Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  But Susan couldn’t. She forgot what she’d been saying, tried to start again, floundered into silence. For the first time in many, many months, I felt sorry enough for her to forget how much I envied her. I changed the subject by main force, swiveling it back around in the direction of shoptalk, and ended up regaling both of them with some of my favorite ghost stories. Most had happened to other people, not me, but I stretched the truth to pretty good effect. The moment passed. The tears that I’d seen in Sue Book’s eyes never actually fell.

  “Moloch said I should go to the source,” I told Juliet when I was a fair way into my fourth glass of Glen acetone.

  “Did he?” Juliet’s tone sounded hard and cold. But when Susan topped up her glass, she reached out to touch her hand for a moment: a very delicate touch, expressing both affection and something a little more proprietorial. After what had passed between them earlier, it was a healing touch—or something close. “And did he say what he meant by that?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I admitted. “He didn’t. But I’ve got some ideas of my own. Have you got anything tomorrow afternoon?”

  “No. Why?”

  “There’s something happening in the morning over in Muswell Hill—something I want to be around for. But I’m free after that, and I was wondering how you’d feel about leaning on some people while I ask them a whole bunch of leading questions.”

  “Which people?”

  “I’ll know when I see them,” I said evasively.

  Juliet rolled her eyes. “Where?” she demanded. “Where do they live?”

  I swirled the brandy in my glass, studiously avoiding her eyes. “Alabama,” I said.

  Fifteen

  IT MAY DENT MY IMAGE OF MACHO, GUNG HO CAPABILITY to say this, but the next morning I felt rough. I’d stayed at Juliet’s long enough to work out the logistics of where we were going to go and who we were going to see, and then I’d made some calls before she could change her mind: one to a travel agent to book a couple of cheap tickets to Birmingham, Alabama, and another to Nicky to tell him what was up and ask if he could work out an itinerary for us. He said he wanted to talk to me before I left, but that was all he’d say.

  A third call, to Gary Coldwood, got me his answering machine. “What does something juicy mean?” I asked it, and hung up.

  I had one last errand to run before I could limp off home, and I’d managed to get it done with the minimum of fuss even though it involved a certain amount of blackmail—both the emotional kind and the kind that’s a felony.

  When the alarm woke me at seven, I felt like my brain had been melted, decanted through a pipette, and left to stand in the petri dish of my skull until it congealed again. The only thing that could possibly have gotten me out of bed was the thought of what was going down at the Stanger this morning—and the knowledge that I had to be there to make sure it went down my way rather than Jenna-Jane’s.

  The Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill was never designed for its current usage. It was originally a set of Victorian workmen’s cottages before it was converted to a residential and holding facility for the violently disturbed after the former owner—the eponymous Charles Stanger, an enthusiastic psychopath in his own right—bequeathed them to the crown. The interiors were gutted and replaced with ugly, functional cells, and a much larger annex was built on as demand grew. It seems that lunatics, like ghosts, are one of the growth industries of the early-twenty-first century.

  But Rafael Ditko isn’t a lunatic; he is just someone for whom the criminal justice and psychiatric care systems have no other label that fit. After all, he does hear a little voice inside his head, telling him what to do: the voice of the demon Asmodeus, who took up residence about four years ago and—thanks largely to me—has never gone home again.

  It was almost eight when I got to the Stanger, which I hoped would still put me ahead of Jenna-Jane’s agenda. I nodded to the nurse at the reception desk, relieved to see that it was Lily. She’d known both me and Webb long enough to have no illusions about the score, and she nodded me through without asking me to sign the visitors’ book.

  One of the male nurses, Paul, who knew I was coming (another late-night call) was waiting for me outside Rafi’s cell. I gestured a question at him, thumb up and then down.

