Dead Men's s Boots

What does it say about me that a scant couple of hours after hearing about Gary Coldwood’s brush with the reaper I was shoving it to the back of my mind to play twenty questions with a demon? That I was so hungry for what he was about to tell me, I even put Mount Grace momentarily on the back burner of my mind?

Moloch stood up, his joints cracking alarmingly.

‘Go on,’ I said.

The demon turned his eyes on me, and something happened in the air between us. It seemed to ripple and thicken, as though something else had been dropped into it and made it curdle. Then suddenly Moloch was gone from in front of me, and his hand clamped down on my left shoulder – from behind. It took all my self-control not to dive off the sofa, hit the ground and roll.

Twisting my head around, I met his unblinking stare. As a show of strength, it did the job: my heart was racing and my throat was dry.

‘I prefer not to,’ he growled. ‘I was only . . . reminiscing. Thinking about the good old days. But they’re gone, now. The time is past when I could sit upon a chair made from my enemies’ intestines and feast on your woeful kindred. That summer will not come again.’

‘It’s a fucker,’ I agreed, trying to keep my voice level. ‘Where are the guts of yesteryear?’

‘The lady,’ Moloch resumed, walking away from me again towards the window. ‘You know what she eats, and how. Sexual desire is like a digestive enzyme for her: it lets her take spirit and flesh together. She inflames, and then she feeds: she can do it as well here as in the realms below, since all desire is ultimately in the mind.’

He stared out into the night and ran his clawed fingertips absently down the pane. ‘My case isn’t so fortunate. My meat is the souls of men who have killed other men, and women likewise. But only the souls: not the flesh. And even the souls I can only take, and feed on, and be nourished by, in certain very specific circumstances. The shedim are highly evolved; highly specialised. We have no mechanism for straining the life, the spirit, the selfness out of torn meat.

‘So when Hell changed – when the borders shifted – we began to starve. And there was no easy remedy. In the subtle realms we make . . .’ He gestured vaguely. ‘I don’t know the word . . . like small creatures, that make traps and then wait for their prey to come to them, instead of hunting. Traps that they weave out of their own bodies’ mass.’

‘Webs,’ I suggested, my voice coming out cracked and strained because my throat was still painfully dry. ‘Spider webs.’

‘Exactly. In Hell we make webs. But now the webs stood empty, year after year. We became desperate, and we fought. Against the succubi. Against the bone-singers. Against each other. And the weaker we became, the more frenzied were these struggles. Like rats in a sack, we tore at each other and devoured each other’s substance, even though it couldn’t nourish us.’

Still staring out of the window, Moloch lapsed into silence. ‘So you jumped ship?’ I suggested, just trying to keep him talking.

He held up his hands in front of his own face, examining them with intense disfavour. ‘A chance conjuration allowed me to rise to Reth Adoma,’ he said. ‘Some necromancer who couldn’t even frame a summoning, so that I rose out of the ground in a family burial plot in the middle of Essex. I looked for him – for the one who’d had the effrontery to summon me – but I never found him. A pity: I’d have liked to show my feelings on that score. Anyway, I wove myself a physical body so that I could stay here. Truly physical, I mean – not like the simulation of flesh that the lady wears. This body is real, and solid, and I live inside it as a hermit crab lives inside a borrowed shell. It took me many years to make, out of pieces of flesh gleaned here and there. The alternative was to go home again, and die.’

Moloch dropped his hands to his sides and turned his head to look at me again.

‘It was despair, more than hope, that kept me here,’ he said, the fires in his eyes flickering like distant beacons on the hills of another country. ‘My needs are not great but, as I said, they’re very specialised. The nourishment I need lies in the souls of those of your kind who have killed many, and taken pleasure in the killing. And whereas the succubus – your lady – is a hunter, I am a trapper. Traps for the soul are hard to build in the stunted, solid realms of Reth Adoma, squashed down by the hideous fist of gravity.’

‘Killers can’t be that hard to find,’ I said, with forced flippancy.

