The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  It’s not exactly what she wants but she’ll get, at last, to train in C-bloody-# and the money is decent and she doesn’t have to go back to the Jobcentre on Tuesdayand she feels she could turn into a bright vapour of relief and float away.

  When her first paycheque comes through, she calls friends she’s been too miserable to talk to all this time and goes into a cocktail bar in Soho. She still shudders at drinks that cost £8 but orders them anyway – and wonders, too late, if it was unkind to bring Luke here, when he still can’t do this, can only accept what she buys for him. He doesn’t seem at ease – little to say for himself, pale under the fading remains of the tan.

  But on the last Tube home Grace watches their reflections in the black mirror of the opposite window and it’s nice, to see them from the outside; a young couple companionably sprawled over each other, half-drunk and half-asleep. She dozes, and imagines she sees two points of pale light reflected above her head; a black shape, blacker even than the tunnel walls, protectively crouched over her.

  Luke jolts awake beside her with an embarrassing cry of alarm, shocking other passengers. He flushes and sits up straight, mumbles something about more dreams and people turning into trees, which doesn’t sound so horrific but evidently was. The phrase doesn’t like boys scrolls through Grace’s mind before being instantly censored.

  LUKE’S BEEN OUT of contact long enough that Grace is starting, crossly, to suspect she’s been dumped. But then his Facebook is suddenly crammed with Get Well Soon messages along with anxious inquiries from people who, like her, don’t know what on earth has happened. Grace leaves a similar message and a few voicemails and texts on his phone and eventually, Luke does call her. “Are you okay?” she asks at once, and there’s a long silence.

  “I’ve been in hospital,” says Luke quietly, and she hears him swallow. “I’ll just say it, I guess. I... everything... got away from me and I... cut my wrists. A bit. And...”

  “Fuck,” gasps Grace. “Luke, Christ. I’m, God, I had no idea...” (but is that completely true?) “I’m so sorry.”

  Luke sighs, weary and staticky across the radiowaves. “It kind of crept up on me. I mean, yes, there’s the whole Unemployed Ex-Military thing but I just... thought I was handling it all right. But evidently not. So. I’m clearly not exactly in a relationships position at present.”

  “Okay. I mean, anything you want, of course. But, if there’s anything I can... if I can help at all...”

  Luke hesitates. “No,” he says carefully. “I really like you. But I don’t feel I can be around you.” He sounds puzzled at himself. Apologetic.

  “Right,” says Grace. And again, “I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” says Luke.

  Grace lays the phone down gently and carefully on her desk. “You vicious bastard, Mr Levanter-Sleet,” she whispers, and then runs out of the room and out of the house, away from what has happened and from having said that.

  THAT NIGHT SHE has horrible nightmares for the first time in months. The next night she puts off going to bed as long as she can, sculpting with code to soothe herself until three in the morning, and that’s followed by some of the richest, most complex dreams yet (worlds of staircases and stars; whispering places under the sea).

  She forces herself to believe it doesn’t feel as if someone is making a point.

  Seven_Magpies sent you a direct message on March 30th, 2013, 05:12 am (GMT):

  I really need Mr LEVANTER-SLEET back.

  You sent Seven_Magpies a direct message on March 30th, 2013, 09:49 am (GMT):

  Fine. Take him then.

  Seven_Magpies sent you a direct message on April 1st, 2013, 03:32 am (GMT):

  I’ve tried and tried.

  THEY HAVEN’T UNFRIENDED each other on Facebook, so she continues, feeling mildly stalkerish, to keep an eye on Luke. He doesn’t post much over the months that follow, never anything very personal (unless perhaps he does and she’s on a restricted access list). She can’t tell how he’s doing. But he’s alive, and he’s away from her and she knows those facts can’t be related.

