by Steve Harris
Which means you are a prisoner. So get up those stairs, get in that forbidden room and get to work on that word-processor. We’ll see who’s God!
The sigh that Snowy heard the moment she’d finished thinking this thought seemed to come from right beside her. She hopped around, the hairs in the nape of her neck prickling and the rolling-pin raised to strike.
Nobody there1, she told herself madly.
‘I’m right beside you, Snowdrop,’ Philip’s voice whispered. She felt his breath against her ear. Reflexively she hopped away.
‘It won’t work, Snowy,’ he said into her other ear. ‘You can’t run away because you can’t get out, and you can’t fight me because you can’t find me. That’s what it means to be a god. I’m omnipotent.’
‘Impotent, more likely,’ Snowy replied in a high-pitched squeak as she hopped away again. This time she saw the shimmering in the air as it vanished.
‘You won’t edit me out of my own story,’ the voice said from behind her and she felt a cool hand slide up under the tails of the shirt she was wearing and trail across her bottom. She stumbled away, hating him for being able to do this to her and hating him even more because the mere touch of his ghostly hand inflamed her with passion. Presumably he had written this into his story. She was being ruthlessly manipulated.
The air began to shimmer about three feet in front of her. ‘Janie’s downstairs,’ Philip’s voice said from inside the disturbance. ‘Why don’t you come down and see what I’m doing to her? Why don’t you help me hurt her? Janie’s strong, Snowy. You’d like her. She’s a long-life battery. Listen.’
Snowy heard a woman’s scream. It was dreadful and it sounded as if it would go on for ever.
‘How much pain would it take to make you scream like that?’ Philip’s voice asked from beside her left ear.
‘You won’t hurt me,’ she said.
‘Unless you misbehave. I can always write myself another Snowy. You know that, don’t you?’
Snowy believed him. ‘Yes,’ she said obediently.
‘Then go upstairs, get back in bed and wait for me.’
‘Yes,’ she said and began to shuffle towards the stairs.
Janie began to scream again, louder this time.
I’m sorry Janie, Snowdrop thought. I’ll make it better for you again. I promise.
Snowy paused at the foot of the stairs then walked past them down the hall to where the second forbidden entrance was. Philip’s voice didn’t speak to her again so she assumed that he was busy. Judging from the continuing screams of agony he was very busy indeed.
For once, the door to the cellar was open. Steep steps led down into darkness. They appeared to be hewn from the black stone of the rock on which the house stood and they were worn concave in the centre. They looked as if they might lead down to the very bowels of the earth.
For an agonized moment, Snowy considered going down there. She thought she could see the faintest tinge of green light at the bottom as she approached the first step.
‘Sarah-Jane!’
Snowy heard the sibilant whisper from behind her. The voice was female, and familiar. Even though it was compressed and hissing, she knew that voice as well as she knew her own.
She turned round.
‘Ellen? Is that you?’
‘Here,’ the voice whispered from down the hall.
Snowy walked towards it and away from the screaming.
‘Here I am Drezy. Here!’
As she moved, the voice moved away from her. The next time it spoke it seemed to be coming from the stairs.
And there was Ellen, perched on the steps, smiling, her chin cupped in her hands. She was real and whole and substantial. She was not dead and her body and face did not bear the marks of torture. ‘You know who you are, Drez,’ she said. ‘And you know what you’ve got to do. Don’t make the same mistake that me and the others made. Don’t believe. Get up them there stairs, and rewrite the book, Drez, then follow the dog.’
And then Ellen was gone as if she had never been there.
That didn’t happen, Snowy told herself. But something had happened because she could now quite clearly remember being Sarah-Jane. Snowdrop was beginning to come unstitched.
She started up the stairs towards Philip’s work-room, unsure if the vision of Ellen had been shown to her by Philip to entice her to his room or if she had just seen Ellen’s ghost.
The work-room door was not locked as she had so fondly imagined it would be during her hike up the stairs. Snowy paused outside for a moment, taking deep breaths. This was either going to be the end for her, or a new beginning.
All you have to do is unwrite him and your problems are all over, she told herself. It’s going to be easy.
She pulled the door handle down and pushed.
Like a bank-vault door, it swung slowly open.
And there was Philip’s work-room, blindingly white and sparse.
And Philip was not there.
At the far end of the room, on a white table that was set against a white wall, the unplugged computer was running, showing the ‘Space Journey’ screen saver.
