Dead Men's s Boots

14

The gospel according to Castor, chapter 1, verse 1: when in doubt, duck.

I threw myself forward into the debris and something went over my head fast enough so that I felt the wind of its passing.

I landed heavily on splintered wood and broken glass, cutting my hands as I threw them out in front of me to break my fall. There was a rending crash as my attacker made his own involuntary touchdown away to my right. Then I rolled, coming up on one knee to bring my whistle to my lips and blow a shrieking discord.

It was a place marker, really, nothing more than that: I didn’t know this were-thing well enough yet to play a tailor-made tune just for him. But loup-garous are more vulnerable than ghosts and demons in one respect, precisely because they’re composites: human souls holding animal flesh in an immaterial full nelson. All you need to do to weaken them is to slide a crowbar between the human and the animal and start working it loose.

That is, assuming they’ll sit still and let you.

The unseen thing I was fighting roared, basso profundo, and the floor shook: or maybe that was just me. There was a swirl of motion and a scrabbling as of claws on polished wood.

I was planning to duck again, but I didn’t get that far: something very solid made contact with my left shoulder, knocking me sprawling and sending the whistle flying out of my hands into the dark.

I would have used my momentum to roll, getting some distance away from the thing, but some overturned piece of furniture was right behind me. I hit it hard, went arse over tip and came down head first on the far side of it. What with the odd angle and the force of the impact, I couldn’t stop my head from hitting the floor hard. Lights danced behind my eyes, and I fought against unconsciousness with fierce desperation – because if I blacked out, even for a second, this was over.

I groped in the blackness for a weapon, knowing that I wasn’t going to find one that would work: knowing that I’d need luck, light and back-up to make a dent in this thing, and that none of them were likely to come my way.

But something came to hand: something rounded, with the texture of wood. The leg of a chair or a desk, maybe. Whatever it was, it was all I had, and it’s a poor workman who picks a fight with his tools. I heard that scrabbling sound again, from right in front of me, as my unseen assailant scaled whatever it was I’d fallen over. I made myself wait for an agonising second and then brought my makeshift club up with all the strength I had left, two-handed, with a silent prayer that the thing would be jumping down on me as the club came up. Its own speed and weight would give the blow a lot more heft than I could right then.

The shock jarred my arms right up to the shoulder. Something went crunch, and then the thing bellowed in agony even as its weight came down on me. I felt claws pierce my shoulder and I yelled too, kicking and rolling to try to get out from under it before it recovered from the pain and the shock.

No dice. I managed to lever my upper body a few inches up off the ground, but then the claws tightened, sending bolts of agony into my captive flesh, and hot stinking breath played over my face like a flameless blowtorch. I threw my head back, heedless of concussion now, and the jaws clashed above me close enough for me to hear the sound. Something warm and wet showered over my face – but at least it wasn’t bits of me.

Out of options, running on pure instinct, I rammed my stick into the place where that mouth had to be, and was rewarded with another shuddering impact. No bellow of rage this time: it’s hard to make with the primal screams with a five-pound toothpick lodged in your gullet. I kicked and flailed and pulled myself out from under, pulling myself off those clutching claws and trying not to think how much of my own precious skin I was leaving there.

It wouldn’t stay down: I knew damn well it wouldn’t. I’d hurt it, and I’d given it something to think about besides me, but this wasn’t a fight I could win: not without my whistle and a fair bit more lead time than the couple of seconds I probably had.

My eyes were starting to adjust to the dark now, at least a little, and I could see the crazy diagonal of the unhinged door up ahead of me. I half-ran, half-staggered towards it: at the very least, if this bastard followed me I’d be leading him away from Smeet and giving her a fighting chance.

I made it out onto the landing, but my head was still reeling a little from the whack it had taken earlier, and I almost fell down the stairwell before I could skid to a halt and orient myself. Down or up? No contest. If I went up I’d be cornered as soon as I ran out of stairs. At the bottom there was the street, and a slim but measurable chance of getting out of this.

What happened next was kind of a mixed blessing. The loup-garou came cannoning out of the door right behind me and hit me squarely in the back with its full weight, sending me tumbling down the stairwell head over heels. It meant I got to where I wanted to go a whole lot faster: unfortunately, it also meant that I reached the bottom in a sprawling heap, one arm twisted painfully under me: all breath had been slammed out of my lungs on the second or third bounce, so all I could do was lie there, sucking in air in a shuddering, drawn-out gasp.

