Dead Men's s Boots

Don’t leave me, Les. I’m so scared.’

And now for the first time I heard him answer her.

‘I’m going, Mimi. I’ve made up my mind. And you can’t keep a hold on this body any more, not without me and the others to help you. Come now, with me, or come later, on your own. That’s the only choice you’ve got.’

Another long silence.

Covington appeared in the doorway. ‘We need you,’ he said.

At any other time I might have baulked at the thought of playing two souls at the same time: but I’d just played two hundred and come out of it with my mind intact, so this didn’t feel too hard.

And Covington didn’t want a full exorcism: just an unbinding. Just something that would lift them both out of their flesh and leave them free to move.

Embarrassingly, though, it was a while before the music would come. I’d flogged my talent pretty hard that night, and the sense of dissociation still hung around me like the wooziness after anaesthesia. Covington had untied Kale’s arms and upper body and they sat together on the bed, his arms protectively around her – or rather Doug’s – shoulders.

She clung to him so hard that I could see the whitening of her knuckles. The two of them stared at me wordlessly, like already condemned prisoners waiting to hear the outcome of some last appeal.

At last I ventured a note, and I knew when I heard it that it wasn’t right. I held it anyway, and then modulated down the scale until I locked into something that felt like it was alive and moving.

I let it find its own way out through the bore, almost unstopped, using bótopwn reath control alone to shape it. It wasn’t a tune: it was an incoherent wail pretending to be music.

Covington kissed Myriam Kale on Doug Hunter’s forehead, whispered something that I couldn’t hear over the sound of the whistle, and then slid sideways off the bed. Kale lasted a few moments longer before slumping back onto the pillow, her eyes glazing over before they closed.

Covington’s ghost was just a smudgy blur hovering over his body: maybe that was a side effect of the protective camouflage that the risen dead of Mount Grace had used in the days of their ascendancy – or maybe it was just a side effect of being so damn old, and having slid and elided his way through so many different flesh-houses over the last hundred years.

Maybe he’d just distilled down into this minimal place-holder for a human shape.

But Kale was magnificent.