The Devil You Know

And it made Scrub let out a startled grunt of protest, like a stuck pig. He cast his head about, triangulating on the sound. Obviously it was coming from behind us—from the empty planking thirty feet or so away, back in the shadows between the Mercedes and her nearest neighbor.

The sound rose in pitch again, and Scrub screamed in pain and rage. He took his foot off my chest, probably just in time to stop my whole rib cage from caving in, and ran back toward the harbor entrance. That meant he was running toward the weird music, which seemed to be as hard for him to do as swimming against a riptide. His headlong pace slowed; he staggered and seemed for a second to be about to fall sideways into the water. Then he saw something on the ground ahead of him and forced himself to take a few steps more, toward it.

I sat up, sucking in an agonizing breath around ribs that seemed to have been reduced to needle-sharp splinters. I watched Scrub try to bend and pick up the thing he’d seen on the floor and fall down instead. I saw him scrabble at the boards and come up holding the Walkman in his huge hand. He stared at it as if he was having trouble making his eyes focus. Then he bellowed like an ox and threw the thing from him. It shattered against the side of the Baroness Thatcher before falling into the waters of the marina, its harsh voice silenced midnote.

Loup-garous are different from regular ghosts—harder or easier, depending on what it is you’re trying to do. On the one hand, the invading spirit has burrowed its way deep into flesh and then resculpted the flesh around itself like a cocoon; so doing a full exorcism can be a bastard. But (and it’s a big but) the flip side of that is that the flesh remembers its original shape. The line of least resistance is to make host and parasite fall out with one another—to set up an interference, so that the borrowed flesh reverts to what it was before the ghost came in and redecorated.

I’d been half convinced that the afternoon I’d spent in Pen’s kitchen, teasing out that tune and getting it down on the Walkman, would be so much wasted time. But I knew I could never take Scrub one-on-one, no matter how many low blows I threw. So if I ever did come up against him, I’d need to have an even more unfair advantage.

The big man lurched to his feet again, but it took him a Herculean effort. His head snapped around, and he looked at me across ten meters of planking with a glare of insane, incendiary hatred.

“Castor,” he growled. “I’ll kill you for this. That’s a promise. When I—”

He stiffened, and a tremor ran through his body like a wave through water. He stared at his arms and groaned. They were writhing, not like limbs but like snakes, like puppy dogs in a sack. He tried to take a step toward me, managed, started work on another. That was as far as he got.

“When I come—back—” Scrub was having to force the words out, his voice bubbling and fluting. He began to melt from the legs up, and he shrank in on himself spectacularly. But he wasn’t melting; that was just the way it looked from where I was sitting on the walkway. What was actually happening was a whole lot more disgusting.

He turned into rats. The whole of that big, solid frame dissolved and separated, tore itself asunder, and a wave of brown, furry bodies struggled out of the folds of his greasy suit to sweep off along the walkway in a filthy tide, heading away from the water. If Scrub’s consciousness had still been animating them and welding them together, they could have eaten me alive, but Scrub—the mind and personality that used that name—was a ghost. When the music punched him out of the flesh that he’d wrapped around himself, the individual little rat minds all kicked back in and took up their own agendas again.

I thought back to the time when I’d unlocked the door of my room and found Scrub sitting on the bed. Now I knew how he’d managed to get in through that barely open window. I gave a reflexive shudder at the thought. When he’d threatened to kill me, it wasn’t just farting in the wind. I hadn’t exorcised him, just broken his concentration and stolen his body out from under him. He could find another body, given time—could and probably would. Loup-garous are like weeds in that way; you think you’ve got rid of them, but they pop up again when you least expect it, kill off your prize geraniums, eat your dog, and crush your skull like an eggshell.

But that was a thought to linger on during some warm summer evening yet to come. Right now I had other things to think about. Picking myself up off the planking, I retraced my steps along the walkway and retrieved the rest of my stuff: the lock picks, the bolt cutters, the cone-bore flute, the whole dodgy tool kit. Then I put my shoes back on, boarded the Mercedes again, and made a beeline for the cabin door.