How to Make Friends with Demons by Graham Joyce Read Free Book Online Page A

wondered what the world was coming to when students couldn't trust each other any more.

    Dick 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 reassure him until the effects had completely worn off. A rumour did the rounds that Fellowes had buggered 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 space 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 glass 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 worship," 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