Dead Men's s Boots

local gravity.

She put one hand on the back of my neck, drawing me close. Our lips met.

At least, I assume they met. If hypnotherapy was guaranteed to help me to remember, I’d sign up for a course today and happily pay whatever it cost up to and including my right arm. But while I can summon up without even trying every agonising detail of the night when Juliet tried to rape and devour me, the only thing I remember about that kiss is a sensation like the whole of my body being melted, rendered like tallow, blasted into steam and then falling like molten rain back into the exact same place I’d been standing. I don’t even know how long it took: it wasn’t the sort of thing that had a time signature on it. It was there, it was everywhere and then it was over. Juliet was stepping away from me towards the ladder and I was standing there alone, each cell of my body separately and searingly aware of the cold night air touching it.

‘That should be enough,’ said Juliet’s voice, from some unfathomable distance. ‘Use it wisely.’

With enormous reluctance, coming down from a height that was already fading out of my mind and leaving no traces, I turned to follow her. A brittle heat filled me now, and it was as dry as the air in a furnace. Otherwise I might have cried.

‘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 had 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 away over his shoulder. There was nothing to slow us down now 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 now 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 sombre black uniforms of priests or security guards. But 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 passer-by 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 towards 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 away to our right: the three guards, taken by surprise, all turned their heads to see what the noise was: we knew it was coming, so we didn’t.

I know Todd 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 upwards and inwards, the hinges breaking open with sharp, metallic cracks like the blows of a hammer on an anvil. Then he swung them like a giant fly-swatter 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 or not I was following. I took out my whistle and put it to my lips.

The wall isn’t 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 of 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 was a current, running through the world.

Another crash, and as we rounded the long curve of the driveway I saw the earth-mover breaking cover a hundred yards ahead. Juliet’s driving skills hadn’t improved, but a bulldozer’s 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’d rammed the fence and broken 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 pot-shots at her, while trying to keep from falling under the massive caterpillar treads that bore her onwards. 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 now before her in a wind that was one notch down from a hurricane – and still there hadn’t been a single drop of rain. We 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 towards 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, just as it had in Todd’s office. It was playing itself through me, so it felt like all I had to do was to keep the whistle at my lips and let myself be a conduit for it. Otherwise the build-up of pressure would probably burst my brain like a big, over-filled water