  He shrugged massively. “He’s quiet,” he said. “Kind of. Had a rowdy night, and I guess he’s resting now. Still wide awake, though.” He was unlocking the door as he spoke, but he paused with his hand on the handle to look me full in the eye. “You’re not gonna like what they’ve done to him,” he warned me. “Try to keep your cool, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He swung the door open, and I stepped in, announcing my arrival with an echoing clang because the floor inside Rafi’s cell is bare metal: steel, mostly, but with a lot of silver in the mix, too. I know because I paid for it to be installed—cost a small fortune, but worth it because for at least some of the time, it keeps Rafi’s passenger from getting too frisky.

  Friskiness didn’t seem to be an issue right now. In preparation for transit, Webb had Rafi trussed up tighter than a Christmas turkey.

  They’d built—or perhaps Jenna-Jane had supplied—a massive steel frame, about seven feet high by four feet wide, standing on three sets of wheels like a mobile dress rack. The resemblance didn’t end there, either: Rafi was hanging inside this construction in an all-over-body straitjacket fitted with a dozen or more steel hoops to which lengths of elasticated cable had been attached. Like a spider trussed in his own web, he dangled at the center of the frame on a slight diagonal, his face the only part of him that was visible. I would have expected that face to be livid with demonic rage, but it was a near-perfect blank, the eyes—all pupil, no white—staring at me and through me.

  “OPG?” I asked Paul.

  “Yeah.”

  “Inhaled or injected?”

  “Both.”

  “Bastards.” I could smell the stuff in the air, although it was the propellants rather than the gas itself that I was smelling. OPG itself is too volatile to linger for longer than a couple of seconds after it’s been used. It was produced as a weapon—a nerve toxin derived from the less potent Tabun—but was banned for military use decades ago. You could still use it on the mentally ill, though, because of a sweet little legal loophole. In tiny, almost homeopathic amounts, it had been proved to slow the onset of Alzheimer’s and to have a sedative effect on manic patients. I was willing to bet that the amounts we were talking about were more in the bulk-haulage range.

  “I’m gonna leave you to it,” Paul said. “And if anyone asks, I’m gonna lie and say I never saw you. Sorry, Castor. Bastards they are, but for now I still work here. We’re meant to be wheeling him out to the front in a few minutes, so you’d best keep it short.” He stepped out and pulled the door almost shut behind him.

  “Hey, Castor,” said Rafi, his voice crystal-clear despite the zoned-out stare.

  “Hey, Rafi,” I answered, giving him the benefit of the doubt until I could be sure. I came in a little closer, but not too close. I wasn’t sure how much give there was in those elastic straps. “Asmodeus in there, too?”

  “Yeah, he’s here. He’s not happy with you.”

  “I bet. Can I have a word?”

  There was a long silence. I waited it out, knowing from past experience that there was no way of rushing this. Asmodeus rose or fell under his own steam and at his own pace, and the massive OPG hit, whimsically cross-connecting the circuitry of Rafi’s nervous system, wouldn’t help much, either. But slow ripples began to pass across Rafi’s face, each one leaving it subtly altered. The effect was slow enough that you could convince yourself it was an optical illusion, but it didn’t much matter how you rationalized it. After half a minute or so, the fact was, you were looking at a different face.

  The new face, wearing Rafi’s features like a savagely ironic quote, stared at me with a sour grimace twisting one corner of its mouth.

  “Can’t hear the cava
lry,” Asmodeus said, sounding like he was crunching down on a mouthful of ground glass.

  “They’re coming,” I answered with more confidence than I felt. “In the meantime, I was going to ask a favor.”

  “I love doing you favors, Castor. Come in a little closer. Kiss me on the lips.”

  “I want you to burrow down as deep as you can. Go all the way to sleep if you can. I’ll play for you: Listen to the music instead of trying to avoid it. Let it work through you, and use it to get as much distance from Rafi as you can.”

  Asmodeus smiled politely. “And why should I do this thing?”

  “Because someone who looks like one of my species but acts like one of yours is coming to get you. And she’ll pick you to pieces with tweezers, and she’ll mount you on slides, and she’ll label all the pieces of you. You know this is true.”

  There was silence except for the punctured-tire hissing of Asmodeus’s breath. “The bitch,” he said at last, without heat. “The bitch with the fishing rod and the big ambitions. When she hits the wall, it will make a very sweet sound.”

