by Neil Gaiman
Gospel Oak is a small area, filling up the gap between Highgate, Chalk Farm and Hampstead. I knew it well because Nick and I used to go play pool at a pub on Mansfield Road, which runs straight through it. I knew the entrance and exit points of the area, and I got the cab to drop me off as near to the centre as possible. Then I stood on the pavement, hopping from foot to foot and smoking, hoping against hope that this would work.
Ten minutes later a police car turned into Mansfield Road. I was very pleased to see them, and enormously relieved. I hadn’t been particularly sure about the Gospel Oak part. I shrank back against the nearest building until it had gone past, and then ran after it as inconspicuously as I could. It took a left into Estelle Road and I slowed at the corner to watch it pull up outside number 6. I slipped into the doorway of the corner shop and watched as two policemen took their own good time about untangling themselves from their car.
They walked up to the front of the house. One leant hard against the doorbell, while the other peered around the front of the house as if taking part in an officiousness competition. The door wasn’t answered, which didn’t surprise me. Ayer was hardly going to break off from torturing his girlfriend to take social calls. One of the policemen nodded to the other, who visibly sighed, and made his way round the back of the house.
‘Oh come on, come on,’ I hissed in the shadows. ‘Break the fucking door down.’
About five minutes passed, and then the policeman reappeared. He shrugged flamboyantly at his colleague, and pressed the doorbell again.
A light suddenly appeared above the door, coming from the hallway behind it. My breath caught in my throat and I edged a little closer. I’m not sure what I was preparing to do. Dash over there and force my way in, past the policemen, to grab Ayer and smash his head against the wall? I really don’t know.
The door opened, and I saw it wasn’t Ayer or Jeanette. It was an elderly man with a crutch and grey hair that looked like it had seen action in a hurricane. He conversed irritably with the policemen for a moment and then shut the door in their faces. The two cops stared at each other for a moment, clearly considering busting the old tosser, but then turned and made their way back to the car. Still looking up at the house, the first policeman made a report into his radio, and I heard enough to understand why they then got into the car and drove away.
The old guy had told them that the young couple had gone away for the weekend. He’d seen them go on Thursday evening. I was over twenty-four hours too late.
When the police car had turned the corner I found myself panting, not knowing what to do. The last two photographs, the one with the dirty mattress, hadn’t been taken here at all. Jeanette was somewhere in the country, but I didn’t know where, and there was no way of finding out. The pictures could have been posted from anywhere.
Making a decision, I walked quickly across the road towards the house. The policemen may not have felt they had just cause, but I did, and I carefully made my way around the back of the house. This involved climbing over a gate and wending through the old guy’s crowded little garden, and I came perilously close to knocking over a pile of flower-pots. As luck would have it there was a kind of low wall which led to a complex exterior plumbing fixture, and I quickly clambered on top of it. A slightly precarious upward step took me next to one of the second floor windows. It was dark, like all the others, but I kept my head bent just in case.
When I was closer to the window I saw that it wasn’t fastened at the bottom. They might have gone, and then come back. Ayer could have staged it so the old man saw them go, and then slipped back when he was out.
It was possible, but not likely. But on the other hand, the window was ajar. Maybe they were just careless about such things. I slipped my fingers under the pane and pulled it open. Then I leant with my ear close to the open space and listened. There was no sound, and so I boosted myself up and quickly in.
I found myself in a bedroom. I didn’t turn the light on, but there was enough coming from the moon and streetlights to pick out a couple of pieces of Jeanette’s clothing, garments that I recognised, strewn over the floor. She wouldn’t have left them like that, not if she’d had any choice in the matter. I walked carefully into the corridor, poking my head into the bathroom and kitchen, which were dead. Then I found myself in the living room.
The big chair stood in front of a wall I recognised, and at the far end a computer sat on a desk next to a picture scanner. Moving as quickly but quietly as possible, I frantically searched over the desk for anything that might tell me where Ayer had taken her. There was nothing there, and nothing in the rest of the room. I’d broken – well, opened – and entered for no purpose. There were no clues. No sign of where they’d gone. An empty box under the table confirmed what I’d already guessed: Ayer had a laptop computer as well. He could be posting the pictures onto the Net from anywhere that had a phone socket. Jeanette would be with him, and I needed to find her. I needed to find her soon.
