Darker Terrors

by Neil Gaiman

  Worst of all, the constant pressure to go outside. ‘What are you doing inside on a day like this? You want to go outside, you do, get some fresh air. You want to go outside.’ No. Wrong. I don’t want to go outside. For a start, I like it inside. It’s nice there. There are sofas, drinks, cigarettes, books. There is shade. Outside there’s nothing but the sun, the mindless drudgery of suntan cultivation, and the perpetual sound of droning voices, yapping dogs and convention shouting at you to enjoy yourself. And always the constant refrain from everyone you meet, drumming on your mind like torrential rain on a tin roof: ‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’ ‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’ ‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’ ‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’

  No, say I. No, it fucking isn’t.

  There was all that, and some more, but I’m sure you get the drift. By halfway through Jeanette was laughing, partly at what I was saying, and partly – I’m sure – at the fact that I was getting quite so worked up about it. But she was fundamentally on my side, and chipped in some valuable observations about the horrors of sitting outside dull country pubs surrounded by red-faced career girls and loud-mouthed estate agents in shorts, deafened by the sound of open-topped cars being revved by people who clearly had no right to live. We banged on happily for quite a while, had another cup of coffee, and then were both surprised to realise that we’d gone into overtime on lunch. I paid, telling her she could get the next one, and although that sounds like a terrible line, it came out pretty much perfect and she didn’t stab me or anything. We strode quickly back to the office, still chatting, and the rest of the afternoon passed in a hazy blur of contentment.

  I could have chosen to leave the office at the same time as her, and walked to whichever station she used, but I elected not to. I judged that enough had happened for one day, and I didn’t want to push my luck. Instead I went home alone, hung out by myself, and went to sleep with, I suspect, a small smile upon my face.

  Next day I sprang out of bed with an enthusiasm which is utterly unlike me, and as I struggled to balance the recalcitrant taps of my shower I was already plotting my next moves. Part of my mind was sitting back with folded arms and watching me with indulgent amusement, but in general I just felt really quite happy and excited.

  For most of the morning I quizzed Jeanette further on her database needs. She was lunching with a friend, I knew, so I wasn’t expecting anything there. Instead I wandered vaguely round a couple of bookshops, wondering if there was any book I could legitimately buy for Jeanette. It would have to be something very specific, relevant to a conversation we’d had – and sufficiently inexpensive that it looked like a throwaway gift. In the end I came away empty-handed, which was probably just as well. Buying her a present was a ridiculous idea, out of proportion to the current situation. As I walked back to the office I told myself to be careful. I was in danger of getting carried away and disturbing the careful equilibrium of my life and mind.

  Then, in the afternoon, something happened. I was off the databases for a while, trying to work out why one of the servers was behaving like an arse. Tanya wandered up to ask Jeanette about something, and before she went reminded her that there’d been talk of everyone going out for a drink that evening. Jeanette hummed and ha-ed for a moment, and I bent further over the keyboard, giving them a chance to ignore me. Then, as from nowhere, Tanya said the magic words.

  Why, she suggested, didn’t I come too?

  Careful to be nonchalant and cavalier, pausing as if sorting through my myriad of other options, I said yes, why the hell not. Jeanette then said yes, she could probably make it, and for a moment I saw all the locks and chains around my life fall away, as if a cage had collapsed around me leaving only the open road.

  For a moment it was like that, and then suddenly it wasn’t. ‘I’ll have to check with Chris, though,’ Jeanette added, and I realised she had a boyfriend.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon alternating between trying to calm myself down and violently but silently cursing. I should have known that someone like her would already be taken – after all, they always are. Of course, it didn’t mean it was a no-go area. People sometimes leave their partners. I know, I’ve done it myself. And people have left me. But suddenly it had changed, morphed from something that might – in my dreams, at least – have developed smoothly into a Nice Thing. Instead it become a miasma of potential grief which was unlikely to even start.

