by Steve Harris
S’n’J nodded. ‘It’s my fault,’ she said.
Janie looked up at her, her tear-stained face a study of anguish. ‘You did write it?’
S’n’J shook her head. ‘No, I didn’t write it, but it’s my book. It’s about me. The author is trying to fictionalize me. Change me. You and Martin have only been drawn in because you know me. Because you’re closely connected with me. I’m the prime target. It’s me that he wants.’
‘Who is he?’
S’n’J shrugged. ‘That remains to be seen. All I know is that Black Rock is a real place. I was there yesterday and I did fall off the side of the rock it stands on.’
Janie gave S’n’J a sad smile. ‘We’re in it together,’ she said. ‘It isn’t your fault, you didn’t make it happen. The blame rests with Peter bloody Perfect, whoever he is. What frightens me most is this: I no longer know what’s real and what’s fiction. When the story ends, do you think everything will go back to the way it was before?’
S’n’J quashed that one. ‘Everything that happens, happens for real. That’s the only way to treat it. Things aren’t going back. Peter Perfect is altering reality. Black Rock is a real place and there are such things as ghosts and haunted houses and they can have an effect on real life. A very profound effect.’
There’s magic down there at Black Rock, isn’t there?’ Janie said.
S’n’J sighed. ‘If there is, it’s bad magic’
‘It’s one of those special places,’ Janie said. ‘It’s near Tintagel Castle isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, but it doesn’t feel particularly special. It just looks like a big house on a rock. There’s no atmosphere or anything.’ She left out the information that whenever you looked at the house it seemed poised like a great animal, ready to spring at you. That kind of fancy wasn’t going to do anyone any good.
Janie took a deep breath. ‘“Hard by was great Tintagel’s table round and there of old the flower of Arthur’s knights made fair beginning of a nobler time,”’ she quoted.
‘What’s that?’ S’n’J asked. ‘It sounds familiar.’
‘Those words have been running through my head all night,’ Janie said. ‘They arrived of their own accord. I know where they come from too. They come from a plaque that’s mounted on a piece of Barras Nose which sticks out into the sea between Tintagel Castle and Black Rock.
‘Arthur chose the place because of its magical qualities. But he didn’t stay there. He pissed off somewhere else and left his knights to it. And while he was gone, his knights didn’t make fair beginning of a nobler time, they did bad stuff. It’s obvious. The Castle was built on a ley and they tapped its energy and used and abused it. And the bad ley runs through Black Rock house. There’s a cave under Black Rock - a kind of cellar because the house was built on top of it. That’s where the knights used to do their stuff.’
‘What kind of stuff?’ S’n’J asked carefully. A fresh picture of Ellen was blooming in her mind and there was something horribly erotic about that bloodstained and pain-racked naked body.
Janie shuddered. ‘You know,’ she said.
S’n’J nodded. She did know. She also knew that Janie had got the information from their friendly neighbourhood teller of tall tales, Mr Peter Perfect, which explained why it contained that subtle reek of bullshit.
‘What happened there long ago doesn’t matter at all,’ S’n’J said thoughtfully and as she spoke, a fantasy image began to form in her imagination. It wasn’t an image of Black Rock or Peter Perfect though, it was an alternative explanation. One that her own mind was constructing from the fragments of information it possessed. ‘It’s what’s happening there now that’s important,’ she added, hearing her voice tail off as her mind plunged her into fantasy mode.
The fantasy - the first period fantasy S’n’J’s mind had ever attempted - constructed itself effortlessly. The date was 1948, three years after the Second World War. It was dusk in Hyde Park on a summer’s evening: a handsome young man wearing his Sunday best suit and a pretty woman in a flowery dress were walking slowly across the grass towards a thicket of trees. The man, S’n’J knew, was Fred King, the factory worker that Snowy had spoken to on the back-in-time telephone within the pages of Black Rock. The one whose elderly mother Sarah-Jane herself seemed to have contacted yesterday. The woman, walking arm-in-arm beside him and smiling like that cat who got the cream, was undoubtedly Zara Winter, the other wrong number Snowy had got connected to.
‘But what is happening now?’ Janie asked.
I know where they’re going and what they’re going to do, S’n’J thought as she pictured the couple walking towards the trees. They’re going to wait beneath those trees until it’s dark and then they’re going to make love. And Zara will become pregnant and they’ll marry and the baby will be a boy. When the boy grows up he’ll be a writer. A very special kind of writer. One who can actually unweave the threads of reality and reconstruct them to suit himself. And the boy will call himself Peter Perfect.
‘Drezy? Are you okay?’