I paced around the room, trying to pick up speed, trying to work out what I could possibly do. No one at VCA knew where they’d gone – they hadn’t even known Jeanette wasn’t going to be in. The old turd downstairs hadn’t known. There was nothing in the flat that resembled a phone book or personal organiser, something that would have a friend or family member’s number. I was prepared to do anything, call anyone, in the hope of finding where they’d gone. But there was nothing, unless …
I sat down at the desk, reached behind the computer and turned it on. Ayer had a fairly flash deck, together with a scanner and laser printer. He knew the Net. Chances were he was wirehead enough to keep his phone numbers somewhere on his computer.
As soon as the machine was booted up I went rifling through it, grimly enjoying the intrusion, the computer-rape. His files and programs were spread all over the disk, with no apparent system. Each time I finished looking through a folder, I erased it. It seemed the least I could do.
Then after about five minutes I found something, but not what I was looking for. I found a folder named ‘j’.
There were files called j12 to j16 in the folder, in addition to all the others that I’d seen. Wherever Jeanette was, Ayer had come back here to scan the pictures. Presumably that meant they were still in London, for all the good that did me.
I’m not telling you what they were like, except that they showed Jeanette, and in some she was crying, and in j15 and j16 there was blood running from the corner of her mouth. A lot of blood. She was twisted and tied, face livid with bruises, and in j16 she was staring straight at the camera, face slack with terror.
Unthinkingly I slammed my fist down on the desk. There was a noise downstairs and I went absolutely motionless until I was sure the old man had lost interest. Then I turned the computer off, opened up the case and removed the hard disk. I climbed out the way I’d come and ran out down the street, flagged a taxi by jumping in front of it and headed for home.
I was going to the police, but I needed a computer, something to shove the hard disk into. I was going to show them what I’d found, and fuck the fact it was stolen. If they nicked me, so be it. But they had to do something about it. They had to try and find her. If he’d come back to do his scanning he had to be keeping her somewhere in London. They’d know where to look, or where to start. They’d know what to do.
They had to. They were the police. It was their job.
I ran up the stairs and into the flat, and then dug in my spares cupboard for enough pieces to hack together a compatible computer. When I’d got them I went over to my desk to call the local police station, and then stopped and turned my computer on. I logged onto the Net and kicked up my mail package, and sent a short, useless message.
‘I’m coming after you,’ I said.
It wasn’t bravado. I didn’t feel brave at all. I just felt furious, and wanted to do anything which might unsettle him, or make him stop. Anything to make him stop.
I logged quickly onto the newsgroups, to see when anon99989
@penet.fi had most recently posted. A half-hour ago, when I’d been in his apartment, j12-16 had been posted up. Two people had already responded: one hoping the blood was fake and asking if the group really wanted that kind of picture – the other asking for more. I viciously wished a violent death upon the second person, and was about to log off, having decided not to bother phoning but to just go straight to the cops, when I saw another text-only posting at the end of the list.
‘Re: j-series’ it said. It was from [email protected].
I opened it. ‘End of series,’ the message said. ‘Hope you all enjoyed it. Next time, something tasteless.’
‘And I hope,’ I shouted at the screen, ‘That you enjoy it when I ram your hard disk down your fucking throat.’
Then suddenly my blood ran cold.
‘Next time, something tasteless.’
I hurriedly closed the group, and opened up alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless. As I scrolled past the titles for road-kills and people crapping I felt the first heavy, cold tear roll out onto my cheek. My hand was shaking uncontrollably, my head full of some dark mist, and when I saw the last entry I knew suddenly and exactly what Jeanette had been looking at when j16 was taken.
