Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  I stared at the sheet, trying to translate the dense, scribbled marks into sounds inside my mind. They still defeated me. “Show me,” I said.

  Pomfret sucked his teeth. “Easy to say. I need something to be the drums.” He looked around the table. “Okay,” he said, “let’s give it a go.” He took his empty coffee cup and turned it upside down in its saucer. “High hat,” he said. Then he did the same with mine. “Snare.” The sugar basin, a steel cylinder full of sealed packets, he dumped out on the table. The basin itself, upturned, was placed next to the coffee cups. “Bass.” That left two spoons, which he put one inside the other, bowl end toward him. “Cymbals.”

  He demonstrated each item. Flicking the saucers made the coffee cups rattle briefly and hollowly. Thumping the sugar basin made a slightly deeper note. Tapping the spoons made them scrape against each other with a metallic ring. “This is how it starts,” he muttered. Rattle rattle thump rattle rattle ring thump ring. “Then you get a backbeat coming in here like this—just the bass.” Thump rest thump thump rest thump rest thump thump rest. “Okay, and now this. The hand drums. Beat then break. Beat then two breaks. You do that—on the edge of the table.”

  I gave it my best shot, unwillingly at first and feeling like an idiot. The waitress at the counter was looking over at us with something that was either concern or annoyance or maybe a mixture of both. But Pomfret didn’t care—he was listening to some inner voice now, head tilted at a slight angle, gaze flicking from the sheet to empty space and then back again. The beat seemed to be accelerating, or at least Pomfret was playing it faster, his fingers flicking across the table so fast they almost became invisible.

  Amazingly, something was starting to show through. As I whacked the table in crude synchrony with his skein of rattling, clanking sounds, there was a dim sense in my mind of random and disconnected things coming tight, coming together, and making meaning as they came—like the loose strings of a cat’s cradle drawn taut between some child’s fingers. Noise into signal.

  Pomfret seemed less impressed. “No, that’s shit,” he grumbled, stopping abruptly. “The sounds are too similar.” He rotated the bigger of the two coffee cups out of the lineup and replaced it with an empty Coke can from the next table. He tested it out, seemed satisfied with it, tried again and again, built up gradually from slow and steady to fast and furious, as if the rhythm had its own internal logic that dictated an accelerando tempo.

  My rough-and-ready accompaniment became more confident, even though I was reading the sheet music upside down. Actually, I was reading it less and less, because I was starting to see where the rhythm was going and could anticipate what shape my own part of it was meant to take. It was only a beginning, but it was strengthening with every moment that passed. Even though I was well outside my comfort zone, I was glimpsing the weave that John had made: the binding that was the first phase of an exorcism.

  But Pomfret slowed down and stopped. “Look,” he said, tapping the sheet. “He’s adding in extra lines to the stave here. He’s got to have three drummers now—one with a full kit and two with tablas or something. And it all goes crazy, because the new guy is half a beat out from the other two. He’s just driving a bus through the rhythm.”

  “It closes the gap,” I murmured, still hearing the beat inside my head. “It sneaks around behind them and closes the gap. This is incredible. Don’t stop.”

  “I’ve only got two hands,” Pomfret said. He looked at his watch. “And I’ve got to go, anyway. Look, whatever this stuff is, I wouldn’t waste too much time on it if I were you. It’s going to sound like shit, whatever it’s played on. If it’s something Lou put you on to, she’s probably having a joke with you.”

  I came down reluctantly from the one-step-removed-from-reality zone I’d started to float away into. I stood up, gathering the sheet music with care. “It’s no joke,” I assured him. “Thanks for your help. When’s your next gig?”

  Pomfret blinked owlishly behind his oversize spectacles. “Tuesday,” he said. “The Lock Tavern in Chalk Farm.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said. “I want to hear what you’re like when you’re Speedo Plank.”

  I checked out a couple of places where Juliet might have been; talked to a few people who might have seen her; got nowhere, not particularly fast.

