in a more malign mood, and less tired, we might have replied with something obscene or cursed the computer from which the message was sent.
“We need to talk” from Oda77 was short and to the point. It said:
Sorcerer -
The Midnight Mayor is dead, the ravens are dead, the Stone is
gone, the Wall is cursed, the city is damned - if you believe the
ramblings of the wicked. I’ll find you.
Oda
I wrote a reply:
Oda -
I’m damned too. I’ll find you. Tell no one, otherwise they’ll kill
me before you get the chance.
Matthew
I wasn’t in a hurry to meet Oda. Psychopathic fanatic magician-murderers with a penchant for dentistry and corrupted Christian theology were not high on my list of confidantes. She’d promised on a number of occasions to kill me, by grace of being a sorcerer, and especially to kill us by grace of being an abomination crawled from the nether reaches of the telephone lines into mortal flesh. God was her excuse, guns were her weapons, and the second I stopped being useful to her and her dentistry-crazed cult, the Order, would be the day I got to meet both. She had helped me only because she feared my enemies more than she hated me.
Besides, the last person who’d helped me . . .
. . . the last person . . .
Had been Vera.
Melted into a puddle of paint.
Hadn’t even stopped to think.
Too much to do. Too damned. Too . . . too much too.
Hadn’t even stopped.
Angry.
Sick and angry. Blink and here we are, looking back with a pair of bright blue eyes colder than the iceberg that hit the Titanic . On fire with frost. Angry. Attacked, burnt, attacked, hurt, attacked, fled, attacked, attacked, attacked, gunning for us, gunning for me, gunning for my . . . for people who stopped to help.
Angry.
Didn’t know what to do about it, except doing itself. So I kept on doing while we clenched and cramped and twisted in rage.
I kept on at the computer.
The last message was obviously bad news. A sensible user would have deleted it and been done. We didn’t. Maybe it was the arrogance from using an internet café, where the computer about to be infected by bad mail wasn’t our own; maybe it was curiosity; maybe it was inspiration; maybe it was none of these things. Whatever it was, we, in full knowledge that it wouldn’t be good, opened the message.
It said:
END OF THE LINE.
The screen went black.
I swore.
A white pinprick appeared at the very centre of the screen and started to grow. As it grew, it became a white circle, then the white circle grew a black circle within it, that expanded from the centre to fill almost its entire form, then the black circle grew white teeth within it, and the blackness wasn’t just a blackness, it was a void, a great falling void that span off for ever into . . . . . . everything, nothing, senseless perfection, freedom, death, entrapment, jubilation, emptiness, pick one, pick everything, all at once -
- and then the blackness was filling the screen and it wasn’t just in the screen, it was crawling out of the screen, cracking and popping and bursting as the white jaw with its endless open gullet stretched out of the screen, dripping writhing worms of hissing static like saliva from its fanged teeth, straining towards my face and roaring the high background whine of a cooling fan about to burst, a hungry computer virus with jaws open for the skull of a mortal -
- then I pulled the plug.
It vanished. Glass fell with a splatter onto the desk and over my trousers, black smoke rolled in eye-watering sickly sweetness from the gutted interior of the screen. I flapped ineffectually at the smoke, coughing and blinking tears from my eyes, pushing myself away from the desk even as the young man with the A-level textbook stood up and began to shout in three different languages, all of them obscene.
Then he saw our face, and fell silent.
I walked away. No one tried to follow me.
It took two night buses to get where I wanted to go. It was faster than the
“We need to talk” from Oda77 was short and to the point. It said:
Sorcerer -
The Midnight Mayor is dead, the ravens are dead, the Stone is
gone, the Wall is cursed, the city is damned - if you believe the
ramblings of the wicked. I’ll find you.
Oda
I wrote a reply:
Oda -
I’m damned too. I’ll find you. Tell no one, otherwise they’ll kill
me before you get the chance.
Matthew
I wasn’t in a hurry to meet Oda. Psychopathic fanatic magician-murderers with a penchant for dentistry and corrupted Christian theology were not high on my list of confidantes. She’d promised on a number of occasions to kill me, by grace of being a sorcerer, and especially to kill us by grace of being an abomination crawled from the nether reaches of the telephone lines into mortal flesh. God was her excuse, guns were her weapons, and the second I stopped being useful to her and her dentistry-crazed cult, the Order, would be the day I got to meet both. She had helped me only because she feared my enemies more than she hated me.
Besides, the last person who’d helped me . . .
. . . the last person . . .
Had been Vera.
Melted into a puddle of paint.
Hadn’t even stopped to think.
Too much to do. Too damned. Too . . . too much too.
Hadn’t even stopped.
Angry.
Sick and angry. Blink and here we are, looking back with a pair of bright blue eyes colder than the iceberg that hit the Titanic . On fire with frost. Angry. Attacked, burnt, attacked, hurt, attacked, fled, attacked, attacked, attacked, gunning for us, gunning for me, gunning for my . . . for people who stopped to help.
Angry.
Didn’t know what to do about it, except doing itself. So I kept on doing while we clenched and cramped and twisted in rage.
I kept on at the computer.
The last message was obviously bad news. A sensible user would have deleted it and been done. We didn’t. Maybe it was the arrogance from using an internet café, where the computer about to be infected by bad mail wasn’t our own; maybe it was curiosity; maybe it was inspiration; maybe it was none of these things. Whatever it was, we, in full knowledge that it wouldn’t be good, opened the message.
It said:
END OF THE LINE.
The screen went black.
I swore.
A white pinprick appeared at the very centre of the screen and started to grow. As it grew, it became a white circle, then the white circle grew a black circle within it, that expanded from the centre to fill almost its entire form, then the black circle grew white teeth within it, and the blackness wasn’t just a blackness, it was a void, a great falling void that span off for ever into . . . . . . everything, nothing, senseless perfection, freedom, death, entrapment, jubilation, emptiness, pick one, pick everything, all at once -
- and then the blackness was filling the screen and it wasn’t just in the screen, it was crawling out of the screen, cracking and popping and bursting as the white jaw with its endless open gullet stretched out of the screen, dripping writhing worms of hissing static like saliva from its fanged teeth, straining towards my face and roaring the high background whine of a cooling fan about to burst, a hungry computer virus with jaws open for the skull of a mortal -
- then I pulled the plug.
It vanished. Glass fell with a splatter onto the desk and over my trousers, black smoke rolled in eye-watering sickly sweetness from the gutted interior of the screen. I flapped ineffectually at the smoke, coughing and blinking tears from my eyes, pushing myself away from the desk even as the young man with the A-level textbook stood up and began to shout in three different languages, all of them obscene.
Then he saw our face, and fell silent.
I walked away. No one tried to follow me.
It took two night buses to get where I wanted to go. It was faster than the
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