Dead Men's s Boots

23

I hadn’t expected to be back in Royal Oak so soon, and Susan Book wasn’t expecting to see me there. In the four or five seconds between ‘Jerusalem’ sounding again and the door opening, I braced myself for storms.

But Susan wasn’t in the mood to give me a hard time. Her eyes looked swollen with unshed tears, or maybe just with sleep. Everything about her posture suggested misery and a pre-emptive surrender to despair. Juliet’s absence was obviously hitting her very hard. Given that even looking at Juliet felt a little bit like taking a hit of some illicit drug, to be withdrawn from her so suddenly must be a little like going into the instant, unwelcome free fall of cold turkey.

Susan just stared at me. ‘I told you she wasn’t here,’ she mumbled tonelessly.

‘I know,’ I agreed. ‘I’m thinking that maybe I know a way to bring her back. Can I come in and explain?’

I hunched my shoulders against the gathering wind, playing the pity card to give myself an additional argument if my words didn’t work. Beside me, Moloch tilted his head back, sniffed the air and growled. ‘This hovel stinks of the lady,’ he said, in his car-crash-in-slow-motion voice. Susan swivelled her head to stare at him, her eyes widening. She hadn’t noticed him until he spoke.

Maybe after living with Juliet for so long she could tell what he was just by looking: that would explain the fear that crossed her face. But even if you didn’t know, he was an intimidating presence and he was glaring at her with an unreadable emotion in his dark eyes. Susan gripped the edge of the door in both hands, as though preparing to close it in our faces, but she hesitated, caught in a crossfire between her survival instinct and good breeding.

I wasn’t sure how to make the introduction, so I didn’t try. I turned to Moloch instead, as the more immediate problem.

‘Juliet lives here,’ I said to him. ‘But she’s not here now. She hasn’t made any contact with anyone since she got back from the States. Well, apart from Doug Hunter, of course, and that’s no use to us.’ I turned back to Susan. ‘Or has she called you?’ I asked.

Susan’s anxious gaze flicked backwards and forwards between the two of us. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not a word. I’m just . . . sitting here by the phone.’

‘She’s probably lying,’ Moloch said, his tone detached and thoughtful. ‘You could hurt her and make sure, one way or the other. You clearly have impressive skills in that area.’

Susan gave a yelp, like a dog that’s had its tail trodden on, and tried to slam the door. Moloch held it open with one negligent, unhurried hand. I knocked the hand away and he gave me a look of politely mystified inquiry as the door slammed in our faces.

‘Nobody,’ I said with slow, heavy emphasis, ‘is hurting anyone. In fact, you’re not even coming in here.’

‘No?’ Moloch’s voice was mild now, but there was an edge of amusement to it.

‘No. You’re going to wait on the other side of the street, under that lamp.’ I pointed. ‘And you’re not going to come near this door, or this house, until I come out.’

‘And why am I going to do that?’

‘Because if you don’t, the poor doggy isn’t going to get so much as a bone to gnaw on. If you want to eat tonight, you’ll do this my way.’

He stared at me in silence for the space of two or three heartbeats. It felt like a lot longer.

‘If she offers you tea,’ he said at last with a nasty grin, ‘decline it. Time is short enough as it is.’

Moloch turned his back on me and walked away. I knocked again, and waited. After a minute or so I rang the bell.

Eventually, the door opened a crack and Susan stared out. The tears had been shed in the meantime. Her cheeks were wet and her face as she glowered up at me was full of a terrible pain.

‘You should go away now, Fix,’ she said, her voice surprisingly strong and even now as though crying had bled some poison out of her. ‘It’s not right for you to be talking to me after what you did to Jules. You should have been a better friend to her.’

I opened my mouth to say that it was Juliet who’d broken a table across my back, rather than the other way around, but this wasn’t the time for scoring cheap points.

‘I think I can bring her back,’ I said again. ‘If I can come in for just a minute, I’ll explain what I want to do. Then if you say no, I’ll just leave.’

‘No. I don’t want you to come in here. Not while I’m alone.’

‘Then let me explain out here,’ I suggested.

‘I don’t want to hear what you’ve got to say.’

‘Susan,’ I said, making my last pitch, ‘this is something she needs to know about. She’s done something that might make it . . . hard for her to stay here on Earth. Or at least here in London. Something that puts her way, way over on the wrong side of the law. She’s made a choice, and in my opinion it was the wrong one. It will hurt her.’

