The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  LEVANTER-SLEET

  She’s oddly touched. It’s no coincidence, she’s sure – the thing has named itself in mimicry of her. Her own name feels a little less absurd and ill-fitting alongside it.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr Levanter-Sleet,” she says.

  That’s when George bangs through the door, looking for his phone. He sees it on the rug beside her at once, then takes in how she’s crouched over a new pattern of dust.

  He flattens her easily. Her immediate instinct is to freeze, go limp, not to fight back. He shoves her face-down into the pile of dust and rubs. Too late (it was always too late) she begins to struggle. “I knew it was you,” he says. “You thieving little freak, how dare you.” He knots a hand in her hair, scoops her back up to see her face. “Do you think I want you running up bills chatting to your little friends about dolls’ tea parties? God, look at all this hair, look at you, Queenie.”

  He shakes her by the hair like a puppet. She can just see herself, in the mirror, her face coated white with dust.

  “You look like a... a dollybird,” says George, absurdly. She cannot remotely see why she looks like that. But he lets go of her and she thinks it’s over, scrambles up and makes to run out of the room.

  But it’s not over and he slings her back to the floor. He was grabbing her box of coloured pastels from the desk, it turns out, and he sits on her, his heavy bottom hot on her pelvis, and holds her head down with one hand while the other scrubs a pastel across her face. She claws at his hands but he slaps her and she’s scared of the scraping of the pastel near her eye, scared of his weight. He hasn’t gone this far before.

  “There. Now you’re a pretty girl, aren’t you?” he pants, oddly breathless. He lets her up, not completely but enough to see the mirror again.

  She looks, if anything, less like a girl than usual. A wild-haired boy with a toddler’s approximation of a clown’s make-up scuffed across his face stares back at her. And yet, yes, she can see what George means now, the white face powder, red lipstick, rouge, eyeliner.

  Something goes hard and clear inside her, like an icicle. She looks back at him.

  “I’m not just a girl,” she says. “I’m a witch.”

  He opens his mouth to laugh, raises his hand to hit her again. Then she sees something change in his face, as Mr Levanter-Sleet’s shadow falls across it. George can’t exactly see him, of course, but some motion in the air, some shred of darkness must have drifted through his awareness, because he starts back. He mutters, “Fucked up little creep,” grabs his phone and slams out.

  She sits holding herself. She can’t stop shaking, she’s uttering reflexive, breathless little sobs. And yet, she discovers, she’s not actually crying. She stops making sounds. She looks at her reflection again, the colours smeared over it, and waits for the agony of humiliation to come, and somehow, it doesn’t.

  She is furious, though perhaps not as angry as Mr Levanter-Sleet, who is surging about the room again, making the lights flash. She can’t make out what he’s saying. George has left the pattern in ruins. She reaches out and draws a line in what remains. She’s still trembling too hard for anything complicated, but it doesn’t seem to matter:

  WHO he demands savagely in her head.

  “My brother,” she sighs.

  ILL-NURTURED LOUT, growls Mr Levanter-Sleet. PRATING COXCOMB.

  He considers for a moment, then adds: DICKHEAD.

  She doubles over laughing, tears squeezed out of her at last.

  “Yes,” she says. “Yes, he is.”

  HATE says the thing, HATE, HATE, SWAGGERING ROUSTABOUTS, LADS, YOOFS, DUDES, HOODIES, BOYS.

  “You don’t like boys?” she asks. She hesitates. “But you like me.”

  Mr Levanter-Sleet peers down at her with more affection in his phosphorous eyes than she can remember seeing in a human face. THOU MAK’ST THE LINES, he says. AND THOU ART BUT A LITTLE MAID IN TROUBLE.

  She catches her breath. “You think I’m a girl?”

  Amber thought she was a girl. George has been calling her one since she was six. The boys at school are all the same. And she, she has felt like this so long, she still feels the same now, even with nothing gurning at her from inside.

  Maybe everyone’s right.

  GIRL confirms Mr Levanter-Sleet, sounding faintly puzzled, as if he had no idea there was any question.

  After that they’re always together.

