How to Make Friends with Demons (20 page)

I had in my knowledge a
key
, which was not something of my own invention, but which I'd stumbled across in at least two different sources. It is very difficult over the course of several hours to stop the mind from wandering from its focus. There come moments of distraction, blankness, instances of almost forgetting what one is doing. These lacunae can be plugged or turned by the key I'd discovered, which is to repeat the numbers
five, six, seven,
and in any language. Five being the number of Man; six being the number of Hell; seven being the number of Heaven. I could do so in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German and of course simply in English. And in those moments when the mind has strayed from its purpose the key is a great comfort, and one almost hears and feels, distantly as it were, the tumbling of the chambers of a lock of cosmic proportion.

Fünf, sechs, sieben.

This device becomes an important reassertion of brain rhythms, and the use of different languages reawakens the supplicant out of the trance which is inevitable but counter-productive.

Pende, exi, efta.

This three-beat count was a lifeline whenever I felt myself coming adrift. It was a yardstick. It was like coming up for air. It was also a numerical amulet.

I broke my chanting only for an occasional sip of water, and used the key to restore the rhythm of the chant. After two or three hours of chanting the mantras and repeating the movements and gestures, the mind becomes open to the most terrible visions: ugly, leering creatures climbing from the silt of the bottommost reaches of the unconscious mind. I was led to understand that the chants and gestures were each a knot in a silver rope that would stretch out until the appointed moment, and that these loathsome creatures represented the weakening of resolve in the psyche, an attempt to loosen each knot, and the numerical count held them at bay before the tying of the next knot.

Cinque, six, sept.

The perspiration was pouring from me. I felt it trickling along my spine and down my neck and in my groin. I sneezed heavily, and became frightened when I thought there was no one to say "bless you." Here I was abasing myself before demons and worrying if my sneeze would open the door to them.

I heard the church bell toll at midday. It felt comforting but enormously distant. Somehow a great, mountainous landscape with brooding skies had opened between me and what should have been the urban location of the church. But it had receded, fallen back deep into inner space; or I had. I persisted.

At one o'clock I heard the bell again, a far-off single toll. My bones were aching and my brain was on fire. I thought I couldn't go on. My throat had swollen and dried. I struggled to swallow a teaspoon of water.

At two o'clock I was brought back to my senses not by the church bell but by the slamming of a door somewhere in the Lodge. By now I was hallucinating. Just across the attic floor I could see another version of myself, speaking the mantras, seated cross-legged inside a pentagram, candles burning at all five points. This other version of myself suddenly became aware of me, mouth horribly agape, tongue waggling lasciviously in its mouth.

In the next moment there was a woman—or a naked creature, for although I want to think it was a woman, it might have been a fat maggoty creature—copulating with him, sitting in his lap, gazing lovingly into his eyes. I remembered to make the count.

Quinque, sex, septem
.

And the nightmarish vision disappeared.

I reapplied myself. Then at three o'clock I heard the church bell clonk, hollow in the distance, like a bell that had cracked in the casting. At four o'clock the sound wasn't even a clonk; more like the sound of a creature trying to clear its throat. My skin flushed horribly; not mere goosebumps but a rippling as if some live things had found their way under my skin and were racing around trying to get out. Then the sensation suddenly stopped instantly.

It was over. The sky outside had gone dark. I knew the ritual was done.

The moment was almost one of anticlimax, but not quite. There was no sudden or dramatic event; the candles neither guttered nor flared; the temperature didn't dip. But something about the attic had changed, beyond my comprehension but not beyond my apprehension. Something about myself had changed, too. Some weight inside me had shifted. Some density had realigned.

And something swarthy was gently pouring itself into the room, like black sand through the neck of a timer, as if through the tiniest fissure, a crack forced in the fabric of the world by my concentration alone.

