How To Make Friends With Demons Part 3

"No, mate, I've got this job to finish."

"It can wait."

"No, it can't. I've already put you behind. I can't let you down William. I can't. Nor can I let down those boys and girls."

"Is it going to work out? The two copies, I mean. Six vols in total, isn't it?"

"It's not like it's twice the work. I'll have to finesse a few differences between the two. Spine and edges. Joints and stuff. But I'll 'ave it for you. Work through the night. And the next night."

Stinx made it sound easy but I knew he proceeded sheet by sheet. He was a master forger.

Originally an accomplished bookbinder, Stinx had been called to make restorative work on some old books that had suffered water damage after a cellar flood. He'd quickly grasped that between restoration and reproduction there are several grey areas. This work was child's play compared with some of the things he'd done in his colourful life.

"Want me to stay over? Do the coffee? Marmite on toast?"

"You sling your hook, mate. You got work in the morning."

He was already turning away from me, digging his hand under the back of his collar, surveying his workshop. I decided to leave him to it. But before I left I saw something skitter under a workshop bench. I thought I saw tiny black eyes watching me. I decided to say nothing to Stinx.

The door to his workshop faced one of those steel industrial cage elevators still working from the days when the building was a warehouse. He followed me out and opened the cage for me.

"Call me," I said, "if crystal meth comes knocking."

He pointed a gnarled, golden finger at me as the cage began to descend. "Be lucky, William."

Chapter 5.

I'm not sure what it was that I saw under the table in Stinx's workshop. People are extremely ignorant about demons and their nature. It is possible to walk into almost any bookshop and find some kind of encyclopaedia or A-to-Z of demons. How disappointing these publications are, for they generally turn out to be nothing more than lists of the names of G.o.ds of various cultures.

Beelzebub, for example, the G.o.d of the Philistine city of Ekron; or Asmodeus, the Persian G.o.d of wrath. These are only demonic in as much as the Judeo-Christian religions took them to be rivals.

These are not demons. These do not number in the one thousand five hundred and sixty-seven, as brilliantly catalogued by Goodridge. And anyway, if it's long lists of G.o.ds you want, you need go no further than the Hindu religion to stop you in your tracks. Diamond Jaz, who was at one time in his youth training for the Sikh priesthood, informed me that they are countless; and the last figure I was quoted was "in excess of three hundred and thirty million." Right. And of course, the person trying to count them is in the grip of that particular demon Goodridge characterized as the "demon of counting the ever-changing number."

I was thinking about this as I neared King's Cross. The light was already fading and a man in a long, filthy coat croaked at me from a doorway. I was thinking about the person working for some government agency whose job it was to count the homeless. I'd probably walked five or six yards past the shop doorway when I stopped and retraced my steps.

I looked hard at the wreck of a man in the doorway. His long hair was plastered to his face.

Tear tracks-I'm sure that's what they were-ran down his grimy face and into his beard. He seemed to be all in.

He blinked at me. "Ain't it terrible, I'm trying to get a cup of tea."

"Seamus, isn't it?" I said. "We met at Otto's place the other day. You were with Otto in the Gulf."

He looked away, to the side. "Don't keep going on about it."

I wasn't sure he was talking to me. "How are you, Seamus? You look a bit rough, if you don't mind me saying."

"Cup of tea would be the thing."

I could have easily given him a couple of quid and carried on walking. But we all know what a cup of tea means, so instead I asked him if he knew about GoPoint. He said he'd heard of it. I found a business card and scribbled the GoPoint address on the reverse, plus a brief note for Antonia, and pushed it into his hand. Seamus looked disappointed. Then on second thoughts I hailed a black cab and steered Seamus into it.

"Thanks," said the driver. "I wanted him in my cab."

"Shaddup. Here's a twenty. Make sure he finds the door to the place, will you?"

Then I took the Tube to the offices of NOYA in Victoria.

It was about eleven when I rolled up to work. It makes no difference what time I go in. For one thing I'm often there until seven in the evening or travelling for the organisation, and for another I'm the boss. In any case, Val, my long-term secretary, holds the fort from nine to five.

Val's a lovely girl. Old school. Immaculate filing cabinets and keeps a delicate tissue tucked inside her sleeve.

Very formal secretarial standards, too. Always opens the post for me and removes the envelopes unless marked "Personal and Confidential," which they never are. Except this morning, there it is on my desk with the other, opened mail: a white envelope.

"What's this?"

