by Steven Hall
Books of Fact/Books of Fiction: Books of fact provide solid channels of information in many directions. Library books are best because they also link the book itself to every previous reader and any applications of the text. Fiction books also generate illusionary flows of people and events and things that have never been, or maybe have only half-been from a certain point of view. The result is a labyrinth of glass and mirrors which can trap an unwary fish for a great deal of time. I have an old note written by me before I got so vague which says that some of the great and most complicated stories like the Thousand and One Nights are very old protection puzzles, or even idea nets by which ancient peoples would fish for and catch the smaller conceptual fish. I don’t know if this is true or not. Build the books into a small wall around yourself. My notes say three or five books high is best.
With regret and hope,
The First Eric Sanderson
(Received: 23rd November)
Letter #60
Dear Eric,
As promised, this is the key to the locked room in the house.
You should reread letters #3, #4, #17, #44, #58 and #59 and follow all procedures before you open the red filing cabinet. The text you will find inside is ‘live’ and extremely dangerous.
With regret and hope,
The First Eric Sanderson
(Received: 30th November)
Letter #67
Dear Eric,
As far as I am aware, the conceptual fish do not see physical plants and trees and animals. They do not see the sky or the moon. They only see people, and the things that people make and say and do. The streams of human history, human culture and human thought are their environment. The Ludovician is always looking. I am careful to hide myself, but I am forgetful.
I’m telling you everything I know before it’s all lost for good.
With regret and hope,
The First Eric Sanderson
(Received: 9th January)
Letter #108
Dear Eric,
I just realised, it has been more than three months for you now. More than a hundred of these letters. I hope you can follow them, I am doing all I can.
Soon you will receive a package containing a light bulb, a videotape and two exercise books. It’s important that you open this package inside a Dictaphone loop because reading the enclosed information will create a strong scent in the waterways.
The light bulb has been carefully modified to flicker a double-encoded Morse/QWERTY text (more on this later) containing a fragment of your history. As you will see, one of the exercise books contains my work on identifying the type of encryption, the other contains the clean text I have been able to extract so far. There is still more to translate and that task falls to you. The videotape contains the light bulb’s complete flash cycle for decoding purposes, and in case of accident.
Be very careful with this text. It should be considered ‘live’ at all times. As with all other live documents, ensure it is stored in a post-filled box for safety.
Regret and hope,
The First Eric Sanderson.
(Received: 11th January)
Letter #110
Dear Eric,
It seems so normal doesn’t it, the writing from my journal about Clio and Greece? I hardly recognise myself. I don’t think I could even write like that anymore. I’ve ended up as a collector’s egg, all the insides and egginess sucked out leaving just an intact and brittle shell, looking just the same, perfectly the same, but not really an egg at all anymore. I don’t know if some of the things I say make sense. When I get to the middle of something I find I’ve lost my grip on one of the ends. Like trying to hang a huge sheet out in the wind, I can’t keep hold of it all at once and parts are escaping, flapping away out of reach. Are you there? Is there even going to be a you after I’m gone? I’m trying hard not to lose faith. Don’t lose faith in me, Eric. If you are there, you will need this information to survive; I need you to believe in me. I’ve killed myself so slowly it’s taken years and I don’t really even know why. I don’t want to die. I’m scared of dying but even more I don’t want to not be. I remembered something Clio said and I wrote it down. We were coming out of a building like a pub or a cinema or a shopping complex and Clio said, “I’m going to have a smiley face tattooed on the underneath of my big toe.” I said why and Clio said, “So when I’m dead and they put a toe tag on me it’ll look funny in the morgue.” Memories like this one are like the coloured dust from butterfly wings coming off on my fingers and then blowing away. I think Clio liked the idea of the tattoo because it would be like her something, her sense of humour, would still be there for at least a little bit longer when her body was cold and dead. It would be like a little cheat. You see what I’m saying don’t you? Don’t lose faith in me, Eric.
Regret and hope,
E
(Received: 12th January)
Letter #111
Dear Eric,
There are two stages to the light bulb text encryption. The first is simple Morse code. The bulb flashes in short and long bursts, dots and dashes. These can be transcribed as letters using the following chart:
You will notice that the letters produced still appear to be random at this point. They don’t make any sense. That is because there is still more to do.
The second part of the code uses the layout of a computer or typewriter keyboard, as below (with rows two and three slightly realigned to make a grid):
Each letter from the translated Morse code sequence is applied to the grid:
The final, correctly decoded letter will always be one of those adjacent to the Morse code letter. For example, if you translate an ‘F’ from the Morse code, the actual letter you are looking for will be one of the eight adjacent to ‘F’ on the QWERTY layout:
The translation letters also ‘rollaround’. This is a way of saying if a Morse code letter touches the edge of the board, as B does
the possible translation letters will not only include V, F, G, H and N, but also R, T and Y, as the three unavailable bottom spaces are rolled up to the top.
