Dead Men's s Boots

Doug Hunter was tied to the bed by an ad hoc but formidable assemblage of rope and old leather belts. He seemed calm enough, but it was a bleak, frazzled calm: the calm of someone who’d already tested himself – or herself, arguably – against the ropes extensively and lost every time. Myriam Kale looked out at me from behind those bland, pale blue eyes and smiled asymmetrically.

I stopped in the doorway. ‘Permission to approach,’ I said.

Juliet gave me what in a human woman would have been an old-fashioned look.

‘You can come in, Castor,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to attack you. I’m not going to hold it against you that you were right Û ri;Yo211; or at least, not to that extent.’

I walked in, skirting the bed, and stood beside Juliet, looking out through the window. Under the street lamp opposite, a dark form waited with its head bowed, endlessly patient: waiting for a banquet that would make up for a century of starvation.

‘So how’d you get home?’ I asked her, knowing that the one thing I wouldn’t get out of her would be the truth.

‘Transatlantic cable? Fishing coracle? Back of a whale? What?’

‘The scenic route,’ she said. ‘It’s another one of those things that you wouldn’t understand.’

‘Right, right.’ I was too tired to rise to the bait. ‘I’ve been talking to that friend of yours some more. You know, the one from the old neighbourhood.’ I nodded out of the window, but she didn’t bother to look.

‘I smelled him,’ she said. ‘You should be more careful around demons, Castor.

It’s only safe so long as they need you.’

‘Now you tell me.’ I turned to look at the figure on the bed. Doug Hunter grinned and thrust his hips towards me in a suggestive mime. ‘So how’s Myriam?’

‘She’s falling apart. She always does, apparently. She begged them not to bring her back again after the last time, but they did anyway. But this time they gave her a man’s body because they thought it might help her to control the urges.’

‘They being –?’

Juliet shrugged and shook her head.

‘She’s not rational for very long at a time now. That’s more or less all I got. She talks about Les, mainly. Les Lathwell. And to him, some of the time. She tells him that she loves him. That she’ll kill him. That she wants him to kill her. She talks about something called inscription a lot, too: she doesn’t want it, she won’t accept it, she didn’t mean to miss it. And then she cries. Or swears. Or bites her tongue and spits blood over the sheets.