The Third Person

Some skirt close, though. I found one site which showed photographs taken by two killers as they raped, tortured and murdered a young girl. They had also audiotaped it, and the track was available at the site. I listened, deliberately hearing it as pitches and tones: fluctuations in sound. The site claimed, incorrectly, that it was the closest thing to snuff available on the internet. I’ve seen closer. Other sites are devoted to animals, both sexually and otherwise. A woman being raped by a horse (real). Cats being flayed alive, their skins coming off like sellotape unsticking from a parcel (real). During the time of the Waco siege in Texas, FBI agents played tapes of rabbits being tortured to death into Koresh’s compound in order to wear down those inside. I have that sound file, and it wears me down, too.

But like I said: none of this is actually real. It’s all just hearsay after the event, like a newspaper report, or the Bible. And that’s the best way to think of it: maybe the only sensible way, if you’re going to think of it at all.

Just dots of colour or beats of sound.

Just words on a page.

‘You have one message… Message One.’

Beep.

I recognised her voice straight away, and pictured her face as she started talking to me from the pocked, steel-grey grid of my answerphone.

‘Jason? It’s me. Charlie. I was just calling to find out how you are. I mean, I know that you’re not great, but… you know. Williams is going spare about you not turning in this week.’

Charlie had just turned eighteen and was cute as hell. Short blonde hair, trim figure, pretty face. She had a pierced nose: a little gold stud, as though someone had banged a painless nail into the perfect skin on the side of her nostril. Whenever she spoke, she didn’t seem to have a bad word to say about anyone. For me, for some reason, they were all good.

‘He’s tried to ring you a couple of times, but there was no answer. He’s left messages, though. Have you not got them?’

I nodded to myself, picturing Williams behind his desk. White shirt, dark tie. Neat hair and glasses. He always had little red flushes in his cheeks, as though he was constantly embarrassed about something. I think he was slightly paranoid that the other guys all took the piss out of him when they were out of ear-shot, but in reality they couldn’t give a shit about him, and I felt the same way. He was my direct superior, and he’d left increasingly angry messages on my answerphone for the last few days. I’d deleted them as soon as I heard the first few nasal notes. A lot of times, you don’t need to hear people to know what they’re saying.

‘Well, whatever. I mean, I know that you’re having a bad time, and you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want. Obviously, but – you know. I just wanted you to know that I’m here for you. If you want to talk, that is. We can have a chat. Hey – I could buy you a coffee some time.’

She always made sure I had a coffee each morning at nine. Bless her. Over the weeks, she’d even kept track of my increasing lateness, with the coffee starting to arrive on my desk at nine-fifteen, and then nine-thirty.

I smiled, and clicked stop, but I didn’t delete it. Instead, I shrugged off my coat onto the chair and headed through to the kitchen.

There was beer in the fridge, as there should be in every decent, civilised home. I collected a bottle, and then went upstairs, to the study, clicking the computer on at the plug and settling in for the night.

The Melanie Room.

Not a room in the normal sense that you might think of a room, but I’d say it still had a good claim. It had two walls, a floor and a ceiling – of a kind, anyway – and rooms branching out in all directions that you created as you went. It was a Chat room: white space filled with text, divided into two vertical sections. The section on the right listed usernames; the larger section on the left was the chat space, steadily scrolling away upwards as users typed in messages that appeared at the bottom. The Room was named after Melanie Shaw, a five-year-old girl who had disappeared in Central England a few years ago. She was still alive somewhere. The Room had been named in her honour after a user named JACKJILL posted a picture of what was claimed to be her: a bound, naked girl, with her head wrapped entirely in black electrical tape, breathing through straws in her nostrils. That was two years ago, and he’d posted a picture a month ever since.

There were thirty-seven users in the Room that night, which was about average. Sometimes there were more and sometimes less, but it hardly mattered. As always, the main room was almost entirely empty. Little in the way of real conversation ever went on there – the real action took place privately. By double-clicking on someone’s username you could enter into a private room with them – just the two of you, unless you invited others – and chat one-on-one. You could cyber or discuss cases in the news, or exchange favourite photographs and links, all out of the way of prying eyes.

I’d logged on as Amy17, and it took all of thirty seconds for the first private message to come through:

HARD4U: [u like it in ass bitch]

Invitations to ‘private’ – however primitive – almost always came up in a separate window, and you could choose to chat or cancel. I took the first sip of my beer and pressed cancel. That thing about my boss? It goes for perverts on the internet, too.

A few more windows flashed up over the next twenty seconds, but none of them were that much better than just plain annoying.

SEXXXYFUCK: [i’ll tie you with ur panties]

M-BRACE: [hi – asl?]

likeyoungirls: [r u wet Amy?]

I pressed cancel on each of them in turn, all the time scrolling down the list of users until I found the one I wanted. I’d been talking to this guy for the last couple of weeks, hiding behind the Amy17 name, and trying to get a little closer to him. Recently, it felt as though I’d been succeeding. Now, I peered at the screen, moving my head closer and closer. His name – ‹~KaREEM~› – did not dissolve into dots the way the gifs he often sent me did: the lines remained solid and connected. It was just text on a screen, this man’s name, but you still couldn’t see through it; it didn’t break down. It gave me the sense that this really was happening now, and that – somewhere nearby – he was looking at his own screen, perhaps running a finger over the text I was hiding behind, and thinking something similar.

I took a sip of my beer, and waited for him to come to me.

A few facts about Amy17. She was seventeen years old, five feet and three inches tall in her bare feet. She had short, blonde hair, cut off in a line just before it touched her shoulders, blue-green eyes and clear skin – a pretty girl. Generally, she wore plain white tops, sometimes a skinny-rib, and a skirt to mid-thigh. Both items showed her off well, because she had tanned, toned legs from her thrice-weekly gym visits, and firm 34C breasts. Amy17 was sexually experienced, and had discovered the boys very young. Her favourite position was missionary, held down firmly by that lovely hair of hers, but she was always open to suggestions. Kareem generally had a few.

I sat and waited for him, wondering how long he could hold out. A few more revolting hopefuls approached me, and I cancelled them all. Mr Hard4U tried me again, and I responded by telling him to fuck himself in the ass, and try his mother out first for practice. I was beginning to despair until, after five minutes, I felt his breath on my neck and the room went that little bit darker. The window appeared.

‹~KaREEM~›: [(whispers) Where are you?]

Got you, I thought, taking another sip of my beer. As always, my heart was pounding and my palms felt sweaty: slightly shaky. That feeling of connecting with someone over the net has always made me feel strange. It’s a feeling that’s never gone away.

I clicked chat, which opened up a private window. When I typed in my reply, it appeared underneath his: