Dead Men's s Boots — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

The wailing voice of the whistle and the hollow thudding rhythm clashed and fought. Moloch shook his head and scowled, but Todd was starting to look a little afraid.

‘CastoÓm"">g rr . . . ‘ he whispered. I couldn’t hear the next word under the music, but I saw his lips move and read it there. Another chord change brought a flicker of real pain, making him screw his eyes tight shut. John’s evil medicine was working. A symphony for drums, played blind and fumbling on a tin whistle. But if it works, don’t knock it.

‘Castor!’ Todd said again, louder. There was a catch in his voice, and his eyes rolled. I carried on playing: deep in the logic of the scribbled score, it would have been almost impossible to stop. I’d given him a choice, but now there were no choices left. A single phrase from the David Bowie song ‘Sound and Vision’ formed in the music and then dissolved, a surprise visitor from another dimension. Flying on autopilot, I was more surprised to see it there than anyone.

The music rushed to its climax, the backbeat limping along behind in a slow-quick-slow. Todd was yelling, tears coursing down his cheeks. ‘Ash! It’s the ash! The ash of our bodies! The ash is our physical focus and we feed it to the people we want to take. Then we all invade them together, subdue them together, and a single spirit stays inside. Please, Castor! That’s the truth. Inscription stops the host soul from reasserting itself. It’s still there but it’s too weak to fight us. We reinscribe once a month, to make sure- Don’t! Don’t!’

He carried on babbling, but the words were lost to me now in the drumming of my own blood. Drumming. Yes. This symphony needed percussion – demanded it. I jumped down off the desk and started stamping on the floor with my left foot. 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. But no, I didn’t eat it. You told me not to. I let it leave unmolested.’

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. The host is tricked or forced into eating the ash. Then all the souls in this – cabal – invade the intended host at once, subduing his soul so that one of their number can possess his body.’

‘I caught that much,’ I said. ‘I thought there was more.’

Moloch nodded. ‘He said they tried to do this to you, when you went to Mount Grace to burn John Gittings. Todd gave you a drink of brandy from a hip flask. The ash was dispersed in the liquor. But the succubus came before they could complete the possession, and they had to stop.