I could feel my alertness start to fade away. It had, after all, been a damn rough day. (Or two? Or three?) The music of the dead had a somnolent effect, drawing me downward toward unconscious realms, whether I liked it or not. I had no will any longer to resist as a deep languor spread across my limbs.

“I have it!” Sully announced abruptly. By now she had traded places and was grooming Moulder, a process I chose not to watch too closely. Still I managed to turn and regard her eyes, which seemed to shine at me with genuine pleasure.

“Have what?” Moulder asked, clearly concerned and trying to squirm around to see what she had found in his scalp.

“I mean I’ve got an idea. I know where we can take our guest in the morning, if the weather’s nice. We’ll guide him to town and introduce him to Professor Ping!”

Moulder sat up suddenly. Too suddenly, leaving a patch of hairy scalp in Sully’s hand, which she quickly hid from view.

“Of course!” he cried. “Ping is the thing. You’ll see, stranger. He’ll get you straightened out in no time.”

“And if he doesn’t, perish the thought,” Moulder added with a leer. “Or if the guards or viggies or Nomorts get you first… well, no harm in trying. You’ll just wind up right back here in Necropolis, and we can show you how to fit right into the rot race.”

I suppose I thanked them. I guess I must have made all the right, polite sounds. But I was so exhausted, I had no strength to ask any further questions.

Sometimes students, in your travels, there will come occasions when you simply have to hope for the best and put your fate in the hands of strangers.

I had never been in stranger hands than I was that night. Still the rule held. Anyway, what choice had I, except to I trust my instinctive feeling that these two would protect me until dawn? I drifted off, lying upwind of my two deceased friends under a marble mausoleum canopy.

As minutes elongated, the crooning from the hillside zombie-gathering seemed to come together with compelling urgency and a kind of unexpectedly weird beauty, blending into the equally unalive, yet animate, singing of the wind.

I recall at the time thinking vaguely about a certain radio station – one still using binaural, no-pix format – that I used to listen to as a boy. The net-jockies on that channel always bragged that they played only contemporary tunes, never classical, or oldies, or cro-rock, or warp zither… Just the latest stuff.

“No music by dead guys.” That was their motto.

But here I was, listening to a veritable song of the perished. A melody with spirit, with soul. And it was the very latest thing.

The rhythms were unique.

The harmonies, splendid.

Decomposers were sublime.

5.