Dead Men's s Boots — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

The mound rose from the desk as more cats added themselves to the base of it, deliquescing more quickly all the time as though the process was gaining its own momentum. Working from memory, I found the whistle’s stops and started to play.

I’d long ago forgotten the tune I’d composed to get the drop on Scrub the last time we’d met, and in any case I couldn’t be sure that this creature was the same loup-garou that had once worn that name and shape. Like Juliet said, if one werewolf could organise itself as a colony creature, then probably they all could if they got the inspiration.

I had one thing going for me, and one thing only. As the loup-garou in front of me assembled itself by inches and ounces, the sense of it grew stronger in my second sight, or rather my second hearing: the tune of the loupgarou strengthened and strengthened, became more vivid and inescapable from moment to moment. I let the plangent notes fill me; and then I let them ooze out of me through my lungs and my throat and my fingertips and the fragile piece of moulded metal in my hands.

The coagulating mass in front of me roared in anger. It was much bigger already, and its disconcertingly liquid substance spilled down from the desk onto the floor, allowing the remaining cats a much bigger surface area to adhere to and be absorbed into. A stumpy appendage reached out towards me, developed blisters on its outer surface: the blisters grew into recognisable fingers which opened and closed spasmodically. Rapier claws grew out from the fingertips.

I was fighting panic now: I wanted to hurry, but the logic of the tune was pulling me in the opposite direction, making me slow down, hold the notes as long as I could and let them glide out into the room on a descending scale. The tower of matter quivered, ripples chasing each other across its surface. Each ripple was like the pass of a magician’s hand, leaving behind first fur, then bare, disqÓthequiuietingly pink flesh, then fur again. The limbs were forced out from the main mass like meat from a mincing machine, and as soon as the legs were able to stand they began to lurch towards me. The face rose and was extruded from the top of the tower like an obscene bubble, the flesh below it crimping and narrowing, creating a head and neck by default. It was all of a piece, the eyes the same colour and texture as the flesh of the face, but they were starting to clear as I watched. The face leered, and my feeling of panic grew.

But the tune was right, and I was wrong. Slow and steady, note upon skirling note, it laid itself on the nascent thing in front of me like chains. It was working: the only question was whether it was working fast enough to keep me from being eaten alive. The loup-garou slowed, its back bent as though under a heavy weight, but it didn’t stop. It took another step forward, the clutch of scimitars at the end of its arm flexing and clashing in front of my face. Its toothless mouth gaped open and grew fangs that solidified from doughy pink to gleaming white. I lurched back involuntarily and the door frame banged my left elbow, almost knocking the whistle out of my hands. That would have been the end of the story, but I recovered with only a brief slur on one note of the tune.

A morbid paralysis was seizing the loup-garou, but it was coming from the feet on up: its upper body still had a lot of flexibility and it leaned forward, aiming a raking slash at my throat. I ducked back on my trailing foot and the wicked claws turned the front of my coat into confetti: a sharp pain and a sudden rush of warmth down my chest told me that one at least had drawn blood. Shuffling like a blind man, I backed out onto the landing an inch at a time until the wooden stair-rail was pressing against the small of my back and I knew there was nowhere else to run. My options had narrowed to two: play or die.

I played, forcing the other option out of my mind. The loup-garou’s legs buckled, and it crashed down onto its knees, but it was still trying to reach me. When the claws of the thing’s outstretched arm slashed at my ankle, I ducked to the side and kicked it away. The loup-garou roared again, but the sound had a sloughing, sucking fall to it: it was the sound of something falling apart from the inside out.

The face, now fully formed, stared at me with indelible hatred. It was Scrub’s face at first; then another wave crossed the surface of that flesh ocean and it was the face of Leonard the copy boy. Struggling to form words, it spewed out blood and black bile instead. A few fragments of sound bubbled through the liquid decay.

‘C – Cas – Cast—’

The eyes became opaque again, and the fluid in the gaping mouth congealed all at once into something that looked as shiny and vitreous as setting tar. The loup-garou was probably dead by this point, but strange movements from this or that part of the massive, slumped body made me wary of stepping in close to check.