There was a sense of slow decanting, as if some presence had dissolved in one space and was reconstructing itself in another. My apprehension of it was more intuitive than it was visual, and even so, there was a smokiness to my vision, as if something unclean had been smeared on my retinas. The room became denser with what I want to describe as soot particles, and this sootiness began to resolve itself into a set of frightening chevrons pointing like a dart right at me. I felt a huge pressure, an enormous solidity of the air. The pressure on my ears was similar to that experienced in an aircraft cabin.

I began to shiver, not from the cold but from terror. My blood dried in my veins as if it had become salt; my banging heart wanted to shatter my ribcage. I felt the migration of warm piss on my leg. I had been warned about this by Fraser, about loss of bodily control. He'd told me it was important to speak, to reassert control of my bodily functions. He said it was vital to sound commanding.

But the words were like wet cement on my tongue. I had to fight them up and out of my larynx and my voice was shaking. I was like a little girl trembling at the sight of a huge black dog.

"No," I said firmly, surprising myself. "You have to find another form or I can't speak with you."

The congealing of sooty particles stopped abruptly. The smokiness in the room began to lighten. The pressure lifted. I'm certain my ears actually popped.

Within moments it had gone.

My steady breathing recovered. Then I heard soft footsteps on the stairs leading to the attic, making an almost stealthy approach. I listened hard. The footsteps climbed another couple of steps, then halted. I listened again. The footsteps seemed to ascend two more steps, and halted again.

My breathing was so shallow I thought my head was going to explode. The footfalls finally reached the top step outside the attic door. I knew that the door was locked, and I held my breath again. But with infinite slowness the door swung open. A spectral figure took a step inside.

With his face to the skylight window, the figure was a silhouette. But I knew who it was who had come. His eyes, lodged in the wreath of shadows that was his face, were starbursting. It was Dick Fellowes. He gazed at me for a long time.

He moved his jaw, as if trying to search for command of his words before speaking. I've seen that gesture since. It is a kind of signature of momentary demonic occupation.

"We need an understanding," he said finally. "You can never walk away from this."

I nodded.

"But the only way out for you," he said, his voice a tense whisper, "is to leave the college. You can't stay around here."

I nodded again. I knew that. "But do we have a deal?" I said.

"A deal? Yes. We have a deal."

By the time I reached the Crown near Seven Dials in Monmouth Street I had almost recovered from my altercation with Fay. Almost. The Crown is a tough place to find a seat. I've been there many times on my own and usually it's standing-room only at the bar. Yet traditionally whenever the Candlelight Club choose to meet there we always find an empty table at the rear. Stinx says it is because we were part of the fabric in the 1820s when it was called the Clock House and its clients were the worst kind of pimps and murderers. Here the "King of the Pickpockets" held court and they divided the spoils of any lunatic stupid enough to enter the district after dusk. Stinx thinks of us as a reincarnation of all this villainy, what with our book-forgery business.

No seats on this night, however. I arrived first and stood at the bar, calling for a glass of Cabernet and studying the paintings of cut-throats and thieves that would have grogged in this very joint a couple of hundred years ago. You could feel their ghosts. No, really, you could. The reek of bad blood has never been washed away from this part of the city.

I once went to see a shrink with nicotine-stained fingers at his surgery near this place. Told him all about my demons. The lot. Held back nothing, and paid good money for the privilege.

He listened very carefully, made notes and asked how long I'd been seeing these demons. Then he threw down his pencil and said, "There's nothing wrong with you."

"Uh?"

"You display the symptoms of schizophrenia yet it doesn't seem to impede you or even overly distress you. You're what I'm tempted to call a
functioning schizoid
. "

"That's a very nice phrase," I said, "but I know that other people can see these demons."

"So you tell me."

"You think I'm lying?"

"Look, did you think there is a line you cross that makes you a schizophrenic? It's not like having an infection that can be seen with a microscope. Schizophrenia is a ragbag term we apply to all the forms of disturbing mental behaviour we can't explain. And even if there were such a 'line' to be drawn, you would have to draw it believing that at least half the population was rational. I see no basis for that."