  The next few hours were going to be agony. I prowled around central London like a banished ghost looking for somewhere new to haunt. I felt angry and restless, a sour taste in my mouth because even now—having been told where my enemy lived, having had a loaded weapon placed in my hands—I couldn’t act. Couldn’t move until I’d filled in at least some of the blank spaces in my mental map: the spaces that currently read “here be monsters.”

  First and foremost, there was the question of what kind of odds I was facing. How many of the born-again killers would be at Mount Grace, and would I meet them in the flesh or in the spirit? It made a difference. John’s symphony for drums might do what he’d obviously designed it to do, but if the souls of the dead were flying around loose when I walked in through the door, they could probably get to me before I got to them. If they were wearing other men’s bodies, they’d put up a different kind of resistance, but at least I wouldn’t have to worry about being possessed and turned into a meat robot, the way I suspected John had been.

  Then there was the even spikier question of how far this network of the evil dead extended. They owned Mount Grace—owned the Palance estate, effectively, through the trustees who employed Peter Covington and ruled in the name of poor, senile old Lionel. They had their own law firm, for Christ’s sake. There could be dozens or hundreds of them out in the field, wearing the bodies of the rich and famous and wielding their names. That would take a bigger nut than me to crack, if it could be cracked at all.

  That was why I had to go through Ruthven, Todd and Clay before I went back out to Mount Grace. In some ways, it was a lousy idea, but I couldn’t come up with a better one. I had to get hold of Maynard Todd’s files. I had to know how big this was and how deep it went, or all I’d achieve by charging into Mount Grace would be to poke the nest and make sure the wasps came out good and angry.

  So I had to go to Todd’s office, and I couldn’t make my move there until after they closed for the night. In the meantime, all I could do was wait—wondering what Juliet was up to and whether Myriam Kale had added any more notches to her garter belt.

  I did have one more stop on my itinerary, though, and it was welcome in one respect only: because it had nothing at all to do with the mess I’d gotten myself into. It belonged to a different mess, older and, if anything, more intractable.

  I could have taken a taxi to the Charles Stanger clinic, but my pockets were almost empty, and my bank balance was in the last stages of its historic decline. I had to husband my resources. So I took the tube to East Finchley and walked.

  There was good news even before I went through the gates: The sound of rhythmic chanting reached me on Coppetts Road as I walked along the outer fence. I couldn’t make out any words, but chants are chants. On marches and sit-ins and occupations, they all carry the same message, which is a variation on “You won’t move us/stop us/intimidate us/make us cut our hair and wear suits.” So the blockade was still in place, and morale was high. That meant, at the very least, that Jenna-Jane hadn’t managed to get her hands on Rafi so far.

  The Breath of Lifers were clearly there for the duration. They’d put up tents and benders, and they were ambling among them like early arrivals at a rock concert. Some of them were cooking on portable stoves or the little disposable barbecue sets they sell in Sainsbury’s.

  But when I finally located Pen among the happy campers, she looked so tired and so low that I was dismayed. She seemed to be equally shocked when she got her first look at me, but she didn’t ask how my face came to look like a pound of raw chuck steak. The question would have carried too many messages she didn’t want to send.

  “So how’s it all going?” I asked with
forced lightness as we sat together on the crest of a tiny hill away from the main scrum of demonstrators.

  Pen’s shoulders twitched in the merest suggestion of a shrug. “We’ve managed to hold them off so far,” she said. “They almost got him last night, because we weren’t covering the kitchen entrance, where they take food deliveries. It’s got its own car park, and it’s way over on the other side of the building, and we just weren’t thinking.”

  “But you’ve got it covered now?”

  “Oh yeah. We were lucky that the driver was an idiot. He didn’t think to switch off his headlights, so someone saw the van coming, and we got there in time to head them off.” She tugged listlessly at the grass between her feet. “But it’s only a matter of time. They’ve been trying to get a court order telling us to cease and desist. That magistrate up in Barnet—Runcie—he’s bumped it up the docket somehow, and they’re going to get a verdict tomorrow morning. Mulbridge must have slipped him a bribe or something.”

