Piranha to Scurfy Read Online Free Page A

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