Dead Men's s Boots

balloon.

I crossed the drive and ascended the steps, my feet thumping arrhythmically on the ground to create the complex, out-of-phase backbeat the music needed to do its stuff. I was aware of resistance now, but it wasn’t coming in the form I’d expected. I 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 was up to my thighs in cold water and had to push myself forward 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 his throat, right gripping his 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 he 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. I became aware, without knowing exactly when it had started, 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, haemorrhaged. I raised my left foot and felt the agonised 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 unsepulchred 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, analysing 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 towards the man who was shooting him, again and again, in the chest: but the demon 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 river bed.

I found myself drawing out 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. Funeral 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 counter-attacked 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 they’d 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 realised 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.

It was all I needed. In crowding me so closely, the dead men had done me a big favour: they’d imprinted their essence on my death-sense so vividly I could have played it in the dark with gloves on. I started to play again, and the tune writhed in the air like a living thing, closed and locked onto the rabid spirits even as they swooped back in for a second pass. They were expecting easy meat: they ran full-speed into a moving avalanche.

Moloch stretched, and because most of my attention was elsewhere I thought the sound I heard was the crack of one of his bones. It wasn’t: it was the hollow report of the guard’s gun as the firing pin fell on an empty chamber. He stared at it in numb dismay, then his hand started to move towards his belt where he probably had a spare clip. Moloch’s punch demolished most of his face, so the movement was never completed. He thudded backwards into the doors of the chapel and slithered to the floor. Moloch pushed the doors open and stepped over the dying man into the room.

I followed, pouring out sweet music like a ninja throws shurikens.

The chapel was full of roiling ghosts, made visible by the tune that anchored them against their will to this spot. They were like some sort of complex, ever-moving cat’s cradle, gliding past and through each other without ever seeming to touch. Faces and limbs and various misplaced or truncated echoes of human form appeared within the mass and then vanished back into it.

Moloch shot me a look.

‘Allegro,’ he growled. ‘And, if you can manage it, al pepe.’

He went down on one knee and bent his head. For a moment, grotesquely, it looked as though he were paying his respects to the enemies he was about to devour. But it wasn’t anything like that at all. It was something a whole lot more disgusting.

He’d told me that he’d made this body for himself, slowly and painstakingly. If I’d given any thought to what that meant, I’d have imagined some process like the knitting of a sweater. But I’d picked the wrong metaphor, clearly. The black leather of Moloch’s coat parted vertically as the flesh within knotted and burgeoned: suddenly there was a broadening split in the coat through which something red and churning could be seen, as though Moloch’s insides were molten liquid.

Out of that cauldron something rose like steam, then solidified in the air into a shape that made my stomach clench and sour bile rise in my throat. It had a lot of limbs, and a lot of mouths. The limbs threshed the air, passing through the turbulent mass of spirits that hovered there in a complex repeating pattern. They lost their coherence: emulsified into something that quickly lost any residue of humanity. Then the mouths opened and Moloch began to drink.

It took a long time. I looked away, concentrating on the music and trying to shut out the sounds of the demon’s banquet. But that left me looking at the guard with the ruined face, so in the end I closed my eyes and