Dead Men's Boots
Also by Mike Carey
The Devil You Know
Vicious Circle
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Mike Carey
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
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Originally published in Great Britain in September 2007 by Orbit
First eBook Edition: July 2009
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ISBN: 978-0-446-55145-8
To Charlotte Oria,
my transatlantic connection for a quarter of a century,
with much love and gratitude
Contents
One
I
DON’T DO FUNERALS ALL THAT OFTEN, AND WHEN I DO, I prefer to be either falling-down drunk or dosed up on some herbal fuzz-bomb
like salvinorin to the point where I start to lose feeling from the feet on up, like a kind of rising damp of the central
nervous system. Today I was as sober as a judge, and that was only the start of it. The cemetery was freezing cold—cold enough
to chill me even through the Russian-army greatcoat I was wearing (I never fought, but poor bloody infantry is a state of
mind). The sun was still locked up for winter, a gusty east wind was stropping itself sharp on my face, and guilt was working
its slow way through my mind like a weighted cheese wire through a block of ice.
Ashes to ashes, the priest said, or at least that was what it boiled down to. His hair and his skin were ash-pale in the February
cold. The pallbearers stepped forward just as the wind sprang up again, and the shroud on top of the coffin bellied like a
sail. It was a short voyage, though: Two steps brought them alongside the neat, rectangular hole in the ground, where they
bent as one and laid the coffin down on a pair of canvas straps held in place by four burly sextons. Then the sextons stepped
in from either side, in synchrony, and the coffin slid silently down into the ground.
Rest in peace, John Gittings. The mortal part of you, anyway; for the rest, it was going to be a case of wait-and-see. Maybe
that was why John’s widow, Carla, looked so strained and tense as she stood directly opposite me in her funereal finery. Her
outfit incorporated a brooch made from a sweep of midnight-dark feathers, and staring at it made me momentarily imagine that
I was looking down from a great height, the black of her dress becoming the black of an asphalt highway, the remains of a
dead bird lying there like roadkill.
The priest started up again, the wind stealing his voice and distributing it piecemeal among us so that everyone got a beggar’s
share of the wisdom and consolation. Sunk in my own thoughts, which were fixed on mortality and resurrection to the exclusion
of redemption, I looked around at the other mourners. It was a who’s who of the London exorcist community: Reggie Tang, Therese
O’Driscoll, and Greg Lockyear were there, representing the Thames Collective; Bourbon Bryant and his hatchet-faced new wife,
Cath; Larry Tallowhill and Louise Beddows, Larry looking like a walking corpse himself with the white of his cheekbones showing
through his skin like a flame through a paper lantern; Bill Schofield, known for reasons both complicated and obscene as Jonah;
Ade Underwood, Sita Lovejoy, Michelle Mooney, all up from the beautiful South (Elephant and Castle, or thereabouts); and among
the also-rans, a very striking, very young woman with shoulder-length white-blond hair who kept staring at me all the way
through the service. There was something both familiar and unsettling about her face, but I couldn’t place it. That uncertainty
did nothing to improve my mood, and neither did the absence of the one London exorcist I’d been hoping to see at this shindig.
But then Juliet Salazar never did hold with cheap sentiment. In fact, she probably didn’t have any to sell even at the market
price.
Meanwhile, seeing as how this was a cemetery, the dead had turned up in considerable force. They clustered around us at a
safe distance, sensing the power gathered here and what it could do to them, but so starved of sensation that they couldn’t
keep away. It was hard not to look at the sad multitude, even though looking at ghosts often makes them come in closer, as
though your attention is a gradient they slide down toward you. There were dozens, if not hundreds, packed so closely together
that they overlapped, thrusting their heads through one another’s limbs and torsos to get a better look at us and maybe at
the new kid on the block. The ghosts of the most recent vintage still carried the marks of their death on them in wasted flesh,
oddly angled limbs, and in one case, a gaping chest hole that was almost certainly a bullet wound. The tenants of longer standing
had either learned or forgotten enough to look more like themselves in life, or else they’d started to fade to the point where
some of the more gruesome details had been lost or smudged over.
The priest seemed oblivious to his larger audience, which was probably a good thing: He looked old enough and frail enough
that he might not weather the shock. But people in my profession have the sight whether they like it or not, and it’s not
something you can turn on and off. At one point during the funeral oration, Bourbon Bryant reached into his pocket and half
drew out the book of matches he always carried there—the particular tool he uses to get the whip hand on the invisible kingdoms,
just as a tin whistle (Clarke Sweetone, key of D) is mine.
I put a hand on his arm and shook my head. “Not the time,” I said tersely, speaking out of the corner of my mouth.
