Piranha to Scurfy

by Ruth Rendell

  One of them came up to him the minute he entered Hatchard’s. He recognized her as the marketing manager, a small, good-looking blond woman with an accent. The very faintest of accents, but still enough for Ribbon to be put off her from the start. She recognized him too, and to his astonishment and displeasure addressed him by his name.

  “Good morning, Mr. Ribbon.”

  Inwardly he groaned, for he remembered having had forebodings about this at the time. On one occasion he had ordered a book, he was desperate to see an early copy, and had been obliged to say who he was and give them his number. He said good morning in a frosty sort of voice.

  “How nice to see you,” she said. “I think you may be in search of the new Kingston Marle, am I right? Demogorgon? Copies came in today.”

  Ribbon felt terrible. The plastic of his carrier was translucent rather than transparent, but he was sure she must be able to see the silver and the two shades of red glowing through the cloudy film that covered it. He held it behind his back in a manner he hoped looked natural.

  “It was Paving Hell I actually wanted,” he muttered, wondering what rule of life or social usage made it necessary for him to explain his wishes to marketing managers.

  “We have it, of course,” she said with a radiant smile and picked the paperback off a shelf. He was sure she was going to point out to him in schoolmistressy fashion that he had already had it in hardcover, she quite distinctly remembered, and why on earth did he want another copy. Instead she said, “Mr. Owlberg is here at this moment, signing stock for us. It’s not a public signing, but I’m sure he’d love to meet such a constant reader as yourself. And be happy to sign a copy of his book for you.”

  Ribbon hoped his shudder hadn’t been visible. No, no, he was in a hurry, he had a pressing engagement at twelve-thirty on the other side of town, he couldn’t wait, he’d pay for his book.... Thoughts raced through his mind of the things he had written to Owlberg about his work, all of it perfectly justified of course, but galling to the author. His name would have lodged in Owlberg’s mind as firmly as Owlberg’s had in his. Imagining the reaction of Paving Hell’s author when he looked up from his signing, saw the face, and heard the name of his stern judge made him shudder again. He almost ran out of the shop. How fraught with dangers visits to the West End were! Next time he came up he’d stick to the City or Bloomsbury. There was a very good Waterstones in the Grays Inn Road. Deciding to walk up to Oxford Circus tube station and thus obviate a train change, he stopped on the way to draw money out from a cash dispenser. He punched in Mummy’s pin number—her birth date, 1-5-27—and drew from the slot one hundred pounds in crisp new notes.

  Most authors to whom Ribbon wrote his letters of complaint either did not reply at all or wrote back in a conciliatory way to admit their mistakes and promise these would be rectified for the paperback edition. Only one, out of all the hundreds, if not thousands who had had a letter from him, had reacted violently and with threats. This was a woman called Selma Gunn. He had written to her, care of her publisher, criticizing quite mildly her novel A Dish of Snakes, remarking how irritating it was to read so many verbless sentences and pointing out the absurdity of her premise that Shakespeare, far from being a sixteenth-century English poet and dramatist, was in fact an Italian astrologer born in Verona and a close friend of Leonardo da Vinci’s. Her reply came within four days, a vituperative response in which she several times used the f-word, called him an ignorant swollen-headed nonentity, and threatened legal action. Sure enough, on the following day a letter arrived from Ms. Gunn’s solicitors, suggesting that many of his remarks were actionable, all were indefensible, and they awaited his reply with interest.

  Ribbon had been terrified. He was unable to work, incapable of thinking of anything but Ms. Gunn’s letter and the one from Evans Richler Sabatini. At first he said nothing to Mummy, though she, of course, with her customary sensitive acuity, could tell something was wrong.Two days later he received another letter from Selma Gunn. This time she drew his attention to certain astrological predictions in her book, told him that he was one of those Nostradamus had predicted would be destroyed when the world came to an end next year and that she herself had occult powers. She ended by demanding an apology.

  Ribbon did not, of course, believe in the supernatural but, like most of us, was made to feel deeply uneasy when cursed or menaced by something in the nature of necromancy. He sat down at his computer and composed an abject apology. He was sorry, he wrote, he had intended no harm, Ms. Gunn was entitled to express her beliefs; her theory as to Shakespeare’s origins was just as valid as identifying him with Bacon or Ben Jonson. It took it out of him, writing that letter, and when Mummy, observing his pallor and trembling hands, finally asked him what was wrong, he told her everything. He showed her the letter of apology. Masterful as ever, she took it from him and tore it up.

  “Absolute nonsense,” she said. He could tell she was furious. “On what grounds can the stupid woman bring an action, I should like to know? Take no notice. Ignore it. It will soon stop, you mark my words.”

  “But what harm can it do, Mummy?”

  “You coward,” Mummy said witheringly. “Are you a man or a mouse?”

  Ribbon asked her, politely but as manfully as he could, not to talk to him like that. It was almost their first quarrel—but not their last.

