There was a deeply Christian cohort of four well-scrubbed lads; though I didn't discount them entirely because Christians are weird and so easily slip to their opposite master. I looked at them all closely but I couldn't see it. A few others in the Lodge were just too plain thick and unscholarly to immerse themselves in Hebrew sigils, so I ruled them out, too.
All this left me with three possibles—and out of these, one probable—but from there I couldn't make progress short of confronting each of the three directly. So in order to help me flush out the would-be diabolic magician I sought the help of the poison dwarf in his cave of gloom.
"Hi," I said genially. "I have to store some equipment in the attic at Friarsfield. Could I get it open?"
The porter's polluted cubbyhole was located under the stairs leading down from the college administrative corridors. I stood at the open door. The Alsatian lying under the porter's desk had his head between his paws, but its ears were pricked up and it looked at me nastily with its one good eye.
The porter didn't even look up at me from his red-top newspaper. Sucking passionately on his billowing pipe he said, "Can't you leave it in the drying room?"
"Not really. One or two things have gone missing lately."
"What is it?"
"Just a box of stuff."
"I'll come tomorrow afternoon. Leave it outside the attic door for me."
"I won't be around tomorrow afternoon."
"Thursday then."
"Won't be around Thursday either, I'm afraid. And I don't want to leave it in the corridor. Sorry."
His yellow teeth clacked in irritation on his pipe stem. He put down his paper and surveyed me for the first time, blinking at me, but without offering a solution.
"Tell you what," I said. "I don't want to disturb you. Give me the key and I'll bring it right back to you."
"Ha!" he said, rising to his feet. The dog raised its head, hopeful, looking at its master. "Not on your nelly, son! Come on, dog could do with a walk."
I shrugged. The excitable dog was up and ready, its leather leash already in its drooling mouth like a postman's finger.
The tiny porter took an age to slip on his coat. He munched on his briar stem again, whipped the pipe out of his mouth and said to me once more, rather unnecessarily, "Not on your very very nelly."
I'm still not sure what a
nelly
is, but having accomplished my purpose I didn't say anything. Together we marched along to the Lodge. I felt slightly ridiculous, striding ahead of a porter roughly half my size and a one-eyed dog. The porter, trailing blue pipe smoke, held the dog's leash in one hand and his horde of a hundred keys in the other. When we reached the Lodge, rather than tether the Alsatian outside, he dragged the animal in with us.
I had a box of junk at the ready in my room—I no longer wanted to stow my antiquarian books in the attic—and quickly caught up with the porter as he swept upstairs. I balanced the box on my knee as he performed the time-consuming ritual of identifying the key. When he got the attic door open, he let the dog go ahead of him and then stepped inside.
"Stone the crows!" he said.
"God," I said, coming up behind him. "I don't like that."
The porter's jaw dropped and he snatched the pipe from his mouth. I could see a row of metal fillings in his nicotine-stained teeth. He was looking at the goat's head.
"That's not nice."
"No," I agreed. "Not nice at all." I was waiting for him to declare that he would have to report this to the college authorities, but something happened.
The dog, which had stopped in its tracks in the middle of the room just like its master, cocked its head as if listening intently. Then it cocked its head to the other side. Suddenly it snapped its jaws at the thin air.
Next the dog gave a yelp, rolled violently on its side, scrambled up again and without warning ran full pelt at the small porthole window at the far end of the attic. The dog's nose hit the glass with full force, like a punch. The glass cracked but held as the dog rocked back, dizzy from the impact. Then it leapt at the glass a second time, whimpered, turned and ran out of the room trailing piss.
"Luther! Come 'ere!" The porter tried to call back his dog, way too late. The creature had bolted.
In another context I might have found it funny. But I didn't like what I'd just witnessed one little bit.
"This is bad." The porter looked at me. All his slothful confidence had vanished. "Bad."
"I want to go," I said.
I left first. The porter had a last look round the attic room and slammed the door behind him, as if to lock something inside.
