The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  One card left. The woman and I pretend not to care, the dealer pretends the same, pretends he doesn’t want to turn a four and a ten and fuck us both over, wipe the smiles from our faces. The chips on the table are more than he earns in a year, and all three of us know it.

  He flips the card. Eight of diamonds. He draws another from the shoe and turns it over. Nine of spades.

  Bust.

  THE THING INSIDE my head’s voice is light and playful. It tells me not to worry, that they won’t be able to prove anything. Then it tells me what it wants to do, and I lean over the side of the hospital bed and vomit onto the white linoleum floor.

  THE DEALER SLIDES me another six thousand in chips, and then more than thirty thousand to the woman, who smiles at me with open mischief, her dress riding high up her thighs, her breasts straining for release. “Drink?” she asks, her lips wet and glossy.

  “No thank you,” I say. Her smile falters, but only for a second.

  “Your loss,” she says, then slides her chips into a cup and disappears.

  I lift my chips with both hands, and make my way to the cashier. The pit boss watches me all the way, his eyes trained on my back, but there’s nothing he can do. I’m not wired, I’m not counting cards.

  I’m something else.

  I pass over my chips, and receive forty-nine thousand pounds in fifty pound notes. They offer me a cheque, but I decline. Cash is what I need.

  IT WAS ADAM’S idea. It really was. He’d seen something on TV and he wanted to try it. I don’t think he ever thought it would work. To this day, I’m still not sure whether it did. I felt something sharp dig into me when I sat down, and pulled the deck of cards out of the back pocket of my jeans. I carried one with me everywhere that summer. I’d discovered poker and I was always looking for a game. I put the cards down next to me before we got started.

  I still don’t know whether that’s why what happened happened to me. I’ll never know. The thing inside me doesn’t answer questions.

  I ACCELERATE, MY hands moving the cards into a blur, and I see the moment where the connection between his eyes and his brain fails, where the speed of the information input overwhelms his ability to process. I slow the cards, then line them up before him. The queen is to my left, his right. He considers for a second, a look of grudging admiration on his face at the quality of my performance, then points to the middle card. I slide the queen under the middle card, and flip it over. As far as he knows, I’ve turned over the middle card, the one he chose. But I haven’t. I’ve let the queen flip and slide over the top of the middle card. I lift it up and away, revealing the queen of hearts. For a moment he says nothing, then a little smile of triumph begins to emerge on his face. He’s beaten me, he thinks. In front of the watching crowd, he’s beaten me.

  “Well done,” I say, and pull a fifty pound note from the pocket of my jacket. I hand it to him, along with his tenner, and he looks slightly incredulously at the money. Then his usual demeanour returns, his master of the universe arrogance, and he tucks the notes into the inside pocket of his grey suit jacket.

  “Better luck next time mate,” he says, and tips me a wink. “You’re pretty good. Bit more practice, that’s all you need.”

  He struts away, and a silver-haired man clutching a black travel mug, his eyes wide and hungry with greed, immediately takes his place.

  I SLOW DOWN and let them come. They’re strolling through the crowd, not even trying to stay hidden. They look like bouncers, which is what they are. They’re wearing dark suits that don’t really fit them, high-necked black T-shirts, flat black shoes with rubber soles. They should be wearing earpieces, but they’ve taken them off in what seems to be their only concession to blending in.

  I leave the crowds of the West End behind and head towards the river. Here the streets get narrower and darker, the buildings crowding in above the cobbles, and the air is quiet and still. I continue to stroll. Two figures lurch out of the shadows at me, but I let them pass by. The man leers drunkenly at me as he drags a semi-conscious girl towards the taxis and buses of Trafalgar Square.

  Near the end of the street there’s an opening in the wall. It’s a pitch black rectangle, that I know leads into an alley with a dead end. I can almost feel the excitement of the two men behind me, feel them hoping against hope that I make the turn.

  WE DID IT in Johnny’s cellar.

  His mum and dad both worked so his house was empty during the week, and it was where we spent most of our time anyway. There were six of us, the same six that had been hanging out all summer; me, Johnny, Adam, Chris, Alice and Erin. Chris and Alice started fucking that summer, and didn’t think the rest of us knew about it. But Erin had read Alice’s diary when she was in the shower one evening, and told the rest of us. We’d taken to dropping lines from her breathless, feverish descriptions of their couplings into normal conversation, and watching the colour rise in her face. She never confronted us about it, so we kept doing it. As a result, there was tension in the air the morning we made our way down into the basement. I still wonder sometimes whether that was partly to blame for what happened.

  We followed Johnny downstairs, and looked at the arrangements he had made. The rug in the middle of the basement had been rolled back against the wall, and a pentagram had been drawn on the concrete floor in red chalk. Candles stood at each point of the shape, and a small bowl sat on the floor to one side.

  “Spooky,” laughed Erin, but the laughter didn’t quite reach her eyes.

