Dead Men's s Boots

20

I turned the light on, shrugged off my coat and threw it over the back of the sofa, then stepped out of my shoes as I advanced into the room. I managed to do all of this stuff fairly matter-of-factly: after all, like the fiend-in-the-shape-of-a-man said, he’d already had an open goal and refused to take the shot. Whatever this turned out to be, it wasn’t a straightforward ambush.

‘So how was your trip?’ Moloch asked, in the same tone of metal grinding against bone.

I made a so-so gesture. ‘Too many Satanists,’ I said.

He nodded sympathetically, but his smile showed way too many teeth to be reassuring. ‘Our little fifth column. Yes. If it’s any consolation, they all get eaten in the end.’

He was sitting in the swivel chair, a 1970s relic that was Ropey’s most prized possession after his music collection. Moloch was looking well: there was a ruddier tinge to his skin, and he’d even gained a little weight. His dress sense had improved, too: in place of the rags he’d been wearing when I first saw him outside the offices of Ruthven, Todd and Clay, he was dressed now in black trousers, calf-length black boots and a black grandad shirt with red jewelled studs at the neck and cuffs. He would have looked like some eighteenth-century priest playing a game of ‘my benefice is bigger than yours’ if it weren’t for the full-length leather coat. As it was, he looked like someone who’d taken The Matrix a little too seriously. The fingers of his two hands were cat’s-cradled around something small that gleamed white between them. He turned it slightly every now and then: the only move he made. Then, when he saw that my gaze had turned to it, he opened his fingers and let me see what it was: a tiny skull, about the size of a human baby’s but longer in the jaw, picked clean of flesh. I was willing to bet that it was a cat’s skull.

‘First things first,’ Moloch said briskly. ‘We don’t want to be interrupted, so let’s draw the curtains around our tent. Keep out the riff-raff.’

He spread his fingers with a flourish, letting the skull tumble off his palm. It made it most of the way to the floor: then it just stopped, in the air, six inches or so above the shag pile.

‘Normal service will be resumed,’ Moloch murmured. ‘Eventually. Until then the walls will have no ears, and nobody can drop in on us unannounced.’

Unable to take my stare off the weirdly suspended skull, I sat at the furthest edge of the sofa, putting as much distance between myself and the demon as I could – and keeping the whistle firmly gripped in my left hand, ready for use.

Moloch noticed, and he affected to be hurt. ‘I saved your life the other night,’ he reminded me reproachfully. ‘We’re fighting the same fight, Felix.’

‘Are we?’ I asked bluntly.

He gave me a slow, emphatic nod. ‘Oh yes. Trust me on this.’

‘And who are we fighting against, exactly?’

‘The immortals. The killers who found the exit door on the far side of Hell. You remember I spoke to you about rhythm. Sequence. Cadence. I know the end of the story, and you know its start. Shall we embrace like brothers, and share?’

‘No,’ I suggested. ‘Let’s not. Tell me what you want out of me and what you can give me, with no bullshit, and I’ll tell you if I’m interested.’

The demon pursed his lips. ‘I confess,’ he said, ‘I prefer a certain degree of commitment at the outset. A promise, at least. It doesn’t need to be sealed in blood. If I tell you what I know, you’ll use it to further my interests, as well as your own. Just swear, on something you care about. The formalities aren’t important.’

I stared him out.

‘Felix.’ He made a sound like the desiccated, risen-fromthe-tomb-unnaturally-alive mummy of a sigh. ‘We have to roll a boulder up a very large hill together. Without some basis of trust between us, it’s going to be hard work.’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t even know what the boulder is,’ I pointed out. ‘I’m not likely to get my shoulder under it any time soon – not on blind faith, anyway.’

‘Faith?’ The demon made a terse, faintly obscene gesture. ‘No. I wouldn’t advise you to deal with me on that basis. Did you mention me to the lady, at all?’

‘To Juliet? Yeah, I did.’

‘And how did she respond?’

I thought back. ‘She spat on the ground,’ I said.

