Dead Men's s Boots

they wanted. Slowly, silently, I snaked my hand into my coat and slid out the tin whistle. The silent presence had a distinct feel to it, and it was starting to resolve into notes – fragmented, for now, but the links would come if I could stay alive long enough.

‘You might as well turn on the light,’ said a dry, brittle, utterly inhuman voice. ‘If I was going to rip your throat out, I’d have done it as soon as you walked in.’

I didn’t need to turn on the light: that voice was imprinted on my mind almost as powerfully as Juliet’s scent.

‘Moloch,’ I snarled.

A faint snicker ratcheted out of the darkness like a rusty thumbscrew being laboriously turned.

‘I thought it was time we pooled our resources,’ the demon said.

20

I turned the light on, shrugged off my coat and threw it over the back of the sofa, then stepped out of my shoes as I advanced into the room. I managed to do all of this stuff fairly matter-of-factly: after all, like the fiend- in-the-shape-of-a-man said, he’d already had an open goal and refused to take the shot. Whatever this turned out to be, it wasn’t a straightforward ambush.

‘So how was your trip?’ Moloch asked, in the same tone of metal grinding against bone.

I made a so-so gesture. ‘Too many Satanists,’ I said.

He nodded sympathetically, but his smile showed way too many teeth to be reassuring. ‘Our little fifth column. Yes. If it’s any consolation, they all get eaten in the end.’

He was sitting in the swivel chair, a 1970s relic that was Ropey’s most prized possession after his music collection. Moloch was looking well: there was a ruddier tinge to his skin, and he’d even gained a little weight. His dress sense had improved, too: in place of the rags he’d been wearing when I first saw him outside the offices of Ruthven, Todd and Clay, he was dressed now in black trousers, calf-length black boots and a black grandad shirt with red jewelled studs at the neck and cuffs. He would have looked like some eighteenth-century priest playing a game of ‘my benefice is bigger than yours’ if it weren’t for the full-length leather coat. As it was, he looked like someone who’d taken The Matrix a little too seriously. The fingers of his two hands were cat’s-cradled around something small that gleamed white between them. He turned it slightly every now and then: the only move he made. Then, when he saw that my gaze had turned to it, he opened his fingers and let me see what it was: a tiny skull, about the size of a human baby’s but longer in the jaw, picked clean of flesh. I was willing to bet that it was a cat’s skull.

‘First things first,’ Moloch said briskly. ‘We don’t want to be interrupted, so let’s draw the curtains around our tent. Keep out the riff-raff.’

He spread his fingers with a flourish, letting the skull tumble off his palm. It made it most of the way to the floor: then it just stopped, in the air, six inches or so above the shag pile.

‘Normal service will be resumed,’ Moloch murmured. ‘Eventually. Until then the walls will have no ears, and nobody can drop in on us unannounced.’

Unable to take my stare off the weirdly suspended skull, I sat at the furthest edge of the sofa, putting as much distance between myself and the demon as I could – and keeping the whistle firmly gripped in my left hand, ready for use.

Moloch noticed, and he affected to be hurt. ‘I saved your life the other night,’ he reminded me reproachfully. ‘We’re fighting the same fight, Felix.’

‘Are we?’ I asked bluntly.

He gave me a slow, emphatic nod. ‘Oh yes. Trust me on this.’

‘And who are we fighting against, exactly?’

‘The immortals. The killers who found the exit door on the far side of Hell. You remember I spoke to you about rhythm. Sequence. Cadence. I know the end of the story, and you know its start. Shall we embrace like brothers, and share?’

‘No,’ I suggested. ‘Let’s not. Tell me what you want out of me and what you can give me, with no bullshit, and I’ll tell you if I’m interested.’

The demon pursed his lips. ‘I confess,’ he said, ‘I prefer a certain degree of commitment at the outset. A promise, at least. It doesn’t need to be sealed in blood. If I tell you what I know, you’ll use it to further my interests, as well as your own. Just swear, on something you care about. The formalities aren’t important.’

I stared him out.

‘Felix.’ He made a sound like the desiccated, risen-fromthe-tomb-unnaturally-alive mummy of a sigh. ‘We have to roll a boulder up a very large hill together. Without some basis of trust between us, it’s going to be hard work.’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t even know what the boulder is,’ I pointed out. ‘I’m not likely to get my shoulder under it any time soon – not on blind faith, anyway.’

‘Faith?’ The demon made a terse, faintly obscene gesture. ‘No. I wouldn’t advise you to deal with me on that basis. Did you mention me to the lady, at all?’

‘To Juliet? Yeah, I did.’

‘And how did she respond?’

I thought back. ‘She spat on the ground,’ I said.

He nodded with a certain satisfaction. ‘Immediately after she spoke my name, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’ll notice I haven’t spoken hers. Only that of her brother, who is dead. These are useful precautions among our kind. Our names aren’t given or chosen at random. They have unique properties, and to speak them casually, without due attention to . . .’ he hesitated before visibly selecting the right word ‘. . . prophylaxis can lead to very serious consequences. And she has good reason both to hate and to fear me.’

‘I’ll bet,’ I said, unimpressed. ‘And, you know, I appreciate your frankness. I’d say it was a breath of fresh air except that the air stinks of rotten meat. This isn’t getting us much further, is it?’

‘No,’ Moloch agreed. ‘It isn’t.’ He smiled nastily. ‘You’re very amusing, Felix, do you know that? Your instinctive mistrust. The way you look for angles, for advantages, even when there aren’t any. You see yourself as the finger in the dyke, don’t you? And me as the rising tide. But I promise you, very solemnly: in the bigger scheme of things, you’re –’ he touched the tips of his fingers together, opened them again, consigning me to oblivion ‘– insignificant.’

‘Can you have a rising tide of shit?’ I asked politely. ‘I suppose technically the answer’s yes, but it’s a disturbing image. I’d go for a different metaphor, if I were you. Something more in a David and Goliath flavour. And you know, I’m like Avis rent-a-car: because I’m insignificant, I try harder.’

I was hoping to shake the aura of smugness Moloch was putting out, but his smile just broadened. ‘Do you even know, Castor, why the dead are rising? Why the order of things has reversed itself so that graves gape and give birth?’

In spite of myself, a tremor went through me. The demon must have seen it because he smiled in modest gratification. ‘I think the answer is no,’ he murmured. ‘Poor little Dutch boy, labouring in the dark as the water rises around his ankles, then his knees, then—’

‘Well, everyone’s got a theory,’ I said, cutting across his chalk-on-blackboard eloquence. ‘Take a number and join the line.’

Moloch shook his head. ‘I don’t have a theory,’ he said, baring his teeth in what looked more like contempt than amusement now. ‘I was there, human. I saw the damage done. The great project. Oh yes. The shedim knew it for what it was.’

The great project. Juliet had mentioned that too, and then had pulled back from explaining what she meant. I felt a sudden brief wave of vertigo break over me, as though I’d been about to jump over a low wall but had then discovered at the last moment that the far side gave onto a sheer drop.

‘Whose project was it, then?’ I asked, still in the same Doubting Thomas voice. ‘Yours, or someone else’s?’