Mike Carey - Dead Men's s Boots

‘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 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.