He nodded with a certain satisfaction. ‘Immediately after she spoke my name, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’ll notice I haven’t spoken hers. Only that of her brother, who is dead. These are useful precautions among our kind. Our names aren’t given or chosen at random. They have unique properties, and to speak them casually, without due attention to . . .’ he hesitated before visibly selecting the right word ‘. . . prophylaxis can lead to very serious consequences. And she has good reason both to hate and to fear me.’

‘I’ll bet,’ I said, unimpressed. ‘And, you know, I appreciate your frankness. I’d say it was a breath of fresh air except that the air stinks of rotten meat. This isn’t getting us much further, is it?’

‘No,’ Moloch agreed. ‘It isn’t.’ He smiled nastily. ‘You’re very amusing, Felix, do you know that? Your instinctive mistrust. The way you look for angles, for advantages, even when there aren’t any. You see yourself as the finger in the dyke, don’t you? And me as the rising tide. But I promise you, very solemnly: in the bigger scheme of things, you’re –’ he touched the tips of his fingers together, opened them again, consigning me to oblivion ‘– insignificant.’

‘Can you have a rising tide of shit?’ I asked politely. ‘I suppose technically the answer’s yes, but it’s a disturbing image. I’d go for a different metaphor, if I were you. Something more in a David and Goliath flavour. And you know, I’m like Avis rent-a-car: because I’m insignificant, I try harder.’

I was hoping to shake the aura of smugness Moloch was putting out, but his smile just broadened. ‘Do you even know, Castor, why the dead are rising? Why the order of things has reversed itself so that graves gape and give birth?’

In spite of myself, a tremor went through me. The demon must have seen it because he smiled in modest gratification. ‘I think the answer is no,’ he murmured. ‘Poor little Dutch boy, labouring in the dark as the water rises around his ankles, then his knees, then—’

‘Well, everyone’s got a theory,’ I said, cutting across his chalk-on-blackboard eloquence. ‘Take a number and join the line.’

Moloch shook his head. ‘I don’t have a theory,’ he said, baring his teeth in what looked more like contempt than amusement now. ‘I was there, human. I saw the damage done. The great project. Oh yes. The shedim knew it for what it was.’

The great project. Juliet had mentioned that too, and then had pulled back from explaining what she meant. I felt a sudden brief wave of vertigo break over me, as though I’d been about to jump over a low wall but had then discovered at the last moment that the far side gave onto a sheer drop.

‘Whose project was it, then?’ I asked, still in the same Doubting Thomas voice. ‘Yours, or someone else’s?’ What does it say about me that a scant couple of hours after hearing about Gary Coldwood’s brush with the reaper I was shoving it to the back of my mind to play twenty questions with a demon? That I was so hungry for what he was about to tell me, I even put Mount Grace momentarily on the back burner of my mind?

Moloch stood up, his joints cracking alarmingly.

‘Go on,’ I said.

The demon turned his eyes on me, and something happened in the air between us. It seemed to ripple and thicken, as though something else had been dropped into it and made it curdle. Then suddenly Moloch was gone from in front of me, and his hand clamped down on my left shoulder – from behind. It took all my self-control not to dive off the sofa, hit the ground and roll.

Twisting my head around, I met his unblinking stare. As a show of strength, it did the job: my heart was racing and my throat was dry.

‘I prefer not to,’ he growled. ‘I was only . . . reminiscing. Thinking about the good old days. But they’re gone, now. The time is past when I could sit upon a chair made from my enemies’ intestines and feast on your woeful kindred. That summer will not come again.’

‘It’s a fucker,’ I agreed, trying to keep my voice level. ‘Where are the guts of yesteryear?’

‘The lady,’ Moloch resumed, walking away from me again towards the window. ‘You know what she eats, and how. Sexual desire is like a digestive enzyme for her: it lets her take spirit and flesh together. She inflames, and then she feeds: she can do it as well here as in the realms below, since all desire is ultimately in the mind.’

He stared out into the night and ran his clawed fingertips absently down the pane. ‘My case isn’t so fortunate. My meat is the souls of men who have killed other men, and women likewise. But only the souls: not the flesh. And even the souls I can only take, and feed on, and be nourished by, in certain very specific circumstances. The shedim are highly evolved; highly specialised. We have no mechanism for straining the life, the spirit, the selfness out of torn meat.

