Dead Men's s Boots

After a minute or so, I let go of her and took my tin whistle out of my pocket.

‘I’m going to play him some more music,’ I said.

That alarmed her all over again. She surfaced from the now slightly soggy depths of my lapels with a look of horror on her face. ‘Fix, if you send him away now—’

‘I didn’t send him away the first time,’ I said. ‘I just made him . . . drowsy. These are tunes I use on Rafi, so I’ve had plenty of time to get them down right. This time I won’t even send John to sleep: I just want to calm him a bit so you don’t have to go to bed in full body armour.

’

I waited for her to respond. Finally she gave me the merest hint of a nod, as though she didn’t trust herself to speak.

I played a tune that was vaguely based on Neko Case’s ‘Lady Pilot’, I think purely because of the line in that song about not being afraid to die. Often in these cases it doesn’t seem to matter all that much what the song is when it starts out: once I let it out into the open air it grows and changes, as though the vibrations of the music are some sort of insubstantial extension of my own nervous system.

It becomes something that I use to touch the world – the invisible world that seems to be idling next to our own right now at some inter-dimensional red light – and to operate on the things I see and feel there.

Opening my mind a little more this time, I met head-on the spirit that was waiting in the dark, and was struck by the sheer intensity of its rage: it was like scalding water, filling the room unseen and unfelt until now.

The strength of it – the strength of the will behind it – took me by surprise. None of the interactions I’d ever had with John had made me suspect that he could be capable of that kind of ferocity. Matching it high for high, low for low, I let the music fall into it like a calving iceberg and slowly, gradually, take away its power to hurt.

I lose track of time when I’m doing this stuff.

Or maybe it’s fairer to say that time becomes one of the dimensions of the music, and I can only perceive it as something that’s moving in my chest and under my fingers, flowing out into the pattern that I’m making. In any case, when I finally surfaced I found that Carla was asleep next to me.

The geist wasn’t asleep but it was quiescent: it wouldn’t be throwing any more beer bottles around for a w [aro2emhile.