The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  Seven Magpies never takes offence – Seven Magpies treasures kindness, from anyone, for anyone, however expressed. But they have never met in the flesh, even though they both now live in London. Seven Magpies once explained politely that she expects her online friendships to stay online for the foreseeable future, and Grace now only suggests meeting in what seem like emergencies. Yet she counts Seven Magpies as a good friend. She, along with Otherwise86 and From Jupiter whom Grace can’t meet because they live in Vietnam or West Virginia, occupy invisible, weightless places in the web of people to whom she’s close. She certainly knows them better than the people she lives with. It’s one of the things she likes about the meeting places of the internet, that it lets programmers discover that they can make friends with witches.

  Besides, she understands Seven Magpies’ cloistered life a little better these days. All her housemates are already at work, and Grace is glad of it. She likes them well enough, but it’s not an arrangement any of them would have chosen freely, and nor is it one she’ll be able to afford much longer, as everyone must know. She’s taken to hiding in her room from them, and she hasn’t seen any of her real friends in months. She tells herself she can’t afford it, and that’s true, but it’s something even more essential, and even more depleted than money that she can’t spare.

  When she returns to the laptop, she finds that Seven Magpies is awake and explaining further:

  Seven_Magpies: on November 30th, 2012, 09:11 am (GMT):

  Mr LEVANTER-SLEET doesn’t like boys, and he doesn’t like other nightmares but he does like girls in trouble, so if any other nightmares turn up on his watch he will tend to stab them. I find him very effective.

  Grace stares, and even laughs a little, and tries to look at it from her friend’s point of view. Can Seven Magpies really believe in magic and nightmare-slaying demons? A lot of the time, she sounds so... reasonable, that Grace thinks probably it’s all just a hobby, an elaborate game of pretend that makes Seven Magpies feel better about life.

  So Seven Magpies is saying “Play with my imaginary friend, maybe you’ll feel better too.”

  On the other hand, sometimes it sounds as though Seven Magpies believes it utterly.

  But even in that case, it’s not really that different from Seven Magpies saying “I’ll pray for you.” Grace is an atheist, but not the sort of atheist who gets offended when people offer to pray for her, and she feels bad about having complained to Seven Magpies in the first place: Seven Magpies certainly has it worse.

  Politeness, she decides, costs nothing.

  LadyJinglyJones: on November 30th, 2012, 09:23 am (GMT):

  All right, send me the demon.

  Seven_Magpies: on November 30th, 2012, 09:25 am (GMT):

  i’ll ask him to head over!

  Grace is relieved to have avoided awkwardness, and amused to think she has discovered a new rule of modern etiquette (when offered a demon over the internet, a lady accepts graciously). She gets dressed and heads to the Jobcentre.

  The novelty of the exchange enlivens her about as far as the bus stop, but then the dream sours everything again like an aftertaste. God, she hates everything about this. She hates the beautiful gothic houses that overlook the park at the top of Seven Sisters Road and she hates the betting shops and Chicken Feasts at the bottom of it. She hates the perversely bright green of the Jobcentre signs, and the empty ritual of the Jobcentre itself. You have to turn off your phone before you go inside; you can’t take in food or drink – not even a bottle of water – as if it’s a temple you have to enter in a state of penitential purity.

  She waits humbly on a citrus green couch, and tries not to focus on anything. Her heart is pounding inexplicably and the details of everything are dangerous as rocks in shallow water; if she lets her attention run against them she’ll overbalance, sink.

  After twenty minutes this begins to fade, mercifully, into ordinary boredom. She realises she’s forgotten to bring a book, again, and starts to look around at her fellow unemployed. A fair-haired young man is standing by the wall, damp from the drizzle, clutching the usual plastic folder and frowning anxiously into its contents as if afraid he’s forgotten something. He must have been afraid of being late, too, for he’s slightly out of breath. He radiates nervous energy, so he’s probably new.

  “Could you sit down there, please?” a security guard says to him, tone and stance announcing that despite the ‘please’, it’s not a request.

  The young man looks perplexed. “Sorry?”

  “You can sit down there or stand to use the workstations.”

  The newcomer glances at the touchscreens mounted on green MDF plinths at the far end of the room. He tilts his head, incredulous. “You mean I’m not allowed to stand up?”

  The realisation that this is exactly what the guard means ignites a mutinous mood among the jobseekers. Jaws drop, eyes meet, everyone is briefly alive with sarcastic fellow-feeling.

  “Watch out!” snarls a large tattooed man, “We’ve got a stander in here!”

  “Practically a terrorist!” says a thin man in a grey tracksuit.

  “We can kneel on the floor, if it’d make you feel safer,” Grace offers the security guard, who huffs ominously. The young man forestalls any further escalation by sitting down next to her, though he accepts everyone’s indignant sympathies with a shake of the head and a roll of the eyes.

  “I’m Luke, what are you in for?” he asks Grace. He’s fair, improbably sunburnt for November with a short, square blond beard; he looks like a slender, harried Viking. He smiles at her and Grace feels a very distant twinge of regret that she’s stopped bothering with makeup and doing her hair. Then her name is called, which at least introduces her to him, but they don’t get much further.