‘Nothing can hurt her,’ Susan said, shaking her head again. I wasn’t sure if it was a boast or a lament.

‘Losing you would hurt her, I think. And if she has to do a moonlight flit – if all the exorcists the Met can lay their hands on are sharpening their knives for her, and she makes the city too hot to hold her – she’ll leave you behind.’ I paused for just a moment to let that idea sink in, then went in for the kill. ‘Or do you think you can go and live with her folks for a while?’

A whole cavalcade of emotions crossed Susan’s face. I wanted to look away. Moloch’s words about my having a gift for hurting people were still hanging in the air: this wouldn’t count as torture at Abu Ghraib, but standing on a doorstep in West London at the arse end of winter with the rising wind carving sharper edges on my face, that was exactly what it felt like.

Susan was looking at me, shaking her head: rejecting the picture I’d painted, or maybe rejecting me, seeing through my sullied flesh to my shabby heart and saying no. She stood aside, wordlessly, and let me come in, then closed the door, locked it and bolted it top and bottom. I waited until she was done and let her lead the way into the living room. It was a gesture: a pretence that she was in control of what was happening. I thought about the aborted dinner party and everything that had happened since, and I had to struggle against a feeling of shame. Susan was right, in spite of everything: I should have been a better friend.

She waved me to a chair, with a visible lack of enthusiasm. I stayed standing: I didn’t feel like I had a right to any hospitality. She sat down herself in one of the armchairs. It was a surprise, and not a happy one, to see a half-empty whisky bottle and a half-full glass on the occasional table next to her.

‘What I wanted to do,’ I explained, ‘was to play the first few notes of an exorcism – an exorcism for Juliet.’ Susan’s eyes went big and wide and she started to speak, but I hurried on, talking over her. ‘Not the binding or the sending, Sue – just the summoning. Juliet said she’d hear that, wherever I played it, and come and –’ rip your throat out had been her actual words; I groped for a mealy-mouthed substitute ‘– stop me from finishing.’

Susan glared at me in deep, almost speechless outrage. She was trembling now. ‘Oh, she’d stop you,’ she assured me.

‘Believe me, Sue, I’m not underestimating her. I’m just hoping I can explain why I’ve come before she cuts in and does something irrevocable to me. That’s why I want to do it here. I’m thinking maybe she’ll hesitate before doing something really violent in front of you. She wouldn’t want to hurt or scare you.’

That didn’t seem to make Susan any happier. Exhausted as I was, and desperate as I was to be moving on and doing what had to be done before I fell down and passed out and deflated like a punctured balloon, I tried to explain.

‘There’s a woman,’ I said. ‘Someone she met. Not . . . romantically. Met in the line of duty. And this woman needs help, that’s the plain truth. Which is what Juliet is trying to do. But I don’t think the help that Juliet is giving her is what she needs. This is what we argued about, back in Alabama. There’s more to it, but I’m hoping that Juliet will accept a compromise solution if I offer one.’ I shrugged. ‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘The whole thing. So it’s up to you. I’m going to do this anyway, but if you tell me not to do it here I’ll go somewhere else.’

Susan picked up her whisky glass, but she didn’t drink from it. She just turned it in her hands and stared into the shallows of the half-finished drink.

‘This woman-’ she said. ‘It’s the woman you were talking about before you went away? The killer?’

Warily, I nodded.

‘Who did she kill?’

‘Most recently, a middle-aged gay guy who was looking for a bit of rough trade. Before that –’ I picked my words with care ‘– a lot of people, but mostly people who’d hurt her. Or people who she thought might hurt her. She’s ill. Killing is one of the symptoms of her illness.’

Susan put the glass to her lips and emptied it. She made a sour face. ‘I’m not good at this,’ she said. I was surprised I hadn’t noticed the slur in her voice at the door. ‘I don’t even like the taste. I think I’m going to get sick before I get drunk.’

‘Susan-’ I began. She shook her head impatiently.

‘Play your tune. I want this to be over. I don’t want it in my life any more.’

I nodded. For the third time that night I unshipped my whistle and held it in my hands, ready to play. My mind was fogged by exhaustion, though, and although I knew the notes I had to play – the notes of a summoning that would have Juliet’s name written all over it – I couldn’t get my mind into the place where it needed to be. I felt like someone trying to fit their eye to the lens of a telescope, and screwing up the angle so that all they can see is the magnified reflection of the blood vessels inside their own eyeball.

