Thicker Than Water

All I want you to do is to weave stay-nots around me so it can’t tear my soul into confetti while I’m working.’

The woman nodded but Caryl with a ‘y’ didn’t look too happy. ‘What if it turns on us?’ he asked.

‘It won’t,’ I promised. ‘Once I start playing, it’ll only have eyes for me. Okay, get your kit out and get ready.’

I watched them with half an eye as I went over in my mind the tune Asmodeus had given me, like a tailor poring over a swatch of cloth before starting to cut. It had to be good quality, and it had to be all of a piece.

If there was a dropped stitch somewhere, we were all going to die in this room, probably with most of our insides on the outside.

Star of Renewed Being’s method of performing an exorcism seemed to rely on jacks - the children’s game in which you throw knuckle-bones up in the air and catch them again in more and more complicated ways. Of course, most kids these days use little plastic nubbins with six rounded points, whose resemblance to knuckle-bones is purely accidental.

The old lady had the real thing: ten of them, well worn and shiny, off-white with brown flecks like the colour of clotted cream that’s been allowed to grow a proper crust.

The boy had a book, and I assumed for a moment that he’d learned his craft from Gwillam - that this would be another bloody Bible-reading. But the pages of the book were blank, and he took a stick of charcoal from his trouser pocket, choosing a page and smoothing it flat with nervous fingers.

There was no point prolonging the agony. This would either work or it wouldn’t. I started in to play, with none of my usual exploratory tuning-up because the tune was present in my head already, a finished thing. It started high and fast but plummeted precipitately into a doleful decelerando: abandon hope, all ye who riff on this one.

Nothing much seemed to happen at first. Because I was playing quite low, I was able to hear from outside the sounds - shouted order, shouted response, boots in lockstep - of serious men moving into position.

The riot squad were here, and incredibly things were about to get even uglier than they already were.

But we had our window, and within it we made music. I did, anyway: the old woman threw bones and the boy sketched obsessive angularÃses""ju lines, turning the paper into a fractal landscape.

The air thickened and roiled. Something huge and diffuse turned its attention towards us.