Dead Men's s Boots

I was six years old – just. And when my dead sister Katie came back from the grave and visited me after midnight in the bedroom we used to share back when she was alive, I sent her packing by singing the stupid taunts that kids use to make each other cry in the playground. I did it because it worked, found out much later why it worked, or rather how, and like many people I’ve met since turned a strange knack into an even stranger career.

The more I did it, the easier it got. I found that I had a sort of additional sense, more like hearing than anything else.

When I was close to a ghost for long enough, I got a feeling for it – a feeling which translated readily into sound and usually into a tune, into music. When I played the tune on my whistle, the ghost would get tangled up in the sound: and when I stopped playing, the ghost would fade away on the last note like breath on a mirror. None of them ever came back, after that. Bizarre and inexplicable as it was, what I did to them was permanent.

But what seems stranger, now, as I look back on that time in my life, is that I did it all without ever once asking where the ghosts went when I played to them. Where did I send them to? Where did I send Katie to? Eternal reward, the world-soul, or just oblivion? Answers on a postcard: except that the undiscovered country has no postal service."

"It took a lot to shake me out of that complacent tree. I was an exorcist for well over ten years, and in that time I must have played a thousand tunes.

The world changed around me as the dead started to return in greater and greater numbers. They made the first tentative steps towards creating their own infrastructure – zombies in particular have some very specialised needs – and predictably the living responded by dividing into antagonistic camps, the Breath of Life movement calling for a recognition of dead rights, while groups like the Catholic Anathemata preached the imminent apocalypse and started stockpiling weapons for it. Meanwhile people in the ghost-busting trade started to talk about encountering other kinds of creatures that had never been either human or, strictly speaking, alive: creatures that seemed to fit the mugshots of the demons described in medieval grimoires. I even met a few myself – encounters that I still relive in dreams, and probably always will.