By a happy chance I fetched up on my back, looking back the way I’d come, so I got to see the thing that was about to kill me for the first time in the light from the street outside. Despite its impressive size, the loup-garou padded down the stairs with an incongruous daintiness, slow at first but accelerating because the stairs were steep and built for two legs rather than four. It was sleek and black – or maybe some dark shade that just looked black in the inadequate light – and it had the basic shape of a panther: more mass in the shoulders and forelegs than in the back, claws as long as the blades of Swiss Army knives, and with a tendency to carry its weight close to the ground. The head was more eclectic, though: the mouth was too wide, and studded with too many different kinds of teeth, to be convincingly cat-like. And the forehead was high, like a human forehead, like the dim memory of a human face stirring behind the bestial shape.

Just for a second, in the near-dark, it reminded me of a face I’d seen before.

When it got halfway down the flight of stairs it launched itself into the air in a graceful, almost lazy leap that would land it right on top of me. Unable to muster enough strength to move I tensed, balling my fists uselessly for a fight that wasn’t going to happen. If the impact didn’t kill me, those claws would – and either way I wouldn’t get to express an opinion about it.

But the loup-garou’s leap ended prematurely as something came streaking in out of the night, jumped and met it in mid-air.

The new something was a whole lot smaller: the loup-garou massed around four hundred pounds and it had gravity on its side. Logically it should have kept on going, the interloper smacking uselessly into it and being brought down by its superior weight and momentum.

Instead the two of them seemed to hang impossibly in space for a moment, all that downward energy cancelled out by some arcane counter-force: then they both crashed together through the delicate balcony rails and came to the ground in a spitting, snarling heap five yards away from me.

The newcomer was a man: long-limbed, lean, cadaverous, and dressed in a full-length coat that had looked momentarily like wings as he made his jump. The loup-garou’s claws raked him, shredding his clothes and laying bare white flesh, red meat, but he paid them no heed. His own blows fell sledgehammer-hard, sledgehammer-heavy, so that I could hear the impact, and the were-thing spat and snarled as it struggled under him.

Yeah, I said under him. He’d managed to come down on top, somehow, and he was taking full advantage of the position. A scything claw opened up his throat but he still laughed, a liquid, musical gurgle, as blood fountained from the wound. And his fists kept rising and falling like pistons, threshing the flesh of the loup-garou, smacking and splintering, breaking and entering.

Under that relentless rain, something grotesque and unexpected happened. The loup-garou started to fracture and fall apart, its flesh sagging and separating, its human form melting away. Its head rolled free from its shoulders, sprouted legs and fled away, miraculously transformed into a huge black tom cat. Cats clawed their way free from its huge shoulders, its splayed legs, its broken back, and they scattered in all directions. Once again I felt the shiver of déjà vu.

The skeletal man caught some of the cats as they ran and twisted them in his hands with malicious glee until they broke and bled. He held them over his head so that the blood rained down into his mouth. He was still laughing, his head tilted back in manic joy. Most of the cats got away, but half a dozen or so ended their lives in pieces in those slender-fingered, impossibly strong hands.

And suddenly it was over. The man tossed the last dead animal to the ground, staring down at it with something like regret, and bared long brown teeth in a skull-like grimace.

It was the tramp: or rather, it was the man I’d met as a tramp outside Maynard Todd’s office and then in a somewhat more respectable guise at the Mount Grace crematorium. He didn’t look like a tramp now. His coat was shiny black leather and his thin face was austere and patrician, dominated by a rudder nose and a fleshy, pouting mouth that made him look like an out-of-work Shakespearean actor. His clothes and his flesh hung in tatters here and there where the loup-garou’s blows had landed, but he didn’t seem to care very much.

‘Fuck!’ I exclaimed weakly.

He glanced around at me as though only then remembering that I was there.

‘We’ll talk,’ he said, his voice the same dry, agonising rasp I’d heard when I’d first encountered him: when he sang his crazy song about heaven and hell. ‘But not yet. Not until you know what I’m talking about. I don’t like wasting my time.’

