Dead Men's s Boots

kneeling down because the pane was on a level with my knee, I found the window catch almost immediately and was able to lever it open. Then 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 make out anything of the layout of the room I was in. Fighting the urge to blunder ahead anyway 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 realised 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 layout of the building from my one and only daytime visit, I went up rather than down. I had a rough sense of 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 to behind me and went on up.

On the next floor up 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’ve never seen an assassin dismount and dismantle his sniper rifle and put the pieces carefully away in the sculpted foam receptacles in a sleek black suitcase. I assume it does happen, but with no personal experience to go on I have to take it on trust. But I am now in a position to comment if I’m ever in a conversation about dismantled werewolves; because 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 backwards, 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 centre of the room, a big white-furred Persian lying on top of an antique roll-top escritoire, opened its eyes.

Then the cats around it did too, and then their neighbours and so forth, out from the centre 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 now, 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 two cats to 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 now, jumping down from the 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 centre 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 was gaining its own momentum. Working from memory, I found the whistle’s 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 in any case I couldn’t be sure that this creature was the same loup-garou that had once worn that name and shape. Like Juliet said, if one werewolf could organise 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 moulded 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 towards me, developed blisters on its outer surface: the blisters grew into recognisable fingers which 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 each other 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 towards 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 colour and texture as the flesh of the face, but they were starting to clear as I watched. The face leered, and my feeling of 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 sudden rush of warmth down my chest told me that one at least 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 copy boy. Struggling to form words, it spewed out blood and black bile instead. 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 just 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 was 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.