Dead Men's s Boots

I raised my left foot and felt the agonised pause, the gap in time before it fell again, as a hole in the music through which my own mind was starting to bleed out. Seven. Eight. I was trudging along a subway tunnel, the air closing in, the ground pulling away and away into unfathomable distance.

Nine.

The mosquito whine of unheard voices enfolded me. I knew them for what they were: the unsepulchred dead, defending their inner sanctum with the single-minded viciousness that had been their hallmark in life.

I could even distinguish the different voices in the insect chorus as my death-sense kicked in like passive radar, analysing and identifying the cold, cruel intelligences that were bent on killing ãenticeme.

Up ahead of me, Moloch stumbled, but my perceptions were so attenuated that he seemed to do it in slow motion. Another security guard was standing at the doors of the chapel, a handgun in his fist aimed at Moloch’s torso, his finger pumping the trigger. Ragged holes blossomed in the taut black leather stretched across Moloch’s back, and green ichor flowed from them like tears: incidental details, both to me and to him.

But the air was thickening and curdling around the demon’s head and shoulders, the evil dead rallying to keep him out. He slowed, his head bowing under an invisible weight.

I felt that weight too. The tenth step was going to be my last: my foot was coming down as heavy as a sack full of spanners and I doubted I’d have the strength to lift it up again.

And even if I did, what then? Another step, and another, like Sisyphus’s boulder, with nothing more to show for it than another yard gained: a slight shift in position that would be more than offset by the endless organic growth of the hallway. Better to stop and rest, and see what came next. Maybe nothing. Nothing would be good.

Moloch was reaching out with both hands towards the man who was shooting him, again and again, in the chest: but the demon was groping like a blind man, and like mine his feet were rooted to the spot.

I understood the blindness, dimly: something foul was silting in my head too, swallowing up my faltering concentration in its feculent, liquid depositions, piling up behind my eyes like mud on a river bed.

I found myself drawing out the note that was in my mouth into a sighing out-breath that had nowhere to go but down. I had no idea what would follow it. It was hard even to care.