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"Darkness fell like a curtain, but it was darkness shot through with light: a curtain flapping in a strong wind, allowing me to glimpse through its folds a silver, saturated light like the luminosity of a coming storm. Everything was working beautifully: Star of Renewed Being and Caryl with a ‘y’ had my back, and the demon couldn’t drag me down into its black-on-black Hell the way it had at the Royal London. It could only bring a piece of that Hell along with it as it came into the room; as it coalesced around us like gritty shadows, angry and confused.

Got you now, you bastard. Your turf, but my rules. Now let’s put you on the griddle and see what colour your juices run.

I shifted my fingers on the stops and pushed the tune into a higher gear, raising the volume because the volume was the delivery system for the pain: and the demon was hurting now. Its rush on me had got it nowhere, because charcoal and knuckle-bones encompassed me like the arms of the Lord.

Now it tried to withdraw, but it was too late for that. It was in a barbed-wire entanglement of music, a thicket of thorns like the devil’s briar patch. Unable to advance, unable to retreat, it thrashed and gored itself on the tune.

And I saw it.

Only for a moment, but I saw it. It stared at me through the shredded layers of its own protective darkness, as it had stared at me in the lightless abyss when I had met it by Kenny’s hospital bed. Not that our eyes met, exactly: in this synaesthetic maelstrom, seeing and hearing were metaphors for something else.

Say, I knew it.

It was just one synapse closing in my mind: making the last link in a chain of connections that I’d probably assembled subconsciously but not allowed myself to see until now.

A door opening, Asmodeus had said. An eggshell breaking across. Call it metamorphosis. Call it transformation.

Juliet, reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar: the little caterpillar pushed his nose out of the cocoon, and looked around in wonder .

. .

Kenny’s ghost, wailing, ‘He’s too big now, and he made me—’

One note, one beat, one breath away from the mercy stroke, and I knew the demonic presence for what it was. Knew, what’s more, Asmodeus’s treachery and the depth of his hatred for me. How perfectly he’d set me up and how many layers of perverse sadism his little plan had wrapped up in it.

The whistle fell from my hands.