Dead Men's s Boots

‘What are you going to do?’ she demanded.

‘What you asked me to do. Give him some peace.’

‘You won’t-?’

‘Exorcise him? Send him away for ever? No, Carla. I won’t. I promise. Wait in the car. It shouldn’t take longer than twenty minutes.’

She took one last look past me into the room, where an invisible entity was trailing some extension of itself through the broken glass on the carpet, making it bristle and shift. Then she nodded and backed out through the door, staring all the time, as if turning her back would have felt like a betrayal.

I keep it in a pocket I’d sewn into my coat myself, high up on the left-hand side. A paletot is handy like that – it’s so voluminous that you can carry a drawerful of cutlery, a samovar and a sub-machine gun around with you and it won’t even spoil the line. I generally just keep the whistle, a silver dagger, an antique goblet I’ve never yet had occh tr yet hasion to use and a bottle of whatever booze I’m currently flirting with.

I blew a random sequence of notes to tune it in – except that even then, even on this first approach, it wasn’t quite random. There was an element of echolocation in it: of throwing out sounds to see how they’d come back to me again – to see which the ghost absorbed and which bounced off and rolled away into the ether. These are just metaphors, you understand: but everything I do is a kind of metaphor. You choose the tools that work, or maybe they choose you.

"And sometimes it comes hard and slow, sometimes quick and easy. This ghost was so big, so angry that the sense of it filled the room: notes ran from my gut up into my chest and lungs, through the bore of the whistle past my flickering fingers and out into the air without me even needing to think about it. They built like a wave, and broke like a wave, and the thing that had been John Gittings met them in full flood.

For a handful of moments the force of that meeting threw me out: I faltered in the middle of a phrase, pieced it out awkward and staccato, then found the flow again and began the laborious crescendo for a second time.

This was the binding: the systolic beat, usually and inexorably followed by the diastole, which is the banishing. But not this time. By this point in my life I’d had plenty of experience of a different kind of tune, with a different, more insidious purpose.