Piranha to Scurfy

by Ruth Rendell

  Was there some way he could write to Kingston Marle and make things all right without groveling, without apologizing? God forbid that he should apologize for boldly telling truths that needed to be told. But could he compose something, without saying he was sorry, that would mollify Marle—better still, that would make him understand? He had a notion that he would feel easier in his mind if he wrote to Marle, would sleep better at night. The two nights he had passed at Frank’s had been very wretched, the second one almost sleepless.

  What was he afraid of? Afraid of writing and afraid of not writing? Just afraid? Marle couldn’t do anything to him. Ribbon acknowledged to himself that he had no absurd fears of Marle’s setting some hit man on him or stalking him or even attempting to sue him for libel. It wasn’t that. What was it then? The cliché came into his head unbidden, the definition of what he felt: a nameless dread. If only Mummy were here to advise him! Suddenly he longed for her, and tears pricked the backs of his eyes. Yet he knew what she would have said. She would have said what she had that last time.

  That Encyclopaedia Britannica volume 8 had been lying on the table. He had just shown Mummy the letter he had written to Desmond Erb, apologizing for correcting him when he wrote about “the quinone structure.” Of course he should have looked the word up, but he hadn’t. He had been so sure it should have been “quinine.” Erb had been justifiably indignant, as writers tended to be, when he corrected an error in their work that was in fact not an error at all. He would never forget Mummy’s anger, nor anything of that quarrel, come to that; how, almost of their own volition, his hands had crept across the desk toward the black, blue, and gold volume ...

  She was not here now to stop him, and after a while he wrote:

  Dear Mr. Marle,

  With reference to my letter of June 4th, in which I pointed out certain errors of fact and of grammar and spelling in your recent novel, I fear I may inadvertently have caused you pain. This was far from my intention. If I have hurt your feelings I must tell you that I very much regret this. I hope you will overlook it and forgive me.

  Yours sincerely,

  Reading this over, Ribbon found he very much disliked the bit about overlooking and forgiving. “Regret” wasn’t right either. Also he hadn’t actually named the book. He ought to have put in its title but, strangely, he found himself reluctant to type the word Demogorgon. It was as if, by putting it into cold print, he would set something in train, spark off some reaction. Of course, this was mad. He must be getting tired. Nevertheless, he composed a second letter.

  Dear Mr. Marle,

  With reference to my letter to yourself of June 4th, in which I pointed out certain errors in your recent and highly acclaimed novel, I fear I may inadvertently have hurt your feelings. It was not my intention to cause you pain. I am well aware—who is not?—of the high position you enjoy in the ranks of literature. The amendments I suggested you make to the novel when it appears in paperback—in many hundreds of thousand copies, no doubt—were meant in a spirit of assistance, not criticism, simply so that a good book might be made better.

  Yours sincerely,

  Sycophantic. But what could be more mollifying than flattery? Ribbon endured half an hour’s agony and self-doubt, self-recrimination, and self justification too, before writing a third and final letter.

  Dear Mr. Marle,

  With reference to my letter to your good self, dated June 4th, in which I presumed to criticize your recent novel, I fear I may inadvertently have been wanting in respect. I hope you will believe me when I say it was not my intention to offend you. You enjoy a high and well-deserved position in the ranks of literature. It was gauche and clumsy of me to write to you as I did.

  With best wishes,

  Yours sincerely,

  To grovel in this way made Ribbon feel actually sick. And it was all lies too. Of course it had been his intention to offend the man, to cause him pain, and to make him angry. He would have given a great deal to recall that earlier letter but this—he quoted silently to himself those hackneyed but apt words about the moving finger that writes and having writ moves on—neither he nor anyone else could do. What did it matter if he suffered half an hour’s humiliation when by sending this apology he would end his sufferings? Thank heaven only that Mummy wasn’t here to see it.