  SHE MOVES OUT of the house-share and gets a place of her own in Archway, still offensively expensive for what and where it is, but it’s wonderful to have her own sitting room and to do the washing up in her own damn time. Nevertheless, she’s no longer quite so blissfully grateful for employment that she enjoys running to the assistance of every idiot who’s forgotten their password. There’s a particularly annoying creature in Client Solutions called Jawad, who appears to believe it’s charming that he can barely make a computer turn on, besides which he’s into amateur theatre and keeps muttering Shakespeare to himself in the office kitchen when he makes coffee. The worst of it is, she has to go to the play; Jawad has got everyone in the office going and the company is very into Team Bonding, so she knows it’ll look bad if she doesn’t.

  The theatre is a black box studio above a pub in Camden, and when she files in among the rest, Jawad is standing alone in the half-dark on the stage, wearing vaguely Victorian military dress, a brace on his leg and a hump on his back. Then the lights come up and Grace braces herself for the worst as Jawad starts telling them that a war has ended and he can’t stand peace.

  It’s some time before Grace even comes back to herself enough to put into words that he’s wonderful. The play is wonderful, but the pace flags noticeably whenever Jawad is offstage, which fortunately isn’t often. Jawad surges through it all: restless brilliance and sarcasm and rage. By the end the charm’s gone, she can see his mind coming to pieces and yet, though she knows he has to die, she’s sorry to see it happen.

  “That was amazing.And I never even liked Shakespeare before this, I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t have to,” she tells him in the bar afterwards, still stunned into tactless truth,

  “That’s the best thing you could say,” says Jawad. Now Richard has gone, he seems like someone new. His hair – harshly slicked back for the play, lightly gelled for work – is tousled over his forehead. “I was too shy to even audition for anything when I was at university. So I have to get it out of my system now.”

  “You should be a professional,” says Grace.

  Jawad shakes his head wistfully, “I admit, I do sometimes dream of the RSC descending in glory to whisk me away. But I have friends who are pros, and it’s so hard – I don’t think I could live that way. Also it would count as matricide if I tried it, so here we are.”

  Watching someone act in a play is surely a terrible reason for changing one’s mind so thoroughly about a person, but Grace finds she keeps thinking about the bit when he seduced Lady Anne and hoping his computer will go wrong so he’ll drag her over to fix it.

  Fortunately Jawad remains an utter idiot with his computer.

  He gets into another play almost immediately and Grace helps him run lines in the kitchen at lunch. They linger talking on the steps of St Paul’s after work and, at last, kiss at the Tube station and Grace goes home, her body humming with excitement and fear.

  She is surely no longer a Girl in Trouble, so Mr Levanter-Sleet would probably have wandered off by now, even if he were real. But it’s been eight months since Luke, and she doesn’t really believe in nine-foot skeleton demons made of shadows who don’t like boys.

  (Though she’s off the anti-depressants now, she still has those beautiful, elaborate dreams).

  She wakes up beside Jawad one Sunday morning and studies him anxiously as he sleeps, but his face is smooth and quiet, black eyelashes lying still on his cheeks. Nothing happens. Does it? He never mentions nightmares, she never sees him moving restlessly in his sleep. But is he a little more subdued, does it mean anything when he decides he’s too tired and busy to go to the next audition that comes up, or the next?

  Then one morning he wakes with a groan and puts both hands to his face and Grace asks “What?” while cold rinses through her blood.

  “Are you brewing LSD under the bed?” says Jawad. “I always have the most messe
d up dreams when I sleep here!”

  “You didn’t say anything,” says Grace, almost accusingly. Jawad shrugs. “What was it about?”

  “Drowning,” says Jawad, and something hollows in his expression. “It’s often drowning... and it went on and on and on.”

  “And this always happens when you sleep here?”

  “‘For never yet one hour in her bed, Did I enjoy the golden dew of sleep’,” says Jawad hammily, “‘but have been wakened by my hideous dreams.’” Though that wasn’t his line, Grace remembers – that was Lady Anne. Talking about the evil king she’d married.

  She’s suddenly weak with affection for him. All this time he’s borne it.

  “Would you say,” she asks carefully, “that it’s getting worse?”

  Jawad doesn’t answer for a while. When he makes himself smile again she can see the effort, but there’s nothing but warmth when he folds her into his arms. “Never mind,” he says. “You’re worth it.”

