John Kenton
interoffice memo TO: John Kenton FROM: Riddley RE: Possible incoming package
Yassuh, Mist Kenton!
Riddley/Mail Room
from THE SAKRED BOOK OF CARLOS SAKRED MONTH OF FEBBA (Entry #64)
I know how to get him. I have set things in motion, praise Abbalah. Praise Green Demeter. I'll get them all. Green Green “must be seen.” Ha! You Judas! Little do you know! But I know! All about your girlfriend, too-only girlfriend is now girlFIEND, little do you know what she is up to! There is another mule kicking in your stall, Mr. Judas Big-Shot Editor! OUIJA says this mule's name is GARY! In my dreams I have seen them and GARY is HAIRY! Not like you, you wimpy little JUDAS! Soon I'm sending you a present! Everyone prospers! Every Judas safe in the arms of Abbalah! Come Abbalah! COME GREAT DEMETER!
COME GREEN!
SYNOPSIS
JOHN KENTON, who majored in English and was President of the Brown University Literary Society, has had a rude initiation into the real world as one of Zenith House's four editors. Zenith House, which captured only 2% of the total paperback market the year before (1980), is dying on the vine. All of its employees are worried that Apex, the parent corporation, may soon take extreme measures to stem the tide of red ink... and the most likely possibility is looking more and more like terminating Zenith House, with extreme sanction. The only hope is a drastic sales turnaround, but with Zenith's tiny advances and creaky distribution system, that seems unlikely.
Enter CARLOS DETWEILLER, first in the form of a query letter received by John Kenton. Detweiller, twenty-three, works in the Central Falls House of Flowers and is hawking a book he's written, called True Tales of Demon Infestations. Kenton, with the vague idea that Detweiller may have some interesting stuff which can be rewritten by a staffer, encourages Detweiller to submit sample chapters and an outline. Detweiller instead submits the entire manuscript, along with a bundle of photographs. The mss is even more abysmal than Kenton-who thought the book could maybe be juiced up for The Amityville Horror audience-would have believed in his worst nightmares. Yet the worst nightmare of all is contained in the form of the enclosed photographs. Most are shots of painfully faked seance effects, but four of them show a gruesomely realistic human sacrifice, in which an old man's heart is being pulled from his gaping chest... and it seems very likely to Kenton that the fellow doing the pulling is none other than Carlos Detweiller himself.
ROGER WADE concurs with Kenton's feeling that they have stumbled into something which is probably a police matter-and a very nasty police matter at that. Kenton takes the photos to SGT. TYNDALE, who wires them to CHIEF IVERSON in Central Falls. Carlos Detweiller is arrested, then released when an officer assigned to surveillance sees the photos in question and remarks that he saw the so-called “sacrifice victim” sitting in the House of Flowers office that very day, playing solitaire and watching Ryan's Hope on TV. Tyndale tries to comfort Kenton. Go home, he says, have a drink, forget it. You made a perfectly forgivable mistake in the course of trying to do your civic duty.
Kenton burns the “sacrifice photos,” but he can't forget; he receives a letter from the obviously insane Carlos Detweiller, promising revenge. Two weeks later, he receives a letter from one “Roberta Solrac,” who purports to be a great fan of Zenith's second-hottest author, Anthony La Scorbia (La Scorbia is responsible for a series of nature-run-amok novels such as Rats from Hell, Ants from Hell, and Scorpions from Hell). “She” claims to have sent La Scorbia roses, and wants to send Kenton, as La Scorbia's editor, a small plant “as a token of esteem.”
Kenton, no fool, realizes at once that Solrac is Carlos spelled backward... and Detweiller, of course, worked in a greenhouse. Convinced that the “token of esteem” is apt to be something like deadly nightshade or belladonna, Kenton sends an interoffice memo to Riddley, instructing him to incinerate any package which comes to him from a “Roberta Solrac.”
RIDDLEY WALKER, who respects Kenton more than Kenton himself would ever believe, agrees, but privately adopts a wait-and-see attitude. Near the end of February 1981, a package from “Roberta Solrac,” addressed to John Kenton, actually does arrive. Riddley opens the package in spite of a strong feeling that the sender-Detweiller-is a terribly evil man. If so, the contents of the package are hardly in keeping with such notions; it is nothing more than a sickly-looking Common Ivy with a little plastic sign stuck into the earth of its pot. The sign reads:
HI!
MY NAME IS ZENITH
I AM A GIFT TO JOHN
FROM ROBERTA
Riddley puts it on a high shelf of his janitor's room and forgets it.
For the time being.
February 25
Dear Ruth,
I've got a case of the mean reds, so I thought I'd pass some of them on-see the enclosed Xeroxes, concluding with a typically impudent communication from Riddley, he of the coal-black skin and three hundred huge white teeth.
You'll notice that Roger kicked my ass good and hardnot much like Roger, and doubly sobering for that very reason. I don't think one has to be very paranoid to see that he's talking about the possibility of firing me. If I'd talked this out with him over martinis at Flaherty's after work, I doubt very much if he would have come down so hard, and of course I had no idea he was waiting on a call from Enders. I undoubtedly deserved the ass-kicking I got-I haven't really been doing my job-but he has no idea of the scare that letter threw into me when I realized it was Detweiller again. I'm too goddam thin-skinned for my own good, that's what Roger thinks... but Detweiller is scary for other, less easily grasped reasons. Being the idee that's gotten fixe in some crazy's head has got to be one of the most uncomfortable feelings in the world-if I knew Jody Foster, I think I'd give her a jingle and tell her I know exactly how she feels. There's an almost palpable texture of slime about Detweiller's communications, and oh boy, oh yeah, I wish I could get him out of my head, but I still have nightmares about those pictures.
Anyway, I have taken care of matters as well as I can, and no, I have no intention of calling Central Falls. We have an editorial meeting tomorrow. I'll try to the best of my limited abilities to get back on the beam... except at Zenith House the beam is so narrow it almost doesn't exist.
I love you, I miss you, I long for your return. Maybe you being gone is part of the problem. Not to make you feel guilty.
All my love,
John
From the journals of Riddley Walker
2/23/81
Like a stone thrown into a large and stagnant pond, the Detweiller affair has caused any number of ripples at my place of employment. I thought that all of them had gone by; yet this afternoon one more rolled past, and who is to say even that one will be the last?