  “Maybe,” I allowed. “Maybe not. She’s a crafty player, Asmodeus, and too fucking big for you right now.”

  “And for you, Castor.”

  “Goes without saying.” Knowing what Asmodeus was, I felt seriously uncomfortable with all of this—almost, as if the phrase had any meaning at all, like a species traitor. I was discussing tactics with a demon, trying to keep him out of the hands of the closest thing the human race had to a predator of demons. This was what Jenna-Jane Mulbridge had brought me to, and at that moment I hated her for it.

  “The people outside need to see Rafi,” I said, taking my whistle—it was the first alternate, and I hadn’t properly worn it in yet—out of my pocket. “They don’t need to see you. If they see you, they’ll think she’s right. You understand?”

  “Humans can’t think, Castor. They can only think that they think.”

  “Point stands. Maybe I’ll see you later, but I sure as fuck don’t want to see you now. And I’ve said all I’m going to say.”

  I stopped talking and played. It started out as a recognizable tune but then became a crazy medley, fast at first but decelerando, working down through the scale with a certain doleful urgency. Asmodeus bobbed his head in time with the beat, ironically showing me that he was keeping up. He sang improvised words in a guttural language that the human voice box was never shaped for, and I hoped I’d never meet anyone who could provide me with a translation.

  But his eyes were closing, and his voice was faltering. His head dropped out of sync with the music, then slowed and stopped. When the door finally swung open behind me, he was still.

  “Got to move the patient,” Paul said brusquely.

  I turned around, tucking the whistle back in my coat. Paul wasn’t alone; a Welsh guy named Kenneth and a third Stanger staffer whom I didn’t recognize stood shoulder to shoulder with him on either side, while farther back I could see Dr. Webb, the Stanger’s director, directing proceedings along with a bald, austere stick figure of a man in a dark gray suit. Paul’s face was impassive; he barely even looked at me. Webb, on the other hand, was dismayed and outraged to see me there ahead of him.

  “Castor!” he exclaimed, spitting out my name in much the same way a cat spits up a hairball. “Who let Castor in here? He’s trespassing! Move him aside!”

  “Sorry,” I said, stepping determinedly into the path of the little party as they came forward. “Got to move the patient where, exactly? Who says? What are you talking about? I’m the patient’s next of kin, so why don’t I know about this?”

  “You’re not his next of kin!” Webb snarled. He snapped his fingers under Kenneth’s nose and pointed at me imperiously. While the stick man was still talking at me, Kenneth put a hand on my chest and pushed me firmly to one side, allowing Paul and the other male nurse to walk past me and take either end of the metal frame. They maneuvered it so that they could wheel it end-on through the door, but I wasn’t done yet. I ducked under Kenneth’s hand, crossed to the door, and slammed it shut. The mortise lock clicked home, which meant that Paul would have to leave off what he was doing, get his keys out, and open it again. And that meant he had to come through me.

  Webb bought me another few seconds, obligingly. Turning three shades south of purple, he stalked toward me, then stood in front of me with his clenched fists hovering an inch from my face, paralyzed by an approach-avoidance conflict so painfully visible that I couldn’t look away. He wanted to hit me; he knew there were witnesses. But he wanted to hit me—but then there were those darn witnesses…

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the room at large, “but I’m performing a citizen’s arrest.”

  Kenneth looked pained as he advanced on me again, having to step around the good doctor. “You’re performing a what, my lovely?” he demanded.

  “A citizen’s arrest. I’m arresting all five of you for the attempted abduction of a mentally ill person against his—” Kenneth clamped a massive hand on my lapel. I swatted his hand vigorously away. He came back with both hands, and although I parried again, he managed to get a better grip this time and keep his purchase.

