by Neil Gaiman
I stood up suddenly and paced around the room, unsure of what to do. If she hadn’t been especially enthralled about having the photos taken in the first place, I couldn’t believe that Jeanette condoned or even knew about their presence on the net. Quite apart from anything else, she wasn’t that type of girl, if that type of girl indeed existed at all.
This constituted some very clear kind of invasion by her boyfriend, something that negated any rights he may have felt he had upon her. But what could I do about it?
I copied the two files onto a floppy, along with j1.gif, and threw them off my hard disk. It may seem like a small distinction to you, but I didn’t want them on my main machine. It would have seemed like collusion.
I got up the next morning with no more than a mild headache, and before I left for work decided to quickly log onto the net. There were no more pictures, but there was something that made me very angry indeed. Someone had posted up a message whose total text was the following.
‘Re: j-pictures {f}: EXCELLENT! More pleeze!’.
In other words, the pictures had struck a chord with some nameless net-pervert, and they wanted to see some more.
I spent the whole morning trying to work out what to do. The only way I could think of broaching the subject would involve mentioning the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica group itself, which would be a bit of a nasty moment – I wasn’t keen on revealing the fact that I was a nameless Net pervert myself. I hardly got a chance to talk to her all morning anyway, because she was busy on the phone. She also seemed a little tired, and little disposed to chat on the two occasions we found ourselves in the kitchen together.
It felt as if parts of my mind were straining against each other, pulling in different directions. If she didn’t know about it, it was wrong, and she should be put in the picture. If I did so, however, she’d never think the same of me again. There was a chance, of course, that the problem might go away: despite the net-loser’s request, the expression on Jeanette’s face in j3.gif made it seem unlikely there were any more pictures. And ultimately the whole situation probably wasn’t any of my business, however much it felt like it was.
In the event, I missed the boat. About 4:30 I emerged from a long and vicious argument with the server software to discover that Jeanette had left for the day. ‘A doctor’s appointment’. In most of the places I’ve worked that phrase translates directly to ‘A couple of hours off from work, obviously not spent at the doctors’, but that didn’t seem to be the general impression at the VCA. She’d probably just gone to the doctor’s. Either way she was no longer in the office, and I was slightly ashamed to find myself relaxing now that I could no longer talk to her.
At 8:30 that evening, after my second salad of the week, I logged on and checked the group again. There was nothing there. I fretted and fidgeted around the apartment for a few hours, and then tried again at 11:00. This time I found something. Two things. j4.gif, and j5.gif, both from the anonymous address.
In the first picture Jeanette was standing. She was no longer wearing her skirt, and her long legs lead up to underwear that matched the bra I’d already seen. She wasn’t posing for the picture. Her hands were on her hips, and she looked angry. In j5 she was leaning back against the arm of the chair, and no longer wearing her bra. Her face was blank.
I stared at the second picture for a long time, mind completely split in two. If you ignored the expression on her face, she looked gorgeous. Her breasts were small but perfectly shaped, exactly in proportion to her long, slender body. It was, undeniably, an erotic picture. Except for her face, and the fact that she obviously didn’t want to be photographed, and the fact that someone was doing it anyway. Not only that, but broadcasting it to the planet.
I decided that enough was enough, and that I had to do something. After a while I came up with the best that I could. I loaded up my email package, and sent a message to [email protected]. The double-blind principle the server operated on meant that the recipient wouldn’t know where it had come from, and that was fine by me. The message was this:
‘I know who you are’.
It wasn’t much, but it was something. The idea that someone out there on the information superhighway could know his identity might be enough to stop him. It was only a stop-gap measure, anyway. I now knew I had to do something about the situation. It simply wasn’t on.
And I had to do it soon. When I checked the next morning there were no more pictures, but two messages from people who’d downloaded them. ‘Keep ’em cumming!’ one wit from Japan had written. Some slob from Texas had posted in similar vein, but added a small request: ‘Great, but pick up the pace a little. I want to see more FLESH!’
All the way to work I geared myself up to talking to Jeanette, and I nearly punched the wall when I heard she was out at a venue meeting for the whole morning and half the afternoon. I got rid of the morning by concentrating hard on one of her databases, wanting to bring at least something positive into her life. I know it’s not much, but all I know is computers, and that’s the best that I could do.
At last three o’clock rolled round, and Jeanette reappeared in the office. She seemed tired and a little preoccupied, and sat straight down at her desk to work. I loitered in the main office area, willing people to fuck off out of it so hard my head started to ache. I couldn’t get anywhere near the topic if there were other people around. It would be hard enough if we were alone.
Finally, bloody, finally she got up from her desk and went into the kitchen. I got up and followed her in. She smiled faintly and vaguely on seeing me, and, seeing that she had a bandage on her right forearm, I used that to start a conversation. A small mole, apparently, hence the visit to the doctor. I let her finish that topic, keeping half an eye out to make sure that no one was approaching the kitchen.
‘I bought a camera today,’ I blurted, as cheerily as I could. It wasn’t great, but I wanted to start slowly. She didn’t respond for a moment, and then looked up, her face expressionless.
