Piranha to Scurfy (3 page)

After a while he got up, opened the door, and put the hall light on. He had never been even mildly alarmed by Selma Gunn’s
A Dish of Snakes,
nor touched with disquiet by any effusions of Joy Anne Fortune’s. What was the matter with him? He came back into the living room and put on the central light and an extra table lamp, the one with the shade Mummy had decorated with pressed flowers. That was better. Anyone passing could see in now, something he usually disliked, but for some reason he didn’t feel like drawing the curtains. Before sitting down again he fetched himself some more whiskey.

This passage about the mummy Charles Ambrose brought back with him after the excavations he had carried out in Egypt was very unpleasant. Why had he never noticed before that the diminutive by which he had always addressed his mother was the same word as that applied to embalmed bodies? Especially nasty was the paragraph where Ambrose’s girlfriend, Kayra, reaches in semidarkness for a garment in her wardrobe and her wrist is grasped by a scaly paw. This was so upsetting that Ribbon almost missed noticing that Marle spelled the adjective “scaley.” He had a sense of the room being less light than a few moments before, as if the bulbs in the lamps were weakening before entirely failing. One of them did indeed fail while his eyes were on it, flickered, buzzed, and went out. Of course Ribbon knew perfectly well this was not a supernatural phenomenon but simply the result of the bulb coming to the end of its life after a thousand hours, or whatever it was. He switched off the lamp, extracted the bulb when it was cool, shook it to hear the rattle that told him its usefulness was over, and took it outside to the waste bin. The kitchen was in darkness. He put on the light and the outside light, which illuminated part of the garden. That was better. A siren wailing on a police car going down Grove Green Road made him jump. He helped himself to more whiskey, a rare indulgence for him. He was no drinker.

Supper now. It was almost eight. Ribbon always set the table for himself, either here or in the dining room, put out a linen table napkin in its silver ring, a jug of water and a glass, and the silver pepper pot and salt cellar. This was Mummy’s standard, and if he had deviated from it he would have felt he was letting her down. But this evening, as he made toast and scrambled two large free-range eggs in a buttered pan, filled a small bowl with mandarin oranges from a can and poured evaporated milk over them, he found himself most unwilling to venture into the dining room. It was at the best of times a gloomy chamber, its rather small window set deep in bookshelves, its furnishings largely a reptilian shade of brownish-green Mummy always called “crocodile.” Poor Mummy only kept the room like that because the crocodile green had been Daddy’s choice when they were first married.There was just a central light, a bulb in a parchment shade, suspended above the middle of the mahogany table. Books covered as yet only two sides of the room, but new shelves had been bought and were waiting for him to put them up. One of the pictures on the wall facing the window had been most distasteful to Ribbon when he was a small boy, a lithograph of some Old Testament scene entitled
Saul Encounters the Witch of Endor.
Mummy, saying he should not fear painted devils, had refused to take it down. He was in no mood tonight to have that lowering over him while he ate his eggs.

Nor did he much fancy the kitchen. Once or twice, while he was sitting there, Glenys Next-door’s cat had looked through the window at him. It was a black cat, totally black all over, its eyes large and of a very pale crystalline yellow. Of course he knew what it was and had never in the past been alarmed by it, but somehow he sensed it would be different tonight. If Tinks Next-door pushed its black face and yellow eyes against the glass, it might give him a serious shock. He put the plates on a tray and carried it back into the living room with the replenished whiskey glass.

It was both his job and his duty to continue reading
Demogorgon,
but there was more to it than that, Ribbon admitted to himself in a rare burst of honesty. He
wanted
to go on, he wanted to know what happened to Charles Ambrose and Kayra de Floris, whose the emblamed corpse was, and how it had been liberated from its arcane and archaic (writers always muddled up those adjectives) sarcophagus, and whether the mysterious and saintly rescuer was in fact the reincarnated Joseph of Arimathea and the vessel he carried the Holy Grail. By the time Mummy’s grandmother clock in the hall struck eleven, half an hour past his bedtime, he had read half the book and would no longer have described himself as merely alarmed. He was frightened. So frightened that he had to stop reading.