‘So when Hell changed – when the borders shifted – we began to starve. And there was no easy remedy. In the subtle realms we make . . .’ He gestured vaguely. ‘I don’t know the word . . . like small creatures, that make traps and then wait for their prey to come to them, instead of hunting. Traps that they weave out of their own bodies’ mass.’

‘Webs,’ I suggested, my voice coming out cracked and strained because my throat was still painfully dry. ‘Spider webs.’

‘Exactly. In Hell we make webs. But now the webs stood empty, year after year. We became desperate, and we fought. Against the succubi. Against the bone-singers. Against each other. And the weaker we became, the more frenzied were these struggles. Like rats in a sack, we tore at each other and devoured each other’s substance, even though it couldn’t nourish us.’

Still staring out of the window, Moloch lapsed into silence. ‘So you jumped ship?’ I suggested, just trying to keep him talking.

He held up his hands in front of his own face, examining them with intense disfavour. ‘A chance conjuration allowed me to rise to Reth Adoma,’ he said. ‘Some necromancer who couldn’t even frame a summoning, so that I rose out of the ground in a family burial plot in the middle of Essex. I looked for him – for the one who’d had the effrontery to summon me – but I never found him. A pity: I’d have liked to show my feelings on that score. Anyway, I wove myself a physical body so that I could stay here. Truly physical, I mean – not like the simulation of flesh that the lady wears. This body is real, and solid, and I live inside it as a hermit crab lives inside a borrowed shell. It took me many years to make, out of pieces of flesh gleaned here and there. The alternative was to go home again, and die.’

Moloch dropped his hands to his sides and turned his head to look at me again.

‘It was despair, more than hope, that kept me here,’ he said, the fires in his eyes flickering like distant beacons on the hills of another country. ‘My needs are not great but, as I said, they’re very specialised. The nourishment I need lies in the souls of those of your kind who have killed many, and taken pleasure in the killing. And whereas the succubus – your lady – is a hunter, I am a trapper. Traps for the soul are hard to build in the stunted, solid realms of Reth Adoma, squashed down by the hideous fist of gravity.’

‘Killers can’t be that hard to find,’ I said, with forced flippancy.

‘No,’ the demon agreed. ‘They’re not. I’ve found and eaten many, but it’s like eating the dream of a meal, and waking to find yourself still hungry. In Hell –’ his voice quivered with longing ‘– we used to let the souls lie for years on our terraces. Let them rot, and mature, and render down into their final form. And then, oh, then we feasted.’

He laughed fondly at the memory: it was the kind of sound you really, really need to forget but know you never will.

‘Old souls, separated from flesh in a way that leaves no bruise on the tender spirit,’ he murmured. ‘That’s what I hunger for. But here, in your thin, drab world, a meal like that is a great rarity.

‘I’ve scraped up enough to survive, through the decades. Barely. And you led me to two snacks that gave me some small nourishment. The were-thing, that built its body out of cats . . . I closed with it twice, the first time when it was following you from the law office, the second when it tried to kill you at the laboratory. Both times I managed to ingest some of its essence, while the soul was in transit and loosened from the flesh. Not perfect, but I was able to keep it down. It’s made me stronger than I’ve been in many decades.

‘But it’s the mother-lode I’m after, Castor. I want you to take me to the waterhole, where the great, ever-living killers come to drink, and drink again, of life and youth and strength. Take me there, and turn me loose, and I’ll eat them for you. After you’ve dressed and prepared the feast for me, with your music.’

Moloch fell silent again, and the spell of his words was so strong that it was a few seconds before I realised that he was waiting for an answer. To be honest, it was an effort to focus my thoughts on what should have been the key issue right now: the born-again killers with their dead-men’s-boots system of reincarnation. I wanted to grill this bastard about what he meant when he said that Hell’s borders had shifted, and what the great project had been.

But the demon’s expectant gaze was still fixed on me. With an effort, I stifled the questions that were jostling for position in my throat. He wanted me to give him an answer to his little proposition, but in true Castor style I ducked. I was uncomfortably aware that he’d asked me for a promise: I didn’t want to say anything to this creature that he might be able to hold me to later.