But what will happen to the boy to give him the power of a god?
S’n’J didn’t know. What she did know, was that the construction of this period piece was taxing her imagination so much that it hadn’t done a perfect job. Because when the couple drew close enough for her to see their features, Fred King looked like a younger version of the Mr Winter she had seen lying bleeding on the forecourt of Black Rock and Zara’s face belonged to her. Zara Winter, to all intents and purposes, was Sarah-Jane Dresden.
‘Drezy! For God’s sake!’ Janie’s voice called.
The fantasy exploded into a billion coloured dots. ‘I’m fine!’ S’n’J said. ‘Really.’
‘I thought you’d gone into a trance or something,’ Janie said worriedly. ‘You didn’t seem to hear me. Oh God, Drezy, what are we going to do?’
‘Get another large brandy,’ S’n’J said. She felt very weak, as if she’d discovered something that was going to be extremely important. She got up, took the glasses back to the kitchen and filled them again, wondering if Peter Perfect had homed in on her because he wanted his mother back again and Sarah-Jane bore a close physical resemblance to her.
‘I think we ought to phone the police,’ Janie said, sipping her drink.
‘And tell them what, exactly? That you killed your husband and he came back to life and ran off? That there’s a guy - or a ghost - down in Tintagel and that he, or it, is writing a book and not only are we in it, but we’re also being forced to act out the scenes he writes for us? We’d be in hospital under sedation in half an hour.’
‘But Billy-Joe did get up and walk away,’ Janie said. ‘And he did do this while he was in the car,’ she added opening her mouth and showing S’n’J the inside of her cheek. There was a circular piece of skin missing. The torn part was about the size of a five pence piece. ‘I don’t know about the ghost stuff, but I do know that hap�
�pened. Some of my teeth are chipped too.’
‘So we phone the police and tell them your husband attacked you and you knocked him out and drove all the way to Bude before he came round, and then he got out of the car and wandered off?’
Janie nodded.
‘And what good will that do?’
‘They might find him. They might be able to stop him coming back here for me.’
‘But he won’t know which flat you’re in. If he starts hammering on doors we’re going to know about it long before he works his way up here to the first floor. And I don’t think he’s hanging around in the street anyway. I would have seen him when I went out. I think I know where he’s gone and I think you know that too.’
Janie nodded. ‘He’s gone to Tintagel,’ she said. ‘To Black Rock.’
‘That sounds right to me, Janie,’ S’n’J said. ‘If we inform the police, they won’t find him. He’s gone to Black Rock to wait there for us. Peter Perfect knows that we’re going to go there eventually. He’s writing our story and making it inevitable that we do. And we’ve got nothing in our arsenal to fight back with until we know what he wants from us. And we’ve got no way of finding out. I think we just have to sit tight, nurse your wounds and wait and see what develops.’
Janie shook her head. ‘I can’t stand it much longer,’ she said. ‘It’s like waiting to be hung. There must be something we can do. Can’t we just ask him to stop it?’
‘If you were writing a book, Janie, and you were having a good time putting your characters through the mill and one of them suddenly began to speak to you and said, “Won’t you please stop this? It’s doing me in!” what would your reply be? Would you say, “Okey dokey, I’ll only make good things happen to you from now on,”? No you wouldn’t. I wouldn’t, and Peter Perfect wouldn’t either. We’d all reply, “And what kind of a story would that leave me with? One with no tension or drama.” We’d say, “You get on and do as you’re told and if you’re good maybe things will work out for you. But I’m not promising anything because I’m the author and I damn well do as I please. If it pleases me to then kill you then hey presto, you’ll die.”’
‘But we’re not fictional characters, we’re real,’ Janie pleaded.
‘Are we? Or are we just Peter Perfect’s pawns? You were right about the bad magic, Janie. He’s worked some of it on us.’
‘But surely we can fight back?’
‘Yeah, but on whose terms? Ours or his? Neither of us knows how much of what’s happened has really happened.’
‘Look at me,’ Janie said. ‘That happened. And I don’t want anything like it happening again. Can’t we just go over there and bust his head open with a rolling-pin?’ she added hopefully.
‘I wish I could believe something that simple would sort it out,’ S’n’J said sadly. She sipped at her brandy. ‘I’m going to run you a bath now. You’re going to sit in it until you feel a little better, then I’m going to put you to bed. While you’re in the bath I’m going to phone my calls for today and tell them I won’t be coming. When you’ve slept we’ll talk about what we can do. If we’re going to go down to Black Rock, I think we’re going to need to take some things with us. Something a little heftier than a rolling-pin. Like a couple of priests… and a barrel of holy water and half a dozen crucifixes.’