Nothing else happened that evening. By mid-morning of the next day a letter appeared, pinned up on the notice board by the stairs, informing us that "a serious occurrence" had taken place and that we were all to be interviewed in turn and in our rooms by the college chaplain, Dick Fellowes.
My simple plan had been to toss my "
he's on to you
" squib at each of my prime suspects in descending order. But I'd rung the bell at my first attempt. And here he was, Charlie Fraser, in my room, armpits reeking, as good as declaring his culpability.
He hadn't admitted it yet, but turning up at my door was as good as a confession. I was angry enough to want to have a pop at him, but I also wanted to find out what in hell he was up to. I made a feeble effort at being indirect. "I don't know what it is you've done up there, but you should have seen the porter's dog."
He nodded. "No, that figures."
"Why does it figure."
"He's not too keen on dogs. In fact he hates dogs."
"Who does?
He shook his head. He obviously wasn't going to tell me.
"Who doesn't like dogs?"
Charlie Fraser looked down at the floor, then lifted up his head and stuck his chin out at me. He had this infuriating smirk on his face. It was superiority, confidence in some knowledge that I didn't have. Then he shook his head again, as if to say, no, there are some things you're not smart enough to grasp.
I'm not a violent person. I'd had one big fight in my life and that was when I was six years old. But that provocative smirk released in my brain a photo-flash of white heat and I stepped forward and hit him twice, once on his nose and once on his chin. He fell back hard against the door, but didn't go down.
His hand went to his nose, which was already streaming with blood. Nipping it between finger and thumb, he took a step forward. "You've broken my nose, you ape," he said. "Get me a tissue."
Frankly, I didn't want to take Otto's money. I would much rather have closed the sale with the loathsome poet, Ellis. I once attended one of his awful poetry readings, in a bookshop on Charring Cross Road, where Jaz introduced us. I hadn't gone there to hear Ellis's whining verse; I'd gone for his custom.
I'm obviously out of touch in so many ways. My idea of a poet is of some rough diamond in a threadbare flying jacket, slouching, in need of a shave, his breath stinking of garlic and black beer: the kind of charming brat who thinks his rancid breath alone is a challenge for any woman. But my stereotypes were all unpicked with this glimpse of Ellis, who turned out to be one who appreciated the sharper weave and the finer thread.
I could tell you that his three-quarter-length coat fluttered with Armani's moniker, that the hidden lifts in the heels of his gleaming shoes obscured a Prada tag, or that the lovely Daniel Hanson scarf that he so carefully unwound from his soft white throat was handcrafted in China from the finest silk. I mean, what use to anyone is a well-dressed poet? I remember thinking it would be a pleasure to take his money for a forged book.
I also recall noticing something very odd about the poet's beak as he flicked off his scarf and eyed the thin assembly that had turned out for him on that damp night. It was as if the moment of wrinkling his nose one time too many at some nasty smell had been trapped on his face. Below the thatch of his scruffy hair it hung like an icicle from a barn roof; dripping, too, because he had a tic, a nervous habit of running his index finger under his snout as he glanced about him.
Oh hell
, I thought,
have I really got to sit here and listen to this dog's spittle-flecked, yammering verse? Yes
, was the answer. We needed the sale, needed the money.
Jaz had told me that Ellis had been in the running for the laureateship. I had to check what that meant. Someone who composes poems about the Queen and is paid with a butt of sack, or a sack of butt, I can't remember. Anyway, Ellis didn't get it; he got a kick in the butt instead. But in my research on our target I'd studied a slim volume of his work.
Oh, give me the tongue of angels to describe his poetry. Well, it's very modern. It's clearly about
something;
but I have from it the feeling that I'm being told a joke which I don't get. Though I do get the sense that this doesn't matter, isn't a problem: that having the reader or the audience feel thick is part of the intention, that incomprehensibility is part of what makes his poems great.
