by Mike Carey
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 whoever was in here had dark-adapted eyes already, and they could pick me off at their leisure if that was what they wanted. Slowly, silently, I snaked my hand into my coat and slid out the tin whistle. The silent presence had a distinct feel to it, 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.
20
I turned the light on, 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 1970s 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 now in black trousers, calf-length black boots and a black grandad shirt with red jewelled 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 between them. He turned it slightly every now and then: the only move he made. Then, 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 riff-raff.’
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 just 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 stare off the weirdly suspended skull, I sat at the furthest edge of the sofa, putting as much distance between myself and the demon as I could – and keeping the whistle firmly gripped in my left hand, ready for use.
Moloch noticed, and he 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-fromthe-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 any time 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.’
‘And how did she respond?’
I thought back. ‘She spat on the ground,’ I said.
He nodded with a certain satisfaction. ‘Immediately after she spoke my name, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’ll notice I haven’t spoken hers. Only that of her brother, who is dead. These are useful precautions among our kind. Our names aren’t given or chosen at random. They have unique properties, and to speak them casually, without due attention to . . .’ he hesitated before visibly selecting the right word ‘. . . prophylaxis can lead to very serious consequences. And she has good reason both to hate and to fear me.’
‘I’ll bet,’ I said, unimpressed. ‘And, you know, I appreciate your frankness. I’d say it was a breath of fresh air except that the air stinks of rotten meat. This isn’t getting us much further, is it?’
‘No,’ Moloch agreed. ‘It isn’t.’ He smiled nastily. ‘You’re very amusing, Felix, do you know that? Your instinctive mistrust. The way you look for angles, for advantages, even when there aren’t any. You see yourself as the finger in the dyke, don’t you? And me as the rising tide. But I promise you, very solemnly: in the bigger scheme of things, you’re –’ he touched the tips of his fingers together, opened them again, consigning me to oblivion ‘– insignificant.’
‘Can you have a rising tide of shit?’ I asked politely. ‘I suppose technically the answer’s yes, but it’s a disturbing image. I’d go for a different metaphor, if I were you. Something more in a David and Goliath flavour. And you know, I’m like Avis rent-a-car: because I’m insignificant, I try harder.’
I was hoping to shake the aura of smugness Moloch was putting out, but his smile just broadened. ‘Do you even know, Castor, why the dead are rising? Why the order of things has reversed itself so that graves gape and give birth?’
In spite of myself, a tremor went through me. The demon must have seen it because he smiled in modest gratification. ‘I think the answer is no,’ he murmured. ‘Poor little Dutch boy, labouring in the dark as the water rises around his ankles, then his knees, then—’
‘Well, everyone’s got a theory,’ I said, cutting across his chalk-on-blackboard eloquence. ‘Take a number and join the line.’
Moloch shook his head. ‘I don’t have a theory,’ he s
aid, baring his teeth in what looked more like contempt than amusement now. ‘I was there, human. I saw the damage done. The great project. Oh yes. The shedim knew it for what it was.’
The great project. Juliet had mentioned that too, and then had pulled back from explaining what she meant. I felt a sudden brief wave of vertigo break over me, as though I’d been about to jump over a low wall but had then discovered at the last moment that the far side gave onto a sheer drop.
‘Whose project was it, then?’ I asked, still in the same Doubting Thomas voice. ‘Yours, or someone else’s?’ What does it say about me that a scant couple of hours after hearing about Gary Coldwood’s brush with the reaper I was shoving it to the back of my mind to play twenty questions with a demon? That I was so hungry for what he was about to tell me, I even put Mount Grace momentarily on the back burner of my mind?
Moloch stood up, his joints cracking alarmingly.
‘Go on,’ I said.
The demon turned his eyes on me, and something happened in the air between us. It seemed to ripple and thicken, as though something else had been dropped into it and made it curdle. Then suddenly Moloch was gone from in front of me, and his hand clamped down on my left shoulder – from behind. It took all my self-control not to dive off the sofa, hit the ground and roll.
Twisting my head around, I met his unblinking stare. As a show of strength, it did the job: my heart was racing and my throat was dry.
‘I prefer not to,’ he growled. ‘I was only . . . reminiscing. Thinking about the good old days. But they’re gone, now. The time is past when I could sit upon a chair made from my enemies’ intestines and feast on your woeful kindred. That summer will not come again.’
‘It’s a fucker,’ I agreed, trying to keep my voice level. ‘Where are the guts of yesteryear?’
‘The lady,’ Moloch resumed, walking away from me again towards the window. ‘You know what she eats, and how. Sexual desire is like a digestive enzyme for her: it lets her take spirit and flesh together. She inflames, and then she feeds: she can do it as well here as in the realms below, since all desire is ultimately in the mind.’
He stared out into the night and ran his clawed fingertips absently down the pane. ‘My case isn’t so fortunate. My meat is the souls of men who have killed other men, and women likewise. But only the souls: not the flesh. And even the souls I can only take, and feed on, and be nourished by, in certain very specific circumstances. The shedim are highly evolved; highly specialised. We have no mechanism for straining the life, the spirit, the selfness out of torn meat.