“I’ll just torch one or two, Fix,” he muttered back. “The rest will scatter like pigeons.”
“I’ll break your jaw if you do,” I said equably. He shot me a surprised, affronted look, read my own expression accurately,
and put away the matches.
Why hadn’t I gotten drunk before coming here? Judging by the faces around me, I sure as hell wouldn’t have been the only one.
Exorcists often resort to booze to stifle their death perception, just as a lot of them use speed when they want to put a
particular edge on it. But I’m careful about how I deploy my crutches. Today that would have felt like I was hiding from something
specific I was ashamed to face, rather than just dulling unpleasant distractions. Bad precedent.
I defocused as far as I could, staring through the massed ranks of the dead toward the cemetery’s high wrought-iron fence,
which was topped with very un-Christian razor wire. No respite there, though; the Breath of Life protesters were pressed up
against the bars like tourists at the zoo, shouting abuse at us that we were too far away to decipher. The Breathers, as we
dismissively call them, are radical dead-rights extremists, and they view us ghostbreakers in much the same light in which
staunch Catholics tend to see abortionists: You can always rely on them to break up the funeral of an exorcist if they get
a tip-off that it’s going down. Most likely, the priest or one of the sextons was a closet sympathizer and had sent the word
down the line.
Things were starting to wind down now. Carla threw some earth into her husband’s grave, and a few other people got in line
to do the same. Then the sextons took over for the serious shoveling. Now that we’d made that ritualistic nod toward plowing
the fields, we were free to scatter as soon as was decent. Carla’s earlier plan for a post-funeral gathering at her house
in Mill Hill had been canceled at the last moment for reasons that weren’t entirely clear—and the service, which on the black-edged
invitations had been set for three p.m., had been moved forward to one-thirty without explanation. Maybe that was why Juliet
hadn’t shown.
But just as I was congratulating myself on getting away easy, a shout from the main gates made me turn my head in that direction.
There was a man there, running toward us at a flat-out sprint that sat oddly with his immaculately cut Italian suit. By and
large, people don’t wear Enzo Tovare to go jogging. All the muck sweat’s not good for that delicate stitching.
This Johnny-come-lately looked pretty striking in other ways, too. His mid-brown hair was back-combed into an Errol Flynn–style
college cut, and he had the Hollywood face to go with it—hard to get without plastic surgery or sterling-silver genes. He
looked to be about thirty, but there was something in his face that read as either premature experience or some kind of innate
calm and seriousness. He was old for his age, but he wore it pretty well.
He had a folded sheet of paper in his hand that he was holding up for our appreciation like Neville Chamberlain. That plus
the sharp suit made it less likely that he was what I’d taken him to be at first: one of the Breath of Life guys trying to
disrupt proceedings with a paint bomb or a noisemaker.
He slowed down as he got in among us, and I noticed as he passed me that he wasn’t breathing hard despite the run. I wondered
if he worked out in Italian linen, too.
“Mrs. Gittings,” he said, offering the paper to Carla. “This is a warrant executed this morning by Judge Tilney at Hendon
Magistrates’ court. Will you please read it?”
Carla smacked the paper out of the man’s hand so that he had to flail briefly to catch it again before it fell into the grave.
“Go away, Mr. Todd,” she said coldly. “You’ve got no business being here. No business at all.”
“I have to disagree,” Italian-suit guy said politely enough, unfolding the paper and showing it to Carla. “You know what my
business is, Mrs. Gittings, and you know why I couldn’t just allow this to happen. What you’re doing here is illegal. This
warrant forbids you from burying the mortal remains of the late Jonathan Gittings, and it requires you to appear at—”
He ran out of steam very abruptly. He was looking into the grave, and he clearly registered the fact that it was already occupied
and half full of earth. There was maybe a second when he seemed false-footed: all dressed up, writ in hand, and nowhere to
go. Then he refolded his warrant and tucked it away in his breast pocket with a decisive motion, his expression somber.
“Obviously, I’m already too late,” he said. “I was under the impression that this service was scheduled to start at three
o’clock. I’m sure that was what I was told when I called the funeral parlor this morning. Perhaps there was a last-minute
cancellation?” Carla flushed red, opened her mouth to speak, but Todd raised his hands in surrender. “I’m not going to try
to interrupt a funeral that’s already in progress—and I apologize for disturbing the solemnity of the occasion. If I’d been
in time to stop the burial, it was my legal duty to do so. Now… I’ll retire and consider the other avenues available to me.
We’ll talk again, Mrs. Gittings. And you can expect an exhumation order in the fullness of time.”