  “Not J-J’s style,” I observed. “She’d much rather put a knife to your windpipe than a tenner in your back pocket. It’s all a matter of nuance.”

  Pen looked at me with glum resentment. “I’m not appreciating the nuances right now, Fix. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s all I can do to keep up with the logistics. Can you spell me? I haven’t slept since the last time I saw you.”

  “Sleep now,” I suggested. “They’re not going to try anything in broad daylight—especially not if they’re expecting the courts to give them a thumbs-up to throw you out tomorrow.”

  She blinked in slow motion, her shadow-rimmed eyes not wanting to open again once she’d let them close. “But you’ll stay,” she pressed, the words forced out of her. “I can’t sleep unless I know someone’s watching. Someone who cares about him.”

  It wasn’t what I wanted to do. I was thinking of the fight I had ahead of me: of Myriam Kale riding Doug Hunter back out into the world when I still hadn’t made a single move against the real enemy—when I didn’t even know who or how many they were, and I wouldn’t begin to find out until I’d raided Maynard Todd’s office and turned over his files. Time wasn’t on my side. It was hard to sit here and feel the odds getting longer.

  But I could see that Pen’s natural resilience had reached its limits. She looked brittle, strained, liable to break in pieces at any moment.

  “I’ll stay,” I said. “Put your head down. I’ll wake you in an hour.”

  As things turned out, I gave her two and some odd minutes. The shadow of the Stanger clinic reached out toward us and then spilled over us while she slept. The Breathers ebbed and flowed, celebrating the oneness of all life on both sides of the grave, with chants and gestures of defiance that nobody except them was listening to.

  “Soul and flesh are friends! Soul and flesh will mend! Death is not the end!”

  I gave them one out of three.

  While I was waiting, I killed the time by looking over the sheet music again, reading it as Jamie/Speedo had told me to, trying to sound the rhythms—the beats and the pauses, the overlaps and elisions—inside my head. I was imagining a tune that you could build to clothe that percussive skeleton; trying to translate a symphony for drums into something else. It was hard work, and it sucked me in hypnotically, taking me out of my flesh into the void where my weird talent operated. I was hardly aware of the passage of time, and it was only when Pen stirred on the grass beside me that I came to myself again—bringing back with me a few more crumbs of possibility, a few more twisted ribbons of not-quite-music. John’s symphony, to a non-drummer, was like a five thousand–piece jigsaw where you had to put in all the pieces in at once by pure guesswork and then see if what you got made any sense.

  “What time is it?” Pen asked muzzily.

  I looked at my watch. “After five,” I said. “How are you feeling? A bit more human?”

  “Like a limp biscuit,” Pen muttered. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. “But go, if you need to. I’ll manage.”

  I wasn’t sure what cues I’d been giving off that told her how much of a hurry I was in to leave. We’d known each other long enough that stuff like that reached the level of telepathy. “Okay,” I said, climbing to my feet. “Hold out for tonight. Tomorrow I’ll be back in force.”

  She stared up at me, shielding her eyes against the setting sun that hung over my shoulder. “If you’re back at all,” she said.

  “I didn’t say that,” I protested.

  “Yes, you did.” She stood up, too, and took a step toward me almost against her will. I thought that she might embrace me; she seemed to bring her arms up in synchrony but then stopped, retreated, folded them instead. “I’ll never forgive you for what you did to Rafi,” she said.

  “I’m not looking for forgiveness, Pen. But if I do, I’ll look elsewhere.”

  “But I don’t want you to kill yourself working some stupid case. Werewolves can eat you. Demons can blind you and rape you and suck out your soul. Almost everything out there is faster than you, and all you’ve got is that stupid whistle. Whatever it is you’ve got it in your head to do, Fix, don’t do it. I can see from here that you don’t think it’s going to work.”

