Black Static Horror Magazine #3

by TTA Press Authors

  Violet felt a slight breeze as the Fantasy Jumper passed. Silently she counted to three, figuring it would take that long for the Fantasy Jumper to land.

  Cloe's hands flew to her open mouth. Her eyes widened with recognition. Then, for an instant, Cloe smiled. It was a fleeting half smile, quickly masked by faux shock, but Violet saw it. She was sure of it.

  Even at the World's Fair it's possible to trick someone, to convince them that the Fantasy Jumper is someone they know, someone they once loved. But only for an instant. Only for that first primordial moment before the higher faculties caught up, and reminded them of where they were.

  Cloe looked up, realizing what Violet had done. Was she disappointed that it was only a trick? Probably.

  Violet screamed in rage. She shoved the telescopic viewer into a spin and stormed back to the Fantasy Jumper kiosk. She made another Violet Jumper, and sent it over the wall.

  Then she made another, and another. They vaulted over the wall, slammed to the concrete below, one after another.

  "This is how much pain I feel!” she screamed at Cloe as she swept her wrist over the eye yet again. “These are my wounds!” she howled, her wrist a blur.

  Like a movie caught in a loop, the Fantasy Jumpers leapt one after another, spattering blood and chips of artificial bone, screaming in agony, writhing as they died. The ground became littered with them as they piled up faster than the ground could absorb them. One Jumper landed atop another, her spine snapping with an audible crack. Still more followed. A pile formed. A Jumper dragged herself out of the pile, her leg shattered, her torn scalp exposing a ragged quilt of stringy fibers, but her arms and back intact.

  Cloe screamed when she saw the Violet-shaped Jumper dragging itself toward her, gasping in pain, tears pouring down its cheeks. She backed up to the edge of the fountain, then scurried around it.

  Slowly, awkwardly, the Jumper dragged itself, its eyes fixed on the sparkling fountain. The tattering of the water spilling down upon itself drowned out all other sound.

  Finally, she reached the edge, clawed her way over the marble lip, and plunged into the cool water. A billion stars exploded in her mind.

  * * * *

  On the roof, the latest Violet Jumper paused, stared down at the fountain in disbelief. “I did it,” she said.

  "Jump!” Violet cried. “Why don't you jump?"

  The Jumper shook her head. “There's no need."

  Violet followed the Jumper's gaze, saw her skinny self floating face-down in the fountain. She laughed bitterly. “At least someone got what they wanted."

  Violet headed for the stairs, oblivious to the open-mouthed stares of the onlookers gathered on the roof.

  * * * *

  While climbing the stairs back to the roof, Rando passed a tall, gangly woman who looked as if she'd been crying. Their fingers brushed, and he wondered if she had allowed them to touch on purpose. He turned and watched her gallop down the stairs, then he continued upward. He was hoping Maya had returned to the roof to wait for him.

  * * * *

  The roof was silent, and nearly empty. The Fantasy Jumper looked out over the park, unmoving. The undertones of restless longing were gone from her face. She looked as if she might stand there forever.

  "Would you care for a cup of tea?” Abbet asked her.

  "I don't drink tea,” the Fantasy Jumper said.

  "Perhaps a conversation?"

  "I don't know."

  He took her hand, led her toward the stairs. They passed a short man who stood scanning the roof with his cheeks puffed.

  "Every so often I like to empty out all my drawers and put everything in a pile,” Abbet said as they left the roof.

  Copyright © 2008 Will McIntosh

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  NIGHT'S PLUTONIAN SHORE—Mike O'Driscoll

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  Michael Chertoff

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  Mike O'Driscoll's latest story, ‘13 O'Clock', appears in Inferno, new tales of terror and the supernatural (ed Ellen Datlow), out now.

