Dead Men's s Boots

So would you mind opening up before I lose my temper?’

The words hung in the air. I was smiling as I said them: a slightly crazed smile that did nothing to take away the edge of threat. But the guard’s pained expression as he scratched his ear and squared his shoulders said very eloquently that the threat wasn’t a credible one – and that he’d had more than enough of being polite.

‘Fuck off out of it, pally,’ he said. ‘I’ve told you we’re closed.’

Moloch stepped past me and took a two-handed grip on the bars, arms at full stretch.

He shook the gates on their hinges, testing their weight and heft. One of the guards on the flank gave a jeering laugh. But the guy in charge wasn&ãin str#8217;t seeing the funny side.

He took a step towards the gate, his hand going to the grip of his nightstick. And that, by a happy chance, was when the fun started. There was a rending crash from away to our right: the three guards, taken by surprise, all turned their heads to see what the noise was: we knew it was coming, so we didn’t.

I know Todd said that the Mount Grace collective liked to keep things in the family, so what happened next was no more than the pirate souls in possession of these men deserved. I couldn’t help remembering, though, that the flesh still belonged to someone else: that each of these human bodies had a prisoner locked in an oubliette somewhere screaming to be released. Moloch granted them their wish in a particularly hideous way.

He pushed the gates upwards and inwards, the hinges breaking open with sharp, metallic cracks like the blows of a hammer on an anvil.

Then he swung them like a giant fly-swatter and brought them down on the three men, crushing them to the ground.

I looked away as I stepped across the ad hoc drawbridge, trying not to see the red ruin of blood and bone under my feet. I told myself we had no choice: I thought about John Gittings, and Vince Chesney, and Gary Coldwood. It didn’t help: nothing was ever going to make these scales balance.

Moloch was striding on ahead, not bothering to look back and see whether or not I was following. I took out my whistle and put it to my lips.

The wall isn’t a wall, John’s letter had said. In other words, the ghosts of Mount Grace weren’t constrained by physical barriers, and anyone who thought he could hold his fire until he got to the front door of the furnace room or wherever he reckoned ground zero might be probably wasn’t going to make it.

I started to play.