Michael Marshall Smith is a novelist and screenwriter. Under this name he has published eighty short stories, and three novels – Only Forward, Spares and One of Us – winning the Philip K. Dick, International Horror Guild and August Derleth awards, along with the Prix Bob Morane in France. He has also won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction four times, more than any other author. Writing as ‘Michael Marshall’, he has published seven international best-selling thrillers including The Straw Men, The Intruders – recently a mini-series on BBC America starring John Simm and Mira Sorvino – and Killer Move. His most recent novel is We Are Here. He lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his wife, son, and two cats. The author is somewhat reticent about ‘More Tomorrow’, except to say that the information within the story came not from him, but from a…friend. ‘People should be very careful of the Internet – it’s an easier way of wasting time than even a Sega Megadrive,’ he advises. The story was written twenty years ago, so the comment seems very prescient!
I’ve Come to Talk With You Again
KARL EDWARD WAGNER
THEY WERE ALL in the Swan. The music box was moaning something about ‘everybody hurts sometime’ or was it ‘everybody hurts something’. Jon Holsten couldn’t decide. He wondered, why the country-western sound in London? Maybe it was ‘everybody hurts somebody’. Where were The Beatles when you needed them? One Beatle short, to begin with. Well, yeah, two Beatles. And Pete Best. Whatever.
‘Wish they’d turn that bloody thing down.’ Holsten scowled at the offending speakers. Coins and sound effects clattered from the fruit machine, along with bonks and flippers from the Fish Tales pinball machine. The pub was lusty with mildew from the pissing rain of the past week and the penetrating stench of stale tobacco smoke. Holsten hated the ersatz stuffed trout atop the pinball machine.
Mannering was opening a packet of crisps, offering them around. Foster declined: he had to watch his salt. Carter crunched a handful, then wandered across to the long wooden bar to examine the two chalk-on-slate menus: Quality Fayre was promised. He ordered prime pork sausages with chips and baked beans, not remembering to watch his weight. Stein limped down the treacherous stairs to the Gents. Insulin time. Crossley helped himself to the crisps and worried that his round was coming up. He’d have to duck it. Ten quid left from his dole cheque, and a week till the next.
There were six of them tonight, where once eight or ten might have foregathered. Over twenty years, it had become an annual tradition: Jon Holsten over from the States for his holiday in London, the usual crowd around for pints and jolly times. Cancer of the kidneys had taken McFerran last year; he who always must have his steak and kidney pie. Hiles had decamped to the Kentish coast, where he hoped the sea air would improve his chest. Marlin was somewhere in France, but no one knew where, nor whether he had kicked his drug dependence.
So it went.
‘To absent friends,’ said Holsten, raising his pint. The toast was well received, but added to the gloom of the weather with its memories of those who should have been here.
Jon Holsten was a American writer of modest means but respectable reputation. He got by with a little help from his friends, as it were. Holsten was generally considered to be the finest of the later generation of writers in the Lovecraftian school – a genre mainly out of fashion in these days of chainsaws and flesh-eating zombies, but revered by sufficient devotees to provide for Holsten’s annual excursion to London.
Holsten tipped back his pint glass. Over its rim he saw the yellow-robed figure enter the doorway. He continued drinking without hesitation, swallowing perhaps faster now. The pallid mask regarded him as impassively as ever. An American couple entered the pub, walking past. They were arguing in loud New York accents about whether to eat here. For an instant the blue-haired woman shivered as she brushed through the tattered cloak.
Holsten had fine blond hair, brushed straight back. His eyes were blue and troubled. He stood just under six feet, was compactly muscled beneath his blue three-piece suit. Holsten was past the age of sixty.
‘Bloody shame about McFerran,’ said Mannering, finishing the crisps. Carter returned from the bar with his plate. Crosley looked on hungrily. Foster looked at his empty glass. Stein returned from the Gents’.
Stein: ‘What were you saying?’
Mannering: ‘About McFerran.’
‘Bloody shame.’ Stein sat down.
‘My round,’ said Holsten. ‘Give us a hand, will you, Ted?’ The figure in tattered yellow watched Holsten as he arose. Holsten had already paid for his round.
