Dead Men's Boots (56 page)

“And now,” said Moloch with ironic emphasis when we reached the bottom of the ladder, “if you’ve adjusted your dress—” Juliet’s
warning glare silenced him.

“We’re the point men,” I said to him. “We’re going in from the front. Juliet’s going to join us when she’s done what needs
to be done here.”

He bowed, gesturing for me to take the lead. I looked around at Juliet one more time. “Luck,” I said, for want of anything
better to say.

“There’s no such thing,” she told me dispassionately, already walking away. “Trust in luck and you’ll die tonight.”

I headed for the entrance to the yard. The gate been closed with a padlock when we turned up, but Moloch had twisted the lock
between finger and thumb, and it had snapped off clean. Then he’d tossed it negligently over his shoulder. There was nothing
to slow us down as we walked back out onto the street.

The front gates of the crematorium were a much heftier proposition. They were off on our left, fifty yards away at most. I
hadn’t taken the time to admire them on the day of John’s cremation, but I could see that they were built to withstand a serious
siege. Where they touched, they wore a massive chain and a clutch of padlocks like a giant’s charm bracelet.

We took our time, not wanting to get there too early. The impassive men inside stared out at us through the bars as we approached.
There were three of them, all dressed in the sober black uniforms of priests or security guards, though most priests don’t
have that kind of physique. I stared back. No sign of small arms—only sidewinder nightsticks in holsters at their waists.
But then they wouldn’t want a chance passerby to notice anything odd and dial 999. The rifles would put in an appearance soon
enough if we gave them any excuse.

“Evening, gents,” I said, coming to a halt right in front of the gates. Juliet’s arcane energies were burning inside me. I
felt slightly hysterical; it was hard not to laugh out loud.

The guy in the middle gave me a bored, neutral look. “Anything we can do for you?” he asked in a tone that emphatically didn’t
expect a yes and wouldn’t be happy to hear one.

“Yeah,” I said equably. “We’ve come to see Uncle George. He’s in the memorial garden, right next to the stone cherub with
the fascist graffiti on its arse. George Armstrong Castor. He was in the cavalry.”

The guard didn’t answer me right away. He gave us both a harder look, his eyebrows inverting themselves into a dark V of stony
disapproval. “The memorial garden is closed,” he said. “You’ll have to come back tomorrow morning.”

I shook my head firmly. “Tomorrow morning is no use,” I said. “We’re grieving now. By tomorrow we could be feeling cynical
and self-sufficient again. So would you mind opening up before I lose my temper?”

The words hung in the air. I was smiling as I said them, a slightly crazed smile that did nothing to take away the edge of
threat. But the guard’s pained expression as he scratched his ear and squared his shoulders said very eloquently that the
threat wasn’t a credible one, and that he’d had more than enough of being polite.

“Fuck off out of it, pally,” he said. “I’ve told you we’re closed.”

Moloch stepped past me and took a two-handed grip on the bars, arms at full stretch. He shook the gates on their hinges, testing
their weight and heft. One of the guards on the flank gave a jeering laugh. But the guy in charge wasn’t seeing the funny
side. He took a step toward the gate, his hand going to the grip of his nightstick. And that, by a happy chance, was when
the fun started. There was a rending crash from our right. The three guards, taken by surprise, all turned their heads to
see what the noise was. We’d known it was coming, so we didn’t.

Todd had said that the Mount Grace collective liked to keep things in the family, so what happened next was no more than the
pirate souls in possession of these men deserved. I couldn’t help remembering, though, that the flesh still belonged to someone
else—that each of these human bodies had a prisoner locked in an oubliette somewhere, screaming to be released. Moloch granted
them their wish in a particularly hideous way.

He pushed the gates up and in, the hinges breaking open with sharp, metallic cracks like the blows of a hammer on an anvil.
Then he swung them like a giant flyswatter and brought them down on the three men, crushing them to the ground.

I looked away as I stepped across the ad hoc drawbridge, trying not to see the red ruin of blood and bone under my feet. I
told myself we had no choice. I thought about John Gittings, and Vince Chesney, and Gary Coldwood. It didn’t help: Nothing
was ever going to make these scales balance.