This rollaround is applied to all edge-of-grid letters, as shown here:
As you are probably noticing, the code is not very specific. When translated from Morse, each letter has eight possible solutions. Only one of these will be the correct letter. This means clean text cannot be constructed at the level of the individual letter. Possible translations must be constructed at word level, re-evaluated at sentence level and refined at paragraph level. It makes the process very time-consuming. It will take a long time. I think I built ambiguity into the encryption as added camouflage against the word shark. Did I? Well. It seems to serve no other purpose. It’s raining here in the past. I hope the weather there in the future is better.
Regret and hope,
E
(Received: 29th April)
Letter #205
Dear Eric,
Six months. Are you still with me? A sort of half birthday if you are, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you are so alone.
Now, here is what this letter is about:
There is a story. There is a story I’ve been avoiding. It’s the story about why all this is happening. Why the Ludovician is hunting you. It’s all my fault, Eric.
Stories. There used to be more stories, records of other things, other fragments I’d written down or encoded. I can remember some of their names. Once, there was The Dust Fragment and The Shadow Fragment and The Envelope Fragment, as well as The Light Bulb Fragment which you have. But it’s dangerous here in the past where I am and things get muddled or lost or destroyed. I’m trying, I’m trying to save as much as I can but those fragments have all gone and I can’t remember what they said.
There once was a fragment called The Aquarium Fragment. I have a single piece of text left from The Aquarium Fragment. It is part of the story of why all this is happening. I will try to tell the story and slot this little bit of fragment in the right place.
This is how the
story goes:
To try to change what happened to Clio, I went looking for a man called Dr Trey Fidorous. I don’t know, I don’t remember what I thought this Dr Trey Fidorous could do, but I devoted myself to finding him. He was a writer, an academic, I think. I looked for him first in his dense and complex papers, all filed and forgotten in university basement stacks. From them, I found his rolling pencil footnotes in a set of old encyclopaedias in a library in Hull. They led me to flyposted text-swarmed poster sheets in Leeds, and from Leeds, on to series of essays written in black marker on the tiles of underpasses in Sheffield. The underpass essays led me to a suite of chalked texts on the walls of an old tower block in Manchester.
I remember this part, this route so clearly because I repeat it to myself every day: ‘The dictionary in Hull, the posters in Leeds, the underpasses in Sheffield, the tower block in Manchester.’ And then there’s a last stop on this route, the place I finally found Dr Trey Fidorous: I found him sick in a closed-up doorway in Blackpool. Something had happened to him. I can’t remember what it was.
Hull. Leeds. Sheffield. Manchester. Blackpool.
Hull. Leeds. Sheffield. Manchester. Blackpool.
What happened next is I went with Fidorous down into the empty, abandoned areas in the world which are sometimes called un-space (I will write you a letter about un-space another time) and I studied with him down there. I learned things, the things I am teaching you about survival and other things too, things he wanted me to know and things he didn’t want me to know, that I shouldn’t have known. I thought I could save her, Eric. I had so many ideas. The details have all gone.
Somewhere in un-space, there was a hole. A deep black hole, a lift shaft. I’d been looking for that hole, for a way to get down it, for so long. It’s patchy, sketchy. Mostly all I have are the feelings left behind, emotion shadows where the facts should be. I do know that I left Fidorous to go looking for that hole and that I hired someone to help me find it, someone from what is called the Un-Space Exploration Committee (I will write you a letter about the Un-Space Exploration Committee too) but the details of that part, the hows and the whys, when I try to think about them they all come apart like rotten old cloth.
I did find the hole.
Down at the bottom there was a place filled with rows and rows of stinking neglected fish tanks with sick, dead and dying fish; a horrible abandoned aquarium. In the heart of the place, that’s where I found the Ludovician. It was younger then, much smaller but still very dangerous. And I let it out of its conceptual loop prison, Eric. I did it. It was me. I gave myself to the thought shark and it ate and ate, growing bigger and bigger and now it’s an adult and there’s no stopping it. I killed myself and I’ve probably killed you too. Why did I do it? Why would I do that?
I think I thought I could save her.
I was so stupid. I was so stupid and now everything’s all gone.
This is the only piece of The Aquarium Fragment I have left, the end of the story. As always, some parts, some meanings, are missing:
] stepped inside the tank-circle.
[missing text] suddenly had a very clear memory of my Granddad, tall and Roman-nosed with silver Brylcreemed hair, hanging wallpaper on old, dark, paint-splattered stepladders. I thought about how since his death my Granddad had become more a collection of scenes than a real man to me, how I could recall him being kind, angry, serious and joking but how the edges of these memory events didn’t quite fit together and left me with a sort of schizophrenic collage rather than the real, rounded-out man I must have known as a child.
