by Mike Carey
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.
Then I let the rhythm-blade unfold like the spokes of an umbrella inside the demon’s rancid, pulpy heart.
Moloch stiffened suddenly and turned to stare at me in wide-eyed astonishment.
‘Three – three most useless things in the world,’ I croaked, forcing the sounds out of my lacerated throat. I could taste the blood that came with them.
‘Castor-’ he muttered, unbelieving, uncomprehending.
‘A nun’s tits – the pope’s balls – and a round of applause for the band.’
The blimp exploded with a wet, flaccid, whimpering belch. Moloch’s chest exploded too, where the tentacles were routed through it: ribs showed like jagged teeth through his ruined flesh. His human form toppled over like a tree and fell full-length on the floor, unmoving, a greenish-black stain spreading lazily out from underneath it.
It felt like an impossible task to get back on my feet, but I knew I had to try. The gunfire, the wanton destruction wrought by the bulldozer and the screams of the dying wouldn’t have gone unnoticed: after all, this wasn’t Kilburn. It wouldn’t be too long before the bright-eyed boys in blue came around to see what the trouble was, and it was probably a good idea if they didn’t find us here.
Juliet was a mess. I knew – rationally – that any damage she survived she could repair: this body was just something that she wore when she was in town. All the same, it hurt to look at her, and my hands shook as I picked her up. She was a lot lighter than she looked, as I’d discovered on an earlier occasion. She hung limp in my arms: her lips moved, but no sound came out.
‘I’m going to have to carry you,’ I told her. ‘I know your back’s broken, but I can’t think of any other way of doing this. I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.’
Finding the last remnants of the strength she’d lent to me, I carried her to the door, down the hallway and out into the chill night air.
This wasn’t over yet. There was still one more man I had to visit tonight: visit, and maybe kill. Again.
The wind was as strong as ever: and now at last the rain began to fall, with perfect timing, like the tears of two hundred funerals saved up and shed at once.
25
The big advantage of Juliet’s Maserati was its acceleration: it had warp engines as well as impulse power. When I got onto the North Circular – which at three in the morning was mercifully deserted – and put my foot down on the pedal, six or seven cartloads of bullying G-force pressed me back into the hand-stitched leather and the street lights blue-shifted. I got to Chingford Hatch in what felt like a minute and a half.
The gates of The Maltings were wide open, and so was the front door. Just like the last time I’d been here, all the lights were on: but this time there was a general absence of people running around like headless chickens. I parked up and glanced at Juliet lying across the back seat, absolutely still.
It was too dark to tell whether the healing process had already begun. If she were conscious, I could ask her how she was feeling: and then if she broke my little finger, as she’d threatened to do back in Alabama, it would be a sign that she was starting to rally. In any case, I couldn’t take her with me where I was going.
I got out of the car and walked across the stone flags to the door. I still didn’t see a soul, and dead silence met me in the hallway. I wandered from room to room, expecting an ambush at first and looking behind every door, but you can’t keep those hair-trigger reflexes honed for ever. After a while it became more of a tense stroll.
I found Covington in Lionel Palance’s bedroom. He was sitting in a steel-framed chair next to Palance’s bed, reading the old man a bedtime story – and it wasn’t Noddy. I guess he must have put his foot down about that. I walked into the room, making as little noise as I could, and stood behind him while he read. He did the voices pretty convincingly.
‘“What have you been doing, Taffy?” said Tegumai. He had mended his spear and was carefully waving it to and fro.
‘“It’s a little berangement of my own, Daddy dear,” said Taffy. “If you won’t ask me questions, you’ll know all about it in a little time, and you’ll be surprised. You don’t know how surprised you’ll be, Daddy! Promise you’ll be surprised.”
‘“Very well,” said Tegumai, and went on fishing . . .’
Covington glanced across at his audience of one. Palance was already asleep, his chest rising and falling without sound.
Covington closed the book and put it on the bedside table, in the midst of all the medicines. His movements were a little jerky and so one or two of them fell off onto the floor: he picked them up and put them back in their places. He leaned forward, kissed Palance on the forehead without waking him, and then straightened again, squaring his shoulders as though for some ordeal.
‘Castor,’ he said, turning for the first time to acknowledge me. He looked impossibly tired. ‘How did it go?’
‘Pretty well, Aaron, all things considered’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that if you went to Mount Grace right now, you’d find it looking like a morgue.’
‘Well – good. That’s good. At least, I presume it’s good. And you and your . . . team all came out of it okay?’
I made a palm-wobbling, so-so gesture. ‘We had one fatality. Fortunately.’
He stood and looked calmly into my eyes. ‘And now you’ve come for me.’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Fancy a whisky?’
‘Pretty much.’
Covington led the way down the stairs to the same room we’d used the night before. It felt like another lifetime. He picked up the Springbank, but I put my hand on his arm and shook my head.