  Those letters had taken him hours, and it had grown quite dark. Unexpectedly dark, he thought, for nine in the evening in the middle of June, with the longest day not much more than a week away. But still he sat there, in the dusk, looking at the backs of houses, yellow brick punctured by the bright rectangles of windows, at the big shaggy trees, his own garden, the square of grass dotted with dark shrubs, big and small. He had never previously noticed how unpleasant ordinary privets and cypresses can look in deep twilight when they are not clustered together in a shrubbery or copse, when they stand individually on an otherwise open space, strange shapes, tall and slender or round and squat, or with a branch here and there protruding like a limb, and casting elongated shadows.

  He got up abruptly and put the light on. The garden and its gathering of bushes disappeared. The window became dark, shiny, opaque. He switched off the light almost immediately and went downstairs. Seeing Demogorgon on the coffee table made him jump. What was it doing there? How did it get there? He had put it in the drawer. And there was the drawer standing open to prove it.

  It couldn’t have got out of the drawer and returned to the table on its own. Could it? Of course not. Ribbon put on every light in the room. He left the curtains open so that he could see the streetlights as well. He must have left the book on the table himself. He must have intended to put it into the drawer and for some reason not done so. Possibly he had been interrupted. But nothing ever interrupted what he was doing, did it? He couldn’t remember. A cold teapot and a cup of cold tea stood on the tray on the coffee table beside the book. He couldn’t remember making tea.

  After he had taken the tray and the cold teapot away and poured the cold tea down the sink, he sat down in an armchair with Chambers Dictionary. He realized that he had never found out what the word Demogorgon meant. Here was the definition: “A mysterious infernal deity first mentioned about A.D. 450 (Appar Gr daimon deity, and gorgo Gorgon, from gorgos terrible).” He shuddered, closed the dictionary, and opened the second Channon Scott Smith paperback he had bought. This novel had been published four years before, but Ribbon had never read it, nor indeed any of the works of Mr. Scott Smith before the recently published one, but he thought this fat volume might yield a rich harvest, if Carol Conway were anything to go by. But instead of opening Destiny’s Suzerain, he found that the book in his hands was Demogorgon, open one page past where he had stopped a few days before.

  In a kind of horrified wonder, he began to read. It was curious how he was compelled to go on reading, considering how every line was like a faint pinprick in his equilibrium, a tiny physical tremor through his body, reminding him of those things he had written to Kingston Marle and the look Marle had given him in Oxford on Saturday. Later he was to ask himself why he had read any more of it at all, why he hadn’t just stopped, why indeed he hadn’t put the book in the rubbish for the refuse collectors to take away in the morning.

  The dark shape in the corner of Charles Ambrose’s tent was appearing for the first time: in his tent, then his hotel bedroom, his mansion in Shropshire, his flat in Mayfair. A small, curled-up shape like a tiny huddled person or small monkey. It sat or simply was, amorphous but for faintly visible hands or paws, and uniformly dark but for pinpoint malevolent eyes that stared and glinted. Ribbon looked up from the page for a moment. The lights were very bright. Out in the street a couple went by, hand in hand, talking and laughing. Usually the noise they made would have angered him, but tonight he felt curiously comforted. They made him feel he wasn’t alone. They drew him, briefly, into reality. He would post the letter in the morning, and once it had gone all would be well.

  He read two more pages.The unraveling of the mystery
began on page 423. The Demogorgon was Charles Ambrose’s own mother, who had been murdered and whom he had buried in the grounds of his Shropshire house. Finally, she came back to tell him the truth, came in the guise of a cypress tree that walked out of the pinetum. Ribbon gasped out loud. It was his own story. How had Marle known? What was Marle—some kind of god or magus that he knew such things? The dreadful notion came to him that Demogorgon had not always been like this, that the ending had originally been different, but that Marle, seeing him in Oxford and immediately identifying him with the writer of that defamatory letter, had by some remote control or sorcery altered the end of the copy that was in his, Ribbon’s, possession.

