by Steven Hall
Nobody had been one of Mycroft Ward’s most important operatives and for sixty seconds every day, between 12.21 a.m. and 12.22 a.m., his laptop was permitted to connect directly with the gigantic online database of self that was Mycroft Ward’s mind. During this single minute, Nobody would upload his reports directly into Ward’s vast consciousness. During this single minute, a direct channel opened between Ward’s mind and the outside world. Scout would convert one of Fidorous’s email rerouting programs to hold open the connection between the laptop and Ward once it occurred. Fidorous, Scout hoped, would create some sort of device to channel the Ludovician into the laptop and into Ward. Simple. The only difficult, dangerous part would be getting close to the Ludovician in the first place.
I was close to crying. I thought Scout might be close to crying too, but I couldn’t tell anymore. After a few moment’s quiet she gathered up Nobody’s laptop, strapped it over her shoulder and said I need to make a start.
And then she turned and walked away, through the door and down the corridor without looking back.
Vague and empty, I sat for a while in the wingback chair, listening to the quiet of the books in the walls.
Some time passed.
Eventually, I noticed the carrier, open and empty in the middle of the room. Ian. I’d not seen him since I’d gone with Fidorous down the corridor to his control room. I pushed myself up in the chair. Finding my cat was something I could do, something that didn’t need any thinking.
I got to my feet, controlling the slight sway Fidorous’s whisky brought on. I remembered then that my backpack was still downstairs, down through the bookcase, in the room of papers.
First things first, I told myself. Get the bag, then find Ian. Simple tasks. A process. A counterbalance to all of this.
I crawled awkwardly back between the bookcase shelves and made my way down the spiral staircase, stepping off the bottom and into a shin-deep drift of papers. My backpack lay just where I’d dropped it. Scout’s was there too, the two bags bumped down together, side by side with one slightly on top of the other. I kicked my way over to them.
Those two bags shouted heartbreaking out-of-date things about a careless sort of closeness which was lost now. I realised that that whole world, our two-day trip through un-space, everything that had happened between us, what little signs, what little avatars of it there had been, would soon all be lost, broken and left behind. We’re all going forwards and we’re never coming back.
I reached and threw my rucksack over my shoulder, swayed a little from the thud and swing of its weight. After a few seconds I picked Scout’s up too then I turned and made my way back towards the stairs.
I left Scout’s bag propped up in one of the wingback chairs, had another glass of the doctor’s whisky, grabbed Ian’s carrier from the middle of the floor and stood weighing it in my hand.
“Ch ch ch ch ch.” Wandering down the corridor, carrier in hand. The walls of books were constant, endless. Me all adrift, vague, emotion-blasted. “Ch ch ch ch ch.” Fidorous’s cabinets passed me as I walked. I didn’t bother to stop and investigate any of them.
There was no sign of Ian.
I came to a branch in the corridor, a second passage running off to the left. On the corner where the passages met, the doctor, or someone, had placed a small wooden chair. I put the carrier down and, for no real reason, decided to sit for a minute.
I wasn’t thinking anymore. My mind was a frozen football pitch, empty, lonely, waiting in the winter cold for me to walk back out onto it. But I wasn’t ready for that yet. Once I started out there again I knew I’d have to relive everything, everything I’d said and everything she’d said. I’d try to work out what every word and inflection in every sentence might have meant. I’d force myself to go through it all, again and again and again and again and every part of it would hit me just as hard, or harder, every single time. Shock’s slow medical anaesthetic kept me quiet and under observation. I had to find my cat.
I reached behind me and pulled a book out of the wall-shelf at random. My hand came back holding a dusty but modern-looking paperback called Holes and Superficialities. I flipped the pages idly, not really taking any of it in. I got up on my knees on the chair and pivoted around, peered into the gap I’d made in the wall shelf. I pushed my eye up close between the book spines and saw more books nestling in the darkness, shadowy and difficult to identify. I wondered again, distantly, vaguely, if the bookshelves were deep or if the walls themselves were made of books. I slotted the Holes book back in where it came from.