‘Something rougher,’ I said. ‘Please. Rotgut, if you’ve got any.’
He found some blended Scotch with a name I didn’t recognise and held it up for my approval. I nodded.
‘“Bartender, give me two fingers of red-eye,”’ he quoted. He mimed the punchline, poking his fingers towards but not into my eyes. I didn’t laugh. I wasn’t in the mood, somehow.
He set out two glasses and poured a generous measure into one. Then he looked at the bottle, thought better of it and took that, leaving the other glass empty on the bar.
‘Shall we sit down?’ he asked, gesturing.
‘Whatever.’ I followed him across to the leather three-piece. He sprawled on the sofa and I took one of the chairs. He chinked the bottle to my glass and then took a deep swallow of the whisky: he didn’t even shudder although God knew it wasn’t smooth.
‘You c
alled me Aaron,’ he observed, running his tongue across his lips.
‘You’d prefer I called you Peter?’
Covington thought about that. ‘No, not really,’ he admitted. ‘Actually – in a strange way – there’s a rightness to it. I made up Silver for myself, but Aaron was the name I was born with. What goes around, comes around. How did you know?’
I let my eyebrows rise and fall. ‘You weren’t particularly trying to hide.’
He acknowledged the point with a shrug. ‘Still. John Gittings never saw through me. Or did he? Was my name in his notes?’
‘No.’ I swirled the whisky in the glass, watching the filaments roll in the liquor like the ghosts of worms. I thought back, trying to get the sequence straight in my own mind because the conviction had crept over me by slow degrees: there wasn’t any one moment when the light bulb had lit up above my head. ‘John didn’t work it out. But the letter you sent him was a part of it, I suppose. You told him to take back-up, and you told me the same thing when I came to see you. I guess that struck a chord. What was with the spelling, by the way? Just your instinct for camouflage kicking in?’
Covington made a slightly rueful face. ‘I can’t spell,’ he said. ‘There’s probably a name for this now – or there will be soon. Aaron Silver learned English late in life, and he never got his head around the orthography. Now I find that every new body I live in has the same limitations as the original. It’s possible to change, but it’s hard. And it doesn’t last. Old habits keep reasserting themselves. The past is . . . more present than the now. It’s easier for me to write like that than it is to look up the correct spellings. Was that all? Just that one coincidence? Me saying the same thing to you that I wrote to Gittings?’
‘No.’
‘Then –?’
‘You really want me to run through all the loose change you were dropping?’
‘If you don’t mind, yes. I still find it hard to believe that I’ve developed a death wish, after working so hard for so long to stay alive. Indulge me.’
I delved into my scattered thoughts again. ‘I was actually looking for you,’ I said. ‘Or at least – not for you, specifically, but for someone behind the scenes who was making things happen. You had to be there. Someone hired John, and gave him a small fortune to spend on those death-row trinkets. Someone told him about the set-up at Mount Grace, but for some reason let him grope around in the dark for weeks on end checking out cemeteries rather than just giving him the address. Someone playing games, in other words. Feeding him crumbs to keep him moving, but not wanting to show his hand. Maybe because if John went directly to Mount Grace, all your dead friends would know who sent him.’
Covington smiled coldly – maybe at the word friends. ‘Go on.’
‘Jan Hunter had a mysterious benefactor, too – someone who called her up claiming to be Paul Sumner, but Paul Sumner was already dead. You again, I’m guessing, trying to keep the momentum going in spite of John’s death – and maybe also looking for a way to stop Doug Hunter going down for a murder he didn’t commit. Strings were being pulled all the way down the line. Did you summon Moloch, too?’ Covington nodded without speaking. ‘Yeah, I thought so. Big coincidence otherwise – that a demon with just those dietary needs happened to be raised from Hell just where he’d catch the scent of the Mount Grace permanent floating barbecue. But there weren’t any coincidences operating here: it was all part of the master plan.’
I took a long swig of the whisky. It burned pleasantly in my mouth.
‘So that was the main thing,’ I said. ‘The strings. You don’t get all those strings without someone to pull on them. How did I know it was you? Just lots of little things. Your real name – Aaron Silver’s real name, I mean – was Berg: and the name you gave to Ruth Kale was Bergson.’ Covington opened his mouth to speak and I anticipated his objection. ‘No, you’re right. I wouldn’t have picked up on that if I didn’t already know. It was the Paragon, Silver. You let yourself get seen by two people there.’
He looked surprised. ‘I know. But I had my collar drawn up and I was moving fast. I didn’t think either of them got a good look at me.’
‘They didn’t. But their different descriptions of you got me thinking. The desk clerk, Merrill – he said you were an old man. But Onugeta jostled against you in the hallway and he felt how solidly muscled you were: he knew you had to be a young, fit guy. So why would Merrill think you were old?’
