Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  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 favor: 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 toward 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 backward 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 one another 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, he 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 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 by 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, and the mouths were closing one by one. If there were 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 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 backward through the air and hit the wall with a sack-of-meat thud.

  “Oh, those are just stories,” Moloch snarled. “I’m not even sure I could get it up with a raddled piece of flesh 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 swiveled 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, looked into her face almost tenderly. “And the woman you live with,” he said. “I’ll keep her as a pet for a little while. Until she start
s 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.”

  He raised her 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 adrenaline. 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 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: It 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 gut. I held it as long as I could.

  Then let the rhythm blade unfold like the spokes of an umbrella inside the demon’s rancid, pulpy heart.

  Moloch stiffened, 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.

  Twenty-five

  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 streetlights 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 and glanced at Juliet lying across the backseat, 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 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 forever. 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, 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, looked calmly into my eyes. “And now you’ve come for me.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Fancy a whiskey?”

  “Pretty much.”

  He 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 recognize, held it up for my approval. I nodded.

  “ ‘Bartender, give me two fingers of red-eye,’ ” he quoted. He mimed the ancient joke, poking his fingers toward but not into my eyes. I didn’t laugh. I wasn’t in the mood, somehow.

  He set out two glasses, poured a generous measure into one. Then he looked at the bottle, thought better of it, and took tha
t, 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 whiskey. He didn’t even shudder, although God knew it wasn’t smooth.

  “You called me Aaron,” he observed, running his tongue across his lips.

  “You’d prefer I called you Peter?”

  He 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 whiskey 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 hadn’t been any one moment when the lightbulb 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 backup, 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 leaned 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?”