"You'll have to open it to find out, won't you?" Val often speaks to me as if I'm twelve years old. "Looks like an invitation to me."

Invitations come often enough-usually to some stiff formal reception or briefing hosted by a government agency and preceded by a pernicious gla.s.s of chardonnay or some filthy sherry.

Inside the envelope was a stiff white card. A small publis.h.i.+ng house called Winding Path was inviting me to the launch of a book by one Charles Fraser.

"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l!" I said aloud. "There's a name I haven't heard in a while."

The publicist had added a little note, telling me that Charles Fraser had acknowledged my contribution to the book and that they hoped to see me there.

What contribution? I thought.

Val laid a file on my desk and looked over my shoulder at the invite. "How exciting for you," she said, as if I'd been chosen to play for the junior school football team. "Is the author someone you know?"

It was at teacher-training college in Derby in the early 1980s, just after my interest in antiquarian books had hatched. I'd moved back into halls of residence for my final year and the college chaplain was interviewing all inmates of Friarsfield Lodge in turn. The Lodge, a shambling Edwardian white-walled mansion converted into single studies, accommodated twenty-two male students. Sometimes the place was a zoo, but mostly it was a dull, tranquil residence with bathrooms full of drying rugby s.h.i.+rts and drying rooms cluttered with football boots or potholing gear. It was approaching Christmas. Fraser I knew from my English cla.s.s, but I hadn't spent much time with him. We were being interviewed in our own rooms, and I saw from the posted schedule that I was to follow Fraser.

We'd had plenty of notice to get rid of any p.o.r.nography or pot-smoking paraphernalia before the chaplain's gentle knock on the door. He came in rubbing his hands, like a surgeon about to perform a routine appendectomy. He declined my offer of tea and sat himself in a chair by the gently hissing gas fire. I sat on my bed.

The college was originally established by the Church of England. Even though the government had stripped the church of its controlling powers, the church still took its ministry seriously, providing a chaplaincy and offering the usual ceremonies at the beginning and end of term. d.i.c.k Fellowes, a wiry and effusive character with sparkling eyes, was normally informal, but that day he was got up in his dog collar. For the record, he also sported a blonde goatee at a time when no-one else did, not even for a joke.

He was n.o.body's fool. He sat on the Students' Union committee, but because the students wanted him there. "So, have you seen it?"

"Yes."

"You've been up to see it?"

"Yes."

"Since this all broke out, or before?"

"I was with the porter when he opened it up."

"Oh yes. So you'd never seen it before the fuss?"

"You can't get in, normally. It's supposed to be locked."

All the time he was asking me these questions he was looking not at me but around my room. For clues. He keenly surveyed the posters on my wall. His eyes fell on an African carved-wood mask a girlfriend had given me because her mother found it spooky and didn't want it in the house. When he got out of his chair it was with the litheness of a jungle cat. He went over to my bookcase and started rubbing his hands again. He crouched down with his back to me. I know he checked out the spine of every single paperback on my shelf. There were certain things I'd removed along with the p.o.r.n and the pot; now I wondered if there were dust marks that would tip him off to the fact that, like the British Library, I had a secret or withheld collection. After he'd done with my books he started leafing through all my tapes.

He turned and flashed me a huge smile over his shoulder. "I know I'm here to talk about that thing upstairs, but I find people's music collections fascinating, don't you?"

Sure.

He waved one my tapes at me. "I adore this! Does things for your head!"

"They've got another alb.u.m just out," I said helpfully.

He stood up, evidently satisfied with my taste in Indie rock. He turned and twinkled his eyes at me. "Then I shall have to put it on my Christmas list. Shall we go up and take a look at the thing?"

He followed me out. I made sure the latch was down to lock the door and he expressed surprise. He wanted to know if I always locked my door. I pointed out that there had been one or two petty thefts recently. He said he wondered what the world was coming to when students couldn't trust each other any more.

d.i.c.k Fellowes led the way up the first two flights of stairs. I noticed that he wore very tight black trousers and black patent-leather shoes. There was something mincing and effeminate about the way he trailed his hand along the banister and swung round the post at the top of the stairs. I knew that he'd once nursed a student all night through a bad acid trip. Apparently he'd been good enough to sit with the ninny and rea.s.sure him until the effects had completely worn off. A rumour did the rounds that Fellowes had b.u.g.g.e.red the student before persuading him it was all part of his hallucinations. I fell on the minority side of believing this to be a malicious story.

