He looks into my eyes and I see emptiness there. This could be a good sign too! It could mean that he is ready to give up on everything in order to gain everything. But maybe he is just bored with my face. Maybe I should change it again, perhaps I would be more successful that way.

‘You don’t have much time left,’ I tell him ominously. ‘The Four are standing at the gate.’

Csaba spits on the floor.

‘Tell them to go fuck themselves too!’ he says, then takes a deep drag from the disgusting cigarillo. When he looks at me again, I’m no longer visible to his eyes. He doesn’t think I can see him when he cries, but I do. I’m always by his side when he gets emotional.

I gave him his first heavy metal tape. We could say that it’s all been my fault. It was a cassette copy of a record smuggled in from the West, Judas Priest’s Killing Machine album. Later I got him some more. I always hid them among his father’s tapes: the first Accept album, the first two records from Black Sabbath, Overkill by Motörhead. I sat there by his side as he listened to them. I heard every song through his ears. Although ‘Hell Bent for Leather’ and ‘Stay Clean’ don’t measure up to a Bach fugue or a Rachmaninoff concerto, I could still appreciate their harsh energy. I felt Csaba’s heart quicken at the rhythm of the drums as he tried to follow the riffs with his fingers. I thought I was being clever. But it only gave him an attitude.

I often think that I should have gotten him books instead of the tapes; words might have made his mission clearer to him. But unfortunately he was born at the wrong time, in the wrong place, enclosed in the cage of the Hungarian language and without the desire to learn another; how could I have arranged for him to get hold of any of the books even of that swindler Crowley? Not to mention the original edition of Unaussprechlichen Kulten? No book written by human hands could express precisely what Csaba’s role in the world was, but at least they would have created a common language between us. I would have had something to build on. But nothing is available in Hungarian, nothing that could spark his imagination. Reading is despised around these parts anyway.

So music was the only thing left. Music is universal, and yet what a bad influence it has on people.

Later he got some tapes of his own, smuggled in from Vienna: Iron Maiden, Venom, Slayer, Dio, Tankard. He listened to everything with fanatical respect. He was given his first guitar at the age of thirteen, along with a tiny amplifier. He was stubborn even back then, too stubborn for his own good. He could have easily saved himself had he accepted my offer back at that time. But it’s kind of my fault too that he didn’t.