by Steve Harris
It took Philip less than five seconds to alter it to suit himself.
‘But although this wasn’t yet happening, Martin knew it soon would. His fingers had begun to tingle and his mental vocabulary seemed to be diminishing.’
Cursing, S’n’J acknowledged that she’d just made things worse for Martin, rather than better.
The writing continued: ‘He picked up the pickaxe handle and looked nervously around him. Somewhere inside that house which looked as if it was hunched ready to pounce, was his Essenjay. And he would either get her back or die trying.
‘Die trying, probably, he told himself cynically.’
The machine saved, then paused again. Tears of gratitude stung S’n’J’s eyes. She hated the bastard. She’d sent him to Scarborough on a wild goose chase because he deserved nothing better. But here he was ready to die for her.
‘Martin will not die!’ she typed and saved it.
And watched it grow to read: ‘Martin will not die! he told himself, and this thought provided him with the exact amount of comfort he’d expected to derive from it. Absolutely none at all.’
S’n’J picked up her rolling-pin and weighed it in her hand as she read that Martin could hear faint noises from off the side of the bank and that he was going to go over there to see what was making them.
Philip had told her that he’d created her on an old Royal typewriter, on this desk against this very wall. Now he did it with a computer. But the important point was that his musings had to become permanent in order to become reality. If it was typed, it was permanent. If it was written on paper or saved on disk, it was permanent. It was not permanent while it only existed in the computer’s memory: if you turned off the word-processing program before you’d saved your writing, what you’d written vanished.
His thoughts didn’t count until they were outside his head and stored somewhere else.
S’n’J hit the computer screen.
She may as well have hit a wall.
I’ll stop you, you wait and see! she thought, placing the rolling-pin down on the desk. She picked up the keyboard and set it down on top of the computer screen, then dragged out the unplugged case which housed the computer’s works and its hard disk.
She could still remember things from when she was Snowy - who had once sold computers - and one of those things was that hard-disk drives did not like to be handled roughly. A gentle bump was sometimes enough to lose you everything that was stored there.
We’ll see about a gentle bump! she thought, and hefted the plastic case off the desk and stood up with it. She turned away from the table, lifted the computer case above her head and flung it at the wall as hard as she could.
She watched the case sail gracefully through the air as if it was moving in slow motion. On its way to the wall, it twice turned end over end.
It hit the wall about three feet off the ground.
The case exploded into spiky fragments.
It hit the floor, damaged beyond repair. The plastic was shattered into five or six large pieces and many more smaller ones. Green circuit boards had spilled from inside it. They lay there gleaming dully, cracked and bent, their collections of chips and resistors and God knew what else no longer fit for use.
S’n’J saw what she had done and was pleased. Put that in your pipe and suck on it, Peter bloody Perfect! she thought.
Somewhere inside the broken electronics, the hard-disk light winked on - she saw the reflection of its light in a corner of the case - heard the quiet tinkling of the disk as it saved a new piece of writing.
‘It can’t still work!’ she shouted. ‘It cannot! It is broken beyond repair!’
She turned back to the screen where another paragraph had appeared.
‘“Who’s that?” Martin demanded, peering into the bushes that grew down the steep side of the track. He clasped his pickaxe handle between both hands and raised it, ready to strike if it was necessary.
‘“It’s me,” a vaguely familiar voice replied. “I fell and hit my head. Knocked myself out. Christ almighty, I’ve got the granddaddy of all headaches.”
‘“James?” Martin asked in astonishment.’
S’n’J felt a huge wave of relief wash over her. Followed by a fresh wave of hatred towards Philip for lying about James, and telling her he was dead.
The next burst of writing went on for a minute or so.
‘“You’re dead. I saw you fall into a wall of fire,” Martin said suspiciously.
‘“Dead but I won’t lie down,” James said from somewhere about ten feet away. “Hang on. You’ll have to give me a hand up when I crawl out of here.”
‘James, when he finally appeared, looked as if he had indeed been through a wall of fire. His clothes were blackened and scorched. His arms were red and badly blistered and all that remained of his hair was a few singed fragments that lay close to his scalp. His eyebrows and eyelashes were gone. He crawled up the bank towards Martin, then reached out a hand.
‘Martin took it, braced himself and heaved James up on to the track.
‘James picked himself up from the ground, tested his limbs and then turned to Martin, grinning. His face was so sooty he looked like a failed Al Jolson impersonator.
