How to Make Friends with Demons by Graham Joyce Page B

not conventionally beautiful, but she was the light of the world. What a project, if I could steal her from the world, and keep her all to myself.

    "It's my hideaway."

    "What are you hiding from?"

    "Demons."

    "Ahh, yes. Those."

    "Don't mock. Seamus was crawling with them. They were like lice in his scalp. He detonated that bomb deliberately."

    "Let me tell you what he did. He deloused himself before he died. He shaved his head. He was a victim, William, not of demons, but of evil people who sent him to a hell of their making and told him he was doing good. He couldn't stand it when he found out they'd deceived him. That's why he killed himself."

    "But Otto was his best friend on Earth. He said as much himself. Why kill Otto?"

    "He was protecting Otto," she said, "from the world."

    "You're mad."

    "Many people think so."

    "Do you want to stay here? Stay the night? I have a spare room."

    "You want a madwoman in your house? I would stay, William, but not in your spare room. I'd want to fuck you, and I'd like that, but it would mean too much to you."

    I almost dropped my glass. "What?"

    "You're the sort of person who takes sex too seriously. It has a religious significance for people like you. You get too attached. So, no, I won't stay. I'm going to save you from yourself. Someone will come for you but it's not me."

    Antonia said she needed to get back to GoPoint. There would be all kinds of confusion and questions. She put down her glass, kissed me lightly and left. I went to the door and shouted after her to see if I could get her a cab, but she just waved and disappeared into the night. I was left standing there wondering who the heck had brought up the subject of sex, and who between us had just turned down whom.

    Women. You've got more chance of figuring out Minkowski's mathematical theorem of four-dimensional space.

    I went back indoors and flicked through the TV channels. Soon enough I found a live report from the scene of the explosion. Without being named, two men were pronounced dead at the scene. The cameras were at some distance and the police had taped off the blast area. Whatever remained of Otto and Seamus, there was nothing to see. I was slightly taken aback to see a tiny bit of footage of me when I was talking with Seamus. On the sequence shown I turned my body towards him in a way that fully shielded the moment when he handed something to me. In the commotion, I'd completely forgotten about whatever Seamus had passed on to me, but the footage reminded me with a start.

    I switched off the TV and went to my coat. There it was in my pocket: the cylindrical shape wrapped in the red-and-white Arab scarf. The scarf had been tied in a tight knot, but eventually I managed to tease it undone.

    It was an exercise book, like a child might use in school, rolled up tight. I flicked it open. On the first page was a sharply drawn pencil illustration of a kind of military coat of arms. It was stylized, like a tattooist's art. Three feathers inside a knot of rope, all crowned. Fancy scrollwork underneath the design simply read: Ich dien . I knew that to be German for I serve . It was a well-executed drawing. Underneath it was a drawing of a butterfly. Even though that too was executed in neat pencil strokes, I could see that it was meant to be a Red Admiral butterfly.

    But the rest of the exercise book was filled with tiny, cramped writing. Every line had been filled and on many pages the spaces between the lines had been filled, too. The writing was so small that it was almost impenetrable.

    I tried to read some of it, and though I could make it out it occurred to me that studying it would be a serious job, and that I might even need a magnifying glass of some sort to read it comfortably.

    It hadn't escaped me that the police would at some point want to talk to me. I had no idea whether they had seen the exercise book pass from Seamus to me, but as they had recorded every detail, they would surely study the