I played a note, more or less at random, hoping my sixth sense would kick in and the music would start to flow. It didn’t. Nothing at all came into my mind, not even a note that would connect to this one in a way that made sense.

I lowered the whistle and stared at it, blinking my eyes back into focus. It was strange, and it was frightening. I’d had good days and bad days, but I’d never had my knack desert me quite so suddenly and completely before. All I wanted to do was the summoning. It was the easiest part of an exorcism: it just made a path, a line of least resistance for the spirit you were looking for to move through. It was usually easiest if you were close to the spirit, harder the further away you got: but the only reason it wouldn’t work at all, wouldn’t even stay in my head long enough to suggest the beginnings of a tune, was if-

‘She’s already here,’ I said. ‘Isn’t she?’

‘She’s upstairs,’ Susan muttered, pointing. ‘In our bedroom. Or it was our bedroom. I don’t know what it is now.’ Slowly, deliberately, but still spilling a little on the table, she poured herself another drink.

I walked right on past her. I wanted to offer her some kind of solace but what could I have said? Bad friend Felix was on the prowl again: good news wasn’t on the agenda.

The main bedroom was dead ahead. Juliet was sitting on the windowsill, legs hugged to her chest, both feet off the ground. In a way it was a curiously little-girlish pose. Doug Hunter was tied to the bed by an ad hoc but formidable assemblage of rope and old leather belts. He seemed calm enough, but it was a bleak, frazzled calm: the calm of someone who’d already tested himself – or herself, arguably – against the ropes extensively and lost every time. Myriam Kale looked out at me from behind those bland, pale blue eyes and smiled asymmetrically.

I stopped in the doorway. ‘Permission to approach,’ I said.

Juliet gave me what in a human woman would have been an old-fashioned look. ‘You can come in, Castor,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to attack you. I’m not going to hold it against you that you were right; or at least, not to that extent.’

I walked in, skirting the bed, and stood beside Juliet, looking out through the window. Under the street lamp opposite, a dark form waited with its head bowed, endlessly patient: waiting for a banquet that would make up for a century of starvation.

‘So how’d you get home?’ I asked her, knowing that the one thing I wouldn’t get out of her would be the truth. ‘Transatlantic cable? Fishing coracle? Back of a whale? What?’

‘The scenic route,’ she said. ‘It’s another one of those things that you wouldn’t understand.’

‘Right, right.’ I was too tired to rise to the bait. ‘I’ve been talking to that friend of yours some more. You know, the one from the old neighbourhood.’ I nodded out of the window, but she didn’t bother to look.

‘I smelled him,’ she said. ‘You should be more careful around demons, Castor. It’s only safe so long as they need you.’

‘Now you tell me.’ I turned to look at the figure on the bed. Doug Hunter grinned and thrust his hips towards me in a suggestive mime. ‘So how’s Myriam?’

‘She’s falling apart. She always does, apparently. She begged them not to bring her back again after the last time, but they did anyway. But this time they gave her a man’s body because they thought it might help her to control the urges.’

‘They being –?’

Juliet shrugged and shook her head. ‘She’s not rational for very long at a time now. That’s more or less all I got. She talks about Les, mainly. Les Lathwell. And to him, some of the time. She tells him that she loves him. That she’ll kill him. That she wants him to kill her. She talks about something called inscription a lot, too: she doesn’t want it, she won’t accept it, she didn’t mean to miss it. And then she cries. Or swears. Or bites her tongue and spits blood over the sheets.’

‘Back in the remand wing,’ I said, ‘they had Doug on anti-psychotics. A mild prescription to keep him stabilised. I don’t suppose you brought any out with you?’ Juliet just looked at me. ‘No. I know. Not the way your mind works. And I never thought to mention it to you when you were flinging me around the diner. Pity. It would actually have been a better line than “I’ll hunt you down and kill you like a dog.” That seemed to upset you.’

‘Can we get some more of the medicine from a doctor?’

‘Not without taking Doug to see a doctor. And if we do that, we’re all ending up in Pentonville.’

‘I’m not going home,’ Myriam Kale said from the bed, speaking out of Doug Hunter’s throat as though from the bottom of a deep pit. Her voice sounded hoarse and agonised. ‘You can’t make me go home. He’ll come and get me. He’ll take me out of there. He’s my home now. I walked in the quiet night on the side of the road and I came back and it was all still there. The blood on the seats. It still smells of it.’

