Demons Read Free

“thank you for dropping in—I have guests, as you see. . . .”
    Shephard’s head swiveled on his shoulders like a turret, first at me, then to Paymenz. “Of course. I am sorry to have precipitated myself upon you, as it were; perhaps certain matters are of some urgency. Perhaps not. I only wished to plant the seed of the idea, so to say, that, should the conference on Spiritual Philosophy and Economics not come about this weekend for any reason, I do wish to stay in touch—very closely in touch. Please feel free to call me.” He handed Paymenz a business card and was moving toward the door. He startled me by not seeming to move on rollers; he walked as any man his size might. A normal walk seemed odd on him. “I will speak to the board about your housing issue, as promised, one more time. Au revoir!” He opened, passed through, and closed the door with hardly a sound, smooth as smoke up a chimney.
    Paymenz irritably tossed the business card onto a lamp table heaped with cards, unopened letters, bills. “That man’s arrogance, the way he just shows up unexpectedly . . . always as if he has no agenda . . . babbling about his conference not coming off—when there’s no reason it shouldn’t . . . I should never have agreed to go to his antiseptic-yet-strangely-septic conference, if he hadn’t offered me a fee . . . but he knows perfectly well I need the money.”
    Hoping Paymenz remembered he actually had invited me over for coffee, I looked around for some place to hang my leather jacket. But of course there was no place, really, to put it. The closet was crammed full with clothes no one wore; and with junk. The other apartments in the twenty-story high-rise were underdecorated minimalist-modern affairs, trying to echo the utilitarian, airy curviness that the architects of the building had borrowed from I. M. Pei or Frank Lloyd Wright. Paymenz, however, had covered the walls with an ethnically disconnected selection of tapestries and carpets—Persian and Chinese and a Southwestern design from Sears. He collected old lava lamps, and though the electricity had been turned off, they churned away, six of them crudely wired to car batteries, with lots of electrical tape around half-stripped connections. The lamps sat on the car batteries and on end tables and mantels, shape-shifting in waxen primary colors. A week previous, it was said, the entire SFSU board of tenure review had come out to the university parking lot to find their cars mysteriously inert.
    Half a dozen more lava lamps were broken, used as bookends for the many hundreds of books that took up most of the space that wasn’t tapestry. Two candles were burning, and a fading battery lamp.
    Cats darted behind chairs and moved sinuously up and down much-clawed cat trees. I counted four cats—no, five: They’d taken in a new one.
    There were bits of breakfast toast in Paymenz’s long, shovel-shaped gray-and-black beard; his eyes, red-rimmed gray under bristling brows, rested on me for only a flicker as he spoke. “Many the auguries this morning, Ira. Would you like to see?”
    “You know how I feel about medieval techniques, especially any that involve damp, decaying guts,” I said, looking about for Melissa. I was an aficionado of the arcane metaphysical, being the former art director for the now-defunct Visions: The Magazine of Spiritual Life , but I drew the line at peering into rotting intestines.
    “It’s fresh pig bladder,” he said, “none of that decaying stuff anymore. Melissa made me promise. I suppose the place is rank enough already.”
    The place wasn’t quite rank, but it bore a distinct smell: pipe tobacco and cat boxes and cloying Middle Eastern incense, all vying for dominance.
    “I see you have some new lava lamps.”
    “Yes. Look at this one—a confection of gold-flecked red ooze fighting its way into a feverish primeval swelling. Unconsciously, the designer was thinking of the philosopher’s stone.”
    “I don’t know if