Then Jamie spoke. “I took a picture,” he said.
Matthew froze.
“Dad let me!”
“Yes.” Christopher smiled. “It’s the only picture we’ve taken.”
“But . . .” Just four words. But once they were spoken, his life would never be the same. “What did you take?”
Jamie pointed. “London.”
And there it was. The entire city of London. They were standing on a hill and it lay there, spread out before them. You could see it all from here. St. Paul’s Cathedral. The Post Office Tower. Nelson’s Column. Big Ben. That’s why the Kings had come here.
For the view.
“London . . . ?” Matthew’s throat was dry.
“I got a great picture.”
“London . . . !”
The sun had disappeared. Matthew stood watching as the clouds closed in and the darkness rolled toward the city.
Light Moves
I suppose my story begins with the death of a man I never met. His name was Ethan Sly and he was a journalist, the racing correspondent for the Ipswich News with his own column, which was called Sly’s Eye. He was, apparently, a thirty-a-day man—cigarettes, that is—and when he wasn’t smoking he was eating, and when he wasn’t eating he was drinking.
So nobody was very surprised when, at the ripe old age of forty-two, Ethan had a huge heart attack and dropped dead. In fact, nobody even noticed for a couple of hours. He’d been working at his desk, typing up his tips for the Grand National, when that poor, overworked organ (his heart) had decided that enough was enough. The doctor said that it had probably happened too fast for him to feel any pain. Certainly, when they found him he just looked mildly surprised.
I learned all this because my dad worked on the same newspaper. I’ve always been a bit embarrassed by this. You see, he writes the cooking column. Why cooking? Why not football or crime or even the weather report? I know I’m probably sexist and Dad’s told me a hundred times that most of the famous chefs are men, but still . . .
Anyway, he was there when they cleared out Ethan’s office and that’s how I ended up with the computer. And that’s when all the trouble began.
Dad came back home with it the day after the funeral. He was carrying it in a big cardboard box and for a crazy moment I thought it must be a puppy or a kitten or something like that. It was the way he was cradling it in his arms, almost lovingly. He set it down gently on the kitchen table.
“Here you are, Henry,” he said. “This is for you.”
“What is it?” Claire asked. She’s my little sister, nine years old, heavily into Barbie and boy bands. We don’t get along.
“It’s for Henry,” my dad repeated. “You always said you wanted to be a writer. This is to help you get started.”
I had said—once—that I wanted to be a writer. I’d just heard how much Jeffrey Archer earned. Since then the idea had stuck, and now whenever Dad introduced me to anyone, he said I was going to write. Parents are like that. They like labels.
I opened the box.
The computer was old and out-of-date. You could tell just from the way that the white plastic had gone gray. The keyboard was so grubby you could hardly read some of the letters and the plastic knob had fallen off the DELETE button, leaving a metal prong showing through. There were sticky brown rings all over the hard drive where the last owner must have stood his coffee mugs while he was working. It had a color screen and a Pentium processor but no 3-D accelerator . . . which meant I could kiss all the best games good-bye.
“What’s that?” My mom had come into the kitchen and was looking at the computer in dismay. We live in a modern house in a development just outside Ipswich and my mom likes to keep it clean. She has a part-time job in a shoe shop and a full-time job as a housewife and mother. She never sits still. She’s always hovering—dusting, polishing, or washing. The cooking, of course, she leaves to Dad.
“It’s a computer,” I said. “Dad gave it to me.”
“Where did you get it?” She scowled. “It needs a wipe-down.”
“What did you get me?” Claire whined.
“It’s for Henry. To help him with writing,” Dad said, ignoring her. “They were clearing out poor old Ethan’s office this morning and a whole lot of stuff was going begging. I got the computer.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said, although I wasn’t entirely sure about it. “Does it work?”
“Of course it works. Ethan was using it the morning he . . .” But then he shrugged and fell silent.
