by Steve Harris
It won’t move, Snowy, she assured herself. It won’t move because it can’t!
She took hold of the mouse and moved it a fraction of an inch away from her. Up on the screen, the little arrow obediently moved towards the top of the page.
Suddenly feeling scared, Snowy picked up the mouse and turned it over. According to the label it was a standard Logitech two button serial mouse, made in Ireland and complying with part 15 of the FCC rules.
She used the mouse to move the cursor to the end of the row of z’s she must have inadvertently typed herself just lifting the keyboard, and used the keyboard’s backspace key to delete them.
Then she stopped and thought for a moment.
And stared suspiciously at the wire that ran across the desk from the keyboard and dangled down behind it - before, presumably, it came back up again and plugged into the back of the computer.
Except that Snowy no longer expected it to be attached.
Don’t you dare take hold of that wire and pull on it! she warned herself. Her head had started to spin now, and she was beginning to feel the first effects of a fear that promised to become an all-encompassing nightmare terror if it was encouraged.
But she could not stop herself.
She watched as her right hand took hold of the cable and began to pull it back towards her. Three tugs told her the bad news. The keyboard wasn’t plugged in either. In a daze, Snowy held the plug in her hand and typed the letter Y. It appeared on the screen. She typed the letter R. This too appeared.
Snowy let go of the keyboard wire, reached behind the monitor and found the cable which connected it to the computer. Surprise, surprise, it too dangled free behind the bench. As did the power cord which also should have been plugged into the back of the computer case.
By this point she knew that she was also going to discover that the computer unit itself wasn’t plugged into the mains.
She pushed the chair back and bent to peer beneath the desk, where the mains sockets surely were. She already knew there were no light fittings or light switches in the room, so the chances were there wouldn’t be any sockets present either.
But computers did not work without power and this computer was working.
In spite of the fact that she could see no sockets beneath’ the desk.
It must have a separate supply, she thought. It must be running off a big battery pack or a fail-safe supply that stops the computer shutting off in a power cut.
But as Snowy well knew, there was nothing on the market that would run a full-sized desktop computer for very long without a mains input. And if there had been, she ought to have been able to see it, either on the desk or beneath it.
And there was nothing there.
Just a tangle of dangling wires.
The printer wasn’t attached to the computer or plugged into a mains supply either, but its ready light was showing and Snowy had no doubt that in spite of this, it would print out hard copy as soon as it was asked to.
Up on the screen, the display flickered, the page of text vanished and the star-flight screen saver began to show her that she was, in fact, at the controls of a craft which was plunging through deep space.
Snowy stared, feeling dizzy enough to fall. Perhaps right through the screen and into the cold vacuum of space.
The fear had become a kind of numb dread. It was like a paralysing venom, which kept you still and kept you conscious so that you were able to experience every aspect of what was in store for you.
The screen was actually expanding in front of her, its seventeen-inch window on to the stars first becoming a full-sized viewing port, then turning into a wall-sized one.
In less than a second, Snowy was speeding through space at something approaching the speed of light. A jewel-studded velvet darkness stretched out before her, above her, below her and on either side of her. Galaxies whirled past beneath her feet, constellations twinkled by her. There was no longer any room or any computer. There was just Snowy, travelling through the universe.
And what happens when you reach the end? she asked herself. What then? Infinity? Will you be dead? Will you, see God Himself?
As she opened her mouth to protest, the air was sucked from her lungs. It didn’t hurt. Snowy knew she was going to die now, but that it wasn’t going to be a painful death. She would just wink out of existence like a minor star. The edge of the universe was closer than she had anticipated.
Perhaps this is how it ends for everyone, a small, clear voice said at the back of her mind. Your essence changes back into the energy from which it was made. Your being is absorbed by the cosmos.
‘you’ve been a very bad girl.’
The voice was thunderous and Snowy knew with certainty that it was the voice of her maker and that He was displeased.
I’ve done my best, Snowy heard herself reply, and felt, somehow, as if the words had been placed in her mind for her to think. As though she was not a creature of her own free will at all, but a machine that had been programmed. A character, perhaps, who was being pushed around the stage of some playwright, or written up as a bit part in a story that a playful author was busily constructing.
‘but your best was not good enough, snowdrop dresden. you know what happens to bad girls, don’t YOU?’