  CECILY MANAGES TO take her into Delchester and have her hair shorn close to the scalp without speaking to her. It’s not a record. Her silences can go on for weeks. Quentin thinks about the lives of the martyrs and endures, endures.

  They sit for twenty minutes in traffic on the way home. Cecily smells faintly of wine again, and she bounces in her seat and pounds the horn. She forgets not to talk to Quentin, exclaiming, “I wish they’d hurry and finish that bloody road!”

  Quentin decides that just because Cecily’s talking to her doesn’t mean she has to speak to Cecily. She grins privately at Mr Levanter-Sleet, who is filling the back seat with darkness.

  On the way out of Delchester you can see the A3012, boring right to the heart of Wylmere Woods. Most of the protesters have been heaved out now. There are only a few encampments left; specialist climbers are coming in to pluck them down from the trees.

  Mr Levanter-Sleet comes with her to school like Mary’s little lamb, and hates all the boys and teachers so extravagantly that they can almost feel it, and more often than not, they keep away. So it’s a little better; everything is a little better. On the rare occasion that incautious things come close, Mr Levanter-Sleet stabs them. Sometimes he stabs people too, and usually they don’t feel it, but sometimes they do; sometimes their faces go pale and they snatch a hand to their heart, they quiver and rush out of rooms and do not soon come back. This happens more and more often. Mr Levanter-Sleet is getting stronger and fiercer, her patterns are charging him up like a battery, and she can do more, too. Now she isn’t always occupied trying to warn off things, she has attention to spare. For instance, she can’t actually make herself invisible, but she can make it so no one notices or thinks to question her when she stops going to rugby lessons. It helps if you build things with power into the patterns, she discovers; her seeing stone, the skull of a mouse, small fires.

  And blood. Blood helps with everything.

  But mirrors scorch her, worse than ever now she doesn’t have her hair to hide behind. She wants not to look, but she can’t help it, to check whether her exposed jawline is growing fuller, whether hairs are appearing on her upper lip. She doesn’t want to know what’s going on under her clothes and can’t bear not to strip off and see. She finds a few dark strands between her nipples and spends an hour curled up under the bed.

  She tries to think of a spell but isn’t sure where to start.

  When she sleeps, now, her dreams are beautiful. Labyrinths of camellia trees, stairways through the clouds, and Mr Levanter-Sleet is always there beside her. But she still sleeps very lightly, wakes easily to creaks in the household or the echo of shouts from the woods.

  She’s taken to wandering the house at night when she can’t sleep, now she has no need to be afraid of anything that might occupy the dark. One night, she goes into Cecily’s office.

  Mr Levanter-Sleet plunges eagerly into the computer as soon as she turns it on, while she spins idly in Cecily’s office chair as the internet twitters and rattles into life. First of all, she searches ‘Radiohead’ just to make sure she’s doing this right and in case the internet is somehow watching her. Then she types ‘witchcraft’ and finds some people talking to each other about spells on Usenet. Most of them are no more authentic than Rachel was, but one or two of them are saying things that have a certain ring to them; they feel recognisable, like something she’d always known but forgotten.

  She takes notes on how to spot soil with a high iron content and why this is important. She takes a break to find out if the internet has more on Morgan le Fay than Tales of the Rou
nd Table. It does, and she learns that you can also spell her name Morgane. The word gives almost the same sheen of recognition, it glows so beautifully she just has to say it aloud.

  Morgane, Morgane, she chants, like an incantation, and the name slips over her like ointment, sinking in through her skin and smoothing the old name away.

  It transforms even her unwieldy surname into something darkly splendid: Morgane Sacheverell-Lytton, she whispers to herself, to Mr Levanter-Sleet, who seems to approve.

  And then she digs deeper into other Usenet threads. She types ‘boy feels like girl’ into Alta Vista. She searches for hours, bouncing from link to link, and comes back the next night to search again. Mr Levanter-Sleet always comes too; he loves the internet, he emerges each time sleek and solid and crackling with energy as if from one of her best patterns. And he learns things, too; he never becomes exactly articulate, but his vocabulary does become much more modern.

