Piranha to Scurfy Read Online Free Page B

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