Dead Men's s Boots

I was still playing, and by now the music had taken on its own momentum, just as it had in Todd’s office. It was playing itself through me, so it felt like all I had to do was to keep the whistle at my lips and let myself be a conduit for it. Otherwise the build-up of pressure would probably burst my brain like a big, over-filled water balloon.

I crossed the drive and ascended the steps, my feet thumping arrhythmically on the ground to create the complex, out-of-phase backbeat the music needed to do its stuff.

I was aware of resistance now, but it wasn’t coming in the form I’d expected. I thought the evil dead would try to possess me: and that I’d feel the same dizziness and weakness I’d experienced on the day of John’s cremation. But it wasn’t like that at all: not at first. It began as a sense of drag, as though I was up to my thighs in cold water and had to push myself forward through it, my steps slowing involuntarily.

Moloch turned as I joined him, squared his shoulders and kicked the doors wide open, then strode across the threshold without looking back.

Two more guards were waiting just inside and they shot him in the chest and head. He picked up one of the two – left hand on his throat, right gripping his crotch – and swung him in a tight semicircle so that his skull met the other man’s with appalling, unstoppable force. It was a single movement – a single missed beat – and then he was walking on, leaving the bodies slumped together under the angel of Saint Matthew, whose robes were stained with their blood and brains.

I followed along behind, but even though we were out of the wind the going was getting harder. The feeling of resistance was growing now that we were inside the building: the cold water was up above my waist and it was congealing into ice, counteracting the fever heat that Juliet had gifted me with. I became aware, without knowing exactly when it had started, of a noise almost beyond the limits of hearing: an atonal skirl that was picking at the stitches of my skein of music, undoing the spell I was trying to weave by infinitesimal increments.

The last time I’d walked down this hall it had seemed barely twenty paces long. It seemed a lot longer now, and every step added to the distance rather than taking away from it. One. Two. Three. Perspective bowed and buckled: space surrendered, haemorrhaged.