‘“James Green, slightly singed, but otherwise alive and well,” he said breathlessly. “And you’re Martin. We’d better do something pretty damned quick, Martin, because very soon, someone’s going to start trying to kill us.”
‘Martin said, “I can’t believe it. I saw what happened to you. I had a vision and saw it all. The cloud and everything. I can’t believe you’re alive.”
‘“They don’t call me Mister Nifty Footwork for nothing,” James said.
‘“You know what’s happening here, don’t you?”
‘James nodded. “The house is haunted, just like it says in the book. Drezy’s inside. We have to get her out. The trouble is, the guy who wrote the book is in there and he doesn’t want us to.”
‘“Have we gone crazy, or what?” Martin asked, glancing up at the overcast sky in case any brown clouds were forming between here and the house.
‘James shook his head. “I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m going to give getting into the house a bloody good try. I brought a crowbar. Did you see it?”
‘“Just back there,” Martin said, pointing. “And you needn’t worry about getting in. Getting out again is supposed to be the hard part.”’
‘Very heroic,’ S’n’J said bitterly. She knew exactly what Philip was doing. He was building them up in order to knock them down again in a few moments. You had to make your customers think the good guys had a chance; had to make them hope your heroes would prevail. This would make it hurt the reader more when you killed them off.
In retaliation, S’n’J took the computer’s mouse in her hand, moved the pointer to the file menu, got a list of options to show and selected the line which said, ‘new
’.
I’ll make you sorry you made Snowy a computer sales woman, S’n’J thought. If you hadn’t done that I wouldn’t know how to work this damned machinery!
Under normal circumstances, clicking on ‘new’, would bring up a fresh blank page on top of the current one. With this program you could compose two separate letters or manuscript chapters simultaneously, switching between one and the other whenever you wanted.
It worked. The words DOCUMENT 2 showed in the title bar.
‘Chapter Seventeen - Additions’ S’n’J typed, knowing Philip was still working on this chapter. She would steal a march on the bastard. If she couldn’t ruin it for him directly, by typing into his chapter, she could spoil it indirectly by writing some inserts that reality would have to slot in -whether reality (and Philip) liked it or not.
Beneath the heading she began: ‘Things were beginning to go seriously wrong for Philip now. There wasn’t enough power available to keep everything rolling because upstairs, Snowy was somehow siphoning it off for herself. Philip didn’t know what she was doing up there.’
She saved what she’d written to the mangled remains of the computer across the room and snarled, ‘Got you, you shithead!’
At which point the screen flickered and Chapter Seventeen reappeared on the screen: ‘Snowy was doing something. Philip knew this and he knew why. She was trying to siphon off his power to weaken him. “It won’t work, Snowy,” he said, and she heard his voice as if he was standing behind her.’
The save menu flicked down and vanished.
‘It won’t work, Snowy,’ Philip’s voice said from behind her and S’n’J wheeled around. Philip wasn’t there. She turned back to the screen where Philip was busily adding more text:
‘“Whatever you’re doing, it won’t work,” he said. “Stop being bad, Snowdrop, because if you don’t I’ll kill you. And your agony won’t even end with your death. I’ll keep your tortured soul in the house throughout eternity. I can get another Snowy. You’re not the only one. There are more. You may have wondered why I stopped manipulating your life after the incident at Tintagel. So here’s the reason: I was too busy to continue. I was writing more little girls into existence. You’re not the only one. Why would I risk everything on one girl when I could just as easily write another one? You were my first, Snowy, and my best, but you were not the last. I can do without you. There are more.”’
The machine saved the text and S’n’J heard the words from behind her. She didn’t even bother turning around this time. The important thing was that he really didn’t know what she was doing. He could feel the power draining, but had no idea she was writing a fresh chapter for him.
Some god you turned out to be! she told herself, suddenly feeling dizzy because of the power at her fingertips. The enchanted little girl inside her who had once seen real magic up there in King Arthur’s Castle was crowing with delight. Do some more! Quick, do some more! she chanted.
Before she could begin to type, the computer switched back to Philip’s chapter.
‘Up in Philip’s work-room, Snowy was still being a bad girl. It didn’t matter. Her only chance was for Martin and James to save her and she could not influence what was going to happen to them. No matter how much power she drained off from the house it wouldn’t be enough to halt their story.
‘“We’d better go quickly,” James said. “It’s starting. There’s a cloud forming. Look!”
‘Martin had spotted the condensing vapour the moment the first strand of it had appeared. “It’s gonna be a thundercloud this time,” Martin said, watching the cloud. It was darkening quickly. “Put the crowbar down,” he advised.
