The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  To know something, or someone, is to be able to see them without the cloud of pre-conceived notions, prejudices and paradigms that we carry around with us. But is it even possible to lose that cloud? Everyone goes about with such a cloud, and inevitably their world-view is distorted, refracted, diffracted. It’s as inevitable as an electron carrying around with it its cloak of virtual particles. Nothing in the frigging universe is naked.

  The interesting thing was this: Schema Five was consistent with her half-in-jest notion that the universe was a sham controlled by crazed aliens. As the dawn light poured in through the kitchen window, she remembered another conversation she had once had with Veenu.

  Veenu: So tell me more about your idea.

  Sujata: Well, there are the deadjims.

  Veenu: The what?

  Sujata: It’s an old Star Trek joke... did I tell you I used to watch Star Trek all through graduate school? Well, I made up the word from something to do with Star Trek, for the people who’ve figured it out.

  Veenu: Figured what out?

  Sujata: You know. That the universe is a sham run by aliens. They know there is no point trying to come up with grand unified theories of the physical universe. Or of human nature. The aliens did a shoddy job of putting together a foundation for the universe, and they take our ideas and improvise with them to do the finishing touches. Take the Higgs boson...

  Veenu: Never mind the Higgs boson. You already told me how it took so long for the aliens to construct the evidence for it. Tell me about the deadjims.

  Sujata: There’s this homeless guy who hangs around outside the grocery store, looking for a handout. Big, smelly guy with a salt-and-pepper beard. Used to be a brilliant physicist. All he’ll tell me is that it doesn’t mean anything to him anymore. There’s this look in his eyes, like he’s seeing through everything. You know, from the parking lots and the walls to the scripted conversations between people – he sees what’s under it, what’s real. And it’s not a grand unified theory he sees, it’s a mess.

  Veenu: So he’s a deadjim?

  Sujata: He’s a deadjim.

  Veenu: Is there no other choice? Confronted with your hypothesis a person could become a nihilist, an existentialist, even a bodhisattva!

  Sujata (annoyed): Not necessarily. There are different reasons why people become nihilists or bodhisattvas. A deadjim is a person who’s seen through the façade, the surface illusions... oh, I see your point. Damn!

  Veenu (consolingly): Still, it’s a damned cool idea. The aliens-at-the-controls is nothing new, but the deadjims! Nice touch.

  Sujata (growling): Stop mocking me.

  Veenu (thoughtfully): Tell me something else, though. If I dream up an idea, something totally crazy, like ‘the distant stars are made of cheese’, does that mean the aliens will have to scramble to make it so?

  Sujata: It doesn’t work like that! That would be stupid. See, ideas have to have weight. Weight comes from internal consistency, and how much in line the idea is with the bedrock, the foundation the aliens have already laid. Weight also comes from how long the idea has lain around, and how many people believe it.

  Veenu: You really believe this, don’t you? So why do you keep publishing papers in physics?

  Sujata: One, we have to eat. Two, I don’t want the aliens to suspect that I’m on to them, do I? Plus it’s fun to have a role in the construction of the universe. Hey, don’t look at me like that! I don’t really believe this shit! I like making things up, in case you haven’t figured it out by now!

  OVER THE NEXT few days Sujata went about her life doing what was expected of her, in a blind and oblivious fashion. She had to play the game for now. That’s was everyone else did, didn’t they? Step around each other in polite little circles, mouthing scripted lines, as though from a play. When the actor realizes it’s just a play, what can the actor do but continue to repeat her words? When there are no words she can come up with as a substitute?

  In the evenings she wrote furiously on sticky notes until she ran out of room on the white wall. She stuck some around her mother’s little altar, so that they formed colorful haloes around the Buddha, the Nataraja, the garish Lakshmi and Jesus.

  Sujata’s Cosmic Censorship Principle: All material objects are surrounded by clouds of ambiguity – which may be virtual particles or prejudices or paradigms. Nothing in the universe is naked.

