Dead Men's Boots (16 page)

I stepped out into the still-rising flood, feeling the vicious undertow trying to pull my legs out from under me. I picked
my way forward one step at a time, feeling with my toes for the edges of the unseen pits. The road was a cemetery, the open
graves hidden by the water so that you couldn’t see them until you fell.

Who’d dig graves in the middle of a road? Maybe it was like housing: Location was all-important, and a dead man with somewhere
important to be would want to be buried in a place that was handy for the shops and the tube.

I rounded one of the graves and almost stepped sideways into another. The water was up to John’s neck now, and he was staring
in all directions, his eyes wide with dread.

Before I could get to him, something pulled him under. He gave a wail of terror, cut off very abruptly when his head went
below the surface. When I got to the spot, there was nothing to show where he’d been except a ragged stream of bubbles, drifting
away on the midnight-black flow of the urban river.

Something brushed against my leg under the surface—something big enough to push me aside as it glided past, unseen. I jumped
away, watching the roiling water it left in its wake. It turned in a vast, lazy arc and headed back toward me. I took one
step back, and then another, and on the third step, there was nothing to put my foot down on. I slipped on the rim of the
submerged grave pit and went under, my mouth clamped shut.

I woke up gasping for air as though I really had half-drowned. Like someone in a movie, I came bolt upright, my body sheathed
in already cooling sweat. I groped for a bedside light, found one, and after a few seconds of floundering, succeeded in turning
it on. A big calico cat that had been sitting at the foot of the bed yowled in protest, jumped down to the floor, and padded
to the door, shooting me a glance of cool disapproval as it left. The stray that Carla had told me about, obviously.

Shit! That had been the worst nightmare I’d had in years. With slightly shaky hands, I unzipped the sleeping bag and swung
my legs out. There was no way I was getting any more sleep until my pulse rate had come back down to normal.

I went to the door, then trekked along the short passage and looked out into the living room. Turning the light on had robbed
me of my night sight, so I couldn’t make out many details in the scene before me. I could hear Carla’s rhythmical breathing,
though, and I could see the shadowy bump that was her sleeping form.

The coffin still stood on its trestles, undisturbed. The cat walked under it, rubbed its cheek against the legs of the nearer
trestle, then strolled on with regal indifference.

A couple of cautious steps into the dark brought me to the foot of the coffin. I put a hand on its lid, the smooth wood chilly
under my fingertips.

All right, mate, I said to myself. Nothing formal. No promises, because when all’s said and done, I don’t owe you a damn thing.

But I’ll do what I can.

    
Eight

T
ODD HAD MADE ALL THE ARRANGEMENTS FOR THE cremation, too. He’d told Carla that the hearse would call at ten in the morning,
but he was there himself at nine-thirty to supervise. Carla was in the shower, so I opened the door for him, feeling like
I’d been rolled up wet and put away dry.

I must have looked fairly rough, too, because as he came inside, Todd gave me a look that was almost supercilious. “Sleep
well?” he asked blandly.

I picked up my mug of coffee, which I’d rested on the coffin lid while I was opening the door, and took a deep swig of Carla’s
bitter espresso before I answered. “Like the dead.” Todd actually winced. They say that if you can make a lawyer blush, you
get a free pass to heaven. I wondered if this would be good for a day trip to purgatory.

He outlined the route to me, although this time we’d be traveling in one of the official cars, so there was nothing to memorize.
“Mount Grace Crematorium is on Bow Common,” he said. “Behind Saint Clement’s Hospital. We’ll drive down to Primrose Hill,
around the Outer Circle, and then east all the way from there. Is Mrs. Gittings ready?”

He could hear the sound of the shower as well as I could, so I gave him the only answer the question seemed to deserve: “Almost.”
He wasn’t listening, in any case; he was prowling around the room looking at the damage that the ghost had done, which of
course he was seeing for the first time. He assessed it with a thoughtful, even professional eye, as if considering what it
might be worth as part of a lawsuit. I finished my coffee and watched him in silence. He seemed nervous and eager to be on
his way, which he probably was. I didn’t know how much he charged for estate work, but it didn’t seem likely that John had
paid him enough to cover two visits to Waltham Abbey and a slap-up funeral in the East End. Or maybe I was underestimating
John’s determination to have his last wishes respected. Maybe he’d given Todd a big enough retainer to cover all eventualities.

The lawyer’s circuit of the room brought him back to the door at last. It was still open; he hadn’t closed it on his way in.
He looked at John’s old wards with the same clinical eye, then glanced at me. “These ought to go,” he said. “Before we take
the body out.”

It was slightly embarrassing that I hadn’t thought of that myself. Of course that could be what had caused John’s ghost to
be separated from his body and stranded here in the first place. It was hard for the dead to cross magical wards if they’d
been put together right—and although they were used mostly to keep ghosts and zombies out of places where they weren’t wanted,
they’d work just as effectively to imprison them. Jenna-Jane’s cheerfully sadistic experiments at the MOU in Paddington had
proved that a hundred times over.

I took down the birch sprig myself; it brought back my dream more vividly than I liked. “Not much left of me now…” Todd wiped
over the chalked
ekpiptein
with the palm of his hand, and I levered off the mezuzah. Between the two of us, we cleared the doorway inside of a minute.
Tactfully, Todd didn’t point out that as the resident exorcist, I ought to have done it myself before he arrived.

Carla still hadn’t put in an appearance, and the cars weren’t here yet, either, so I went back into the kitchen and brewed
some more coffee—I’d bought a packet the night before, on my expedition for the curries and beer. Todd accepted some—black,
no sugar—and then left it to cool as he paced around the room some more.

