Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

That evening, Mr Edgerton sat at his desk once again and stared at the paper before him. And stared. And stared. Before him, the inkpot monkey squatted impassively, its eyes reflecting the lamplight and lending its mummified form an intimation of life that was both distracting and unsettling. Mr Edgerton poked at it tentatively with his pen, leaving a small black mark on its chest. Like most writers, he had a shallow knowledge of a great many largely useless matters. Among these was anthropology, a consequence of one of his earlier works, an evolutionary fantasy entitled The Monkey’s Uncle. (The Times had described it as ‘largely adequate, if inconsequential’. Mr Edgerton, grateful to be reviewed at all, was rather pleased.) Yet, despite searching through three reference volumes, Mr Edgerton had been unable to identify the origins of the inkpot monkey and had begun to take this as a bad omen.

After another unproductive hour had gone by, its tedium broken only by the spread of an occasional ink blot upon the paper, Mr Edgerton rose and determined to amuse himself by emptying, and then refilling, his pen. Still devoid of inspiration, he wondered if there was some part of the arcane ritual of fuelling one’s pen from the inkpot that he had somehow neglected to perform. He reached down and gently grasped the monkey in order to raise the lid, but something pricked his skin painfully. He drew back his hand immediately and examined the wounded digit. A small, deep cut lay across the pad of his index finger, and blood from the abrasion was running down the length of his pen and congregating at the nib, from which it dripped into the inkpot with soft, regular splashes. Mr Edgerton began to suck the offended member, meanwhile turning his attention to the monkey in an effort to ascertain the cause of his injury. The lamplight revealed a small raised ridge behind the creature’s neck, where a section of curved spine had burst through its tattered fur. A little of Mr Edgerton’s blood could be perceived on the yellowed pallor of the bone.

The unfortunate writer retrieved a small bandage from his medicine cabinet, then cleaned and bound his finger before resuming his seat at his desk. He regarded the monkey warily as he filled his pen, then put it to paper and began to write. At first, the familiarity of the act overcame any feelings of surprise at its sudden return, so that Mr Edgerton had dispensed with two pages of close script and was about to embark upon a third before he paused and looked in puzzlement first at his pen, then at the paper. He reread what he had written, the beginning of a tale of a man who sacrifices love at the altar of success, and found it more than satisfactory; it was, in fact, as fine as anything he had ever written, although he was baffled as to the source of his inspiration. Nevertheless, he shrugged and continued writing, grateful that his old talent had apparently woken from its torpor. He wrote long into the night, refilling his pen as required, and so bound up was he in his exertions that he failed entirely to notice that his wound had reopened and was dripping blood on to pen and page and, at those moments when he replenished his instrument, into the depths of the small Chinese inkpot.

Mr Edgerton slept late the following morning, and awoke to find himself weakened by his efforts of the night before. It was, he supposed, the consequence of months of inactivity, and after coffee and some hot buttered toast he felt much refreshed. He returned to his desk to find that the inkpot monkey had fallen from its perch and now lay on its back amid his pencils and pens. Gingerly, Mr Edgerton lifted it from the desk and found that it weighed considerably more than the inkpot itself and that physics, rather than any flaw in the inkpot’s construction, had played its part in dislodging the monkey from its seat. He also noted that the creature’s fur was far more lustrous than it had appeared in the window of the antique shop, and now shimmered healthily in the morning sunlight.

And then, quite suddenly, Mr Edgerton felt the monkey move. It stretched wearily, as though waking from some long slumber, and its mouth opened in a wide yawn, displaying small blunt teeth. Alarmed, Mr Edgerton dropped the monkey and heard it emit a startled squeak as it landed on the desk. It lay there for a moment or two, then slowly raised itself on its haunches and regarded Mr Edgerton with a slightly hurt expression before ambling over to the inkpot and squatting down gently beside it. With its left hand, it raised the lid of the inkpot and waited patiently for Mr Edgerton to fill his pen. For a time, the bewildered writer was unable to move, so taken aback was he at this turn of events. Then, when it became clear that he had no other option but to begin writing or go mad, he reached for his pen and filled it from the well. The monkey watched him impassively until the reservoir was replenished and Mr Edgerton had begun to write, then promptly fell fast asleep.

Despite his unnerving encounter with the newly animated monkey, Mr Edgerton put in a most productive day and quickly found himself with the bulk of five chapters written, none of them requiring more than a cursory rewrite. It was only when the light had begun to fade and Mr Edgerton’s arm had started to ache that the monkey awoke and padded softly across a virgin page to where Mr Edgerton’s pen lay in his hand. The monkey grasped his index finger with its tiny hands, then placed its mouth against the cut and began to suck. It took Mr Edgerton a moment to realize what was occurring, at which point he rose with a shout and shook the monkey from his finger. It bounced against the inkpot, striking its head soundly upon its base, and lay unmoving upon a sheet of paper.

At once, Mr Edgerton reached for it and raised it in the palm of his left hand. The monkey was obviously stunned, for its eyes were now half-closed and it moved its head slowly from side to side as it tried to focus. Instantly, Mr Edgerton was seized with regret at his hasty action. He had endangered the monkey, which he now acknowledged to be the source of his new-found inspiration. Without it, he would be lost. Torn between fear and disgust, Mr Edgerton reluctantly made his decision: he squeezed together his thumb and forefinger, causing a droplet of blood to emerge from the cut and then, his gorge rising, allowed it to drip into the monkey’s mouth.

The effect was instantaneous. The little mammal’s eyes opened fully, it rose on to its haunches, and then reached for, and grasped, the wounded finger. There it suckled happily, undisturbed by the revolted Mr Edgerton, until it had taken its fill, whereupon it burped contentedly and resumed its slumbers. Mr Edgerton gently laid it beside the inkpot and then, taking up his pen, wrote another two chapters before retiring early to his bed.

Thus it continued. Each day Mr Edgerton rose, fed the monkey a little blood, wrote, fed the monkey once again in the evening, wrote some more, then went to bed and slept like a dead man. The monkey appeared to require little in the way of affection or attention beyond its regular feeds, although it would often touch fascinatedly the miniature of itself that dangled from Mr Edgerton’s wrist. Mr Edgerton, in turn, decided to ignore the fact that the monkey was growing at quite an alarming rate, so that it was now obliged to sit beside him on a small chair while he worked and had taken to dozing on the sofa after its meals. In fact, Mr Edgerton wondered if it might not be possible to train the monkey to do some light household duties, thereby allowing him more time to write, although when he suggested this to the monkey through the use of primitive sign language it grew quite irate and locked itself in the bathroom for an entire afternoon.

In fact, it was not until Mr Edgerton returned home one afternoon from a visit to his publisher to find the inkpot monkey trying on one of his suits that he began to experience serious doubts about their relationship. He had noticed some new and especially disturbing changes in the monkey. It had started to moult, leaving clumps of unsightly grey hair on the carpets and exposing sections of pink-white skin. It had also lost some weight from its face; that, or its bone structure had begun to alter, for it now presented a more angular aspect than it had previously done. In addition, the monkey was now over four feet tall and Mr Edgerton had been forced to open veins in his wrists and legs in order to keep it sated. The more Mr Edgerton considered the matter, the more convinced he became that the creature was undergoing some significant transformation. Yet there were still chapters of the book to be completed, and the writer was reluctant to alienate his mascot. So he suffered in silence, sleeping now for much of the day and emerging only to write for increasingly short periods of time before returning to his bed and collapsing into a dreamless slumber.