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

squeezed my thigh before I got out of the cab. "Do you want to do something?" she said.

    I leaned over and gave her a peck on the cheek. "I've never paid for it in my life," I said, "and I'm not going to start now. Goodnight."

    She shrugged and opened the cab door for me. It doesn't matter how much I've had to drink, you start paying for sexual comfort and you invite flocks of them into your life. Throngs of them. Swarms.

    I was so drunk that when I got to my front door I could barely get my key in the lock. Once inside I drank a pint of water in one gulp, kicked off my shoes and collapsed into my chair, where I instantly fell into a fitful sleep, dreaming of my days back in Derby, at the teacher-training college.

     

Chapter 8
    I saw Charlie Fraser collecting his mail from the pigeon holes near the Students' Union. No one was around so I darted up behind him and whispered, "Watch out, he's on to you," and then kept on moving.

    I found something in my own pigeon hole a few yards along the rack, and pretended to be absorbed in the minutes of the staff-student English Programme Committee. Even without looking up I could feel his brown, spaniel eyes boring into me.

    "What are you talking about?"

    I still didn't look up from my essential reading. "I'm just tipping you off, that's all."

    "Who is on to me?"

    I turned and smiled at him. "Okay. Please yourself." I walked away. Sweat, you fucker , I thought.

    I thought it might be a day or two before he felt compelled to speak to me. In fact he broke cover sooner than that. Early that evening there was a short rap on my door.

    He stood with his hands in the pockets of his black jeans. His capped black t-shirt revealed one of the Chinese ideograms sported on the bicep by just about every middle-class student at that time, and if he wore underarm deodorant it had let him down. I couldn't stop myself from wrinkling my nose.

    "Yeh?" I asked, like he might have been selling insurance.

    He didn't answer. I saw the toe of his boot tap once, but other than that he just stared at me.

    "You want to tell me what it's all about?" I stared back at him for a while. Then I stepped back and let him come in. "Sit down," I said.

    "No. I'd rather stand."

    "Okay, don't fucking sit down. What's cracking off?"

    He sniffed. "I've no idea what you're talking about."

    "Really? Well, fuck off out of my room then, because you stink. And what about those fucking photos?"

    He blinked. That was all I needed. He blinked. I'd been right all along and it was him. And I hadn't been able to stop thinking about the photographs since I'd discovered them pinned around the goat's head in the attic.

     

    I'd needed somewhere to stow my antiquarian books for a while. I'd entered into a house-clearing partnership with a bad lot called Johnno, a guy who'd found his way onto List 99—the teacher-exclusion register—and been expelled from the college for supplying cannabis, more or less by the bale. Johnno had a house-clearance operation. Well, a van.

    Johnno's technique was to go in to bereaved families or incompetent pensioners and offer them good money for some piece of tat. Having won their confidence, he'd then pick up anything valuable they had for a song. I got all and any books in return for furniture humping. It was unsavoury and I was already thinking of packing it in before somebody's aggrieved and psychotic son came after Johnno with a crow-bar. I became convinced that he would be after me, too, and I wanted to hide some books I'd collected.

    The attic seemed the obvious place. I didn't want the college porter to know I was stashing stuff away in there so I went up to see if there was some way I could force the lock, or maybe take off the hinges of the door, I don't know. But when I got up there I saw a bit of debris on the floor and noticed that the wall enclosing one side of the landing by the door was no more than a flimsy plyboard panel painted over. What's more, the panel was floating