How to Make Friends with Demons

by Graham Joyce

  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."

&nbs
p; 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.

  "No problem," I said. "After this one we just freeze all activity for a while. Close down. Give them nothing further to go on. We start up again in a year."

  "Why not just close down now?"

  I could hardly tell him that I'd loaned myself to GoPoint and needed the money to pay off my debts. "No. We'll complete this one. If Stinx comes through."

  Jaz looked at me hard. "You seem to think he might not."

  "It's more complicated than usual. Remember the original we took to model our copy on? Stinx spoiled one volume of it in a studio accident and I'm under pressure to return it. So he has to come up with two copies. And pronto."

  "He hasn't let us down before, has he?"

  "No. But where the fuck is he? That's all I'm saying."

  We speculated a bit about who might be asking the questions but drew a blank. We had another round of drinks. Jaz told me a few fun things about his poetry tours. He was being commissioned by Lambeth Council to supply a short poem which was to be set in stone around the base of a sculpture outside a new community centre. The project was funded by Lottery money. The penniless buy their tickets of impossible hope and the government rake-off is partly returned to them in the form of bad artwork and fake poetry. How the poor get roughed up. Twice.

  Cold Chisel Press were also avid for a new collection and Jaz was very keen for me to write it fast. We agreed as usual to hand over the spoils, which admittedly were not likely to be very much, to GoPoint.

  Apropos of nothing, Jaz said, "Write me a sex poem."

  "Bugger off, Jaz."

  "Please. Write about this woman you're in love with."

  "Ha," I said. "I'm not in love, you ponce."

  "Go on. Write me a really deliciously sleazy sex poem. I'd say you are in love, actually."

  "Ha!" I said again. "Ha!"

  Chapter 24

  Jaz was right, of course. My worst fears had been confirmed. I was in thrall to Yasmin, right up to my neck. My head, ears, nose and throat, however, were still trying to resist. My rational, clonking, battery-dead misfiring-calculator-like brain was trying to summon up numbers other than those shown on the screen. Because I did not wish to acquiesce. Did not wish to go under. Because I lived in mortal dread of transitory love, winged and fiery, principal amongst all the frightening demons.

  You think I'm speaking in metaphor. I'm not. Of all the demons most difficult to describe, the demon of transitory love is the easiest to identify or to witness. You are humbled in its presence. You are awed, mortified, trounced, pissed on. Still your mortal heartbeat quickens, your skin flushes, your eyes fix and re-fix and deliquesce. You lose all faculty of good judgement. You mismanage all sensible emotion. You become an ape, led by the demon on an unbreakable golden chain. And then when the subject of your fascination is just not ready for it any more and departs, you are left only with the company of yourself.

  How do you know when it has gone? You just know. There is a radiance lost; a glamour fades; a soft focus resolves itself into sharper lines. A certain pressure in the air recedes. The demon that carried you in its wings to the glorious heights has dropped you like a stone.

  And then all hell breaks loose.

  A long time ago I resolved never, ever to give this demon such power over me again.

  When I left Mandy at the college, I quit the course without a word to anyone. I didn't tell Mandy; I didn't let my mother know—in fact, to this day she still thinks I completed my degree and I see no reason to disillusion her; and I didn't bother to inform the college.

  I just packed up my bags and I left. It made me physically sick to do it, but that's what I did. I threw up in a rubbish bin behind the bus station on the morning I left Mandy forever. I came to London because it's a city of refugees. Pretty much everyone who comes to London to live is fleeing from one demon or another. Some of them even know it.

  My actions regarding Mandy might have been cowardly, but they were not selfish. I was trying to save her. I knew that her fate would be the same as those four other girls unless I made the trade, the deal, the exchange. I was still passionately in love with her but I wouldn't allow myself to be the instrument of her destruction.

  Yet I hadn't managed to completely cheat the demon. It's one thing knowing when the demon will flap its wings and go; it's quite another thing to leave before the demon has done with you. That particular demon followed me to London and wrecked my life for three years before it was through with me. I hurt over Mandy. I cried. I tried to destroy my life with drink and drugs and reckless behaviour. But for three years, when I woke in the morning the first thing on my mind was Mandy; and she was the last thought in my head when I went to sleep at night, no matter whom I was with nor how much I poisoned my system.

  For a thousand nights, I shredded myself. My demon flogged and flamed me. Old London Town is a fine place to burn. There is so much company, also on fire.

  When the demon was done with me I promised myself never to let it approach me again. I devised a kind of mental yoga to keep it away. A system of disciplined thinking and alertness. And it worked! The side effect of this yoga was to roll back the surface of the world, and to make plain to me the astonishing array of demonic activity exacting a pull, like the moon and the tides, on every single human life in the capital and beyond.

  There are thousands of them, and in multiple forms, living at our shoulders. Hosts of them, malign and benign, swarming or singleton, some fascinated by us, others disinterested. All utterly unseen except by the initiated.

  The truth about demons is shocking to those who cannot see them. For those of us whose eyes are opened once, we can never go back. And the fact of it, their constant presence in the ether, would become almost banal were it not for the constant discipline required to keep them from attaching.

  I have medicated my life with vigilance.

  When I met Fay I liked her a great deal, and I knew that I wouldn't fall in love with her. Not in the kicking and screaming, biting and scratching, weeping and wailing manner. I saw that she would be a fine companion and a good mother should we be blessed with children. But also that neither of us would be open to the demon.

  They are so clever. They enter our lives at a tangent, as it were, staying only for as long as it suits them, for as long as they can feed on our emotions. Maybe for a few seconds, maybe for years. Those who know about these things talk about spectacular interventions for good or ill. I met a man once who told me that a demon was the inspiration of Christ, entering him when he was a young man and abandoning him on the cross. These stories should not be repeated.

  But since the day I saw one of their number enter Dick Fellowes in the gloomy attic room of Friarsfield Lodge to make my contract, the world was a changed place for me. There are so few cognoscenti. So few with whom this fact of life can be discussed. I knew Fraser, of course. And over the years I had occasionally sought out one or two authorities in the field. Those who were not charlatans were spectacularly eccentric or even unhinged. Then there were the accidental encounters with people who knew. Seamus the old soldier who was no older than I am: he was a good example. But he didn't know
what he was seeing and they fed on him mercilessly. I could have helped him. I should have helped him.

  And now there was Yasmin, who hosted demons, but who didn't know it. They flew in and out of her, like dark birds in and out of a tree.

  I neither expected nor wanted ever to see Fraser again. I always regarded him as the chief architect of my suffering over Mandy. I know I wrote the fraudulent book that summoned the demon, but it was he who conducted the first ritual and it was he who had placed the photographs of Mandy and the four other girls around the goat's head.