Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Terror

“Eric—”

“Hey, remember—”

“Eric, it’s finished!”

He blinked, listened, heard nothing, and let his small chest sag in relief.

“Hey,” he said proudly, “we ain’t so little, are we?”

She sat on the bench facing the red curtains. Methodically she arranged the satin across her knees, touching each thread line that led to the corner. A needle sharp with use glinted in her right hand, and a single web of many lights dropped from its eye into a plain brown sack at her feet. Then her eyes seemed to clear and she waited, poised, humming arcane tunes to herself and the chest that was filled to the brim with bright on dark.

“You probably think you’re pretty smart,” Caren said.

“Sure am. It was my idea, wasn’t it? I put it all together and figured out that the Old Lady was taking away all our happiness with that music we was hearing, didn’t I? And that’s what was making all the bad things happen, right?”

“Well—”

“—and didn’t I say that we had to show her that we were still doing all right anyway? And now that we did, she’ll move away and never come back because we were too much for her. We beat the music.”

“Well, it’s done now,” she said, and grinned.

“Sure is,” he said, grinning, wiping his forehead with his sleeve.

The needle shimmered, dipped, ready to extend the rainbow.

“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.”

The needle darted.

“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.”

The corner was nearly finished. She hummed, knowing her fingers would stop in just a minute. Then tie. Bite. And she gathered the cloth to her chest and breathed deeply the musty mausoleum odor of the house. Then she dropped the spectrumed satin into the chest with the others. One day, she thought, she would sew herself a new dress of a thousand colors and be young again. But there was one more town . . .

She locked the chest with a pass of her hand.

And the light went out.

“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!”

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.”