Dead Men's s Boots

His coat was shiny black leather and his thin face was austere and patrician, dominated by a rudder nose and a fleshy, pouting mouth that made him look like an out-of-work Shakespearean actor. His clothes and his flesh hung in tatters here and there where the loup-garou’s blows had landed, but he didn’t seem to care very much.

‘Fuck!’ I exclaimed weakly.

He glanced around at me as though only then remembering that I was there.

‘We’ll talk,’ he said, his voice the same dry, agonising rasp I’d heard when I’d first encountered him: when he sang his crazy song about heaven and hell.

‘But not yet. Not until you know what I’m talking about. I don’t like wasting my time.’

‘Wh- Who-?’ I slurred inarticulately, trying to sit up and not getting very far. A lance of white-hot pain went through my back from shoulder to coccyx, stopping me in my tracks: shit, my spine could even be broken.

‘A friend,’ the thin man said, with a leering snigger that robbed the word of any warm connotations it might otherwise have had.

‘Because fate makes our friends, doesn’t it, Castor? And I’m certainly your enemy’s enemy.’

He walked across to me and looked down at me with a cold and clinical interest.

‘You’ve got some of it,’ he murmured. ‘You must have, because you’re not a fool. And only a fool would refuse to see the obvious because it happens to be impossible. But you have to go to the source. Otherwise they’ll kill you before you’re in a position to kill them.’ He paused, frowning.

‘Sequence. Cadence. Rhythm,’ he said. ‘Let’s get this rig“;s efoht. My name is Moloch, and you may pass on my best wishes – with an ironic inflection – to Baphomet’s sister.’

‘To-?’

‘Your ally. The lady. We have . . . history.’

He stepped over me and back out into the dark, and I was in no position to stop him.

In fact it was all I could do to crawl to my feet – back not broken after all, just agonisingly bruised – and limp off out of there before the sirens started to sound in the distance.

I cast a longing look back up the stairs to where the rest of Chesney’s notes and trinkets might still be lying, no doubt with his own blood added to the patina of ancient violence that made them so collectable. No good to me now: no good at all, because even if they were still there – even if they weren’t what the loup-garou had been sent here to fetch, and I was nearly sure they were – I couldn’t afford to hang around long enough to find them.