  I mimed a dealer at a blackjack table. It’s a gesture I’ve used on her a lot of times, when she seemed to be trying to give me a tarot reading without her deck in her hands. It always irritates her, and it always pushes her away—which was where I wanted her right then because she was way too close for comfort.

  “Fine, then,” she snapped. “Go and kill yourself. Don’t worry about the shit you’re leaving Rafi in. Let someone else pick up the bill. That’s the default setting, isn’t it?”

  “Reckless hedonism,” I agreed. “Devil take the hindmost.”

  “Which devil, Fix?”

  “Next time I pass by, I’ll bring you a catalog and some color swatches.”

  I walked away quickly, before she could get over the irritation and tackle me from a different direction. I didn’t want to explain any more than I already had, and even more than that, I didn’t want to go into this whole exercise with the feeling that there was another way I was too stupid to see. That just gets you second-guessing yourself, and that just gets you dead. I wanted to live.

  But that’s always been my problem. I set my sights way too high.

  Twenty-two

  STOKE NEWINGTON AFTER DARK: THE LUBOVICH HASSIDIM and the scallies from Manor House wander the streets in feral packs, but I was in a bad enough mood by this time to take on anything I was likely to meet. God was in a bad mood, too—a strong wind was getting up, harrying plastic carrier bags and scraps of paper along the pavements, and the sky was filling up with pregnant clouds.

  The offices of Ruthven, Todd and Clay were in reassuringly total darkness. I circled the outside of the building looking for the likeliest way in, deciding at last to go in from the back and on the first floor. I had my lockpicks with me and could have taken the street door inside of a New York minute, but there was too much chance of being seen by people walking past. I couldn’t afford the time I’d lose in any brush with the forces of the law.

  On the side street behind the office, there was a blind alley full of wheely bins and old fridges, the high walls topped with broken glass set in very old cement. The only door was bolted from the inside rather than locked, but the brickwork on either side of it was old and frost-pitted and offered pretty good purchase. I shinnied up the doorway itself, using footholds in the brickwork where I found them and bracing myself against either side where I didn’t.

  The top of the door was a couple of inches below the top of the frame. I stood on the door, wadded up my coat, and laid it down on the glass. I only had to stand on it for a moment, using it to step across to a shed roof. Then I leaned out and hooked the coat across after me, only a little worse for the wear.

  The coat came into play again almost immediately. I wrapped it around my fist to break a single pane of the window at the other end of the shed and then—wi
th gingerly care—to knock the broken glass out of the frame. It was handy that the building had never been double-glazed, although if it had, I could have dropped down into the yard and tried my luck with the back door. Safely out of view, I could have taken my time.

  As it was, things seemed to be going my way. Even groping around in the dark and at an odd angle, kneeling because the pane was on a level with my knee, I found the window catch almost immediately and was able to lever it open. I slid the window up as far as it would go and climbed inside.

  There was carpet under my feet, but it was too dark for me to see anything of the layout of the room I was in. Fighting the urge to blunder ahead and find my way by feel, I waited for my eyes to get a little more accustomed to the dark. It was just as well I did. As the space around me resolved itself slowly out of shadows into some degree of visibility, I realized that I wasn’t in a room at all. I was in a turn of the stairwell, which was just as narrow as I remembered it. My first step would have pitched me down the stairs on my head.

  Trying to remember the building from my one and only daytime visit, I went up rather than down. I had a rough sense where Todd’s door would be in relation to the stairs, but not how far up it was. The first door opened when I tried the handle, but the layout within was wrong—the desk was over against the far wall instead of under the window. I pulled the door shut behind me and went on up.

  On the next floor, the corresponding door seemed to be locked, but then I noticed with a faint stir of surprise that it was bolted from the outside. I undid the bolt and peered in.

  This time the darkness was absolute, even when I pushed the door wide open. More unsettlingly, the room was emitting a soft bass rumble, almost more vibration than sound. Under the circumstances, there were close on a million good reasons for not turning the light on, but that was what I did. It was almost automatic—groping on the wall to my left to see if there was a switch there and, once I found it, flicking it on.