Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  The front doors of the crematorium opened onto a narrow entrance hall, almost long enough to count as a corridor, whose dark woods and vaulted ceiling confirmed the impression of age I’d gotten outside. Four huge inlaid panels dominated the space, two to either side of the door: a lion and an eagle to the left, an ox and a robed angel to the right. The symbols of the four evangelists. The carpet was royal blue, scuffed pale in places by the passage of many feet.

  Ahead of us was another door. Black-suited men, presumably also hired by Todd, stood on either side of it and nodded respectfully to us as we passed. They looked like bouncers at a nightclub.

  We walked into a large, high-ceilinged room that looked like any church hall anywhere, except for the dumbwaiter-like doors at the far end and the slightly sinister platform placed in front of them—a platform whose surface was a plain of slick, frictionless plastic rollers. I abreact to furnaces, probably because of having to take my dad his lunch a couple of times when he worked behind the ovens in a bread factory. Places like this one always put me in mind of Satan’s locker room.

  The bearers placed the coffin on the platform and stepped back, and at the same time a very short man in a black ecclesiastical robe came out through a curtained doorway off to one side. Todd went forward and had a brief, murmured conversation with him, presumably along the lines of “This is the action replay, but let’s dispense with the slow motion and get it over with.” The man nodded briskly. He had a slender face with a very long, sharp nose that made me think of a fox or a wolf. I’d seen a Japanese ivory once—a tiny figure, barely bigger than the top joint of my thumb—of a fox dressed as a priest, with a long robe and a staff and a pious expression. Maybe it was unfair, because the nose must have been enough of a burden in itself, but this young cleric brought the statuette vividly into my mind.

  Todd had presumably mentioned that Carla didn’t want any prayers said, but the cleric clearly wasn’t happy to let the occasion go by without ruminating on mortality just a little. Force of habit, I figured, although technically, he was wearing a surplice.

  “In the midst of life,” he said, “we are in death.” Two cheers and a thump on the tub for Ecclesiastes. Sitting in the front row, with Carla to my left and Todd to my right, I let my attention wander. Unfortunately, it wandered to the furnace doors, where it found no comfort and shied away again pretty fast.

  I was still feeling tired and rough, worse than I had when I woke up, if anything. The chill in the room was creeping into me, and the half-floral, half-chemical smell was turning my stomach. It didn’t help that beyond the walls, the dead souls were massed thickly, sounding to my overdeveloped senses like a swarm of desert locusts.

  There was another soul here, too: stronger, or at any rate, closer. It hovered around our heads like an invisible cloud, making the lights in the room seem a fraction dimmer. But a cloud suggests something dispersed and diffuse, and this presence was localized. As my gaze panned across the room, it reached the coffin and stopped as if the coffin were a black hole pulling light and matter and everything else in toward it.

  The priest’s voice had taken on a hollow echo. There was an arrhythmical vibration rising behind it like a pulse, and the vibration danced against the surface of my skin, wave after wave, as though looking for a way in.

  Neither Carla nor Todd seemed to be aware of any of this. They were both watching the priest, whose lips were still moving, although I was damned if I could hear a word he was saying. For a moment I wondered if I was just imagining the whole thing—if the nightmare and the lack of sleep were just taking their toll—but then the feeling of general overall pressure narrowed in on the front of my head and intensified into one of actual pain.

  Todd slipped something into my hand, and I found myself staring down dully into a hip flask a little like my own, except this one was slimmer and cased in black leather. Reflexively, I raised it to my lips and took a hit. The liquor was very potent and very bitter, and it took a real effort not to gag. I passed the flask back to Todd, and he slid it away into some recess of his suit where it didn’t spoil the hang.

  The priest pressed a switch on the catafalque, and the coffin moved forward on its rollers. The waves of pressure in my skull built to a new crescendo as John Gittings’s body trundled toward the double doors like a very short wagon train rolling over black plastic prairie. The doors slid open on either side to receive him into the furnace beyond.