  He went upstairs and rewrote his letter, adding to the existing text: “Please forgive me. I meant you no harm. Don’t torment me like this. I can’t stand any more.” It was a long time before he went to bed. Why go to bed when you know you won’t sleep? With the light on—and all the lights in the house were on now—he couldn’t see the garden, the shrubs on the lawn, the flower bed, but he drew the curtains just the same. At last he fell uneasily asleep in his chair, waking four or five hours later to the horrid thought that his original letter to Marle was the first really vituperative criticism he had sent to anyone since Mummy’s death. Was there some significance in this? Did it mean he couldn’t get along without Mummy? Or, worse, that he had killed all the power and confidence in himself he had once felt?

  He got up, had a rejuvenating shower, but was unable to face breakfast. The three letters he had written the night before were in the postbox by nine, and Ribbon on the way to the tube station. Waterstones in Leadenhall Market was his destination. He bought Clara Jenkins’s Tales My Lover Told Me in hardcover, as well as Raymond Kobbo’s The Nomad’s Smile and Natalya Dreadnought’s Tick in paperback. Copies of Demogorgon were everywhere, stacked in piles or displayed in fanciful arrangements. Ribbon forced himself to touch one of them, to pick it up. He looked over his shoulder to see if any of the assistants were watching him and, having established that they were not, opened it at page 423. It was as he had thought, as he had hardly dared put into words. Charles Ambrose’s mother made no appearance; there was nothing about a burial in the grounds of Montpellier Hall or a cypress tree walking. The end was quite different. Charles Ambrose, married to Kayra in a ceremony conducted in a balloon above the Himalayas, awakens on his wedding night and sees in the corner of the honeymoon bedroom the demon curled up, hunched and small, staring at him with gloating eyes. It had followed him from Egypt to Shropshire, from London to Russia, from Russia to New Orleans, and from New Orleans to Nepal. It would never leave him; it was his for life and perhaps beyond.

  Ribbon replaced the book, took up another copy. The same thing: no murder, no burial, no tree walking, only the horror of the demon in the bedroom. So he had been right. Marle had infused this alternative ending into his copy alone. It was part of the torment, part of the revenge for the insults Ribbon had heaped on him. On the way back to Liverpool Street Station a shout and a thump made him look over his shoulder—a taxi had clipped the rear wheel of a motorbike—and he saw, a long way behind, Kingston Marle following him.

  Ribbon thought he would faint. A great flood of heat washed over him, to be succeeded by shivering. Panic held him still for a moment. Then he dived into a shop, a sweetshop it was, and it was like entering a giant chocolate box. The scent of chocolate swamped him. Trembling, he stared at the street through a window draped with pink frills. Ages passed before Kingston Marle went by. He paused, turned his head to look at the chocolates, and Ribbon, again almost fainting, saw an unknown man, lantern-jawed but not monstrously so, long-haired but the hair sparse and brown, the blue eyes mild and wistful. Ribbon’s heartbeat slowed; the blood withdrew from the surface of his skin. He muttered, “No, no thank you,” to the woman behind the counter and went back into the street. What a wretched state his nerves were in! He’d be encountering a scaly paw in the wardrobe next. Clasping his bag of books, he got thoughtfully into the train.

  What he really should have done was add a P.S. to the effect that he would appreciate a prompt acknowledgment of his letter. Just a line saying something like “Please be kind enough to acknowledge receipt.” However, it was too late now. Kingston Marle’s publisher would get his letter tomorrow and send it straight on. Ribbon knew publishers did not always do this, but surely in the case of so eminent an author and one of the most profitable on their list...

  Sending the letter should have allayed his fears, but they seemed to crowd in upon him more urgently, jostling each other for preeminence in his mind.The man who had followed him along Bishopsgate, for instance. Of course he knew it had not been Kingston Marle, yet the similarity of build, of feature, of height between the two men was too great for coincidence. The most likely explanation was that his stalker was Marle’s younger brother, and now, as he reached this reasonable conclusion, Ribbon no longer saw the man’s eyes as mild but as sly and crafty. When his letter came Marle would call his brother off but, in the nature of things, the letter could not arrive at Marle’s home before Wednesday at the earliest. Then there was the matter of The Book itself. The drawer in which it lay failed to hide it adequately. It was part of a mahogany cabinet (one of Mummy’s wedding presents, Ribbon believed), well polished but of course opaque.Yet sometimes the wood seemed to become transparent and the harsh reds and glaring silver of Demogorgon shine through it as he understood a block of radium would appear as a glowing cuboid behind a wall of solid matter. Approaching closely, creeping up on it, he would see the bright colors fade and the woodwork reappear, smooth, shiny, and ordinary once more.