‘By the mother-lode,’ I said carefully, ‘you mean Mount Grace?’

‘Of course.’

‘In that case, two further questions. Why do I need you? And why do you need me?’

Moloch’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘I’ve explained my position,’ he said, the ragged edges in his voice grinding against each other. ‘And so you’re only asking these questions because you want to hold me at arm’s length a little longer. There are two hundred souls behind the crematorium’s walls. Souls that have learned the trick of invading living flesh. Could you exorcise them all, before they took you down? I doubt it. They’d take you and possess you, and you’d be no more than one more suit for them to wear. You need someone like me: someone who sits above them in the same food chain. Someone who was born and bred to prey on them.’

I mulled that over, couldn’t see any holes in it. But I didn’t get to be as old as I am without reading the small print before signing. ‘There were two parts to the question,’ I reminded him, my tone level and my face poker.

The demon acknowledged the point with a curt nod. ‘Yes. Of course. I need you, Felix, to make me an entry point. With your whistle, with your lovely little party trick, you can make a hole in their defences: bind them, and distract them, and make them stumble. They’ve held me at bay for more years than I care to count: there are a great many of them, as I said, and they’re both old and strong. They’ve found ways to keep me from crossing that threshold, though I’ve tried a thousand times. Outside the crematorium they move in flesh, and in flesh I can’t touch them. But pipe me in through the door and you’ll see the carnage a fox makes in a hen house.

Silence fell once more: the burning eyes held me in place while Moloch waited for my binding word.

‘It all sounds great,’ I said, tearing my own gaze away from his with an effort. The effort was largely wasted, though: magnetically, my head swivelled back around until the searchlight of his stare shone full on me again. It was like Juliet’s hypnotic fascination, but with no overlay of desire: it was naked coercion, the veils of seduction all stripped away. ‘But my music works on one ghost at a time. What you’re asking me to do – it can’t be done. I can’t play two hundred tunes all at once. You said as much yourself.’ Moloch hawked and spat, with great deliberation.

‘Then do whatever needs to be done,’ he said. ‘Enlist yourself an army of exorcists – or dredge your own courage up from whatever cloaca you keep it in. Invite the lady to come with us, if she’s still taking your calls. The details I’ll leave to you. The offer is exactly as I’ve stated it. That we go to Mount Grace crematorium, you and I. Together. In fact, you and I and the lady, because the odds will be against us even with her: without her we won’t prevail. You will go to avenge your friend’s death, which you’re beginning to suspect – correctly – was actually two separate deaths. I will go to feed. The lady – well, she’ll go because you’ll ask her to. Because she’s trying to pretend to be human, and in some way that makes her vulnerable to you even though she could kill you with a single flexing of her pudenda.

‘Say that all this will happen, and it will happen. Or say no, and I’ll find somewhere else to eat. The meal you so kindly laid on for me has given me enough strength to wait a few centuries longer.’

So this was it. The moment of truth. Maybe the demon was bluffing about going elsewhere: on the other hand, it was clear to see that he’d changed from the walking skeleton I’d met outside Todd’s office. He probably could wait a little longer now if he had to. Okay, he was going to be as safe to be around as sweaty gelignite. But too many people had died already, and I couldn’t see where a better offer was going to come from.

‘All right,’ I said at last. ‘We’ll go in there. Together. We’ll wipe out the whole fucking nest of them.’

‘You swear this?’

‘I swear it.’

‘On what do you swear it?’

‘On myself, because I don’t believe in any bastard else.’

Moloch bowed, with a faintly satirical emphasis.

‘Then it will be so,’ he said.

He turned to the window again and opened it as far as it would go.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘There’s something I need to do first. Before we tackle the ghosts. I want to go and sweat the lawyer. Todd. He’s in this up to his kishkas.’

‘Is he?’ Moloch still had his back turned to me, so I couldn’t see his face.