I carried the computer up to my room and made a space for it on my desk, but I didn’t turn it on then and I’ll tell you why. I suppose it was kind of my dad to think of me and I know he meant well, but I didn’t like it. It was such an ugly old machine with its gray coiling wires and heavy sockets. Although I had tucked it away in the corner, it seemed to dominate the room. Do you know what I mean? I didn’t want to look at it, but at the same time I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. And I had a nasty feeling that the empty, dark green glass monitor . . . well, I almost felt that it was staring back.
I had tea. I did my homework. I talked on the telephone to Leo (my best friend). I kicked a soccer ball around the garden and finally I had a bath and went to bed. It sounds silly but the truth is I’d put off going back to my room as long as I could. I kept on thinking of Ethan Sly. Dead and rotting in his grave. And just forty-eight hours before, his nicotine-stained fingers had been pattering across the keyboard that now sat waiting on my desk. A dead man’s toy. The thought made me shiver.
I fell asleep quickly. I’m normally a heavy sleeper, but I woke up that night. Suddenly my eyes were wide open and I could feel the cool of the pillow under my head. What had woken me up? There was no sound in the room except . . . now I could hear a low humming noise; soft and insistent and strange. Then I realized that there was a green glow in the room. It had never been there before. It was illuminating the movie posters on my walls—not enough to make the words readable but enough to show up the pictures. I turned my head, feeling the bones in my neck click as they rotated on my spine. My left cheek touched the pillow. I looked across the room.
The computer was on. That was what was making the humming sound. The screen was lit up with a single word in large capital letters stretching across the center.
CASABLANCA
That made no sense to me at all. Casablanca. A city in North Africa. The title of an old film that always made my grandmother cry. Who had typed it on the screen and why? I was more annoyed than puzzled. Obviously my dad had come into my room and turned the computer on while I was asleep. I suppose he wanted to check that it worked. But I was fussy about who came into my room. It was my private place and Mom and Dad usually respected that. I didn’t mind him fixing the computer. But I’d have preferred it if he’d asked.
I was too tired to get out of bed and turn it off. Instead I closed my eyes and turned my head away again to go back to sleep. But I didn’t sleep. It was as if someone had thrown a bucket of ice water over me.
This is what I had seen even though my eyes had refused to believe it. This is what I was seeing now.
The computer wasn’t plugged in.
The plug was lying on the carpet with the cord curled around it, a good six inches away from the socket. But the computer was still on. I put two and two together and decided I had to be dreaming. What other possibility could there be? I shut my eyes and went back to sleep.
I forgot all about the computer the next morning. I’d overslept (as usual) and I was late for school for the second time that week. It was all just a mad scramble to get into my clothes, into the bathroom before Claire, and into school before they locked the gates. After that it was the usual school routine: math, French, history, science . . . with each lesson melting into the next in the early summer sun. But then something happened and suddenly school was forgotten and the computer was right back in my mind.
It was just before the last class and I was walking down the corrid
or and Mr. Priestman (biology) and Mr. Thompson (English) were walking the other way. Now everybody knew that Mr. Priestman was a bit on the wild side; down at the pub at lunchtime, smoking in the bathroom since they’d made the staff room a no-smoking area, and off to the betting shop between lessons. Well, he was grinning from ear to ear as he came out of his classroom and the other teacher must have asked him what he was so pleased about because this was the fragment of conversation that I heard.
“A hundred and fifty bucks.” That was the Priest.
“What was that, then? A horse?” Mr. Thompson asked.
“Yeah. The two o’clock at Newbury. Casablanca came in at fifteen to one.”
Casablanca.
A horse.
Ethan Sly’s computer.
I don’t know how I managed to get through the last class—it would have to be religious studies, wouldn’t it?—but as soon as school was over, I found my friend Leo and poured the whole thing out to him. Leo is the same age as me, fourteen, and lives on the next block. He’s dark and foreign-looking—his mother came from Cyprus—and he’s the smartest boy in our class.