No, Snowy thought. I’m sorry, but I don’t. ‘bad girls have to be punished, bad girls have to feel pain. bad girls have to stay in the house. for EVER.’
Don’t make me stay here, Snowy pleaded. Please! I’ll be good. I promise!
In spite of the fact that she knew her emotions were being relentlessly manipulated, the terror she felt at having to stay indoors was real.
‘IT’S TOO LATE TO REPENT. BLUEBEARD IS MY SON. AND YOU BROKE BLUEBEARD’S RULES. NOW YOU MUST PAY THE CONSEQUENCES. THE GETTING IN IS EASY, SNOWDROP DRESDEN, IT’S THE GETTING OUT AGAIN YOU HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT.’
Snowy could feel herself diminishing, shrinking steadily. ‘touch me now,’ the voice of God said, ‘reach out and TOUCH ME NOW.’
And so it was that Snowy put out a dwindling arm and felt the body of God. Even though she couldn’t see him, she could feel him.
God was made of cold, smooth glass.
And when her hand sank through the glass, she suddenly felt air in her lungs again and screamed. Long and hard.
The universe flickered like a fluorescent lamp and went out.
Then Snowy was once again sitting in a high-backed swivel chair in Philip’s big white work-room. Her hand was against the computer screen.
Except that her hand was partially merged with the screen, as if the glass had liquefied, then solidified around her fingers.
‘Oh Jesus God!’ she heard herself squeal, and a distant part of her noted that the expression was far too mild to fit the circumstances and wondered if it would be fixed on the redraft.
When she tried to pull her hand away from the monitor, it simply slid towards her across the smooth desk-top.
Being careful not to touch the glass, Snowy held the monitor with her other hand and tugged her trapped hand, trying to free it. It moved, but not easily. She pulled harder and her fingers began to come out of the glass, drawing it out with them like strands of clear melted toffee. When her fingers finally came away from the screen, the strands released their grip on her and snapped back into the screen, which rolled as if a wave had passed across it and settled into exactly the same shape it had been before.
Snowy looked at her fingers in total disbelief. Apart from the fact that her hand was shaking enough to be almost waving, she seemed to have suffered no ill effects whatsoever.
The question is, she asked herself, did any of that actually happen?
Snowy didn’t know. All she knew was that she wanted to leave the room and never visit it again. Or even think of it again. Because if she did, she was going to have to revise her views about one of two things; either her disbelief in ghosts or her opinion that she was sane. She was certain of her sanity… but if she was sane, the computer was haunted, which was impossible.
Either way, you should leave now, before anything else happens, she instructed herself.
All well and good, but the old legs felt rubbery and she wasn’t certain she would be able to stand. Tentatively, she put her hands against the work-bench to push herself up from the chair and give her some support.
This turned out to be another mistake.
Because the fingers of her right hand touched the mouse.
And the mouse moved.
In response the flying through space screen saver vanished and the page of text came back.
As Snowy rose, a section of this text caught her eye. It was about half-way down the screen and it was written in capitals. It said exactly what the voice of God had said to her a few moments earlier.
you’ve been a very bad girl.
And the text below this seemed to be an exact transcription of what had happened to her since. She read: The voice was thunderous and Snowy knew with certainty that it was the voice of her maker and that He was displeased.
‘This can’t be true,’ she heard herself say and read: I’ve done my best, Snowy heard herself reply, and felt, somehow, as if the words had been placed in her mind for her to think. As though she was not a creature of her own free will at all, but a machine that had been programmed. A character, perhaps, who was being pushed around the stage of some playwright, or written up as a bit part in a story that a playful author was busily constructing.
Snowy’s mind spun. She had just acted out a scene that Philip had written in his book. Acted it out exactly as it was written down on the screen, with each thought and each sensation.
Impossible as it sounded, she was sitting in a room before a computer that worked even though it wasn’t plugged in, reading what had just happened to her.
He made it happen to you, Snowy told herself, and wasn’t sure where that left her. It seemed to leave her not existing at all, other than as a character in a book that Philip was writing. What if he’d written her whole life? What then? Would he have given her a happy ending? Somehow, she doubted it.