Moloch was striding on ahead, not bothering to look back and see whether I was following. I took out my whistle and put it
to my lips.

The wall isnt a wall,
John’s letter had said. In other words, the ghosts of Mount Grace weren’t constrained by physical barriers, and anyone who
thought he could hold his fire until he got to the front door or the furnace room or wherever he reckoned ground zero might
be probably wasn’t going to make it.

I started to play. There was no fumbling or feeling my way into it this time, partly because the music was still fresh in
my mind from when I’d wielded it like a scalpel to slice spirit from flesh back in Maynard Todd’s office, but mainly because
whatever juice Juliet had charged me up with when we kissed was fizzing and burning through my blood. It didn’t feel like
a current running through me; it was more visceral than that. It was as though
I
were current, running through the world.

Another crash, and as we rounded the long curve of the driveway, I saw the earthmover breaking cover a hundred yards ahead.
Juliet’s driving skills hadn’t improved, but a bulldozer is a simple enough thing to control so long as you don’t care what
you hit. The first avalanche of sound—the one that had distracted the guards at the gate—had been when she rammed the fence
and broke through from the building site into the crematorium ground. Now she was cutting diagonally across the path ahead
of us, leaving in her wake a ruin of desecrated urns and mangled fence posts. Running men took potshots at her while trying
to keep from falling under the massive Caterpillar treads that bore her on. She ignored the shots, both the ones that missed
and the occasional ones that found their mark.

And she drew the pursuit away from us, into and through the decorative hedge of privet on the far side of the drive, bending
before her in a wind that was one notch down from a hurricane, and still there hadn’t been a single drop of rain. Moloch and
I walked on, more or less unmolested, and the doors of the building loomed ahead of us.

The doors weren’t going to be fun, though. The black-uniformed men stationed on the steps had seen us coming, and they were
already kneeling to take aim. Moloch took off toward them at a run, and I veered off the path into the trees, not even missing
a note, part of my mind working out the likely trajectories of any bullets that might miss him and find their way to me.

I circled wide, hearing the impact of flesh on flesh and the choked-off screams of the men on the steps as the demon landed
among them, undeterred by their bullets and so eager for the feast still to come that even sadism had temporarily lost its
charm. By the time I came out of the stand of trees, he was already turning to look for me, rigid with impatience, his fists
clenching and unclenching at his sides. Men lay around him like fallen leaves, unconscious or dead.

I was still playing, and by now the music had taken on its own momentum, as it had in Todd’s office. It was playing itself
through me, so I felt like all I had to do was keep the whistle to my lips and let myself be a conduit for it. Otherwise,
the buildup of pressure would probably burst my brain like a big, overfilled water balloon.

I crossed the drive and ascended the steps, my feet thumping arrhythmically on the ground to create the complex, out-of-phase
back-beat the music needed to do its stuff. I was aware of resistance, but it wasn’t coming in the form I’d expected. I’d
thought the evil dead would try to possess me and that I’d feel the same dizziness and weakness I’d experienced on the day
of John’s cremation. But it wasn’t like that at all, not at first. It began as a sense of drag, as though I were up to my
thighs in cold water and had to push myself through it, my steps slowing involuntarily.

Moloch turned as I joined him, squared his shoulders, and kicked the doors wide open, then strode across the threshold without
looking back. Two more guards were waiting just inside, and they shot him in the chest and head. He picked up one of the two—left
hand on the throat, right gripping the crotch—and swung him in a tight semicircle so that his skull met the other man’s with
appalling, unstoppable force. It was a single movement, a single missed beat, and then Moloch was walking on, leaving the
bodies slumped together under the angel of Saint Matthew, whose robes were stained with their blood and brains.

I followed along behind, but even though we were out of the wind, the going was getting harder. The feeling of resistance
was growing now that we were inside the building. The cold water was up above my waist, and it was congealing into ice, counteracting
the fever heat that Juliet had gifted me with. Without knowing exactly when it had started, I became aware of a noise almost
beyond the limits of hearing: an atonal skirl that was picking at the stitches of my skein of music, undoing the spell I was
trying to weave by infinitesimal increments.

