I put the whistle to my lips, tried to find the sense: I took one deep breath, held it for a second, then another second, until the seconds became beats and the music invited me in.
Open with a hot trill like manic birdsong: but the bird’s a dive-bomber, and it crashes down hard through the scale to level out a full octave lower in a welter of hard, pugnacious chords. Bail out into C and hold it for a full four beats before dropping even further. It was all guesswork – and I was trying to cover both parts of John’s wacky notation, playing two voices on the same instrument. Todd looked at me with blank puzzlement, but beyond that he didn’t respond.
Change the key, change the time, start again. Still no reaction from Todd. When I got to the hard part, where Luke Pomfret had told me a third drummer was meant to come in, I started to tap my heel against the wood of the desk in crude counterpoint to the music. It was hard not to tap on the beat, but John’s music was quite clear that the new voice should be at odds with the rest of the rhythm. I kept it up until the weird lack of synchronisation made me stumble, lose my sense of direction and stop dead in the middle of a bar.
‘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.
‘Castor . . .’ 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. It turned into a clumsy dance. I was staggering around like a drunk, the sounds rising through me and making me move whichever way they needed me to move. Downstairs I’d played for my life, cold and focused, pulling every note out of my mind and out of the darkness by will alone. What was welling up inside me now was different, and will had very little part to play in it. The closing notes seemed almost to tear the back of my throat, and when they faded I found that I was down on my knees on the floor beside Todd’s chair.
Groggily, I straightened and stood. I stared down at the lawyer in his hemp cocoon. His head lolled at an angle, his glazed eyes staring at nothing. A string of spittle trailed from the corner of his mouth onto the collar of his shirt. I thought he was dead, but I realised after a few moments that his tongue was moving inside his mouth. He was trying to form words.
I bent down, put my ear to his mouth and listened. Nothing intelligible, although there was a faint rise and fall of sound like the half-heard voices in between radio stations that you can never focus into audibility.
‘You drove the possessing spirit out,’ Moloch said, at my elbow.
‘Yeah, I did,’ I said, the words hurting my tender throat. ‘And look – someone else is still home.’
‘The original owner of this flesh,’ Moloch confirmed. ‘He seems . . . disorientated.’
‘He seems pretty much catatonic,’ I muttered, looking away. ‘Did you catch Todd on the wing?’
‘This is Todd. The soul that animates this meat now. What fled is not Todd but someone else, who lived in his body and stole his name. But no, I didn’t eat it. You told me not to. I let it leave unmolested.’
I nodded. I had to sit down: that performance had left me feeling as hollow as a cored piece of fruit. A dull ache was starting inside my head. I stumbled across to a vacant chair and sank into it. My breath was coming as rough and ragged as if I’d just swum the Channel, and panic was settling on my mind like a physical weight.
The thing that had been Todd looked past me with its eyes focused on nothing very much.
‘What did he say?’ I asked the demon. ‘He was shouting, towards the end, but I couldn’t stop to listen or I would have lost the tune. Lost the sense of it.’
Moloch summarised with crisp precision, turning away from the shell of Maynard Todd as though it held no further interest for him. ‘That they use the ash of their cremation as a physical vessel for the possession of new host bodies. The host is tricked or forced into eating the ash. Then all the souls in this – cabal – invade the intended host at once, subduing his soul so that one of their number can possess his body.’
‘I caught that much,’ I said. ‘I thought there was more.’
Moloch nodded. ‘He said they tried to do this to you, when you went to Mount Grace to burn John Gittings. Todd gave you a drink of brandy from a hip flask. The ash was dispersed in the liquor. But the succubus came before they could complete the possession, and they had to stop.’
I remembered the sudden, terrible sickness that had come over me as John’s casket rolled through the furnace doors. Not like me at all, and now I knew why. It wasn’t me at all.
‘He also said that the procedure – the possession – is only temporary. The soul of the possessed tries to reassert itself – tries to break free from their control. It gets stronger again over time, however hard they whip it into submission. They have to meet at Mount Grace once a month to repeat the ritual, for want of a better word, and reassert their control. They do this at the dark of the moon, and they call it—’
‘Inscription.’
‘Yes.’ He stared at me with a hungry intensity. ‘Castor, he answered your question, finally, when he was desperate and trying to make you spare him. But in any case you’d only have to look out of the window. The dark of the moon is tonight.’
‘I know.’
‘We have them. We can take them all.’
I nodded slowly. ‘Yeah.’
Maybe the feeling of foreboding I was experiencing was just paranoia. I’d just performed a full exorcism – or something that felt like one. The ghost that had flown out from this room should either have vanished into the ether or else it should be heading for Hell at a good cruising speed. That was where the smart money was lying.