“Witchcraft? You want to fight an enemy whose technology makes us look like chimpanzees with witchcraft?”
“It’s not witchcraft,” Zoe seethed through clenched teeth. “It’s a manual for guerrilla warfare.” Walter took off his glasses and rubbed his temples.
“It’s a book of spells written, apart from the title, in some sort of imaginary language. It once belonged to someone who burned witches, a deranged author, and a mass murderer. Its attraction is its inability to be understood. It allows the willful to project whatever meaning they want upon it. That’s its only power.” Zoe shook her head.
“The whole reason I came to see you is that I made a breakthrough with the translation. The symbols. They’re phonetic. It’s as much musical notation as it is text. It’s a songbook.” Walter shrugged.
“How is that supposed to help us against an enemy who can deactivate our weapons, pulverize our defenses, and disguise themselves as one of us?”
“It’s worked before. Magistrate Mathers? The one who supposedly burned the witches back in 1698?”
“Supposedly?” Walter sniffed. “It was well-documented in contemporary church and legal records.”
“He helped stop an advance party. Those he burned weren’t witches, but aliens.”
“That’s preposterous. By what means could he have possibly overcome them?” Zoe held up the book.
“So, what? You’re going to sing to the aliens and they’ll lay their weapons at your feet?”
“I was watching a poor quality video of a theremin player from the sixties that rendered her arm as a streak of light and I recognized shapes from the text. It shows how to play the spells.”
“But Magistrate Mathers didn’t have a theremin.”
“There are also dots which conform to ocarina notation.”
“So, like Nero playing his fiddle as Rome burned, you’re going to play your magic flute for the aliens as they rampage through the city?”
“It’ll work a lot better as a duet,” she said. “Come on. Let’s rehearse every song in the book.” They entered a music store and found some ocarinas that seemed capable of playing the notation, then they sat together in one of the store’s rehearsal rooms and learned the strangely lilting, somewhat whale-like, songs by heart.
They woke up on the floor of the rehearsal room to the ground shaking along with explosive sounds, shattering glass and falling masonry. They climbed up the fire escape to the roof where they could see the insectoid vehicles firing invisible beams of energy detectable only by the destruction they wreaked.
The first song was the song of unveiling. When they started playing it, some among the humans who scattered for cover like floodlit roaches dropped their skins to reveal their reptilian selves. Other songs turned their equipment on and off, bringing an end to the destruction. The final song put all of the aliens to sleep, Justice was meted out and reconstruction was achieved with the constructive use of the songbook and the equipment that it controlled. It lived up to its name entirely.
