The Mammoth Book of Terror (8 page)

“When’s your mother coming home from the hospital?”

“I don’t know. She said she was going to look in on someone, I don’t know who, on her way back.”

They stared at each other across the room, then gathered in air and screeched it out in a victory yell that shattered all their doubts. Eric fetched two cans of soda, opening one and immediately
pouring it over Caren’s head.

“I told you I was right, and I was, right?”

Caren grabbed for the other can, but he ducked away. “So what?” she said, laughing. “Nobody’s going to believe us. They don’t know she was some kind of a witch
thing.”

“What do you care?” he shouted, leaping onto the couch to avoid her grasp. “We’re still heroes. And everything will be all right, you’ll see.”

“One of these days,” he said, “I’m going to be the world’s best trumpet player, and you can come to my opening and tell everyone you know
me.”

“No thanks,” she said. “You look like an elephant with that horn in your mouth.”

He laughed, leaped over the arm. But he wasn’t fast enough to escape Caren’s hand, and in a minute the second container of soda was emptied over his head, and Caren, for good
measure, rubbed it in like shampoo.

“I don’t care,” he shouted. “I don’t care.”

“Hey, we’d better clean this up before your mother gets home.”

Eric looked at the still bubbling soda spilled all over the tiles, and he nodded. His arms felt leaden, his legs began to stiffen, and the stuffing in his head wouldn’t go away. Caren
prodded him again, and he ran toward the stairs, didn’t hear her warning yell until it was too late. His foot slid in one of the puddles and, in trying to wave his arms to keep his balance,
pitched face forward into the corner with the lamp.

Caren paled when he finally turned around, groaning, and she screamed when he dropped his hands from his face and smeared the blood that ran from his lips.

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER LIVES AND WORKS
in central London, where he is a director of the Soho movie marketing company The Creative Partnership, producing TV
and radio scripts, documentaries, trailers and promotional shorts. He spends the remainder of his time writing short stories and novels, and he contributes a regular column about the cinema to
The 3rd Alternative.

His books include the novels
Roofworld, Rune, Red Bride, Darkest Day, Spanky, Psychoville, Disturbia, Soho Black, Calabash, Full Dark House
and
The Water House
, and such short
story collections as
The Bureau of Lost Souls, City Jitters, Sharper Knives, Flesh Wounds, Personal Demons, Uncut, The Devil in Me
and
Demonized. Breathe
is a new novella from Telos
Publishing.

Fowler’s short story “Wageslaves” won the 1998 British Fantasy Award, and he also scripted the 1997 graphic novel
Menz Insana
, illustrated by John Bolton.

“‘Turbo-Satan’ sprang from watching a TV series about tower blocks,” recalls Fowler, “and how teenagers were setting up and destroying each other’s pirate
radio stations on the rooftops.

“I also wanted to do a new ‘urban legend’ story involving mobile phones, but needed an unguessable outcome rather than the usual ‘then the Devil appears’ kind of
ending such stories attract.

“Hopefully readers won’t be prepared for the punch-line to this!”

Balancing under leaking concrete eaves, looking out on such dingy grey rain that he could have been trapped inside a fish tank in need of a good clean, he felt more than usually depressed. The
student curse: no money, no dope, no fags, no booze, nothing to do, nowhere to go, no-one who cared if he went missing for all eternity. He had chosen to be like this, had got what he wanted, and
now he didn’t want it.

Withdrawn inside his padded grey Stussy jacket, he sat beneath the stilted flats, on the railing with the torn-up paintwork that had been ground away by the block’s Huckjam skateboarders
who ripped up their own bones more than they flipped any cool moves, because this wasn’t Dogtown, it was Tower Hamlets, toilet of the world, arse-end of the universe, and every extra minute
he spent here Mats could feel his soul dying, incrementally planed away by the sheer debilitating sweep of life’s second hand. London’s a great place if you have plans, he thought,
otherwise you sit and wait and listen to the clocks ticking. He should never have turned down his father’s offer of a monthly cheque.

“You’re late,” he complained to Daz, when Daz finally showed up. “Every minute we’re getting older, every hour passed is another lost forever. Don’t you
wonder about that?”

“If you think about it you’ll want to change things and you can’t, so the gap between what you want and the way things actually are keeps growing until you drive yourself
insane, so actually no, I don’t,” said Daz. “Have you got any fags?”

They were first year graphic art students, college locked for the duration of the Christmas break because vandals had turned the place over and all passes had been rescinded until a new security
system could be installed. So Mats was sleeping on Daz’s mother’s lounge sofa because he didn’t want to spend Christmas with his parents. Not that they cared whether he showed or
not, and Daz’s mother was away visiting her boyfriend in Cardiff, possibly the only place that gave Tower Hamlets a run for its money in the race to become Britain’s grimmest area.

“It’ll be a new year in two days’ time, and I have absolute zero to look forward to,” Mats complained. “I hate my life. All the crappy art appreciation classes I
took at school are never going to give me the things I want. Kids in Africa have a better time than I do.”

“I don’t think they do, actually,” Daz suggested.

The two students had so little in common it was perhaps only proximity that connected them. Mathew’s parents were not, in truth, missing him. Having given in to their son for too long,
they had allowed him to attend art college in the hope that he would eventually weary of trying to be outrageous. His parents were not outraged, or even vaguely shocked, by his attempts to test the
limits of their liberality. If truth be told, they found him rather boring, a bit of an angry student cliche, incapable of understanding that the world’s axis was not set through his
heart.