‘Oh yes?’ she said, eventually. ‘What are you going to photograph?’
‘Oh, you know, buildings, landscape. Black and white, that kind of thing.’ She nodded distantly, and I ran out of things to say.
I ran out because in retrospect the topic didn’t lead anywhere, but I stopped for another reason too. I stopped because as she turned to pick up the kettle, the look on her face knocked the wind out of me. The combination of unhappiness and loneliness, the sense of helplessness. It struck me again that despite the anger in her face in j4, in j5 she had not only taken her bra off but looked resigned and defeated. Suddenly I didn’t care how it looked, didn’t care what she thought of me.
‘Jeanette,’ I said, firmly, and she turned to look at me again. ‘I saw a pict …’
‘Hello boys and girls. Having a little tea party, are we?’
At the sound of Morehead’s voice I wanted to turn round and smash his face in. Jeanette laughed prettily at her employer’s sally, and moved out of the way to allow him access to the kettle. Morehead asked me some balls-achingly dull questions about the computer system, obviously keen to sound as if he had the faintest conception of what it all meant. By the time I’d finished answering him Jeanette was back at her desk.
The next hour was one of the longest of my life. I’d gone over, crossed the line. I knew I was going to talk to her about what I’d seen. More than that, I’d realised that it didn’t have to be as difficult as I’d assumed.
The first picture, j1.gif, simply showed a pretty girl sitting on a chair. It wasn’t pornographic, and could have been posted up in any number of places on the net. All I had to do was say I’d seen that picture. It wouldn’t implicate me, and she would know what her boyfriend was up to.
I hovered round the main office, ready to be after her the minute she looked like leaving, having decided that I’d walk with her to the tube and tell her then. So long as she didn’t leave with anyone else, it would be perfect. While I hovered I watched her work, her eyes b
lank and isolated. About quarter to five she got a phone call. She listened for a moment, said ‘Yes, alright’ in a dull tone of voice, and then put the phone down. There was nothing else to distract me from the constant cycling of draft gambits in my head.
At five she started tidying her desk, and I slipped out and got my jacket. I waited in the hallway until I could hear her coming, and then went downstairs in the lift. I walked through the lobby as slowly as I could, and then went and stood outside the building. My hands were sweating and I felt wired and frightened, but I knew I was going to go through with it. A moment later she came out.
‘Hi,’ I said, and she smiled warily, surprised to see me, I suppose. ‘Look Jeanette, I need to talk to you about something.’
She stared at me, looked around, and then asked what.
‘I’ve seen pictures of you.’ In my nervousness I blew it, and used the plural rather than singular.
‘Where?’ she said, immediately. She knew what I was talking about. From the speed with which she latched on I realised that whatever fun and games were going on between her and Ayer were at the forefront of her mind.
‘The Newsgroups. It’s …’
‘I know what they are,’ she said. ‘What have you seen?’
‘Five so far,’ I said. ‘Look, if there’s anything I can do …’
‘Like what?’ she said, and laughed harshly, her eyes begin to blur. ‘Like what?’
‘Well, anything. Look, let’s go talk about it. I could …’
‘There’s no use,’ she said hurriedly, and started to pull away. I followed her, bewildered. How could she not want to do anything about it? I mean, all right, I may not have been much of a prospect, but surely some help was better than none.
‘Jeanette …’
‘Let’s talk tomorrow,’ she hissed, and suddenly I realised what was happening. Her boyfriend had come to pick her up. She walked towards the curb where a white car was coming to a halt, and I rapidly about-faced and started striding the other way. It wasn’t fear, not purely. I also didn’t want to get her in trouble.
As I walked up the road I felt as if the back of my neck was burning, and at the last moment I glanced to the side. The white car was just passing, and I could see Jeanette sitting bolt upright in the passenger seat. Her boyfriend was looking out of the side window. At me. Then he accelerated and the car sped away.
That night brought another two photographs. j6 had Jeanette naked, sitting in the chair with her legs slightly apart. Her face was stony. In j7 she was on all fours, photographed from behind. As I sat in my chair, filled with impotent fury, I noticed something in both pictures, and blew them up with the magnifier tool. In j6 one side of her face looked a little red, and when I looked carefully at j7 I could see that there was a trickle of blood running from a small cut on her right forearm.
And suddenly I realised, with help from memories of watching her hands and arms as she worked, that there had never been a mole on her arm. She hadn’t got the bandage because of the doctor.
She had it because of him.
I hardly slept that night. I stayed up till three, keeping an eye on the newsgroup. Its denizens were certainly becoming fans of the ‘j’ pictures, and I saw five requests for some more. As far as they knew all this involved was a bit more scanning originals from some magazine. They didn’t realise that someone I knew was having them taken against her will. I considered trying to do something within the group, like posting a message telling what I knew. While its frequenters are a bit sad, they tend to have a strong moral stance about such things. It’s not like the alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless group – where anything goes, the sicker the better. If the a.b.p.erotica crowd were convinced the pictures were being taken under coercion, there was a strong chance they might mailbomb Ayer off the net. It would be a big war to start, however, and one with potentially damaging consequences. The mailbombing would have to go through the anonymity server, and would probably crash it. While I couldn’t give a fuck about that, it would draw the attention of all manner of people. In any event, because of the anonymity, nothing would happen directly to Ayer apart from some inconvenience.
