by Steve Harris
Philip plucked the empty bottle and the bible from her hands. He didn’t smoulder. His hand didn’t catch fire where it held the bible. ‘Enough, Snowy,’ he said. ‘I am not a demon or a ghost.’
‘I’m not Snowy!’ she wailed, backing away.
‘Look at your driving licence, Snowy,’ he said gently.
She took the wallet out of her pocket and opened it. There was her licence and her insurance certificate. Both gave her name as Mrs Snowdrop Winter.
‘Now do you believe me?’ Philip asked.
‘I lost, didn’t I?’ she said thickly.
Philip shook his head. ‘No one lost,’ he said gently. ‘Do you want to come in? We’ll both have won if you want to come in.’
And she did want to go in. She wanted to be home again and whole again.
‘Yes,’ she said in a small voice, ‘I want to come in.’
You shouldn’t have said that! a mental voice she no longer recognized snapped, and she paused on the threshold for a moment, wondering if she had made the wrong response.
And then it didn’t matter one way or the other because she was inside, feeling dizzy because all the flat surfaces in the house seemed wrong and she hadn’t yet rediscovered her Black Rock legs and Philip was supporting her, holding her upright. By the time the next doubtful thought surfaced, Philip had taken her into his strong arms and was holding her, comforting her as she sobbed, and his warm lips were pecking tiny homecoming kisses all over her face and telling her how much he’d missed her.
In seconds, the remnants of Sarah-Jane Dresden were gone.
28 - Snowy, Unravelling
Snowy awoke from an uneasy sleep in which she had heard the screaming of the damned battery-girls, the ones that Philip kept in the cellar so that the house could feed on their pain.
She lay there in the big bed, echoes still resounding while she tried to piece together the shattered fragments of the dreams she’d had.
The curtains were closed and it was gloomy inside, but Snowy got the distinct impression that it was daytime beyond the window. She didn’t recall going to bed - only that there had been frantic passion at some point beforehand. Then Philip had gone into his work-room to catch up on some of that writing he was supposed to be doing.
He’s probably actually rewriting, she thought, and didn’t quite know why the voice of her imagination sounded so snappy. She didn’t think he’d finished the book he was working on, so there shouldn’t be any need to redraft yet.
Remembering the dream, she began to picture some unfortunate in the cellar, manacled to the wall. She could also remember Philip explaining to her that the house - like any half-way decent haunted house, she supposed - needed pain and suffering in order to exist. Except that he hadn’t said that, exactly. It had sounded a lot more mystical than that. Something to do with God wanting to rebuild reality in his own image. The battery-girls who died in the cellar had been something to do with feeding the fire that forged the new reality.
It all sounded like Japanese to her, especially now that she couldn’t remember half of it.
But the fire allegory had stuck. She visualized the house connected in some mysterious way to a roaring power source that sounded like a furnace and looked like blazing Armageddon.
Snowy could clearly remember looking at it in her dream. She’d found the source by opening a door in Philip’s workroom - a door that she knew did not exist in real life. The door - although it should have been on the other side of the house in her dream because it was in real life - opened back into this bedroom. Except that when you came into this room from the work-room, everything was different. When you came in here from there, you walked in on the source of the power that ran the house. The power with which God could re-shape reality.
And if that isn’t heavy going, I don’t know what is! she told herself.
But there were other snippets of dream-memory that were also pretty heavy going. You didn’t just take those girls to the basement and leave them there, she knew, you had to do things to them, too. She could remember a pretty girl called Janie who was manacled to the wall where a girl called Ellen had once been. Nothing remained of Ellen to mark her passing but a patch of dried blood on the cellar floor. Ellen had taken some heavy-duty usage.
Snowy didn’t want to think about it anymore. Sometimes you were better off leaving things alone. Like the fact that she had two different memories of a girl called Ellen; one in which she’d been her lover and one in which she hadn’t. Or the memory of having had an argument with Philip, in spite of the fact that they hadn’t had a disagreement.
‘Something’s wrong,” she said and got out of bed. The spike of pain that shot up her right leg cleared her head. She sat down and examined her ankle, frowning. She’d twisted it quite badly, apparently. The problem was that she couldn’t recall having done this.
You did it this morning, her mind told her and treated her to a fantasy in which she was walking across Black Rock’s forecourt carrying a rolling-pin and a plastic bottle of water. She watched as her legs became entangled and she stumbled.