‘No,’ the demon agreed. ‘They’re not. I’ve found and eaten many, but it’s like eating the dream of a meal, and waking to find yourself still hungry. In Hell –’ his voice quivered with longing ‘– we used to let the souls lie for years on our terraces. Let them rot, and mature, and render down into their final form. And then, oh, then we feasted.’

He laughed fondly at the memory: it was the kind of sound you really, really need to forget but know you never will.

‘Old souls, separated from flesh in a way that leaves no bruise on the tender spirit,’ he murmured. ‘That’s what I hunger for. But here, in your thin, drab world, a meal like that is a great rarity.

‘I’ve scraped up enough to survive, through the decades. Barely. And you led me to two snacks that gave me some small nourishment. The were-thing, that built its body out of cats . . . I closed with it twice, the first time when it was following you from the law office, the second when it tried to kill you at the laboratory. Both times I managed to ingest some of its essence, while the soul was in transit and loosened from the flesh. Not perfect, but I was able to keep it down. It’s made me stronger than I’ve been in many decades.

‘But it’s the mother-lode I’m after, Castor. I want you to take me to the waterhole, where the great, ever- living killers come to drink, and drink again, of life and youth and strength. Take me there, and turn me loose, and I’ll eat them for you. After you’ve dressed and prepared the feast for me, with your music.’

Moloch fell silent again, and the spell of his words was so strong that it was a few seconds before I realised that he was waiting for an answer. To be honest, it was an effort to focus my thoughts on what should have been the key issue right now: the born-again killers with their dead-men’s-boots system of reincarnation. I wanted to grill this bastard about what he meant when he said that Hell’s borders had shifted, and what the great project had been.

But the demon’s expectant gaze was still fixed on me. With an effort, I stifled the questions that were jostling for position in my throat. He wanted me to give him an answer to his little proposition, but in true Castor style I ducked. I was uncomfortably aware that he’d asked me for a promise: I didn’t want to say anything to this creature that he might be able to hold me to later.

‘By the mother-lode,’ I said carefully, ‘you mean Mount Grace?’

‘Of course.’

‘In that case, two further questions. Why do I need you? And why do you need me?’

Moloch’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘I’ve explained my position,’ he said, the ragged edges in his voice grinding against each other. ‘And so you’re only asking these questions because you want to hold me at arm’s length a little longer. There are two hundred souls behind the crematorium’s walls. Souls that have learned the trick of invading living flesh. Could you exorcise them all, before they took you down? I doubt it. They’d take you and possess you, and you’d be no more than one more suit for them to wear. You need someone like me: someone who sits above them in the same food chain. Someone who was born and bred to prey on them.’

I mulled that over, couldn’t see any holes in it. But I didn’t get to be as old as I am without reading the small print before signing. ‘There were two parts to the question,’ I reminded him, my tone level and my face poker.

The demon acknowledged the point with a curt nod. ‘Yes. Of course. I need you, Felix, to make me an entry point. With your whistle, with your lovely little party trick, you can make a hole in their defences: bind them, and distract them, and make them stumble. They’ve held me at bay for more years than I care to count: there are a great many of them, as I said, and they’re both old and strong. They’ve found ways to keep me from crossing that threshold, though I’ve tried a thousand times. Outside the crematorium they move in flesh, and in flesh I can’t touch them. But pipe me in through the door and you’ll see the carnage a fox makes in a hen house.

Silence fell once more: the burning eyes held me in place while Moloch waited for my binding word.

‘It all sounds great,’ I said, tearing my own gaze away from his with an effort. The effort was largely wasted, though: magnetically, my head swivelled back around until the searchlight of his stare shone full on me again. It was like Juliet’s hypnotic fascination, but with no overlay of desire: it was naked coercion, the veils of seduction all stripped away. ‘But my music works on one ghost at a time. What you’re asking me to do – it can’t be done. I can’t play two hundred tunes all at once. You said as much yourself.’ Moloch hawked and spat, with great deliberation.