‘Normal service will be resumed,’ Moloch murmured. ‘Eventually. Until then the walls will have no ears, and nobody can drop in on us unannounced.’
Unable to take my stare off the weirdly suspended skull, I sat at the furthest edge of the sofa, putting as much distance between myself and the demon as I could – and keeping the whistle firmly gripped in my left hand, ready for use.
Moloch noticed, and he affected to be hurt. ‘I saved your life the other night,’ he reminded me reproachfully. ‘We’re fighting the same fight, Felix.’
‘Are we?’ I asked bluntly.
He gave me a slow, emphatic nod. ‘Oh yes. Trust me on this.’
‘And who are we fighting against, exactly?’
‘The immortals. The killers who found the exit door on the far side of Hell. You remember I spoke to you about rhythm. Sequence. Cadence. I know the end of the story, and you know its start. Shall we embrace like brothers, and share?’
‘No,’ I suggested. ‘Let’s not. Tell me what you want out of me and what you can give me, with no bullshit, and I’ll tell you if I’m interested.’
The demon pursed his lips. ‘I confess,’ he said, ‘I prefer a certain degree of commitment at the outset. A promise, at least. It doesn’t need to be sealed in blood. If I tell you what I know, you’ll use it to further my interests, as well as your own. Just swear, on something you care about. The formalities aren’t important.’
I stared him out.
‘Felix.’ He made a sound like the desiccated, risen-fromthe-tomb-unnaturally-alive mummy of a sigh. ‘We have to roll a boulder up a very large hill together. Without some basis of trust between us, it’s going to be hard work.’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t even know what the boulder is,’ I pointed out. ‘I’m not likely to get my shoulder under it any time soon – not on blind faith, anyway.’
‘Faith?’ The demon made a terse, faintly obscene gesture. ‘No. I wouldn’t advise you to deal with me on that basis. Did you mention me to the lady, at all?’
‘To Juliet? Yeah, I did.’
‘And how did she respond?’
I thought back. ‘She spat on the ground,’ I said.
He nodded with a certain satisfaction. ‘Immediately after she spoke my name, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’ll notice I haven’t spoken hers. Only that of her brother, who is dead. These are useful precautions among our kind. Our names aren’t given or chosen at random. They have unique properties, and to speak them casually, without due attention to . . .’ he hesitated before visibly selecting the right word ‘. . . prophylaxis can lead to very serious consequences. And she has good reason both to hate and to fear me.’
‘I’ll bet,’ I said, unimpressed. ‘And, you know, I appreciate your frankness. I’d say it was a breath of fresh air except that the air stinks of rotten meat. This isn’t getting us much further, is it?’
‘No,’ Moloch agreed. ‘It isn’t.’ He smiled nastily. ‘You’re very amusing, Felix, do you know that? Your instinctive mistrust. The way you look for angles, for advantages, even when there aren’t any. You see yourself as the finger in the dyke, don’t you? And me as the rising tide. But I promise you, very solemnly: in the bigger scheme of things, you’re –’ he touched the tips of his fingers together, opened them again, consigning me to oblivion ‘– insignificant.’
‘Can you have a rising tide of shit?’ I asked politely. ‘I suppose technically the answer’s yes, but it’s a disturbing image. I’d go for a different metaphor, if I were you. Something more in a David and Goliath flavour. And you know, I’m like Avis rent-a-car: because I’m insignificant, I try harder.’
I was hoping to shake the aura of smugness Moloch was putting out, but his smile just broadened. ‘Do you even know, Castor, why the dead are rising? Why the order of things has reversed itself so that graves gape and give birth?’
In spite of myself, a tremor went through me. The demon must have seen it because he smiled in modest gratification. ‘I think the answer is no,’ he murmured. ‘Poor little Dutch boy, labouring in the dark as the water rises around his ankles, then his knees, then—’
‘Well, everyone’s got a theory,’ I said, cutting across his chalk-on-blackboard eloquence. ‘Take a number and join the line.’
