The Grin of the Dark

'Not even a penny?'

'It isn't funny, Colin. Not everything's funny.'

'You sounded like you thought it was.'

Can this be true? The memory of my own voice is already out of reach. 'I'm saying there's been no – '

My words blunder into one another as if they've fetched up against silence. A transformation is indeed overtaking the amount on the screen. My debt has just acquired an extra zero. For an irrational moment I try to joke that it's nothing, and then my skull grows fragile with realising that now I owe ten times as much. 'No, that's not right,' I protest as if whoever is responsible can hear me. 'No.'

Rufus and Colin step around either side of the desk. As they stoop to the monitor, another zero appears to greet them. Rufus is the first to laugh. 'Well, that's a new one.'

'I've not seen that before,' says Colin.

Do they think it's too absurd to take seriously? It's their job to deal with it. I don't know what sound I utter when a further pair of zeros swells my debt. They put me in mind of eyes pretending to be too blind to watch me. All the noughts might be the eyes of nothingness – and then I realise whose glee I can almost sense. 'It's him, isn't it,' I blurt. 'He's doing it. He's here.'

'Who?' says Colin.

'Where?' says Rufus.

'Don't talk like a pair of clowns. Our emeny, our ennenny. The one who's been after me ever since I started writing about Tubby.' While this isn't quite accurate, since I first wrote about him in my thesis, at least I seem to have regained control of my words. 'Let's see what he's saying now,' I shout loud enough to be heard in the next room. 'Let's see if he gives himself away.'

Rufus and Colin are watching me oddly, but how do they expect me to behave? Perhaps we can collaborate on a response to my persecutor; perhaps they can edit my post. I scrabble at the keys to log onto my Frugonet account. Is it my haste that brings up an altogether different site? In the moment before I expel it from the screen I glimpse fat naked shapes crawling slug-like over one another. In the greyish light I can't tell whether they're babies or some even more primitive life form, and they're gone before I'm sure how widely they're staring and grinning. I don't even know whether the clammy guilt that clings to me is on Rufus's behalf or my own, since my typing managed to locate the site. I try to log on fast enough to pretend I saw nothing and nobody else did.

Hundreds of emails on subjects as nonsensical as the names of their senders are waiting for me. I leave them unopened and move to the newsgroups. Too many to count have a single message for me.

Yes it is.

Perhaps the words and the message are too short to give him the scope to misspell, but I have the disconcerting notion that he has forgotten to. I glare at the screen until it begins to throb. 'What's he mean by that?' I demand.

'What do you make of it?' says Colin.

I wouldn't admit to my feelings if I hadn't been asked, but who can I trust to be sympathetic if not my friends and patrons? 'It sounds as if he's answering me, doesn't it? It sounds as if he heard what I said about him.'

Colin turns away before he speaks. 'I'll check next door.'

'You think he's there?' I whisper. 'Did you hear him?'

Colin glances back too briefly for me to read his expression. 'Check,' he says as he steps into the corridor, 'that we've got access to the copier.'

Does he think I'm being too paranoid? He hasn't been through all I have. At least he has reminded me that there's one aspect of my thoughts Smilemime can't touch – my book. As Colin's footsteps and their flapping echoes veer beyond audibility I brandish the envelope at the screen. I don't care if Rufus hears me snarl 'Try and alter this, you tubby little grurd.' I peel the parcel tape off the envelope and unpick the staples. I look up from dropping the last one with a ting like a tiny bell in the waste bin, but the other sound wasn't Colin's return, it was Rufus shifting his big feet. I slip the pages upside down out of the envelope and feel my grin rising to greet them as I turn them the other way up.

Let stalk about Ubby in Howwylud. Hiss firts flim – hiss debboo – scalled 'The Bets Messy Din'...

Perhaps I'm still wearing a kind of grin as I search the pages for even a single sentence that I remember writing. For as long as it takes me to race through the manuscript it seems my stiffened lips won't let me speak, and then I manage to force out a few basic words. 'He's been here. He's got in.'

Why isn't Rufus bothering to examine the pages? He looks as though just their presence has robbed him of speech. He widens his eyes and turns up his hands to indicate his smile, which I assume is meant to be apologetic. 'How could he have?' I demand.

Does Rufus take this for a game? He might be playing charades, the way he's jerking his hands at his smile, which seems less apologetic than impatient. His lips part, but at first simply to let his pale tongue lick them. Eventually he says 'I did my best. I'm sorry, Simon.'

However clear his words are, I find them indistinguishable from nonsense. 'What did you do?'

'I tried to stop it but I couldn't.'

He keeps lifting his hands as if he's attempting to support his expression. He isn't just smiling – he's miming a smile. The thought settles over my mind like blackened cobweb, darkness rendered substantial. 'You don't mean that,' I plead. 'You're joking.'

He shakes his head but fails to dislodge his smile. 'It's me.'

I grip the corners of the desk. I might be capable of hurling it at him, but I'm hanging onto it in the hope that it at least can be relied upon to stay solid. 'What sense does that make?'

'More than some of the things you've been going through, I should imagine.' He actually sounds self-righteous. 'You've been seeing him, haven't you?' he says with more than a hint of jealousy. 'He's been playing his tricks, or something he stirred up has.'

'Have you?' I retort in too similar a tone. 'Have you been seeing him?'

'Ever since I started looking into him after you brought him up in your thesis. I thought if I got you to research him that would distract him, lure him away. I should have known it would just make him or whatever it is stronger.'

He's apologising again. It's one more bewilderment to add to the mass that's swarming in my skull. I manage to disentangle a question that seems to have a point, at any rate until I voice it. 'Are you saying you found out things about him you didn't tell me?'

'Just a book with a couple of pages on him.' As if this justifies any secretiveness he adds 'It was about surrealism. In French.'

I can barely hear my own question. 'What did you do with it?'

'Wrote in it and sent it on its way. Don't ask me what I wrote, it made no sense to me.' Even more defensively he says 'I know I should have destroyed it but you can't, can you? You have to pass him on to other people. Anyway, we don't matter any more. There'll be no stopping him now.'

'Why not?'

'You've put him on the net. It's his ideal medium, the one he's been waiting for, or whatever he represents has. Everyone can get to him and he can get to everyone.'

'So you're telling me it was his fault,' I say savagely, 'what you did.'

'Depends what you have in mind.'

How can Rufus continue to smile? I grip the desk so fiercely that the corners feel close to piercing my hands. 'You said you couldn't stop posting that crap.'

'No, that isn't what I said.'

I do my best to fend off a sense that the past is changing – that the change is creeping up on me. 'What did you say, then?'

'That I couldn't stop you. I should have known it was no use. Everything's true on the net, and it lets anyone use a mask who wants to. It's the medium he kept talking about.'