My senses, trying to catch my attention in all this, suddenly broke through to the surface and I came back into the present. A horrific clarity came into the world, a sense of all things being exactly what [missing text] with relevance, obviousness and a bright [missing text]. Without me telling it to, my mind switched itself back to the image of my Granddad up the ladder. And then I saw it, partly with my eyes, or with my mind’s eye. And partly heard, remembered as sounds and words in shape form. Concepts, ideas, glimpses of other lives or writings or feelings. And living, the thing obviously alive and with will and movement. Coming oddly [missing text] light links in my memory, swimming hard upstream against the panicking fast flow of my thoughts. The Ludovician, into my life in every way possible.
I did it, Eric. I let it out. I’m responsible.
I really am so sorry.
Regret and hope,
Eric
(Received: 1st May)
Letter #206
Dear Eric,
Q) What is un-space?
A) It is the labelless car parks, crawl tunnels, disused attics and cellars, bunkers, maintenance corridors, derelict industrial estates, boarded-up houses, smashed-windowed condemned factories, offlined power plants, underground facilities, storerooms, abandoned hospitals, fire escapes, rooftops, vaults, crumbling churches with dangerous spires, gutted mills, Victorian sewers, dark tunnels, passageways, ventilation systems, stairwells, lifts, the dingy winding corridors behind shop changing rooms, the pockets of no-name-place under manhole covers and behind the overgrow of railway sidings.
Q) Who are the Un-Space Exploration Committee?
A) They map and chart and explore and research un-space.
I’m sorry for the format. Today is a bad day. All my structure is gone.
Regret and hope,
Eric
(Received: 22nd May)
Letter #214
Dear Eric,
I hope you’ve been able to master the techniques I sent to you about dealing with receipts. And the internet, remember there is no safe procedure for electronic information. Avoid it at all costs (refer to letter #5 for ATMs, and bank account management).
Regret and hope,
E
(Received: 30th May)
Letter #222
Dear Eric,
Much of what I learned, this little box of tricks and tactics I’m leaving behind for you, it came directly from Dr Trey Fidorous. He knows about the waterways of thought and the conceptual fish. He knows about Clio Aames and what I thought I could do to save her. He knows all of it, all the things I’ve lost, I’m sure he does. You need to find him again, Eric. Find Dr Trey Fidorous. He knows about the Ludovician, so maybe he knows a way to stop it too.
Hull. Leeds. Sheffield. Manchester. Blackpool.
Regret and hope,
E
(Received: 16th June)
Letter #238
Dear Eric,
I hope the job search is going well. Be careful in selecting the right person to study. A well planned, fully-realised false identity will provide the most versatile day-today protection should you decide to make the journey. It requires months of hard work to perfect someone else’s mannerisms, movements and attitudes but this will allow you to move through the world without generating a single recognisable ripple.
The Ludovician will circle forever if it needs to. All it needs, all it’s waiting for, is for you to stir the waters in a familiar way–a recognisable way–to cross its path with yours by one or two degrees of separation. Practice practice practice. The disguise may not hold up close, but from any distance you will be invisible.
Regret and hope,
Eric
8
The Impressionist
“How have things been at work this week?”
I’d had the job for months, but Dr Randle was still pleased about it.
“They’ve been fine. Well, boring. You know.”
“Boring is okay, Eric. It’s been over a year since your last recurrence. I think you could count boring as a triumph, even.”
“This is good then, you’d say?”
“Well, you’re certainly not taking any backwards steps.”
“I still don’t remember anything.”
“No, but one thing at a time. You really should be counting boring as an achievement compared to where you were when we started. Sometimes you have to do a lot of work to arrive at
stability.”
“Now here, you see, you have to run just as fast as you can to stay in the same place.”
“Eric.”
Dr Randle wore a big red knitted jumper with a llama on it, or maybe a badly done horse. She’d been growing her hair over the last twelve months and now she had it tied back in a ponytail. The odd copper coil sprig still escaped here and there, sticking out of her head at fiercely demented angles. Her eyes were just the same though, heavy and oppressive and powerful and also not very observant.
“You’re the doctor,” I said. “I’m in your capable hands.”
“This is a team effort, Eric. Rest assured we’ll get there in the end.”
I’d been learning that Dr Randle mostly saw what she expected to see rather than what was actually in front of her. I’m in your capable hands? I didn’t always speak like that. When I first came to her I didn’t speak like that at all but–whoosh–over it goes, over her big stormy head along with everything else. Maybe most people don’t notice half of what they actually see.