"I don't know. I'm just not very keen on being labelled a schizophrenic."

"Look, let's assume for a moment that these demons you see are real. If you could persuade me to see them, would it change your life in the slightest?"

"No."

"And if you were unable to persuade me?"

"No."

"In which case, Mr. Heaney, if you want we could discuss this philosophically for an hour once a week at my standard rates."

I left him; I could see he was dying for a cigarette. I felt like I'd been offered the choice between a blue pill and a red pill, one of which would change my life forever. I know he was just trying to save me my money, but I wasn't sure if he'd helped me or made things worse.

Diamond Jaz ambled into the pub, perhaps half an hour late, wearing shades and a beautiful camel coat. The broadsheet newspaper folded and tucked under his arm might have been there to skilfully offset the expensive chic of his impeccable style for all I know. A photographic accessory. Every head in the Crown turned briefly, as they always do. And in the same moment a table cleared itself.

Jaz dropped his newspaper on the table to claim the space against the dozen or so other customers who might have wanted it. Effortlessly securing a third seat for Stinx, he smiled at me and sat down as I called in his usual tipple.

"Why the shades?" I asked as I settled down next to him.

He lifted them briefly. A small but angry blue bruise formed a crescent under his right eye, which he covered again with the shades.

"You want to watch that rough-trade thing," I said, clinking glasses with him.

"Yes, I think I might be ready to try a woman again."

"Careful."

"I've seen what it's done for you. You keep trying to wipe that smile off your face but you can't."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"She's hot, isn't she? Gets you hard just by sitting across the table from you?"

"Where's Stinx? He should be here by now."

"What are you afraid of, William?"

It was no good trying to tell Jaz to shut up. If he knew he'd got to you he would tease all the more. So I said, "Falling in love with her, that's what."

He took off his shades the better to look at me. "It's not going to fuck up my poetry, is it?"

"Oh, I've got you a couple here for you." I reached inside my breast pocket and withdrew a few folded sheets. They were samples for his new collection. Less cynical; less miserablist, as requested.

He snatched them up and began to read avidly. As he did so I flicked open the newspaper he'd brought in. There was a photograph of a suicide case on the front page. The man in the photograph looked familiar. He was a footballer. "Hey," I almost shouted, "this guy used to drink in that god-awful club you keep taking us to."

Jaz looked up from my doggerel. "Yeh. Topped himself. He was being blackmailed."

"What about?"

"Queer." Jaz went back to perusing the poems.

"The poor guy. Surely no one bothers about being gay in this day and age."

"Get in the real world, William. Can you imagine the chants from the terraces? Hey, this is a love poem!"

"Sort of."

Jaz went on to study the second poem. My thoughts were still with this poor young man. He'd tried to reach out to me in the nightclub. Not that I could have helped him in any way—Tara the good-time girl had misled him about that. But I'd seen his demon in the men's room. His sad, squat, suffering demon. Even then it was a demon of no hope. Waiting. Like all the other demons I see. Just waiting.

"I like the new phase I seem to be entering. This is good stuff."

"I should think so—it took me a quarter of an hour to write."

It was true. I'd spent three hours thinking about Yasmin and this poem—which ostensibly was not about Yasmin at all, but really was when I came to look at it later—flowed from my hand in an act of automatic or almost unconscious writing. Granted, it was bad; but it was effortlessly bad.

"No, really, William, this is fine stuff."

"Oh shut up. I'm going to give Stinx a call. See what he's up to."

But I couldn't get hold of him. I left a message for him to call me back. I tried to put a little urgency into my voice.

While we waited for Stinx we talked about our other book project. The forgery. Not the forged poetry, the antiquarian forgery. We would be needing a new mark. But Jaz had spooked. He said there was still someone poking around asking questions. He had no idea who this person was, but it had come to him via a third party: someone had been asking how Jaz and I knew each other.