Dead Men's s Boots

My mind was a slender filament of light and the filament was flickering, stuttering, stop start stop.

Juliet saved me – Juliet and our rough-andready timing. There was another apocalyptic crash from outside that shook the foundations of the building, and simultaneously my consciousness bobbed to the surface again, yawing and pitching so that the world lurched drunkenly around me and I almost fell to my knees. The hypersonic whine in my ears dropped a notch and became a hollow, keening moan.

Moloch laughed, harsh and triumphant.

Outside, although I couldn’t see it, I knew that Juliet had just piloted the bulldozer, blade lowered and ready, through the picturesque glades and paths of the garden of remembrance. Funeral urns were exploding like ripe fruit under the caterpillar tracks, spilling dry and ancient dust into the hungry wind. And feeling their earthly tabernacles defiled, feeling the other wind that blew from eternity plucking at them million-fingered, the dead men were afraid. They faltered in their attack, because they hadn’t expected to be counter-attacked in such a viciously intimate way.

It was the advice that John had passed on to me inside the case of the pocket watch, as they’d been passed on to him by his mysterious informant: Remember you can still threaten them. Physically, I mean. If you pull your foot back to kick, a man is going to cover his balls. I hadn’t realised what that meant until Todd had told me that he and his dead pals used their own ashes as the medium of transference when they leapfrogged into new bodies. That was when I saw the rough outline of what we’d have to do. And when we got to the building site, and Moloch found the keys to the bulldozer in the site hut inside a safe whose walls were barely three inches thick . . . well, it seemed like destiny.

The lull was already over. The dead men renewed their assault on us, although no doubt another contingent had peeled off to find Juliet and deliver unto her the verdict and the sentence of their time-distilled hatrã-diulted.

In all, we’d had maybe five seconds of respite.

It was all I needed. In crowding me so closely, the dead men had done me a big favour: they’d imprinted their essence on my death-sense so vividly I could have played it in the dark with gloves on. I started to play again, and the tune writhed in the air like a living thing, closed and locked onto the rabid spirits even as they swooped back in for a second pass.