Snowy suddenly knew that if she hobbled to the window and opened the curtains she would see a burned-out American car blocking the track about a hundred yards away. There would be another car behind it. The one she had arrived in. A Ford Sierra.
The car you had when you worked for the computer company, she told herself. The car you no longer have because you left your job years ago when you moved in here. We’ve been married for four years. He told you that earlier.
‘Then why can’t I remember the wedding?’ she wondered.
There was no burned-out American car on the track, or red Sierra like the one she had once driven. What there was appeared to have been stolen from the special effects department of a low-budget film. There were two patches of shimmering heat-haze in the position where she could almost recall the cars being. If what she could see up there was supposed to be a mask, it wasn’t a good one. You couldn’t see either of the cars, admittedly, but you could see that something was covering them. He might as well have thrown a tarpaulin over them.
A picture of a sandy-haired man flickered into life in her mind. He looked absolutely astonished and terrified and there was blood running down his face from his scalp.
Where you hit him with the rolling-pin! she told herself.
The problem was, there wasn’t a Martin and there never had been.
Think! Try to remember! If there’s no Martin to recall, then how about thinking back on what happened to you during those four years you’ve lived here!
Snowy tried. It was like falling into a pit. There were no memories of the past four years of her marriage to Philip. There were snippets of other memories though, of things that had nothing to do with Philip. But nothing was complete. It was as if something had erased the
se from her mind. But the erasing hadn’t been done successfully. Bits were still there, lurking beneath new memories which only went back as far as the nervous breakdown she’d had. The old memories were disjointed and broken but even in this condition they felt more real than the ones she had.
Well, they couldn’t feel any less real than four years of emptiness, could they? she asked herself as she gazed out of the window at the wavering shrouds around the cars.
There’s something peculiar going on here and I think I know what it is.
But Snowy didn’t allow herself to voice the thought because she had the distinct feeling that she would instantaneously vanish if she did. Her whole personality felt about as thick as a rainbow of oil on the surface of a puddle.
Out on the track, the heat-haze wavered as if a wind had pushed against it and for a moment Snowy saw the front corner of the car beneath it. The car was red and the wing looked distinctly Sierra-shaped.
If this was a spurious reality and Philip was orchestrating it, then he had bitten off more than he could chew. Like a juggler with too many balls, he was being sorely taxed trying to keep everything in the air at once.
She was Philip’s creation, she was sure of that, and she wouldn’t be able to act against him. He would have built that rule in, like one of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics.
She just wished that she could reject the silly notion that Philip had created her. Then she could do something. But the message - whether or not he had planted it in her mind - was big and bold. She was his and his alone. She belonged to him, heart and soul, for better or for worse. And if she did anything to him - even a small thing, like remembering one of those things she oughtn’t remember - he could and would make her wink out of existence in the twinkling of an eye.
Come on, Snowy, you’re made of tougher stuff than that! she told herself. What are you, a woman or a marshmallow? There must be something you can do, even if it’s only to get to the bottom of this! Answer this simple question and win yourself a prize: Why did you wake up thinking Philip was busy rewriting?
The answer, of course, was because she’d dreamed he’d created her as a character in a book. He was rewriting, because of the holes in the plot - one of which she could see quite clearly, if she cared to stare at the twin patches of heat-haze a hundred yards up the track.
He made me on his magical computer, she thought. He made me. Magical computer. Magic. Made me.
There was something there, buried deep. But if she kept at it, she was sure it would surface.
The answer, when it came, was absurd. The answer was ‘God for Windows’, a computer joke she had once cracked in a time of stress. Windows was the Microsoft answer to tricky computing. Your programs were represented on your computer screen as little picture icons in little windows. You simply pointed at the program you wanted to use, clicked a button on your mouse, and you were in business. And all the programmes that worked for Windows were called ‘Some-thing-or-other for Windows’. ‘God for Windows’ was the term Snowy had used when she’d… and here came the memory, not popping up like a jack-in-the-box or rising from the depths like a cinema organ, but flickering like a faulty fluorescent tube trying to light.
Suddenly the light was on and Snowy could remember what had happened all that time ago. She’d woken up worrying about Philip and had gone to his work-room thinking about what had happened to Bluebeard’s wives when they had disobeyed him by entering the place that was forbidden to them. And then she’d opened the door and gone in.