I’d only gone a few minutes further along the corridor when I heard shouting.
Scout. Not frightened shouting but angry shouting, too far away for me to make out the words. I listened. Fidorous was shouting something back. Then Scout again. An argument catching fire somewhere up ahead.
I stood still, blank.
No, no more tonight–the shock doctor inside my head doing the thinking for me–No more. You’ve had enough for one day. Too much.
My body turned itself around. I retraced my steps to the chair and made my way down the branch corridor ch-ch-ch-ing as I went.
This new corridor felt narrower, the books leaning in closer, soaking up the sound. The argument noise behind me faded quickly into the walls and out of my head. There were fewer lights along here. Bulbs covered with simple white lampshades hung down from the ceiling at not-quite-frequent-enough intervals so the pools of bright yellow light didn’t quite connect with each other, leaving deep bookshelf shadows to grow up in the dark areas between them. I wondered, in an uncommitted sort of way, about where Fidorous got his power. His house, book structure, whatever it was, it was gigantic. I thought about a postman trying to find his way through the word tunnels to deliver an electricity bill and the idea dredged up a small under-siege smile.
“Ch ch ch ch ch ch.”
I came to another junction and turned left by a case of old printing blocks and 1930s typewriters. After a while I realised I’d started thinking about Dr Randle, something I’d not done in a long time.
Another junction, I turned left.
“Ch ch ch ch ch ch.”
I tried to remember what Randle’s dog was called. Ricky? Robbie? Rusty? Something beginning with R. He would get excited sometimes if he could smell Ian on my clothes and rush around and around Randle’s usually calm conservatory, barking like–I turned right–barking, well, yapping really, and she’d have to shut him in the kitchen before either of us could risk sitting down without being jumped all over. I felt vaguely guilty that Randle might have worried about me once she realised I’d gone. But what could I have told her? What could I have possibly said to her really? Maybe when all this was over I’d write to her and tell her–tell her what? I turned left. Tell her everything. I’d write it all down and she could believe whatever she wanted.
“Ch ch ch ch ch.”
Had Nobody said something about her writing a paper about me when I was alone with him, deep in that abandoned hospital? Is that how he’d found me? It sounded familiar. Suddenly I didn’t feel so guilty. Writing an academic paper wasn’t the behaviour of a woman torn apart with worry for one of her clients, was it? In fact, if she was detached enough to sit down and write about me in a–I stopped at the door in front of me and reached into my pocket for my keys–in a purely academic sense then it probably wasn’t guilt I should be feeling at all but–
But.
My brain snapped itself into the here and now, rushing to catch up with what had happened.
I looked down at the keys in my hand then up at the door in front of me.
For the last, what, ten minutes I’d been walking in a daze, drifting inside my head while my body moved along on autopilot. That autopilot had brought me here. My body acting on–what? Instinct? No, acting on a learned and repeated routine my mind had forgotten. My body remembered its own way here, to this door. To this pinewood door with its brass door handle and its small lock set underneath.
; I looked down at my hand again then counted through the few keys on my key ring: the key for the yellow Jeep, the key to the front door of my house, the key to the back door, the key the First Eric Sanderson had posted to me all that time ago, the one that had opened the door to the locked bedroom.
I stopped on this last key and, trying not to think too hard about the logic of any of it, slid it into the lock in front of me.
I turned experimentally.
Clunk.
I put the keys back in my pocket then pushed down on the door handle.
The door swung open.
I reached along the dark wall to find a light switch.
Click.
I stepped inside.
A bedroom. Behind the door was a small, tidy bedroom. A single bed with a bookshelf screwed to the wall above it, a wardrobe, chest of drawers, bedside table and a small desk near the door. I clicked the door shut behind me, put down Ian’s carrier and propped my rucksack up against the desk. Under the quiet and woolly tickle of dust, the room still had a faint, lived-in smell–sleep, deodorant, washing powder, skin, hair, sweat. The smell of a person. The smell sank naturally into me, so familiar and reassuring that at first I didn’t see the significance. When the realisation came it was a shock volting my system.