I decided to put the idea on hold, in case talking to Jeanette tomorrow made it unnecessary. Eventually I went to bed, where I thrashed and turned for hours. Some time just before dawn I drifted off, and dreamt about a cat being caught in a lawnmower.
I was up at seven, there being no point in me staying in bed. I checked the group, but there were no new files. On an afterthought I checked my email, realising that I’d been so out of it that I hadn’t done so for days. There were about thirty messages for me, some from friends, the rest from a variety of virtual acquaintances around the world. I scanned through them quickly, seeing if any needed urgent attention, and then slap in the middle I noticed one from a particular address.
[email protected].
Heart thumping, I opened the email. In the convention of such things, he’d quoted my message back at me, with a comment. The entire text of the mail read:
‘> I know who you are.
>Maybe. But I know where you live.’
When I got to work, at the dot of nine, I discovered Jeanette wasn’t there. She’d left a message at eight thirty announcing she was taking the day off. Sarah was a bit sniffy about this, though she claimed to be great pals with Jeanette. I left her debating the morality of such cavalier leave-taking with Tanya in the kitchen, as I walked slowly out to sit at Jeanette’s desk to work. After five minute’s thought I went back to the kitchen and asked Sarah for Jeanette’s number, claiming I had to ask her about the database. Sarah seemed only too pleased to provide the means of contacting a friend having a day off. I grabbed my jacket, muttered something about buying cigarettes, and left the office.
Round the corner I found a public phone box and called her number. As I listened to the phone ring I glanced at the prostitute cards which liberally covered the walls, but soon looked away. I didn’t find their representation of the female form amusing any more. After six rings an answering machine cut in. A man’s voice, Ayer’s, announced that they were out. I rang again, with the same result, and then left the phone box and stood aimlessly on the pavement.
There was nothing I could do.
I went back to work. I worked. I ran home.
At six-thirty I logged on for the first time, and the next two pictures were already there. I could tell immediately that something had changed. The wall behind her was a different colour, for a start. The focus of the action seemed to have moved, to the bedroom, presumably, and the pictures were getting worse. j8 showed Jeanette spread-eagled on her back. Her legs were very wide open, and both her hands and feet were out of shot. j9 was much the same, except you could see that her hands were tied. You could also see her face, with its hopeless defiance and fear. As I erased the picture from my disk I felt my neck spasming.
Too late I realised that what I should have done was get Jeanette’s address while I was at work. It would have been difficult, and viewed with suspicion, but I might have been able to do it. Now I couldn’t. I didn’t know the home numbers of anyone else from the VCA, and couldn’t trace her address from her number. The operator wouldn’t give it to me. If I’d had the address I could have gone round. Maybe I would have found myself in the worst situation of my life, but it would have been something to try. The idea of her being in trouble somewhere in London, and me not knowing where, was almost too much to bear. Suddenly I decided that I had to do the one small thing I could. I logged back onto the erotica group and prepared to start a flame war.
The classic knee-jerk reaction that people on the Net use to express their displeasure is known as ‘flaming’. Basically it involves bombarding the offender with massive mail messages until their virtual mailbox collapses under the load. This draws the attention of the administrator of their site, and they get chucked off the net. What I had to do was post a message providing sufficient reason for the good citizens of pornville to dump on anon99
[email protected].
So it might cause some trouble. I didn’t fucking care.
I had a mail slip open and my hands poised over the keyboard before I noticed something which stopped me in my tracks.
There were two more files. Already. The slob from Texas was getting his wish: the pace was being picked up.
In j10 Jeanette was on her knees on a dirty mattress. Her hands appeared to be tied behind her, and her head was bowed. j11 showed her lying awkwardly on her side, as if she’d been pushed over. She was glaring at the camera, and when I magnified the left side of the image I could see a thin trickle of blood from her right nostril.
I leapt up from the keyboard, shouting. I don’t know what I was saying. It wasn’t coherent. Jeanette’s face stared up at me from the computer and I leant wildly across and hit the switch to turn the screen off. Just quitting out didn’t seem enough. Then I realised that the image was still there, even though I couldn’t see it. The computer was still sending the information to the screen, and the minute I turned it back on, it would be there. So I hard-stopped the computer by just turning it off at the mains. Suddenly what had always been my domain felt like the outpost of someone very twisted and evil, and I didn’t want anything to do with it.
Then, like a stone through glass, two ideas crashed into each other in my head.
Gospel Oak.
Police.
From nowhere came a faint half-memory, so tenuous that it might be illusory, of Jeanette mentioning Gospel Oak station. In other words, the rail station in Gospel Oak. I knew where that was.
An operator wouldn’t give me an address from a phone number. But the police would be able to get it. They had reverse directories.
I couldn’t think of anything else.
I rang the police. I told them I had reason to believe that someone was in danger, and that she lived at the house with this phone number. They wanted to know who I was and all manner of other shit, but I rang off quickly, grabbed my coat and hit the street.