Dead Men's s Boots

played for a few minutes more in the dark, in a sort of abstract trance.

A hand on my shoulder brought me out of it, and when I opened my eyes Juliet was at my side. She was boltered with blood from hairline to boots. I wondered if any of the men she’d killed had died with hard-ons. Probably not: she would have been moving too fast, working too hard to be able to linger and bring her lethal charm to bear on them. For some reason that I couldn’t explain, I felt relieved at that.

The room was silent. Most of the ghosts were gone. The bloated ectoplasmic hulk of Moloch hovered and pulsated in the air above us like some blasphemous Goodyear blimp, peristaltic ripples passing across its surface as its myriad appendages hoovered the air.

‘Great stuff,’ I said hoarsely. ‘Only next time, you want to go into second gear when you’re up past ten miles an hour. I meant to tell you that when you gave me a lift in your Maserati the other day.’

Juliet didn’t seem to be in the mood for banter. ‘We need to leave,’ she murmured, staring up at the terrible spectral mass. The tentacles were moving more sluggishly now, and the mouths were closing one by one. If there was such a thing as the ghost of a wafer-thin mint, the demon had reached the stage of the meal where it might be offered to him.

I saw Juliet’s point and headed for the door. But it was already too late.

‘Ah!’ Moloch exclaimed oleaginously, in a voice that seemed to reach us by making the bones of our skull vibrate directly, cutting out the etheric middle man. ‘The sister of Baphomet. Did I ever tell you how I killed him?’

Juliet looked up at the obscene, sated thing with its dozens of grinning mouths.

‘From behind,’ she said.

The physical body that the demon had abandoned in order to feed raised its head abruptly and stood.

‘And shall I tell you how I’m going to kill you?’ he asked.

Juliet raised an eyebrow, its perfect line spoiled by a piece of human tissue plastered to her forehead with human blood. ‘Shedim ere’fa minur,’ she said. ‘Ehad iniru, ke rekol ha dith gerainou.’

Both Molochs – the blimp and the one that looked like a man – roared in response. Both went for Juliet at the same time.

Juliet met the ‘man’ head-on and stopped him dead in his tracks. They both moved so fast that there was almost no sense of movement: they seemed to flick between static postures like a slide show. Moloch was trying the shock-and-awe tactics he’d used against the loup-garou, throwing punches and kicks like confetti at a wedding. Juliet blocked every one, and even got in a couple of her own so that suddenly Moloch was giving ground, parrying rather than hitting out.

But then the tentacles of the blimp-thing drifted through her head and shoulders and chest. She froze in place for a fraction of a heartbeat: Moloch saw the window and he was there, his right hand raised above his head, clawed fingers spread. The smack of impact came a second later. Juliet flew backwards through the air and hit the wall with a bag-of-wet-cement thud.

‘Oh, those are just stories,’ Moloch snarled. ‘I’m not even sure I could get it up with a raddled piece of meat like you.’

Juliet gathered herself and stood, with a visible effort. Three livid wounds marred her face, running diagonally in parallel from her left temple. Blood was already welling up from them in vigorous arterial gouts. But it wasn’t the wound that was giving her trouble, nor the blood: it was the puppet strings dangling down from the blimp monster, attaching themselves in thicker and thicker profusion to her forehead, her arms, her back and chest. She took a step forward, gathering herself to spring, but she was too slow by some huge, wasteful portion of a second. Moloch’s foot slammed into her stomach and she folded: then he swivelled like a dervish dancing, and his second kick, rising into her downturned face, lifted her off her feet. This time she hit the wall hard enough to leave a skull-shaped indent in one of the wooden panels.

I fitted the whistle to my lips again, sick horror making my movements clumsy, my mind empty and unresponsive. Moloch didn’t even look at me: he just gestured. One of the trailing tentacles of the blimp-thing drifted lazily across my throat, which constricted in sudden agony. I made a grunting wheeze of protest – the only sound that I could force out of my mouth. Another tendril rippled through my chest and my legs buckled under me, sending me crashing down onto my knees.

