The Mammoth Book of Terror

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!”

IT WAS SATURDAY afternoon in East London when Mats reordered his world.

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Withdrawn inside his padded grey Stussy jacket, he sat beneath the stilted flats, on the railing with the torn-up paintwork that had been ground away by the block’s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.”

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.

Daz made his way along the balcony of Montgomery House, avoiding pools from the dripping ceiling, swinging the cans of beer he had withdrawn from his secret stash behind the bins. He had half-expected Mats to trail him back to the flat, but perhaps he was off sulking somewhere about the phone joke. That was the great thing about people like Mats – you could tell them any old shit, and at some primitive level, even when they said they didn’t, they actually believed you. Heart and soul.