‘Then what?’ Juliet said. ‘I thought of calling Coldwood, but I don’t want to get Susan into trouble. If Hunter is found in her house . . .’

‘It’s not just Susan,’ I pointed out, fighting the urge to look at my watch. Time was against us. We had to move. But Juliet could only be invited, not coerced. ‘It’s you, too. You busted Hunter out of jail. You never walked in front of a camera, but there aren’t that many people around who could have done what you did. The only thing that’s saved you so far is that Gary Coldwood is in the hospital and he’s the one who knows where you live.’

She seemed surprised at this news. ‘In hospital? What happened to him?’

‘I set him onto this thing after someone tried to kill me. I thought maybe he could shake the tree better than I could, but they just trashed his career and broke his legs instead. Juliet, we have to sort this. Not just Myriam Kale but all of it. Mount Grace, the reincarnation racket, the whole thing.’

‘Let me go,’ Myriam Kale suggested from the bed, staring at me with wide, insane eyes. ‘I’ll blow you, mister. I’ll blow you and I’ll swallow. Best you’ve ever had.’

Juliet frowned. ‘Mount Grace? The crematorium? How is any of this connected to Mount Grace?’

I brought her up to speed, as quickly as I could, starting with John’s funeral and covering all the main fixtures since. When I got to Moloch’s part in recent events she drew back her lips in a snarl. And when I suggested that she might want to come along with us for a little breaking and entering and wholesale slaughter, she shook her head in sombre wonder.

‘Fight alongside the demon?’ she demanded.

‘Essentially, yeah,’ I said, trying not to sound defensive. ‘If you’ve got a rodent problem you need a terrier. Best estimate, there are around two hundred of these bastards. Could you take them all by yourself?’

‘No. The ones in flesh would be easy meat for me. The ghosts . . . I don’t believe they’d respond to me in the necessary way.’

‘Right. And I could exorcise the ghosts, but it’s murderously hard. I already played that tune once tonight and it was like taking a beating from a bunch of blokes with baseball bats. And the chances are that it wouldn’t be enough anyway: not by itself. These guys are tough. Some of them have cheated the grave for a hundred years. I think I could punch their spirits out of the bodies they’ve borrowed, but I seriously doubt I could push them all the way off the mortal plane. They’d still be around, and they’d still be dangerous – they’d be gunning for me, and it’s odds-on they’d get me. But Moloch is a specialised predator. He’d be there with his knife and fork to finish the job. See, the three of us together can—’

‘Castor, what do we stand to gain from this? Spell it out for me.’

I paused. I’d hoped she might get absorbed in the logistics and not ask any of the really tough questions.

‘Revenge?’ I ventured.

She seemed genuinely surprised. ‘For Coldwood?’

‘Yeah.’ A long pause.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Juliet. ‘This isn’t my fight. Less now than before, in fact. Nobody’s paying. Nobody will care, when we’re done. Revenge isn’t enough.’

I let out a long breath. ‘Well, okay . . . I could appeal to your sense of civic duty, but I hate it when you laugh at me. At my end it’s become kind of a life-and-death thing. They know I’ve found out about them and they’re not going to let it drop.’ I hesitated. ‘As for you, what you stand to gain, obviously, is – from a global perspective – when all’s said and done—’

‘You get to stay with me,’ said Susan, from the doorway.

We both turned to stare at her in perfect comedic sync.

‘Sue,’ Juliet said, the tone softer than the words. ‘Wait downstairs. This isn’t something that concerns you.’

Susan closed the door behind her and folded her arms. The expression on her flushed face was one I’d never seen there before. She cast one nervous glance at the bound figure on the bed, then she directed her full attention towards Juliet.

‘You brought an escaped murderer into my house, Jules,’ she said, in a tone that had something of a taut string about it. ‘And I let you do it, because I thought you wouldn’t have done it unless you had to. But if it’s just because she’s a woman who kills men and that used to be your – your thing, too, then that’s not good enough. And Felix is right about one thing. If you don’t fix this you’ll have to go away. I’ll lose you. I’m not going to lose you because of something like this.’

Juliet couldn’t have been more nonplussed if a cavalcade of tap-dancing mice had sung the words at her. She blinked, visibly thinking her way around the situation. ‘If I have to leave,’ she said, ‘I’ll come back to you. They can’t keep me away.’

