Free The Mammoth Book of Terror by Stephen Jones

attracted Mats because he was real. There was a loose-limbed lying craziness that sometimes took Daz to the brink of a mental breakdown, which was all the more frightening because
his nerve endings crackled like exposed live wires. It took guts to be nuts, and Daz was braver than most.
    Mats hadn’t stopped complaining for almost twenty minutes. “I mean,” he was saying now, “what’s the pointin creating real art when it’s denied an impact? I
don’t know anything that can change anything.”
    “I do,” said Daz, cutting him off. “I know a trick.”
    “What kind of a trick?”
    Daz jumped up and brushed out his jeans, then headed into the rain-stained block of flats behind them.
    “Where are you going?” asked Mats as they moved through the dim concrete bunker that passed for the building’s foyer. Daz just grinned, dancing across orange tiles to smack the
lift buttons with the back of his fist.
    “There’s only one place it works,” said Daz, stepping into the lift, three narrow walls of goose-fleshed steel that reeked of urine and something worse. He pumped the panel,
firing them to the top floor. When they got out, he pushed at the emergency exit and took the stairs to the roof three at a time. Montgomery House was required to keep the door unlocked in case of
fire evacuation. Mats didn’t like thirty-storey tower blocks, too much working-class bad karma forced upright into one small space, but he felt safe with Daz, who had chased storms from the
stairwells since he was two-foot-six.
    “Is it cool to be up here?” Mats asked, all the same. The hazing rain had dropped a grey dome over the top of the block. He walked to the edge of the roof and looked down, but the
ground was lost in a vaporous ocean.
    “There’s some kids run a pirate station from one of the flats, that’s that thing over there.” Daz pointed to the makeshift mast attached to the satellite TV rig propped
in the centre of the gravelled flat-top. “Touch their stuff and they’ll cut you up. No-one else ever comes up here.” The wind moaned in the wires strung between the struts of the
satellite mount. Five blocks, all with their own pirate sounds. “When they’re not chucking vinyl, they’re taking each other’s signals down with bolt-cutters. Give me your
mobile.”
    “Fuck right off, I got about three calls left before it stiffs.”
    “Come on, check this,” said Daz, snatching the mobile away from Mats. He flipped it open and punched in 7–2–8–2–6, waited for a moment, held it high, punched
in the same numbers again, waited, held it high again, did it twice more, making five numbers five times, then turned the phone around so that Daz could see.
    Behind them, the makeshift transmitter released a melancholy hum, like a phasing analogue radio. Mats could feel the crackle of electricity rustling under his clothes, as though he was about to
be hit by lightning. Something had happened to the phone’s screen; the colours had turned chromatic, and were cascading like psychedelic raindrops on a window.
    “You screwed up my phone, man. What did you do?”
    “7–2–8–2–6, you figure it out.”
    “I don’t know,” Mats admitted, “you paying your congestion charge?” A lame joke, seeing as neither of them owned any kind of vehicle.
    “Try texting the number, see what comes up.”
    Mats went to MESSAGES, and tapped in the digits. “Oh, very mature. How do I clear the screen?”
    “Can’t, you have to put in a text message to that number to get rid of it.”
    “What is it, a glitch in the system?”
    “Must be, only works on a Nokia, and only when you’re near a mast, getting a clear signal.”
    “I don’t get it, what’s the point?”
    “You didn’t type in the text yet.”
    “Okay.” Mats’ fingers hovered over the pinhead keys. “I don’t know what to write.”
    “C’mere.” Daz pulled him beneath the hardboard shelter beneath the illegal transmission masts. “Ever wonder why