‘A hundred years,’ Moloch remarked conversationally. ‘That’s a long time to go between meals. No doubt it was good for my figure, but still. Not pleasant. Not pleasant at all.’ Levering herself up on hands and knees, Juliet reached blindly for his ankle, maybe intending to trip him. He stepped on her wrist, twisting as he brought his weight down. There was an audible crack.

‘The great project,’ he snarled, standing over her. ‘The shedim will piss on the rubble of your great project, and bury your children in the wastelands where it stood.’

He lifted her one-handed and looked into her face almost tenderly.

‘And the woman you live with,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep her as a pet, for a little while. Until she starts to bore me. Then I’ll eat her, over some long and leisurely period of time. Meiden agon, sister of Baphomet: all things in moderation.’

Moloch raised Juliet above his head, held her there for a second, and then brought her down so that her back broke across his raised knee. Juliet gave a grunt of pain. It was so unexpected, and so wrong, that my system flooded with adrenalin. Nothing could hurt Juliet: nothing could shake her poise. That was part of what made her what she was.

My brain kicking sluggishly back into gear, I started to beat out a tattoo with my palms on the cold stones of the floor. The sound was faint, and it hardly carried above the butcher-shop noises of what Moloch was doing to Juliet. But it was a rhythm – and a rhythm, as John Gittings had taught me, is the skeleton of a song.

Moloch didn’t notice at first. He was still delivering his gloating monologue, drawing out the pain and the humiliation of Juliet’s death so that it would measure up to the happy fantasies he’d been living on for the last century. He was working on her face with both hands, talking in a low intimate murmur now so that his words didn’t reach me. The blimp was above and behind him, its tentacles stretching down through his chest and into hers. Of course: if murderers had a patron saint, it would be Juliet. This must be the best part of the meal.

A naked rhythm is slyer and more slippery than a whistled tune. It’s like the narrow blade of a shank, slipped in between your ribs, that doesn’t even hurt until it moves and starts to make a broader incision. I let it go in deep, deeper, deeper still. My hoarse, hissing breath was a part of the pattern now, and the sounds my wrists made against the cuffs of my shirt, and the creak of my shoes as I shifted my weight, coming up on one knee. All of it, all the negligible, tiny, repeated, inscaped sounds were converging into something impossibly subtle, impossibly slender and sharp. The effort of keeping it so tightly focused was like a physical ache in my guts. I held it as long as I could.

Then I let the rhythm-blade unfold like the spokes of an umbrella inside the demon’s rancid, pulpy heart.

Moloch stiffened suddenly and turned to stare at me in wide-eyed astonishment.

‘Three – three most useless things in the world,’ I croaked, forcing the sounds out of my lacerated throat. I could taste the blood that came with them.

‘Castor-’ he muttered, unbelieving, uncomprehending.

‘A nun’s tits – the pope’s balls – and a round of applause for the band.’

The blimp exploded with a wet, flaccid, whimpering belch. Moloch’s chest exploded too, where the tentacles were routed through it: ribs showed like jagged teeth through his ruined flesh. His human form toppled over like a tree and fell full-length on the floor, unmoving, a greenish-black stain spreading lazily out from underneath it.

It felt like an impossible task to get back on my feet, but I knew I had to try. The gunfire, the wanton destruction wrought by the bulldozer and the screams of the dying wouldn’t have gone unnoticed: after all, this wasn’t Kilburn. It wouldn’t be too long before the bright-eyed boys in blue came around to see what the trouble was, and it was probably a good idea if they didn’t find us here.

Juliet was a mess. I knew – rationally – that any damage she survived she could repair: this body was just something that she wore when she was in town. All the same, it hurt to look at her, and my hands shook as I picked her up. She was a lot lighter than she looked, as I’d discovered on an earlier occasion. She hung limp in my arms: her lips moved, but no sound came out.

‘I’m going to have to carry you,’ I told her. ‘I know your back’s broken, but I can’t think of any other way of doing this. I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.’