Dead Men's Boots (53 page)

Todd didn’t answer, but there was a glint in his eye as he looked at me—a hint of challenge or mockery. Looking down at the
music, fixing the opening beats in my mind, I slid my whistle out of my inside pocket and shipped it into the operating position.

“But here’s the bad news,” I said. “John Gittings
did
manage to get a fix on you. I don’t know where he was standing or what sort of tricks he used. He wasn’t a particularly smart
guy, in my opinion, but he did it anyway. He nailed you and got you down on paper.” I cleared my throat, spat on the floor.
“And that’s what I’m going to play for you this evening,” I muttered, not looking at Todd. I put the whistle to my lips, tried
to find the sense. I took one deep breath, held it for a second, then another second, until the seconds became beats and the
music invited me in.

Open with a hot trill like manic birdsong, but the bird’s a dive-bomber, and it crashes down hard through the scale to level
out a full octave lower in a welter of hard, pugnacious chords. Bail out into C and hold it for a full four beats before dropping
even further. It was all guesswork—and I was trying to cover both parts of John’s wacky notation, playing two voices on the
same instrument. Todd looked at me with blank puzzlement, but beyond that, he didn’t respond.

Change the key, change the time, start again. Still no reaction from Todd. When I got to the hard part, where Jamie Pomfret
had told me a third drummer was meant to come in, I started to tap my heel against the desk in crude counterpoint to the music.
It was hard not to tap on the beat, but John’s music was quite clear that the new voice should be at odds with the rest of
the rhythm. I kept it up until the weird lack of synchronization made me stumble, lose my sense of direction, and stop dead
in the middle of a bar.

“What’s the point of this?” Moloch demanded.

“Shut up,” I said, trying to think my way through the sequence that had just tripped me.

Again from the top, and faster now because the sense was growing inside me again: the sense that was my knack, my stock in
trade, and that had started to kick in back at the National Gallery café when Pomfret was playing the cruet set for all he
was worth. My fingers were finding the right stops almost without being told to, and the atonal skirl leaked out into the
air like toxic waste.

Todd winced, which was encouraging. I had to hope it didn’t only mean he was a music lover.

I skated up to the crux again, started to kick with one heel and then with both. The wailing voice of the whistle and the
hollow thudding rhythm clashed and fought. Moloch shook his head and scowled, but Todd was starting to look a little afraid.
“Castor—” he whispered. I couldn’t hear the word under the music, but I saw his lips move and read it there. Another chord
change brought a flicker of real pain, making him screw his eyes tight shut. John’s evil medicine was working. A symphony
for drums, played blind and fumbling on a tin whistle. But if it works, don’t knock it.

“Castor!” Todd said again, louder. There was a catch in his voice, and his eyes rolled. I carried on playing. Deep in the
logic of the scribbled score, it would have been almost impossible to stop. I’d given him a choice, but now there were no
choices left. A single phrase from the David Bowie song “Sound and Vision” formed in the music and then dissolved, a surprise
visitor from another dimension. Flying on autopilot, I was more surprised to see it there than anyone.

The music rushed to its climax, the backbeat limping along behind in a slow-quick-slow. Todd was yelling, tears coursing down
his cheeks. “Ash! It’s the ash! The ash is our physical focus, and we feed it to the people we want to take. Then we all invade
them together, subdue them together, and a single spirit stays inside. Please, Castor! That’s the truth. Inscription stops
the host soul from reasserting itself. It’s still there, but it’s too weak to fight us. We reinscribe once a month, to make
sure— Don’t! Don’t!”

He carried on babbling, but the words were lost to me in the drumming of my own blood. Drumming. Yes. This symphony needed
percussion—demanded it. I jumped down off the desk and started stamping on the floor with my left foot. It turned into a clumsy
dance. I was staggering around like a drunk, the sounds rising through me and making me move whichever way they needed me
to move. Downstairs I’d played for my life, cold and focused, pulling every note out of my mind and out of the darkness by
will alone. What was welling up inside me now was different, and will had very little part to play in it. The closing notes
seemed almost to tear the back of my throat, and when they faded, I found that I was down on my knees on the floor beside
Todd’s chair.

Groggily, I straightened and stood. I stared down at the lawyer in his hemp cocoon. His head lolled at an angle, his glazed
eyes staring at nothing. A string of spittle trailed from the corner of his mouth onto the collar of his shirt. I thought
he was dead, but I realized after a few moments that his tongue was moving inside his mouth. He was trying to form words.

I bent down, put my ear to his mouth, and listened. Nothing intelligible, although there was a faint rise and fall of sound
like the half-heard voices in between radio stations that you can never focus into audibility.