The room smelled like my house. It smelled of me.
This is the First Eric Sanderson’s room.
A heave of panic and another type of instinct kicked in–Fidorous had said the whole place was completely shark-proof, but still–Mark Richardson’s expression leapt up over the top of mine, tightening muscles, changing my face.
“Okay,” I told myself. I pulled in a calming breath, let it go slowly. “Come on. It can’t get in here. There are defences.” But something from one of The First Eric’s letters came floating up from the dark.
Be absolutely sure, then check again, and then check again.
I unfastened my rucksack, took out the Dictaphones and set them up in the corners of the room. Safety and caution always. Better safe than sorry.
Once the tapes were chattering out their familiar hiss and treble, I fastened up the rucksack again and leant back against one of the walls, letting the Richardson persona slip away. Walls. This room really did have walls–not the endless books of the corridors outside but real walls, plastered and painted a deep thoughtful blue.
The First Eric Sanderson’s bedroom.
I’ve found you, I thought, I’ve found you again.
I crossed the room and climbed onto the bed, kneeling up so I could reach the books on the shelf.
“Alright, Eric,” I told the old still air. “I’ve made it here just like you wanted, only everything’s fucked up and your friend the doctor hates me, so you’re going to have to help me out.”
The books clapped up plumes of dust as my fingers flipped their way through them.
The Teachings of Master Lin-Chi, clap. The Helmet of Horror, clap. Out of Africa: The Story of Human Evolution, clap. The Intuitive Edge, clap. Catch-22, clap. Dreamtime and the All-At-Once; Jurassic Park; Understanding Quantum Mechanics, clap, clap, clap. The Call of Cthulhu; How Your Brane Works; The Unfortunates; A Brief History of Time; The Quantum Machinegun; The Complete Escher and then–Brick by Brick, The Analysis and Treatment of Traumatic Disassociation–
“No.”
I pulled the book, a big hardback, off the shelf and opened it up, scanning the front flyleaf then flipping to the back. In her author picture she was younger, slimmer and, from the colours and the hair, smiling out at me from some point in the mid-eighties. But, Christ, it was her. Dr Randle. Professor Helen Randle, according to the cover. I flickerbooked the pages, stopping at random:
…and even more general responses to standard Overland folios do not indicate any truly significant 8-cycle event as such. Precision is vital when recording these phenomena as memmiatic sequencing algorithms as Herenik (1979) suspects a subbautinous projection even in straightforward observational data. To calculate inaccuracy due to Backland’s constant we must…
I flicked again but the next three or four sections were equally impenetrable so I turned back to Randle’s photograph. What the fuck are you doing here? What does this mean? Her face smiled up at me, not telling, being just a million tiny dots of mass printed, arranged ink. I snapped the book shut. What does it mean? I’ll tell you what it means, Eric. It means what it always means. It means another forgotten story, another dried-up stream, another snapped or missing thread.
But then I noticed something. Something about the back of the book caught hold of me, it was something so slight as to almost not be there at all. I tipped the book forward a little, back a little, moving reflected light over the glossy surface. A cluster of raised marks, tiny bumps like the most delicate Braille had been pushed up in the back cover. I knew what marks like that meant. I peeled off the dust jacket and, yes, on the inside was a block of carefully handwritten text:
It isn’t just the past we remember, it’s the future too. Fifty per cent of memory is devoted not to what has already happened, but to what will happen next. Appointments, anniversaries, meetings, all the rolling engagements and plans, all the hopes and dreams and ambitions which make up any human life–we remember what we did and also what we will do. Only the knife edge of the present is ‘hard’ to any degree. Past and future are things of the mind, and a mind can be changed.
