Christopher Fowler - Personal Demons

'What's wrong?' she gasped, staring incredulously at Gregor. A hot brick of pain thudded into her chest. She could feel blood pouring down the back of her throat. Trevor was convulsing on the floor beside her.

'All I could find was poison for the rats,' Gregor explained apologetically. 'Very strong taste. But hidden in brandy, I think. Especially after spicy food. Mrs Colson. I let your husband choose.' Gregor raised his hands in a gesture of personal absolution. 'He chose the best.' He turned the label of the cognac bottle to show Celia the row of golden stars, but her eyes stared past him, reflecting only pain, terrible endless pain. 'Five Star, see. Very good. To be fair, this bottle was the only one I put poison in, out of so many. Always a man like that has to have the very best, no?'

Gregor waited for the bodies of his two guests to stop twitching, then stripped and dragged them to the open basement door, kicking them down into darkness. His cousin was due to have the area pumped full of cement in a week, to stop the foundation piles from shifting. It would be an easy matter to bring the delivery date forward. He wondered how long it would take him to forge Mr Colson's signature from the visitors' book. A man like that always came abroad with plenty of travellers' cheques. After locking the door, he walked down to the jetty and plunked the empty brandy bottle into the sea. A terrible waste of a fine cognac, he knew.

Tonight, though, a glass of homemade wine would taste just as well.

It was too wet and too cold to go all the way into town for such a trivial purpose, but as Ann pointed out, he might regret it if he didn't. Somebody had to win, after all, and there was a double rollover this week.

He had tried to point out the folly of buying the tickets at all, had explained that the odds were so astronomical she was more likely to be struck by lightning ten times in a row than win the national lottery, but she would not be told. Somebody has to win, she would say, I've seen them on the telly, grinning brickies, office workers in syndicates, housewives, don't tell me that they've all been struck by lightning ten times.

She was missing his point. To say that they were short of money was an understatement. They were living in a limbo somewhere beyond bankruptcy, about to have their electricity cut off, about to lose their house and all its contents, and hoping against hope that everything would be neatly sorted out by winning an unimaginable amount of money seemed, well, unrealistic to say the least.

But he went, because she wanted him to and he loved her. That was what you did, wasn't it, if you loved someone? Things you didn't want to do yourself. The engine of the little Fiat sounded as if it was suffering from tuberculosis. He crested the hill and looked down on the wet rooftops of the town, the ashen carparks, the hideous plasticky shopping centre and the inhospitable moorland that butted against the new estate beyond. How he hated what he saw, how he longed to get out, even though he knew he was imprisoned here as surely as if he was locked inside a cell. Money could do that, just lift him up and set him down somewhere better. A simple row of numbers marked down in biro, the work of a moment. But the odds! The astronomical odds! He'd read that each week 30,000 people picked the numbers 1 to 6 in consecutive order! Ann had read an article on the subject which advocated ringing the number 1 – infrequently chosen for its proximity to the top of the sheet – and multiples of ten, which did not look random enough for the public to select. But how could anyone really know? Second-guessing the laws of chance would require understanding how life itself was shaped.

As he entered the tobacconist's shop, a spark of elation jumped within him at the prospect of winning, even though he knew the impossible, absurd odds and loathed the irrationality of hope. They could not afford to waste money, and yet here he was gambling it away. He ran a hand through the back of his shaggy blonde hair and waited for a pair of ancient women to shift from the counter. Queuing for the lottery had taken the place of queuing in the post office for sheer annoyance-value. He snatched up a pair of forms, grimly aware of the syndicates up and down the country that were each filling in dozens of such forms, thought for a moment and began marking off numbers. The age of his dog, Boots (12), the size of his shoes (9), the age of Ann's mother (56), and so on, until he was done.

He posted the slips in the white plastic box and started to leave the shop when he felt a loose pound coin in his jacket pocket. At the same moment his eye caught a separate scratchcard dispenser beside the main lottery ticket display. Dropping the pound coin in the slot released one of the scratchcards, which he slipped into his jeans intending to scratch off when he reached the car. But the rain had begun falling in slate-grey sheets, the traffic was bad, the DJ on the radio annoyed him and he forgot all about it.

Ann insisted on seeing the lottery draw live on television, so that he was forced to miss the end of the programme he was watching in order to stare at some capering ninny and his simpering sidekick while they made a big deal about reading the numbers from coloured ping-gong balls – ping-pong balls !

'Doesn't it amaze you that we have all this modern technology, and the best random-number selection device they can come up with is running a hairdryer under a box of ping-pong balls?' he asked, but was shushed. Ann excitedly checked each number, and even managed not to reveal her disappointment when she failed to match a single digit to the winning line. Her innocent enthusiasm never ceased to surprise him; it was one of her most charming qualities.

It was then that he remembered the scratchcard in his back pocket. And it was only when he looked at it properly that he realised what an odd item it was. One word was emblazoned across the top of the card in crimson: WIN!Win what it didn't say, almost as if the promotions company could not be bothered to put details on the card. Underneath this were six grey panels, and beneath these were instructions: Scratch off each of the boxes in turn. Each one will reveal a word, WIN or LOSE. The more you WIN, the bigger your prize. To be the Prizewinner Of The Week you must uncover threeWIN boxes. To be the Prizewinner Of The Month you must uncover fourWIN boxes. To be the Grand Prizewinner Of The Year you must uncover all sixWIN boxes.On the back was an address where you had to send the card to by registered post if you were a winner. He rested the cardboard oblong on his knee and began scratching across two of the boxes with a five pence piece while he was still talking to Ann. He stopped talking as soon as he saw the words revealed beneath the plastic coating, WIN, both.

Then a third.

'Ann?' He looked down at the card on his knee, and she followed his gaze. 'How many do you need?' she asked.

'Not sure. All, for the grand prize.'

'Keep going, then.'

He placed the edge of the coin against the corner of the fourth square and scratched. WIN.

And the fifth. WIN.

He swallowed and looked across at Ann. She gave him a puzzled look, a suspicious this couldn't happen to us look. 'Well, do it.'

He scratched at the sixth square, but could not bring himself to look. Slowly, he opened his eyes.

'It's a trick, it's not a real card,' he said, 'it must be selling something.'

'No, you paid for it, didn't you?'

'Yes, but – '

'Then you've won, Gary. My god, you've won. Does it say how much?'

'No, it just tells you how to do it, and there's no company name, it's weird. I've never seen cards like these before.'