  He had bowed to her edict and stuck it out in accordance with her instructions, as he did in most cases. And she had been right, for he heard not another word from Selma Gunn or from Evans Richler Sabatini. The whole awful business was over, and Ribbon felt he had learned something from it: to be brave, to be resolute, to soldier on. But this did not include confronting Owlberg in the flesh, even though the author of Paving Hell had promised him in a letter responding to Ribbon’s criticism of the hardcover edition of his book that the errors of fact he had pointed out would all be rectified in the paperback. His publishers, he wrote, had also received Ribbon’s letter of complaint and were as pleased as he to have had such informed critical comment. Pleased, my foot! What piffle! Ribbon had snorted over this letter, which was a lie from start to finish. The man wasn’t pleased; he was aghast and humiliated, as he should be.

  Ribbon sat down in his living room to check in the paperback edition for the corrections so glibly promised. He read down here and wrote upstairs. The room was almost as Mummy had left it. The changes were only in that more books and bookshelves had been added and in the photographs in the silver frames. He had taken out the pictures of himself as a baby and himself as a schoolboy and replaced them with one of his parents’ wedding, Daddy in air force uniform, Mummy in cream costume and small cream hat, and one of Daddy in his academic gown and mortarboard. There had never been one of Ribbon himself in similar garments. Mummy, for his own good, had decided he would be better off at home with her, leading a quiet sheltered life, than at a university. Had he regrets? A degree would have been useless to a man with a private income, as Mummy had pointed out, a man who had all the resources of an excellent public library system to educate him.

  He opened Paving Hell. He had a foreboding before he had even turned to the middle of chapter 1, where the first mistake occurred, that nothing would have been put right. All the errors would still be there, for Owlberg’s promises meant nothing, he had probably never passed Ribbon’s comments on to the publishers; and they, if they had received the letter he wrote them, had never answered it. For all that, he was still enraged when he found he was right. Didn’t the man care? Was money and a kind of low notoriety—for you couldn’t call it fame—all he was interested in? None of the errors had been corrected. No, that wasn’t quite true; one had. On page 99 Owlberg’s ridiculous statement that the One World Trade Center tower in NewYork was the world’s tallest building had been altered. Ribbon noted down the remaining mistakes, ready to write to Owlberg the next day. A vituperative letter it would be, spitting venom and catechizing illiteracy, carelessness, and a general disregard (contempt?) for the se
nsibilities of readers. And Owlberg would reply to it in his previous pusillanimous way, making empty promises, for he was no Selma Gunn.

  Ribbon fetched himself a small whiskey and water. It was six o’clock. A cushion behind his head, his feet up on the footstool Mummy had embroidered, but covered now with a plastic sheet, he opened Demogorgon. This was the first book by Kingston Marle he had ever read, but he had some idea of what Marle wrote about. Murder, violence, crime, but instead of a detective detecting and reaching a solution, supernatural interventions, demonic possession, ghosts, as well as a great deal of unnatural or perverted sex, cannibalism, and torture. Occult manifestations occurred side by side with rational, if unedifying, events. Innocent people were caught up in the magical dabblings, frequently going wrong, of so-called adepts. Ribbon had learned this from the reviews he had read of Marle’s books, most of which, surprisingly to him, received good notices in periodicals of repute. That is, the serious and reputable critics engaged by literary editors to comment on his work praised the quality of the prose as vastly superior to the general run of thriller writing. His characters, they said, convinced, and he induced in the reader a very real sense of terror, while a deep vein of moral theology underlay his plot. They also said that his serious approach to mumbo jumbo and such nonsense as evil spirits and necromancy was ridiculous, but they said it en passant and without much enthusiasm. Ribbon read the blurb inside the front cover and turned to chapter 1.

  Almost the first thing he spotted was an error on page 2. He made a note of it. Another occurred on page 7.Whether Marle’s prose was beautiful or not he scarcely noticed; he was too incensed by errors of fact, spelling mistakes, and grammatical howlers. For a while, that is. The first part of the novel concerned a man living alone in London, a man in his own situation whose mother had died not long before.There was another parallel: the man’s name was Charles Ambrose. Well, it was common enough as a surname, much less so as a baptismal name, and only a paranoid person would think any connection was intended.

  Charles Ambrose was rich and powerful, with a house in London, a mansion in the country, and a flat in Paris. All these places seemed to be haunted in various ways by something or other, but the odd thing was that Ribbon could see what that reviewer meant by readers fainting with terror before page 10. He wasn’t going to faint, but he could feel himself growing increasingly alarmed. Frightened would be too strong a word. Every few minutes he found himself glancing up toward the closed door or looking into the dim and shadowy corners of the room. He was such a reader, so exceptionally well-read, that he had thought himself proof against this sort of thing. Why, he had read hundreds of ghost stories in his time. As a boy he had inured himself by reading first Dennis Wheatley, then Stephen King, not to mention M. R. James. And this Demogorgon was so absurd, the supernatural activity the reader was supposed to accept so pathetic, that he wouldn’t have gone on with it but for the mistakes he kept finding on almost every 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 pe
rverted 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.