Jaz was talking but his voice was like a radio station struggling for bandwidth, drifting in and out. I looked around me at the swollen red walls. They seemed to be veined and twisted and pulsating slightly, like a giant larynx. I had a horrible insight of myself and all the other people in the club as individuated fragments in the gagging throat of a drunken demon.
"You've gone ashen," Jaz said. "You're not going to throw up are you? Look out!"
I don't know if she has spies, but somehow everything seems to get back to Fay eventually. I mean everything. The evening after my embarrassing but record-breaking projectile vomiting in the Red Club she called me.
Ostensibly she wanted to talk about the children. Sarah had come home from Warwick University for the Christmas break with a boyfriend who, according to Fay, looked like Nosferatu but not so handsome. Was he on drugs, did I think? Claire meanwhile had had a brush with the police after shoplifting a Cadbury's Chocolate Flake.
"A what?"
"A Cadbury's Flake. Stop pretending you don't know what a Cadbury's Flake is."
Robbie, meanwhile, was having a miserable time at the local comprehensive. Some girls had pulled him into the female toilets and dragged his trousers down.
I was still thinking about why I was never lucky enough to have this horror befall me when Fay said, "I hear you've been drinking a lot."
"What? Who told you that?"
"You were also seen on the Embankment, strolling arm-in-arm with a young woman."
"Seen? What do you mean
seen?
I don't remember trying to make myself invisible."
"William, I hope you're not having a mid-life crisis."
I thought about that for a few seconds. The usual indicators were not available: I wasn't married so couldn't have a mistress; and the thought of purchasing and owning a sports car is in my mind tantamount to walking the streets with one's penis exposed. Anyway what was this about "mid-life"? As far as I'm concerned, the crisis started when as an infant I was removed from the maternal breast and the situation will continue to remain critical until I am comforted by the black teat of death. There is no "mid" about it. Life
is
a crisis from the cradle to the grave.
"If I am having a crisis," I told Fay, "I intend to do so quietly. Now, what are you calling about?"
"Nothing," she bridled. "That is, I just wanted to see if you're okay."
"I'm okay. Okay?"
"I also wanted to tell you your maintenance payment didn't come through this month."
"Oh, I changed my bank account. I'll sort it. Make a double payment next month or whatever."
"Not like you to miss a payment. You're not going to leave us, are you?"
"Leave you?" I reminded Fay that she was the one who was in the spiriting-away business, and for celebrity pastry chefs.
"I mean, you're not going to shoot off into space so that we'd never see you again. Are you?"
"No," I assured her, "I'm not going to shoot off into space."
The one time that I nearly did shoot off into space was when I discovered Fraser had been basing his conjuring of demons on my book. In fact I
freaked out
, to use the parlance of the day. I remember staring down at the rotting book and my own manuscript pages as if it were a pit of snakes into which I was about to be tossed.
"It won't bite you," Fraser said.
I was paralysed. I couldn't speak. I wanted to destroy the book and strangle Fraser at the same time. But I also needed to disguise my reaction to the manuscript. There was no way that I was going to confess to him that I was the author of the fraudulent scribblings on the onion-leaves.
I was also trying to calculate the insane implications of it all. Fraser had scared himself half out of his wits with whatever it was he'd managed to summon. Of course, he might simply have created that psychological condition for himself; but independently of that I had most certainly sensed some presence in the attic. So had the porter. So had the porter's dog. I tried to think back over what I'd done with the manuscript.
The original book, the rotting publication, had fallen into my hands along with several other mildewed volumes buried deep in a cardboard box I'd collected from a doctor's widow during one of my house-clearance jaunts. Most of what was in the box was rubbish, but I had been intrigued by the occult content of the book. As I say, half of it was missing and the cover and all the frontispieces were gone. It had no resale value. It was impossible to tell who had published it, or when, or who had authored it.
The main body of the text was offered in long-winded style, but involved lengthy preparation for magical rituals. There were diagrams and formulae in the book, but frustratingly no instructions for the performance of the actual rituals. I'd assumed these were in the missing section of the book.