“Did John ever mention why he was so dead set on being cremated at Mount Grace?” I asked. “Is there something special about
that one place?”

Todd turned to glance in my direction, looking a little surprised. “Well, perhaps I played a part in that,” he said. “I thought
I mentioned this already, but maybe I was talking to someone else. Mount Grace is something of an oddity. The owners—the Palance
family—are clients of ours. They bought the crematorium from the borough in the twenties, although they founded a blind trust
to take care of the actual running of the place—its running as a historical site, I mean. It’s hardly ever used for its real
purpose anymore, except in very rare cases—family and friends, mainly. I had the file on my desk one time when John came into
the office. He was talking about cremation, and I told him about Mount Grace. The idea of a crematorium that’s something of
a select club seemed to appeal to him.”

So whatever it was, John’s concern hadn’t been narrowly geographical. He’d been concerned about what exactly was done to his
body, rather than where it was done or where the remains were put afterward. Burning rather than burial. Why? To close the
door on his return? But it hadn’t. Although a lot of ghosts tend to stay close to their mortal remains, far more linger in
the place of their death, just as John had done. Being cremated only ruled out coming back as a zombie, not coming back per
se.

“Any reason why you suggested Mount Grace, then?” I asked for form’s sake. “Did John ask for something specific in the way
his body was disposed of?”

Todd shook his head firmly, looking bored and perhaps even a little resentful at being questioned. “It was nothing like that.
It was just that he wanted the whole thing settled quickly, almost on the spot. Because of my firm’s connection to the Palances,
I was able to make arrangements at Mount Grace with a single phone call. And it seemed to meet John’s requirements in other
respects, too. The cost is nominal, because as I said, the trust sees the place mostly as a site of historical interest, and
there’s a bequest that covers its maintenance.

“There’s a garden of remembrance where Mr. Gittings’s ashes will be laid, and it’s in a rather beautiful spot. At least it
was
beautiful, and I’m sure it will be again when the building works on the site next door are finished. The crematorium has
its own formal gardens. I think they were designed by Inigo Jones. In fact, that’s why the Palances acquired the site in the
first place: The buildings and the grounds are very fine, and there’d been some talk of bulldozing them and building houses
there. Michael Palance, who’s dead now, tried to get the building adopted by the National Trust, which was fairly new in those
days, and when that failed, he bought it himself.”

Carla walked in at this point, looking more than a little stunning in her widow’s weeds. She clearly wasn’t all that happy
to see Maynard Todd in her living room, but almost at the same moment, there was a knock at the door—the four pallbearers
reporting in for duty. They hefted the coffin, and we got under way immediately, avoiding any need for an unpleasant scene.
A few of the neighbors watched from their front gardens or from behind lightly twitching curtains as John went off to the
next installment of his eternal reward. Carla walked regally down the steps and into the car, not sparing any of them so much
as a glance.

Since all three of us rode together in the hearse, conversation was sparse and strained. That left me plenty of time to mull
over the change in John’s will, and to chase my thoughts around in decreasing circles until I was sick of them. Cremation.
Why had it mattered to John so much that he had drawn up a new will and gone to a new law firm to make sure that his instructions
were followed, no matter how much distress it might cause Carla?

Nicky Heath, who, as a zombie, took a lively [
sic
] interest in stuff like this, told me once that in early civilizations, cremation was kind of a patriarchal thing. “You could
think of the smoke as a ghost phallus if you want to,” he said. “The ‘dead man’s last stand’ kind of thing. Or if that strikes
you as a little off-color, you could go for the official symbolism. You’re seeing the soul ascend to heaven to sit at God’s
right hand. Matriarchies didn’t go for that whole heaven argument so much—they favored burial because it was going back to
the womb of Mother Earth. Closing the big circle. You can’t get born again until you put yourself back.” Needless to say,
Nicky sided with the mothers on this one. Anyone who came near him with a can of kerosene was likely to return to Mother Earth
in a lot of separate pieces.

But John was a ghostbreaker through and through: There are very few of us who have any time for religion. When you spend your
life dealing with the crude mechanics of life and death, you tend to find the elegant theories less than compelling. So maybe
Carla was right—maybe his mind had started to go, and maybe that explained both his aberrant behavior in the last few weeks
of his life and his scary transformation after death.

Or maybe there was something else going on, although it was hard to imagine what sort of something that could be if it required
him to burn his body after he died, as though it contained a secret message of some kind. For just a moment, an idea stirred
in the fuzzy depths of my mind, but it submerged again before I could reach for it.

Todd brought me out of my thoughts by leaning forward to tell the driver to hang a left. The unexpected sound made Carla tense,
showing how strained the silence in the car had become even as it broke. As though the ice had been broken, too, Todd turned
to Carla and offered her an affable smile.

“I haven’t made any specifications about the service, Mrs. Gittings,” he said, “but I believe there will be a clergyman on
hand. If you want any kind of a prayer spoken over the casket, or a hymn—” He left the sentence unfinished, no doubt realizing
as he said it how pathetic the three of us would sound striking up a chorus of “Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer.”

“I just want it to be over,” Carla said in a low, curt tone that left no room for further conversational pleasantries.

Our route took us through a part of London that’s one of my favorites. Mile End is steeped in tragic and tragicomic history
in the same way that, say, a pickled pig’s trotter is steeped in vinegar. This was where the first of Hitler’s flying bombs
rained down; where the spectacularly cocked-up launch of H.M.S.
Albion
killed dozens of local kids who’d taken the day off school to see it glide off the slipway; where the resurrection men plied
their trade; and where Bishop and Williams murdered the Italian Boy. The rising of the dead is a fairly recent thing, but
in Mile End, the ghosts have soaked into the stone.