  “Can you change my body?” she asks him one night.

  She doesn’t think he can. But at least she knows now that she’s not the only person in the world with the reason to ask the question.

  Mr Levanter-Sleet shifts and growls and doesn’t emerge from the computer.

  Without looking at herself, she thinks about her body. There are several fundamental things wrong with it. But she’s still no taller than Cecily, her face still a neat heart shape. There’s a faint crack in her voice sometimes that terrifies her, but it hasn’t actually broken yet.

  “Then,” she asks, “can you keep it the same?”

  MAKE says Mr Levanter-Sleet on the screen in front of her. LINES.

  It would take a lot of work, she thinks. A very big complicated spell. She’s not quite ready for it yet, but soon. Maybe she wasn’t a witch when she told George she was, maybe she still isn’t one, but she’s getting close.

  Then two things happen: Morgane Sacheverell-Lytton comes home from school one day and finds the house full of bailiffs, and Cecily discovers something on the internet called the ‘search history’.

  AFTER THE FIRST brunt of it, the crying and screaming and violence, Cecily leaves her locked in her room. Morgane is glad enough to stay there, where it’s quiet, at first.

  But the others are still in the house somewhere, still shouting. She can feel it, even though she can’t hear them. She uncurls, wipes her face on her sleeve.

  The lock is no trouble to her at all now; it just takes a simple sequence of lines sketched with her finger on the wood. She walks out silently, paces down the empty Long Gallery, stands in the shadows outside the drawing room.

  It’s May, but the house is still so cold.

  “Actually, Father,” George is saying, “running this place is supposed to be my career, too, so it is my business.”

  The bailiffs are gone, it only took two hundred pounds to make them leave for now. But apparently Randall, who has not paid any tax in a long time, wouldn’t take the money from the compulsory purchase for the A3012 because he knew it wouldn’t be enough to make a difference.

  “You both carry on as if I am somehow deliberately withholding the money,” Randall says. “Where is it, this fortune we apparently possess, do you know?”

  “You deliberately didn’t tell me,” screams Cecily.

  “Oh, well, we know your idea of a helpful contribution, my dear. Ten prayers to St Whatsit or crawling into a bottle.”

  “How dare you. How dare you insult me when it’s me you expect to clean up your mess!”

  “Of course, it’s entirely my mess, it has nothing to do with you burning cash in one fad after another. What is it now, five thousand to ship Quentin off to America?”

  Morgane turns to Mr Levanter-Sleet and stares. For a moment she pictures walking down a gangplank from a ship at Ellis Island, a suitcase in her hand, all America before her, alone except for Mr Levanter-Sleet. It doesn’t sound like an entirely bad idea.

  But that isn’t what Cecily wants to do:

  “They have people who know how to deal with this,” says Cecily. “The Emmitsburg Prayer Warriors – no, don’t roll your eyes at them when you don’t have the first idea how to help him yourself; it’s not just prayer, they do aversion therapy, it’s all researched. Don’t you realise how serious this is, how he’s going to turn out if we don’t do something?”

  “Then you dosomething about it. Sort him out, that’s supposed to be your job. Can’t we sling him into a few cold water baths for free?”

  “Maybe if he actually had a decent male role model,” Cecily spits out.

  George volunteers instantly: “I can spend more time with him, at least until we find somewhere for him to go. And what about the ACF? Military training, like Donald’s brother had. They’re a charity.”

  “That’s just treating the problem from the outside,” says Cecily.

  “He doesn’t need anything mystical, Mother, he just needs to get it into his head that he can’t flounce around in a tutu.”

  “Don’t you think,” says Randall, “that anyone who isn’t paid to keep a kid like that around will kick him out?”

  This, briefly, silences everyone. “I don’t know how we’re going to handle this if we’re all turned out in the streets,” Cecily quavers.

  George says, “There has to be something we can sell.”

  Randall laughs.

  It would be unbearable to listen to all of this, but Mr Levanter-Sleet is there.

  It is going to have to be a very big spell, Morgane thinks. It is going to take a lot of work to make everything better.

