by Steven Hall
Why?
Maybe the answer was still in the box.
Thick, heavy and solid, I knew the second object was a book before I’d even unwrapped it from its cloth protection. I wasn’t prepared for the kind of book I’d find though.
An Encyclopaedia of Unusual Fish by Dr Victor Helstrom. The book looked sixty, maybe eighty years old. A hardback in a tattered, ripped and faded orange dust jacket with an old-fashioned ink drawing of a very ugly deep sea fish on the front.
In a lightning strike I remembered the book sent by Mr Nobody and the sick, slimy winding Luxophage hiding inside. I almost shoved Unusual Fish off the desk in a jerk of panic.
But this was the First Eric Sanderson’s room, the First Eric Sanderson’s book. The ice thawed a little inside my head as I stared at the old, creased cover.
Come on, Eric. Get a grip. And anyway, what are you going to do? Not look?
I pulled the book back towards me and carefully opened it up.
The pages were dry and yellowed, dirty at the edges and the thing smelled of cigarette smoke and finger grease. I skipped through a long and wordy introduction and found a contents page. The author, this Victor Helstrom, had divided his unusual fish into categories.
I flipped my way towards the back of the book. The first three categories were filled with ink drawings and long detailed descriptions and notes, but when I reached ‘The Fish of Mind, Word and Invention’, entries became smaller, blocky and unillustrated, like a dictionary.
Apalasitien, Araul Calthonis, ‘Blinking’ Quaric Blue Bonbolian, Burgnatell–I flicked forwards a few pages–Fathmic Candiru, Franciscan (“Bede Shark”), Flatwold, Folocondorius–and a few more–Jarhaphish (“Inknose”), Lampropini, Ledgerlantern, Lewzivian–and there it was–Ludovician.
The entry had been circled in pencil. My left hand crept up to my chin and then over my mouth as my eyes shuttled down through the passage:
Ludovician
First officially catalogued for the USC by Capt. St John Lewis in 1839, and named in honour of him by the society, the Ludovician shark has been a cause of myth, speculation and storytelling for over four thousand years (see below). A powerful and persistent mnemonic predator, Ludovicians are to be considered amongst the most dangerous of all sentapiscis and should only be observed after great preparation and with extreme caution.
With a recorded length of over thirty notional lumens from snout to tail tip, the Ludovician is the largest living member of the Cognicharius family, outsized only by the gigantic Meglovician which seems to have become extinct between four and five hundred years ago, possibly due to the western diversification of printed language from a previously prevalent Latin. The Ludovician appears to be more adaptable and, as a result, is more widely distributed than its extinct cousin. Although the animal is solitary and (thankfully) rarely encountered in the field, Ludovician attacks on speakers of over twenty languages have been reliably reported over the past fifty years.
This and other research suggests a stable, if not growing population.
Ludovician characteristics: Portentous, impassive to vague to vacant colouration, sepulchral bite radius, regressively swept fins and ubiquitous dorsal meme.
Ludovician myths: It should come as little surprise that this large, dangerous and enigmatic predator should be the focus of much legend and superstition. Perhaps the most engaging of all the myths associated with these animals is the ancient Native American belief that all memories, events and identities consumed by one of the great dream fishes would somehow be reconstructed and eternally sustained inside it. The indigenous oral tradition tells us how the greatest shamans and medicine men would travel to ancestral holy places to pass their souls into the dream fish when they reached old age. These shamans believed that once they had sacrificed themselves, they would join their ancestors and memory-families in eternal vision-worlds recreated from generations of shared knowledge and experience. In effect, each Ludovician shark came to be revered as a self-contained, living afterlife. Name chants once told which of the ancestors had passed into which of the seven greatest dream fish, but these are now understood to be fragmented and lost. Thankfully, this misguided and macabre practice is no longer observed.
As my mind raced, my hands turned Helstrom’s book of fish over and placed it carefully to one side, Ludovician pages down. I reached inside the shoebox and took out the last wrapped object. This was a book too, smaller but just as thick, maybe even a little thicker.
I unfolded the cloth and looked inside.
Thump. Thump.
Thump. Thump.
Thump. Thump.
My heart. All I could hear as I stared at the last book’s cover.
Thump. Thump.
Thump. Thump.
Thump. Thump.
My fingers traced the folds and fault lines in the glossy card. Thump. Thump. My fingers over pictures of sandy bays, crumbling columns and little white villages on hot dusty hillsides. Thump. Thump. My fingers over the blocky sky blue lettering of the title.
Greek Island Hopping: A Backpacker’s Guide.
Shaking, I opened the book–
–and found a universe inside.
An entire galaxy of biro stars, pen orbits and ink loop rings around museums and boat rides and campsites, endless stellar clusters of ticks, crosses, exclamation and question marks all in, on and around the lists of tavernas and bed and breakfasts and bars and towns and trails and beaches.
“Oh God.” No force behind the words, just them escaping, leaking out in my breath.
My fingers touching the indentations, the pen marks, the folded page corners.
Clio.
Clio’s guidebook.
Clio Aames’s real and true and actual writing right there in front of me.