“All right,” he said when I’d finished. “So the ghost of this racing journalist . . .”
“. . . Ethan Sly . . .”
“. . . came back last night and haunted your Apple.”
“It’s not an Apple. It’s a Zircon. Or Zincom. Or something . . .”
“He haunted your computer and told you the result of a race that was happening today?”
“Yes, Leo. Yes. What do you think?”
Leo thought for a moment. “I think you’ve had a bit too much sun.”
Maybe Leo isn’t as smart as people think.
That night I did my homework at double speed, wolfed down my supper, and cut out my usual argument with Claire. I went up to my room as soon as I could, closed the door, and plugged in the computer. There was a switch on the front. I pressed it, then sat back and waited.
The screen lit up and a line of text stretched itself across the glass.
Zincom System. Base memory 640K. 00072K extended.
It was just the usual computer jargon—nothing unusual about that. The screen flickered a couple of times and I found myself holding my breath, but then the software finished booting itself and clicked into an ordinary word-processing program; the electronic equivalent of a blank page. I typed my name on the screen.
HENRY MARSH
The letters sat there doing nothing. I typed a line of text, even though I felt uneasy doing it.
HELLO, MR. SLY. ARE YOU THERE?
Again, nothing happened and I started wondering if I wasn’t behaving like an idiot. Maybe Leo was right. Maybe I had dreamed the whole incident. On the screen, the little cursor was blinking, waiting for my next input. I reached out and turned it off.
But the computer didn’t turn off.
I had cut the power. The whole thing should have shut down, but even as I sat there staring, two words glowed on the screen in front of me. There really was something ghostly about the letters. They didn’t seem to be projected onto the glass but hung behind it, suspended in the darkness.
MILLER’S BOY
That was the name of a horse if ever I’d heard one. I reached out for a sheet of paper, and as I did so, I noticed that my hand was shaking. I was actually terrified, but I suppose I was too fascinated by what was happening to notice. And something else was already stirring in my mind. The computer had already predicted the winner of one race. Priestman had won a hundred and fifty dollars on Casablanca. And now here was a second horse. Maybe there would be others. Suppose I were to put money on them myself? There was no limit to the amount I could make.
I wrote the name down on the paper. At the same time the letters began to fade on the screen as if it knew they were no longer needed. A moment later they had gone.
I tracked down Leo during the first break at school the next day. He listened to what I had to say with his usual, serious face, but then he shook his head.
“Henry . . .” he began in a voice that told me what was about to follow.
“I’m not afraid and I’m not making this up,” I interrupted. “Look . . .” I had bought the Sun newspaper on the way to school and now I opened it at the back, where the races were listed. I stabbed at the page with a finger. “There it is,” I said triumphantly. “The four-forty Bunbury Fillies Handicap at Chester. Number five. Miller ’s Boy.”
Leo peered at the newspaper. But he couldn’t argue. There it was in black and white.
“The odds are nine to two,” he said.
“That’s right. So if we put two dollars on it, we’ll get nine dollars back.”
“If it wins.”
“Of course it’ll win. That’s the whole point.”
“Henry, I don’t think—”
“Why don’t we go down to the betting shop after school? We can go there on the way home.” Leo looked doubtful. “We don’t have to go in,” I went on. “But it can’t hurt to find out.”
“No.” Leo shook his head. “You can go if you want to, but I’m not coming. I think it’s a bad idea.”
But of course he came. Why else do you think he’s my best friend?
We went as soon as school was over. The betting shop was in a shabby, unfriendly neighborhood, the sort of place where there’s always graffiti on the walls and litter in the streets. The only times I passed it were on the bus and nothing would have normally made me want to stop there. It was part of a series of three shops and the funny thing was that you couldn’t see into any of them. On the left was a liquor store, its window covered by steel mesh. On the right was a smoke-filled café with its window coated in grease. The betting shop didn’t have a window. It just had a sheet of glass painted to look like a racetrack. The door was open, but there were plastic strips hanging down to stop people from looking in.