  The pain was so intense that I actually gasped. It was as if John had thrown out an invisible grapnel, trying to keep a purchase in this world, and one of the flukes had embedded itself in my skull.

  Carla looked around at me in surprise. She put a hand on my arm, but I waved it away. I had to get out. As casually as I could, I lurched to my feet and stepped out into the aisle. I was heading for the door, but suddenly, I wasn’t even sure which way the door was. Instinctively, I walked away from the force that was pulling on me so hard—away from the coffin, half convinced that I was dragging it along behind me like a sheet anchor. The sensation of weight, of resistance, was so palpable.

  The doors loomed into my field of vision, and I took another step toward them. Carla was on her feet at my side, and Todd, too. Hot air that must have been entirely imaginary billowed across my back. The hook bit deeper, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t move at all now; couldn’t make myself walk forward, because a force as unanswerable as gravity was pulling me back toward that hot mouth behind me, pulling me back and down into the dark.

  Someone shouted a name, a single syllable. My name? Possibly. I wouldn’t have wanted to be categorical on that subject right then, because I didn’t seem to have a name of my own, only a vague sense of a space that was me and a space that was everything else. And the oven’s searing heat was making the space that was me shrink away like the film of breath you leave on a windowpane.

  Then the doors ahead of me were thrown open, and something miraculously beautiful filled my sight. It was Juliet. Vivid, ineffable, irreducible Juliet, a bookmark in the stodgy, samey script of the world that always let you find your place. I fell into her arms like a drowning man, aware even through the sweltering ruck inside my head of her strength, the incredible ease with which she took my weight. The last thing I saw as the red of the furnace rose before my eyes was her face staring down into mine, a little surprised.

  She said something too long and complicated for me to catch, but I was pretty sure that my name was in there somewhere.

  Castor. Yeah, of course. I knew that.

  Voices came toward me across a fractal landscape of synesthetically throbbing shadow. They were raised in argument.

  Todd telling Juliet that this was a private ceremony and she couldn’t just walk in off the street and interrupt it.

  Juliet telling Todd in a calm and neutral tone that if he didn’t step way back out of her face, he was likely to lose some internal organ that he couldn’t do without. No more from Todd after that.

  The foxy priest asking if everyone would please, please sit down again so the cremation could continue. Juliet telling him that he could go ahead and burn whomever he liked, she hadn’t come along to watch.

  Carla asking Juliet who in the hell she was, and Juliet saying it was funny she should ask.

  I must have been out for all of ten seconds. Ten seconds was more than enough, though, if Juliet was in a sour mood. It was lucky for all of us—and probably for Todd most of all—that she’d gotten out of the right side of Susan Book’s bed this morning.

  I was lying on the ground, though, and that was a bad sign. If she’d put me down to free up her hands, things could be about to escalate. I started to sit up, my stomach lurching slightly as gravity sloshed around me like cooling soup.

  “Fix, are you all right?” Carla knelt beside me and supported me as I tried to get my upper body vertical.

  “I’m fine, Carla,” I said, and it was true that the blood-red haze was fading out to the corners of my eyes. I could think again without feeling
as though my brain were about to explode out of my ears like Silly String. It was obvious I could think, because I was doing it: I was thinking about Juliet’s legs, which were on a level with my face. Juliet’s legs are long and shapely, and they deserve are a lot of very serious thought—especially when, as now, they were encased in tight black leather pants and stiletto-heeled boots. But it wouldn’t help restore dignity to the proceedings if I started howling like a wolf.

  I stood up, taking in the rest of her outfit only in peripheral vision. More blacks—her favorite color, and she goes for every possible shade of it. Her arms and shoulders were bare because her shirt was really only a vest, made out of something almost diaphanous that allowed you to guess at the shape of the body underneath it. Sometimes, with Juliet, even peripheral vision was too much.

