Dead Men's s Boots

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.

But what was the worst-case scenario? That the tough old soul had been cast out but had had the strength to resist utter dissolution. That it knew where it was going and had the strength to get there.

Sure, the thing inside John Gittings had needed to be taken to Mount Grace and burned there again – but then, John’s house had more wards and fendings on it than Pentonville had bars. They were designed to keep the dead out, but they cut both ways: that was why the mad, desperate ghost had gone geist. But here at Todd’s offices, as I’d noticed when I first came in, there wasn’t anything to keep the evil dead from coming and going as they pleased.