‘“I might need it.”
‘“Yeah, you really do need a lightning conductor, don’t you?” Martin said. “Don’t let’s make it easy for him. Or it. Or whatever it is.”
‘As he spoke, the cloud darkened until it was black and began to…’
This time the sentence ended part way through. S’n’J watched the machine save it and the room suddenly darkened. She turned to the window, already knowing why the light had been reduced. Outside the house the cloud had come into existence. It hung there, dark and angry. It was low enough to block her view of the track on which Martin and James stood.
Whatever was to come for them, she could not influence it. Philip had stated this and saved it. But she could still influence Philip, before he prevented it. She switched the computer back to her own piece of writing and began to type: ‘He was just a man wearing the garments of a god. An ordinary man who had found the power of the gods in a haunted house and who had wrapped it around himself like a cloak,’ she wrote. ‘And now that power was draining away. There wasn’t enough of it to hold everything in place. Philip had created reality for others but he had failed to create it for himself.’
S’n’J found her fingers becoming nimble, her touch, sure. It was almost as if her hands had become enchanted. Without having to even look at the keys she typed: ‘Without the power the house tapped he would become mortal once more. And that power was peeling away like the layers of an onion. There was nothing he could do to stop it. In a matter of minutes it would be all over.’
But as she saved what she had written, her hands tingling and her mind surging with the power of composition, S’n’J had the strong sensation that something was in the room with her. She spun around.
Curled up on the floor next to the ruins of the computer case, was Diamond Ambrose Anstey. His eyes held S’n’J’s.
Follow the dog, the ghost of Ellen had said. Write the book … then follow the dog.
‘OK, Diamond,’ she said, pushing herself up to a standing position. Her bad leg hurt like hell. ‘I’m ready to leave now,’ she said and added, ‘I think,’ as she tested her leg.
The dog didn’t move.
‘Good boy. Take me out!’ S’n’J encouraged.
Diamond blinked at her.
isn’t it time?’ she asked, worriedly glancing back at the computer screen, which still hadn’t switched back to Philip’s page of writing. ‘My mind’s gone blank. I don’t have to write any more, do I? Please!’
Apparently she had to.
She sat back down again, now very close to the point of screaming with frustration and panic. Her mind wouldn’t clear. There were hundreds of things she could be writing, she knew. But they were all floating around on the periphery of her mind and outside her reach. She tried to apprehend at least one of them and failed miserably.
Then Diamond barked. A single deep wooof!
And S’n’J’s block broke.
What always happens to haunted houses* she asked herself and found that she knew the answer.
Her fingers were suddenly energized and poised over the keyboard ready to describe the demise of Black Rock. She held down the shift button and reached for the ‘T’ to type ‘The house was already on fire,’ when
the screen flickered and her page vanished.
A new text appeared.
BITCH!
IF YOU THINK IT WILL YOU MUST BE CRAZY
THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE GOD HERE
AND IT ISNT YOU
YOU’RE DEAD, SNOWY
DEAD
I DON’T NEED THE COMPUTER ANYMORE
THE STORY IS FINISHED AND STORED
I HAVE BECOME A TRUE GOD
TRY ALTERING THIS REALITY!
The computer screen then flicked back to a completed page of text and began to scroll. Thousands of words went past, so quickly she could barely see them, let alone read them.
He did them instantaneously’, she told herself in dismay.
The blur of moving words ceased only at the end and S’n’J had time to read the last line before the screen faded to grey. It said: The story was complete. Peter Perfect had prevailed.’
‘No!’ S’n’J shouted. Her ringers found the keys and hit them. Nothing happened.
Downstairs in the basement, Janie began to scream, a thin, high, strangled note.
S’n’J clapped her hands to her ears and could still hear it.
‘Stop it!’ she screeched, squeezing her eyes shut.
When she opened them again, the computer’s screen was cracked into a crazed pattern of glass and the plastic that surrounded it was smouldering and melting, dripping strands of burning plastic on to the desk.
‘Write on that! Bitch!’ Philip said from behind her.
S’n’J spun around just in time to see him fold up and vanish.
Outside the window the black cloud roiled and thunder cracked, the noise shaking the house to its foundations.
Diamond lay on the floor, glaring at her.
‘Get up dog!’ she screamed. ‘Get up and take me out of here! Help me get away!’
But the dog didn’t move.
31 - Martin to the Rescue
