He’d run it with the right voltage.Įverything was perfect, and still, and still… Every test he’d conducted on it showed that it’d been made with micrometer precision, exactly in the configuration he’d calculated. And Pif would string him up by his yajtza, which was a more immediate problem. He was damned if he was going to face them across a lecture hall having lost the race. Stanford-Stanford! Those raspizdyay kolhoznii amerikanskij-were breathing down his neck, and he knew that if he didn’t crack it soon, they’d either beat him to his own discovery or debunk the whole effort. The first practical test of the Ekanobi-Petrovitch laws, and it just sat there, dumb, blind, motionless. The yebani thing didn’t, wouldn’t work, no matter how much he yelled and hit it. His eyes, always so blue, were surrounded with red veins. He let it fall heavily onto his desk and flicked his glasses off his face. A kilometer of fine alloy wound up into a ball the size of a double fist.īut it was supposed to be more than that. It was a work of art dense, cold, beautiful, a miracle of manufacture. Shining silver lines of metal in curves and whorls shone against the black resin matrix, the seeming chaos replicated throughout the hidden depths of the globe a single strand of wire that swam up and down, around and around, its path determined precisely by equations he himself had discovered. Petrovitch stared at the sphere in his hands, turning it slowly to reveal different parts of its intricately patterned surface. So this one’s for Masters of Terror’s webmaster, Andy.
Learning how to terrify someone through the medium of prose-mere words-ought to be a weapon in every writer’s armory. What hasn’t changed is that we still like to tell each other tall tales and we still try to scare our friends and our readers. All sorts, whatever pays the bills and keeps us interested. We write fantasy and crime and horror and SF: short stories, novellas, novels, screenplays and script and tie-ins.
But the number of us from Masters of Terror, from that first pub meeting in London (at the Dead Nurse, I think), who are still active in writing is quite startling. There’s been some fall out: some people we don’t see anymore, some have gone on to do other things and live different lives. Now we’re pretty much all in our forties, bald or balding, with a preponderance of black T-shirts and silly beards. Now, to think of the bunch of us-and most of us still meet up every year at the British Fantasy Society’s Fantas圜on-as young… well, we were once. Message boards were becoming popular, and I ended up at the place where most of the UK’s young horror writers hung out. It started in the early days of what became “the web,” when things were beginning to move off the newsnets and list servers. It was more by accident than design, but one of those happy accidents I’ve never regretted. When I was a very new writer, I-for reasons explained in the dedication for Equations of Life-fell in with a bunch of horror writers.