‘Of course he is. He was the one working the angles to get John Gittings exhumed and trundled away to Mount Grace. He’s handling the legal affairs of the Palance family, which means he’s conducting the whole show. And in any case, that’s why you were hanging around outside his office. Because he’s one of them: one of the killers whose scent you’ve been following. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Possibly,’ Moloch said. ‘Again, you’ll do as you see fit. I saved your life, and I gave you information you couldn’t have obtained by any other means. I consider that, at the moment, you’re heavily in my debt. So whatever you do on your own account, don’t include me as a factor in your plans. All that’s between us is the bargain, as we’ve already agreed it. When you’re ready to make the journey to Mount Grace, just say my name – out in the open air, with silence all around, and preferably in darkness. I’ll hear you.’

I thought he was just going to walk out of the window into the night, but the night came to him instead. Blackness spilled into the room like a solid wave, washing over Moloch and swallowing him up. An instant later it cleared, and he was gone.

There was a soft thump as the skull fell onto the carpet and rolled a few inches before rocking back and settling on its apex. The upside-down sockets stared vacantly at me, inviting me into the well within that used to be full to the brim with cat-thoughts and now was full of nothing.

Normal service had been resumed.

Almost in the same instant, the TV set gave an unsettlingly organic shudder and the screen lit up like an eye opening in the dark corner of the room.

‘- Don’t even know where she came from,’ a man’s voice said, sounding strained and almost tearful. The man on the screen was burly, middle-aged, dressed in what I took at first to be a police uniform. He didn’t look prone to tears. ‘She just walked right past the guard post, and we all – three of us – we all ran out after her. I was just thinking how did she get in, because there’s a wall. It’s twenty feet high, and then – there’s an overhang, with razor wire. You can’t climb it. Nobody could climb it.’

The image switched abruptly to an external shot of one of the five wings of Pentonville, and I realised that he wasn’t a cop: he was a prison guard.

‘Nobody else had any clearer explanations to give,’ said a news presenter’s voice in public-solemnity mode, ‘for how a prisoner on remand for murder was able to walk out of one of London’s highest-security prisons, in what was evidently a highly planned and meticulously executed raid. The mystery woman entered here . . .’

I shook my head to clear it, which turned out to be a mistake: the various dull aches in my neck and in the muscles of my face connected up suddenly into an all-singing, all-dancing multimedia extravaganza. On the screen, successive still photos of Pentonville were overlaid with computer graphics mapping a route through a gate, now hanging off its hinges, over an inner wall of impressive height and down through an interior space punctuated with inspection posts and barred, locked doors. The voice was still talking, but I was momentarily distracted by the pretty pictures.

Another talking head popped up, this time wearing a suit and batting for the Home Office. He denied allegations that staff cuts had played a part in these events. ‘There were plenty of guards on the scene. Three at the first guard post and three more in D wing itself. Two of them were very seriously assaulted – hospitalised. The rest seem to have been exposed to some sort of drug – a nerve gas, or a hallucinogen – and are unable to give a clear account of what happened.’

Cutaway to some hand-held footage of another uniformed guard sitting on the steps of an ambulance with a blanket round his shoulders. He was staring at nothing as cameras flashed all around him.

‘She just looked at me,’ he said. ‘She just – and then – I was – I don’t know. I don’t know. I was so-’ He hid his face in his hands, either trying to evade that remembered gaze or to relive it.

Cut to still image of Doug Hunter: an archive shot of him walking into court, presumably on the day of his remand hearing. His face impassive, closed, giving nothing away.

‘This is the man who walked out of the front gate of Pentonville this evening, leaving the prison and the system it represents in chaos—’

I’d found the remote by this time. Now I found the off switch. Moloch had made his point: Juliet was home, the fewmets had hit the windmill and if time had ever been on my side then it sure as hell wasn’t any more.

I limped through into the bathroom, so overwhelmed with tiredness that I felt like my body had melted and then congealed again as a lump of undifferentiated matter. I splashed cold water in my face, stripping one layer off the exhaustion and revealing a lot more layers underneath.

