Dead Men's s Boots

My scalp prickled, and then the rest of me too: I was being watched in the dark by something that was neither wholly alive nor wholly dead.

I stepped hastily away from the door so I wouldn’t be silhouetted against the light from the corridor outside: but whoever was in here had dark-adapted eyes already, and they could pick me off at their leisure if that was what they wanted. Slowly, silently, I snaked my hand into my coat and slid out the tin whistle. The silent presence had a distinct feel to it, and it was starting to resolve into notes – fragmented, for now, but the links would come if I could stay alive long enough.

‘You might as well turn on the light,’ said a dry, brittle, utterly inhuman voice. ‘If I was going to rip your throat out, I’d have done it as soon as you walked in.’

I didn’t need to turn on the light: that voice was imprinted on my mind almost as powerfully as Juliet’s scent.

‘Moloch,’ I snarled.

A faint snicker ratcheted out of the darkness like a rusty thumbscrew being laboriously turned.

‘I thought it was time we pooled our resources,’ the demon said.

20

I turned the light on, shrugged off my coat and threw it over the back of the sofa, then stepped out of my shoes as I advanced into the room. I managed to do all of this stuff fairly matter-of-factly: after all, like the fiend-in-the-shapeof-a-man said, he’d already had an open goal and refused to take the shot. Whatever this turned out to be, it wasn’t a straightforward ambush.

‘So how was your trip?’ Moloch asked, in the same tone of metal grinding against bone.

I made a so-so gesture. ‘Too many Satanists,’ I said.

He nodded sympathetically, but his smile showed way too many teeth to be reassuring. ‘Our little fifth column. Yes. If it’s any consolation, they all get eaten in the end.’

He was sitting in the swivel chair, a 1970s relic that was Ropey’s most prized possession after his music collection. Moloch was looking well: there was a ruddier tinge to his skin, and he’d even gained a little weight.

His dress sense had improved, too: in place of the rags he’d been wearing when I first saw him outside the offices of Ruthven, Todd and Clay, he was dressed now in black trousers, calf-length black boots and a black grandad shirt with red jewelled studs at the neck and cuffs. He would have looked like some eighteenth-century priest playing a game of ‘my benefice is bigger than yours’ if it weren’t for the full-length leather coat.