Roaring drunk and carrying salt and iron in the pockets of my cothamore inside-out. No dice. He’ll come again.The soul of the man murdered walks the earth on Samhain when the faerie mounds vomit their wards. I haunt the pubs, a guiser with a mask of bonhomie, but to no effect. He will find me.

You can kill a man every which way. That’s the trouble. You think there’ll be some shade feigning Ellen Terry and holding out a crown and dagger dripping, but murther usually sneaks up on you in this world and haunts you from the next. Did I do that? Is a pillow over a face, sleeping, less a murder than a stick-em-up roscoe to the temple? Are there degrees to it? I don’t think so. I never laid a finger on, but that’s the point. If you put your hand in your pocket when a man reaches for it in familiarity he’s done for. He died alone, but no rutabaga will ward him off me now.

You can starve a man out and say that he died of inanition and who’s fault’s that? I moved his stone in the Samhain ring without touching it. The smoke off the bones from a stranger’s fire could not save him. It had to be me. I offered a cold shoulder and a deaf ear to him and he went away, and now he walks at my elbow like an usher.