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  Fear and Loathing ... just about everywhere

  Shit, as they say, happens and yet, somehow, we get on with our lives. Yesterday, January 17th, British Airways flight 38 from Beijing crash-landed short of the southern runway at Heathrow. Earlier that morning, police in Taupo, New Zealand, discovered 26 year old British woman Karen Aim dying in a pool of blood. On Wednesday, US Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff expressed his fear of the “real risk that Europe will become a platform for terrorists.” What, apart from the fact that they all made headlines, do these events have in common? In the first, it seems that what so easily could have been a disaster with a loss of over one hundred and thirty lives, was averted by the cool nerve of the pilot. The situation may change over the course of the next few days, but presently Captain Peter Burkill is being feted as a hero. Meanwhile, questions are already being asked about how this near tragedy—involving one of the world's safest aircraft, flown by one of the safest airlines, into an airport with a safety record among the best in the world—could possibly have happened. All perfectly reasonable questions that need to be asked, but in between praising the courage of Burkill and speculating as to what went wrong, a subtext lurks, prompting a sense of unease, feeding a mass anxiety. If it could happen here, on this craft, to this airline, then how safe is safe? Should I change my travel plans? Can I get where I want to go by other means than air?

  I don't like flying, never have. This fear—let's call it what it is—has never stopped me from flying, though it has come close. In August 2001, along with my wife and kids, I flew out of Boston on an American Airlines flight bound for Denver. Four weeks later I watched the twin towers fall on TV at home in Swansea, promising myself I'd never fly again. When I next boarded an airplane, what I felt was no more terrible than it always was. A sense of dread that slowly mounts as the plane taxis out to the runaway, then escalates swiftly as we hurtle along and up into the sky. I'm all right then, most of the time, unless we encounter turbulence, in which case a hard knot of quiet terror twists round my guts. I try to keep reading, or watching the in-flight movie, but the truth is the only thing I can focus on is the seat-belt light over my head—waiting for it to turn off. As soon as it does I'm okay, at least until we begin our approach to our destination. Then it's the same process all over again until we touch down. Intellectually, I know this response is completely irrational but it's also instinctual, something over which I have no control. That is the nature of fear. What puzzles me is how quickly it comes and goes.

  What shocks people about the murder of Karen Aim is not simply its brutality or that it could happen to an attractive young woman travelling away on the other side of the world. What disturbs us is that it happened in New Zealand, a country that—whatever the reality—we associate with mountains and beautiful scenery, with Lord of the Rings, with opportunity, and friendly, good-natured people. This is where people go to escape the mundane realities of normal life, not to get murdered. Factor in the simple, but nonetheless real, fears that parents experience when their children, suddenly grown-up, suddenly independent and struck with wanderlust, venture off to foreign lands, and it's not difficult to see why this particular killing makes so many of us feel disquiet. Last summer my elder daughter, twenty-one, spent five weeks backpacking in Kenya. Despite the blandishments of reason—she's smart, she knows how to avoid trouble, she won't put herself in danger—and despite the reassurances of occasional emails and text messages, I was always aware of a sense of unease lurking in the back of my brain. Not until she arrived home, weary but excited and bursting with the desire to talk about her experiences, did I feel that burden of worry fall away. Maybe it gets easier with time, as they get older, but I suspect that for most of us, trace elements of dread will always lurk in the quiet corners of our minds when we think about our daughters and sons, out there in the big bad dangerous world
.

  Which, as Michael Chertoff assures us, is what our continent has become. My liberal gut instinct screams that Chertoff is talking out his arse but then, being a left-leaning liberal, I would say that. After all, the biggest threat to American citizens on their home soil would appear to be other Americans, other heavily armed Americans, some of them schoolkids, with grievances that it seems can only be sated with blood. But maybe it's too easy to dismiss his comments as the paranoid ravings of a man whose job it is, after all, to see every Johnny Foreigner as a potential threat. Chertoff thinks that Americans may have become complacent about the threat of terrorism given their success in preventing further attacks at home since 9/11. Perhaps so, but compared to the Yanks, we've got complacency down pat. Despite the looming threat of ID cards, the increasing ‘monitoring’ of our personal lives and the creeping erosion of civil liberties, we still perceive ourselves as somehow more ‘enlightened', more tolerant and less frightened than Americans.