“You drove the possessing spirit out,” Moloch said, at my elbow.

“Yeah, I did,” I said, the words hurting my tender throat. “And look—someone else is still home.”

“The original owner of this flesh,” Moloch confirmed. “He seems—disoriented.”

“He seems pretty much catatonic,” I muttered, looking away. “Did you catch Todd on the wing?”

“
This
is Todd. The soul that animates this meat now. What fled is not Todd but someone else who lived in his body and stole his
name. But no, I didn’t eat it. You told me not to. I let it leave unmolested.”

I nodded. I had to sit down. That performance had left me feeling as hollow as a cored piece of fruit. A dull ache was starting
inside my head. I stumbled across to a vacant chair and sank into it. My breath was coming as rough and ragged as if I’d just
swum the Channel, and panic was settling on my mind like a physical weight.

The thing that had been Todd looked past me with its eyes focused on nothing very much.

“What did he say?” I asked the demon. “He was shouting toward the end, but I couldn’t stop to listen or I would have lost
the tune. Lost the sense of it.”

He summarized with crisp precision, turning away from the shell of Maynard Todd as though it held no further interest for
him. “That they use the ash of their cremation as a physical vessel for the possession of new host bodies. The host is tricked
or forced into eating the ash. Then all the souls in this—cabal—invade the intended host at once, subduing his soul so that
one of their number can possess his body.”

“I caught that much,” I said. “I thought there was more.”

Moloch nodded. “He said they tried to do this to you when you went to Mount Grace to burn John Gittings. Todd gave you a drink
of brandy from a hip flask. The ash was dispersed in the liquor. But the succubus came before they could complete the possession,
and they had to stop.”

I remembered the sudden terrible sickness that had come over me as John’s casket rolled through the furnace doors. Not like
me at all, and now I knew why. It
wasn’t
me at all.

“He also said that the procedure—the possession—is only temporary. The soul of the possessed tries to reassert itself—tries
to break free from their control. It gets stronger again over time, however hard they whip it into submission. They have to
meet at Mount Grace once a month to repeat the ritual, for want of a better word, and reassert their control. They do this
at the dark of the moon, and they call it—”

“Inscription.”

“Yes.” He stared at me with a hungry intensity. “Castor, he answered your question, finally, when he was desperate and trying
to make you spare him. But in any case, you’d only have to look out the window. The dark of the moon is tonight.”

“I know.”

“We have them. We can take them all.”

I nodded slowly. “Yeah.”

Maybe the feeling of foreboding I was experiencing was paranoia. I’d just performed a full exorcism—or something that felt
like one. The ghost that had flown out from this room either should have vanished into the ether or should be heading for
hell at a good cruising speed. That was where the smart money was lying.

But what was the worst-case scenario? That the tough old soul had been cast out but had the strength to resist utter dissolution.
That it knew where it was going and had the strength to get there. Sure, the thing inside John Gittings had needed to be taken
to Mount Grace and burned there again—but then John’s house had more wards and fendings on it than Pentonville had bars. They
were designed to keep the dead out, but they cut both ways. That was why the mad, desperate ghost had gone geist. But here
at Todd’s offices, as I’d noticed when I first came in, there wasn’t anything to keep the evil dead from coming and going
as they pleased.

So I’d had my rehearsal for the big show, and that was good, but it was more than possible I’d told the bastards I was coming.
They’d have all the time in the world to prepare us a really nasty welcome.

“We’ve got to go now,” I said.

Moloch gave me a look of ruthless, detached appraisal. “You think you can walk?” he asked.

I nodded again. “Yeah,” I said from a fog of exhaustion and pain. “Just getting my second wind.”

“We can’t go now,” he reminded me in the same cold tone. “We need the lady.”

I climbed unwillingly to my feet. “I know,” I muttered.

“Can you find her?”

I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know. There was only one place I’d thought of that was worth looking, and I knew for a fact
I wasn’t going to be welcome there. I trudged down the stairs. I couldn’t hear Moloch’s footfalls, but the prickle on the
back of my neck told me that he was following.

The night loomed ahead of us like a mountain. Only idiots climb mountains in the dark.

    
Twenty-three

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 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 with sleep. Everything
about her posture suggested misery and a preemptive 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 like going into the instant, unwelcome free fall of cold turkey.

Susan 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-wreck-in-slowmotion voice. Susan swiveled 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 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 cross fire between her survival instinct and her good breeding.

I wasn’t sure how to make the introduction, so I didn’t try. Instead, I turned to Moloch as the more immediate problem. “Juliet
lives here,” I said to him. “But she’s not here now. She hasn’t made 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 back and forth 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, 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.”