‘Wh- Who-?’ I slurred inarticulately, trying to sit up and not getting very far. A lance of white-hot pain went through my back from shoulder to coccyx, stopping me in my tracks: shit, my spine could even be broken.

‘A friend,’ the thin man said, with a leering snigger that robbed the word of any warm connotations it might otherwise have had. ‘Because fate makes our friends, doesn’t it, Castor? And I’m certainly your enemy’s enemy.’

He walked across to me and looked down at me with a cold and clinical interest.

‘You’ve got some of it,’ he murmured. ‘You must have, because you’re not a fool. And only a fool would refuse to see the obvious because it happens to be impossible. But you have to go to the source. Otherwise they’ll kill you before you’re in a position to kill them.’ He paused, frowning. ‘Sequence. Cadence. Rhythm,’ he said. ‘Let’s get this right. My name is Moloch, and you may pass on my best wishes – with an ironic inflection – to Baphomet’s sister.’

‘To-?’

‘Your ally. The lady. We have . . . history.’

He stepped over me and back out into the dark, and I was in no position to stop him.

In fact it was all I could do to crawl to my feet – back not broken after all, just agonisingly bruised – and limp off out of there before the sirens started to sound in the distance. I cast a longing look back up the stairs to where the rest of Chesney’s notes and trinkets might still be lying, no doubt with his own blood added to the patina of ancient violence that made them so collectable. No good to me now: no good at all, because even if they were still there – even if they weren’t what the loup-garou had been sent here to fetch, and I was nearly sure they were – I couldn’t afford to hang around long enough to find them. Even with Gary Coldwood’s grudging patronage, this was one crime scene I wasn’t going to be reading for the Met if I could possibly help it.

Susan Book’s doorbell played the first four bars of ‘Jerusalem’: for some reason that made me laugh, even though laughing hurt right then.

Juliet opened the door, and stood there for a moment staring at me in silence, taking in all the details – the bruising on my face, the split lip and the blood on my shirt. She nodded slowly, as if acknowledging that I probably had a valid excuse. All the same . . .

‘You’re an hour and a half late, Castor,’ she said sternly.

‘I know,’ I answered. ‘And I’m sorry. I got held up.’

‘At gunpoint?’

‘At clawpoint. Can I come in before I fall down?’

She considered for a moment longer.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All right. But we ate without you.’

She held the door open for me and I lurched in out of the night. Susan Book bustled out of the kitchen wearing a Portmeirion apron – passion flower, it said and showed – and opened her mouth to speak, but then changed her mind and shut it again. She just stared at me instead, blinking a few times as if to clear her vision.

‘I’m really sorry, Sue,’ I said. ‘I hope I didn’t spoil your evening. I was on my way here when something came up.’

‘Would you like a drink?’ asked Juliet, who knows me pretty well. I nodded. ‘Then come on through into the living room,’ she said. She pronounced the phrase with careful emphasis, as though it was still a little alien to her. Some concepts are harder for her to get her head around than others.

‘I think,’ Susan said, hastily, ‘that we should probably take Felix into the bathroom first.’

Juliet stared at her, momentarily puzzled. Susan pointed at the crusted blood on my shoulder, where the loup-garou’s claws had pierced the cloth of my greatcoat and dug deeply into the flesh beneath.

‘Oh,’ said Juliet. Wounds are something else she has to be reminded about – mainly because her own flesh (if that’s what it is) flows like water to heal itself up on the rare occasions when she sustains any damage. ‘Yes. Of course. Do we have any disinfectant and bandages?’

It turned out they had both, and Susan did a good job of cleaning my wounds, although she drew in her breath slightly when she first saw them, her eyes widening. Examining myself with queasy fascination in the bathroom mirror, I could understand her reaction: it looked as though some huge bird of prey had scrabbled at my right shoulder, trying to pick me up, and then – judging from the bruising all over my torso – had given up the effort and dropped me from a great height onto some rocks.

‘You met one of the were,’ Juliet said – an observation, not a question.

‘Yeah,’ I confirmed. ‘You remember Scrub?’

She frowned, consulting her memory. ‘The rat-man that worked for Lucasz Damjohn,’ she said, with no obvious emotion – although she had hated Damjohn enough to linger over his death and add a number of artistic flourishes to it. ‘You killed him at Chelsea Harbour.’

