Dead Men's s Boots

Both were alarming signs, because for all her scary sexiness Juliet wears human flesh at a jaunty angle. She’s not human, so a human body is only ever a disguise for her, or a craftily designed lure like an anglerfish’s light. She doesn’t have to breathe or sweat if she doesn’t want to. There are, of course, times when she wants to do both – but this seemed to be involuntary.

A little while later, when I looked at her again out of the corner of my eye, trying not to make a big deal out of it, she’d either fallen asleep or passed out.

At any rate, she’d slumped over sideways in her seat, her head sliding over until it almost rested against my shoulder. Then as I watched it tilted the rest of the way, smoothly and inexorably.

She didn’t respond when I whispered her name, and her sharp, sweet scent – the smell that more than anything else defined her in my mind – was gone. She smelled of nothing except a faint, inorganic sourness: an almost chemical odour.

What was going on here? I turned over some possibilities in my mind.

Maybe it was because demons were chthonic powers, linked in some way to the earth itself – as though, in addition to the biosphere everyone knows about, there’s another meta-biosphere which includes the fauna of Hell. Maybe demons were like the children of Gaea in Greek mythology, who were invincible as long as they were standing on terra firma, but weak as kittens if you could manage to lever their feet off the ground.

Or maybe this was something completely different: an anti-demonic casting that we were flying into, like the wards and stay-nots that people put up over their doors to stop the dead from crossing the threshold.

Maybe the whole of the USA had wards on it, and they were already operating even this far out and this far up.

Either way, there might be something I could do about it. I started to whistle under my breath, so faintly that it was barely voiced and wouldn’t carry beyond the row of seats we were in. The tune was Juliet: the sequence of notes and cadences that represented her in my mind.

No summoning, no binding, and certainly no banishing – just the bare description. Perhaps it might work as a kind of anti-exorcism: give her immune system a little boost and help her to fight back against whatever was happening to her.

She slept through the whole flight. When the stewardess came round with our meals, I ate one-handed so as not to disturb Juliet. It was an odd and unsettling experience.