  How many of us will still be thinking this way if and when we're asked by the police to produce our ID cards in order to prove we are who we say we are? What if you don't have one? What if it's been lost or stolen or if, like me, you have no intention of applying for one? A similar discussion is happening right now in the US, where Chertoff wants to introduce something called Real ID cards—as opposed to what, fake IDs of the sort kids acquire in order to get a beer? Whether any of this, or the online registering Chertoff hopes to introduce for Europeans wishing to travel to America—in lieu of getting rid of the visa waiver scheme—helps prevent terrorist attacks in the future, I remain sceptical. Technologies are only as foolproof as the fools who control them.

  What connects these stories is that they reveal something about our relationship with fear. Fear has become something we've adapted to, something we've learned to accommodate. I suspect that this is the way it always has been—part of our evolutionary make-up. Certainly this accord with fear, for most of us can be seen in our willingness to board planes after air disasters, or in the way parents manage to get on with their lives while still carrying their quiet fears about the wellbeing of their loved ones. Chertoff's comments reveal a deep-rooted anxiety about our accommodation with fear. No doubt he, Bush and Gordon Brown would claim to want to make all of us more vigilant. But what kind of world would it be whose most powerful message to its people is “be afraid, be very afraid"?

  Copyright © 2008 Mike O'Driscoll

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  THE TOAD AND I—Matthew Holness

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  Matthew Holness wrote and starred in his own Channel 4 television series Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and Man to Man With Dean Learner. Previous short stories have appeared in Phobic (Comma Press) and At Ease With the Dead (Ash Tree Press).

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  I found one in the unfinished pond foundation that had swallowed wet cement and was rock solid, and another in the road outside the front of our new house, flattened by traffic and splayed milky white like a surgeon's glove. They were migrating, I told myself, prising the crusted body from the ground with my modelling knife. It peeled free gradually, and I suppose this might actually have been a somewhat delicate operation, but fortunately my hands were still up to the task and there was nobody nearby watching. I dropped it, intact save for one light tear, inside a brown A4 envelope, and closed my briefcase on it. Without saying any goodbyes, I drove my unwashed van slowly to Kenyons.

  When I arrived someone had already taken my parking space, so I left the van over with Collins, who told me to shave, and walked back to the warehouse via the café, where I remember I bought my usual tea and a stale scone with butter and jam. The jam I returned in the hope of a small refund, but this was refused. I recall straightening my tie before heading out again, and laughing loudly when a sudden wind sent it lashing back against my face. By the time I reached the reception desk at Kenyons, my hair was a mess and the comb-over must have looked obvious.

  "Haven't seen you here for a while,” said Janice, with or without a smirk. “Are you after Donald?"

  "I'm expected for two o'clock,” I stated as professionally as I could, having been careful to delay my arrival until the last possible minute. In the event I was kept waiting for a further thirty-five, and the cup of tea they offered to make me failed to arrive in all that time. Eventually Donald's assistant, a new girl already smelling of his cigarette brand and whose make-up was applied too thickly around the eyes and mouth, arrived to show me up to his office, not that I needed a guide. Her face and body were a remarkable shape; quite ideal, really, until I noticed that her delicate fingers were covered in ink. We exchanged pleasantries; she was truly nice enough, but her false vivacity soon palled. I could feel the sad weight of my adult years closing in with each strained smile.

  "Mr McCarthy would like a cup of tea and several peppermints,” said Janice from behind. I turned and glared, but she was already re-examining the catalogue on her desk.

  "I'll have some peppermints brought up in a while,” said Donald's assistant. I never actually learned her name, and I realise now it was probably rude of me not to have asked.

  "Please don't,” I said out of the far corner of my mouth. I couldn't tell. Perhaps Janice had noticed scone in my teeth.

  "How do you like your tea?” the assistant asked as we passed through the modelling department. A table of unfamiliar sculptors sat copying one of my early designs.

  "Milk and one sugar, please,” I replied. We ascended stairs in the far corner of the room, closed off from the workshop by a swinging metallic door that clanked shut loudly behind me.