Moloch shook his head. ‘I don’t have a theory,’ he said, baring his teeth in what looked more like contempt than amusement now. ‘I was there, human. I saw the damage done. The great project. Oh yes. The shedim knew it for what it was.’
The great project. Juliet had mentioned that too, and then had pulled back from explaining what she meant. I felt a sudden brief wave of vertigo break over me, as though I’d been about to jump over a low wall but had then discovered at the last moment that the far side gave onto a sheer drop.
‘Whose project was it, then?’ I asked, still in the same Doubting Thomas voice. ‘Yours, or someone else’s?’ What does it say about me that a scant couple of hours after hearing about Gary Coldwood’s brush with the reaper I was shoving it to the back of my mind to play twenty questions with a demon? That I was so hungry for what he was about to tell me, I even put Mount Grace momentarily on the back burner of my mind?
Moloch stood up, his joints cracking alarmingly.
‘Go on,’ I said.
The demon turned his eyes on me, and something happened in the air between us. It seemed to ripple and thicken, as though something else had been dropped into it and made it curdle. Then suddenly Moloch was gone from in front of me, and his hand clamped down on my left shoulder – from behind. It took all my self-control not to dive off the sofa, hit the ground and roll.
Twisting my head around, I met his unblinking stare. As a show of strength, it did the job: my heart was racing and my throat was dry.
‘I prefer not to,’ he growled. ‘I was only . . . reminiscing. Thinking about the good old days. But they’re gone, now. The time is past when I could sit upon a chair made from my enemies’ intestines and feast on your woeful kindred. That summer will not come again.’
‘It’s a fucker,’ I agreed, trying to keep my voice level. ‘Where are the guts of yesteryear?’
‘The lady,’ Moloch resumed, walking away from me again towards the window. ‘You know what she eats, and how. Sexual desire is like a digestive enzyme for her: it lets her take spirit and flesh together. She inflames, and then she feeds: she can do it as well here as in the realms below, since all desire is ultimately in the mind.’
He stared out into the night and ran his clawed fingertips absently down the pane. ‘My case isn’t so fortunate. My meat is the souls of men who have killed other men, and women likewise. But only the souls: not the flesh. And even the souls I can only take, and feed on, and be nourished by, in certain very specific circumstances. The shedim are highly evolved; highly specialised. We have no mechanism for straining the life, the spirit, the selfness out of torn meat.
‘So when Hell changed – when the borders shifted – we began to starve. And there was no easy remedy. In the subtle realms we make . . .’ He gestured vaguely. ‘I don’t know the word . . . like small creatures, that make traps and then wait for their prey to come to them, instead of hunting. Traps that they weave out of their own bodies’ mass.’
‘Webs,’ I suggested, my voice coming out cracked and strained because my throat was still painfully dry. ‘Spider webs.’
‘Exactly. In Hell we make webs. But now the webs stood empty, year after year. We became desperate, and we fought. Against the succubi. Against the bone-singers. Against each other. And the weaker we became, the more frenzied were these struggles. Like rats in a sack, we tore at each other and devoured each other’s substance, even though it couldn’t nourish us.’
Still staring out of the window, Moloch lapsed into silence. ‘So you jumped ship?’ I suggested, just trying to keep him talking.
He held up his hands in front of his own face, examining them with intense disfavour. ‘A chance conjuration allowed me to rise to Reth Adoma,’ he said. ‘Some necromancer who couldn’t even frame a summoning, so that I rose out of the ground in a family burial plot in the middle of Essex. I looked for him – for the one who’d had the effrontery to summon me – but I never found him. A pity: I’d have liked to show my feelings on that score. Anyway, I wove myself a physical body so that I could stay here. Truly physical, I mean – not like the simulation of flesh that the lady wears. This body is real, and solid, and I live inside it as a hermit crab lives inside a borrowed shell. It took me many years to make, out of pieces of flesh gleaned here and there. The alternative was to go home again, and die.’