There was a television on inside and fortunately it was turned up high enough for us to be able to hear the commentary. Leo and I hung about on the sidewalk trying to look innocent as the four-twenty Fulford Handicap came to its close.
“. . . and it’s Lucky Liz from Maryland . . . Lucky Liz as they come to the finishing line . . . it’s Lucky Liz . . . Lucky Liz . . . then Maryland, then the favorite, Irish Cream . . .”
Now, even as I was hearing this, a thought was forming in my mind. I shoved my hand into my pocket and found exactly what I knew was there. Two dollars. I’d washed the car, mowed the lawn, and cleared the table twice for that. Slave labor! But I was thinking of what Leo had said. If I put two dollars on Miller ’s Boy, I’d get nine dollars back when it won. I took the money out.
“Put it away!” Leo must have read my mind. “You said we were only coming to look. Anyway, you’re too young to bet. They wouldn’t even let you in.”
And that was when Bill Garrett appeared.
Bill was famous at our school. For five years he had terrorized staff and pupils alike, never doing enough to get himself expelled but always walking close to the line. The fire that had destroyed the gymnasium had always been put down to him although nobody could ever prove anything, just like the theft of two hundred dollars from the Kosovo relief fund. It was said that when he left, age sixteen, with no qualifications whatsoever, the teachers had thrown a party that had lasted the whole night. For a while after that, he had hung around the school gates, occasionally latching onto some of the younger kids for their lunch money. But he had soon gotten bored with that and hadn’t been seen for a while.
But here he was, strolling out of the café with a cigarette between his lips and an ugly look in his eyes. He must have been eighteen by now, but smoking had stunted his growth. His body was thin and twisted and he smelled. He had black curly hair that fell over one eye like seaweed clinging to a rock. Leo coughed loudly and began to edge away, but it was too late to run.
“What are you two doing here?” Garrett asked, recognizing our uniform.
“We’re lost . . .” Leo began.
“No we’re not,” I said. I looked Garrett straight in the eye, hoping he wouldn’t thump me before I got to the end of the sentence. “We want to put a bet on a horse,” I explained.
That amused him. He smiled, revealing a set of jagged teeth, stained with nicotine. “What horse?” he asked.
“Miller ’s Boy. In the four-forty at Chester.” Leo was making huge eyes at me, but I ignored him. “I want to put on two dollars.” I held out the money for Garrett to see.
“Two dollars?” He sneered. Suddenly his hand lashed out, his palm slapping up beneath my outstretched fingers. The two bills flew into the air. His hand whipped out and grabbed them. I bit my lip, annoyed with myself. They were gone and I knew it.
Garrett waved the bills in his hand. “Shame to waste it on a horse,” he said. “You can buy me a pint of beer.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Leo muttered. He was just glad we were still alive.
“Wait a minute.” I was determined to see this through. “Miller’s Boy in the four-forty,” I said. “It’s going to win. Put the money on the horse and I’ll let you keep half of it. Four-fifty each . . .”
“Henry . . . !” Leo groaned.
But I’d caught Garrett’s interest. “How can you be so sure it’ll win?”
“I have a friend . . .” I searched for the right words. “He knows about horses. He told me.”
“Miller ’s Boy?”
“I promise you, Garrett.” Inspiration struck. I held up my watch, noticing that the time was 4:35. It was now or never. “If it loses, I’ll give you my watch,” I said.
Leo rolled his eyes.
Garrett considered. You could almost see his thoughts reflected in his eyes as they churned around slowly in what passed for his brain. “All right,” he said at last. “You wait here. And if you move you’ll be sorry.”
He loped into the betting shop, the plastic strips falling across behind him. As soon as he had gone, Leo turned to me.
Horowitz Horror Page 5