  "If you'd like to wait here,” she said at the top, indicating an empty seat by the window. We had arrived in the long dark corridor approaching Donald's office, although this was the first occasion I ever recalled a visitor's chair being placed this far away from his door. “I'll let Mr Kenyon know you've arrived."

  She walked the length of the corridor quite slowly; posing with responsibility, I guessed, like I had probably done myself on previous occasions. She might actually have proved a perfect model; certainly a damsel for the Knights and Fairy Tale playsets; perhaps even a one-off sports doll. Except for the ink on her hands, of course, which ruined everything. Despite what they all say, I wasn't lusting after her, even though the look I received from one of the young painters emerging from a nearby office swiftly condemned me.

  I turned away then, noting that the early afternoon sky outside was now a duller shade of grey. All I could hear through the grimy window was the distant crash of factory machinery, and a radio blaring out faintly from across the concrete parkway, as it had done every day of every year I'd worked at the plant. I felt inside my jacket pockets and found a small toy lion resting above the unused paper napkins I somehow seemed to collect. It was one I had sculpted; I could feel that from its shape, my trademark signature concealed subtly within the weaving contours of its mane. I wondered if it had been put there as a surprise present for me by one of my children. I hoped so, and clutched it tightly in my hands until the door at the far end of the corridor opened again, and Donald's assistant beckoned me forward.

  Now, when I walked down that corridor toward her something strange occurred. Without my quite knowing when, she froze. Her smile, stretched solid, ceased quivering in that slyly seductive manner, and her eyelids, parted for what seemed to me to be an inordinately long period of time, directed her gaze past my own as if vision were fixed permanently at the far end of the corridor where I'd been sitting. Nearing her body, I found that the colour of her eyes matched her face identically; her hair, too, looked somehow unusual, and was stained a similar waxy green. Too much make-up in the wrong dingy light, I will admit, yet she looked queerly still and pale, as if coated in paint or wet plastic. Realising she was not about to move, I slid past her rigid body, which continued staring past me toward the far window, and lodged myself in the outer half of Donald's office, gripping my briefcase. His voice ar
rived before he did, riding out on a dirty cloud of cigarette smoke through the parted doorway to his inner sanctum.

  "Ed."

  "Donald,” I replied.

  "Come in, then."

  I pushed open the door that I had last seen slammed in my face, and shuffled in. I say shuffled because that is what it was. All my endless courageous talk had failed me in an instant, and, unaware until too late, I held my briefcase up in front of my chest for protection.

  "Tea?"

  Before I could reply that I had been offered it twice already, Donald stubbed out his cigarette angrily and shouted.

  "Andrea, get him tea."

  There was no reply from the outer room. Kenyon passed roughly round the side of the desk, upsetting an impressive military diorama which he let fall to the floor before bellowing again through the open door.

  "Andrea. Tea. Milk, no sugar. That's it, isn't it?” he said, peering back over his shoulder.

  "Yes, thank you,” I replied, counting four fat rolls of neck flesh before the twisted half-face turned back to the door. Something else was said, which I didn't catch, and Donald returned, clumsily, via the far side of the desk this time, expelling air from his mouth as he pushed past, knocking a small landscape askew on the wall behind his head. He collapsed into his seat, slapping one hand on the desk loudly as he did so. Behind me I heard what sounded like a gentle snap through the open doorway, followed by the light click of departing feet retreating down the corridor beyond.

  "This will soon be bigger,” he said, waving a large lazy arm at the room. “Much, much bigger."

  Stupidly, I asked him how the takeover deal was faring, and he replied that it was more profitable than could have been expected. I think we both realised how ill-judged my attempt at congeniality was. I felt ashamed, and my air of self-reproach evidently amused him. Grinning, he paused for me to advance the conversation.

  "Well,” I said, falling short in the hope that he might continue. His eyes gleamed mischievously as his mouth opened to speak, then closed shut prematurely. Out of politeness I opened mine to continue, and he again opened his, which caused mine to close, followed by his, and I sensed then that this could be the start of a rather prolonged game.