The printed words and the biro warped and rolled together for a second. Something hit the page with an audible tap. I tensed up, thinking again about Nobody and his book traps, about Luxophages, Franciscans and Ludovicians. Then I noticed my face, my cheeks were wet.
I looked down again across Clio’s constellations of notes. Tap. Tap. Tap.
I hadn’t even realised I was crying.
Tired, I closed Clio’s guidebook again, climbed off the First Eric Sanderson’s bed and collected my rucksack, dragging it back across the room with me. I dug The Light Bulb Fragment and my notebooks out and read through them again, once, twice, three times, feeling an empty ache for something simple and normal and solid.
I thought a lot about Clio and about Eric. And then because I couldn’t help it, I thought about Scout and me.
Would Clio have done what Scout did?
Oh, come on, you know the answer to that. Sometimes, when you’re sleepy, ideas and feelings in the back of your mind get whispery voices of their own. She’s just doing what she’s always done, what’s best for you, whether you can see it at the time or not.
I tried to block it out, but the nonsense wouldn’t let go.
You know, don’t you? The way it works between the two of you, all those emotions, the tattoo on her big toe. You know who she really is, even if you won’t–
“Shut up.” My arm shot out and hurled the texts and the notebooks against the wall. The books thudded, flapped and settled like a flock of broken kites.
Half-climbed onto the end of the bed, Ian stopped mid-step and stared at me with big round eyes.
27
Who Are You Really, and What Were You Before?
Sometimes when I think I can’t sleep, I actually am part-way asleep. Or at least, not completely awake. For the hours I’d been lying on the First Eric Sanderson’s bed trying to unpick the knotted tangle of events and fragments in my mind, I’d have said I was one hundred per cent all-the-way awake with no chance of sleeping. But now, standing in the book corridor outside, I felt light, half-focused, unsteady on my feet. The things I’d been thinking back on the bed, those intricate thought trains I’d been putting together now seemed to be all flickering lights and groundless le
aps of logic–ideas warped and twisted by the un-sense that lives at the edge of sleep.
But then, maybe there was something else about that place too; maybe white out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye truth birds dive and swoop there, little rips of blotter paper soaring free from the weight of fact and possibility which extincts them everywhere else.
What? White birds? Wake up, Eric. I rubbed my face with my palms to bring myself around and drive out the fog.
I pulled on my jacket and quietly closed the door.
I needed answers. That’s why I couldn’t sleep. Clio Aames, the Ludovician, the First Eric Sanderson. There was only one person who would be able to give me the facts.
I’d loaded the things I’d found in the First Eric’s room into a plastic bag; The Encyclopaedia of Unusual Fish, Clio’s guidebook, the empty photo wallet and (after some sleepy soul-searching) Randle’s book jacket with the First Eric Sanderson’s hidden message. I’d also packed my Light Bulb Fragment notebooks. It seemed to make sense to take everything, to try to get him to look at all of it.
Getting dressed, I’d been worried the lights would be off and the maze of books and corridors would be impossible to navigate, all corners, blackness and quiet like some huge silent brain. As it was, the lights seemed to stay on all night, but that didn’t make things any easier. After a few minutes’ walking and a few guessed-at turns, I started to worry I wouldn’t find my way out, or my way back. I turned around, tried to retrace my steps but I must have gone wrong at the second or the third junction because where I expected the bedroom door to be, it wasn’t. I stood looking at a blank, uninterrupted wall of books. A shower of cold nerve-needles down my back–you’re lost, Eric.
I called out: “Hello?”
Nothing.
“Can anyone hear me?”
But the books flattened the sound, sucked it in and breathed it out again as miles and miles of dusty silence.
I dropped my forehead against the wall of spines. “Fantastic.”
Then I heard a noise, distant and muffled but real and out there, a sound like a big bell or a gong striking in the distance.
Dang–one. Dang–two.
A landmark. I pulled myself together and began to jog in the direction of the sound.
Dang–three. Dang–four.
The corridor ended in a T-junction, I waited.
Dang–five.
Left. I ran now, realising I had to find the sound before it stopped, realising this was an all or nothing strategy and if I didn’t make it in time I’d be properly, definitely all-the-way lost.
Dang–six. Dang–seven.
Another left, another long and patchily lit corridor of books.
Dang–eight. Dang–nine. Dang–ten.
Come on, me running flat out, head down, pounding the floor.
Dang–eleven.
Louder now, closer.
A branch corridor. Trying to slow down and throw myself around the corner, making it but hitting wall and scattering books.
Dang–twelve.
I managed to stay on my feet, just, and jogging forwards I saw an archway. An archway in the wall of the corridor just up ahead. The sound coming from inside. It must be–
Dang–thirteen.
My lungs were burning. I stopped, bent over double, hands on knees to catch my breath.
A moment passed.
Two moments.
“If you’re looking for the toilet, you’ve come too far. Go back to the last junction and turn right.”
The suddenness of it made me jump, but I knew the voice.
Still breathing hard, I straightened up and made my way towards the arch.
“Sorry.” I took half a step inside. “I got lost and there was, I think, a bell or something so I followed it. Actually–I was looking for you.”
