would have found herself expelled from Doug’s body sooner or later. And if the way we’d done it had eased the trauma and lessened the damage, the thanks probably belonged to the man who’d died a second time to make it happen. I told Jan to put the money toward a second honeymoon. If she invests it wisely, it might pay for a dirty weekend in Clacton.

  It took me a long time to go through the files I took from Maynard Todd’s office, but the preliminary sweep of the names was quick and easy—although some of them made my eyebrows skitter across the top of my head and come to rest behind my ears. There were a couple of cabinet ministers in there for starters, along with a Radio 4 presenter, the head of a major union, and the CEOs of three companies even I’ve heard of.

  But the biggest surprise wasn’t any of those. It was another name that sent me on my travels to the top end of the Northern Line, five days after all this shit had hit the fan and when the echoes had already started to fade.

  Court number one at Barnet had a full docket that morning: I didn’t bother to look at the details, but summary justice was scheduled to be meted out to an impressive number of people. Never mind the quality, as the saying goes. Feel the burn.

  I sat at the back of the court, making myself as inconspicuous as I could, but something was throwing the honorable Mr. Montague Runcie off his honorable stride. He wasn’t looking in the peak of condition, for one thing: His face was pale, and there was a sheen of sweat on his forehead, as though he were hunkered down under about five degrees of fever. And he kept looking over at me in the back row center, getting more and more rattled each time. He fought his way manfully through the first case (a persistent burglar going down for a three-stretch), but he lost the thread of things a bit in the second (nonpayment of council tax) and got downright tetchy in the third (bad debt). Finally, he called a recess of half an hour and stormed off the bench so quickly that we didn’t have time to stand up and sit down again when the door slammed behind him.

  A minute or so after that, the court clerk picked his way ca
sually to the back row and asked me if I’d mind attending His Honor in his chambers. I said I’d be delighted, and asked whether I could bring my bronze funerary urn with me. It held the mortal remains of my uncle George, and it was hard for me to be parted from them.

  Runcie favored me with a berserker glare as I walked in, but he had enough presence of mind to dismiss the clerk before he started in on me. I took the opportunity to sit down on the far side of the dignified mahogany barricade that was his desk. Runcie was standing, so rigid with indignation that he was vibrating slightly, like a tuning fork. He really looked unwell, the pallor going beyond ashen into waxy.

  “How dare you bring that—thing into my courtroom?” he demanded, waving a finger at the urn, as soon as we were alone. “What’s the meaning of it?”

  I gave the urn a wipe, because the bronze was a bit tarnished here and there. “Well,” I explained, “it’s a mark of respect for the dead, primarily, but it also gives the living a focus for their grief. Otherwise you could just flush your ashes down the khazi and use the money for—”

  “Don’t give me all that—nonsense,” Runcie interrupted me, forcing the words past clenched teeth. “Why did you bring it here? Why are you showing it to me?”

  “Ah!” I said, shaking my head ruefully at my own misunderstanding. “Yeah, I get you now. Not so much ‘What the hell is that?’ as ‘What the hell is that doing in my courtroom?’ Well, Mr. R., it’s a great, huge, festering, bloated bastard of a memento mori. Which, if your Latin isn’t up to it, means—”

  “I know what it means.”

  “—a reminder of death; a vivid or stirring testimony to human mort—”