Best British Short Stories 2020

^{JEFF NOON & BRIDGET PENNEY} THE FURTHER DARK

You’ve been looking at the email for hours and hours, the same email. Or have hours joined together to create a day and in turn days added one after another to make a week, a fortnight, a month? You find it scary to think that. So look away from the screen. Turn your head and gaze around the room. Get up out of your chair. Tell yourself to get up. OK, flatten your feet on the floor under your desk. Feel the pressure in your arches, every wriggle of your toes. Concentrate and the rest will follow. Or don’t think at all and your muscles will act instinctively. Part of a chain reaction. Or perhaps not. Keep still, keep still, don’t move. You’re fuddled. Keep repeating yourself, it’s funny how quickly it all becomes true. Stay still. Concentrate.

If you start at the beginning, surely you’ll make sense of this. You will work out what is happening. You will work out why you feel this way. You can remember when the first email came. You were having coffee with… Maria? Somewhere down the road. Somewhere no more than one hundred steps from here. You’re faint and exhausted. Sweating. You don’t believe the clock in the bottom corner of your computer screen. But this is your room, your familiar room, you know everything in it, all your trinkets and non-precious objects, it’s your room, you’re repeating yourself now. Isn’t that meant to be comforting, isn’t that a way of reinforcing your sense of self in your surroundings if you just go on repeating this really isn’t, this really isn’t good for you. Keep saying it anyway. This is your room.

Are you hungry? You have food in the kitchen but you would have to stand up to access it and this you can’t seem to do even if you are telling yourself this is what you want. You can’t remember when you last ate. So you must be hungry. Repeat to yourself. You are going to eat right now. Order a pizza with free home delivery. You will choose the toppings you like: cracked pepper, artichoke, caramelised onion? At least you recognise their names though you can’t for the life of you remember how they taste. Why not include a half-price fizzy drink with your order? You will open the door when you hear the bell. But that means standing up, moving about, taking steps. Your life is right here on the screen in front of you… you can’t see anything else that’s why you can’t turn round you look at your fingers resting on the keyboard, awaiting instructions; delete or open? It’s too hard a choice, too hard too hard too hard you repeat you repeat you repeat…

You received the email yesterday or could it have been last week? In your inbox on your screen you really need to focus. You click. You open. That part is easy. You see a blank. A blank is what you’re looking at a blank is what you’ve been trying to get your head round staring at the screen hypnotised by next to nothing this is what you keep coming back to this is why you can’t leave it because even though you can’t see anything anything anything you keep repeating to yourself you know there must be something there because why would someone be sending you a blank email. Repeatedly. Over and over again. The same email. Blank.

You remember contacting Maria about this when it started and Charles and your online crony redFox rich in stoner wisdom and @id.iot, no that’s wrong, it’s @id.iot who is contacting you. The blank emails are from @id.iot. Unknown person. How much sense does that make you think and suddenly it makes perfect sense. Blank blank blank blank blank. They’re not blank! Maria says this to you, on one of them there’s a button you can press to make them stop. This is what I’ve heard anyway, she says, and yeah I know that goes against everything you’ve ever had dinged in your head that you mustn’t click on any links cos they’ll take you to the bad place all your files corrupted your identity stolen proper rinsed and all those things you meant to clear from your cache sent to your mumdad wifehusband boygirlfriend workmateboss anyone at all you’ve ever wanted to impress literally the end of your fucking world… But I still can’t see any button, you reply, there is no button. It has to be right there mate open it with a different browser. Or copy the whole damned thing into a program that shows you hiddentext…

But nothing is revealed nothing is ever revealed, no hidden words, no symbols, or magic buttons, and you try the same technique on each and every new email as it arrives nothing nothing nothing. Try another trick. Search for message, sender @id.iot, select all and then delete the whole damned lot. Gone! For a split second. Who was that old king trying to hold back the tide, Canute or Knut, they changed the spelling? And then refresh. Here they come, spewing forth cascading the deluge descends and whoosh! Your inbox chokes up with the same empty messages, and your actual emails – the ones from your friends your real friends your friends and colleagues – are submerged and lost under the pressure of incoming incoming incoming. Isolation cocoon bloody mental lockdown! Think: this is spam with no purpose apart from to really mess with your head. Don’t take it personally. @id.iot is not about you. You are not special chosen. This is spam nothing else. Tell yourself this over and over. You random victim, one of very many nice kind. I like you! Send bitcoin now and I treat you good. Boom Boom. Special investment. One weird tip. Delete as inappropriate. You are not being punished. But no, no, no. If only. Instead: blank, blank, blank, no message, not a sales pitch. Nothing. Keep deleting.