  THEY WALK THROUGH Wylmere Woods together in the dark, Morgane and Mr Levanter-Sleet. She turns on her torch and breaks off a stick of beechwood from a sapling as she goes and the things flutter nervously and shrink back into the wet trees. The earthworks have begun in earnest, Morgane skids down a loose bank of sidecast soil onto the flat bed of the A3012.

  The earth is damp and raw beneath her, they have laid nothing new down yet. And she has the space she needs to work.

  She digs the point of the beech staff into the earth and draws a line as long as she’s tall, then, as she pulls it into a sharp curve, scatters blood from the back of her hand on the bend. She works the pattern along fifty yards of road, and she focuses different desires into different parts of it (diamonds, mandalas) and seals them with blood and flames, and then she tries to knit them all together.

  Not to be sent anywhere terrible. Money for Randall and Cecily. To stay the same. To be left alone.

  But it gets harder and sometimes she realises she’s just stumbling through the mud, sore and shivering and half-asleep, unable to focus on anything more elaborate than Everything to be better.

  And at last it’s done, the pattern, but the spell isn’t, it still needs something more.

  “Be very small, Mr Levanter-Sleet,” she whispers. “Be so small nothing can see you.”

  Mr Levanter-Sleet obliges at once. Even she can’t feel him at her side, for the first time in months. The loneliness of it weakens her knees and she has to lean on the beech staff. And there isn’t limitless time, dawn is coming and the rain is getting heavier; it will wash away her lines, in the end.

  Gradually, the things re-emerge from what remains of the woods. But they’re not like the things in the house, they’re not so vicious, so half-human.

  But she needs one to approach.

  She is sick of hurting herself, but she grits her teeth, pokes the little knife from the kitchen into her arm again and draws in blood on the palm of her own hand. And this time instead of desire or intent, she loads the pattern full of the pain it cost to make. She fills it with loneliness and defencelessness and hurt.

  And still it takes so long that when it finally happens, she looks up to see something ragged and green inches from her face, peering at her, and realises she was crouched on the ground, barely propped upright on the staff, asleep.

  (It’s possible, she has to admit later, that the thing didn’t want to hurt her. It’s possible it was o
nly curious, like Mr Levanter-Sleet was at the beginning.)

  Mr Levanter-Sleet explodes out of nothingness. The thing has only time to emit a thin shriek as he stabs it and drags it down into the labyrinth Morgane has made. The ground beneath Morgane rocks as he surges through its passageways and turns. Then he erupts out, the force of it knocking her onto her knees, roaring like a black geyser into the air, and goes streaming away towards Wylmere Hall.

  Morgane stumbles after him, through woods that are utterly silent around her. She climbs the dark and silent stairs to her room, and falls asleep. Mr Levanter-Sleet is not there to bring her sweet dreams, but nothing else comes near her, and for once she sleeps heavily. She doesn’t hear the sirens.

  THE INQUEST INTO George’s death fails to reach any very satisfactory conclusion on what he was doing down at the construction site at five in the morning. As he was barefoot and still wearing pyjamas, sleepwalking seems the only answer.

  But one of the last protesters, cold and wakeful in the upper branches of an oak, claims to have seen a man running away from Wylmere Hall, shouting for help, scrambling over roots and sawn-off stumps in the first glimmer of dawn.

  “Like he was being chased,” he insisted. “As if the devil was after him.”

  But whatever brought George there, he was not responsible for the Highways Agency’s contractors failing to follow proper procedure before finishing work for the night. All heavy machinery should have been left securely parked and firmly turned off, keys should have been in key safes. It should have been thoroughly impossible for the excavator to trundle down a slope of loose earth and topple over.

  The construction firm, with surprising alacrity, offers Cecily and Randall two million pounds. They accept at once.

  There would be plenty of money to send Morgane to the Emmitsburg Prayer Warriors now, but somehow no one gets round to it.

  Cecily cries in her room a lot and Randall broods in the library or the drawing room. But they both did that anyway and now they do it with the lights on and the refitted central heating comfortably blazing.