  For about half an hour I was furious, with what I don’t know. With myself, for letting my feelings grow and complicate. With her, for having a boyfriend. With life, for always being that bit more disappointing than it absolutely has to be.

  Then, because I’m an old hand at dealing with my inner conditions, I talked myself round. It didn’t matter. Jeanette could simply become a pleasant aspect of a month-long contract, someone I could chat to. Then the job would end, I’d move on, and none of it would matter. I had to nail that conclusion down on myself pretty hard, but thought I could make it stick.

  I decided that I might as well go out for the drink anyway. There was another party I could go to but it would involve trekking halfway across town. Nick was busy. I might as well be sociable, now that they’d made the offer.

  So I went, and I wish I hadn’t.

  The evening was okay, in the way that they always are when people from the same office get together to drink and complain about their boss. Morehead wasn’t there, thankfully, and Cremmer quickly got sufficiently drunk that he didn’t qualify as a Morehead substitute. The evening was fine, for everyone else. It was just me who didn’t have a good time.

  Jeanette disappeared just before we left the office, and I found myself walking to the pub with everyone else. I sat drinking Budweisers and making conversation with John and Sarah, wondering where she was. She’d said she’d meet everyone there. So where was she?

  At about half-past-eight the question was answered. She walked into the pub and I started to get up, a smile of greeting on my face. Then I realised she looked different somehow, and I noticed the man standing behind her.

  The man was Chris Ayer. He was her boyfriend. He was also the nastiest man I’ve met in quite some time. That’s going to sound like sour grapes, but it’s not. He was perfectly presentable, in that he was good-looking and could talk to people, but everything else about him was wrong. There was something odd about the way he looked at people, something both arrogant and closed off. There was an air of restrained violence about him that I found unsettling, and his sense of his possession of Jeanette was complete. She sat at his side, hands in her lap, and said very little throughout the evening. I couldn’t get over how different she looked to the funny and confident woman I’d had lunch with the day before, but nobody else seemed to notice it. After all, she joined in the office banter as usual, and smiled with her lips quite often. Nobody apart from me was looking for any more than that.

  As the evening wore on I found myself feeling more and more uncomfortable. I exchanged a few tight words with Ayer, mainly concerning a new computer he’d bought, but wasn’t bothered when he turned to talk to someone else. The group from the office seemed to be closing in on itself, leaning over the table to shout jokes which they understood and I didn’t. Ayer’s harsh laugh cut across the smoke to me, and I felt impotently angry that someone like him should be able to sit with his arm around someone like Jeanette.

  I drank another couple of beers and then abruptly decided that I simply wasn’t having a good enough time. I stood up and took my leave, and was mildly touched when Tanya and Sarah tried to get me to stay. Jeanette didn’t say anything, and when Ayer’s eyes swept vaguely over me I saw that for him I didn’t exist. I backed out of the pub smiling, and then turned and stalked miserably down the road.

  By Sunday evening I was fine. I met my ex-girlfriend-before-last for lunch on the Saturday, and we had a riotous time bitching and gossiping about people we knew. In the evening I went to a restaurant that served food only from a particular four square mile region
of Nepal, or so Nick claimed, such venues being his speciality. It tasted just like Indian to me, and I didn’t see any sherpas, but the food was good. I spent Sunday doing my kind of thing, wandering round town and sitting in cafés to read. I called my folks in the evening, and they were on good form, and then I watched a horror film before going to bed when I felt like it. The kind of weekend that only happily single people can have, in other words, and it suited me just fine.

  Monday was okay too. I was regaled with various tales of drunkenness from Friday night, as if for the first time I had a right to know. I had all the information I needed from Jeanette for the time being, so I did most of my work at a different machine. We had a quick chat in the kitchen while I made some coffee, and it was more or less the same as it had been the week before – because she’d always known she had a boyfriend, of course. I caught myself sagging a couple of times on the afternoon, but bullied my mood into holding up. In a way it was kind of a relief, not to have to care.

