Dead Men's s Boots

It was cold, and completely opaque – like a rising tide of ink.

‘Who, John?’ I asked. ‘Who wants to get you?’

‘The same ones as before,’ he said, with a helpless shrug. He stared into my eyes, his jaw tightening with fear. ‘Always the same ones, again and again and again. That’s the point. Kill me if you have to, Fix. Better you than them, God knows.’

He took a few steps away from me, out into the road, then stopped and looked off to the right and then to the left as if he wasn’t sure which way to go – or maybe as if he was checking for traffic.

You’ve got to keep your wits about you when you cross the road in London: as if to underscore that point, he tripped and fell, vanishing into the water almost up to his shoulders. There was a hole of some kind in the middle of the street. Roadworks, maybe. But it wasn’t roadworks, and I knew.

I stepped out into the still-rising flood, feeling the vicious undertow trying to pull my legs out from under me. I picked my way forward, one step at a time, feeling with my toes for the edges of th [he ng e unseen pits.

The road was a cemetery, the open graves hidden by the water so that you couldn’t see them until you fell.

Who’d dig graves in the middle of a road? Maybe it was like housing: location was all-important, and a dead man with somewhere important to be would want to be buried somewhere that was handy for the shops and the Tube.

I rounded one of the graves and almost stepped sideways into another. The water was up to John’s neck now, and he was staring in all directions, his eyes wide with dread.

Before I could get to him, something pulled him under. He gave a wail of terror, cut off very abruptly when his head went below the surface. When I got to the spot there was nothing to show where he’d been except for a ragged stream of bubbles, drifting away on the midnight-black flow of the urban river.

Something brushed against my leg, under the surface: something big enough to push me aside as it glided past, unseen.

I jumped away, seeing the roiling water it left in its wake. It turned in a vast lazy arc and headed back towards me. I took one step back, and then another, and on the third step there was nothing there to put my foot down on. I slipped on the rim of the submerged grave pit and went under, mouth clamped shut.

I woke up gasping for air as though I really had half-drowned. Like someone in a movie I came bolt upright, my body sheathed in already cooling sweat.