by Mike Carey
Another crash, and as we rounded the long curve of the driveway I saw the earth-mover breaking cover a hundred yards ahead. Juliet’s driving skills hadn’t improved, but a bulldozer’s 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’d rammed the fence and broken 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 pot-shots at her, while trying to keep from falling under the massive caterpillar treads that bore her onwards. 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 now before her in a wind that was one notch down from a hurricane – and still there hadn’t been a single drop of rain. We 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 towards 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, just as it had in Todd’s office. It was playing itself through me, so it felt like all I had to do was to keep the whistle at my lips and let myself be a conduit for it. Otherwise the build-up of pressure would probably burst my brain like a big, over-filled water balloon.
I crossed the drive and ascended the steps, my feet thumping arrhythmically on the ground to create the complex, out-of-phase backbeat the music needed to do its stuff. I was aware of resistance now, but it wasn’t coming in the form I’d expected. I 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 was up to my thighs in cold water and had to push myself forward 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 his throat, right gripping his 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 he 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. I became aware, without knowing exactly when it had started, 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, haemorrhaged. I raised my left foot and felt the agonised 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 unsepulchred 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, analysing 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 was reaching out with both hands towards the man who was shooting him, again and again, in the chest: but the demon 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 river bed.
I found myself drawing out 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. Funeral 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 counter-attacked 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 they’d 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 realised 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.
The lull was already over. The dead men renewed their assault on us, although no doubt another contingent had peeled off to find Juliet and deliver unto her the verdict and the sentence of their time-distilled hatred. In all, we’d had maybe five seconds of respite.
It was all I needed. In crowding me so closely, the dead men had done me a big favour: they’d imprinted their essence on my death-sense so vividly I could have played it in the dark with gloves on. I started to play again, and the tune writhed in the air like a living thing, closed and locked onto the rabid spirits even as they swooped back in for a second pass. They were expecting easy meat: they ran full-speed into a moving avalanche.
Moloch stretched, and because most of my attention was elsewhere I thought the sound I heard was the crack of one of his bones. It wasn’t: it was the hollow report of the guard’s gun as the firing pin fell on an empty chamber. He stared at it in numb dismay, then his hand started to move towards his belt where he probably had a spare clip. Moloch’s punch demolished most of his face, so the movement was never completed. He thudded backwards into the doors of the chapel and slithered to the floor. Moloch pushed the doors open and stepped over the dying man into the room.
I followed, pouring out sweet music like a ninja throws shurikens.
The chapel was full of roiling ghosts, made visible by the tune that anchored them against their will to this spot. They were like some sort of complex, ever-moving cat’s cradle, gliding past and through each other without ever seeming to touch. Faces and limbs and various misplaced or truncated echoes of human form appeared within the mass and then vanished back into it.
Moloch shot me a look.
‘Allegro,’ he growled. ‘And, if you can manage it, al pepe.’
He went down on one knee and bent his head. For a moment, grotesquely, it looked as though he were paying his respects to the enemies he was about to devour. But it wasn’t anything like that at all. It was something a whole lot more disgusting.
He’d told me that he’d made this body for himself, slowly and painstakingly. If I’d given any thought to what that meant, I’d have imagined some process like the knitting of a sweater. But I’d picked the wrong metaphor, clearly. The black leather of Moloch’s coat parted vertically as the flesh within knotted and burgeoned: suddenly there was a broadening split in the coat through which something red and churning could be seen, as though Moloch’s insides were molten liquid.
Out of that cauldron something rose like steam, then solidified in the air into a shape that made my stomach clench and sour bile rise in my throat. It had a lot of limbs, and a lot of mouths. The limbs threshed the air, passing through the turbulent mass of spirits that hovered there in a complex repeating pattern. They lost their coherence: emulsified into something that quickly lost any residue of humanity. Then the mouths opened and Moloch began to drink.
It took a long time. I looked away, concentrating on the music and trying to shut out the sounds of the demon’s banquet. But that left me looking at the guard with the ruined face, so in the end I closed my eyes and played for a few minutes more in the dark, in a sort of abstract trance.
A hand on my shoulder brought me out of it, and when I opened my eyes Juliet was at my side. She was boltered with blood from hairline to boots. I wondered if any of the men she’d killed had died with hard-ons. Probably not: she would have been moving too fast, working too hard to be able to linger and bring her lethal charm to bear on them. For some reason that I couldn’t explain, I felt relieved at that.
The room was silent. Most of the ghosts were gone. The bloated ectoplasmic hulk of Moloch hovered and pulsated in the air above us like some blasphemous Goodyear blimp, peristaltic ripples passing across its surface as its myriad appendages hoovered the air.
‘Great stuff,’ I said hoarsely. ‘Only next time, you want to go into second gear when you’re up past ten miles an hour. I meant to tell you that when you gave me a lift in your Maserati the other day.’
Juliet didn’t seem to be in the mood for banter. ‘We need to leave,’ she murmured, staring up at the terrible spectral mass. The tentacles were moving more sluggishly now, and the mouths were closing one by one. If there was such a thing as the ghost of a wafer-thin mint, the demon had reached the stage of the meal where it might be offered to him.
I saw Juliet’s point and headed for the door. But it was already too late.