The taut string snapped.

‘They can send you home!’ Susan shouted, advancing on Juliet with her hands clenched into fists as though she was going to hit her. She was crying again, but she didn’t wipe away the tears on her cheeks or even seem to notice them. She was incandescent enough that I was surprised they didn’t evaporate. ‘They can trap you and send you back down to Hell, no matter how strong you are. You’d be down there, in the dark, and you’d have to wait until someone called you back up again. Except that they’d call you as a slave, the way you were before. Or else I’d have to find a way to summon you up myself, and then what? Then you’d be my slave! We’d – we wouldn’t be us any more. We’d be a stupid, sick joke. It’s got to stop, Jules. You’ve got to stop it, and then you’ve got to explain and say you’re sorry.’

From about halfway through this speech, she’d been screaming the words rather than just yelling them. Her fists were trembling like tuning forks. Juliet caught them in her hands, pushed them down to Susan’s sides and then embraced her. Susan slumped in her arms, all the fight suddenly gone from her.

‘You’ve got to,’ she mumbled almost inaudibly, her head pressed to Juliet’s breast. ‘Please. For me.’

Juliet stared at me over Susan’s head. She looked unhappy. No, more than that: she looked afraid – and not of the Mount Grace ghosts.

‘Is that the plan, then?’ she demanded, her face a sombre deadpan. ‘We go to the crematorium. We break in. And I keep the three of us alive long enough for you to play your tune and for Moloch to feast?’

I was a bit taken aback by how quickly the tide had turned. I realised, much to my own surprise, that I hadn’t been expecting to win this one. ‘There’s a little more to it than that,’ I said lamely. ‘But yeah, that’s the basic scheme.’

‘It’s absurd. We don’t know their strength or their numbers.’

Juliet kissed Susan gently on the cheek, held on to her for a moment longer and then set her to one side very firmly. Susan took all this with great stoicism.

I delved into my pocket, and brought out my ace in the hole. It was the torn fragment of notepaper that I’d found in John Gittings’s pocket watch: when you looked at it, he really had gone out of his way to make sure that I’d have everything I needed. In fact, he’d been shrewder when his brain was disintegrating than he’d been at any time in his life before.

‘John was there before us,’ I said.

‘Isn’t that why he died?’

‘Yeah, but he left us some notes. This is pretty vague on their strengths, but it drops some succulent hints about their weaknesses.’

‘And you,’ Juliet said, giving me a cold, hard stare. ‘You said this tune was hard to play – that it drains you. Do you think you’ve got the energy to play it again tonight? Please don’t take this personally, but you look as though you’d have a hard time blowing up a child’s balloon.’

I’d been thinking the same thing, but since I didn’t see any other choice I just shrugged the question off. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I always am on the night.’

Juliet’s expression didn’t change. ‘If you can’t do it,’ she said, ‘you’d better tell me now. There’s no point in going into a fight with a plan that can’t work.’

‘All right,’ I admitted. ‘Right now, I don’t think I could do it. But it’s going to take us at least an hour to get over there. I’m hoping that’ll give me the time I need to get match-fit again.’

She nodded. ‘We’ll see,’ she said, with grim promise.

I left her and Susan alone for a minute or two to say their goodbyes. When Juliet came down from the bedroom I shot her a look of inquiry: she walked right past me, her face unreadable but her shoulders hunched in a tension I’d never seen in her before. Juliet normally uses her body language to draw you in: it’s second nature to her because it’s part of the way she feeds. For her to lose control of it, even around the edges, was a surprising and in some ways a disturbing thing to see.

Moloch smiled as he saw us coming, and gave Juliet an ironic bow. ‘The sister of Baphomet,’ he grated. ‘I’m honoured above all of my kindred. Never would I have imagined my lowly station would permit—’

Juliet’s ringing smack knocked him back on his heels, his head thrown sideways by the force of the blow. ‘You should have stayed in your lowly station,’ she snarled, her gaze skewering him. ‘It’s grotesque to see you crawling on the face of the Earth. One word, Moloch. One word more will use up all that’s left of my slender fucking patience.’

A demon’s face isn’t that much harder to read than a human one. I could see in his narrowed eyes and tight smile that he’d already thought of a cool comeback – and that he didn’t quite have the balls to try to deliver it.

‘Are we good?’ I asked, breaking the tense silence. They both nodded unconvincingly.

‘Then let’s go commit some atrocities.’