  Sujata’s Cosmic Uncertainty Principle: The Universe exists as a superposition of unformed possibilities for theorists to speculate about, and experimenters to discover. The alien technicians set things up so that the ‘discovery’ causes a possibility or a combination thereof to become ‘real’.

  She submitted her paper on the Higgs boson (the straightforward one) without bothering to review it, and began work on ‘The Higgs Field Considered as a Metaphor for the Entanglement of Matter in Time’.

  Just as the Higgs field gives mass to matter through coupling with various particles to different degrees, so does an analogous field tangle us in linear time, like a leaf carried by a river.

  De-couple from that field, and you can wander outside of linear time. Aliens do not want you to do this because then you can see what they’ve been up to.

  The thought came to Sujata then that the people she called deadjims must be able to do such a thing, that if she was turning into a deadjim too, she should be able to walk off linear time and see what the aliens were up to, if they were really there.

  Sujata had been fourteen when she had first realized there was something strange about the universe. It happened when she began to notice that whenever she drew a graph, within a day or two she would see the shape of it in the real world: a city skyline, the planes of a face, the curving of a stair railing in a tall building. When she drew her first world-line, in her relativity class in high school, the road appeared before her for the first time. It took a few of these ghostly visitations for her to realize that the road was nothing but a world-line, her world-line, her path in life through space and time, made real, or as real as a vision could get. After that first time, the road appeared at random intervals, without warning. She had learned early in life that the universe was more than the notions of theorists and pundits.

  As she remembered this, a thought came to her. She had been chewing the end of her pen; she set it down on an untouched plate of fish tacos. She marched up to the white wall and glared at it, and demanded silently that the road appear. This had never worked before. Her head hurt; the sticky notes swam before her eyes. There was a shimmer and a crackle, and the smell of hot plastic and cinnamon. There, before her, was the road.

  THIS TIME SHE did walk up to the demarcation, the place where the road ended. At first the road seemed to make a half-hearted effort to maintain a distance between Sujata and the clean finish line, but her fury carried her forward until she was at the blank wall where the road stopped. She took a deep breath, tucked a stray tendril of hair behind her right ear, and walked through the wall.

  She found herself on the lawn outside her house. The neighborhood was simultaneously familiar and different. She could tell that everything around was a hastily put together construct. She didn’t know how she could tell, because it looked the same. But some inner eye had opened within her. She had wandered backstage at last, and she could see, in a manner of speaking, the supports for the stage-sets, the gantries, the unpainted cardboard backs of the façade that made up reality. She walked around like a child, eyes round with wonder, and saw that her own life was nothing – all her theories and assumptions, her hypotheses about particles or people, were as intangible and meaningless as the cobwebs you brush away from your face when you enter a dark, abandoned room. Even meaning had no meaning. It was all a goddamned sham.

  The why of it bothered her, though. Why would the aliens take all this trouble to deceive? What was in it for them?

  The kid next door waved to her from his front porch. Bright little seven-year-old with a mop of copper colored hair – she’d help him with
mathematics problems sometimes. She could see him with her inner eye, the atoms and molecules ghost-like, great voids of emptiness between them, the forces and reactions clear in places, fuzzy in others, where the processes had not yet been determined or invented. He was a ghost, a hastily put-together construct, needing and awaiting constant tinkering. She stared at him, at the maple trees, whose branches nodded at her as though in agreement. She saw the door of her own house. How had she gotten outside? Oh yes, she had walked through the wall. That meant she was probably locked out, not that it mattered. The road had ended for her because world-lines were part of the illusion of pattern and order. Once you saw that, no need for the illusion. The world swam before her, unfinished and awkward and imperfect. So that is how the homeless man at the grocery store had seen it. She knew that if she looked into a mirror she would find in her eyes the same look. She was a deadjim, and it was funny, and not funny at the same time. Veenu’s bizarre behavior had been the thing you could not explain away. Who, or what, was Veenu, then?

  She caught herself. There she was, constructing another schema. It was an endless obsession. Humans were so desperate for pattern that they had to invent it, construct it, even where it did not exist. Were other animals like that? Other aliens on other worlds? She thought of the gulf of space and time, and the impossibility of two species meeting and understanding each other. Different schemas might simply tear the cosmic fabric apart, shoddily constructed as it was.

  She began to wander through the neighborhood. Although everything was as usual – the cars in the driveways, the shuttered windows, the guarded expressions on the faces of the few people she passed, the formulaic greetings, the sun beating down on the parking lot in front of the grocery store – she was suddenly frightened. “A nightmare,” she said to herself. “I’m in a nightmare, and I’ll wake up and have tea with Veenu and everything will be back to normal.” But it wasn’t. She passed the place near the store entrance where the homeless man always sat in a dilapidated heap, and as their eyes met, he seemed to solidify, to come into focus. A look of recognition passed between them that terrified her. She turned to go home.

  The kid was still there on the front porch of his house. He waved again. Something occurred to her. She went up to him in desperation. Looking at him deliberately made him clearer, more real. She said,

  “Peter, who else lives in my house?”

  Peter’s eyes went wide.

  “Nobody, just you,” he said. He smiled a little tentatively.

  “Why am I getting sympathy cards then?”

  “Because... your mother died.” He stared at her.

  She rubbed her hand across her face. She stumbled away to her house and sat heavily down on the front steps. She scratched absently at an itch on her left calf, where a mosquito had bitten her. She sensed its fat little body, replete with blood, its hum in her ear as it sailed away. For a moment she could see, through its compound eyes, the crazy, patchwork, swaying world.

  There was a pad of sticky notes in her pocket. She had no pen. She plucked a blade of grass and began to write in invisible script.

  The Universe does not need a bunch of control-freak aliens. The aliens are among us. The aliens are us.

  The universe is a giant quantum-mechanical relativistic Rube-Goldberg patchwork construct, knit by interactions of its constituents, changed and ever changing through these interactions.

  All we ever see are shadows cast on the wall of our limited understanding, and the shadows change depending on how the beast of reality mutates, and which way you shine the light.

  She half-smiled. She was caught in her net of schemas just as much as before.

  She looked up. The bright day was fading. She saw the familiar neighborhoods of middle America, the green lawns of Indrapal University, and the hornbills sailing awkwardly through sunset skies. She saw the tree she’d fallen off as a child. The scar was still there on her knee. She saw the people with whom she’d shared her life, so distant now, separated by space and time and more.

  Then she saw Veenu striding through all the jagged pieces of reality, the backpack flung carelessly over one shoulder. She thought of calling out, but then she saw the serenity in Veenu’s face, the way her arms swung as though she might take off into the air at any point. In her eyes was the same curious, interested, engaged look that Sujata knew so well. Long after she had gone, Sujata sat on the step, thinking about her choices. Before anything, she had to call her uncle, book a flight to Mumbai. The empty space inside her was filling up slowly with sorrow, like rain. She felt it as surely as she’d felt the mosquito’s bite. She would go for the funeral. After that... after that, who knew? She’d have to think about it later.

  ALWAYS IN OUR HEARTS

  ADAM NEVILL

  Adam is one of those writers who is as at home with the short story as he is with the novel. He’s already proven himself with several stark, white-knuckle, visceral horror novels – Banquet for the Damned, Apartment 16, The Ritual and Last Days – and continues to produce short fiction on a regular basis. His story for House of Fear (Solaris, 2011) was short-listed for the British Fantasy Award and he has appeared in many anthologies. What follows shows Adam at his very best – a hit and run driver faces the consequences of his actions in a tale of terror that is gradual in its build-up and devastating in its pay-off.

  RAY LARCH OFTEN marvelled at the amount of traffic accidents that were possible. Their consequences he didn’t choose to think about, but such a consideration was inevitable once his mind turned in this direction. Such thoughts mostly occurred in the few hours when he wasn’t driving a taxi.

  If he turned too quickly on a wet road, or failed to execute an emergency stop in time when a child ran into the road, or lost concentration and plunged into oncoming headlights, or drove recklessly while too close to the vehicle in front, or fell asleep on a motorway at night, or reversed over a toddler not visible in his rear view mirrors... The opportunities appeared infinite. And as a mere speck among millions of other motorists, from the moment he turned the ignition key he knew he risked an involvement in any number of incidents, at any time, as did every other motorist. It was a lottery, and every motorist had a ticket.

  He guessed the clincher about the outcome of a potential accident involving him came down to his decisions and reactions, often made in less than a second, compounded by the decisions and reactions made by other motorists, cyclists and pedestrians. Considering the outcome of the wrong choice in either respect, there wasn’t much time to make a crucial choice of stop, accelerate, swerve or jump.

  When he thought of the deaths, the disability, the physical torment and human misery of long term physical rehabilitation, the lifelong grief or invalidity that he could inflict through a traffic accident (in the amount of time it took a person to realise they were having an accident), he often wondered why he was even allowed to drive a car at all. Or why anyone else was allowed to drive one either.

  He’d still had near misses. He had them all the time. He drove a private hire car seven days a week. He never slept more than five hours in any night and would haul himself, baffled and blinking, out of bed at 3am for an airport fare, or to pick up drunken girls in short skirts at the weekend when the clubs closed. The upskirt potential alone on those latter jobs could be the cause of any number of accidents, because every time he looked in the rear view mirror he wasn’t checking the traffic behind his car; while he endeavoured to glimpse gusset it would be so easy to jack-knife a tipsy pedestrian over the bonnet and bring an end to their days of unassisted mobility.

  The more he thought about accidents, the more he also wondered why more vehicles out there were not suddenly crashing. Or why the entire network of roads did not become a long sequence of traffic accidents. Should drivers undergo the same fallibility assessments as train drivers and airline pilots? Or did that come down to a matter of scale?

  We drive because we forget, he’d decided. We forget pain, we forget fear, we forget the hot-cold pa
ralysis of near misses, we forget consequences. We forget our vulnerability: the very fragility of our bodies, of our wobbling heads packed with brain matter, mounted on a thin spinal column, the weakest link in the entire animal kingdom. And we forget how we are dependent upon those miniscule threads of nerve tissue that – once severed – lead to legs incapable of sensation, or wheezing apparatus standing sentinel at our white-sheeted bedsides. We forget the picture of the car smashed beneath the truck on the hard shoulder, and the blackened silhouette of a figure burned into its seat in a motorway pileup. We forget the vestiges of wreckage in a newspaper picture in which four teenagers died. We look away from the dirty, wilting flowers tied to metal railings on that corner you have to slow down for, if you know the road. In time, we even forget how we felt at the funeral of a child.

  Our entire existence is contingent on forgetting horror. Maybe all of our repeat infractions as a species are based on not remembering the horror of past infractions. And Ray had even begun to forget the time he clipped a cyclist on Rocky Lane two years before.

  He never stopped his car and after a sudden, metallic thunk against one of the passenger side doors, he barely heard anything else because of the volume of his radio. At the edge of his hearing, as he passed, there was a suggestion of keys being dropped onto the tarmac somewhere behind his car.

  Ray had been doing at least forty miles per hour in a thirty, and weaving around a row of cars badly parked at the curb. But he never noticed the cyclist until the back of his jacket seemed to fill the windscreen.

  The kid was black, he thought, though wasn’t sure. But he’d glanced into his rear view mirror and there was absolutely no cyclist in the road anymore. He’d put his foot down because he barely touched the guy, or so he told himself later. Not for a fraction of a second had he thought of stopping. Getting away had been the only conscious consideration.