  She looked nervous as we sat in a circle around the chalk outline, forcing small talk, trying not to appear scared. I was scared. I can remember that much. I was scared from the second I saw the pentagram. It was cold in the basement, and the shape seemed unpleasant, almost threatening. I knew I was projecting, that there was nothing scary about the chalk lines themselves, that I was thinking about the things I had seen them used for in films and TV programmes, none of which were real.

  Johnny passed a box of matches around the circle, and we each lit one of the candles. There was now a greasiness to the air, a thickness that I didn’t believe had been there before the yellow flames flickered into light. Then Adam picked up the bowl, put it in his lap, and unwrapped a razor blade.

  “Let’s do this,” he said, grinning.

  WHEN THE POLICE eventually turn up and move me on, I’ve managed to lose just over four thousand pounds, and the crowd waiting for their turn has swollen to almost a hundred.

  THE DEALER GIVES me a curt nod as I sit down. I’ve had him before, but I don’t think he remembers me. Hundreds of faces pass before him every night, most of them creating no impression. The drunks, the screamers, the ones who throw punches and spit threats, they’re the ones who get remembered. I’m none of those.

  The pit boss glances in my direction. He keeps the recognition from his eyes with practiced restraint, but he looks for just a millisecond too long, and I know I’m on his radar. I shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be back in the same place so soon after I was last here. But I’m desperate. The yearning, the need to atone is wider and deeper than it’s been in years, and it’s Christmas and most places are closed. Even the most debauched, degenerate places like to close for a day or two over the holiday. It makes them feel a little more respectable, a little more dignified, rather than the open, running sewers they really are, whirlpools of filth and one-way lust that suck in the hopeless and the helpless.

  THE THING INSIDE me tells me I did well. I thank it through gritted teeth, and wait for the police to let me leave the hospital.

  I TAKE THE dealer for four thousand quid in about forty minutes. I’m not counting the cards, not really. I could be, could tell anyone who wanted to know that the true count through the decks was positive nine, but that’s not why I win. I can’t explain why I win. The thing inside me might be able to, but I don’t let it out. I never let it out, not voluntarily. I bet and double and split and I win and win and win and it waits and waits and waits.

  That’s the
deal. The deal I never agreed to.

  I WAKE UP and the flat is cold. I paid the man who owns it a year’s rent to leave me alone, and he’s held up his end of the bargain admirably. I pay the bills even though I rarely use the gas or the electricity. I shower in the morning, and I turn on the lights at night for about ten minutes when I get home, but that’s all. I eat breakfast in a café around the corner, and that’s normally the only meal I sit down for each day. I grab something in the evening if there’s time, or I get a waitress to bring me a sandwich if I’m working one of the shiny casinos on Park Lane.

  They’ll bring you anything they want, especially alcohol. Nothing tips the odds in the house’s favour quicker than getting the players drunk. It doesn’t matter how many free beers or gin and tonics they give you, as long as in the end you lose your chips. It’s a mutually beneficial system; the player feels like they got something out of the house while they played, and the house gets your money. Seems fair, although it obviously isn’t.

  Most people are just too stupid to see it.

  AN HOUR AND ten minutes at Fenchurch Street and last night’s money is all gone. Sixteen thousand pounds given away in just over two hours.

  It’s not enough though. It’s never enough.

  I STROLL INTO the alleyway, and I feel their excitement spike. The possibility of violence is close now, and they know it. As I walk down the alleyway, my heels drumming on the stone beneath them, I feel the air shift and the light change as they follow me through the opening. I keep walking, my eyes fixed on the damp, dripping wall in front of me, and then the thing inside me speaks, its voice soft and lazy, the voice of something that has just woken up.

  It asks me the question, the same question as always, and I answer it as I turn around to face the two men in suits, a wide smile on my face. The smug expressions on their faces falter as they look at me, as they see something they don’t like. They stop, ten feet away from me, and for a long moment there is no sound at all. Then the thing inside me emerges, raw and growling, and everything turns red.

  “NICE TATTOO,” SAYS a girl with two metal bars through one of her eyebrows.

  I don’t correct her. She starts to count them, like they always do. I let her get to the end of the first suit, watching her eyes flicker across my skin.

  “Forty-five,” I tell her, and smile. “There are forty-five of them.”

  She smiles back at me, and I shuffle the cards.

  DOMESTIC MAGIC

  STEVE RASNIC TEM AND MELANIE TEM

  Steve and Melanie Tem’s writing utilizes every trick the genre has to offer, and more. I urge you to seek out their autobiographical novel, The Man on the Ceiling, in which you can witness the full range of their powers. The story that follows shows their talent for literary prestidigitation and demonstrates why they are amongst the most exciting writers working today.

  FELIX DIDN’T HATE his mother, but got so mad at her so often she probably thought he did. Sometimes his anger scared him, that she might be right when she said thoughts could make things happen.

  That was what made him so mad – that she said and believed ridiculous stuff and she almost got him believing it, too. And she didn’t take care of Margaret right. Why’d they have to get a mother like her?