The last time I’d walked down this hall, it had seemed barely twenty paces long. It seemed a lot longer now, and every step
added to the distance rather than taking away from it. One. Two. Three. Perspective bowed and buckled, space surrendered,
hemorrhaged. I raised my left foot and felt the agonized pause, the gap in time before it fell again, as a hole in the music
through which my own mind was starting to bleed out. Seven. Eight. I was trudging along a subway tunnel, the air closing in,
the ground pulling away and away into unfathomable distance.

Nine.

The mosquito whine of unheard voices enfolded me. I knew them for what they were: the unsepulchered dead, defending their
inner sanctum with the single-minded viciousness that had been their hallmark in life. I could even distinguish the different
voices in the insect chorus as my death sense kicked in like passive radar, analyzing and identifying the cold, cruel intelligences
that were bent on killing me.

Up ahead of me, Moloch stumbled, but my perceptions were so attenuated that he seemed to do it in slow motion. Another security
guard was standing at the doors of the chapel, a handgun in his fist aimed at Moloch’s torso, his finger pumping the trigger.
Ragged holes blossomed in the taut black leather stretched across Moloch’s back, and green ichor flowed from them like tears:
incidental details, both to me and to him. But the air was thickening and curdling around the demon’s head and shoulders,
the evil dead rallying to keep him out. He slowed, his head bowing under an invisible weight.

I felt that weight, too. The tenth step was going to be my last. My foot was coming down as heavy as a sack full of spanners,
and I doubted I’d have the strength to lift it up again. And even if I did, what then? Another step, and another, like Sisyphus’s
boulder, with nothing more to show for it than another yard gained—a slight shift in position that would be more than offset
by the endless organic growth of the hallway. Better to stop and rest and see what came next. Maybe nothing. Nothing would
be good.

Moloch was reaching out with both hands toward the man who was shooting him, again and again, in the chest, but he was groping
like a blind man, and like mine, his feet were rooted to the spot. I understood the blindness, dimly. Something foul was silting
in my head, too, swallowing up my faltering concentration in its feculent, liquid depositions, piling up behind my eyes like
mud on a riverbed.

I found myself drawing the note that was in my mouth into a sighing out breath that had nowhere to go but down. I had no idea
what would follow it. It was hard even to care. My mind was a slender filament of light and the filament was flickering, stuttering,
stop start stop.

Juliet saved me—Juliet and our rough-and-ready timing. There was another apocalyptic crash from outside that shook the foundations
of the building, and simultaneously, my consciousness bobbed to the surface again, yawing and pitching so that the world lurched
drunkenly around me and I almost fell to my knees. The hypersonic whine in my ears dropped a notch and became a hollow, keening
moan.

Moloch laughed, harsh and triumphant.

Outside, although I couldn’t see it, I knew that Juliet had just piloted the bulldozer, blade lowered and ready, through the
picturesque glades and paths of the garden of remembrance. Funereal urns were exploding like ripe fruit under the Caterpillar
tracks, spilling dry and ancient dust into the hungry wind. And feeling their earthly tabernacles defiled, feeling the other
wind that blew from eternity plucking at them million-fingered, the dead men were afraid. They faltered in their attack, because
they hadn’t expected to be counterattacked in such a viciously intimate way. It was the advice that John had passed on to
me inside the case of the pocket watch, as it had been passed on to him by his mysterious informant.
Remember you can still threaten them. Physically, I mean. If you pull your foot back to kick, a man is going to cover his
balls.
I hadn’t realized what that meant until Todd had told me that he and his dead pals used their own ashes as the medium of
transference when they leapfrogged into new bodies. That was when I saw the rough outline of what we’d have to do. And when
we got to the building site, and Moloch found the keys to the bulldozer in the site hut inside a safe whose walls were barely
three inches thick… well, it seemed like destiny.

The lull was already over. The dead men renewed their assault on us, although no doubt another contingent had peeled off to
find Juliet and deliver unto her the verdict and the sentence of their time-distilled hatred. In all, we’d had maybe five
seconds of respite.