Dead Men's s Boots

I saw then, for the first time, what the photos had failed to capture: the energy and the feral grace that had drawn so many men in and made the great Aaron Silver linger and be lost.

The two spirits – the one so painfully vivid, the other so very nearly not there at all – came together in the air over the bed and then started to waver as though in some kind of heat haze. It was something I’d never seen before: self-exorcism, a willed and wanted abdication. Kale smiled as she faded: but then apes smile when they’re afraid, and there was something of blind terror about her eyes.

But she was looking at Covington – at the man who’d been born Aaron Berg, and then had worn so many other names – and I thought the expression was softening into something else as it sublimed out of my visible spectrum altogether.

Doug Hunter came around after only a few minutes. I was afraid he might draw entirely the wrong conclusion from finding himself tied to a bed in a room in a strange house with a guy he didn’t recognise sitting on a chair next to the bed, but that was one complication I didn’t have to worry about.

He was too weak and too sick at first to care much about where he was, and his memories came back with his strength.

Peter Covington – assuming that was the blond man’s original name – wasn’t so lucky. Like Maynard Todd, he’d been ridden for much longer by the Mount Grace dead and it had damaged him more deeply. He lay on the floor, conscious but unable or unwilling to move, his lips moving silently.

I helped Doug to untie himself, and then I helped him to stand.

‘Where’s . . . Jan?’ he slurred.

‘Waiting for you at home,’ I told him. ‘You want to go there now?’

He tried to speak, but couldn’t get the word out. He nodded instead.

‘You’re still wanted for murder, Doug. You probably want to give yourself up rather than let them catch you and bring you in.’

He nodded again. ‘To–tomorrow.’

Yeah. There’s always tomorrow.

27

The world turned under me, and I turned with it.

These things harrowed me with fear and wonder at the time, but you know how it is: with the endless repetitions of memory they lost a lot of their impact after a while. You’ve probably had similar weeks yourself.

With Sue Book guarding her like a tender-hearted Rottweiler, Juliet recovered almost a hundred per cent in thö wee space of a couple of weeks – but there’s a world of meaning in that ‘almost’.