‘Ah!’ Moloch exclaimed oleaginously, in a voice that seemed to reach us by making the bones of our skull vibrate directly, cutting out the etheric middle man. ‘The sister of Baphomet. Did I ever tell you how I killed him?’
Juliet looked up at the obscene, sated thing with its dozens of grinning mouths.
‘From behind,’ she said.
The physical body that the demon had abandoned in order to feed raised its head abruptly and stood.
‘And shall I tell you how I’m going to kill you?’ he asked.
Juliet raised an eyebrow, its perfect line spoiled by a piece of human tissue plastered to her forehead with human blood. ‘Shedim ere’fa minur,’ she said. ‘Ehad iniru, ke rekol ha dith gerainou.’
Both Molochs – the blimp and the one that looked like a man – roared in response. Both went for Juliet at the same time.
Juliet met the ‘man’ head-on and stopped him dead in his tracks. They both moved so fast that there was almost no sense of movement: they seemed to flick between static postures like a slide show. Moloch was trying the shock-and-awe tactics he’d used against the loup-garou, throwing punches and kicks like confetti at a wedding. Juliet blocked every one, and even got in a couple of her own so that suddenly Moloch was giving ground, parrying rather than hitting out.
But then the tentacles of the blimp-thing drifted through her head and shoulders and chest. She froze in place for a fraction of a heartbeat: Moloch saw the window and he was there, his right hand raised above his head, clawed fingers spread. The smack of impact came a second later. Juliet flew backwards through the air and hit the wall with a bag-of-wet-cement thud.
‘Oh, those are just stories,’ Moloch snarled. ‘I’m not even sure I could get it up with a raddled piece of meat like you.’
Juliet gathered herself and stood, with a visible effort. Three livid wounds marred her face, running diagonally in parallel from her left temple. Blood was already welling up from them in vigorous arterial gouts. But it wasn’t the wound that was giving her trouble, nor the blood: it was the puppet strings dangling down from the blimp monster, attaching themselves in thicker and thicker profusion to her forehead, her arms, her back and chest. She took a step forward, gathering herself to spring, but she was too slow by some huge, wasteful portion of a second. Moloch’s foot slammed into her stomach and she folded: then he swivelled like a dervish dancing, and his second kick, rising into her downturned face, lifted her off her feet. This time she hit the wall hard enough to leave a skull-shaped indent in one of the wooden panels.
I fitted the whistle to my lips again, sick horror making my movements clumsy, my mind empty and unresponsive. Moloch didn’t even look at me: he just gestured. One of the trailing tentacles of the blimp-thing drifted lazily across my throat, which constricted in sudden agony. I made a grunting wheeze of protest – the only sound that I could force out of my mouth. Another tendril rippled through my chest and my legs buckled under me, sending me crashing down onto my knees.
‘A hundred years,’ Moloch remarked conversationally. ‘That’s a long time to go between meals. No doubt it was good for my figure, but still. Not pleasant. Not pleasant at all.’ Levering herself up on hands and knees, Juliet reached blindly for his ankle, maybe intending to trip him. He stepped on her wrist, twisting as he brought his weight down. There was an audible crack.
‘The great project,’ he snarled, standing over her. ‘The shedim will piss on the rubble of your great project, and bury your children in the wastelands where it stood.’
He lifted her one-handed and looked into her face almost tenderly.
&nb
sp; ‘And the woman you live with,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep her as a pet, for a little while. Until she starts to bore me. Then I’ll eat her, over some long and leisurely period of time. Meiden agon, sister of Baphomet: all things in moderation.’
Moloch raised Juliet above his head, held her there for a second, and then brought her down so that her back broke across his raised knee. Juliet gave a grunt of pain. It was so unexpected, and so wrong, that my system flooded with adrenalin. Nothing could hurt Juliet: nothing could shake her poise. That was part of what made her what she was.
My brain kicking sluggishly back into gear, I started to beat out a tattoo with my palms on the cold stones of the floor. The sound was faint, and it hardly carried above the butcher-shop noises of what Moloch was doing to Juliet. But it was a rhythm – and a rhythm, as John Gittings had taught me, is the skeleton of a song.
Moloch didn’t notice at first. He was still delivering his gloating monologue, drawing out the pain and the humiliation of Juliet’s death so that it would measure up to the happy fantasies he’d been living on for the last century. He was working on her face with both hands, talking in a low intimate murmur now so that his words didn’t reach me. The blimp was above and behind him, its tentacles stretching down through his chest and into hers. Of course: if murderers had a patron saint, it would be Juliet. This must be the best part of the meal.
A naked rhythm is slyer and more slippery than a whistled tune. It’s like the narrow blade of a shank, slipped in between your ribs, that doesn’t even hurt until it moves and starts to make a broader incision. I let it go in deep, deeper, deeper still. My hoarse, hissing breath was a part of the pattern now, and the sounds my wrists made against the cuffs of my shirt, and the creak of my shoes as I shifted my weight, coming up on one knee. All of it, all the negligible, tiny, repeated, inscaped sounds were converging into something impossibly subtle, impossibly slender and sharp. The effort of keeping it so tightly focused was like a physical ache in my guts. I held it as long as I could.