At the time there had been a heightened interest in occult publications. Bookshop shelves groaned with imbecilic titles like
Finding Your Egyptian Spirit Guide
or
Casting Runes for Your Cat
and the like. It occurred to me to use the book as a basis for a manuscript purporting to offer the secrets of magic rituals. I purchased the onion-skin paper and the India ink, and with a bit of research set about composing the rituals myself. My hair-brained plan had been to offer the manuscript to a publisher as a "sensational find."
I spent hours on the elegant almost copperplate script and the painstaking draughtsman-like illustrations, only to abandon the project well before completion. It was all too much like hard work. I figured it would take me a year to get the manuscript anything like ready for a publisher. So I packed the book and my unfinished occult manuscript, along with all my other old books, in the attic at Friarsfield Lodge, to gather dust.
And that's how Fraser had stumbled across it.
"I'm going to take these papers away," I told Fraser that morning.
"Not bloody likely. I need those."
"What for?"
"They might help me figure a way to . . . put it all back in the box."
I could have simply asserted ownership. But then I would have felt more deeply implicated. And though I hesitate to say it, more deeply threatened by what Fraser had done. It's barely rational—but then none of this was rational—but I thought that if Fraser knew my part in all of this then the thing that was contaminating him might make a virus-like leap to me.
"I just want to study them. I know a bit about this shit."
"You do?" Fraser said, disbelieving.
I mentioned a few things like the Key of Solomon and other fragments of magical jargon. Enough to impress him, anyway. He surrendered the papers to me. "I need to know exactly what you did."
"I just followed it as it's laid out there. It's clear as a bell."
A cracked, doom-laden bell
, I wanted to add. "What about the pictures? The girls?"
He shuffled. "They were the object of the ritual."
"To do what?"
He flared his eyes open at me.
"You did this," I asked him, "just in the vague hope that you would get to fuck them?"
He blinked. I wanted to mend his broken nose just to break it again.
"Fraser, you're such a shit. Why all
my
girlfriends?"
"Because it was easy to get personal effects when they were here. From the bathroom, I mean. Hairbrushes. Bath water."
"Bathwater? You stole their bathwater?"
"Stole? They didn't exactly want it! In one or two cases it was easy to nip in while the water was draining. I mean, if their hygiene had been better, if they'd rinsed the bath—"
"Shut it or else. You're not one to talk about hygiene."
"I'm just saying."
"Well don't. What about the photos?"
"It's easy, William. You just pretend to be snapping something behind them."
"I take it that it hasn't worked."
"Not exactly."
"Not exactly? What's that supposed to mean? Has it or fucking well hasn't it?"
"Well, no, not yet."
I thought about his creepy handshake when he was saying goodbye to Mandy that morning. "I'm going," I said. "I'll take these with me."
"What will you do?" he shouted after me.
I ignored him. I felt like taking a bath myself.
I went to my room and sat at my desk, spreading out the onion-skin papers before me, trying to recall the sources for my fabricated rituals. I remember I had a pounding headache as I flicked through the nicotine-coloured pages of the torn book trying to re-create the inspiration for my pentagrams and pentacles and bits of Latin.
It occurred to me that Fraser hadn't given me the whole story. His pentacle or pentagram or whatever the damn thing was that he'd chalked on the attic floor certainly wasn't one of my careful drawings, or I would have remembered it. True, it bore a superficial resemblance to mine—one pentacle looks like another, doesn't it?—but the infill, the text, the symbols, these were all new to me and couldn't have come from the drawings I'd constructed so carefully with compass and protractor.
With my head throbbing I pored over the onion-skin papers. A scholar of this material would probably be able to piece together the fragments I'd culled from so many sources: Egyptian charms found on papyrus; major and minor Keys of Solomon; Latin curses; hell, there was even stuff I'd invented myself. I recalled one evening sitting smoking a strong joint and talking in tongues for fun, just writing down the gobbledygook coming out of my mouth. It didn't seem possible that all of this could aggregate into an effective ritual invoking things I didn't even believe in.
It just didn't seem possible.