‘So when Hell changed – when the borders shifted – we began to starve. And there was no easy remedy. In the subtle realms we make . . .’ He gestured vaguely. ‘I don’t know the word . . . like small creatures, that make traps and then wait for their prey to come to them, instead of hunting. Traps that they weave out of their own bodies’ mass.’
‘Webs,’ I suggested, my voice coming out cracked and strained because my throat was still painfully dry. ‘Spider webs.’
‘Exactly. In Hell we make webs. But now the webs stood empty, year after year. We became desperate, and we fought. Against the succubi. Against the bone-singers. Against each other. And the weaker we became, the more frenzied were these struggles. Like rats in a sack, we tore at each other and devoured each other’s substance, even though it couldn’t nourish us.’
Still staring out of the window, Moloch lapsed into silence. ‘So you jumped ship?’ I suggested, just trying to keep him talking.
He held up his hands in front of his own face, examining them with intense disfavour. ‘A chance conjuration allowed me to rise to Reth Adoma,’ he said. ‘Some necromancer who couldn’t even frame a summoning, so that I rose out of the ground in a family burial plot in the middle of Essex. I looked for him – for the one who’d had the effrontery to summon me – but I never found him. A pity: I’d have liked to show my feelings on that score. Anyway, I wove myself a physical body so that I could stay here. Truly physical, I mean – not like the simulation of flesh that the lady wears. This body is real, and solid, and I live inside it as a hermit crab lives inside a borrowed shell. It took me many years to make, out of pieces of flesh gleaned here and there. The alternative was to go home again, and die.’
Moloch dropped his hands to his sides and turned his head to look at me again.
‘It was despair, more than hope, that kept me here,’ he said, the fires in his eyes flickering like distant beacons on the hills of another country. ‘My needs are not great but, as I said, they’re very specialised. The nourishment I need lies in the souls of those of your kind who have killed many, and taken pleasure in the killing. And whereas the succubus – your lady – is a hunter, I am a trapper. Traps for the soul are hard to build in the stunted, solid realms of Reth Adoma, squashed down by the hideous fist of gravity.’
‘Killers can’t be that hard to find,’ I said, with forced flippancy.
‘No,’ the demon agreed. ‘They’re not. I’ve found and eaten many, but it’s like eating the dream of a meal, and waking to find yourself still hungry. In Hell –’ his voice quivered with longing ‘– we used to let the souls lie for years on our terraces. Let them rot, and mature, and render down into their final form. And then, oh, then we feasted.’
He laughed fondly at the memory: it was the kind of sound you really, really need to forget but know you never will.
‘Old souls, separated from flesh in a way that leaves no bruise on the tender spirit,’ he murmured. ‘That’s what I hunger for. But here, in your thin, drab world, a meal like that is a great rarity.
‘I’ve scraped up enough to survive, through the decades. Barely. And you led me to two snacks that gave me some small nourishment. The were-thing, that built its body out of cats . . . I closed with it twice, the first time when it was following you from the law office, the second when it tried to kill you at the laboratory. Both times I managed to ingest some of its essence, while the soul was in transit and loosened from the flesh. Not perfect, but I was able to keep it down. It’s made me stronger than I’ve been in many decades.
‘But it’s the mother-lode I’m after, Castor. I want you to take me to the waterhole, where the great, ever-living killers come to drink, and drink again, of life and youth and strength. Take me there, and turn me loose, and I’ll eat them for you. After you’ve dressed and prepared the feast for me, with your music.’
Moloch fell silent again, and the spell of his words was so strong that it was a few seconds before I realised that he was waiting for an answer. To be honest, it was an effort to focus my thoughts on what should have been the key issue right now: the born-again killers with their dead-men’s-boots system of reincarnation. I wanted to grill this bastard about what he meant when he said that Hell’s borders had shifted, and what the great project had been.
But the demon’s expectant gaze was still fixed on me. With an effort, I stifled the questions that were jostling for position in my throat. He wanted me to give him an answer to his little proposition, but in true Castor style I ducked. I was uncomfortably aware that he’d asked me for a promise: I didn’t want to say anything to this creature that he might be able to hold me to later.
‘By the mother-lode,’ I said carefully, ‘you mean Mount Grace?’
‘Of course.’
‘In that case, two further questions. Why do I need you? And why do you need me?’
Moloch’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘I’ve explained my position,’ he said, the ragged edges in his voice grinding against each other. ‘And so you’re only asking these questions because you want to hold me at arm’s length a little longer. There are two hundred souls behind the crematorium’s walls. Souls that have learned the trick of invading living flesh. Could you exorcise them all, before they took you down? I doubt it. They’d take you and possess you, and you’d be no more than one more suit for them to wear. You need someone like me: someone who sits above them in the same food chain. Someone who was born
and bred to prey on them.’
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.