Dr Fidorous turned around to face me.
“You heard that?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then. You’d better come in, hadn’t you?”
The room was small and empty apart from the doctor and a simple wooden table covered in candles against the far wall; no electric lighting here and nothing obvious to account for the noises I’d heard. The space looked to have been made from huge books, old encyclopaedias, dictionaries or atlases I thought, and their peeling leather spines, like thick bricks, twitched shadows in the candlelight. An old poster of a shaolin-style monk with a huge gong had been pinned up on one of the book-walls.
Fidorous sat cross-legged on a cushion in the middle of the floor, originally facing the table of candles but now shuffled around to look at me. He was different. For a second I thought it was a trick of the candlelight, but, no, he’d changed. His huge hair had been tamed a little, slicked back with Brylcreem. The dressing-gown had gone too. In its place was an old dark suit and light blue shirt. The doctor must have seen me looking.
“It’s easy to lose track of yourself down here,” he said. “When you don’t see other people for such a long time, you tend not to think”–he made a circular gesture in front of his face–“about all this.”
He seemed relatively calm but I’d seen first-hand how quickly that could change.
“I wasn’t–” I tried, then, “I didn’t mean to stare.”
He watched me for a moment and I had no idea what would happen. When he spoke, he looked away, turning back to the table of candles.
“I should never have said what I did to you about Scout. Whatever’s between the two of you should stay between the two of you. It wasn’t my business or my place to say those things.”
Cold flowing under my skin, like someone had watered down my blood.
“You were right, though. She was using me.”
“I know,” Fidorous said. “But she’s a girl who’s come a long way from where she started and from who she was. Some of her edges have worn sharp. It happens, you should know that. I shouldn’t have said those things.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because it’s the truth.”
“No, I mean, you made it pretty clear before that you don’t like me very much.”
The doctor turned back to me. “Is that what you think?”
“Well, yes.”
I saw for the first time how pale his eyes were behind the Michael Caine glasses. Even in the orange and shadows of candlelight, I could see they were a clear, calm tropical blue; baby’s eyes in an old man’s face.
“It’s difficult,” he said at last, struggling even with that much. “It’s difficult when people become hell-bent on making terrible mistakes. I couldn’t let you walk out of here and kill yourself for some delusion.”
“Is that what happened?”
Fidorous shook his head, tiny, slow movements, eyes never leaving mine. This wasn’t an answer to my question, it was something else; a funeral expression, a deserted place between resignation and regret.
“There’s nothing left of you, is there?” he said.
The question knocked me. I didn’t know how to answer. “I didn’t–I’ve been trying to find you because I need help. I need answers. I don’t know much about his time or what he did or why, but I need to, I need to know him, I think. I have to figure it all out before this ends.”
“You’re not making sense–need to know who?”
“The First Eric Sanderson.”
The calm, blue eyes looked deep into me.
“I see. And that would make you, what? The Second Eric Sanderson?”
“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so.”
“Hmmm.” The doctor brought his eyebrows down at this, thoughtful. “An old man’s pride, that’s what you’ve been up against, I’m ashamed to say.”
“I’ve got to understand why he did what he did,” I said. I dug into my plastic bag and pulled out The Encyclopaedia of Unusual Fish. “I found this.”
Fidorous looked up at the book. The new warmth in him was suddenly gone, everything turning back to ice. Cold snap.
“Give me that.”
I hesitated but there was no way around it. I passed him the book.
“Listen to me, Eric Sanderson the Second, listen to me carefully–this book is sick. It’s sick and contagious with dangerous and misleading ideas, do you understand? I don’t want you to ever ask me about it again.” He wrenched open the pages and flung the encyclopaedia hard against the wall. I heard the spine crack. The dead book fell clumsily to the floor.
I wasn’t shaken or intimidated. This was too big, too important.
I’d come to Fidorous for answers.
Sometimes answers don’t need to be given in words.
I stared at the broken book.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” I said.
Fidorous looked up at me, not moving, not speaking.
“First Eric Sanderson believed everything it said in there about memories living on inside word sharks. He believed it and so he went off looking for a Ludovician. Didn’t he?”
The doctor watched me from behind his thick glasses.
“Didn’t he?”
“Yes,” Fidorous said eventually.
“Jesus.” The pieces slipping into place now, one after another. “He found one and he gave himself to it. For Clio Aames. He did it for her, tried to save her life, preserve her after she was already gone, only it didn’t work. It didn’t work and the Ludovician ate his mind. It just chewed him up, didn’t it?”
“Yes.”
It just chewed him up.
“Jesus.”
“Eric, I’m sorry.”
“So, God, I mean–” I cast around, spinning inside my head, looked again at the broken book. “There’s no chance any of it could be true?” I believed I could change what happened, save her life somehow after she was already gone.
Fidorous looked away. “Conviction, point of view, ways of looking; these are all powerful tools if you know how to use them, but there are limits. The Ludovician shark is a living animal, an animal has its own nature and there’s no way to change that. A shark is always a shark, whatever you choose to believe. For memories to survive inside a Ludovician would be like–like a mouse surviving inside a cat.”