  In the study upstairs on Monday evening he tried to do some work, but his eye was constantly drawn to the window and what lay beyond. He became convinced that the bushes on the lawn had moved.That small thin one had surely stood next to the pair of tall fat ones, not several yards away. Since the night before it had shifted its position, taking a step nearer to the house. Drawing the curtains helped, but after a while he got up and pulled them apart a little to check on the big round bush, to see if it had taken a step farther or had returned to its previous position. It was where it had been ten minutes before. All should have been well, but it was not. The room itself had become uncomfortable, and he resolved not to go back there, to move the computer downstairs, until he had heard from Kingston Marle.

  The doorbell ringing made him jump so violently he felt pain travel through his body and reverberate. Immediately he thought of Marle’s brother. Suppose Marle’s brother, a strong young man, was outside the door and when it was opened would force his way in? Or, worse, was merely checking that Ribbon was at home and, when footsteps sounded inside, intended to disappear? Ribbon went down. He took a deep breath and threw the door open. His caller was Glenys Next-door.

  Marching in without being invited, she said, “Hiya, Amby” and explained that Tinks Next-door was missing. The cat had not been home since the morning, when he was last seen by Sandra On-the-other-side sitting in Ribbon’s front garden eating a bird.

  “I’m out of my mind with worry, as you can imagine, Amby.”

  As a matter of fact, he couldn’t. Ribbon cared very little for songbirds, but he cared for feline predators even less. “I’ll let you know if I come across him. However”—he laughed lightly—“he knows he’s not popular with me, so he makes himself scarce.”

  This was the wrong thing to say. In the works of his less literate authors Ribbon sometimes came upon the expression to bridle: “she bridled” or even “the young woman bridled.” At last he understood what it meant. Glenys Next-door tossed her head, raised her eyebrows, and looked down her nose at him.

  “I’m sorry for you, Amby, I really am.You must find that attitude problem of yours a real hang-up. I mean socially. I’ve tried to ignore it all these years, but there comes a time when one has to speak one’s mind. No, don’t bother, please, I can see myself out.”

  This was not going to be a good nigh
t. He knew that before he switched the bedside light off. For one thing, he always read in bed before going to sleep. Always had and always would. But for some reason he had forgotten to take Destiny’s Suzerain upstairs with him, and though his bedroom was full of reading matter, shelves and shelves of it, he had read all the books before. Of course he could have gone downstairs and fetched himself a book, or even just gone into the study, which was lined with books. Booked, not papered, indeed. He could have done so, in theory he could have, but on coming into his bedroom he had locked the door. Why? He was unable to answer that question, though he put it to himself several times. It was a small house, potentially brightly lit, in a street of a hundred and fifty such houses, all populated. A dreadful feeling descended upon him as he lay in bed that if he unlocked that door, if he turned the key and opened it, something would come in. Was it the small thin bush that would come in? These thoughts, ridiculous, unworthy of him, puerile, frightened him so much that he put the bedside lamp on and left it on till morning.

  Tuesday’s post brought two letters. Eric Owlberg called Ribbon “a little harsh” and informed him that printers do not always do as they are told. Jeanne Pettle’s letter was from a secretary who wrote that Ms. Pettle was away on an extended publicity tour but would certainly attend to his “interesting communication” when she returned. There was nothing from Dillon’s. It was a bright sunny day. Ribbon went into the study and contemplated the garden. The shrubs were, of course, where they had always been. Or where they had been before the large round bush stepped back into its original position?