Marta and the Demons Read online

clumsy hug. Suddenly everything felt weird. Strained. The park had been so good. Should I have brought sweat, not Sauvignon Blanc?

  It was still nice to brush against her. Geeze, why was I here? I went over to Marta’s kitchenette and put the wine on the counter. Did she suspect I had a crush on her? I didn’t even have a crush on her, but if she suspected I did then I might get one. When I turned, Marta was staring in horror at the wine.

  Come on. She knew I was unemployed!

  ‘What?’ I said lightly. ‘To me, 75cl is an excellent vintage and ABV 13.5% is an unsurpassed terroir. It all starts to taste the same after the first glass anyway, right?’

  Something was dawning on me.

  The look Marta had picked for tonight was – confusing. She was carefully made-up, but she was in purplish capri tights and a black Adidas –

  ‘Marta are you just back from – oh, God! No! You thought we were going running together?’

  Marta nodded violently. ‘We said we’d do it properly, eh?’

  I laughed. ‘I don’t know, Marta. What about wine and chat and cheeky cigarette?’

  ‘Myeong, I must focus on my jogging.’

  ‘Or must you focus on your cheeky cigarette? Will you raise a cloud, m’lady?’

  ‘I wasn’t kidding, hey,’ said Marta grimly. She was fishing out her phone. ‘I got this app called Monetrize to help me with my regime. Let me show you.’

  Luminous scores and charts scrolled.

  I tried to look interested. ‘The different demons chase you?’

  The room was closing in. It felt like I needed a note from Carly to get me out of Games. Or indeed out of Hell.

  ‘No, you add it to the demons app. The demons app is Burn to Run. This is called Monetrize.’

  ‘Oh, I think I’ve heard about that too,’ I said vaguely. ‘It bolts on to other apps, right?’

  Another thing I’ve heard about is exorexia, I didn’t say. I am a person in charge of a lot of repressed sass.

  ‘So you can see it’s pretty cool,’ said Marta, and there was a startling flurry somewhere, almost as if a bird had flown in a skylight – I flinched.

  But it had just been Marta sliding her phone away down the kitchenette counter. ‘You wanna borrow some kit?’ Marta demanded.

  I looked wildly at the Sauvignon Blanc. ‘Cool, yeah, cool. So explain Monetrize? It’s not just exercise, right? It turns any in game currency into real prizes?’

  ‘It’s something like that,’ Marta said evasively. ‘What size shoe? Show me your foot.’

  ‘Stall, Myeong. Stall.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Did I say that out loud? It’s just – because a bottle of white wine,’ I coaxed, ‘is also like a prize!’

  ‘I can go alone,’ Marta said quietly.

  Marta looked shifty now. She shot me a weird, expectant smile.

  Wait a minute.

  This wasn’t right. No bird, no skylight, but something had got in Marta’s flat that shouldn’t be here.

  She’d shown me the app. Then she’d snatched it away.

  ‘Marta, is it – is Monetrize more like . . . gambling?’

  ‘No risk! I gave Monetrize a deposit, huh? Every time I run, they give me some back. When I get to two hundred and fifty miles, I have it all back.’

  I put on my stern face. ‘How much? How much, Marta?’

  ‘Fifty pounds,’ said Marta.

  ‘Lie.’

  ‘Four thousand and five hundred pounds.’

  I sagged. ‘Oh, honey.’

  Marta shrugged. ‘It keeps me to my schedule! What is the use of a deposit on a flat, when all you can think of is a deposit of fat?’

  ‘Lol,’ I told her. ‘Honey, they can’t hold you to that. They can’t. We need to get you legal advice, okay? Was there consideration? Did you – sign anything?’

  Carly can help, I almost said, but for some reason didn’t feel like speaking Carly’s name.

  ‘I unchecked the box for spam? Myeong, don’t treat me like an idiot, eh? First you are too good for my job, next –’

  ‘Marta, honey, I’m sorry. It’s just a shock. Why don’t you sit? Have you got a bottle – oh, it’s screw-top. Awesome.’

  Marta didn’t sit. ‘I am getting my money back. I am, Myeong. Only about forty more miles, maybe fifty.’

  ‘That does sound doable,’ I admitted. ‘Two marathons? Does Stephen know?’

  I glanced around. I guessed Stephen wasn’t in. Maybe he’d dumped her!

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lie, maybe?’

  ‘Stephen knows up to one hundred pounds.’ Marta scrunched up her face. ‘The Monetrize deposit limit nowadays is one hundred pounds per user. So in a way he knows more true than true is.’ English never failed Marta exactly, but sometimes it gave her more than she bargained for.

