Dead Men's s Boots

Logically it should have kept on going, the interloper smacking uselessly into it and being brought down by its superior weight and momentum.

Instead the two of them seemed to hang impossibly in space for a moment, all that downward energy cancelled out by some arcane counter-force: then they both crashed together through the delicate balcony rails and came to the ground in a spitting, snarling heap five yards away from me.

The newcomer was a man: long-limbed, lean, cadaverous, and dressed in a full-length coat that had looked momentarily like wings as he made his jump.

The loupgarou“he mer’s claws raked him, shredding his clothes and laying bare white flesh, red meat, but he paid them no heed. His own blows fell sledgehammer-hard, sledgehammer-heavy, so that I could hear the impact, and the were-thing spat and snarled as it struggled under him.

Yeah, I said under him. He’d managed to come down on top, somehow, and he was taking full advantage of the position. A scything claw opened up his throat but he still laughed, a liquid, musical gurgle, as blood fountained from the wound.

And his fists kept rising and falling like pistons, threshing the flesh of the loup-garou, smacking and splintering, breaking and entering.

Under that relentless rain, something grotesque and unexpected happened. The loup-garou started to fracture and fall apart, its flesh sagging and separating, its human form melting away. Its head rolled free from its shoulders, sprouted legs and fled away, miraculously transformed into a huge black tom cat.

Cats clawed their way free from its huge shoulders, its splayed legs, its broken back, and they scattered in all directions. Once again I felt the shiver of déjà vu.

The skeletal man caught some of the cats as they ran and twisted them in his hands with malicious glee until they broke and bled. He held them over his head so that the blood rained down into his mouth. He was still laughing, his head tilted back in manic joy. Most of the cats got away, but half a dozen or so ended their lives in pieces in those slender-fingered, impossibly strong hands.

And suddenly it was over. The man tossed the last dead animal to the ground, staring down at it with something like regret, and bared long brown teeth in a skull-like grimace.

It was the tramp: or rather, it was the man I’d met as a tramp outside Maynard Todd’s office and then in a somewhat more respectable guise at the Mount Grace crematorium. He didn’t look like a tramp now.