Mats considered himself more sensitive than those around him, but his convictions had the depth and frailty of autumn leaves. His parents could see he was adrift but had run out of solutions.
They were comforted by the knowledge that he could only fall as far as his trust fund allowed, and were happy to let him get on with the gruesome task of self-discovery. What he really wanted, he
told them unconvincingly, was to become a citizen of the world. Finally they shrugged and left him alone.

“The problem is that I haven’t been properly equipped to deal with the future,” Mats continued, “and there’s no nurture system for highly sensitive
people.”

Daz had heard all this before, and had other things on his mind; his sister was pregnant and broke, his mother increasingly suffered mental problems and was probably going to lose her flat.
Oddly, listening to Mats moaning about his life didn’t annoy him; it had a curiously calming effect, because his fellow student was so fake that you could make him believe anything.
Conversely, Daz attracted Mats because he was real. There was a loose-limbed lying craziness that sometimes took Daz to the brink of a mental breakdown, which was all the more frightening because
his nerve endings crackled like exposed live wires. It took guts to be nuts, and Daz was braver than most.

Mats hadn’t stopped complaining for almost twenty minutes. “I mean,” he was saying now, “what’s the pointin creating real art when it’s denied an impact? I
don’t know anything that can change anything.”

“I do,” said Daz, cutting him off. “I know a trick.”

“What kind of a trick?”

Daz jumped up and brushed out his jeans, then headed into the rain-stained block of flats behind them.

“Where are you going?” asked Mats as they moved through the dim concrete bunker that passed for the building’s foyer. Daz just grinned, dancing across orange tiles to smack the
lift buttons with the back of his fist.

“There’s only one place it works,” said Daz, stepping into the lift, three narrow walls of goose-fleshed steel that reeked of urine and something worse. He pumped the panel,
firing them to the top floor. When they got out, he pushed at the emergency exit and took the stairs to the roof three at a time. Montgomery House was required to keep the door unlocked in case of
fire evacuation. Mats didn’t like thirty-storey tower blocks, too much working-class bad karma forced upright into one small space, but he felt safe with Daz, who had chased storms from the
stairwells since he was two-foot-six.

“Is it cool to be up here?” Mats asked, all the same. The hazing rain had dropped a grey dome over the top of the block. He walked to the edge of the roof and looked down, but the
ground was lost in a vaporous ocean.

“There’s some kids run a pirate station from one of the flats, that’s that thing over there.” Daz pointed to the makeshift mast attached to the satellite TV rig propped
in the centre of the gravelled flat-top. “Touch their stuff and they’ll cut you up. No-one else ever comes up here.” The wind moaned in the wires strung between the struts of the
satellite mount. Five blocks, all with their own pirate sounds. “When they’re not chucking vinyl, they’re taking each other’s signals down with bolt-cutters. Give me your
mobile.”

“Fuck right off, I got about three calls left before it stiffs.”

“Come on, check this,” said Daz, snatching the mobile away from Mats. He flipped it open and punched in 7–2–8–2–6, waited for a moment, held it high, punched
in the same numbers again, waited, held it high again, did it twice more, making five numbers five times, then turned the phone around so that Daz could see.

Behind them, the makeshift transmitter released a melancholy hum, like a phasing analogue radio. Mats could feel the crackle of electricity rustling under his clothes, as though he was about to
be hit by lightning. Something had happened to the phone’s screen; the colours had turned chromatic, and were cascading like psychedelic raindrops on a window.

“You screwed up my phone, man. What did you do?”

“7–2–8–2–6, you figure it out.”

“I don’t know,” Mats admitted, “you paying your congestion charge?” A lame joke, seeing as neither of them owned any kind of vehicle.

“Try texting the number, see what comes up.”

Mats went to MESSAGES, and tapped in the digits. “Oh, very mature. How do I clear the screen?”

“Can’t, you have to put in a text message to that number to get rid of it.”

“What is it, a glitch in the system?”

“Must be, only works on a Nokia, and only when you’re near a mast, getting a clear signal.”

“I don’t get it, what’s the point?”

“You didn’t type in the text yet.”

“Okay.” Mats’ fingers hovered over the pinhead keys. “I don’t know what to write.”

“C’mere.” Daz pulled him beneath the hardboard shelter beneath the illegal transmission masts. “Ever wonder why ancient curses used to work? ‘Cause they’re
ancient. Victims sickened and died, they wasted away when they discovered they were cursed. Belief, man.” He thrust his outstretched fingers at Mats’ brain, then his own.
“There’s no belief anymore, so curses no longer work. Who do you believe now? Do you think God will answer your prayers and sort out your life? No. Do you buy the whole Judeo-Christian
guilt-trip? No. Do you believe your computer when it tells you your account’s overdrawn? Yes. The new world order can’t survive on images of demons and the fiery pit, ‘cause
we’re just slabs of flickering code running to infinity. The only things you have faith in are digitised. Digital society needs digital beliefs. Most people’s brains are still hardwired
to analogue. Not our fault, that was the world we were born into, but it’s all gone now. So change your perception.”

Mats glared at the tiny silver handset. “What, with this?”

“What I think? A programmer somewhere spotted an anomaly in his binary world and opened up a crack, a way through. Then he leaked it. A five-digit number punched in five times, somewhere
near a powerful signal, near a transmitter, all it takes to open the whole thing up. Send the message. Make it something that could alter the way you see the world.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, use your imagination.”