Mike Carey - Dead Men's s Boots

‘The cremation,’ I reminded him. ‘When is it going to be?’

‘Wednesday, most likely. But it depends how soon I can get the disinterment done. It might have to be Thursday. Talk to Mrs Gittings and let me know what she says. Oh, and please leave a number with Carol. I think under the circumstances Mrs Gittings won’t appreciate a call from me, so if you don’t mind continuing to act as a go-between . . .’

‘Happy to,’ I said stolidly. ‘Thanks for listening.’

I went downstairs again and left my address and phone numbers with the bored brunette. The photocopier was in a state of even more advanced disassembly and Leonard was nowhere to be seen.

I stepped back out onto the street. It was about five o’clock, and although there was still some light from the low, loitering sun, a roiling rope of heavy grey cloud was in the process of swallowing it whole like a python gulping down a guinea pig.

A scarecrow-thin old man crusted with the filth of years spent on the streets, dressed in a long trailing outer coat so dirty and tattered you couldn’t guess what colour or even what kind of garment it might once have been, came shambling along the pavement towards me. I stepped aside automatically, but he zigged at the same time and walked right into me. His mad, mud-brown eyes stared into mine.

‘At the waterhole,’ he said, his voice a dry, throat-tearing rasp. ‘With the others there behind you. Pushing. Pushing. Nowhere to go.’ He laughed out loud, delighted by some sudden revelation, and the stench of his breath hit me across the face like a solid slap.

I winced and leaned back, away from the searing smell, but he was already walking on – singing now, in the same harsh, agonised tone, ‘Oh, the Devil stole the beat from the Lord, and it’s time we put things straight . . .’ I didn’t recognise the tune, but that ragged voice was shredding it pretty effectively in any case.

An involuntary shudder went through me, and with it came a nagging prickle somewhere at the edge of consciousness – the slight sensation of pressure that comes when I’m being looked at by one of the risen dead. I looked around: nobody in sight except the decayed tramp, who was heading away from me and had his back turned, and a woman on the other side of the street wheeling a baby in a stroller. Maybe recent events had put me on something of a hair-trigger: I slipped my hand inside my coat to make sure that my whistle was there and forgot about the psychic twinge. Probably nothing, but if it was something I was all tooled up.

I headed north-west, aiming to grab a train at Finsbury Park. That gave me two choices – the immense dog-leg of Stamford Hill and Seven Sisters Road, or the back cracks. I took the latter, turning off the main drag into a maze of terraced streets and narrow alleys. The sense of being watched – watched and followed – ebbed and flowed as I walked: that wasn’t something that had ever happened to me before, and it made me wonder if I was experiencing some kind of after-effect from my contact with John Gittings’s ghost. All ghosts impinge on my death-sense, but geists have an intense, indelible presence that you can’t just shake off afterwards. Maybe it had been lurking in the background of my perceptual field ever since.

I took another street, another back alley, tacking alternately north and west so that ultimately I’d break out onto Seven Sisters Road somewhere past the reservoir. Meanwhile the darkness leaked down out of the sky to cover the Earth, and the prickle at the back of my mind became an itch, and then an itch with a sick heat underlying it like the raw tenderness of sunburn.

I turned again, along an alley that ran between the back yards of a row of terraces and a high, blind wall that presumably had the reservoir on the other side of it. I took ten steps forward, then pivoted on my heel and waited, looking back the way I’d come. Now that I wasn’t moving any more I ought to have been able to hear the footsteps of anyone approaching the corner I’d just walked around, but the silence was absolute.

Before me was thick shadow: thick enough so that if something dead or undead rounded the bend I might lose the initiative because I couldn’t get a clear enough look at it to know what it was. Impatient, I took a few steps back towards the corner I’d just turned and my foot came down on something that moved. A black shape streaked past me with a whuff of air that I felt even as I yelled and jumped aside. The squawl of protest reached me a moment later.

Tom cat, big and fat, out on the pull.

With a muttered curse, I ran to the corner, then round it and back out onto the street. Nothing and nobody in sight. I’d have been surprised if there was, after the early warning I’d just given out. As ambushes went, it was a sod of a long way from the Little Big Horn. And as if to confirm the futility of the endeavour, the extrasensory prickle faded out again into nothingness.

Which, for something so liminal and barely-there to start with, wasn’t a long haul at all.

I was about to say that I went home, but when I use that word I still think of Pen’s creepy old place in Turnpike Lane, with its Noah’s Ark freighting of rats and ravens and its Möbius-strip architecture. (It’s built into the side of a hill, so the ground floor at the back becomes a basement at the front.)

Now, though – just for a few weeks, or maybe a month or so – I was living in a flat in a high-rise block just off Wood Green High Road: high enough up in the stack so that I could look out of my window and see the Centre Point tower giving me the finger across the length of London.

The flat belonged to a friend of a friend – a guy named Ronald ‘Ropey’ Doyle, who’d gone back to the Republic of Ireland to deal with some family crisis and didn’t want to lose his place on the council housing list while he was away. He needed a sitting tenant, who could pretend to be him if the need arose, and I needed a place to dump my stuff until I came up with a better idea. It seemed like a sweet deal.

It became less sweet when the lights went out and I discovered that all the utilities were on a meter – and soured altogether the first time the lift broke down. The flat itself smelled of root vegetables and when it rained the walls wept discoloured tears that left brown-edged tracks down the paintwork. The decor ran to black leather and three-inch-deep orange shag-pile. But, to give it its due, it had four walls and a ceiling. Beggars can’t be choosers.

Tonight, though, walking down Lordship Lane from Wood Green Tube station, I felt a definite desire to be somewhere else. If anything, that feeling only increased when I turned onto Vincent Road and saw what was parked in front of the block: a high-sided blue van with Bowyer’s Cleaning Services written in reverse over the windscreen.

Son of a bitch! I’d been solid-gold certain I’d ditched the Breathers on the M25. Now it seemed that they’d not only stayed with me all the way to Southgate, they’d planted a walking tail on me when I left Carla’s and came home by Tube. They knew where I lived. Taken in conjunction with Louise Beddows’s tales of ambushes and punishment beatings, it wasn’t a happy thought. More than anything, it made me ashamed. How could I have let myself be rolled up by a shower of amateurs? Normally my instincts are better than that.

There was a guy sitting in the driver’s seat of the van. The fractured sodium glare of a street lamp was splattered over the curve of the windscreen, so that all I could see of him was an outline, immobile and sinister. I couldn’t even tell if he was looking at me or not. I fought the urge to wrench the door open and have it out with him there and then: the back of the van was probably stuffed three-deep with his mates.