Dead Men's s Boots

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 Molãmic;t och 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.

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.

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.