  ‘No limit when you signed up though?’

  ‘There was no limit. I just need a running buddy this weekend. To give me an incentive.’

  I had to laugh at that. ‘Fine. You and me can be joggernauts, Marta. My condition is, we take tonight off. I want to catch up, not . . . uh, fail to catch up?’

  ‘We must! Fifty-eight miles by Tuesday, that’s all.’

  My throat tightened. ‘There’s a deadline.’

  ‘But I don’t know if it’s midnight or what.’

  I didn’t want to ask my next question. ‘What happens when you miss the deadline, Marta?’

  Marta didn’t want to answer it. ‘So you wanna run with me or not?’

  She pursed her lips scornfully.

  ‘I don’t think we should go running together,’ I sighed. ‘I think we should go running in shifts.’

  ‘And there’s more to it,’ Marta added loftily. ‘The demons catch you, you lose a mile. It’s more an art than a game.’

   

  II. Shares

   

  Marta was right. There were two apps – the perfectly sensible demons-are-chasing-you-around app, called Burn to Run, and the Monetrize app, clamped onto it like an awful facehugger.

  The demons-are-chasing-you-around app used both GPS and pedometer to track you. There was probably a way to hack it, but I couldn’t figure it out quickly.

  So we started fleeing in turns.

  The demons don’t mind. It’s like you would imagine. To demons, we all look the same.

   

  §

   

  The demons of Burn to Run jumped out at you and chased you. They lived panting in your headphones. The nibbler-gibbler, the spitted jurk, the careless one. You’d get away and then some other demons would jump out. The tech-ent, the normmare, the chintz-on-an-unknown-kid, the hook horror, the jemble, the fented gaf, the bibby, the realboy, the mormo, the mantifly.

  Slurping and gibbering and hissing. You never saw them, you just heard them. Some of them bellowed threats. What they were gonna do to you, in English and in Latin. The machine-raised-by-wolves, the grasping gulper, the hondy-hondy man, the doubled-urchins, the winked-too-hard, the gname, the kors, the leg-and-a-hunger, the lord of the flies, the lord of slander, the centaur.

  The narrator told you how far they were behind you. She had the cut glass English accent of David Attenborough.

  Sometimes even the narrator yelped in fear. The wokest omniscience will still jumps for jump-scare.

  Sometimes you had to hide. Almost always you had to run.

   

  §

   

  While Marta took her shift fleeing from demons, Monetrize was fleeing from my Google searches.

  ‘Monetrize,’ I muttered, ‘you have flop written all over you.’

  It was the stupidest idea. The Monetrize bros probably got texts back from the Betamax bros and Google Audio Ads bros saying, like, “soz who is this ur not in my phone.”

  At first I was happy Monetrize was such drek. Then I got nervy. What if they went bust before Marta got her money back?

  Four thousand five hundred pounds was yet another hal
f-truth – that was how much Marta still had to earn back. Her real original deposit was eight thousand pounds. Basically all her savings.

  Something was wrong with the numbers. Even though Marta had run three-quarters of her target, she’d made back less than half her deposit.

  ‘Okay, so it’s using some kind of evil non-linear curve.’

  ‘Yes. Demons can never die,’ Marta explained.

  ‘It makes you think you’re getting away from it. It’s like Columbo. It’s the Internet of “Just One More Things.”’

  So far, every mile Marta ran only released like twenty pounds on average. But she’d start releasing more deposit per mile as she approached her target. There was obviously some kind of scary mathematical business model underlying it all.

  I didn’t like it.

  ‘I don’t like it. “Monetrize.” What does it even mean?’

  ‘Money-tries,’ said Marta emphatically. ‘We don’t try. Money tries!’

  Marta remained an ardent defender of the Monetrize app. Even as she, I, her boyfriend Stephen (we had to tell him everything) and even Carly were all jogging around the clock to release her from her terrible First World debt peonage (which Marta kept referring to, mysteriously, as “unwinding her position” #cute), she continued to enthusiastically recommend we try the Monetrize app ourselves.

  Demons chased me in my dreams and they got weirder.

  And I dreamed about a woman – she was Marta and not-Marta, in that special dream way – dashing up hill and down dale, always tireless, but always a little faster than the materials of her body could withstand. So the woman’s skin flew from her in leaves, and her feet ground down to nubs, and they kept scrabbling at her nubs.

  And in my dreams, I could see them, but not very well. The rapid orchard, the kissing shadow, the thing-that-goes-lump-in-the-night, the boneless, the reaper-portrayed-by-butter, the needlenose, the buttercon, the veins-veils-and-nails, the no-body niece, the