Dead Men's s Boots — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

I stood on the door, wadded up my coat and laid it down on the glass. I only had to stand on it for a moment, using it to step across to a shed roof. Then I leaned out and hooked the coat across after me, only a little the worse for wear.

The coat came into play again almost immediately. I wrapped it around my fist to break a single pane of the window at the other end of the shed and then – with gingerly care – to knock the broken glass out of the frame. It was handy that the building had never been double-glazed – although if it had I could always have dropped down into the yard and tried my luck with the back door. Safely out of view, I could have taken my time.

As it was, though, things seemed to be going my way. Even groping around in the dark and at an odd angle, kneeling down because the pane was on a level with my knee, I found the window catch almost immediately and was able to lever it open. Then I slid the window up as far as it would go and climbed inside.

There was carpet under my feet, but it was too dark for me to make out anything of the layout of the room I was in. Fighting the urge to blunder ahead anyway and find my way by feel, I waited for my eyes to get a little more accustomed to the dark. It was just as well I did: as the space around me resolved itself slowly out of shadows into some degree of visibility, I realised that I wasn’t in a room at all: I was in a turn of the stairwell, which was just as narrow as I remembered it. My first step would have pitched me down the stairs on my head.

Trying to remember the layout of the building from my one and only daytime visit, I went up rather than down. I had a rough sense of where Todd’s door would be in relation to the stairs, but not how far up it was. The first door opened when I tried the handle, but the layout within was wrong – the desk was over against the far wall instead of under the window. I pulled the door to behind me and went on up.

On the next floor up the corresponding door seemed to be locked, but then I noticed with a faint stir of surprise that it was bolted from the outside. I undid the bolt and peered in.

This time the darkness was absolute, even when I pushed the door wide open. More unsettlingly, the room was emitting a soft bass rumble, almost more vibration than sound. Under the circumstances, there were close on a million good reasons for not turning the light on, but that was what I did. It was almost automatic: groping on the wall to my left to see if there was a switch there and, once I found it, flicking it on.

Outside of the movies, I’ve never seen an assassin dismount and dismantle his sniper rifle and put the pieces carefully away in the sculpted foam receptacles in a sleek black suitcase. I assume it does happen, but with no personal experience to go on I have to take it on trust. But I am now in a position to comment if I’m ever in a conversation about dismantled werewolves; because when the light clicked on, that was what I was looking at.

The room was full of cats, and they Ócatmanwere all asleep: on the floor, on the furniture, on the shelves, covering every surface in sight. The deep vibration was caused by their combined synchronous purring. I took an involuntary step backwards, recoiling from the implications of what I was seeing. And in that queasy moment, as I hovered on the cusp of a decision, a cat in the centre of the room, a big white-furred Persian lying on top of an antique roll-top escritoire, opened its eyes.

Then the cats around it did too, and then their neighbours and so forth, out from the centre in a spreading wave, like one vast creature sending a single instruction via an old and creaky nervous system that took its own sweet time getting the message through.

A hundred or more cats stared at me now, with ancient and inscrutable malevolence in their eyes. It was deeply, viscerally nasty, but there was worse to come. The Persian mewled on a rising tone, and the two cats to either side of it pressed in and nuzzled its cheeks as if to comfort it. But that gentle contact became a firmer pressure, held for too long, and the flesh and fur of the three cats’ faces started to run together into a repulsive amorphous mass. The bodies followed, and more cats were crowding in now, jumping down from the dusty shelves full of old books of legal precedents or leaping up from the floor to join the press.

With a single muttered ‘Fuck!’ I pulled my coat wide open and hooked my whistle out of the inside pocket. It occurred to me – fleetingly – to back out and bolt the door again, but what good would that do? When these cats coalesced into the creature they were going to become, doors weren’t going to hold it.

The three cats in the centre were gone now. The spherical mound of pulpy flesh they’d become had a rudimentary face.