Dead Men's s Boots

It turned into a clumsy dance. I was staggering around like a drunk, the sounds rising through me and making me move whichever way they needed me to move. Downstairs I’d played for my life, cold and focused, pulling every note out of my mind and out of the darkness by will alone. What was welling up inside me now was different, and will had very little part to play in it. The closing notes seemed almost to tear the back of my throat, and when they faded I found that I was down on my knees on the floor beside Todd’s chair.

Groggily, I straightened and stood. I stared down at the lawyer in his hemp cocoon. His head lolled at an angle, his glazed eyes staring at nothing. A string of spittle trailed from the corner of his mouth onto the collar of his shirt. I thought he was dead, but I realised after a few moments that his tongue was moving inside his mouth. He was trying to form words.

I bent down, put my ear to his mouth and listened. Nothing intelligible, although there was a faint rise and fall of sound like the half-heard voices in between radio stations that you can never focus into audibility.

‘You drove the possessing spirit out,’ Moloch said, at my elbow.

‘Yeah, I did,’ I said, the words hurting my tender throat. ‘And look – someone else is still home.’

‘The original owner of this flesh,’ Moloch confirmed. ‘He seems . . . disorientated.’

‘He seems pretty much catatonic,’ I muttered, looking away. ‘Did you catch Todd on the wing?’

‘This is Todd. The soul that animates this meat now. What fled is not Todd but someone else, who lived in his body and stole his name.

I nodded. I had to sit down: that performance had left me feeling as hollow as a cored piece of fruit. A dull ache was starting inside my head. I stumbled across to a vacant chair and Ócan thsank into it. My breath was coming as rough and ragged as if I’d just swum the Channel, and panic was settling on my mind like a physical weight.

The thing that had been Todd looked past me with its eyes focused on nothing very much.

‘What did he say?’ I asked the demon. ‘He was shouting, towards the end, but I couldn’t stop to listen or I would have lost the tune. Lost the sense of it.’

Moloch summarised with crisp precision, turning away from the shell of Maynard Todd as though it held no further interest for him. ‘That they use the ash of their cremation as a physical vessel for the possession of new host bodies.