Phone

There’s a number you can dial if you have a secret. Of course nobody answers; that’s the game. In this area code you have to dial at least eight digits, and this number has only seven. You stop while the line is still silent, and you whisper into the listening aether. 

I kissed my best friend’s boyfriend.

I stole the petty cash at work.

When I said I loved him, I lied.

The reason I set it up is because my familiar creature eats secrets and there was only so many of them I could create for myself. When I summoned it I thought it’d be simple: I was living a life of sin and telling nobody about it, and when I called up my creature it was glad, at first, to feast. 

It’s a little moon-faced thing, frog-bodied with a great round circle of eyes gazing at me in hunger. A sucking mouth in the middle of them something like a lamprey’s gullet: rings and rings of razor teeth, dragging secrets down into an infinite maw. The eyes are ranged round the mouth, looking something like the holes on an old dial phone. That’s what gave me the idea. 

The first time I told it a secret, it sucked it down with a sound like tearing cloth.

I’m tired of my mistress in the arts. She makes me sweep her house and carry her bags, and she drinks so much of my blood in payment that I’m near anaemia. I want her dead.

I’d never told anyone, and my familiar swallowed the words down. Then it digested. It coughed, it grappled, and into my waiting hands it pissed out a warm fulfilment of the secret: I’d wished her dead, and next day, there she was, lying stiff in her bed with a look of true astonishment in her drying eyes.

That’s how it digests. If you just tell it the secret it’ll eat it happily, and all it excretes is a relief from the burden. You wanted someone to know something; you didn’t want to carry the burden alone. My creature eats the secret, and behold, your wish is granted. 

But then it gets hungry again.

I told it I felt some guilt for killing my mistress in the arts, and it pissed out relief: no more conscience pains for me. I told it I wished for great wealth, and that secret gave it indigestion, wailing cramps and sad little farts of metaphysics until I came up with a more practical way to put it: I said I wished that seven million pounds from the account of the worst tech billionaire I could think of would be transferred into my account by a banking error, and it pissed happily. 

Of course, then I had to wish some brain damage onto the tax inspectors and auditors, but on the whole we were getting along great.

The trouble was that once its tummy was empty, the thing started growing needy. I’d wake to find it suckling on my veins, its hooked teeth clamped deep in my skin drawing out the deepest blood it could drink. Secret liquids inside me that had never seen the light of day. 

I couldn’t blame it. You get a pet, you have to feed it. But I couldn’t survive the endless nursing.

So for a while I took to creating new secrets. I’d ride the bus just to pick pockets. I’d ride crowded lifts so I could pinch unsuspecting bottoms. I scrawled confusing graffiti on posters: ‘If you’re reading this I know what you did on Sunday the twelfth, Delilah,’ – anything that people would think about enough that it would be a secret big enough to keep its pulsing belly filled.

Too many nights of nibbling, though, and I realised that a secret deliberately created was like skim milk: it’d slake my creature for a while, but it wouldn’t keep it full.

So I started the rumour. I dropped it on a few Internet sites, printed some fliers and left them on trains, slipped little pamphlets between books in the teen sections of libraries. Creating the connection between the number and my familiar creature itself was simple summoning, and my mistress in the arts had taught me that before she became one of my secrets. 

I built the line and watched the food coming in.

I only said I forgive my sister because our mother is dying. I don’t forgive a thing.

As soon as he leaves his wife, I’ll leave my husband.

When I went for a piss in your house, I stole your girlfriend’s panties.

My familiar creature was fat and happy. The relief it pissed out when the messages came in was mostly just the weight of a burden lifted: people wanted to say something, and once they’d said it, it evaporated from the table or the floor and I only needed to give it a quick wipe.

Every now and again, though, there would be something in that secret it couldn’t digest without doing more.

I wish he’d hurry up and die so I could inherit, for instance. Oh dear. I mean, not my problem, but the size of my familiar creature’s belly after it feasted on that little titbit – well, I think somebody’s richer than they used to be.

Or, When he does that stupid baby voice in bed, I wish I could kill him. I think I saw something about that on the news.

It was easy to solve at first. It meant I had another secret for my creature.

Sometimes, I whispered into its serried teeth, I feel guilty for what happens to the people who wish on you.

Then it pissed, and I didn’t. After all, I didn’t make them wish for those things. They wouldn’t have said it if it wasn’t in their hearts to begin with. And if you tamper with magic, well, that’s your choice.

But after another call – things got awkward.

I wish, someone said, that I could just take a knife and stab every last person at my doctor’s surgery. 

That kind of thing draws attention from the police, you see. And before I could wish anything about it, they’d looked up the last numbers dialled. 

It didn’t lead them to me - it’s not my phone number - but they did put out an enquiry. Some people started messaging them about this odd Internet rumour. I wouldn’t have thought the police were that quick at finding their way through to the dark arts, but I suppose I hadn’t reckoned on amateur sleuths these days. We’re a long way from the time of the dial phone.

I tried wishing I’d never started this whole business – that seemed the simplest – but the amount of upset tummy it created meant I spent an entire night on my hands and knees mopping stinking paradoxes out of the carpet. It didn’t work, and it was disgusting. 

It had seemed such a clever way of keeping my familiar creature fed. But I suppose when you let it swallow your pangs of guilt, you forget to worry about the future as much as you should. It didn’t occur to me until it was too late that some clever-clogs might call the number and whisper:

I wish I knew the secret behind this phone.

Shit.

I’m typing this under coercion, Simona Harris, I hope you know that. If I’d known you were going to do that I’d have wished something against you before you ever had the chance. And I can tell that my fingers aren’t going to be able to stop moving until I confess not just my name – it’s June Alice Marks – oh for fuck’s sake, but yes, that’s the truth, it’s June Alice Marks and I live in South Manchester and before I finish this I’ll have to type up my address too – 

But let me tell you this, Simona Harris. There’s one thing I can do. I can read aloud as I type, and my familiar creature is sitting next to me, and as I read aloud every secret word it gulps them down. 

And do you want to know how I know your name? Because my familiar creature has had all its eyes on me for a very long time, and it knows that along with my secret it’s going to get a wish. It swallows the secrets whole, and however long a secret I have to tell, it already knows what wish will go with it. 

My secret is that I’m the one behind the murder-phone mystery and I wish that I knew the name of the person who forced me to confess so that I could give her my familiar creature as a parting gift. 

Signed, June Alice Marks, 42a Russell Street, South Manchester, which the police will no doubt confirm when they read this. 

Enjoy feeding it blood or secrets, Simona Harris. We all think we’re clever till it’s gnawing on our veins. 

posted by Kit Whitfield  # 7:00 am