I followed, pouring out sweet music like a ninja throws shurikens.
The chapel was full of roiling ghosts, made visible by the tune that anchored them against their will to this spot. They were like some sort of complex, ever-moving cat’s cradle, gliding past and through each other without ever seeming to touch. Faces and limbs and various misplaced or truncated echoes of human form appeared within the mass and then vanished back into it.
Moloch shot me a look.
‘Allegro,’ he growled. ‘And, if you can manage it, al pepe.’
He went down on one knee and bent his head. For a moment, grotesquely, it looked as though he were paying his respects to the enemies he was about to devour. But it wasn’t anything like that at all. It was something a whole lot more disgusting.
He’d told me that he’d made this body for himself, slowly and painstakingly. If I’d given any thought to what that meant, I’d have imagined some process like the knitting of a sweater. But I’d picked the wrong metaphor, clearly. The black leather of Moloch’s coat parted vertically as the flesh within knotted and burgeoned: suddenly there was a broadening split in the coat through which something red and churning could be seen, as though Moloch’s insides were molten liquid.
Out of that cauldron something rose like steam, then solidified in the air into a shape that made my stomach clench and sour bile rise in my throat. It had a lot of limbs, and a lot of mouths. The limbs threshed the air, passing through the turbulent mass of spirits that hovered there in a complex repeating pattern. They lost their coherence: emulsified into something that quickly lost any residue of humanity. Then the mouths opened and Moloch began to drink.
It took a long time. I looked away, concentrating on the music and trying to shut out the sounds of the demon’s banquet. But that left me looking at the guard with the ruined face, so in the end I closed my eyes and played for a few minutes more in the dark, in a sort of abstract trance.
A hand on my shoulder brought me out of it, and when I opened my eyes Juliet was at my side. She was boltered with blood from hairline to boots. I wondered if any of the men she’d killed had died with hard-ons. Probably not: she would have been moving too fast, working too hard to be able to linger and bring her lethal charm to bear on them. For some reason that I couldn’t explain, I felt relieved at that.
The room was silent. Most of the ghosts were gone. The bloated ectoplasmic hulk of Moloch hovered and pulsated in the air above us like some blasphemous Goodyear blimp, peristaltic ripples passing across its surface as its myriad appendages hoovered the air.
‘Great stuff,’ I said hoarsely. ‘Only next time, you want to go into second gear when you’re up past ten miles an hour. I meant to tell you that when you gave me a lift in your Maserati the other day.’
Juliet didn’t seem to be in the mood for banter. ‘We need to leave,’ she murmured, staring up at the terrible spectral mass. The tentacles were moving more sluggishly now, and the mouths were closing one by one. If there was such a thing as the ghost of a wafer-thin mint, the demon had reached the stage of the meal where it might be offered to him.
I saw Juliet’s point and headed for the door. But it was already too late.
‘Ah!’ Moloch exclaimed oleaginously, in a voice that seemed to reach us by making the bones of our skull vibrate directly, cutting out the etheric middle man. ‘The sister of Baphomet. Did I ever tell you how I killed him?’
Juliet looked up at the obscene, sated thing with its dozens of grinning mouths.
‘From behind,’ she said.
The physical body that the demon had abandoned in order to feed raised its head abruptly and stood.
‘And shall I tell you how I’m going to kill you?’ he asked.
Juliet raised an eyebrow, its perfect line spoiled by a piece of human tissue plastered to her forehead with human blood. ‘Shedim ere’fa minur,’ she said. ‘Ehad iniru, ke rekol ha dith gerainou.’
Both Molochs – the blimp and the one that looked like a man – roared in response. Both went for Juliet at the same time.
Juliet met the ‘man’ head-on and stopped him dead in his tracks. They both moved so fast that there was almost no sense of movement: they seemed to flick between static postures like a slide show. Moloch was trying the shock-and-awe tactics he’d used against the loup-garou, throwing punches and kicks like confetti at a wedding. Juliet blocked every one, and even got in a couple of her own so that suddenly Moloch was giving ground, parrying rather than hitting out.
But then the tentacles of the blimp-thing drifted through her head and shoulders and chest. She froze in place for a fraction of a heartbeat: Moloch saw the window and he was there, his right hand raised above his head, clawed fingers spread. The smack of impact came a second later. Juliet flew backwards through the air and hit the wall with a bag-of-wet-cement thud.
‘Oh, those are just stories,’ Moloch snarled. ‘I’m not even sure I could get it up with a raddled piece of meat like you.’
Juliet gathered herself and stood, with a visible effort. Three livid wounds marred her face, running diagonally in parallel from her left temple. Blood was already welling up from them in vigorous arterial gouts. But it wasn’t the wound that was giving her trouble, nor the blood: it was the puppet strings dangling down from the blimp monster, attaching themselves in thicker and thicker profusion to her forehead, her arms, her back and chest. She took a step forward, gathering herself to spring, but she was too slow by some huge, wasteful portion of a second. Moloch’s foot slammed into her stomach and she folded: then he swivelled like a dervish dancing, and his second kick, rising into her downturned face, lifted her off her feet. This time she hit the wall hard enough to leave a skull-shaped indent in one of the wooden panels.
I fitted the whistle to my lips again, sick horror making my movements clumsy, my mind empty and unresponsive. Moloch didn’t even look at me: he just gestured. One of the trailing tentacles of the blimp-thing drifted lazily across my throat, which constricted in sudden agony. I made a grunting wheeze of protest – the only sound that I could force out of my mouth. Another tendril rippled through my chest and my legs buckled under me, sending me crashing down onto my knees.
‘A hundred years,’ Moloch remarked conversationally. ‘That’s a long time to go between meals. No doubt it was good for my figure, but still. Not pleasant. Not pleasant at all.’ Levering herself up on hands and knees, Juliet reached blindly for his ankle, maybe intending to trip him. He stepped on her wrist, twisting as he brought his weight down. There was an audible crack.
‘The great project,’ he snarled, standing over her. ‘The shedim will piss on the rubble of your great project, and bury your children in the wastelands where it stood.’
He lifted her one-handed and looked into her face almost tenderly.
‘And the woman you live with,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep her as a pet, for a little while. Until she starts to bore me. Then I’ll eat her, over some long and leisurely period of time. Meiden agon, sister of Baphomet: all things in moderation.’
Moloch raised Juliet above his head, held her there for a second, and then brought her down so that her back broke across his raised knee. Juliet gave a grunt of pain. It was so unexpected, and so wrong, that my system flooded with adrenalin. Nothing could hurt Juliet: nothing could shake her poise. That was part of what made her what she was.
My brain kicking sluggishly back into gear, I started to beat out a tattoo with my palms on the cold stones of the floor. The sound was faint, and it hardly carried above the butcher-shop noises of what Moloch was doing to Juliet. But it was a rhythm – and a rhythm, as John Gittings had taught me, is the skeleton of a song.