The other alternative was that Philip was somehow controlling her ‘real life’ actions through what he was writing. This didn’t sound quite so outlandish, but it did raise many questions which couldn’t be answered. Like, how could Philip know what she would do or think under any given set of circumstances?
The answer lay before her on the ‘Words for Windows’ screen on a magic computer which she could quite easily imagine was a whole lot more than a mere pack of circuit boards and microprocessors. This computer might just turn out to be the machine which controlled reality. Her reality, anyway. Perhaps ‘God for Windows’ was a better way of putting it.
Snowy drew a deep breath and tried to steady herself. It wasn’t easy. Not when she had a written record in front of her of what had happened to her in the past five minutes. Especially when that record had been written by someone else before it had happened, and even more especially when it didn’t end at the bottom of the screen. There was going to be more there, if she scrolled down, she knew that. She was also certain that if she read it, it was going to turn out to be an exact copy of everything she’d seen, done and felt since she’d last looked. And, if she scrolled down enough pages, she’d read what she was going to see, do and feel in the future. Perhaps right up until the end of her life.
Is this the punishment Bluebeard doles out to his disobedient women? she wondered. To see their life and death written down ahead of time?
Snowy fought off the urge to look through the text to find out what might happen to her next. Perhaps it would be a good idea not to know. On the other hand, she did want to know if she really was trapped here…
So she took hold of the disconnected mouse and scrolled down the screen to the next page, and then the page after. The book Philip had been working on (BlkRck02.DOC according to the title bar), lasted for another three pages. If it was a novel, her novel - the story of Snowy - there was still a lot yet to come. This was only Black Rock Page 48. She had another two or three hundred to go yet. Maybe more.
Snowy scrolled back to Page 45, most of which she had read. She scanned down the page, only taking in peripherally the events that had happened to her since she last looked at the piece of prose, and when she got to the point which read, ‘She scanned down the page…’ she had to look away because it was like looking at your reflection when you had a mirror in front of you and one behind. You felt as if you might fall inside those reflections and vanish.
She skipped the next six or seven paragraphs - which seemed to deal with what was going to happen when she got up - and her eye lit on a section that contained the magic words: But now, Snowy knew exactly what she must do.
‘What must I do?’ she asked aloud and her voice seemed to be coming from miles away. She back-tracked a little and discovered that she was going to make a tour of the house, looking for ways out, and find that only the front door offered an exit. And, apparently, that was going to offer the usual resistance.
Snowy read on:
The door could not be opened by normal means, as Snowy well knew. Unless you happened to be Mr Philip Winter of course. The door would open easily and smoothly for Philip. If he was outside, all he did was take hold of the large golden door knob and push gently. The door would open. If he was inside, he would simply take hold of the knob and pull gently.
There was a trick to opening the door, and, like the most irritating stage magicians, Philip would not tell Snowy what it was.
Consequently, Snowy had never yet managed to open the door. But now, alone in the house and frightened by what she had read about Bluebeard and the revenge he might extract, opening that door had become an imperative. Previously, she had not had even the faintest idea as to how the problem could be overcome. But now, Snowy knew exactly what she must do.
There was more than one way to skin a cat - or open a door - and if she couldn’t do it Philip’s way, she would simply do it the other way.
And that other way depended on altering the flow of power which ran through the house. It would be as simple as throwing a switch, except that in this case there were many switches that would have to be thrown. But Snowy knew exactly how to throw them.
There were thought, by certain people, to be such things as geological power networks. Some folk called them leys, others, fairy highways, others, lines of geomantic force. Whatever they were called the fact remained that they were believed to be routes through which the earth’s energy travelled.
Snowdrop Dresden, who didn’t believe in ghosts, didn’t believe in ley lines either.
What she did know was that Cornwall was thought to be particularly well endowed with sites that marked junctions of lines of geomantic force. There was St Michael’s Mount, Tresvannock, Wiscairn and dozens of others.
And according to something Philip had once mentioned in passing, one of those important places was King Arthur’s Castle, through which, he said, if you were in possession of a map, you could draw a line which led directly to Glastonbury Tor and magical places beyond.
Snowy also knew that Philip had drawn such a line, and believed that it ran right through Black Rock itself.
And although Snowy did not believe in leys, she was desperate. Desperate enough to try out something that might harness or alter their power. Like throwing the switches that would alter the path of the current that flowed through the house.
