The Mammoth Book of Terror (9 page)

Mats stared at the falling rain. Unable to think of anything interesting, he typed MY PARENTS LIVE IN A BIG HOUSE IN THE COUNTRY, then sent the message to 7–2–8–2–6.

MESSAGE SENT

“Now what?”

“That’s it, dude.” Daz was grinning again.

“You
fuck.
” Mats angrily stamped to his feet and shoved his way into the downpour. “You almost had me believing you.”

He took the lift to the ground and walked off toward the bus stop, annoyed with himself for being so stupid. While he was waiting for the bus he rang his father, thinking that maybe he could tap
his old man for a cheque after all, despite having failed to return home for the holidays. He’d told his mother he couldn’t come back for Christmas because there was no God, and how
could they all be so fucking hypocritical? He stared absently at the falling rain, waiting for the call to be answered. His mother picked up the receiver. When she realised who was calling, she
adopted a tone that let him know she would be displeased with him until they were all dead.

“Just let me talk to Dad.”

“You’ll have to hold on for a minute, Matthew,” she warned. “Your father’s in the garden fixing the pump in the pond.”

Which was interesting, because they didn’t have a pump, a pond or a garden. They lived on the fourth floor of a mansion block in St John’s Wood.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“The garden doesn’t stop growing just because it’s raining,” she answered impatiently. “Hold on while I call for him.”

Mats snapped the phone shut as if it had bitten him. He fell back on the bus stop bench in awe. In the distance, a bus appeared. He felt his flat pockets, knowing there was no more than sixty
pence in change. Minimum fare was a pound, and the bus driver got so weird if he tried to use a credit card. Money – he needed money.

It was a good reason to go back and try again.

He ran to Montgomery House and hopped the lift, but found that Daz had left the roof. Stepping out into the rain and flipping open the mobile, he redialled 7–2–8–2–6,
adding text: BUS DRIVER GIVES ME TEN POUNDS, punched SEND. Then he shot back down, jumped on the next bus, and waited to see what would happen.

Red doors concertina’d back. The wide-shouldered Jamaican driver had surprisingly dainty hands, which she rested at the lower edge of her steering wheel. She did not move a muscle as he
stepped up and stood before her, never raised her eyes from the windscreen before hissing the doors shut. Then she reached into her cash dispenser and handed him two five pound notes as if they
were change.

He stayed on until reaching the city, the phone burning a patch in his pocket. Alighting near the Bank of England, he tried to understand what might be happening. Altered perception, Daz had
said. Daz, who had not replaced his own mobile since it was stolen, so why hadn’t he altered perception to make himself really, really rich?

Why wouldn’t you? There had to be some kind of problem with that, didn’t there? How specific did you have to be? Tom Thumb’s Three Wishes-specific, get the wording exactly
right or else you end up with a sausage on your nose? What were the parameters? Was there a downside, some kind of come-up-pance for being greedy, for failure to perform a good deed? Did the Devil
appear, hands on hips, laughing hard at Man’s foolishness? Already he had forgotten talk of binary existence and was replacing it with the lore of fairytales, a language of quid pro quo
cruelties, kindnesses and revenges,
because that’s what is ckarly fuckin’ called for in this situation
, he thought, sweating at the seams.

Obviously, he needed to try again. There was a transmitter mast at Alexandra Palace, but what about mobile masts? There had been some kind of argument about placing one halfway up Tottenham
Court Road, so that was where he headed next.

He couldn’t get high above the ground, but he climbed to the second floor of Paperchase and stood near the rear window, close enough to see the phone mast, hoping it was closer enough to
register. Flipping open the mobile, he examined the screen. The pulsing chroma-rain had cleared itself after the transmission of the last message. Suddenly, his sealed existence had unfolded into a
world of possibilities. Suppose he could do anything, anything at all? He could save the world. End starvation and poverty. Reverse climate change. Bring back the Siberian Tiger. Build a special
community in the Caribbean where artists from all over the world could live and work together in peace, free from the pressures of society.

Fuck that shit. What about the things he really wanted?

The exhilaration welled inside his gut as he realised that he could be a good six inches taller for a start, five-eight to at least six-two. His height had always bugged him. And a better
physique, get rid of the beer belly. No, wait. He needed to think carefully before doing anything else. His priorities were ridiculous and wrong. What he wanted most, what he needed more than
anything, was a girl – no, not a girl, a woman,
Women.
Lots of them. He wouldn’t force them to like him, just provide them with the possibility.
Wishes go bad when
they’re forced
, he thought. But what he really needed was money, lots of money, because it could buy you freedom. He’d be able to travel, because that was how to make yourself truly
free. Go around the world and hang out with whomever you liked. It was all a matter of slipping through the cracks in perception.

Whatever he asked for had to be something he wanted very badly. As quickly as the possibilities occurred, they faded away, leaving behind a fog of appalled anxiety. If it was so easy, why
hadn’t Daz done it? Why was he still hanging out at his mother’s council flat?

He punched out Daz’s number and asked him.

Daz sounded surprised. “That’syour perception, Mats. I only feature in your world as some kind of sidekick, a support to the main act. But that’s not the way I see it from my
side,
compadre.
I’m the big event – you barely exist. You see, once you’re
really
through to the other side, the digital world, that’s when you discover who
you should really be, and you’re free. You get the life you always deserved, probably the life you have right now but simply can’t see. Figure it out, Mats, the answer’s right in
front of you. Just help yourself.” The line went dead. Was he stifling a laugh as he rang off? It sure as hell didn’t sound like Daz talking. He couldn’t usually string two clear
thoughts together without aid.