  The advisor grieves over Grace’s forms. “You always think computer people should be fine come rain or shine, don’t you?” she sighs.

  “That was the idea, yes. Might as well have done the arts degree after all,” says Grace, unsmiling.

  She takes a mild, spiteful pleasure in making the woman’s eyes glaze over by explaining programming languages, about the differences between Ada and Java and C++ and C#, and how everyone wants a year’s professional experience in C# these days and of course she’s never going to get that if no one gives her a job...

  “Nothing’s changed,” summarises the advisor, eventually.

  “No,” Grace agrees, and is humiliated at how her voice cracks on the word.

  “See you in two weeks,” says the advisor, pretending politely not to notice.

  GRACE WAITS IN the rain for nearly half an hour, trying to summon a bus by chanting its number in her brain, and shivers all the way back. The yearning mantra of two-five-three, two-five-three gives way to home home home, and when at last the quiet and warmth of her room enfold her again she nearly weeps, at once with relief and with misery that it isn’t her room, and its safety can’t be relied on. The dole does not cover the rent. She’s paying it out of her overdraft already. Soon she will have to move, and moving will easily cost two hundred pounds in itself.

  She crawls onto her bed, resisting – just barely – the temptation to crawl into it, and opens her laptop.

  There’s a new email. The conversation about Mr Levanter-Sleet had thus far taken place entirely in comments to Seven Magpies’ post about her insomnia, but apparently Seven Magpies has decided the time has come for privacy, though it’s hard, from her message, to see why:

  Here you go. Hope he can help! – Morgane.

  There isn’t any attachment.

  Grace already knew her friend’s name was Morgane (yes, her realname, but no, not her original name), though she can’t really think of her by anything other than her screen handle.

  “So you can capitalise, when you want to,” she says affectionately to the screen, and gets on with the day’s work.

  She types:

  Please consider my application for the position of Digital Architect. I believe I am well-suited
for this role.

  I am excited by this opportunity to apply for the post of Junior Programmer. I have a proven track record in software engineering and software architecture.

  I would like to apply for the post of audio secretary. I am diligent, conscientious and hardworking. I am also educated way above this godawful job, which is probably one reason why you won’t reply to this, but you should give me a chance anyway because I find it spiritually fulfilling when people too lazy to type their own letters drone into my ears, and photocopying excites me. Sexually.

  She finds it mildly cathartic to write dash off parody entries while thinking out the real thing, though she sometimes panics at the possibility of pressing ‘submit’ by mistake. She deletes everything after ‘hardworking’ and does it again properly.

  It’s only when she scares herself in this way that she recovers any real belief someone might read what she writes. The emails feel as insubstantial as prayer, wisps of incense sent into the sky to appease unrelenting gods.

  Nevertheless, she grapples with an online application form for hours, comforting herself a little by sneering inwardly at how cack-handedly it has been put together. At four she remembers that she hasn’t eaten lunch but it doesn’t seem worth it now. She loses a few more hours looking for cheaper places to live on property websites, googling ‘housing benefit’ and trying not to cry, then she microwaves a bowl of instant risotto, and at last, gives up.

  She closes her internet browser, opens a compiler instead, and starts to play.

  She’s stopped caring about music, clothes, films, books, games (except, dimly, Angels of the Embers, and that’s really only nostalgia) food and sex; all that’s left are mucking about on the internet and this.

  It began as a mess of different projects: she needed to learn new programming languages, and to keep herself from entirely losing the ability to do complex maths. Now, though, it’s wonderfully pointless. She sets up a loop of programs talking to each other in different languages, passing a package of data between them, in a pipeline of digital channels that forms a maze, a labyrinth, a collaborative work of art. It’s possible to turn the results into visual images and in the end she does this, watching the pixels dance into shapes that are like clouds and river systems but also like architecture. But in a way this isn’t where the beauty of it lies for her. It’s the complexification itself, existing somewhere between her mind and the computer, the moment when it seems to lift away from both like a bubble into brief, spontaneous life.

  She turns out the lights at last, and remembers she has a guest.

  “Hullo, Mr Levanter-Sleet,” she says, and waves into the empty room.

  It takes longer than she’s used to to fall asleep. If this on top of everything else is going to go wrong too...! But she hasn’t forgotten what to do, so she drags herself up and goes and cleans the bathroom. Girls in trouble, she thinks as she tries to wipe a smear off the mirror that turns out to be a shadow on the wall behind her. What a mortifying category to belong to.

  But when she returns to bed, sleep comes with delicious speed, dark and velvety as it settles over her like a crow on its nest. She does wake once in the night, with a confused sense of the slope of the mattress being wrong, as if someone’s resting beside her. But she rolls over and plummets back into sleep, and when she wakes again, doesn’t remember it at all.

  It’s just before nine. After only a short struggle, Grace gets up and is in the shower before it occurs to her to think about her dreams.

  She can just remember something about building a very complicated book case, and the colour yellow.

