Dead Men's Boots (50 page)

But that’s always been my problem. I set my sights way too high.

    
Twenty-two

S
TOKE NEWINGTON AFTER DARK: THE LUBOVICH HASSIDIM and the scallies from Manor House wander the streets in feral packs, but
I was in a bad enough mood by this time to take on anything I was likely to meet. God was in a bad mood, too—a strong wind
was getting up, harrying plastic carrier bags and scraps of paper along the pavements, and the sky was filling up with pregnant
clouds.

The offices of Ruthven, Todd and Clay were in reassuringly total darkness. I circled the outside of the building looking for
the likeliest way in, deciding at last to go in from the back and on the first floor. I had my lockpicks with me and could
have taken the street door inside of a New York minute, but there was too much chance of being seen by people walking past.
I couldn’t afford the time I’d lose in any brush with the forces of the law.

On the side street behind the office, there was a blind alley full of wheely bins and old fridges, the high walls topped with
broken glass set in very old cement. The only door was bolted from the inside rather than locked, but the brickwork on either
side of it was old and frost-pitted and offered pretty good purchase. I shinnied up the doorway itself, using footholds in
the brickwork where I found them and bracing myself against either side where I didn’t.

The top of the door was a couple of inches below the top of the frame. I stood on the door, wadded up my coat, and laid it
down on the glass. I only had to stand on it for a moment, using it to step across to a shed roof. Then I leaned out and hooked
the coat across after me, only a little worse for the wear.

The coat came into play again almost immediately. I wrapped it around my fist to break a single pane of the window at the
other end of the shed and then—with gingerly care—to knock the broken glass out of the frame. It was handy that the building
had never been double-glazed, although if it had, I could have dropped down into the yard and tried my luck with the back
door. Safely out of view, I could have taken my time.

As it was, things seemed to be going my way. Even groping around in the dark and at an odd angle, kneeling because the pane
was on a level with my knee, I found the window catch almost immediately and was able to lever it open. I slid the window
up as far as it would go and climbed inside.

There was carpet under my feet, but it was too dark for me to see anything of the layout of the room I was in. Fighting the
urge to blunder ahead and find my way by feel, I waited for my eyes to get a little more accustomed to the dark. It was just
as well I did. As the space around me resolved itself slowly out of shadows into some degree of visibility, I realized that
I wasn’t in a room at all. I was in a turn of the stairwell, which was just as narrow as I remembered it. My first step would
have pitched me down the stairs on my head.

Trying to remember the building from my one and only daytime visit, I went up rather than down. I had a rough sense where
Todd’s door would be in relation to the stairs, but not how far up it was. The first door opened when I tried the handle,
but the layout within was wrong—the desk was over against the far wall instead of under the window. I pulled the door shut
behind me and went on up.

On the next floor, the corresponding door seemed to be locked, but then I noticed with a faint stir of surprise that it was
bolted from the outside. I undid the bolt and peered in.

This time the darkness was absolute, even when I pushed the door wide open. More unsettlingly, the room was emitting a soft
bass rumble, almost more vibration than sound. Under the circumstances, there were close on a million good reasons for not
turning the light on, but that was what I did. It was almost automatic—groping on the wall to my left to see if there was
a switch there and, once I found it, flicking it on.

Outside of the movies, I’d never seen an assassin dismount and dismantle his sniper rifle and carefully put the pieces away
in the sculpted foam receptacles of a sleek black suitcase. I assumed it happened, but with no personal experience to go on,
I had to take it on trust. But I am now in a position to comment if I’m ever in a conversation about dismantled werewolves.
When the light clicked on, that was what I was looking at.

The room was full of cats, and they were all asleep: on the floor, on the furniture, on the shelves, covering every surface
in sight. The deep vibration was caused by their combined synchronous purring. I took an involuntary step backward, recoiling
from the implications of what I was seeing. And in that queasy moment, as I hovered on the cusp of a decision, a cat in the
center of the room, a big white-furred Persian lying on top of an antique rolltop escritoire, opened its eyes.

Then the cats around it did, too, and their neighbors and so forth, out from the center in a spreading wave, like one vast
creature sending a single instruction via an old and creaky nervous system that took its own sweet time getting the message
through.

A hundred or more cats stared at me, with ancient and inscrutable malevolence in their eyes. It was deeply, viscerally nasty,
but there was worse to come. The Persian mewled on a rising tone, and the cats on either side of it pressed in and nuzzled
its cheeks as if to comfort it. But that gentle contact became a firmer pressure, held for too long, and the flesh and fur
of the three cats’ faces started to run together into a repulsive, amorphous mass. The bodies followed, and more cats were
crowding in, jumping down from dusty shelves full of old books of legal precedents or leaping up from the floor to join the
press.

With a single muttered “Fuck!” I pulled my coat wide open and hooked my whistle out of the inside pocket. It occurred to me
fleetingly to back out and bolt the door again, but what good would that do? When these cats coalesced into the creature they
were going to become, doors weren’t going to hold it.

The three cats in the center were gone now. The spherical mound of pulpy flesh they’d become had a rudimentary face. The mound
rose from the desk as more cats added themselves to the base of it, deliquescing more quickly all the time as though the process
were gaining its own momentum. Working from memory, I found the stops and started to play.

I’d long ago forgotten the tune I’d composed to get the drop on Scrub the last time we’d met, and I couldn’t be sure that
this creature was the same loup-garou that had once worn the name and shape. Like Juliet said, if one werewolf could organize
itself as a colony creature, then probably they all could if they got the inspiration.

