The Third Person

Before I knew what I was doing, I picked up the sheets of paper and started to read.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

‘Are you writing this down now?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Look at me while you’re doing it.’

So I looked over at him, sitting next to me. He was a large man: tall and solid, without being muscular or fat. Clean shaven. Brown hair. Blue eyes behind the glasses he was wearing. In fact, apart from the gun he was holding, pointing only vaguely at me but with his eyes doing most of the damage, he seemed normal. Just an average, everyday guy: the kind you passed in the street all the time without noticing, caring about or looking twice at.

Except for that gun.

‘What do you want?’ I said. I was surprised by how frightened I sounded. ‘I don’t have any money.’

He smiled, but even as I’d said it I’d known how stupid it was. He wasn’t here for money. My flat was on the top floor of a half-abandoned, three-quarters derelict shit-stack, and that was hardly the sort of place you came at random just to turn somebody over. On top of that, he clearly knew all about me. He hadn’t got me on the floor; he hadn’t tied me up or told me not to fucking move and asked where the money was.

What had happened was this.

It had been pouring down outside. There was a cacophony of clicks and splashes as the rain hit windowsills and cars and awnings below: a deep, dense, wet sound; a three-dimensional noise that you could walk through. The rain smelled warm, almost spicy. The street and pavements far below seemed suitably black and charred.

I’d been sitting, staring at the blank e-mail I’d received. There was no actual message, only the attachment, and I kept alternating between reading sections of the text it contained and staring at the empty e-mail and wondering what it meant.

Somehow, it had sidled through all the broken and breaking servers and found its way here, to my inbox.

The screensaver woke up – a featureless black background and I nudged the mouse to send it away. The blank message returned. Implacable. It was almost surprising how full of meaning no words could be.

I opened the attachment again and read it through.

It was very much incomplete: I guessed that there was less than a quarter of the original text there, and the rest was corrupted to the point where the meaning had gone, but I could make out some of the words and I recognised enough of the others to know what this was. she screams se har(d thyt wf jjkpeopllr hurt h..r

I closed the attachment and clicked back to the blank message. Nothing – no words anyway. The malformed text made me think of a dog. It was like an old dog you’d dragged out back and shot in the head, but then you hear a scraping at the back door, go and open it, and there it is. And you don’t know whether it’s loyalty or anger that’s brought it back to you, except that in this case I thought that I did. The blank screen glared at me. If I stared, the emptiness felt like it was burning into my eyes.

Bang. Bang.

Two steady knocks at the front door, and I’d turned around before I knew it. The blank message continued its empty flare in the corner of my eye.

I didn’t move.

My attention was focused on the lock, with the rest of the room fading away around me, and I realised that it was open. My front door was unlocked, and I didn’t even dare move. But then it really was open – opening, anyway – and a large man with a gun was walking into the darkness, bringing sickly light from the hall along with him.

He’d just closed the front door calmly, keeping the gun pointing at me the whole time, and then he’d taken a seat at the table beside me.

‘Get yourself some fresh paper,’ he’d said. ‘And a pen. And then start writing down what’s happening here.’

And so that’s what I’d done.

The smile disappeared now as he told me what I already knew.

‘I don’t want your money. I just want you to listen.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Right.’

‘Yes. Listen and write.’

Okay, I thought. He’s someone who knows about me and what I can do, and maybe he wants to make some money. So perhaps there was an angle here that I could use to help myself. But then again – if that was all that he wanted, he could have taken a dozen notebooks off the shelves behind him and sold them to whatever buyer he had interested. So why not do that? My mind was backtracking, and I couldn’t help thinking of the blank e-mail I’d just received. The corrupted attachment. Did this have something to do with that empty message?

He leaned forward and looked me in the eyes. Just stared into them intently.

‘Are you in there, Jason?’ he said. ‘Are you hearing me?’

All I could do was stare back at him. I didn’t know what to say, but I didn’t have the courage to look down. So I kept the connection, my right hand twitching away as I wrote.

After a second, he leaned away again. ‘Never mind. Either you are or you aren’t.’