Free Dead Men's Boots by Mike Carey

nowhere to be seen.
    I stepped back out onto the street. It was about five o’clock, and although there was still some light from the low, loitering
     sun, a roiling rope of heavy gray cloud was in the process of swallowing it whole like a python gulping down a guinea pig.
    A scarecrow-thin old man crusted with the filth of years on the streets, dressed in a long, trailing outercoat so dirty and
     tattered you couldn’t guess what color or even what kind of garment it might once have been, came shambling along the pavement
     toward me. I stepped aside automatically, but he zigged at the same time and walked right into me. His mad mud-brown eyes
     stared into mine.
    “At the water hole,” he said, his voice a dry, throat-tearing rasp. “With the others there behind you. Pushing. Pushing. Nowhere
     to go.” He laughed out loud, delighted by some sudden revelation, and the stench of his breath hit me across the face like
     a solid slap.
    I winced and leaned away from the searing smell, but he was already walking on—singing now in the same harsh, agonized tone.
     “‘Oh, the devil stole the beat from the Lord, and it’s time we put things straight…’ ” I didn’t recognize the tune, but that
     ragged voice was shredding it pretty effectively.
    An involuntary shudder went through me, and with it came a nagging prickle somewhere at the edge of consciousness—the slight
     sensation of pressure that comes when I’m being looked at by one of the risen dead. I looked around. Nobody in sight except
     the decayed tramp, who was heading away from me and had his back turned, and a woman on the other side of the street, wheeling
     a baby in a stroller. Maybe recent events had put me on something of a hair trigger: I slipped my hand inside my coat to make
     sure that my whistle was there and forgot about it. Probably nothing, but if it was something, I was all tooled up.
    I headed north, aiming to grab a train at Finsbury Park. That gave me two choices—the immense dogleg of Stamford Hill and
     Seven Sisters Road, or the back cracks. I took the latter, turning off the main drag into a maze of terraced streets and narrow
     alleys. The sense of being watched—watched and followed—ebbed and flowed as I walked: It wasn’t something that had ever happened
     to me before, and it made me wonder if I was experiencing some kind of aftereffect from my contact with John Gittings’s ghost.
     All ghosts impinge on my death sense, but geists have an intense, indelible presence that you can’t just shake off afterward.
     Maybe it had been lurking in the background of my perceptual field ever since.
    I took another street, another back alley, tacking alternately north and west so that ultimately, I’d break out onto the Seven
     Sisters Road somewhere past the reservoir. Meanwhile, the darkness leaked down out of the sky to cover the earth, and the
     prickle at the back of my mind became an itch, then an itch with a sick heat in back of it like the raw tenderness of sunburn.
    I turned again, onto an alley that ran between the backyards of a row of terraces and a high blind wall that presumably had
     the reservoir on the other side of it. I took ten steps forward, then pivoted on my heel and waited, looking back the way
     I’d come. Now that I wasn’t moving anymore, I ought to have been able to hear the footsteps of anyone approaching the corner,
     but the silence was absolute.
    Before me was thick shadow, thick enough that if something dead or undead rounded the bend, I might lose the initiative because
     I couldn’t get a clear enough look to know what it was. Impatient, I took a few steps back toward the corner I’d just turned,
     and my foot came down on something that moved. A black shape streaked past me with a whuff of air that I felt even as I yelled
     and jumped aside. The squawl of protest reached me a moment later.
    Tomcat, big and fat, out on the pull.
    With a muttered curse, I ran to the corner, then around it and