Snowy limped down towards it, each step sending a jolt of agony up her leg and through her body. Get the bastard! she told herself. Teach him to make me into someone else! She reached the high-backed chair in which Philip wove his lies and threw herself into it.
I’ll unplug you, Philip Winter, she thought, being careful not to look at the screen saver in case she got sucked through it like she had done last time. She moved the mouse and the screen saver cleared. What now lay in front of her was not a screenful of the latest instalment of her own life, but a blank screen ready to be written on. According to the title bar at the top of the screen this was Document 1 and that was it.
Her heart hammering hard, she moved the pointer to the file menu and clicked a button. A list of Philip’s documents was presented to her. There was black rockoi.doc to black ROCK09.DOC, which she presumed were the nine chapters he’d written so far and another file called rock notes.doc which presumably contained the notes he’d jotted down before starting work.
That stuff could wait. Time was short. She didn’t have long before Philip realized what she was up to and came hotfooting it up here to stop here. What she had to do first was delete any reference to him. She selected the last chapter, got it on screen, scrolled down to the first mention of Philip Winter, put the cursor after the words, then used the backspace key to delete them.
Which was when she realized it wasn’t going to be as easy as she had imagined.
The backspace key didn’t work.
Neither did the delete key.
Neither did the cut function.
Whatever she did, she couldn’t remove any words.
‘ You bastard!’ Snowy hissed, glancing nervously over her shoulder in case the bastard was already here and observing her.
What do I do? For God’s sake, what do I do?
The obvious answer was t
o do what Ellen had advised her. She was going to have to alter the story, but not by cutting things out of it. She was going to have to put something in.
She moved to the end of the chapter and read the last four lines:
The backspace key didn’t work.
Neither did the delete key.
Neither did the cut function.
Whatever she did, she couldn’t remove any words.
‘He hasn’t written up the bit after that, when I hissed and asked myself what I should do,’ Snowy said aloud. ‘Which means that I’m on my own.’
‘But Snowy was not beaten’, she typed, hunting and pecking at the keys like someone who had never before used a keyboard. Philip had evidently removed her keyboard skills for his own safety.
When she looked up at the screen she immediately saw the error she’d made and cursed. She tried to delete the misspelt word, tried to overstrike it, then she tried to change it with the spell-checker. None of this worked. This magical word-processor was of the one-time-only variety, apparently. If you didn’t get it right first time, tough shit.
Which is why there are holes in the plot of Black Rocky she told herself. He’s had to tailor his material to fit in with what happens outside in the real world and doing that has left him with inconsistencies that cannot be corrected. That’s why you can almost remember being Sarah-Jane.
Glancing nervously around the room she began to create her own version of events. ‘Snowy stayed in the writing room for three hours, and Philip did not turn up,’ she typed.
‘When she went to look for him, Snowy found that Philip had suffered a massive coronary at the foot of the stairs and was well and truly dead,’ she added. ‘The spell that Philip and his haunted house had woven over Snowy and her friends broke when he died. Now there was nothing to keep Snowy imprisoned there. The three hours passed in a twinkling. She then went downstairs and found her friends, all alive and well, if a little confused. “Is it over?” they asked her.
‘Snowy nodded. “We’d better get out of here because you know what happens in the end of ghost stories, don’t you?” she said. “The haunted house burns down. And this one is about to go that way,” she said, smiling. “There is going to be an electrical fault. Or that’s what the investigators will say. We’ve got five minutes, now let’s hoof it!”
‘Snowy and her friends were half-way up the track when the fire started. They turned back and watched it for a while. None of them spoke.
‘When they were sure that nothing would remain of the house, they turned, as one person, and walked away.
‘They all lived long, happy and healthy lives.
‘The end.’
It seemed to take for ever to type all this. By the time she’d finished, the inside of Snowy’s bottom lip was raw where she’d been chewing it in concentration. She read back what she’d written and scowled. It didn’t look as if she would ever make a writer.
But at least she wasn’t even going to have to wait for three hours. She’d written that the time passed in a twinkling, therefore it had already passed. That was the beauty of fiction,
you could manipulate things to suit yourself.
There was only one way to find out if her strategy had worked and that was to go to the top of the stairs and see if Philip was at the bottom, dead of a heart attack.
And why shouldn’t he be?
Snowy got up and wished she’d remembered to add a line concerning the injury to her leg. Would the machine allow an inserted line? It was worth a go.