  He’d skipped school again today to run errands with her. She’d never ask him to miss school, she was worried he’d get behind like she had when she was a kid. But she just let him do it. What kind of mother let her son skip school? Wasn’t that against the law? What kind of mother made her son worry about her so much he didn’t want her leaving the house without him? At his age you were supposed to be thinking about friends and music and video games and sex, not whether your mother was capable of crossing the street by herself or taking care of your little sister. He was almost grown now; it was too late for him. But Margaret was little.

  He couldn’t remember his Mom ever saying no. He was the good kid, which was kind of sickening but it was easier than doing stuff that made his mother cry and chant and cook weird stuff in the slow-cooker that stank up whatever crappy apartment or homeless shelter they were living in at the moment.

  Margaret was not a good kid. Felix tried to tell her what to do because somebody had to, but she just ignored him or laughed or threw a fit. When she was a baby she’d cried all the time because her world wasn’t perfect, and Mom had fussed and worried and chanted and rubbed goop on her chest and the soles of her feet.

  When Margaret had started crawling and toddling she got into everything, Mom’s stuff and Felix’s stuff, dangerous stuff and stuff you didn’t want ruined. One time because of a hunch he looked into the dirty playroom of the shelter and she was coloring in his school books, copying one of Mom’s so-called secret designs over and over again in the margins, crossing out words and underlining other ones, and he had to pay for the books. Another time when they lived in a studio apartment he had a feeling and found her on a chair reaching into a cabinet and dipping into Mom’s jars of herbs and tinctures and sticking her fingers into her mouth, and he grabbed her and yelled at her and she threw up all over everything.

  Mom would explain why she shouldn’t do whatever she’d just done, and Margaret listened and then did the same thing again or worse because now she had more information. Felix yelled at her but it didn’t make any difference. The minute she’d started talking she’d been whining, sassing, lying, chanting, telling you her dreams whether you wanted to hear about them or not which he didn’t.

  So he had a crazy mother and a bratty sister who was probably crazy, too. It was like living with aliens. Everywhere else Felix felt like the alien, but he was the most normal one in this family, which was scary.

  Mom patted his shoulder and said in order for powers to be most efficacious we have to meet people where they are and not wish they were somebody else. What about somebody meeting him where he was for a change? The only thing Felix ever got from his mother’s advice was knowing what words like ‘efficacious’ meant in case they showed up on some standardized test.

  Practically the minute Margaret could run she’d started running away. Not like she was going somewhere; more like she was just going. Mom would chant and throw cards and do divinations until she thought she knew where Margaret was. Then she’d send Felix to get her. Felix got mad when she was wrong because she’d wasted his time. He got mad when she was right because Margaret was such a pain and Mom wouldn’t punish her. She said it was Margaret’s nature and the rest of the world, including him, would just have to get used to it. Well, what about his ‘nature’?

  Wasn’t that child neglect? Was there somebody Felix could report it to without having to tell everything else about his nutso family? Like that Mom really was a witch? She preferred ‘seer’ or ‘person of powers,’ so he made a point of thinking ‘witch’ in case she could maybe read his mind.

  So far today there’d been no calls or texts from the school that Margaret had escaped. So here Felix was with his mother in a thrift store doing his best to act as if he’d never seen this crazy lady before. Being anywhere in public with her sucked. The older she got the weirder she became, and if anything bad happened to her he’d be stuck with Margaret by himself.

  She talked to junk. Out loud. Who does that? Now she was holding up some old jar thing and speaking to it. “What have you held inside you? If I put some quarters for the laundromat into you, will you help me make them multiply?”

  Great. Felix had been saving quarters for a couple of weeks so he could wash his and Margaret’s clothes. He almost had enough. Maybe the jar would cough up a couple more. If they walked around much longer in dirty clothes somebody would surely call Social Services. Maybe that would be a good thing. Maybe not.

  When the tone of Mom’s voice told him she was about to start chanting, he walked over to the other end of the store and pretended to be looking at men’s shoes. He needed shoes. So did Margaret. But who knew where this stuff had been, who’d touched it, what they’d used it for? Felix didn’t
believe in evil spirits but he did believe in germs. Donated clothes like from churches and clothing banks were safer but still embarrassing.

  His mother bought the jar for herself – for the family, she’d say – and a long curved knife for Margaret. A knife for an eight-year-old? One more thing he’d have to get rid of, preferably before Margaret saw it and thought it was cool. Nothing for him. He didn’t want anything, but it was another reason to be mad, along with the fact that she’d wasted $2.78 they didn’t have. Sometimes people paid Mom for tomatoes or rhubarb, spells or potions or readings, and she got food stamps and checks from the government, but it still seemed there was never enough money for good food. Nobody should live like this, especially a kid like Margaret who didn’t have a choice. But Felix was almost old enough to have a choice.

  Next stop was an organic grocery where everything cost a fortune. Mom had been sick a lot lately, and she said it was because she had to wait for money to come in before she could buy what she needed. But obviously it was the crap she ate from places like this and from her garden and the woods and streets. He wasn’t going to put any more of that crap into his body no matter how Mom tried to hide it in orange juice or disguise it as real food. Give him burgers and fries any day. “The government removes essential nutrients from our food,” she told him cheerily for like the thousandth time as they went into the store. “Who knows what they replace them with?”