  “Leave him alone. You leave him the fuck alone, Mr Levanter-Sleet,” she hisses into the bathroom mirror when Jawad is gone. “And you can drag my brain through hell all night long, I don’t care, you’re not getting him.”

  You sent Seven_Magpies a direct message on November 12th, 2013, 22:16 pm (GMT):

  I need to see you.

  OF COURSE THE lift isn’t working. Of course Seven Magpies has to live at the very top of the tower. Grace slogs grimly upwards, past ripped binbags, through a stubborn reek of urine, floor after floor, and rehearses what she’s going to say to Morgane when she sees her. How could you do this to me. Fix it. Fix it fucking now. Panting she lurches onto the top floor.

  The wind soughs in over the walkway, catching at shreds of plastic and paper. There’s a deadness and emptiness up here – aging graffiti scrawled on front doors that somehow Grace senses never open any more. She makes her way to the green door she was told to look for, the last door on the highest floor.

  “Hello, Lady Jingly Jones, it isn’t locked,” pipes a voice from inside. It’s a high, pure-toned, remarkably posh voice, like that of an aristocratic child.

  She pushes open the door and Seven Magpies – Morgane – scrambles to her feet to meet her.

  She can’t be as young as she looks – from her blog, she’s about Grace’s age, surely? – she doesn’t even look out of her teens. She’s frighteningly thin; bare, sapling limbs emerging from a beaded flapper-girl dress that’s too big for her. Her hair is bobbed flapper-short, too, though it seems likely Morgane might have done that herself. Her feet are bare and slightly bluish on the grey carpet. She must be freezing.

  “Do come in,” says Morgane, in her cut-glass accent, gesturing elegantly. A princess in a tower, thinks Grace, and wonders what she’s come here to do with her.

  The room is tiny, one corner occupied by a grubby kitchenette. There’s a sewing machine on a stained coffee table surrounded by cotton reels and swatches of black satin, and there’s a pattern of bones laid out on a makeshift hearth of slate tiles in the middle of the floor. But there’s also an Xbox by the old cathode-ray television, a laptop lying on a crumpled velvet blanket on the unmade bed. And there’s Angels of the Embers, stacked with other games beside a tall bookcase that is nevertheless too small to contain all Morgane’s books.

  “I thought he’d stay for a week and then come home,” offers Morgane. She sounds so forlorn that Grace seethes with an unstable brew of guilt and anger.

  “He’s trying to kill someone,” she says.

  Morgane titters. “He wouldn’t have to try.”

  “He nearly did kill someone else!”

  “I did tell you what he was like.”

  “But I didn’t think he was real!”

  “Oh,” says Morgane. “So you were humouring me. You shouldn’t have done that. We’re supposed to be friends. I was only trying to help.”

  Grace deflates. Scrubs her hands over her face and into her hair. She moans, “So what are we going to do?”

  Morgane reaches down and lifts a stone from a heap beside the tiles. It has a hole through it which Morgane positions against her eye.

  “Can you see him?” Grace breathes.

  Morgane nods. “I saw him when you came in together,” she says. “This only makes it clearer. I always see them. All of them.”

  “There are others?” Grace tries to keep from visibly shuddering. “Here? Right now?”

  Morgane’s voice quivers. “They’re too much for me all on my own. Mr Levanter-Sleet is very different from most.”

  “How?” asks Grace.

  Morgane puts down the stone. “He’s a lot nicer.” She smiles. “Shall we make a start?”

  Morgane kneels daintily on the floor, gesturing for Grace to do the same, and says “I’m going to need some blood.”

  “Somehow I knew you would,” says Grace, sighing.

  “I’m very hygienic,” protests Morgane.

  She is, actually, producing a pair of small surgical scalpels in sealed plastic sleeves, and handing one to Grace. “Not yet, though,” she says. She clears away the bones and places pebbles at points on the square of tiles, then pours out black sand from a bottle, drawing a pattern.