‘I spiked him at Chelsea Harbour,’ I corrected her. ‘Hit him with a chord sequence hard enough to push him out of the flesh he was hiding in. But you know how it is with the were-kin. They’re old souls, mostly, and they’re tough as hell. Most of them are used to migrating to a new host when the old one dies.’ I winced as Susan applied TCP too enthusiastically to a tender area of torn flesh.

‘Are you saying this was Scrub?’ Juliet demanded.

I shrugged – and gritted my teeth because shrugging seemed to draw the disinfectant deeper into the wounds. ‘I don’t know. For a second, it kind of looked like Scrub. Then it looked like someone else. But Scrub was the only loup-garou I ever met who was a colony. I mean, he made his body out of rats, not out of a rat. And this thing I met tonight was made out of cats in the same way.’

I had to suppress a physical tremor at the memory, half-disgust and half-fear. All at once an identity parade of cats filed before my inner eye: the stray that was hanging out at the Gittingses’ flat; the tom I almost trod on as I was walking home from the law offices in Stoke Newington; the feral moggy in Trafalgar Square when I was talking to Jan Hunter on the phone. I would have bet the farm that there was a cat lurking under the left-luggage lockers at Victoria, too: that it had heard my conversation with Chesney and somehow contrived to get there first. I’d sentenced him to death just by calling him.

Juliet raised an eyebrow, unconvinced. ‘If one were can make that transition – from monad to gestalt – then presumably others can too.’

‘Presumably. Most of them – ow! – most of them don’t, though. It would help to know, because if it is Scrub I can probably remember the tune I used to smack him down.’

‘I’m sorry if I’m hurting you,’ Susan said, looking up from her work. ‘But they’re nasty, ragged wounds. It would be really easy for them to get infected.’

I nodded. I’d been there and I wasn’t likely to forget. But at least my tetanus shots were up to date this time. ‘Go for it, Sue,’ I muttered, trying hard to dismiss the spectre of Larry Tallowhill from my thoughts.

As Susan moved from cleaning the wounds to dressing them, I told them both about what had happened at Nexus. Susan was pale by the time I’d finished, but Juliet seemed moved in a different way.

‘Moloch,’ she said. And she spat, very precisely, onto the floor. Without a word, Susan Book took a piece of toilet tissue and wiped up the mess.

‘Yeah. He told me he knew you. Asked me to pass on his best wishes – with a broad hint that he didn’t really mean it.’

‘He doesn’t,’ said Juliet, her teeth showing in a genteel snarl: she usually manages to rein herself in around Susan, who frightens easily, but clearly the mention of Moloch’s name had touched her at a level below the pretensions of civilisation. ‘I left my mark on him once, a long time ago. But it goes further than that. His kind and mine – we were old enemies, even before the great project.’

‘Before the what?’

Juliet seemed to remember herself. ‘Nothing,’ she said, a little too quickly. ‘I was remembering things that happened before you were born. Let’s just say that his kin are cats, and mine are dogs. Or vice versa. Where the succubi and incubi settle and build their houses, the shedim can’t live. He’d love to hurt me, if he thought he could. But what is he doing on Reth Adoma?’

‘You know,’ I groused, ‘if you keep doing this I’m going to ask for a simultaneous translation. What is he doing where?’

‘On Earth. Among the living. There’s nothing he can eat here. He’ll starve if he stays too long.’

‘He looked like he was halfway there already,’ I agreed. ‘At least – that’s how he looked when I first met him, a few days ago. Today he looked a fair bit sleeker. And he was strong enough to make this loup-garou run for cover.’

Juliet frowned, her eyes slightly unfocused as she followed a train of thought she didn’t bother to voice. To be honest, I didn’t want her to: it’s hard to think of Hell as a place, and even harder to think of her walking there. It has a whiff of bad Bible stories and undigested metaphors.

‘This is bigger than we thought,’ she said, looking at me again. ‘Something – something important, perhaps – is at stake here. Something has brought him up through the gates, and made him stay long enough to weave a body for himself. I think . . . ’

The pause lengthened.

‘What?’ I prompted. ‘What do you think?’

