The Mammoth Book of Terror by Stephen Jones

string two clear
thoughts together without aid.
    Mats had walked the upper floor of the store half a dozen times before he understood what he was supposed to do. Gardens, buses, looks, girls, money, all small-time stuff, changing single
elements, not rewriting the hard drive. He pulled the phone from his pocket, flipped it open and punched in the number again.
    7–2–8–2–6
    He watched as the letters came up once more.
    S-A-T-A-N
    A broadband hotline to the Devil, a kind of turbo-Satan, a programmer’s joke, not even that – a child’s idea of a secret, something so obvious nobody even thought to try it. You’re supposed to send it to yourself, he thought, that’s all you have to do, like making a wish. This time, instead of texting a request, he simply typed in his own
phone number, then pressed SEND.
    MESSAGE SENT
    What now? The screen was teeming with colours once more, but now they were fading to mildewed, sickly hues; something new was at work. For a moment he thought he saw Daz outside the window,
laughing wildly at something preposterous and absurd. He felt bilious, as if he had stepped from a storm-shaken boat. The pale beech wood floor of the store tilted, then started to slide away until
he was no longer able to maintain his balance.
    He landed hard, jarring his arm and hip, but within a second the wood was gone and he had fallen through – he could feel the splinters brushing his skin – until the ground was
replaced with something soft and warm. Sand on clay, earth, small stones, heat on his face, his bare legs. His eyes felt as if they had been sewn shut. He lay without moving for a moment, feeling
the strange lightness in his limbs. Then he reached out a hand to touch his bruised thigh.
    Stranger still. It was not his leg, but one belonging to a child, thin and almost fleshless – and yet he could feel the touch of his fingers from within the skin.
    So bright. He could see the veins inside his orange eyelids. Yet there was something else moving outside. He sensed rather than saw them – dozens of black dots bustling back and forth.
    He ungummed his eyelids and opened them. Flies, fat black blowflies lifted from his vision in a cloud and tried to resettle at once. He brushed them away with his hand, and was horrified to
discover the brown, bony claw of a malnourished child. The effort required to pull himself upright was monstrous. Looking down at his legs, he found that instead of the pre-stressed flares he
always wore, his twisted limbs were encased in torn, ancient suit-trousers five sizes too small.
    He found himself sitting exhausted beneath a vast fiery sun on a ground of baked mud, waiting for the charity worker in front of him to dole out a ladle of water from a rust-reddened oil drum.
Staring down into the opalescent petrol stains on the rancid liquid, he saw his opposite self: an encephalitic head, fly-crusted eyes, cracked thin lips, sore-covered ribs thrust so far forward
that they appeared to be bursting from his skin; the knife of perpetual hunger twisting in his swollen stomach. Looking around, he saw hundreds of others like himself stretching off into the dusty
yellow distance, the marks of hunger and disease robbing them of any identity. He would have screamed then, if his throat had not been withered long ago to a strip of sun-dried flesh.
    Daz made his way along the balcony of Montgomery House, avoiding pools from the dripping ceiling, swinging the cans of beer he had withdrawn from his secret stash behind the
    bins. He had half-expected Mats to trail him back to the flat, but perhaps he was off sulking somewhere about the phone joke. That was the great thing about people like Mats – you could
    tell them any old shit, and at some primitive level, even when they said they didn’t, they actually believed you. Heart and soul.

 

    DENNIS ETCHISON IS THE winner of two World Fantasy Awards and three British Fantasy Awards. The late Karl Edward Wagner described him as