Free That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote by K.J. Bishop Page A

bear to have their demonic nature reflected back at them. They cannot survive it. The experience turns them inside out.
    I threw the door open and jumped out of the van, because the inside of a demon, even a minor one, has little to recommend it.
     
    Déjà vu. Hairdryers, lunchboxes, clothes, lamps, carpets, perfume, sink plungers, caged birds. This time the bazaar had been separated out from the city, and there was no sand, and no sun; but essentially I had come halfway across the world only to find that there was nothing new to see. And there were no salient serendipitous signs.
    I sat down on a bench next to an escalator and indulged in self-pity. I no longer felt like an adept of cledonomancy, or of anything. I couldn’t be sure that the Delphi woman had set me up with the two demons, especially since she had given me the mirror coins; but then, how else could she have given me my change? And there being no reason for her to suppose I’d have any idea what to do, wouldn’t it have been amusing to think of me having the power to free myself but not knowing how to use it?
    I tried to think where I might have gone wrong. Was the mistake a recent one, a bad choice made at a point to which I could possibly return? Or had it been made a long time ago, behind some door that was now closed to me? I remembered my traipsing through the desert city, and my prior traipsing across the desert itself. And before that… there should be something before that, I thought. I felt that I had been somewhere, and, before that, somewhere else. Smaller places? Small rooms?
    Thinking of small rooms made me need the loo. I got up and walked until I found toilets down a corridor between shops .
    There were eight doors in the corridor: female, male, disabled, baby change, female staff, male staff, cleaner, and Authorised Personnel Only. I looked into the baby change and the disabled toilet. They were empty. I tried opening each of the four non -public doors, but all were locked. Pretending to tie my shoe, I waited until I was sure that everyone who had been in the toilets had come out. I recognised none of them. Despondent, I availed myself of the appropriate chamber and returned to the corridor feeling more comfortable but no less at a loss.
    I was considering going back down to take the van, never mind the condition in which I had left it, and driving somewhere, perhaps back to the mansions. However, fortune intervened. After I stepped out of the restroom, a man in a suit came out of the Authorised Personnel door and strode down the corridor in a great hurry. He had pushed the door open wide, and it was closing itself slowly.
    My thoughts about small rooms had brought me here at exactly the right moment to see the opportunity and take advantage of it. With recovering self-confidence, I caught the door and slipped through.
     
    ‘I’m told I shouldn’t be here at the casino,’ said the woman with whom I had got talking in one of the lounge areas overlooking the atrium. ‘I especially shouldn’t be writing here. I am, apparently, profaning the sacred Word by dragging it into this place. This is the same language, more or less, that Milton and Emily Dickinson used, and my pious friends chastise me because I’m taking it within spitting distance of poker machines . Well, listen, my father used to take a book into the toilet every night to read while he had a leisurely shit. I’m reliably informed that many people do this, particularly when they have children and can’t get peace and quiet anywhere else. So if they can read in a toilet, why can’t I write in a casino?
    ‘ No reason at all,’ I said.
    ‘ I’m not even in the bloody casino,’ she went on. ‘I couldn’t work in there. It’s smoky, and I get asthma.’
    I nodded to be sympathetic. ‘So health, not principle, keeps you out here.’
    ‘ Exactly. I tell my friends that it’s actually quite a principled place. You notice that people don’t judge each other by