Thicker Than Water

She knows from past experience that when I’m putting a tune together for the first time - using the music as sonar to zero in on a dead or undead presence that I haven’t got a proper fix on yet - the two things that are most likely to screw me up are strong emotions and external sounds.

I turned to look at Bic. He had carried on twitching and muttering all through our conversation, his eyes wide and unseeing. Lost in his own little world, Jean had said, describing what her son was like when he was reading superhero comics.

Well, he was now, that was for damned sure. And wherever that world was, it was a long way from South London.

Sitting on the arm of the sofa, I closed my eyes and fitted the whistle to my lips. I blew a few exploratory notes, drawing them out long and slow, not even trying to fit them together into a phrase. They faded from the air but remained in my mind and on my inner ear: something to build on. The next notes had a suggestion of melody to them, although it was a melody that kept changing its mind, rising and then falling, approaching a resolution and then shying away from it, breaking into discord and then finding the key again when you thought it was out of reach.

Gently and painstakingly, I assembled braided ropes of sound and sent them out into the room. And as they grew in complexity, my sense of the room itself faded. I drifted in an undefined un-place, drawn along in the wake of my expelled breath like a sailboat making its own headwind.

Two presences hung off to the right of me, one small and bright, the other huge and sprawling and dark: the boy’s soul and its k soprepassenger.

But bright and dark were metaphors in this case, because I wasn’t seeing them with my eyes: it was more like how a bat sees a moth, through the shapes made by the distorted echoes of its own shrill cries.

I tried to stifle the surge of triumph that I’d found the thing so soon, because finding it wasn’t the same as driving it out. But it seemed like a good omen, all the same, and I couldn’t resist the urge to push it a little further.

I played an atonal sequence that approximated to a stay-not: a crude command to the dark thing to piss off out of here before things got rough. The notes rolled straight forward from my mind like the bow wave of my will and consciousness. They touched the edges of the dark thing.

It backed away from me, in some direction that wasn’t up or down or left or right or anything else I could find a name for.