Mike Carey - Dead Men's s Boots

‘And then, after he . . .’ Carla saw the word looming, swerved away from stved awa it, ‘after he did it . . . I got this letter, from a solicitor. Mr Maynard Todd, from some company with three names and one of the names is him. He said John had come to him before he died and written a new will. Still left all his money to me, but he wanted to make sure he’d be burned instead of buried. Even picked out some place over in the East End – Grace-something. He’d put it all down in black and white. And he’d written a bit at the end about how he’d had to go to a stranger because he couldn’t trust his own wife to do right by him.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Nothing,’ Carla said, with bitter satisfaction. ‘I ignored it. I thought fuck it, let the bastard sue me. I’ll do what my John wanted when he was still in his right mind. So I went ahead with the funeral, even though this Maynard Todd said he was going to stop me, and I moved the time from three o’clock back to half past one so as he’d miss it and get there too late. Which he did.’ Her voice had been getting thicker, and now she burst into shuddering sobs. ‘But it doesn’t matter any more, Fix. I don’t care what they do to John’s body. I just want him to be at peace. Oh God, let him find some peace!’

There wasn’t anything I could say to that, so I didn’t try. I just concentrated on making life hideous for the driver of the blue van. The League against Cruel Sports wouldn’t approve, but if you know you’re being tailed there are all sorts of subtle torments and indignities you can inflict on the guy who’s chasing you. By the time we’d reached the Stag Hill turn-off I’d shaken him loose and relieved some of my own tensions in the process.

I drove on in silence, turning off the motorway and coaxing the uncooperative car through the congested streets of Cockfosters and Southgate. Meanwhile Carla went through three handkerchiefs and most of what was left in the bottle.

When I pulled up at Aldermans Hill she was more than half drunk. I parked in front of the costume shop, which was closed for Sunday, leaving the car on a double yellow line because it seemed more important right then to get her back onto her home turf and more or less settled.

The flat was on the first floor, up an external flight of steps with a dog-leg. On the door frame there were a good half-dozen wards against the dead, ranging from a sprig of silver birch bound with white thread to a crudely drawn magic circle with the word ekpiptein written across it in Greek script. That translates as ‘Bugger off until you’re wanted, you bodiless bastards’: Greek is a very concise language.

Carla fumbled with her keys, and I noticed that her hands were trembling. I was quite keen to get out of there now that I’d done my civic duty: I’m fuck-all use as a shoulder to cry on.

‘I’m sure he is,’ I said clumsily – and belatedly. ‘At peace, I mean. John was a good man, Carla. He didn’t have any enemies in this world. You know I don’t believe in Heaven, but if anyone deserved—’

I stopped because she was looking at me with the sort of expression you give to dangerous madmen.

‘No,’ she said bluntly. ‘He’s not in Heaven, Fix, or anywhere else. He’s here. He’s still here.’

She turned the key and shoved the door open, but she made no move to go in. I stepped past her into the small hallway. I was aware of a slightly musty, unused smell as though nobody had been there in a few days.

Three steps took me on into the living room, and I stopped dead, if you’ll pardon the expression, taking in a scene of devastation and ruin. Most of the furniture was overturned. The television lay in the corner like a poleaxed drunk, staring blindly up at the ceiling: three deep dents scarred the screen, a fish-scale pattern of fracture marks spreading out from each one. Broken glass crunched under my feet.

And then a framed photo of John and Carla smiling, arm in arm, leaped up from the broken-legged dresser and shot through the air, spinning like a shuriken, to explode against the wall just inches from my head.

With a muttered oath I dodged back around the angle of the wall and turned to stare at Carla in dazed disbelief. She gave me a curt nod, her face bitter and despairing.

Despite his faults, most of which I’ve already mentioned, John had always been a pretty easygoing sort of guy. But that had been when he was alive.

In death, it was painfully obvious, he’d gone geist.

Some apostle not noted for charm or tact once told an appreciative audience somewhere near the Sea of Galilee that the poor would always be with us. He could have said the same thing about the dead. Of course, back in Jesus’s time there were only maybe a hundred million people in the world, give or take, but even then they were heavily outnumbered by the part of the human race that was already lying in the ground. The exact ratio wobbles up and down as we ride the demographic roller coaster, but these days you could bet on twenty to one and probably not lose your money.

Twenty of them to one of us. Twenty ghosts for every man, woman and child living on this planet. But that was an empty statistic until just before the turn of the second millennium. Until then, most of the dead were content to stay where they’d been put: in the words of a million headstones, they were ‘only sleeping’. Then, not too long ago, the alarm clock went off and they all sat up.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Even now, a whole lot of people die and stay dead – trek off across the undiscovered country, or dissolve into thin air, or go and sit at God’s right hand in sinless white pyjamas, or whatever. But a whole lot more don’t: they wake up in the darkness of their own death, and they head back towards the light of the world they just left, which is the only direction they know. Most of the time they come back as a visual echo of their former selves, without substance, mass or weight, and then we call them ghosts. Sometimes they burrow back into their own dead flesh and make it move: then we call them zombies. Occasionally they invade an animal body, subdue the host mind by force majeure and redecorate the flesh and bone so it looks more like what they used to remember seeing in the mirror. Then we call them werewolves or loup-garous , and if we’re smart we keep the fuck out of their way.

But here’s the wonderful thing: for all the revenants’ many forms, there were people like me who shouldered the live man’s burden and came out fighting with the skill and the will to knock them back again. The exorcists. Probably we’d always been there too – a latent tendency in the human gene pool, as I’d said to Louise, waiting for its time to shine. Whatever it is that we do, it’s got sod-all to do with sanctity or holy writ: it’s just an innate ability, expressing itself through the other abilities that we pick up as we go through life. If you’re good with words, then you’ll bind the dead with some kind of incantation: if you’re an artist, you’ll use sketches and sigils. I met a gambler a while back – nice guy named Dennis Peace – who did it with card tricks.

And with me, it’s music.

I always had a good ear as a kid, but I never had the patience or the concentration to survive formal lessons. This was in Walton, Liverpool, you understand – and although the image of the godforsaken North that persists down here in the Smoke is a bit of a caricature, the mean streets I walked down would have been a damn sight meaner if I’d been walking down them with, say, a cello.

In the end I picked up the tin whistle because I found I could knock out a tune on it without really having to know what I was doing. Most of the little musical knowledge I’ve got I picked up along the way, either by jamming with better musicians or by not being ashamed to ask stupid questions whenever I was with someone who might be able to answer them. I learned to read music by watching a TV programme aimed at six-year-olds, painstakingly practising exercises set for me by a smiling animated treble clef.