She sat down again, moved the cursor to the end of the line where Snowy had found her friends alive and well, and added the words, ‘And now she thought about it, Snowy’s leg didn’t even hurt any more.’
The words went in easily and stayed there. You could insert extra lines apparently, even if you couldn’t take any out again.
It wasn’t really early enough in the story for Snowy’s liking - she wasn’t going to find out if her leg was better until everything else had happened - but it was the only place the added line seemed to fit. It would do.
She got up and limped towards the door, hoping that three hours had really passed in a twinkling, that Philip really was dead and that she was free.
29 - A Conversation with Peter Perfect
The sound behind Snowy stopped her in her tracks.
It was the crisp flap flap! of paper being rapidly unfolded.
She turned round slowly, remembering - with Sarah-Jane’s memory - how Philip had once seemed to fold himself up until he vanished.
Over in his high-backed chair, the opposite thing was currently happening.
Philip Winter was unfolding himself.
Heart sinking, Snowy watched what appeared to be nothing more substantial than a flat piece of black paper double its size with the following movement. Within a second the unfolding had speeded to a blur.
A second later the movement snapped to a stop, and there was Philip, large as life and twice as handsome. He did not appear to be in any distress at all, let alone look like a candidate for a fatal heart attack. He looked relaxed and happy.
He smiled. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, Snowy, but I’m not dead or dying. Or even feeling poorly. The trouble with novels, as I’m sure you know, is that although they don’t have to be terribly logical, they have to be convincing. Your little addition doesn’t make sense, you see, so it can’t work. If you’d been thorough, you’d have scanned the text for important plot-points and worked round them. You missed one, you see.’
Snowy glared at him. She didn’t care about plot-points or anything else any more. All she knew was that she had failed; she didn’t need to know why.
‘Chapter five,’ Philip said, grinning. ‘Chapter five, page one-twenty, lines thirty-two to thirty-nine. Let me quote: “Philip knew that Snowy would try to use the computer to change reality and he also knew she would fail. She would fail because she had not read chapter five. Where she would have learned that nothing she wrote could become reality until she’d saved it to disk. Until the words had been saved in the computer, they merely hung there on screen, existing only in electronic limbo. All Philip had to do to kill Snowy’s own additions was to quit the document that was currently being displayed without saving what she’d appended.” Which is exactly what I’m going to do now,’ he told her.
Two seconds later, all Snowy’s hard work was gone.
‘You should have read chapter five,’ he said, turning back to her, ‘then you would have found answers to the questions that have been bothering you lately. Let me elaborate: you would have discovered that in my story - as in real life - this house was designed by a man called William Copplethwaite. Mister Copplethwaite knew his onions, not just about house design, but about geomancy too. He understood the principles and rules concerning the dimensions of buildings and the placement of those buildings. Do you understand what I’m getting at?’
/>
Snowy was too dazed to speak.
‘I’m talking about making magic by harnessing potential power sources. Certain physical objects of the right shape, and arranged in the proper way, may tap and amplify the latent power of the earth’s energy. Or even cosmic energy. I know it comes across as a bit New Age, but the fact is it works. What the New Agers will forget to tell you though, is that everything has a price. We know what the price is, me and you, don’t we? You have to pay in blood and pain. No pain, no gain, I think the keep-fit industry says. Whatever, it’s true. Our man Copplethwaite knew all this and he knew all about this site. They used to bring prisoners from the Castle over here in the olden days. I don’t have to tell you what they did to them. A woman with your imagination can picture it quite well.’
Snowy tried not to picture it and failed. Her imagination showed her the rock before the house was built on it. There was a fissure in the centre which opened on to a tiny cave nestling half-way between the top of the hill and the sea. A neat opening had been hewn from the fissure and steep steps had been carved out, leading down to that small cave. The cave was now Black Rock’s cellar. This was where they had brought people and chained them to the walls in order to pay the price. They’d made blood music here. Plenty of it. They’d ruined people’s bodies, slowly and agonizingly.
‘And during the late eighteen eighties and early nineties, Copplethwaite drew up the plans for the present house. According to the records he left, the construction wasn’t completed until the year nineteen hundred. This was because the land put up a resistance. The upshot of it all was that Copplethwaite’s project, Black Rock, was already… haunted … by the time it was completed. It was designed to be. The house is placed so that parts of it are windows into another realm. Not large parts, but the corner of a room here, and a section of wall there. These windows look into the place where reality is born. Except that it’s not really a place, it’s more like a sea of raw power. With me so far?’