  She raises her eyebrows at herself. She hadn’t thought she was so suggestible. But she’s not about to complain about it.

  Seven_Magpies sent you a direct message on December 10th, 2012, 22:44 pm (GMT):

  so hey did LEVANTER-SLEET do any good?

  You sent Seven_Magpies a direct message on December 10th, 2012, 23:09 pm (GMT):

  I guess he did! Tell him he’s a good demon.

  Seven_Magpies sent you a direct message on December 18th, 2012, 04:04 am (GMT):

  i can’t tell him anything.

  HER LUCK DOESN’T, in any larger way, change overnight. The odd bad dream or two still gets through, but they’re more about missing trains and failing exams and less about mass suicides and plague, and when she wakes she says “Tsk, tsk, Mr Levanter-Sleet, you’re slipping!” instead of weeping under the blankets.

  She starts having coffee with Luke from the Jobcentre after their appointments. His sunburn and his redundancy turn out both to be courtesy of the British Army, and he is amazed – a little too amazed, really– to have met a woman who likes playing computer games. They have already discussed the disappointing third Angels of the Embers sequel half to death. It isn’t quite enough to get her actually looking forward to her appointments, but it does work very nicely as an incentive to get through them without screaming or throwing anything.

  Still, once or twice things are so bad that she stops moving in the middle of getting dressed and has to curl up on the floor for minutes on end before she can go on.

  Then she finds a new comment on her weeks-old ‘post of angst.’

  From_Jupiter on December 20th, 2012, 14:24 pm (DST)

  Hey, sorry I’m getting to this late. RL crazy. So, are things still this bad? Because you don’t sound well, dude. “I hate being awake and I hate being asleep”????? Just look at that, would you? If it was anyone else talking like this, you’d have tucked them under your arm and marched them to the doctor months ago. You have socialised medicine over there. Go take advantage while it lasts.

  Grace stiffens, baffled and slightly offended, then rereads her post.

  She nearly replies that things are in fact somewhat better, it’s only being awake that’s a problem now, but then realises that might not be very reassuring.

  She types, in the end:

  Thank you.

  GRACE IS LUCKY with the anti-depressants. Several of her friends online have had awful trouble finding anything that works, and the doctor warns her she won’t feel better for at least a fortnight; actually things start to feel less dreadful within a week. She feels mildly dizzy for a day or two, but that soon wears off.

  The only other side-effects are the dreams. The leaflet in the box with the pills warns that this can happen, but anything’s better than the nightmares – and these are good dreams, really. It’s only that night after night they grow in detail and complexity, until they’re sometimes exhausting. A painted city carved into the walls of a canyon. A tunnel that’s also a garden, opening at both ends to whirling stars. Building a cathedral in a desert of blood red sand. Impossible shapes, and music she can’t remember when she wakes up. And there’s someone beside her yet half out-of-sight, a pillar of shadow with clawed hands that help her build, bright eyes that watch her climb.

  She would wonder why it isn’t frightening, but the figure is somehow so unobtrusively part of everything else, that she never questions its company, or retains more than the faintest residue of its presence in her brain when she wakes.

  SHE SITS WITH Luke on a bench on Hampstead Heath. Bars of shadow stretch over the grass, longer than the height of the bare trees and the level of the chilly red sun seem to warrant.

  Luke’s started applying for jobs in security, on the Jobcentre’s orders. But he’s not physically intimidating, despite experience of carrying a gun around, and probably does not convincingly project actually wanting to do it.

  “I’m going to be out of the army, I want to be out of the army,” he tells Grace. “Not army-lite.” He frowns into the middle distance. “I think I’ll open a flower shop. Call it Guns and Roses.”

  Grace feels slightly guilty about telling him she’s just had an interview that seemed to go really well, though she knows she’s being silly. But Luke is delighted for her. So – not quite to celebrate, because she hasn’t got the job yet – and not quite to console him because of course he doesn’t nee
d it – she buys him a drink. Then she takes him home to play computer games and when they’ve blown up enough things they get into her bed. Collapsed over him, afterwards, Grace thinks that remembering the reason why people make so much fuss about this almost makes forgetting in the first place worthwhile.

  Around three in the morning, she wakes and finds Luke sitting on the edge of the bed, taking long, slow, deliberate breaths. She reaches for his shoulder, finds it damp with sweat and he flinches slightly.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Just – bad dream.”

  She strokes his back in silence and thinks, of course, the army. They get this, a lot, don’t they – he hasn’t told her anything, but surely he must have seen awful things.

  Or done them, possibly. But then Luke lies down, looking so wan and battered, she’s ashamed of herself.

  “People were stabbing themselves in the eyes,” he whispers.

  Grace kisses him and strokes his hair, then lies beside him and drifts straight back into a wonderful dream about a labyrinth in a forest full of flowering creepers and a black shape, stamping sullenly along a parallel path, just the other side of the hedge.

  EVEN THOUGH THE interview went so well, even though she was nearly sure she’d got it, when the email comes through she still knows it will be a rejection. When it says I would be delighted to offer you the position of Systems Administrator, she has to read it several times to be sure she’s understood it properly.