Twice during the course of the past hour he had refilled his whiskey glass, half in the hope that strong drink would induce sleep; finally, at a quarter past eleven, he went to bed. He passed a miserable night, worse even than those he’d experienced in the weeks after Mummy’s death. It was, for instance, a mistake to take
Demogorgon
upstairs with him. He hardly knew why he had done so, for he certainly had no intention of reading any more of it that night, if ever. The final chapter he had read— well, he could scarcely say what had upset him most, the orgy in the middle of the Arabian desert in which Charles and Kayra had both enthusiastically taken part, wallowing in perverted practices, or the intervention, disguised as a Bedouin tribesman, of the demon Kabadeus, later revealing in his nakedness his hermaphrodite body with huge female breasts and trifurcated member.

As always, Ribbon had placed his slippers by the bed. He’d pushed the book a little under the bed, but he couldn’t forget that it was there. In the darkness he seemed to hear sounds he had never heard, or never noticed, before: a creaking as if a foot trod first on one stair, then the next; a rattling of the windowpane, though it was a windless night; a faint rustling on the bedroom door as if a thing in grave clothes had scrabbled with its decaying hand against the paneling. He put on the bed lamp. Its light was faint, showing him deep wells of darkness in the corners of the room. He told himself not to be a fool. Demons, ghosts, evil spirits had no existence. If only he hadn’t brought the wretched book up with him! He would be better, he would be able to sleep, he was sure, if the book wasn’t there, exerting a malign influence. Then something dreadful occurred to him. He couldn’t take the book outside, downstairs, away. He hadn’t the nerve. It would not be possible for him to open the door, go down the stairs, carrying that book.

The whiskey, asserting itself in the mysterious way it had, began a banging in his head. A flicker of pain ran from his eyebrow down his temple to his ear. He climbed out of bed, crept across the floor, his heart pounding, and put on the central light. That was a little better. He drew back the bedroom curtains and screamed. He actually screamed aloud, frightening himself even more with the noise he made. Tinks Next-door was sitting on the windowsill, staring impassively at curtain linings, now into Ribbon’s face. It took no notice of the scream but lifted a paw, licked it, and began washing its face.

Ribbon pulled back the curtains. He sat down on the end of the bed, breathing deeply. It was two in the morning, a pitch-black night, ill-lit by widely spaced yellow chemical lamps.What he would really have liked to do was rush across the passage—do it quickly, don’t think about it—into Mummy’s room, burrow down into Mummy’s bed, and spend the night there. If he could only do that he would be safe, would sleep, be comforted. It would be like creeping back into Mummy’s arms. But he couldn’t do it—it was impossible. For one thing, it would be a violation of the sacred room, the sacrosanct bed, never to be disturbed since Mummy had spent her last night in it. And for another, he dared not venture out onto the landing.

Back under the covers, he tried to court sleep by thinking of himself and Mummy in her last years, which helped a little. The two of them sitting down to an evening meal in the dining room, a white candle alight on the table, its soft light dispelling much of the gloom and ugliness. Mummy had enjoyed television when a really good program was on:
Brideshead Revisited,
for instance, or something from Jane Austen. She had always liked the curtains drawn, even before it was dark, and it was his job to do it, then fetch each of them a dry sherry. Sometimes they read aloud to each other in the gentle lamplight, Mummy choosing to read her favorite Victorian writers to him, he picking a book from his work, correcting the grammar as he read. Or she would talk about Daddy and her first meeting with him in a library, she searching the shelves for a novel whose author’s name she had forgotten, he offering to help her and finding—triumphantly—Mrs. Henry Wood’s
East Lynne.

But all these memories of books and reading pulled Ribbon brutally back to
Demogorgon.
The scaly hand was the worst thing and, second to that, the cloud or ball of visible darkness that arose in the lighted room when Charles Ambrose cast salt and asafetida into the pentagram. He reached down to find the lead on the bed lamp where the switch was and encountered something cold and leathery. It was only the tops of his slippers, which he always left just beside his bed, but he had once again screamed before he remembered. The lamp on, he lay still, breathing deeply. Only when the first light of morning, a gray trickle of dawn, came creeping under and between the curtains at about six, did he fall into a troubled doze.