‘I don’t know, Castor. What’s the punchline?’
I pointed at his head. ‘Your snow-white locks. You walked past his desk with your head down and your collar up, and all he saw of you was your hair. And I dunno, maybe there’s something about how you walk, too: another echo. Something that goes with being a century and a half old. Either way, the paradox got my mind working. And once it was working, I saw that the little question – who was that masked man? – was the same as the big question. Why were you there at all? Why did you take the hammer away with you? Locking the stable door after the horse had bolted, even though Doug Hunter – and Myriam Kale inside him – was going to be arrested anyway.’
Covington shook his head slowly. ‘You really thought this through, didn’t you? Why did I?’
‘Because flesh is clay. When a human soul possesses an animal body, it bends it as far as it can into a human shape. Sometimes the animal soul pushes back, and you can get some really interesting – not to say nasty – results as the see-saw tips. And the same thing happens to you and your friends, doesn’t it? The longer you stay inside a body that isn’t yours, the more it adjusts to having you there. The more it slides into the shape and form you remember having in your old body. That’s why you’re snow-white blond as Peter Covington, and why you were snow-white blond as Les Lathwell: because Aaron Silver’s soul remembered having snow-white hair. And that hammer, gripped in Doug Hunter’s hand as Myriam Kale came bubbling up out of his soul and into the driver’s seat—’
‘-Had Myriam Kale’s fingerprints on it. Right. The hammer is behind the bar, by the way: I assume you’ll be wanting to take it with you when you go. And it won’t make any difference to me or to Mimi after tonight. Can I refresh your drink, Castor?’
I looked at my empty glass. ‘Probably better not,’ I said. ‘I need a clear head if I’m going to play you out.’
‘You don’t need to worry. I won’t make it hard for you. But I’m in the mood to confess before I die. And I’ve got a favour to ask you, too. Have another drink with me.’
Fuck it. Why not? It was his house, and his booze. I held out the glass and Covington filled it from the bottle he’d been drinking from. Well, alcohol is meant to be a good disinfectant.
‘How long has it been since your last confession?’ I asked him.
He laughed. ‘A hundred and some years. And I’m Jewish, not Catholic. Born Jewish, anyway: religion never meant very much to me – which is why I had myself burned rather than buried. I didn’t believe in the bodily resurrection. All my life I just did what I had to do to get by, and that never seemed to leave much room for thinking about God. The last time I went to schul was on the day I was bar mitzvah. Three years after that I killed my first man. Probably the one thing had as much to do with growing up as the other did.’
Suddenly the prospect of hearing all this seemed a lot less attractive. ‘So you were a bad man,’ I said. ‘We can take that as read, if you like. Move on to the atonement and the absolution.’
‘I’ve been handling the atonement in my own sweet way, Castor. And for your information, I haven’t started telling you my sins yet. I don’t think any of the men I killed back when I was Aaron Silver had any reason to complain. They would have done the same to me, if I’d given them an opening. One of them did, in the end. Henry Meyer-Lindeman got the drop on me in a whorehouse in Streatham. Actually on the job. Shot me and shot a lady name of Ginny Tester under me. We both died instantly.’
‘And in your end was your beginning.’
Covington grimace
d. ‘Not right away. It was a shock – waking after my own death and finding that I was trapped in Mount Grace. Tied to my own ashes. You never really are, of course. The trap is just your own habits. Your own ways of thinking. But it felt real. It felt as though I’d be spending eternity on that one little plot of ground, and eternity would be a long time passing.
‘But a year later Stephen Kesel died, and he felt the same way about burial as I did. And four years after that it was Rudolf Gough’s turn. And that was critical mass. There was an old janitor who used to live on the site. We took him one night while he was asleep: the three of us, working together. Then we took turns to ride him. We were back in business.
‘The first thing I did was to visit Meyer-Lindeman and pay him back with interest. I liked Ginny Tester a lot: she deserved better than to die in that undignified way. And Steve and Rudy had similar visits to make – good ones and bad ones.
‘But we realised pretty quickly that this went beyond dealing with unfinished business. We also figured out that it wasn’t possible for one of us to betray the others: Steve tried to take off on his own, but he came limping back three days later: the janitor was fighting back, and it took the three of us to whip him into line again.
‘So there we were. We were immortal, but only so long as we stuck together. An immortality collective. Till death us do part, only it never could whether we wanted it to or not.
‘All the rules and refinements came over the next twenty years or so – the years of throwing things against the wall to see whether or not they stuck. Experimentation and refinement. We discovered that the ashes made everything ten times easier, and made the possession stick for longer too. We discovered that night was better than day, particularly for the initial breaking-in of a new body, and that dark of the moon was the best time of all. We turned it into a very streamlined process. Tried and tested. It helped that nobody believed what we were doing was even possible: that meant nobody was on their guard.’