On one leaf I'd drawn a classical five-pointed star surrounded by a double-circle. I'd inscribed in the wheel of the double-circle the words ShBThAI, TzDQ, MADIM, ShMSh, NVGH, KVKB and LBNH. Underneath this I'd plundered from somewhere:
Know that the hours of the day and of the night together, are twenty-four in number, and that each hour is governed by one of the seven planets in regular order, commencing at the highest and descending to the lowest. The order of the planets is as follows: ShBThAI, Shabbathai, Saturn; beneath Saturn TzDQ, Tzedeq, Jupiter; beneath Jupiter MADIM, Madim, Mars; beneath Mars ShMSh, Shemesh, the Sun; beneath the Sun NVGH, Nogah, Venus; beneath Venus KVKB, Kokav, Mercury; and beneath Mercury is LBNH, Levanah, the Moon, which is the lowest of all the planets. Know that the hour of your invocation must correspond with its governing planet.
Baloney, all of it. I'd mixed that with other stuff I'd unearthed:
In the days and hours of Saturn you can perform experiments to summon souls from Hades.
Which is of course Greek, so I was confounding my Greek with my Latin and Hebrew, and my Egyptian with my outright Hoopla. I'd drawn another double-circle, this time containing a triangle, with various letters or sigils I'd borrowed from a Coptic manuscript I'd found reproduced in the college library. I wondered if perhaps I'd found the inspiration for Fraser's perverted ritual, for underneath that I'd copied from some source:
LVI.vii Rouse yourself for me, spirit, whether male or female, and go into every place, into every quarter, into every house, and bind Kopria, whom her mother Taesis bore, the hair of whose head you have, for Ailourion, whom his mother named Kopria bore, that she may not submit to vaginal nor anal intercourse, nor gratify another youth or another man except Ailourion only, whom his mother named Kopria bore, and that she may not even be able to eat nor drink nor ever get sleep nor enjoy good health nor have peace in her soul or mind in her desire for Ailourion, whom his mother Kopria bore, until Kopria, whom her mother Taesis bore, whose hair you have, will spring up from every place and every house, burning with passion, and come to Ailourion, whom his mother named Kopria bore, loving and adoring with all her soul, with all her spirit, with unceasing and unremitting and constant erotic binding, Ailourion, whom his mother named Kopria bore, with a divine love, from this very day, from the present hour, for the rest of Kopria's life.
I was startled by a light tapping on my door. In fact it made me jump. I laid down the manuscript and got up. I opened the door to find that there was no one there.
I peered down the long corridor. The entire building was deserted. The cleaners hadn't yet reached the Lodge in their daily rounds, and all of the other students were at lectures, except for me and Fraser.
"Fraser?" I shouted. I went downstairs to his room and knocked on the door. "Fraser?" There was no answer. I pressed my ear to the panel of the door but I could hear nothing at all from inside. Then I thought I heard a tiny footfall on the stairs behind me.
There was no one there. A second set of stairs led up from the back of the Lodge, obviously a hangover from the days of servants in the old house, and I thought that if I nipped up that way smartly I might be able to catch whoever was messing around. But when I reached the top of those stairs, the landing was clear and the house remained in silence. Further down the shadowy corridor the door to my own room stood slightly ajar, as I'd left it.
I heard another tiny creak of steps. This time, though, it was from the winding staircase leading up to the attic. I went to the foot of those stairs and looked up. The gloomy stairwell was clear. My head was throbbing now in competition with my pulse. I set a nervous foot on the first step and began to ascend the attic stairway.
I hadn't been in the attic since I'd gone up with Dick Fellowes, after which the door had been securely locked up all over again. Now the door stood open a tiny crack. I touched my finger to the door, but I didn't apply any pressure. Instead I listened.
I listened hard. What I heard from behind the door was the most terrifying sound I have heard in my life. I had to strain hard to hear it.
The only possible way I can describe it is to say that it sounded like grains of sand. A very few grains, falling on a plastic or metal sheet. A faint sprinkling, and then a sudden spitting of the gritty sand at its target. Then it would stop altogether. In that moment I had the horrible impression that something was listening to me on the other side of the door: listening to me listening. The sprinkling of sand resumed again. Then stopped.