I had one thing going for me, and one thing only. As the loup-garou in front of me assembled itself by inches and ounces,
the sense of it grew stronger in my second sight, or rather my second hearing. The tune of the loup-garou strengthened and
strengthened, became more vivid and inescapable from moment to moment. I let the plangent notes fill me, and then I let them
ooze out of me through my lungs and my throat and my fingertips and the fragile piece of molded metal in my hands.

The coagulating mass in front of me roared in anger. It was much bigger already, and its disconcertingly liquid substance
spilled down from the desk onto the floor, allowing the remaining cats a much bigger surface area to adhere to and be absorbed
into. A stumpy appendage reached out toward me and developed blisters on its outer surface. The blisters grew into recognizable
fingers that opened and closed spasmodically. Rapier claws grew out from the fingertips.

I was fighting panic now. I wanted to hurry, but the logic of the tune was pulling me in the opposite direction, making me
slow down, hold the notes as long as I could, and let them glide out into the room on a descending scale. The tower of matter
quivered, ripples chasing one another across its surface. Each ripple was like the pass of a magician’s hand, leaving behind
first fur, then bare, disquietingly pink flesh, then fur again. The limbs were forced out from the main mass like meat from
a mincing machine, and as soon as the legs were able to stand, they began to lurch toward me. The face rose and was extruded
from the top of the tower like an obscene bubble, the flesh below it crimping and narrowing, creating a head and neck by default.
It was all of a piece, the eyes the same color and texture as the flesh of the face, but they were starting to clear as I
watched. The face leered, and my panic grew.

But the tune was right, and I was wrong. Slow and steady, note upon skirling note, it laid itself on the nascent thing in
front of me like chains. It was working. The only question was whether it was working fast enough to keep me from being eaten
alive. The loup-garou slowed, its back bent as though under a heavy weight, but it didn’t stop. It took another step forward,
the clutch of scimitars at the end of its arm flexing and clashing in front of my face. Its toothless mouth gaped open and
grew fangs that solidified from doughy pink to gleaming white. I lurched back involuntarily, and the door frame banged my
left elbow, almost knocking the whistle out of my hands. That would have been the end of the story, but I recovered with only
a brief slur on one note of the tune.

A morbid paralysis was seizing the loup-garou, but it was coming from the feet on up. Its upper body still had a lot of flexibility,
and it leaned forward, aiming a raking slash at my throat. I ducked back on my trailing foot, and the wicked claws turned
the front of my coat into confetti. A sharp pain and a rush of warmth down my chest told me that at least one had drawn blood.
Shuffling like a blind man, I backed out onto the landing an inch at a time until the wooden stair rail was pressing against
the small of my back and I knew there was nowhere else to run. My options had narrowed to two: play or die.

I played, forcing the other option out of my mind. The loup-garou’s legs buckled, and it crashed down onto its knees, but
it was still trying to reach me. When the claws of the thing’s outstretched arm slashed at my ankle, I ducked to the side
and kicked it away. The loup-garou roared again, but the sound had a sloughing, sucking fall to it. It was the sound of something
falling apart from the inside out.

The face, now fully formed, stared at me with indelible hatred. It was Scrub’s face at first, then another wave crossed the
surface of that flesh ocean, and it was the face of Leonard the copyboy. Struggling to form words, it spewed out blood and
black bile. A few fragments of sound bubbled through the liquid decay. “C-Cas-Cast—”

The eyes became opaque again, and the fluid in the gaping mouth congealed all at once into something that looked as shiny
and vitreous as setting tar. The loup-garou was probably dead by this point, but strange movements from this or that part
of the massive, slumped body made me wary of stepping in close to check. I left it there, sprawled on the landing like something
huge and unwanted left out for the dustman.

Maynard Todd’s office was on the next turn of the stairs; I knew it when I saw the light already on. I didn’t see anything
particularly to be gained by subtlety. My fight with Scrub had made enough noise to wake the dead, assuming there were any
more of them around, so anybody in there knew I was coming. I could always turn and walk away, but that didn’t seem like an
option. So I pushed the door wide and went on in.

Todd was sitting at his desk, the chair tilted back slightly so that he could lean on the shelves behind him. The gun in his
hand was pointing at my chest, and his posture was completely relaxed.

“Mr. Castor,” he said, pushing the chair on the client side of the desk out toward me with his foot. “How is it that you can
never rely on religious cultists even to get a simple murder right? Take away their pentagrams and their mystic sigils, they’re
like little kids. I was very disappointed to hear that you’d survived your little trip to Alabama. But I try to treat every
setback as an opportunity. Come on in and sit down.”

I walked into the room, but I didn’t take the chair. So long as I was standing, there was a chance I might get the drop on
him at some point. Sitting down, I was dead meat. “Working late,” I commented.

His gaze flicked the corner of the room. Looking in that direction myself, I saw a foldout bed. “I sleep here these days,”
Todd said, sounding a little flat and resigned. “Mrs. Todd has filed divorce papers. She says I’m not the man she married.
And you know what? She has a point. I asked you to sit down, Mr. Castor. A bullet through your kneecap would force the issue.”

I sat down. I wondered why he hadn’t killed me already, if that was the plan. Maybe because he was worried about getting blood
on the carpet. If that was it, his night was going to be ruined when he saw what was on the second-floor landing.

“You’ve come a long way in a short while,” Todd went on. “That’s a tribute to your detective skills.”

“Thanks.”

“Except that you’re not a detective.” Todd’s tone hardened, and he gave me a look of actual dislike. “You’re just a man who
gets rid of unwanted ghosts. One step up from a backstreet abortionist. What they do at the start of the life cycle, you do
at the end. And like them, you’re doing it for the money. You don’t have either the brains or the motivation to figure us
out.”