Anyway, to my surprise he stepped forward and said, in what's called an Estuary accent round here and in a voice loud enough not only for the present audience of six, but for everyone on the lower floors, "Gawd! Bit parky for poetry, innit?"
My life!
I remember thinking.
Stroll on!
Here's one who can jump easily from the Oxford High to my own dark origins on the Old Kent Road and back again without missing a single beat. And I thought:
You be careful, sunshine, you're on my manor now, and we are not mocked without payment
.
It was perhaps a week after our visit to the nightclub—a week in which I'd failed to hear a single report from Stinx—when I used my lunch hour to pay a visit to Antonia at GoPoint. As usual, GoPoint had been emptied of its inmates for the day, with the exception of a therapy group in the small meeting room. The door to the meeting room had a vertical glass panel and I looked in on them. The group sat in a circle on hard plastic chairs and Antonia was leading the group in discussion. I'm not sure what they do in these sessions exactly: lay out their life stories, lament where it all went wrong, resolve to do better. I expect that's the drill. Celebrity addicts pay thousands for the same drill at The Priory and I don't think GoPoint, for all its scuffed paintwork and patches of damp, is any more or less effective.
I watched through the window, rather uncomfortably, as Antonia, with her arms spread wide, explained her four-step routine. There were half a dozen men and women in the group, and also in a circle, behind their chairs, stood their respective demons.
Each member of the group had at least one demon; though one woman had three, clustered behind her chair. The demons were listening intently to what Antonia was saying.
A word on demons, as I don't expect everyone to know exactly what I'm talking about here. Demons do not have leathery wings. Neither do they have horns, cloven hooves, monkey heads or any of the usual representations from religious mythology. They can easily slip into or retreat from the human form of their hosts. But when they have externalized themselves—as they all had in this instance—they become passive, muted, even slothful, though this can disguise the danger they represent. They only have use for us to quicken their own intentions.
They are all squat, somewhat shorter than human beings, and are always slow-moving. Their substance is elusive to describe, being comprised of something akin to loose soot. People who are sensitive to demons will often refer to them as a kind of shadow, but unlike a shadow they are three-dimensional, detached and assert full integrity. Goodridge in his
Categorical Evidence
refers to their substance as
solid black vapour
. Fraser, right from the beginning, called it
swart-cast
.
Believe me, it is no joke. The first time you encounter this substance in the form of these beings, you feel like your skin is being flayed. The terror is such that the fluid of your eyes seems to freeze at the sight of them.
One of the demons became sensitive to my presence behind the door. It turned slowly, cast a disinterested gaze over me and returned its attention to Antonia. Their faces are somewhat indistinct: it's as if a lesser god had made a prototype being, without the full detail of Creation. But although their faces are blurred, they are individualised, unique, and their facial expressions readable. Right at that moment they all looked as though they were listening for a flaw in her argument, a fault in her position, a moment of psychic exhaustion, a chink. They fear Antonia. They cannot approach her. For them, an indomitable light burns around her, and for that reason she fascinates them.
Perhaps the most mystifying thing about demons when externalised is their passivity. They always seem to be
waiting
for something. Waiting for something to happen.
In the same way that the demon sensed my presence at the door, Antonia did, too. She looked over her shoulder, smiled at me and held up three fingers to indicate she just needed a few minutes to wrap up the proceedings. She returned to her summing up, and then the entire group got up from their chairs to embrace each other in turn. I believe they call it giving support. But as one did so I noticed her chair threaten to topple backwards, until one of the demons attending behind reached out a hand—a limb, a paw, a hoof, I don't know what—to steady it. Though the demons each took a step back away from Antonia as she approached to hug their respective hosts.
It was remarkable to watch.
Antonia came out of the room, beaming at me, letting the door close on the group, who were in no hurry to abandon the warm interior for the cold streets outside. Antonia kissed me on the cheek and grabbed my hand, leading me into her office—a tiny cupboard with a phone and a computer workstation. She put an electrical kettle on to boil and dropped teabags into a pair of mugs.
"I know," she said, still beaming.