Try to forget about Juliet, at least for now. What she’d done, terrible though it was, was no surprise – and it was a big silver lining that she’d managed to do it without killing anyone. How long that would last was another question altogether. If she just let Myriam Kale walk away in Doug Hunter’s body after the jailbreak, then it was only a matter of time before Kale met some guy who pushed all the wrong buttons for her. Then there’d be another Alastair Barnard lying in a hotel room somewhere for the maid to find when she came to turn the sheets over.

I couldn’t do anything about that. I probably shouldn’t even try: it would be like aiming the fire extinguisher at the flames, instead of at the base of the fire. Because Myriam Kale was just a symptom of something bigger and older and a lot more terrifying.

Why had I agreed? Why had I decided to dance with the devil? I’d known Asmodeus for long enough to know what kind of moves demons favour and where I was likely to end up after the dance was done. But I didn’t have any choice. Even if Juliet hadn’t left me in the lurch, Moloch was right about the kind of help we needed: a specialist, adapted to the terrain and the situation by whatever passed in Hell for Darwinian pressures. The forces of supernature.

That left at least one question unanswered. How in the name of Christ and all his bloody saints was I going to hold up my end of the bargain? John Gittings had tried, and he seemed to have an informer on the inside – someone who was writing him briefing notes and giving him tips on strategy. Take back-up: take lots of back-up. Exactly what Covington had advised me to do – and exactly what John had been calling me to arrange. Me, and maybe Stu Langley too. But I didn’t pick up, Stu Langley got himself a fatal concussion and John had had to go in alone.

I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, water pouring down my battered face and dripping onto my bloody, rumpled shirt. I was looking for cracks in the famous Castor façade, but I saw someone else’s face staring back at me: John’s face, from my dream on the night before the cremation. What had he said to me? That he was supposed to give me something. And when I told him I’d already found the letter inside the pocket watch, he’d shaken his head as though that didn’t matter at all.

‘Not the letter. The score. The final score, after the whistle blew.’

‘The whistle?’

‘Or the drums. I forget. It’s like a skeleton, Fix. The skeleton of a song.’

Maybe I had some back-up already: maybe John could pitch in for me in just the way I’d refused to do for him.

Feeling slightly light-headed, I went back into the living room and rummaged around under the sofa cushions – my favoured location for all flat valuables – until I found the sheet music I’d taken from the left-luggage locker at Victoria. I took it over to the table, laid it down and smoothed out the worst of the creases.

The skeleton of a song. I hadn’t even bothered to try to work out what that meant: begging to differ from Sigmund, I’d never believed that dreams were the royal road to anywhere very much. But John was a drummer, and drummers are different from normal people. The skeleton of a song: not what was left when the substance of the song had rotted away, but the framework, the scaffolding, on which the rest of the song could be built.

That might be how a drummer felt about rhythm.

The notations on the sheet music were as opaque to me now as they had been when I’d first seen them: vertical flecks of ink densely but as far as I could see randomly spaced across the lines of the stave and the width of the page. Occasionally a few marks interspersed that might have been letters or symbols: a vertical line with a horizontal slash near the top that could be a ‘T’ or a plus sign; another that looked like a crude asterisk. Nothing to indicate how any of it fitted together or how it could be translated into sound.

Part of the problem was that I could never be arsed with reading sheet music even when I was trying to learn my own instrument: I picked out tunes in a rough-and-ready way, already listening more to whatever was going on in my head than to anything else. So now I didn’t even have much to compare this gibberish with.

If I was going to have a hope in hell of deciphering it, I was going to need an expert.

I picked up the phone and dialled from memory. Got some irate old man out of bed because I was one step away from falling over and my thread-stripped brain transposed two digits.

Tried again.

‘Hello?’ A woman’s voice, fuzzy with sleep.

‘Louise?’ I said.

The same voice, a little sharper. ‘Yeah. Who’s this?’

‘Felix Castor.’

‘Fix. Fuck your mother, look at the goddamn time. Are you on something?’

‘What’s the name of your band, Lou?’

‘My band?’ she echoed with pained incomprehension.

‘You still play, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So what’s the name of-?’

‘The Janitors of Anarchy. Fix, you didn’t call me up in the middle of the night to ask—’

‘No,’ I interrupted her, ‘I didn’t. I just want to meet the drummer.’