A fly crawls across the screen. What is it connecting with? Perhaps the demon familiar of @id.iot. Idiosyncratic. Private. Private. Private. Private. Open each new message one after another, without sleep, into the night the day the. This is your work now you’re not even angry any more. No movements but for the repeated tapping of your fingers on the keys, and the emails continue to arrive courtesy of an algorithm you try to tell yourself this in a bid to take back some control all blank blank blank, blink blank blank, blink blank, BLANK and on and on and on and you open each in turn trying to keep up with the flow and you gaze at each in turn, empty screen, six seconds each which is a LONG time more than enough to absorb its absence of meaning, click blink click blink click blink blank and on to the next next next next blank next. You are entranced. Your mind the same now, no content, your mind as blank as the screen and imagination fails imagine imagine that as your body slows down, weakens, becomes heavy like too much gravity pressing down. Concentrate! Put every last single pitiful scrap of effort in that one tiny movement, your index finger pressing over and over and over endlessly again as the hours pass, the seconds, the days, the weeks and then you see the content at last that single line of text against the white space, the one email you’ve been waiting for

and you jam and hold your finger down on the keyboard waiting wanting hoping for what? Think think think think blink. What DO you want? To be taken away somewhere new where something good or bad would be a change a release an escape from torment but the web is not a web it’s nothing but a sticky mess and now you’re stuck, trapped in your own wherever dark, and into your head pops that line from Ovid: She rose up from the ghosts of the recently dead, walking slowly because of her wound. Right? Where the snake bit her and poisoned her stone cold no pulse no breath, so how come bloody Eurydice gets another chance at life, but you but you why not you, or you might put it this way: I have risen from the ghosts of the living dead, holding my head in my hands, seeking a pathway lost. The music in my earbuds died a very long time ago. OK, listen closely: there is no magic button. There is no escape, so why not turn off your machine? Just disconnect. Power down. Why not? But remember: beyond that darkness – soothing, languorous and weirdly welcoming – there is only the further dark.

Stand up. Walk to the window. Lift the blind and gaze out, across and down at the street. Observe the back of your hand reflected in the glass; why does it look like it belongs to somebody else? Go into the bathroom but you don’t seem to need to pee. Splash water on your face. Avoid the mirror. Decide to sprawl on the comfy couch and stick your feet on the coffee table. There’s a hole in one of your socks but no big deal. You wonder how many times the hands of your clock have gone round since you last looked. You flip through the pages of a book. Nothing makes sense. Don’t think about the screen on the desk your emails the blank messages. You could close your eyes. Is there light outside? Ticktock. It’s morning. It’s evening. And you glance at your phone over there not ringing never ringing.

Or you could go out to the cafe just one hundred steps down the road, or the public house, maybe, just across the street. The Rose and Crown. Maria and your other friends will be there, chatting away as though nothing at all has ever happened. You take a pew. A drink appears on the table in front of you. You nod thanks. You are fine, thanks. The conversation turns away from you as you evidently don’t feel much like talking today. But all you want, all you are waiting for, really, is for just one of them to ask you: What happened, mate? When you pressed the button? Did you press the button? Will they will they will they will they will they ever ask?

But no. They barely look at you. No one asks. You’ve got that floaty feeling. Reach for the table edge. Hold on tight. Now your friends are all laughing at a joke and you make a huge effort to join in but your laugh is mistimed. They don’t notice. So study your nails. Then your fingertips: are these loops whorls arches the same as they ever were? You’ve had enough. No point excusing yourself. Just head for the toilets where you find yourself waiting waiting waiting for the tap to stop rinsing soap off your hands. Dare the mirror at last and see your features your eyes your lips your hair start to fade to fade to fade. Blink. Then look away. No second glance. Keep on walking, touching and holding each object as you reach it. The dryer, the wall, the door jamb, Maria’s hand…