And she’d fallen two hundred feet into the Atlantic Ocean.
But that had been an hallucination. When her vision had cleared she had discovered that although there was no power source in the room, the computer that stood on Philip’s big clean desk was working. She had gone to it, marvelling at how it could work without being plugged in.
And the computer monitor had expanded around her and sucked her in, then flung her through space where the voice of God had told her that it was too late to repent because Bluebeard was his son and she’d broken Bluebeard’s rules and must pay the consequences. ‘The getting in is easy, Snowdrop Dresden,’ the voice of God had said, ‘It’s the getting out again you have to worry about.’
Then both the voice of God and the computer screen had told her that she would have to stay in the house for ever.
That was when she’d read the text that Philip had been working on before he left the house. It was called Black Rock and it was about her. About what had happened to her in real life and what was going to happen to her too.
And then, in a panic, she’d tried to escape.
Because I discovered the truth. The truth is that Philip wrote my story, and brought me to life, not in his own mind, or in the mind of a reader, but properly to life. He made me exist. Using the magic computer and the god behind it, he brought me to life, straight from his imagination.
Snowy shifted her weight to her bad right foot because there was still something that wasn’t quite right and she knew that in the aftermath of the pain, her head would be crystal clear for a few seconds.
She clenched her teeth as the lightning-conductor leg shot tracers of agony right up to her shoulder.
During the moment of clarity between the pain and the dull ache which followed, Snowy corrected herself. He hadn’t created her solely from his own imagination, but from another person. This was why she had conflicting memories. He’d shaped her from a woman called Sarah-Jane. A woman whom she had fleeting memories of having been. He had sat at his magical word-processor - which was somehow linked to reality - and had changed that reality for Sarah-Jane Dresden until she became what he wanted her to be. Snowy Dresden.
And now he’s rewriting me to fix the mistakes he made during the transition. You are Snowdrop Dresden in Sarah-jane’s body. There is no such person as Snowdrop Dresden.
The thought left behind it a nasty after taste of madness. Here she was, living and breathing and thinking, and she didn’t exist. Except as Sarah-Jane.
And for a few minutes she didn’t know what the hell she could do about it.
You could creep across to his work-room, start up his computer and delete him from his own story, a sly mental voice eventually suggested.
She doubted that she would be able to do anything approaching a creep with her right leg in its current condition, and she didn’t know what good it would do, but she would try.
And what if Philip is outside the door, waiting for you? He must know what you’re going to do. If you’re a story character he must have already written all this.
But she didn’t think Philip would be awaiting her. The shielding he’d arranged around the two cars was proof enough of this. The heat-haze covering was growing thinner as she watched. She could almost discern the shapes of the two cars beneath it. Philip was struggling to keep everything in its pl
ace. His furnace was running low. He would not be at his keyboard rewriting her because if he was she would not be having these thoughts. Philip would be down in the cellar feeding the house on someone’s pain.
And when he’s stoked up the fire, I’ll be the one sitting in front of the screen ready to take advantage of it. I’ll be there unwriting him and editing out everything he’s done. I’ll make it so that none of this has happened, so that no one has suffered. I’ll unwrite the bloody house itself if I can! Two can play at being God.
Snowy turned away from the window and limped across the thick bedroom carpet to the door, knowing it was going to be locked. Any half-way decent captor would have done this.
But the door wasn’t locked and Philip wasn’t waiting for her outside.
Snowy was half-way down the stairs when she spotted an empty plastic Panda Cola bottle upright in the corner beside the front door. Next to it was a rolling-pin and a little copy of the Illustrated New Testament - with colour illustrations by E.S. Hardy, Snowy told herself. That bible is mine! I brought it with me. I tried to exorcize Philip with it. I remember. The bottle contained tap-water that I had blessed and I threw it on him. Those aren’t Snowy’s memories, they’re Sarah-]ane’s. You are Sarah-]ane!
She picked up the rolling-pin - which felt good in her hand but a little too light to make a really effective weapon - then she looked at the front door. The were-lion embossed into the big gold knob seemed to be grinning at her.
This house is haunted, she told herself. Philip Winter is a ghost.
She took hold of the cold gold door knob. It would not turn. There was no catch on the door and no letter box. She shoved the knob, then pulled it, then spoke several magic words, but the door would neither open nor even move.