Morning makes an enormous difference to fear and to depression. It wasn’t long before Ribbon was castigating himself for a fool and blaming the whiskey and the scrambled eggs, rather than Kingston Marle, for his disturbed night. However, he would read no more of
Demogorgon.
No matter how much he might wish to know the fate of Charles and Kayra or the identity of the bandaged reeking thing, he preferred not to expose himself any longer to this distasteful rubbish or Marle’s grammatical lapses.

A hot shower, followed by a cold one, did a lot to restore him. He breakfasted, but in the kitchen. When he had finished he went into the dining room and had a look at
Saul Encounters the Witch of Endor.
It was years since he had even glanced at it, which was no doubt why he had never noticed how much like Mummy the witch looked. Of course Mummy would never have worn diaphanous gray draperies and she’d had all her own teeth, but there was something about the nose and mouth, the burning eyes and the pointing finger, this last particularly characteristic of Mummy, that reminded him of her. He dismissed the disloyal thought but, on an impulse, took the picture down and put it on the floor, its back toward him, to lean against the wall. It left behind it a paler rectangle on the ocher-colored wallpaper, but the new bookshelves would cover that. Ribbon went upstairs to his study and his daily labors. First, the letter to Owlberg.

21 Grove Green Avenue
London E11 4ZH

Dear Sir,

In spite of your solemn promise to me as to the correction of errors in your new paperback publication, I find you have fulfilled this undertaking only to the extent of making
one single amendment.

This, of course, in anyone’s estimation, is a gross insult to your readers, displaying as it does your contempt for them and for the TRUTH. I am sending a copy of this letter to your publishers and await an explanation both from you and them.

Yours faithfully,
Ambrose Ribbon

Letting off steam always put him in a good mood. He felt a joyful adrenaline rush and was inspired to write a congratulatory letter for a change. This one was addressed to: The Manager, Dillon’s Bookshop, Piccadilly, London W1.

21 Grove Green Avenue
London E11 4ZH

Dear Sir or Madam,

(There were a lot of women taking men’s jobs these days, poking their noses in where they weren’t needed.)

I write to congratulate you on your excellent organization, management, and the, alas, now old-fashioned attitude you have to your book buyers. I refer, of course, to the respectful distance and detachment maintained between you and them. It makes a refreshing change from the overfamiliarity displayed by many of your competitors.

Yours faithfully,
Ambrose Ribbon

Before writing to the author of the novel that had been directly responsible for his loss of sleep, Ribbon needed to look something up: a king of Egypt of the seventh century B.C. called Psamtik I he had come across before in someone else’s book. Marle referred to him as Psammetichos I, and Ribbon was nearly sure this was wrong. He would have to look it up, and the obvious place to do this was the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica.

Others might have recourse to the Internet. Because Mummy had despised such electronic devices, Ribbon did so too. He wasn’t even on the Net and never would be. The present difficulty was that Psamtik I would be found in volume 8 of the Micropaedia, the one that covered subjects from
Piranha
to
Scurfy.
This volume he had had no occasion to use since Mummy’s death, though his eyes sometimes strayed fearfully in its direction. There it was placed, in the bookshelves to the left of where he sat facing the window, bound in its black, blue, and gold, its position between
Montpel
to
Piranesi
and
Scurlock
to
Tirah.
He was very reluctant to touch it, but he
had to.
Mummy might be dead, but her injunctions and instructions lived on. Don’t be deterred, she had often said, don’t be deflected by anything from what you know to be right, not by weariness, nor indifference, nor doubt. Press on, tell the truth, shame these people.

There would not be a mark on
Piranha
to
Scurfy
—he knew that— nothing but his fingerprints, and they, of course, were invisible. It had been used and put back and was unchanged. Cautiously he advanced upon the shelf where the ten volumes of the Micropaedia and the nineteen of the Macropaedia were arranged and put out his hand to volume 8. As he lifted it down he noticed something different about it, different, that is, from the others. Not a mark, not a stain or scar, but a slight loosening of the thousand and two pages as if at some time it had been mistreated, violently shaken or in some similar way abused. It had. He shivered a little, but he opened the book and turned the pages to the P’s. It was somewhat disappointing to find that Marle had been right.
Psamtik
was right, but so was the Greek form,
Psammetichos I;
it was optional. Still, there were enough errors in the book, a plethora of them, without that. Ribbon wrote as follows, saying nothing about his fear, his bad night, and his interest in
Demogorgon
’s characters: