Wired Teeth Read online

  O’Brien Press Memo

  From: The Management

  To: All Members of Staff

  Subject: The Forbidden Files

  You’re probably wondering why you arrived this morning to find the police searching your desks.

  The safe containing the Forbidden Files was broken into. The Files have been STOLEN.

  The stories in these Files were kept locked up and hidden away for good reason. These stories are too FRIGHTENING, too DISTURBING or just too downright DISGUSTING to be read by children.

  The police will want to speak to all of you — please give them your full cooperation. We have to find The Forbidden Files; they must NEVER see the light of day.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  1 Terror In The Classroom

  2 The Remote Control Contraption

  3 Making An Example Of Fintan

  4 Mixed Signals

  5 The Face In The Window

  6 More Victims

  7 No Help At All

  8 Drawing Monsters

  9 A Secret Government Plot

  10 Laughing In The Face Of Fear

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  Terror In The Classroom

  Jason McGinty was a bad kid, but his teeth were worse. At this moment, they were leering wickedly at an unfortunate fourth class pupil who had the bad luck to catch Jason’s eye as he came out into the playground at break-time.

  ‘What you lookin’ at?’ Jason snarled, baring his horribly jagged, crooked teeth.

  ‘Nothing!’ the ten-year-old cowered. ‘I wasn’t looking at anything!’

  ‘You’re lookin’ at me now. And you’re talkin’ to me. Did I say you could talk to me?’ Jason persisted.

  The younger kid’s mouth shut with a stifled squeak.

  ‘Answer me!’ Jason shouted.

  His victim went pale as he struggled to work out which was more likely to get him beaten up – talking, or not talking. He couldn’t tell. Maybe both.

  Jason gave the younger boy another close look at his teeth, and then shoved him backwards for good measure, sending him stumbling onto his backside.

  ‘Watch yourself in future,’ he snapped. ‘You’re on my list now, right?’

  With that, he walked off to where his posse of mates were looking on in amusement.

  ‘You’re in a bit of a mood, Jayo,’ Vince said to him. ‘What’s got up your nose?’

  ‘Your bad breath, ye smelly git,’ Jason retorted, and they all cackled noisily.

  That was his favourite sound, his mates laughing. And he made them laugh more than anyone else. He was The Man. Nobody messed with Jason McGinty. But Vince was right; Jason was in a bit of a mood. In fact, that morning, Jason was being extra-aggressive because he was scared – scared like a little kid being chased by a big dog. He was getting a half day today. Normally that would be a good thing – a great thing – but not today.

  Because today he was going to see his orthodontist, a kind of dentist who straightened teeth.

  This was his third orthodontist, to be exact. The first one had taken one look at Jason’s teeth and had a nervous breakdown right there on the spot. The second one had nearly lost two fingers when Jason accidentally bit down during an examination. The man’s sleeve had tickled his nose, making him sneeze, his fearsome array of teeth snapping closed like a bear-trap. Jason’s mother had rushed the unfortunate man to the hospital, but he had made it clear he never wanted to see Jason or his teeth again.

  This third fellow, though, was different. He got giddy when he first saw Jason’s teeth. The X-rays that showed those impossibly contorted molars, the twisted canines, the zig-zag incisors, they brought an excited grin to the face of this orthodontist. And that worried Jason. Nobody else smiled when they looked at his teeth.

  When the bell rang at the end of break, all the children filed reluctantly back to their classrooms. Jason found his favourite victim, Fintan, already sitting at his desk like the swot he was. Miss Taylor wasn’t back from the staffroom yet, so Jason seized the opportunity to grab Fintan’s pencil case, unzip it, and hurl its contents across the room. The large collection of pens, set squares and carefully sharpened pencils scattered everywhere. His posse laughed heartily as they took their seats, watching Fintan scamper around on the floor between the desks, trying to pick up his stuff. He was pushed and hustled as the other kids hurried to their desks. He kept his head down, trying not to show the hurt on his face. This was just another bit of hassle in a whole life full of hassle.

  ‘Get your act together, Fintan,’ Vince called. ‘Honestly, you’re so clumsy.’

  ‘You’ll need this, Fintan,’ Jason waved the Fireflight pencil case.

  Fintan straightened up, and went to grab it, but he was too slow. Jason tossed it to Tony, on the other side of the room. Tony waited for Fintan to come after it, but Fintan knew better by now. He humbly took his seat, and laid the handful of pencils and pens out loose on his desk. His face was full and red, like it was going to burst, and he was careful not to look at anybody else. The posse knew he wouldn’t squeal on them. That was the beauty of it; he could seek the protection of the teacher, but the teacher couldn’t be there all the time, and once she was out of sight, the lads would make it twice as bad for getting them in trouble. They’d really get nasty then. And squealing would lose him whatever respect he had left in the yard. So Fintan just shut up and took it, like the good boy he was. Some of the other kids were laughing, mainly the posse. The rest just ignored him.

  ‘You’re a funny man, Jason McGinty,’ Sonia Singh said.

  ‘Getting funnier every day,’ her twin sister, Anita, added.

  Jason turned to look at them. They were smiling, but not with proper smiles. They had this look on their faces like they knew something he didn’t. They were always giving him that look. He never knew if they were taking the mickey out of him or not, and that really annoyed him.

  He shot an exaggerated frown at them, and they both crossed their eyes at him at exactly the same time. It was spooky how they could do that. He opened his mouth to make a smart remark, but Miss Taylor walked in just then, and he shut it again.

  The class was boring. Boring maths and then history until lunch. Jason sat through both lessons with his jaws clenched shut, unable to stop thinking about what was coming. Normally, when the lunch bell rang, he was the first one out of his seat. This time it seemed to ring deep and slow, like a funeral bell. He started to slowly put his things into his bag.

  The school secretary leaned in the door as the other children flooded out like a herd of miniature wildebeest.

  ‘Jason? Your mother’s here.’

  2

  The Remote Control Contraption

  Jason sat trembling with tension in Dr Shapiro’s waiting room.

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about, Jason,’ his mother said. ‘Children get braces put on every day of the week. And … and he’s supposed to be very good. That little girl from round the corner had her braces put on here, and look at her teeth now!’

  Jason sniffed. That little girl from round the corner used to have buck teeth. He’d have given his right arm just to have buck teeth. She used to look like a rabbit; he looked like a shark that had been chewing on an iron bar. It wasn’t the same thing.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ his mother reassured him.

  But she sounded almost as scared as he was. He thought about his hero, John Crater, from the Fireflight films. He wouldn’t have been scared of an orthodontist. Jason glanced uneasily towards the surgery door. The only thing was, John Crater had perfect teeth.

  The nurse came in, a clipboard in her hand, dressed in a clean white uniform.

  ‘Jason McGinty,’ she said, and a shiver r
an down Jason’s spine.

  He tried to act brave, he really did. But as he was led away from his mother, walking through to the hallway and into the surgery, his breath was catching like he was going to cry, and his legs were trembling. He had been in the surgery once before, but that was just so Dr Shapiro could have a look at him, and make a mould of his teeth. That had been bad enough, the big lump of putty – or whatever it was – filling his mouth had made him feel like he was choking. This time the weird tooth-fanatic was going to operate.

  ‘Ah, young Mr McGinty,’ the orthodontist welcomed him with an eager smile. ‘Hop up on that seat there, and let’s get you sorted out.’

  He was a pale, scrawny man, with tufts of sandy-coloured hair, and the smallest hands Jason had ever seen on an adult. His eyes were always open a little too wide. Jason took a deep breath, and did as he was told.

  The seat was cool. Jason wished he had one at home for sitting in while he was playing his games. The rest of the room gave him the creeps. It was mostly like a dentist’s surgery – with the tools and lamps and the mask for the laughing gas – which made him uncomfortable as it was. But there were some bizarre-looking machines sitting around on the counters too, stuff he hadn’t even seen in the other orthodontist’s surgeries. Stuff that looked like Shapiro had invented it himself. Jason’s teeth were chattering as he lay back in the chair.

  ‘That’s it,’ the man said gently, leaning over him and switching on the big angle-poise lamp. ‘Now, open wide.’

  Jason did as he was told. Dr Shapiro managed to get both of his miniature hands into Jason’s mouth as he poked and prodded around. Jason could tell he was really excited.

  ‘Good, good,’ he said to himself.

  Jason wondered what was so good about it.

  ‘Right, well I think it’s time to get started,’ the orthodontist said, standing up straight again, and picking up some tools. Hard, sharp, thin, steel tools.

  ‘As you know, you have a rather … a rather unusual dental profile, and I just don’t think the standard “train-tracks” would do the job. A little bit too … conventional. I think this calls for something special – a little contraption I’ve come up with myself. I love that word, “contraption”, don’t you?’

  No, Jason didn’t like it. It made him want to wet himself with terror.

  ‘This won’t hurt too much,’ Shapiro said softly. ‘Here. Bite down on this.’

  He stuck something in Jason’s mouth, and when Jason bit down, there was a snapping noise. Jason yelped as he felt something grip his teeth.

  ‘No need to worry,’ Shapiro assured him. ‘That’s just the frame. Here we go now.’

  And then he began his work. He explained everything as he did it, and despite the abject fear of the ordeal, Jason found the man’s voice comforting. And when Shapiro wasn’t talking, he hummed to himself, interrupted every now and again by a grunt while he had to twist or tighten something.

  First, he attached an anchor point to each tooth, carefully cementing each into place in much the same way that Jason put together his model aeroplanes. Then he wound sturdy pieces of wire through them, tightening them like guitar strings, testing them, adjusting them, taking them out and putting them back in again. When he had them properly ‘tuned’, he used a screwdriver to turn something along the inside of Jason’s cheek, and the wires suddenly constricted all around his teeth at once. By now, Jason was nearly in tears, and he could feel the tension spread from his jaw up into his head.

  ‘It will feel a bit tight to begin with, but you’ll get used to it,’ Dr Shapiro said. ‘And you won’t have to wear those silly straps around your head at night like with some braces. No, these are state-of-the art! You see, these are smart braces.’

  He opened up a laptop computer and showed Jason the screen.

  ‘A microprocessor in the braces reads how much tension is needed from one minute to the next, and sends the information to this computer. Here are your teeth on the screen, see?’

  Jason nodded, fascinated despite the pain. He could see a computer image of his teeth on the screen, with the braces around them. It was like looking at a ghostly, green skull.

  ‘The computer takes that information,’ Shapiro went on, ‘and sends commands to the braces when they’re too loose or causing you too much pain, et cetera et cetera … So they work with maximum efficiency.’

  ‘So my braces are on remote control?’ Jason asked, wincing as the words made his jaw ache.

  ‘Precisely,’ Shapiro smiled. ‘It’s amazing what we can do with computers these days.’

  * * *

  When they got home, Jason’s mother let him watch two Fireflight films on DVD, to help him forget the discomfort of the braces. It still took him a long time to get to sleep that night. His jaw hurt, and he spent a long time looking in the mirror before going to bed. Half of him hated what he saw, the other half relished the thought of going into school looking like a monster, like one of the villains from Fireflight. But he remembered all the kids he’d slagged for having train-track braces, and knew they’d be laughing at him tomorrow.

  Jason lay awake, thinking about what he would have to do to stop them laughing.

  3

  Making An Example Of Fintan

  His mother always dropped him off to school early, on her way to work. This was fine with Jason, because that was normally when he crammed his homework in, trading answers with his mates in the half hour before the bell rang. He didn’t have any homework to do this morning; but as he walked into school with his lips tightly closed, his brain was working overtime. There was a strange tingling in his teeth, which for some reason reminded him of static on a radio.

  He was surprised to find he was nervous about going into the yard. Usually, he was the reason other people were nervous. On an empty lot opposite the school was a huge, steel phone mast that had gone up earlier in the year. Standing in its shadow, reluctant to cross the road to school, Jason remembered when the towering mast had been built.

  All the parents had protested against it, because they said it would mess with their children’s brains. The children, on the other hand, had been delighted. They thought school was already messing with their heads, and this way they’d at least get a better signal on their mobile phones.

  That was until the thing was finished, and all the kids found out the signal on their phones was worse than before. They had joined their parents in their protest, and had made banners and everything. That had been fun, they’d missed nearly a week of school over it. But now the tower meant he couldn’t call his mum and tell her he was feeling sick, and wanted to go home. Not without going into the school. He would just have to ‘bite the bullet’, like John Crater always said.

  His class normally gathered in the same place in the yard, near the door to their room, and some of them were already there. He found Fintan sitting against the wall with a book open on his lap. The sap was always reading. Jason went up to him and leaned his face in close.

  ‘Hey, Fintan,’ he said, loud enough for everyone to hear him. ‘What do ya think of my new braces?’

  Fintan looked up as Jason bared his teeth at him. Jason saw the corners of his mouth begin to curl into a smile, and savagely grabbed him by his ears, pulling him onto his feet.

  ‘What did you say?’ he snarled.

  ‘I didn’t say anything!’ Fintan protested.

  ‘You made a crack about my braces, y’little git. Say it again, or don’t you have the guts to say it to my face?’

  ‘I didn’t say a thing!’ Fintan whined, frantically.

  Jason saw more of his class walking up towards them, and knew this was the time. He swung his knee hard into Fintan’s thigh, giving him a dead leg.

  Fintan collapsed to the ground, crying. Jason took out his carton of milk, opened it, and splashed some over his un witting victim’s hair. Fintan would wipe the worst of it off, but in the summer heat, it would be smelling before the end of the day.

  Jason stood over
him, his fist held out.

  ‘Don’t you EVER try it on with me, or I’ll kill ya, you little prat! D’you hear me?’

  But it didn’t matter if Fintan heard him. Fintan had learned that lesson long ago. It was the rest of the class, everyone else, who had to hear him.

  As he walked away, Jason heard a voice from somewhere close by, but tinny, like it was on a radio:

  ‘Orange to Indigo. We have the last element. The Tormentor is good to go.’

  4

  Mixed Signals

  Making an example of Fintan worked; nobody said a thing about his braces until break-time, when the five lads who made up his posse gathered around to check out Dr Shapiro’s handywork.

  ‘They look serious,’ Vince whistled. ‘Do they hurt?’

  ‘Not much,’ Jason said casually.

  ‘Do they catch on the insides of your cheeks?’ Tony asked.

  He had train-tracks, and sometimes they cut the inside of his mouth.

  ‘No,’ Jason replied. ‘I mean, they feel really big in my mouth, but they’re not sticking out anywhere, y’know? The guy said they were, like, future technology kind of thing.’

  He explained how they worked by remote control. The lads were suitably impressed.

  ‘Cool,’ said Vince.

  There was a crackling sound, and then:

  ‘Orange, this is Indigo; Subject Alpha is engaging in social interaction with his associates. Situation normal.’