  Todd was taking her in stride, which was an impressive feat. Her threat to eviscerate him had made him stop talking, but he was staring at her with a cold composure that I still haven’t managed to master. Maybe lawyers are wired differently from the rest of us.

  “Mr. Castor,” he said, “is this a friend of yours?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Juliet, this is Carla Gittings, John’s widow. And Maynard Todd. John’s solicitor. Both of you, Juliet Salazar, my—associate.”

  She gave each of them a glance that you could only call minimal. “You left a message with Sue,” she said to me. “Something you wanted to ask me about.”

  “Yeah, but—” I was about to ask how she’d found me here, but I realized before I got the question out that it was like asking a dog how it had found a bone it had once buried. Juliet was a predator, and she had my scent—she could find me anytime, anywhere, without the benefit of my number, my address, or my permission. “I meant… afterward,” I finished lamely, conscious of the little priest looking at me with bristling resentment. “Could you wait for me outside? I’ll just be another ten minutes or so.”

  Juliet considered, then nodded. “Ten minutes,” she agreed, and she turned and walked out without another word. Again, Juliet walking out stayed in your mind for a long time after you’d seen it, but I wouldn’t want to give you the impression that I’m obsessive in any way: It’s a side effect of what she is, that’s all. I tore my eyes away, apologized to Carla, and discovered with wry amusement that she was still staring at Juliet’s departing back.

  The bride forgets it is her marriage morn;

  The bridegroom too forgets as I go by.

  But this wasn’t a wedding, it was a funeral, and I’d disrupted it more than enough. We went back to our seats. I looked across at the coffin, and listened, too—listened on the frequencies that the living don’t use all that much. Nothing. The dead still kept up their cricket-chirping from the garden of remembrance, but from John, there wasn’t so much as a tinker’s fart. I had my answer now, at any rate: John’s vengeful ghost had anchored itself in his flesh again and come along with us for the ride. But if I’d been hoping that falling in with his plans for the afterlife would sweeten his disposition, it looked as though I’d been mistaken.

  On the credit side, that last attack, if it was an attack, had spent him. As the priest pressed the switch, John Gittings rolled in his sustainable hardwood casket through the furnace doors into eternity without valediction. What happened next would be a combination of the banal and the unknowable. His body would burn; the rest of him would start out on a different journey, and there were no maps or roadside services. I was obscurely sorry that my last goodbye to him had taken the form of a psychic wrestling match. Even sorrier, maybe, that he’d had me on the ropes.

  When it was all over, I asked Carla if she’d be okay going back without me. She was easy on that score, because she’d already decided to cut loose and take a cab. She found a little of Todd’s company went a long way, and it didn’t help at all to know that he was going out of his way to be friendly. From her point of view, he’d still played a major part in the nightmare of the last few days, and he stuck in her craw no matter what.

  I gave her a hug, promised to be back in touch the next day to see how she was, and headed for the door. Todd ran an intercept, and I stopped because otherwise I’d have had to trample him. He gave me a firm handshake and a hard, speculative glance.

  “Thanks for all your help, Mr. Castor,” he said.

  “My pleasure.”

  “You feeling okay now?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Nervous condition?”

  “Something like that.” I pushed on past him. I liked the man well enough, but I wasn’t interested in talking about it right then.

  Juliet was leaning against the wall in between the Lion of Saint Mark and the Eagle of Saint John, looking like the odd one out in a police lineup. She checked her watch meaningfully as I appeared. It was kind of cute. It wasn’t like she gives a damn about time in the days, hours, and minutes sense, but it was exactly the sort of human mannerism that fascinated her—and watching her reproducing it was like hearing someone talk in a sexy foreign accent.

  “Pushed for time?” I asked.

  “I’ve got other places to be, yes,” she confirmed, kicking off from the wall and falling in beside me. “I came all the way over here because Sue said you sounded worried. She thought it might be something urgent. If it’s not, just tell me. I’ll go back to where I belong, and you can send me a letter.”

