‘Sorry, love,’ I said, slowing involuntarily. ‘I’m boracic.’
She stared at me with one eye, the other socket being full of some milky-white goo that I was trying not to examine too closely. ‘All right, sweetheart,’ she said, resignedly. ‘Have a good night.’ She looked down and away suddenly, as though staring at my face hurt too much.
One of the other walking dead took up the slack, favouring me with a truly hideous grin. ‘What about plastic, mate? We take everything except American Express.’ A hollow snicker went through the ranks of the undead, like a breeze through dry grass.
I turned out my pockets theatrically. ‘Only thing between me and you lot is a pulse,’ I said. ‘But I come through this way a lot. When I’m in funds, I’ll stop by again.’
‘Course you will,’ one of the zombies agreed sardonically.
I’d stopped walking now, which in purely social terms was a mistake: once you’ve stopped, how do you start again without looking like a selfish, blood-warm bastard who thinks of the dead in the way racists think of people with a different skin colour, as belonging to an alien species?
‘What do you spend the money on?’ I asked, by way of small talk. The walking dead can’t eat or drink: they don’t have any stomach enzymes to break food down, or any blood to carry the disassembled feast through the lightless chambers of their bodies.
‘Wards.’ It was the woman who’d asked me for money in the first place. She spoke bluntly, tersely, her face – still averted from mine – expressionless. ‘Wards and stay-nots.’
I laughed politely. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Scared of ghosts, are we?’
Now she looked up at me again, and the others did too. ‘Not ghosts, mate,’ one of the men said.
‘Loup-garous?’ That did make a kind of sense, although it would be a pretty desperate werewolf that fed on this meat.
I was still the focus for all eyes. The woman put her hands out towards the fire, the gesture forlorn and futile, like a bereaved mother singing a lullaby to her dead child’s doll. The fire was only a memory of something she’d had once and would never have again.
‘There’s other things besides the hairy men,’ she muttered. ‘More all the time, from what I can see. They come in the night, wriggling all around you. Shining, some of them. Don’t know what they are, or where they came from, but I don’t want them crawling over me in the dark, that’s for bloody sure.’
There were murmurs of agreement from all sides. I flashed on a memory: the tapeworm-like ribbons of nothingness that had drifted around me as I sat on the pavement, drunk out of my mind, and tried to play the new note I was hearing in the night.
‘World’s changing,’ said another of the zombies, his voice a horrendously prolonged death rattle. ‘It don’t want us no more.’
‘Never fucking did, mate,’ said another man gloomily. ‘Cold leftovers is what we are. Shoved to the side of the plate.’
‘Something always turns up though, doesn’t it?’ I pointed out with impeccable banality. I fished in another of my coat’s many and capacious pockets and came up with something that might cheer them up – a half-bottle of blended Scotch. I handed it to the woman, who looked at it with solemn approval. Although I said that the dead couldn’t eat or drink, some of them do anyway, even though they know it will sit in their stomach and rot, giving the vectors of decay something extra to work on. Others, like my friend Nicky, drink the wine-breath and take some attenuated comfort from that.
‘Thanks, mister,’ the dead woman said. ‘You’re a diamond.’
‘Take care of yourself,’ I said, probably at least a month or so too late, and went on my less-than-merry way.
Pen was not only still up, she was actually outside the house, prowling around the floral border underneath the ground-floor windows in a state of simmering rage.
‘Look at this,’ she said as I came up, as though we were already in the middle of a conversation. ‘I only planted these tulips yesterday, and something’s trampled right through them. You can’t keep anything. Not a thing.’
The sheer ordinariness of the topic was welcome right then. ‘You could put a circle of salt down,’ I said. ‘That’s what my dad used to do, to stop cats shitting in our coal bunker.’
Pen breathed out hard and audibly. She hates the way I elide the fragile boundary between folk magic and bullshit.
‘Seriously?’ I said. ‘You’re standing in the garden in the middle of the night because something broke your tulips?’
Pen looked at me and shook her head. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I’m laying down some more wards.’ She showed me the lump of white chalk in her hand.
‘The ones on the doors and windows aren’t enough?’
‘They always have been. Now . . . I don’t know. It’s weird, Fix. This is a warm night, isn’t it?’
‘Very.’
‘But I can’t stop shivering. Everything feels wrong, somehow. It has done ever since . . .’ She didn’t have to finish the sentence. By tacit assumption, all unfinished sentences could be taken to refer back to the night of Asmodeus’ escape. She might have had some more to say about how she felt, but it was then that I stepped into the light from the open doorway. Pen gave an audible gasp as she stared at my damaged face.
‘Oh my God,’ she said, dismayed and solicitous. ‘What happened? Don’t just stand there, you twerp. Come on inside and let me put something on those cuts.’ She shoved me toward the house, leaving chalk marks on the sleeve of my coat.
‘I was in a fight,’ I said, putting up only a token resistance.
‘With what? A combine harvester?’
I hesitated. Sooner or later, I’d have to tell Pen what had happened tonight but, given the mood she was in, if I did it right then and there I’d be guaranteeing her a sleepless night.
‘It was just an argument that got out of hand,’ I said.
‘At Coldwood’s crime scene?’ Pen didn’t sound convinced.
‘Well, some of these grass-green constables still need the rough edges knocking off of them . . .’
She let the lie stand, but since she knew that was what it was, she reneged on her promise of a hot poultice. She handed me a yellow Post-it note instead. Sue Book, it read. 10.30. Get back to her tonight if you can.
But I couldn’t. Not now. Sue might be shacking up with a sex-demon, but she was a humble librarian and she worked nine to five like most ordinary, decent people. If I called her up at three in the morning and interrupted her beauty sleep, I might get a tongue-lashing from Juliet. And pleasant though that sounds, Juliet’s tongue can strip rivets off steel.
‘She sounded like she’d been crying,’ Pen said, as Arthur the raven came swooping down from the banister to take up his station on her left shoulder.
Sue? Crying? That was unnerving.
‘Anyone else?’ I asked.
Pen shook her head.
‘Then I guess I’ll turn in,’ I said. ‘Unless you want to draw some more stay-nots. I’m good for that if you’ve got another piece of chalk.’
Pen snorted. ‘As if I’d trust a ward you’d written,’ Pen said. ‘I know mine work: all I know about yours is that they’d be spelled wrong. Goodnight, Fix.’
It wasn’t, particularly. I couldn’t get to sleep for a long while. The night was a furnace and the booze-craving was still churning sourly in my stomach and sending static through my nerves.
When I did sleep, it was a shallow doze punctuated with disconnected, rambling dreams. A dog scratched at a dry crumbling fence; a butcher sharpened an overlarge knife on a leather strap, accidentally slashing his own arms every so often with the tip of the unwieldy blade; an old gramophone played all by itself in a dark empty room, the horn echoing with nothing but scraping static because the song had finished.
Some time before dawn I opened my eyes, still half-adrift on the tides of sleep. What was the sound now? I wondered dully. But this was the waking world, and the intermittent scratching that had accompanied me along all the avenues of my dreams was now sounding from directly over my head.