  The evening was warm and sunny, and I took my time walking home. Then I rustled myself up a chef’s salad, which is my only claim to culinary skill. It has iceberg lettuce, black olives, grated cheese, julienned ham (that’s ‘sliced’, to you and me), diced tomato and two types of homemade dressing: which is more than enough ingredients to count as cooking in my book. When I was sufficiently gorged on roughage I sat in front of the computer and tooled around, and by the time it was dark outside found myself cruising round the net.

  And, after a while, I found myself accessing alt.binaries.pictures.erotica. I was in a funny sort of mood, I guess. I scrolled through the list of files, not knowing what I was after. What I found was the usual stuff, like ‘-TH2xx.jpg-{m/f}-hot sex!’. Hot sex wasn’t really what I was looking for, especially if it had an exclamation mark after it. Of all the people who access the group, I suspect it’s less than about 5% who actually put pictures up there in the first place. It seems to be a matter of intense pride with them, and they compete with each other on the volume and ‘quality’ of their postings. Their tragically sad bickering is often more entertaining than the pictures themselves.

  It’s complete pot luck what is available at any given time, and no file stays on there for more than about two days. The servers which hold the information have only limited space, and files get rolled off the end pretty quickly in the high volume groups. I was about to give up when something suddenly caught my attention.

  ‘j1.gif-{f}-“Young_woman, fully_clothed (part 1/3)”.

  Fuck me, I thought: that’s a bit weird. The group caters for a wide spectrum of human sexuality, and I’d seen titles which promised fat couples, skinny girls, interracial bonding and light S&M. What I’d never come across was something as perverted as a woman with all her clothes on. Intrigued, I did the necessary to download the picture’s three segments onto my hard disk.

  By the time I’d made a cup of coffee they were there, and I severed the Net connection and stitched the three files together. Until they were converted they were just text files, which is one of the weird things about the newsgroups. Absolutely anything, from programs to articles to pictures, is up there as plain text. Without the appropriate decoders it just looks like nonsense, which I guess is as good a metaphor as any for the Net as a whole. Or indeed for life. Feel free to use that insight in your own conversations.

  When the file was ready, I loaded up a graphics package and opened it. I was doing so with only half an eye, not really expecting anything very interesting. But when, after a few seconds of whirring, the image popped onto the screen, I dropped my cup of coffee and it teetered on the desk before falling to shatter on the floor.

  It was Jeanette.

  The image quality was not especially high, and looked as if it had been taken with some small automatic camera. But the girl in the picture was Jeanette, without a shadow of a doubt. She was perched on the arm of an anonymous armchair, and with a lurch I realised it was probably taken in her flat. She was, as advertised, fully clothed, wearing a short-ish skirt and a short-sleeved top which buttoned up at the front. She was looking in the general direction of the camera, and her expression was unreadable. She looked beautiful, as always, and somehow much, much more appealing than any of the buck-naked women who cavorted through the usual pictures to be found on the net.

  After I’d got over my jaw-dropped surprise, I found I was feeling something else. Annoyance, possibly. I know I’m biased, but I didn’t think it right that a picture of her was plastered up in cyberspace for everyone to gawk at, even if she was fully clothed. I realise that’s hypocritical in the face of all the other women up there, but I can’t help it. It was different.

  Because I knew her.

  I was also angry because I could only think of one way it could have got there. I’d mentioned a few net-related things in Jeanette’s presence at work, and she’d showed no sign of recognition. It was a hell of a coincidence that I’d seen the picture at all, and I wasn’t prepared to speculate about stray photos of her falling into unknown people’s hands. There was only one person who was likely to have uploaded it. Her boyfriend.

  The usual women (and men) in the pictures are getting paid for it. It’s their job. Jeanette wasn’t, and might not even know the picture was there.

  I quickly logged back onto the Net and found the original text files. I extricated the uploader information and pulled it onto the screen, and then swore.

