At first, Mr. Edgerton had almost welcomed the opportunity to rest his creative muscles. He took coffee with those less successful than himself, safe in the knowledge that a brief hiatus in production was unlikely to damage his reputation among them as a prolific producer of adequate material. He attended the best shows, making sure that his presence was noted by taking his seat at the last possible moment. When questioned about his latest endeavors, he would merely smile mysteriously and tap the side of his nose with his index finger, a gesture employed by Mr. Edgerton to suggest that he was in the midst of some great literary endeavor, but which instead gave the unfortunate impression that a particularly irritating fragment of snuff had stubbornly lodged itself in his nostril.
But after a time, Mr. Edgerton stopped attending musical performances, and his peers were forced to find other sources of amusement at the city’s coffeehouses. Conversations about writing began to pain him, and the sight of those whose creative juices flowed more freely than his own compounded his agony. He found himself unable to keep the bitterness from his voice as he spoke of such blessed souls, arousing immediately the suspicions of his fellow, less prolific, scribblers, for although they were more than willing to skewer another’s reputation with a barbed witticism or unflattering anecdote, they avoided the use of brute insults or, indeed, any form of behavior that might lead a casual listener to suspect that they were not their rivals’ superiors in talent, success, and critical acclaim. Mr. Edgerton came to fear that even his silences now gave him away, clouded over as they were with brooding and frustration, and so his social appearances grew fewer and fewer until at last they ceased altogether. In truth, his colleagues were not unduly troubled by his absence. They had reluctantly tolerated his modest success. Now, with the taint of failure upon him, they relished his discomfort.
To further complicate matters, Mr. Edgerton’s wallet had begun to feel decidedly lightweight of late, and nothing will dampen a man’s ardor for life more than an empty pocket. Like a rodent gripped in the coils of a great constricting snake, he found that the more he struggled against his situation, the tighter the pressure upon him grew. Necessity, wrote Ovid, is the mother of invention. For Mr. Edgerton, desperation was proving to be the father of despair.
And so, once again, he found himself wandering the streets, trawling the city’s great rivers of people in the hope of netting a single idea. In time, he came to Charing Cross Road, but the miles of shelved books only depressed him further, especially since he could find none of his own among their number. Head down, he cut through Cecil Court and made his way into Covent Garden in the faint hope that the vibrancy of the market might spur his sluggish subconscious into action. He was almost at the Magistrates Court when something caught his eye in the window of a small antiques shop. There, partially hidden behind a framed portrait of Admiral Nelson and a stuffed magpie, was a most remarkable inkpot.
The inkpot was silver, and about four inches tall, with a lacquered base adorned by Chinese characters. But what was most striking about it was the small, mummified monkey that perched upon its lid, its clawed toes clasped upon the rim and its dark eyes gleaming in the summer sunlight. It was obviously an infant of its species, perhaps even a fetus of some kind, for it was no more than three inches in height and predominantly gray in color, except for its face, which was blackened around the mouth as if the monkey had been sipping from its own ink. It really was a most ghastly creature, but Mr. Edgerton had acquired the civilized man’s taste for the grotesque and he quickly made his way into the darkened shop to inquire about the nature of the item in question.
The owner of the business proved to be almost as distasteful in appearance as the creature that had attracted Mr. Edgerton’s attention, as though the man were somehow father to the monkey. His teeth were too numerous for his mouth, his mouth too large for his face, and his head too great for his body. Combined with a pronounced stoop to his back, his aspect was that of one constantly on the verge of toppling over. He also smelled decidedly odd, and Mr. Edgerton quickly concluded that he was probably in the habit of sleeping in his clothes, a deduction that briefly led the afflicted writer to an unwelcome speculation upon the nature of the body that lay concealed beneath the layers of unwashed clothing.
Nevertheless, the proprietor proved to be a veritable font of knowledge about the items in his possession, including the article that had brought Mr. Edgerton into his presence. The mummified primate was, he informed the writer, an inkpot monkey, a creature of Chinese mythology. According to the myth, the monkey provided artistic inspiration in return for the residues of ink left in the bottom of the inkpot. As he spoke, the dealer placed the inkpot on the counter before him, like an angler skillfully spinning a lure before a hungry fish in the hope of drawing it onto his hook.
Mr. Edgerton’s limited ability, like that of so many of his kind, was inversely proportionate to his sense of self-regard, and he was therefore generally unwilling to entertain the possibility that his genius could be attributed to any outside agency. Nevertheless, he was a man profoundly in need of inspiration from any source, and had recently been considering opium or cheap gin as possible catalysts. Having heard the story of the inkpot, he required no further convincing. He paid over money he could ill afford for the faint hope of redemption offered by the curiosity, and made his way back to his small apartment with the inkpot and its monkey tucked beneath his arm in a cloak of brown paper.
Mr. Edgerton occupied a set of rooms above a tobacconist’s store on Marylebone High Street, a recent development forced upon him by his straitened circumstances. While Mr. Edgerton did not himself partake of the noble weed, his walls were yellowed by the fumes that regularly wended their way between the cracks in the floorboards, and his clothing and furnishings reeked of assorted cigars, cigarettes, pipe tobaccos, and even the more eye-watering forms of snuff. His dwelling was, therefore, more than a little depressing, and would almost certainly have provided him with the impetus necessary to improve his finances were he not so troubled by the absence of his muse.
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. (One newspaper 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, he 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 inkblot 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 fueling one’s pen from the inkpot that he had somehow neglected to perform. He reached down, and had gently grasped the monkey in order to raise the lid, when something pricked his skin painfully. He drew back his hand immediately and examined the wounded digit. A deep cut ran across the pad of his index finger, and blood from the abrasion was flowing 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.