Mike Carey - Dead Men's s Boots

To my brother, Dave, with much love. Are you right there, our kid?

Thanks to Jock for my first lesson in musical notation for drums. If I got it wrong, it’s not his fault. Thanks to Ade and Joel for raising my awareness of the weirder and more arcane bits of London, a process which is ongoing. Thanks to Gabriella Nemeth and Nick Austin for proofing and copy-editing this sprawling monster, and to Meg, Darren and George for their unfailing support.

I don’t do funerals all that often, and when I do I prefer to be either falling-down drunk or dosed up on some herbal fuzz-bomb like salvinorin to the point where I start to lose feeling from the feet on up, like a kind of rising damp of the central nervous system. Today I was as sober as a judge, and that was only the start of it. The cemetery was freezing cold – cold enough to chill me even through the Russian army greatcoat I was wearing (I never fought, but poor bloody infantry is a state of mind). The sun was still locked up for winter, a gusty east wind was stropping itself sharp on my face, and guilt was working its slow way through my mind like a weighted cheese-wire through a block of ice.

Ashes to ashes, the priest said, or at least that was what it boiled down to. His hair and his skin were ash-pale in the February cold. The pall-bearers stepped forward just as the wind sprang up again, and the shroud on top of the coffin bellied like a sail. It was a short voyage, though: Two steps brought them alongside the neat, rectangular hole in the ground, where they bent as one and laid the coffin down on a pair of canvas straps held in place by four burly sextons. Then the sextons stepped in from either side, in synchrony, and the coffin slid silently down into the ground.

Rest in peace, John Gittings. The mortal part of you, anyway: for the rest, it was going to be a case of wait and see. Maybe that was why John’s widow Carla looked so strained and tense as she stood directly opposite me in her funereal finery. Her outfit incorporated a brooch made from a sweep of midnight-dark feathers, and staring at it made me momentarily imagine that I was looking down from a great height, the black of her dress becoming the black of an asphalted highway, the remains of a dead bird lying there like road kill.

The priest started up again, the wind stealing his voice away and distributing it piecemeal among us so that everyone got just a beggar’s share of the wisdom and consolation. Sunk in my own thoughts, which were fixed on mortality and resurrection to the exclusion of redemption, I looked around at the other mourners. It was a who’s who of the London exorcist community. Reggie Tang, Therese O’Driscoll and Greg Lockyear were there, representing the Thames Collective; Bourbon Bryant and his hatchet-faced new wife, Cath; Larry Tallowhill and Louise Beddows, Larry looking like a walking corpse himself with the white of his cheekbones showing through his skin like a flame through a paper lantern; Bill Schofield, known for reasons both complicated and obscene as Jonah; Ade Underwood, Sita Lovejoy, Michelle Mooney, all up from the beautiful South (Elephant and Castle, or thereabouts) and among the also-rans a very striking, very young woman with shoulder length white-blonde hair, who kept staring at me all the way through the service. There was something both familiar and unsettling about her face, but I couldn’t place it. That uncertainty did nothing to improve my mood, and nor did the absence of the one London exorcist I’d been hoping to see at this shindig: but then, Juliet Salazar never did hold with cheap sentiment: in fact she probably didn’t have any to sell even at the market price.

Meanwhile, seeing as how this was a cemetery, the dead had turned up in considerable force. They clustered around us at a safe distance, sensing the power gathered here and what it could do to them, but so starved of sensation that they couldn’t keep away. It was hard not to look at the sad multitude, even though looking at ghosts often makes them come in closer, as though your attention is a gradient they slide down towards you. There were dozens, if not hundreds, packed so closely together that they overlapped, thrusting their heads through each other’s limbs and torsos to get a better look at us, and maybe at the new kid on the block. The ghosts of the most recent vintage still carried the marks of their deaths on them in wasted flesh, oddly angled limbs and in one case a gaping chest-hole that was almost certainly a bullet wound. The tenants of longer standing had either learned or forgotten enough to look more like themselves as they’d been in life; or else had started to fade to the point where some of the more gruesome details had been lost or smudged over.

The priest seemed oblivious to his larger audience, which was probably a good thing: he looked old enough and frail enough that he might not weather the shock. But people in my profession have the sight whether they like it or not, and it’s not something you can turn on and off. At one point during the funeral oration Bourbon Bryant reached into his pocket and half-drew from it the book of matches he always carried there – the particular tool he uses to get the whip hand on the invisible kingdoms, just as a tin whistle (Clarke’s Sweetone, key of D) is mine. I put a hand on his arm, shook my head.

‘Not the time,’ I said tersely, speaking out of the corner of my mouth.

‘I’ll just torch one or two, Fix,’ he muttered back. ‘The rest will scatter like pigeons.’

‘I’ll break your jaw if you do,’ I said equably. Bourbon shot me a surprised, affronted look, read my own expression accurately and put the matches away.

Why hadn’t I got drunk before coming here? Judging by the faces around me, I sure as hell wouldn’t have been the only one. Exorcists often resort to booze to stifle their death-perception, just as a lot of them use speed when they want to put a particular edge on it. But I’m careful about how I deploy my crutches: today it would have felt like I was hiding from something specific that I was ashamed to face, rather than just dulling unpleasant distractions. Bad precedent.

I defocused as far as I could, staring through the massed ranks of the dead towards the cemetery’s high wrought-iron fence, which was topped with very un-Christian razor wire. No respite there, though: the Breath of Life protesters were pressed up against the bars like tourists at the zoo, shouting abuse at us that we were too far away to decipher. The Breathers, as we dismissively call them, are radical dead-rights extremists, and they view us ghostbreakers in much the same light in which staunch Catholics tend to see abortionists: you can always rely on them to break up the funeral of an exorcist if they get a tip-off that it’s going down. Most likely the priest or one of the sextons was a closet sympathiser and had sent the word down the line.

Things were starting to wind down now. Carla threw some earth into her husband’s grave, and a few other people got in line to do the same. Then the sextons took over for the serious shovelling. Now that we’d made that ritualistic nod towards ploughing the fields, we were free to scatter as soon as was decent. Carla’s earlier plan for a post-funeral gathering at her house in Mill Hill had been cancelled at the last moment for reasons that weren’t entirely clear – and the service, which on the black-edged invitations had been set for three p.m., had been moved forward to one-thirty without explanation. Maybe that was why Juliet hadn’t showed.

But, just as I was congratulating myself on getting away easy, a shout from back towards the main gates made me turn my head in that direction. There was a man there, running towards us at a flat-out sprint which sat oddly with his immaculately cut Italian suit. By and large, people don’t wear Enzo Tovare to go jogging: all the muck sweat’s not good for that delicate stitching.