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I was uncomfortably aware that he’d asked me for a promise: I didn’t want to say anything to this creature that he might be able to hold me to later.

‘By the mother-lode,’ I said carefully, ‘you mean Mount Grace?’

‘Of course.’

‘In that case, two further questions. Why do I need you? And why do you need me?’

Moloch’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘I’ve explained my position,’ he said, the ragged edges in his voice grinding against each other. ‘And so you’re only asking these questions because you want to hold me at arm’s length a little longer.

There are two hundred souls behind the crematorium’s walls. Souls that have learned the trick of invading living flesh. Could you exorcise them all, before they took you down? I doubt it. They’d take you and possess you, and you’d be no more than one more suit for them to wear. You need someone like me: someone who sits above them in the same food chain. Someone who was born and bred to prey on them.’

I mulled that over, couldn’t see any holes in it. But I didn’t get to be as old as I am without reading the small print before signing.

RÃe sem""16;There were two parts to the question,’ I reminded him, my tone level and my face poker.

The demon acknowledged the point with a curt nod. ‘Yes. Of course. I need you, Felix, to make me an entry point. With your whistle, with your lovely little party trick, you can make a hole in their defences: bind them, and distract them, and make them stumble. They’ve held me at bay for more years than I care to count: there are a great many of them, as I said, and they’re both old and strong.

They’ve found ways to keep me from crossing that threshold, though I’ve tried a thousand times. Outside the crematorium they move in flesh, and in flesh I can’t touch them. But pipe me in through the door and you’ll see the carnage a fox makes in a hen house.

Silence fell once more: the burning eyes held me in place while Moloch waited for my binding word.

‘It all sounds great,’ I said, tearing my own gaze away from his with an effort.

The effort was largely wasted, though: magnetically, my head swivelled back around until the searchlight of his stare shone full on me again. It was like Juliet’s hypnotic fascination, but with no overlay of desire: it was naked coercion, the veils of seduction all stripped away. ‘But my music works on one ghost at a time. What you’re asking me to do – it can’t be done. I can’t play two hundred tunes all at once. You said as much yourself.

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