I think that was when I first learned the glorious cost-free feeling of righteousness that comes with defending other people's reputations.

At the end of the corridor on the uppermost landing was a tiny set of steps curling up to an attic door. The attic was supposed to be available to us as storage s.p.a.ce when we had to clear our rooms between terms so that the college could rent the premises for conferences. But the attic was permanently locked and to get access you had to go and see the head porter, a doleful, pipe-smoking, pint-sized sack of misery with a cubbyhole office reeking of tobacco and nastiness, and guarded by a vicious one-eyed Alsatian. The porter's office was half a mile away. Never disposed to loan out the key, he insisted on a scheduled appointment during which he would with great ceremony drag out his huge bunch of keys and exercise his dog all the way from his office to the attic. Everyone spared themselves this theatricality by just not bothering, which was of course the porter's intention. Instead the drying room and the laundry room served for any essential storage.

This time Fellowes had the keys to the attic. The door was a bit stiff: he had to put his shoulder to it. When the door opened, it released a kind of sigh. Fellowes stepped in, pirouetting neatly to hold open the door for me. When I was inside he gently closed it behind me. I don't know why but I would have preferred the door open.

He crossed the gnarled old varnished floorboards and with his hands on his hips stood looking down at the markings on the floor. A pool of December sunlight was beamed onto the floor by a porthole-type gla.s.s window at the far end of the attic room, making the markings look fainter than they actually were. It was a good few seconds before he asked me, "Do you know what it is?"

"Of course. It's a pentagram."

"Pentacle," he corrected.

"What's the difference?"

He answered just as if I were enjoying the benefit of one of his college tutorials. "The circle around the five-pointed star is what makes it a pentacle," and here he looked up at me, "and not a pentagram."

"Devil wors.h.i.+p," I said.

"Is it?"

I must have coloured. "Well. That's what it looks like."

Inside the chalked circle was a five-pointed star, and surrounding the whole thing was a larger, concentric circle. At each of the five points was a candle stub and a small ceramic bowl containing maybe salt in one, some spice in another. Various symbols-possibly Hebrew-were chalked there, and between the concentric circles was a long Latin inscription.

"Someone seems to know their stuff," he said. "Or they are just pretending to."

"What does this Latin thing mean?"

"It's not important," he said. "Plus I'd rather not say it aloud. So, you didn't put it here?"

"Heck!"

"Is that a no?"

"Yes, it's a no."

I stooped to rub at the chalk on the floorboards. It wasn't the usual kind of stuff that dusts away easily.

"Chalk on the floor is just chalk on the floor," Fellowes said. "I'm a bit more disturbed by this fellow."

He turned to the wall. There was a goat's head: a real goat's head, with a very impressive set of horns. It had been pushed onto a nail at about eye-level. Some objects had been removed from around the goat's head but I didn't say anything. I didn't want to incriminate myself. Fellowes was watching me closely.

"You're a lad about campus," he said. "You get around. You see what comes and goes. Any ideas?"

"What, about who might have done it?"

He folded his arms, nodded. I looked down at the pentacle on the floor and shook my head slowly.

"None at all? You see, when the same question was put to other students they all had one or two ideas. Your name cropped up more than once."

"Well, we all have our enemies," I said.

"We do, Mister Heaney, we do."

"All right, it's a long shot, and I've got no real evidence to back it up," I said, "but if it's just ideas you're after, I can think of a couple of names."

"Let's close this place up again," said Fellowes. "You can tell me downstairs."

Chapter 6.

I skimmed the book-launch invitation card across my desk and got on with my work. I had a number of papers to read from various committees and I had a report to prepare. The demon of acronyms was busy that morning: the DEFS were encouraging all INGYOS to prepare a response to the YOPA statement on EEC grants for voluntary CRY groups.

It wasn't easy to switch off. I was seriously worried about Stinx, and whether he was going to come through on the book. It was true that he'd never let us down on a project, though it always came in his own time. And time was what Antonia and her colleagues didn't have. If they defaulted, the bailiffs would be sent in with indecent haste and the GoPoint project would be all over.

I left off my report writing and went online to have a look at what was in my own private bank account. Not much at all, but I did at least have the money I'd saved from Robbie's Glastonhall fees. I wondered what the betting odds would be for a) Stinx coming through with the forgeries; b) my making a good sale; and c) this all happening before the GoPoint premises got turned into designer s.h.a.g-pads for young stockbrokers.