Eric Sanderson
I stared down at the words. He must have written this before he left here to go looking for the Ludovician, which would make it, what, some sort of a mission statement? Whatever it was, it seemed like something he didn’t want the doctor to find after he’d gone. Why write it down on a book, on this book? Unless–unless he knew I’d recognise Dr Randle’s name and I’d…Did he send me to her? Send me to spend a year with her listening to those stupid fucking theories just so when I finally got here I’d pull this particular book off the shelf and find this message? And if so, why? What was this supposed to mean? Something came back to me, something from one of First Eric Sanderson’s letters, something written much later, when the word shark had already eaten most of him away: I think I believed I could change what happened, undo it, prevent it, save her life somehow after she was already gone.
I read through the paragraph inside the dust jacket again.
“Christ, Eric. What the fuck is this?” I whispered it. “What the fuck were you trying to do?”
“What the fuck were you trying to do?”
I turned the room over. Filled the air with long-settled dust and the bed with T-shirts, pants and socks from the chest of drawers and a heap of opened, shaken-out books from the bookshelf. The shock doctor couldn’t hold it back anymore, now I was a creature made of wounded kinetics. “What the fuck were you trying to do? Come on, I’m ready for my next clue now.” I pulled open the wardrobe, dragging out pairs of jeans and combat pants, heavy coats and boots into a pile on the floor. “Or, maybe you could just fucking tell me. How about that? I deserve to know why I’m like this, don’t I? I deserve to know why you made me into this empty fucking thing, this machine that people can’t really touch or feel anything for and so they just–”
Use.
Scout. She used you, Eric.
“Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.” The dam all the way broken, everything flooding out now. I ripped out the last of the clothes from the wardrobe, stretch-twisting hangers, pulled out the last of the boots and the carrier bags of trainers and rolled-up jumpers and old shirts onto the pile on the floor and kicked at it shouting “You cunt, Sanderson, you selfish fucking cunt.”
A plastic bag caught around my foot and I pulled it off, hurling it at the wall where it split like a medical IV bag of boots and old socks. Bang. Thud tunk tunk tunk.
I gave the pile two, three more half-hearted kicks and sank down to my knees–“You fucking, fucking cunt”–slowing down in the next swell of shock. Another anaesthetic tide rising up from my stomach.
My sore eyes stared, blank.
&nbs
p; Minutes ticked away and I squeezed myself tight. My arms hugged warm around my chest.
The heap of clothes sat, kicked and bullied and still, in front of me.
My sore eyes stared.
One of the plastic bags on the top of the pile had a box inside, a shoebox probably. I’d kicked a dent into it and a lid corner had been forced up, stretching a tract of the navy blue plastic into puckered stuttery sky blue, before ripping through it altogether. Inside the box was what looked like a block of carefully folded white linen.
Curiosity, like a film playing backwards, bringing a million smashed pieces back together–slow, faster, faster, faster, complete–remaking them into me.
I blinked.
Wiped my eyes.
My hand reached out.
I took the dented box and, slowly, abstractedly, worked it out of its ruined bag. The three rectangular objects inside had been carefully, very, very carefully, wrapped up in soft white cloth. I stared for a few seconds. I took the box over to the desk and put it down.
Grabbing a bottle of water out of my rucksack, I took a slow, cool drink then splashed a wet palmful onto my eyes and face, drying myself off with my pulled-up T-shirt.
I ran my fingers through my hair, pulled the desk chair up behind me.
Okay.
Okay then. Let’s have a look at you.
I lifted the first object out of the box. It was the thinnest of the three, as thin and light as an envelope, and that’s almost what it was. I unfolded the white cloth and found a photograph wallet: one of the bright, glossy card packets your prints and negatives come back in from the chemist’s. The colourful picture on the front flap showed a girl jumping on a guy’s back, both of them laughing and dressed in bright summer clothes. Underneath it said Kodak in big, bold letters and to the right of that, in a yellow and orange starburst, 36 exposures. I lifted the flap and I looked inside and then, just to be sure, I turned it upside down and shook. Nothing. No pictures, no negatives. The wallet was completely empty. I turned it over and around to see if I’d missed something important, like I almost had with Randle’s book, but no, it was just an empty photo wallet. An empty photo wallet wrapped, stored and treated as a relic.