She shrugged dismissively. ‘Nothing. So you think Kale might have been involved somehow in John Gittings’s death?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Not directly, obviously. He killed himself. But the big case he was working on – the one he kept saying was going to get him into the history books – had something to do with dead killers. And now we know that Kale was on his list.’

Juliet thought about this. ‘And the problem with Kale is that she isn’t dead enough,’ she finished, voicing my own thoughts. ‘Are there any urban legends about the great East End gangsters coming back from the grave?’

‘None that I’ve heard. Maybe it’s a foreign-exchange kind of thing. Kale does London and the Krays do Chicago.’

Juliet nodded. ‘It’s possible,’ she mused. ‘But it goes against everything we know about the dead. And it raises far more questions than it answers.’

‘I meant it a joke,’ I said.

‘Then you should have smiled.’

‘I’ve finished,’ Susan said, standing up and inspecting her handiwork with profound and obvious misgivings. ‘But you should probably go to a hospital as soon as you can, Felix, and let a doctor take a look at you.’

‘I will,’ I lied. ‘Thanks, Sue. You’re an angel of mercy.’ Living with a sex demon, I added in my mind: life throws you some funny curves.

‘I saved you some ratatouille,’ Susan said, embarrassed. ‘You can eat it on a tray, if you like.’

Downstairs in the living room, I ate and drank and began to feel less like a piece of wind-blown trash. The room had changed a lot since I’d been there last. Then, it had still been full of Susan’s late mother’s ornaments and antimacassars and framed samplers like a mock-up of a room in a museum of Victoriana: now it was kind of minimalist, with red Chinese calligraphy hung on white-painted walls. I knew enough about Juliet’s tastes to recognise them here, and I wondered how Susan felt about the changed ambience. She seemed comfortable enough.

‘So how’s work?’ I asked her. ‘Juliet said you’re kind of snowed under.’ Susan had been the verger at a church in West London when she’d met Juliet, but had bailed out when they’d started living together and had gone back to her old career as a librarian. It was a principled decision, based more on the fact that she was in a same-sex relationship than on her shacking up with a demon. The modern Anglican church regards Hell as a state of mind and doesn’t officially believe in demons (unlike the Catholics, who hunt them with papally blessed flamethrowers), but it still has problems with church officers who are openly gay. As an atheist with issues, I have to say I love that shit.

Susan smiled, genuinely pleased to be asked. ‘No, I’m fine, really,’ she said. ‘I’m enjoying it. It’s a little hard, sometimes, because I’m trying to do a lot of ambitious things on no money. But it’s lovely to be working with children. They’re so open-minded and spontaneous. And you’d be amazed how many children’s authors will do readings just for the fun of it. We had Antony Johnston in last week. He wrote the graphic-novel version of Stormbreaker. And he was wonderful. Very funny, and very – whatever the opposite of precious is. Very matter-of-fact about what he does. We got the biggest audience we’ve ever had.’

‘Stormbreaker being . . . ?’ I prompted, feeling a little lost.

‘It’s one of the best-selling children’s books of the last decade, Felix,’ Susan chided me schoolmarmishly.

‘Oh, that Stormbreaker,’ I bluffed.

‘They made a movie of it.’

‘Not a patch on the book.’

‘You don’t need to work,’ Juliet said to Susan, putting a broom handle through the spokes of my small talk.

There was an awkward pause.

‘I like to work, Jules,’ Susan said.

Juliet met that statement with a cold deadpan ‘Why?’

Susan didn’t seem very happy with the question: generally anything that looked like an argument looming in the distance made her run for cover, but this time she stood her ground. ‘Because it’s part of who I am. If I just made your meals and cleaned house for you, and warmed your bed, then – well, I’d be a very boring person. And then you’d want to see other people, and then you’d leave me. And then I’d kill myself.’

Juliet considered. ‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘I can see the logic. I’ve never been romantically infatuated with anyone before, so it’s difficult right now to see how my feelings for you could change. But there’s plenty of evidence from human relationships, so you’re probably right. Go on.’

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, swivelling it back around in the direction of shop talk, and ended up regaling both of them with some of my favourite ghost stories. Most of them had happened to other people, not to 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 on tomorrow afternoon?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Well, 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 whisky in my glass, studiously avoiding her gaze.

‘Alabama,’ I said.