Mats had walked the upper floor of the store half a dozen times before he understood what he was supposed to do. Gardens, buses, looks, girls, money, all small-time stuff, changing single
elements, not rewriting the hard drive. He pulled the phone from his pocket, flipped it open and punched in the number again.

7–2–8–2–6

He watched as the letters came up once more.

S-A-T-A-N

A broadband hotline to the Devil, a kind of turbo-Satan, a programmer’s joke, not even that – a child’s idea of a secret, something so obvious nobody even thought to try it.
You’re supposed to send it to yourself,
he thought,
that’s all you have to do, like making a wish.
This time, instead of texting a request, he simply typed in his own
phone number, then pressed SEND.

MESSAGE SENT

What now? The screen was teeming with colours once more, but now they were fading to mildewed, sickly hues; something new was at work. For a moment he thought he saw Daz outside the window,
laughing wildly at something preposterous and absurd. He felt bilious, as if he had stepped from a storm-shaken boat. The pale beech wood floor of the store tilted, then started to slide away until
he was no longer able to maintain his balance.

He landed hard, jarring his arm and hip, but within a second the wood was gone and he had fallen through – he could feel the splinters brushing his skin – until the ground was
replaced with something soft and warm. Sand on clay, earth, small stones, heat on his face, his bare legs. His eyes felt as if they had been sewn shut. He lay without moving for a moment, feeling
the strange lightness in his limbs. Then he reached out a hand to touch his bruised thigh.

Stranger still. It was not his leg, but one belonging to a child, thin and almost fleshless – and yet he could feel the touch of his fingers from within the skin.

So bright. He could see the veins inside his orange eyelids. Yet there was something else moving outside. He sensed rather than saw them – dozens of black dots bustling back and forth.

He ungummed his eyelids and opened them. Flies, fat black blowflies lifted from his vision in a cloud and tried to resettle at once. He brushed them away with his hand, and was horrified to
discover the brown, bony claw of a malnourished child. The effort required to pull himself upright was monstrous. Looking down at his legs, he found that instead of the pre-stressed flares he
always wore, his twisted limbs were encased in torn, ancient suit-trousers five sizes too small.

He found himself sitting exhausted beneath a vast fiery sun on a ground of baked mud, waiting for the charity worker in front of him to dole out a ladle of water from a rust-reddened oil drum.
Staring down into the opalescent petrol stains on the rancid liquid, he saw his opposite self: an encephalitic head, fly-crusted eyes, cracked thin lips, sore-covered ribs thrust so far forward
that they appeared to be bursting from his skin; the knife of perpetual hunger twisting in his swollen stomach. Looking around, he saw hundreds of others like himself stretching off into the dusty
yellow distance, the marks of hunger and disease robbing them of any identity. He would have screamed then, if his throat had not been withered long ago to a strip of sun-dried flesh.

DENNIS ETCHISON IS THE
winner of two World Fantasy Awards and three British Fantasy Awards. The late Karl Edward Wagner described him as “the
finest writer of psychological horror this genre has produced”.

Etchison’s stories have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies since 1961, and some of his best work has been collected in
The Dark Country, Red Dreams, The Blood Kiss
and
The Death Artist. Talking in the Dark
is a massive retrospective volume from Stealth Press marking the fortieth anniversary of his first professional sale, and
Fine Cuts
is a volume
of stories about the dark side of Hollywood, from PS Publishing.

Etchison is also well known as a novelist (
TheFog, Darkside, Shadowman, California Gothic
and
Double Edge
) and has published the movie novelizations
Halloween II, Halloween
III
and
Videodrome
under the pseudonym “Jack Martin”.

As an acclaimed anthologist, he has edited
Cutting Edge, Masters of Darkness I-III, MetaHorror, The Museum of Horrors
and
Gathering the Bones
(with Jack Dann and Ramsey
Campbell).

More recently, Etchison has written thousands of script pages for
The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas
, broadcast world-wide and available on audiocassette and CD. He also reads his stories
“The Dog Park” and “Inside the Cackle Factory” on
Don’t Turn on the Lights! The Audio Library of Modern Horror, Vol. 1.

“In 2000 I was asked to assemble a retrospective collection of my stories,” remembers the author, “to be entitled
A Long Time Till Morning.
This required me to re-read
forty years’ worth of short stories, and the experience was a shock to the system. They were not at all as I remembered them. Those I had believed were the best now seemed tedious and
embarrassingly overwrought, and some of the minor pieces, while not very good stories, contained quirky, idiosyncratic material that surprised and fascinated in ways I could not have anticipated.
All of which suggests that we are not reliable, objective judges of even the most important events in our lives at the time we live through them.

“I lived through a lot, some of it not very pleasant, while this story was written at the beginning of the 1980s. But that could be said about any period of my life after the age of five
or six, and I suspect the same applies to everyone. My stories usually reflect personal events and obsessions, either directly or metaphorically. I won’t bore you with autobiographical
details, except to say that I felt very alone for several years and began to wonder when if ever my real life, the one I had always looked forward to, would begin. Poor me. But the feeling was very
real.

“It was difficult to talk about this in a way that might be entertaining or interesting to other people, who surely had problems of their own. Then one day, as is often the case, several
unrelated entries from my notebooks suddenly came together, and I began to see a story that might convey some of what I had held inside for so long, in the manner of a song that serves as a vehicle
for a singer’s deepest emotions. The working title was ‘The Sources of the Nile’, and it began with my recollections of a well-known (and benign) editor and personality in the
science fiction field who once took a car trip across America for the sole purpose of meeting fans with whom he had corresponded over the years.