  He outweighed me by a good fifty pounds. I could have taken him, but only by playing dirty, and getting myself banged up for assault at this stage of the game wasn’t a risk I could take. I let him pull me aside and pin me into a corner of the cell while Paul got the door open and he and his colleague manhandled the massive steel frame through it, hindered rather than helped by Webb’s unnecessary instructions and ubiquitous presence. “To the right, Paul. No, to the left—”

  “Mind your feet, Dr. Webb,” Paul rumbled, and then there was an agonized yelp from Webb that did my heart good. But they were out in the corridor and picking up speed. My delaying tactics had foundered.

  “Okay, boyo, you just stay put,” Kenneth growled, wagging his finger sternly in my face. But as he turned to follow the others, I shouldered past him and got to the door first.

  We trotted along the corridor in a strange and unwieldy procession. Paul and the other nurse pushing the frame along after Dr. Webb, the ugliest drum majorette in history, flanked on one side by Jenna-Jane’s tame lawyer and on the other by me, with Kenneth bringing up the rear.

  When we got to the reception area, they faltered to a stop, staring out through the double doors onto the small apron of the Stanger’s front drive. In theory, I knew, there should have been a van waiting there, its back doors open and a ramp in place, with a happy crew of psychiatric interns and burly removal men all ready to take Rafi aboard and whisk him away to his new life in Paddington.

  The van wasn’t there, though. Presumably, it was still out on the road, or stranded at the Stanger’s gates. Meanwhile, the drive had been colonized by three or four hundred young men and women who were singing “You can’t kill the spirit” with as much wild energy as if they knew what they were talking about. They were mostly in casual dress, but black T-shirts dominated, and on a lot of them, I could pick out the slogan DEATH IS NOT THE END.

  “Holy fuck,” Paul muttered under his breath.

  “What?” Webb demanded, words seeming to fail him for a moment. “Who are all these people?”

  “Mostly the local chapter of the Breath of Life movement,” I told him helpfully, relieved that they’d all made it on time. “I met some of them a couple of days ago. Really nice guys once we got past the small talk and the mutual fear and loathing. They were fascinated when I told them what you and J-J were up to.” I didn’t mention the frightener I’d had to put on Stephen Bass—threatening to tell his tutors and the police about his hobbies of vandalism, stalking, and criminal damage—before I could get him to agree to this. That seemed to fall under the heading of a trade secret. “Oh, and I think those guys over there,” I went on, “are from a national TV network. You see the letters on the side of the camera? They stand for Beaten, Butt-fucked, and Clueless, and they’re talking to you.”

  Web
b shot me a look of horrified disbelief and opened his mouth to speak. But his words were lost to posterity, because at that moment the double doors of the Stanger swished open and Pen strode across the threshold, bang on cue.

  “Where’s my husband?” she demanded, projecting beautifully for the cameras and standing dead center between the doors so they slid impotently back and forth on their tracks, unable to close on her. “What have you done with my husband, you bastards? I want him back!”

  Webb blinked, his jaw dropping. He turned to face Pen, at bay, and took a step toward her, but then he stopped as flashbulbs popped out on the drive—one, two, then a whole cluster all at once. The paparazzi were moving into position on either side of the doors so that they could enfilade anyone coming out from a variety of photogenic angles.

  “Miss Bruckner!” Webb struggled with the polite form of words, forcing them out through clenched teeth. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You and Ditko aren’t married. You don’t even—”

  “He’s my common-law husband!” Pen shouted. “We’re married in the sight of God! And I’m not letting you put him in a concentration camp!”

  Webb was struggling to make any sound at all, his complexion getting darker and more alarming by the second. “The—the MOU in Padddington is not a—a—”

  “Oh, look what they’ve done to him!” Pen wailed, pointing at the frame and Rafi’s glum, limp form hanging in the center of it. “He’s not a criminal! He’s not a monster! Why are they torturing him?”

  “Rights for the dead and the undead!” Stephen Bass bellowed from the front ranks of the Breathers. “Soul and flesh are friends! Soul and flesh will mend! Death is not the end!” The chant was taken up by his undisciplined but enthusiastic cohorts. It didn’t mean a damn thing, as far as I was aware, but it sounded great.