  “Where you belong?” I raised an eyebrow. That’s something of a loaded proposition when you’re an earthbound demon.

  “You know what I mean.”

  We walked down the steps and out into bright, clear winter sunlight. The clouds had rolled away while we were inside, and the day had taken on an entirely different cast. I welcomed it with something like relief.

  “It’s about a crime scene you read for Gary Coldwood,” I said as we walked down the curved drive back toward the street. Silence from the gardens. The dead were in communion, maybe welcoming a newbie into their hallowed ranks.

  “Alastair Barnard,” Juliet said.

  “Lucky guess.”

  “Gary called me. He said you were taking an interest in the case, and he reminded me that I’d signed a confidentiality agreement with the Met when I took their retainer.”

  “Good money?”

  “You did it for three years, Castor. I assume that’s a rhetorical question.”

  “So he told you not to talk to me?”

  “Not in so many words. But he’s concerned about doing things by the book. He has a past association with you, and you’ve taken on a commission from somebody—the accused man’s wife?—who has a real interest in sabotaging his case. He doesn’t want to make life difficult for you, but he doesn’t trust you overmuch.”

  I laughed at that. “He’s right not to,” I admitted. “But I like the delicate nuances there. He’s saying that he could make life hard for me if he wanted to.”

  Juliet shrugged. “He’s a policeman.”

  “Say ‘cop,’” I suggested.

  “Why?”

  “Just say it. For me.”

  “All right. He’s a cop.”

  “Better. It’s like looking at your watch when you want to say you’re in a hurry. It sounds more authentic.”

  She shot me a sardonic glance. “Thank you, Castor.”

  “It’s my pleasure.”

  We came out through the gates onto the street, the noise from the building site making further talk impossible for a few moments. As we turned right and back up toward the main drag, a very tall and very lean man in a full-length tan Driza-Bone coat walked right in between us. Juliet kept on going, but I swerved to avoid a collision and was struck by the guy’s pungent smell, which sat oddly with the way he looked and walked.

  I went on a few more steps, then stopped dead. Something about both the smell and the circumstances triggered a small avalanche in my memory: the tramp who’d accosted me on the street outside Todd’s office. He’d looked very different, but he had the same rancid sweat-and-sickness stink about
him. There couldn’t be two smells that bad in the world: They’d have to meet and fight it out to the death.

  I turned and looked back, but the guy was already out of sight, which was interesting, because the only place he could have gone was in through the crematorium gates. As Juliet stared at me, bewildered, I sprinted back the way we’d come, rounded the nearer gatepost, and stared up the long, clear drive. There was no one in sight.

  “Did you leave something behind?” Juliet asked.

  I shook my head as I went back to join her. “Nothing I need right now,” I said. “It’ll keep. Okay, you already did pretending that you’re worried about the time. You want to go pretend you need to eat?”

  She nodded. “Certainly.” She put her hand in her pocket and drew it out with something small and dark glinting between her fingers. She pressed it with her thumb, and the car that was standing beside her on the pavement—a very jaunty-looking little number that was wasp yellow and sleek and elongated at the front end in a way that suggested a great amount of discreetly stabled horsepower—made a self-satisfied warbling sound. Juliet opened the door. “Get in,” she said.

  I stared incredulously at this transport of delight. I’m not a car fetishist by any means, but I know something way out of my price range when I see it. The badge on the hood bore the distinctive trident logo of Maserati—a sweet little touch for a demon’s wheels. It had a very low center of gravity, the sculpted cowling underneath the front bumper almost touching the road. It had the look of a car that might have Gransport in its name, and maybe Spyder, too.

  “Is there something wrong, Castor?” Juliet asked with an edge of impatience.

  “No,” I assured her. “No, I’m fine. It’s just—you can drive now?”

  “Obviously. I’ve been living among human beings for over a year. I’m not intimidated by your technologies.”