Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Terror

“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.