‘And silver bullets and garlic,’ Janie added, finding a smile.
Sometimes the only defence you had when the cards were stacked against you was humour, even if it was bitter humour. Sometimes it proved you weren’t as beaten as you’d thought. Sometimes it merely kept you going. On this occasion it seemed to prove to her that Peter Perfect had yet to dominate them totally.
S’n’J didn’t notice the answering machine light flashing until she’d put Janie in a warm bath and gone to the phone to cancel her appointments for the day.
I got a call, she thought in surprise. When did that happen? I didn’t hear the phone ring.
She rewound the tape, almost certain that when she played it back she was going to hear a list of instructions from Peter Perfect concerning what she and Janie had to do next. Or perhaps he’d read out the next chapter of his book for her. The tape was taking quite a while to wind back, so it was a possibility.
Are you sure you want to do this? her Girl Guide voice asked her as her finger hovered over the play button. S’n’J wasn’t at all sure. But she couldn’t simply ignore it in case it was a message from James.
Holding her breath, she hit the play button.
‘Damn and blast it! Essy!’
Martin, S’n’J acknowledged during the pause. What does he want now?
‘It’s Martin!’ Martin’s voice shouted. He sounded angry and frightened. ‘Look, I need to talk to you. Now. I think there’s someone…’
As his voice reached the word ‘someone’, the answering machine began to screech in a high-pitched electrical buzz. It only lasted a second, but it was enough to blot out the following few words.
‘… you,’ Martin said, ‘Don’t leave…’
The screech began again and stopped as Martin said, ‘… get there. Phone… tell them… receipt of… to… threatening… way!’
Then the message ceased. And was replaced with an electronic version of ‘Frosty the Snowman’. The tinny tune sounded like one of those things the switchboard of a large company forced you to listen to when you were on hold around this time of year. Late October was pretty early for anyone to be playing Christmas tunes, but what worried S’n’J most was that this particular version of ‘Frosty the Snowman’ didn’t sound the least bit seasonal or cheery. It sounded downright sinister. What was worse, it didn’t just loop around and begin again like these things normally did, it kept going, growing as it played. Inside thirty seconds, what had started out as an electronic tune turned into something being played by a full orchestra. Thirty seconds after that it began to sound as if Richard Wagner had got his hands on it and was changing it into something that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in one of the more threatening sections of the Ring cycle.
S’n’J let it play in case Martin was going to make another appearance with something new to say. ‘Frosty the Snowman’ lasted for ten minutes, grew to a crescendo and stopped with the sound of crashing cymbals still hanging in the air.
S’n’J waited, now expecting to hear Peter Perfect’s laughter. What she actually got was a voice she didn’t recognize saying, with feeling, ‘Baby it’s cold outside. Do you think it’ll snow?’
And that was it.
She wound the tape back again and hit the play button once more, trying to fill in the blanks where Martin’s voice had been bleeped out.
He had presumably spoken the words ‘damn and blast it’ when he’d realized he had the answering machine rather than S’n’J herself. The introduction to the message was unharmed. Martin needed to talk to her urgently and he thought there was someone… S’n’J hit the pause button, wondering.
What does he think? There’s someone
, blank blank blank, you. Trying to get you? Coming after you?
She strongly suspected that Martin had reached the same conclusion as she and Janie had. That Peter Perfect was real and dangerous. She had no idea how he’d arrived at that conclusion, but for once in her life she congratulated him. He might have been a bastard, but he was a sharp bastard.
She hit play again. Don’t leave, blank-blank-blank-blank-blank-blank-blank-blank-blank-blank get there. That’s going to be a tough one, she told herself, hitting pause again. Don’t leave home? It has to be home. Don’t leave home until he gets here? There’s a bit missing, Dropsy. What’s the other bit?
‘Don’t leave home and don’t let anyone in, until I get there,’ seemed too easy though and S’n’J spent ten minutes trying to work in other patterns of words before she finally accepted the obvious option.
The rest of the message was going to be harder to work out. Martin apparently wanted her to phone someone and tell them something about a receipt. The word ‘way’ might have suggested he was on his way here.
S’n’J told herself that this hung together. Janie was already here, and Martin was the only other person who knew about Black Rock, so it seemed fitting that he was on his way too.
It all hung together a bit too nicely for her liking. Peter Perfect, son of Fred and Zara King, was obviously responsible for the distortion which had blocked most of Martin’s message. He’d wiped just enough to enable her to reconstruct the important parts; presumably so that she would feel very clever - as if she’d won a small battle.