  Remember a while back I said it was possible to hide yourself when posting up to the net? Well, that’s what he’d done. The email address of the person who’d uploaded the picture was listed as ‘anon99989@penet.fi’. That meant that rather than posting it up in his real name, he’d routed the mail through an anonymity server in Finland called PENET. This server strips the journey information out of the posting and assigns a random address which is held on an encrypted database. I couldn’t tell anything from it at all. Feeling my lip curl with distaste, I quit out.

  By the time I got to work the next day I knew there wasn’t anything I could say about it. I could hardly pipe up with ‘Hey! Saw your pic on the Internet porn board last night!’ And after all, it was only a picture, the kind that people have plastic folders stuffed full of. The question was whether Jeanette knew Ayer had posted it up. If she did then, well, it just went to show that you didn’t know much about people just because you worked with them. If she didn’t, then I think she had a right both to know, and to be annoyed.

  I dropped a few net-references into the conversations we had, but nothing came of them. I even mentioned the newsgroups, but got mild interest and nothing more. It was fairly clear she hadn’t heard of them. In the end I sort of mentally shrugged. So her unpleasant boyfriend had posted up a picture. There was nothing I could do about it, except bury still further any feelings I might have entertained for her. She already had a life with someone else, and I had no business interfering.

  In the evening I met up with Nick again, and we went and got quietly hammered in a small drinking club we frequented. I successfully fought off his ideas on going and getting some food, doubtless the cuisine of one particular village on the top of Kilimanjaro, and so by the end of the evening we were pretty far gone. I stumbled out of a cab, flolloped up the stairs and mainlined coffee for a while, in the hope of avoiding a hangover the next day. And it was as I sat, weaving slightly, on the sofa, that I conceived the idea of checking a certain newsgroup.

  Once the notion had taken hold I couldn’t seem to dislodge it. Most of my body and soul was engaged in remedial work, trying to save what brain cells they could from the onslaught of alcohol, and the idea was free to romp and run as it pleased. So I found myself slumped at my desk, listening to my hard disk doing its thing, and muttering quietly to myself. I don’t know what I was saying. I think it was probably a verbal equivalent of that letter I never gave to someone, an explanation of how much better off Jeanette would be with me. I can get very maudlin when I’m drunk.

  When the newsgroup appeared in
front of me I blearily ran my eye over the list. The group had seen serious action in the last twenty-four hours, and there were over 300 titles to contend with. I was beginning to lose heart and interest when I saw something about two thirds of the way down the list.

  ‘j2.gif-{f}-“Young_woman”’, one line said, and it was followed by ‘j3.gif-{f}-“Young_woman”’.

  These two titles started immediately to do what half a pint of coffee hadn’t: sober me up. At a glance I could tell that there were two differences from the description of the first picture of Jeanette I’d seen. The numerals after the ‘j’ were different, implying they were not the same picture. Also, there were two words missing at the end of the title: the words ‘fully clothed’.

  I called the first few lines of the first file onto the screen, and saw that it too had come from anon99989@penet.fi. Then, reaching shakily for a cigarette, I downloaded the rest. When my connection was over I slowly stitched the text files together and then booted up the viewer.

  It was Jeanette, again. Wincing slightly, hating myself for having access to photos of her under these circumstances when I had no right to know what they might show, I looked briefly at first one and then the other.

  j2.gif looked as if it had been taken immediately after the first I’d seen. It showed Jeanette, still sitting on the arm of the chair. She was undoing the front of her top, and had got as far as the third button. Her head was down, and I couldn’t see her face. Trembling slightly from a combination of emotions, I looked at j3.gif. Her top was now off, showing a flat stomach and a dark blue lacy bra. She was steadying herself on the chair with one arm, and her position looked uncomfortable. She was looking off to one side, away from the camera, and when I saw her face I thought I had the answer to at least one question. She didn’t look very happy. She didn’t look as if she was having fun.

  She didn’t look as if she wanted to be doing this at all.