  “Have you always... been like this?” Grace ventures after a while.

  “I always saw things,” says Morgane neutrally, frowning thoughtfully at her stones and rearranging them. “But was I always a witch? No. That takes a lot of self-training. Now, please.”

  She cuts her own hand with practiced indifference, and carefully spills the blood into a circle of sand that’s joined, by a long winding pathway, to a similar point on Grace’s side of the hearth. Grace, reluctantly, mirrors her, and Morgane begins whispering. Grace wonders if it’s Latin or something, but then realises it must be English, although Morgane is too quiet for her to catch any words other than, occasionally, “please.”

  She sits motionless, silent. Grace watches anxiously, sucking at the back of her hand. She assumes she’s not supposed to speak but this goes on for so long that at last she asks: “Is it working?”

  Morgane opens her eyes. “No,” she says, and destroys the pattern in a sweep of her bony arm and collapses into a huddle over the wreck.

  “He likes you better,” she moans into her arms. “He likes what you do more.”

  “What I do?” Grace asks, baffled, but Morgane shakes her head and moans. Grace watches her weep awkwardly then reaches out with her uninjured hand to pat her hair. It’s the first time in three years’ acquaintance they’ve ever touched. “I’m so sorry,” she says, “Is there anything I can do?”

  Morgane lifts her head and shakes it again, bravely this time, “I’ll have to work harder.” But just for a moment all the shadows in the room seem wrong.

  Grace flees, but from Morgane’s plaintive cry of “Mr Levanter-Sleet!” Grace knows she’s taken him with her.

  And so he must still be with her at New Cross station, and London Bridge, and so it’s ridiculous that she feels safer now she’s away from Morgane’s tower. But then it’s not her he means any harm to.

  She struggles to think. She refuses to accept this effort has been a total failure.

  He likes what you do more.

  She emailed him to me, Grace thinks. However much messing around with blood and sand she did first, that’s how he got to me. She didn’t know where I lived, how else could he have found his way?

  She stares at the pattern of coloured lines on the Tube map.

  “I’VE BEEN THINKING,” says Jawad, and Grace tenses. “Maybe... you see, we could both save a lot of money, if... oh lord, that is the least romantic way of putting it. I mean, I miss you so much when you’re not there. Maybe we could move in together?”

  Grace cannot speak.

  Jawad’s smile falters, and then, bravely, reappears. “You look less than delighted, so we’ll just pretend that never happened, and...”

  “Let’s get married,” says Grace, sharply, suddenly. And then she smiles, takes his hand an
d says it again, properly.

  BEING ENGAGED, PERVERSELY, gives her time away from him to do what needs to be done. She tells him she doesn’t want them to live together before the wedding; it will make moving into their new home less special. And she needs to talk to her friends, make plans.

  It’s really not as if she can tell him the truth.

  Thank God none of this happened when she was unemployed. She has to spend a lot of money: a powerful new desktop with its own server and a backup generator, because she dare not take chances – and this is going to do awful things to her electricity bills.

  She calls in sick to work, and begins.

  She starts by ganking a lot of code from a virtual reality game called World of My Own, and cobbles on some from Angels of the Embers for old times sake, and sets about layering in complexity – patterns of algorithms and pipelines of data and soon starts to panic – for how does this come close to the places she’s visited with Mr Levanter-Sleet?

  She remembers the cathedrals, the forests, the music, the stars.

  She’s programming in a sequence of fractals when it occurs to her that the games she was using as raw material are designed to render a three-dimensional world to human eyes on a two-dimensional screen. But why should Mr Levanter-Sleet be so limited?

  It’s so hard and it goes endlessly wrong, that late into the night she weeps with effort and desperation. But when at last she thinks that, if everything she’s guessed and remembered about Mr Levanter-Sleet is right then she might have made something he could perceive as a six-dimensional space, something alters, she starts to feel a lonely pleasure in what she’s doing. She’s crafting a palace, hung with tapestries of code, stocked with various flavours of infinity, and no other human being will ever see how beautiful it is.