Dead Men's s Boots

‘What’s the point of this?’ Moloch demanded.

‘Shut up,’ I said, trying to think my way through the sequence that had just tripped me.

Again, from the top, and faster now because the sense was growing inside me again: the sense that was my knack, my stock-in-trade, and that had started to kick in back at the National Gallery café when Pomfret was playing the cruet set for all he was worth. My fingers were finding the right stops now, almost without being told to, and the atonal skirl leaked out into the air like toxic waste.

Todd winced, which was encouraging. I had to hope it didn’t just mean he was a music lover.

I skated up to the crux again, started to kick with one heel and then with both. The wailing voice of the whistle and the hollow thudding rhythm clashed and fought. Moloch shook his head and scowled, but Todd was starting to look a little afraid.

‘CastoÓm"">g rr . . . ‘ he whispered. I couldn’t hear the next word under the music, but I saw his lips move and read it there. Another chord change brought a flicker of real pain, making him screw his eyes tight shut.

John’s evil medicine was working. A symphony for drums, played blind and fumbling on a tin whistle. But if it works, don’t knock it.

‘Castor!’ Todd said again, louder. There was a catch in his voice, and his eyes rolled. I carried on playing: deep in the logic of the scribbled score, it would have been almost impossible to stop. I’d given him a choice, but now there were no choices left. A single phrase from the David Bowie song ‘Sound and Vision’ formed in the music and then dissolved, a surprise visitor from another dimension.

Flying on autopilot, I was more surprised to see it there than anyone.

The music rushed to its climax, the backbeat limping along behind in a slow-quick-slow. Todd was yelling, tears coursing down his cheeks. ‘Ash! It’s the ash! The ash of our bodies! The ash is our physical focus and we feed it to the people we want to take. Then we all invade them together, subdue them together, and a single spirit stays inside.

Please, Castor! That’s the truth. Inscription stops the host soul from reasserting itself. It’s still there but it’s too weak to fight us. We reinscribe once a month, to make sure- Don’t! Don’t!’

He carried on babbling, but the words were lost to me now in the drumming of my own blood. Drumming. Yes. This symphony needed percussion – demanded it. I jumped down off the desk and started stamping on the floor with my left foot.