Dead Men's s Boots

26

Sue Book greeted the sight of her fallen lover with a wail of anguish: then she wrested Juliet’s body out of my hands and took her away from me into another room – even Sue could carry Juliet’s negligible bulk without strain – and kicked the door shut behind her. I took that to mean that if we wanted tea and biscuits we’d have to rustle them up for ourselves.

But Covington was hungry for something else entirely, and he wasn’t in the mood for delayed gratification. ‘Where is she?’ he demanded, looking peremptorily around the small hall. ‘Is she here?’

‘Up the stairs,’ I said, and he was taking them three at a time almost before the word was out of my mouth. I didn’t follow straight away. The energy Juliet had lent me had all drained away now and the events of the last few hours were taking their inevitable toll. I felt like a piece of wind-blown crud that had fetched up out of the night at the foot of these stairs and couldn’t be expected to go any further. Wind-blown crud doesn’t defy gravity: it knows its place.

But eventually I summoned the will-power from somewhere and started to climb. From the bedroom facing me I heard Covington’s murmured voice, and then a crazed laugh from Doug Hunter’s throat.

I hesitated on the top step, not sure whether this was a private party or not. Covington’s ‘We’ll sort this’ gave me no clue at all as to what he had planned – or even who the ‘we’ referred to.

Leaning my back against the wall, I enjoyed the momentary sensation of weightlessness that comes with having carried something very heavy for a long time and finally been allowed to set it down. Tomorrow there was more still to come, but tomorrow was another day – technically, anyway, even though it was probably less than half an hour to sunup.

The weightlessness passed, but I still felt curiously detached from my own emotions. The guilt that had bitten into me when I’d heard about Gary Coldwood’s car accident was mercifully dulled, but there was no sense of triumph or satisfaction in having dealt with his attackers. If anything, Covington’s account had left me feeling as though there was mourning still to be done: but I couldn’t make a start on it just yet.

Covington’s voice rose and fell in the bedroom, his words never quite becoming audible. I could hear Kale’s replies, though.

‘No. I didn’t see you. I looked for you and I didn’t see you. You left me!’

Murmuring from Covington.

‘Oh, that’s fine! That’s wonderful! Whatever you want to call it. Fucking – cocks! Cocks talking, calling themselves men! Love me? Oh yeah, I’ll bet you do. I’ll bet you do!’

Murmur.

‘Well, this is me, now. It’s not him any more, it’s me.’

Murmur.

‘I don’t even know the way. But if I knew the way, I couldn’t do it. Not on my own, Les! Not – not all that way, on my own. Don’t make me. Don’t ask me to.’

Murmur.

‘No.’

Murmur.

‘You can’t. Don’t lie to me! I won’t even have a fucking hand to hold.’

Murmur.

Long silence.

Kale laughed, and the laugh turned into a sob.

‘Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me, Les. I’m so scared.’

And now for the first time I heard him answer her.

‘I’m going, Mimi. I’ve made up my mind. And you can’t keep a hold on this body any more, not without me and the others to help you. Come now, with me, or come later, on your own. That’s the only choice you’ve got.’

Another long silence.

Covington appeared in the doorway. ‘We need you,’ he said.

At any other time I might have baulked at the thought of playing two souls at the same time: but I’d just played two hundred and come out of it with my mind intact, so this didn’t feel too hard. And Covington didn’t want a full exorcism: just an unbinding. Just something that would lift them both out of their flesh and leave them free to move.

Embarrassingly, though, it was a while before the music would come. I’d flogged my talent pretty hard that night, and the sense of dissociation still hung around me like the wooziness after anaesthesia. Covington had untied Kale’s arms and upper body and they sat together on the bed, his arms protectively around her – or rather Doug’s – shoulders. She clung to him so hard that I could see the whitening of her knuckles. The two of them stared at me wordlessly, like already condemned prisoners waiting to hear the outcome of some last appeal.

At last I ventured a note, and I knew when I heard it that it wasn’t right. I held it anyway, and then modulated down the scale until I locked into something that felt like it was alive and moving. I let it find its own way out through the bore, almost unstopped, using breath control alone to shape it. It wasn’t a tune: it was an incoherent wail pretending to be music.

Covington kissed Myriam Kale on Doug Hunter’s forehead, whispered something that I couldn’t hear over the sound of the whistle, and then slid sideways off the bed. Kale lasted a few moments longer before slumping back onto the pillow, her eyes glazing over before they closed.

Covington’s ghost was just a smudgy blur hovering over his body: maybe that was a side effect of the protective camouflage that the risen dead of Mount Grace had used in the days of their ascendancy – or maybe it was just a side effect of being so damn old, and having slid and elided his way through so many different flesh-houses over the last hundred years. Maybe he’d just distilled down into this minimal place-holder for a human shape.

But Kale was magnificent. I saw then, for the first time, what the photos had failed to capture: the energy and the feral grace that had drawn so many men in and made the great Aaron Silver linger and be lost.

The two spirits – the one so painfully vivid, the other so very nearly not there at all – came together in the air over the bed and then started to waver as though in some kind of heat haze. It was something I’d never seen before: self-exorcism, a willed and wanted abdication. Kale smiled as she faded: but then apes smile when they’re afraid, and there was something of blind terror about her eyes. But she was looking at Covington – at the man who’d been born Aaron Berg, and then had worn so many other names – and I thought the expression was softening into something else as it sublimed out of my visible spectrum altogether.

Doug Hunter came around after only a few minutes. I was afraid he might draw entirely the wrong conclusion from finding himself tied to a bed in a room in a strange house with a guy he didn’t recognise sitting on a chair next to the bed, but that was one complication I didn’t have to worry about. He was too weak and too sick at first to care much about where he was, and his memories came back with his strength.

Peter Covington – assuming that was the blond man’s original name – wasn’t so lucky. Like Maynard Todd, he’d been ridden for much longer by the Mount Grace dead and it had damaged him more deeply. He lay on the floor, conscious but unable or unwilling to move, his lips moving silently.

I helped Doug to untie himself, and then I helped him to stand.

‘Where’s . . . Jan?’ he slurred.

‘Waiting for you at home,’ I told him. ‘You want to go there now?’

He tried to speak, but couldn’t get the word out. He nodded instead.

‘You’re still wanted for murder, Doug. You probably want to give yourself up rather than let them catch you and bring you in.’

He nodded again. ‘To–tomorrow.’

Yeah. There’s always tomorrow.