Ted Crosley was a failed writer of horror fiction: some forty stories in twenty years, mostly for non-paying markets. He was forty and balding and worried about his hacking cough.
Dave Mannering and Steve Carter ran a bookshop and lived above it. Confirmed bachelors adrift from Victorian times. Mannering was thin, dark, well-dressed, scholarly. Carter was red-haired, Irish, rather large, fond of wearing Rugby shirts. They were both about forty.
Charles Stein was a book collector and lived in Crouch End. He was showing much grey and was very concerned about his diabetes. He was about forty.
Mike Foster was a tall, rangy book collector from Liverpool. He was wearing a leather jacket and denim jeans. He was concerned about his blood pressure after a near-fatal heart attack last year. He was fading and about forty.
The figure in the pallid mask was seated at their table when Holsten and Crosley returned from the bar with full pints. No need for a seventh pint. Holsten sat down, trying to avoid the eyes that shone from behind the pallid mask. He wasn’t quick enough.
The lake was black. The towers were somehow behind the moon. The moons. Beneath the black water. Something rising. A shape. Tentacled. Terror now. The figure in tattered yellow pulling him forward. The pallid mask. Lifted.
‘Are you all right?’ Mannering was shaking him.
‘Sorry?’ they were all looking at Holsten. ‘Jet lag, I suppose!
‘You’ve been over here for a fortnight,’ Stein pointed out.
‘Tired from it all,’ said Holsten. He took a deep swallow from his pint, smiled reassuringly. ‘Getting too old for this, I imagine.’
‘You’re in better health than most of us,’ said Foster. The tattered cloak was trailing over his shoulders. His next heart attack would not be near-fatal. The figure in the pallid mask brushed past, moving on.
Mannering sipped his pint. The next one would have to be a half: he’d been warned about his liver. ‘You will be sixty-four on November the 18th.’ Mannering had a memory for dates and had recently written a long essay on Jon Holsten for a horror magazine. ‘How do you manage to stay so fit?
‘I have this portrait in my attic.’ Holsten had used the joke too many times before, but it always drew a laugh.
And he was not going on sixty-four, despite the dates given in his books.
‘No. Seriously.’ Stein would be drinking a Pils next round, worrying about alcohol and insulin.
The tentacles were not really tentacles – only something with which to grasp and feed. To reach out. To gather in those who had foolishly been drawn into its reach. Had deliberately chosen to pass into its reach. The promises. The vows. The laughter from behind the pallid mask. Was the price worth the gain? Too late.
‘Jon? You sure you’re feeling all right?’ Stein was oblivious to the pallid mask peering over his shoulder.
‘Exercise and vitamins,’ said Holsten. He gave Stein perhaps another two years.
‘It must work for you, then,’ Mannering persisted. ‘You hardly look any older than when we first met you here in London some ages ago. The rest of us are rapidly crumbling apart.’
‘Try jogging and only the occasional pint,’ Holsten improvised.
‘I’d rather just jog,’ said Carter, getting up for another round. He passed by the tattered yellow cloak. Carter would never jog.
‘Bought a rather good copy of The Outsider,’ said Foster, to change the subject. ‘Somewhat foxed, and in the reprint dust jacket, but at a good price.’ It had been Crosley’s copy, sold cheaply to another dealer.
Holsten remembered the afternoon. Too many years ago. New York. Downstairs book shop. Noise of the subway. Cheap shelf. The King in Yellow, stuffed with pages from some older book. A bargain. Not cheap, as it turned out. He had never believed in any of this.
The figure in the pallid mask was studying Crosley, knowing he would soon throw himself in front of a tube train. Drained and discarded.
‘Well,’ said Holsten. ‘I’d best be getting back after this one.’
‘This early in the day?’ said Mannering, who was beginning to feel his pints. ‘Must be showing your age.’
‘Not if I can help it.’ Holsten sank his pint. ‘It’s just that I said I’d meet someone in the hotel residents’ bar at half three. He wants to do one of those interviews, or I’d ask you along. Boring, of course. But …’
