by Steven Hall
“A glitch? Doctor, it wasn’t a glitch–all three of us just heard the engine ripping itself to pieces. I mean, look around for fuck’s sake. The truth is we’re dead in the water and we’re listing. I don’t know a lot about boats or anything, but I do know that when they start to list it’s usually because they’re filling up with water.”
“The truth is a complex mechanism, Scout, especially in this place, and I don’t have the time or the inclination to sit down and explain its workings to you. If we’re going to succeed here you’re going to have to trust me to do my job and focus yourself on yours, do you understand?”
“Okay, fine. Just answer me this–are we taking on water or not?”
“It’s just run-in. The conceptual loop has data cleaners which act as pumps and keep it clear and functional.” The doctor went to leave the deck but Scout caught him by the sleeve.
“Hang on. Yesterday this boat was unsinkable and now we’ve got pumps keeping us afloat?”
“Okay, if everything has to be black and white for you, we’ll do it that way. The bottom line is this conceptual loop is unbreakable, therefore whatever appears to be happening, we cannot sink. Can’t you see that? It just can’t happen.”
“Oh, that’s so good because for a second there I thought we were sitting on a sinking boat with no engine and with a giant fucking shark in the water.”
“Christ,” I said, “guys.”
Two faces looked up at me from the deck. I pointed out to sea.
The barrels were completing a large gentle curve in the water and heading back towards us.
Scout pushed her sunglasses up onto her head. “Oh fuck. It’s coming back. What, is it–is it attacking us?”
“Well, whatever it’s doing, it’s going to give us another shot at it.” Fidorous said. “Scout, tie another barrel off.”
“Is that going to do any good?” I called down.
Fidorous looked up at me. “It can’t keep this up with all three barrels. We’ve almost got him.”
“Someone’s almost got someone,” Scout said, hand shielding her eyes, still staring out to sea.
“Dorothy.”
“Aye, aye, captain.”
The barrels picked up speed towards us, each one throwing up a jellyfish umbrella of water over and around itself. From up on the flying deck I could see the dark torpedo shadow of the shark rising up towards the surface. The fin broke the water again.
Fidorous stood out in his shooting position, gun at his shoulder. The Ludovician came higher in the water and I saw its wide flat head and snout, its fins like wings, its great flat muscle of tail powering towards us, all of it huge and grey and unstoppable.
“He’s coming straight on,” I heard myself shouting. “He’s attacking the boat, Scout grab hold of something,” I braced myself against the side of the control deck.
“My God,” the doctor called out. “Hold on.” Thwap. The harpoon hit the shark in the fin but the Ludovician didn’t slow down at all, it came in faster, closer, closer, closer–
The splintering sound of crunching wood and the Orpheus leaned hard to port. I grabbed onto the boat’s small windshield, pushed my feet against the flying deck side; Fidorous braced himself against his railings as buckets, boxes, ropes and everything else tumbled and clattered across the deck.
“Scout.”
“It’s alright, I’m okay.” Her voice from somewhere I couldn’t see.
A tub-thump-rumbling from underneath us, the Ludovician’s barrels dragging under the hull. As I watched, the third and final barrel wrenched itself overboard with a splash and all three hiss-spray-skidded out and away across the flat ocean.
The Orpheus rocked itself slowly back to upright and then carried on over a little too far, listing to starboard.
I jogged down the steps and around the cabin. Fidorous and Scout were already at the railings.
Scout shook her head. “He’s going under again.”
“He can’t, can he?” I said to the doctor, “Not with three barrels?”
Fidorous looked at me and I saw a crack in his conviction. “No, “he said. “No, I don’t–”
The skidding-away barrels suddenly dragged down underwater and disappeared, leaving only a slowing wave to run itself out across the still, dead surface.
“Oh, shit,” Scout said. “Oh, shit.”
I turned away from the railings, wrapped my arms around her and she pressed her face into my shoulder. I squeezed her tight and she squeezed back.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll figure it out, we’ll figure all this out. Doctor?”
“I don’t–I don’t know,” he said, still staring out at the empty sea.
“It’s alright,” I said again, my arms tight around Scout. “It’s alright, come on, we’ll come up with something.” And looking over her shoulder as I spoke, looking out across the deck and the sea towards the rocky landmass rising up in the distance, I remembered.
I remembered where I’d seen the island before.
Inside the Orpheus’s cabin, Ian watched the three of us work with big frightened eyes.
Scout and Fidorous were clearing fallen clutter and furniture from the sloping floor to get to the maintenance hatch. I had my backpack tipped out on the bunk, sifting through clothes and boots, and plastic packets of books and files. Come on, come on. Where are you?
“Hey, could use some help here,” Scout said. “What are you doing?”
“The island. I’ve seen that island out there before.”
The clearing-away noises behind me stopped. “You’ve what?” Fidorous said. “Seen it where?”
I remembered the pocket in the top of the rucksack, unzipped it and pulled the little plastic bundle out. “On this postcard. I’d forgotten all about it, I found it in Sheffield and I put it in here.” I turned around, struggling to unwrap the bundle. “It’s Naxos, it’s a picture of Naxos.”
Scout looked carefully at me.
“The Greek island?” Fidorous said.
I nodded. “The best one, the one Eric and Clio spent most of their time on before, before what happened. That’s Naxos out there right now, or, at least, it looks exactly like it. How can that happen? What does it mean, doctor?”
“I don’t know. Give me Eric’s notes, the ones you found in the bedroom.”
I passed him the bag of fragments. My hands were shaking and I couldn’t get the tape free and unwrap the postcard from its waterproof plastic so I pushed the bundle into the back pocket of my shorts. I clambered through the upturned cabin towards the door.
“Eric,” Scout reached out and rested a hand on my arm. There was something in the way she said my name, something I was too distracted to hear.
“I’ve got to go out and see. I need to make sure I’m not crazy.”
Scout let her hand drop and I climbed out of the cabin and onto the deck.
There it was, huge and real and out across the sea: the island. I pulled the bundle out of the back of my pocket and fought again with the cocoon of tape. Eventually, I managed to rip enough of it off, unravel the plastic and pull out the postcard.
The picture had changed.
Instead of the rocky, tan and olive island I remembered, the postcard now had a black and white picture of a small terraced house. The First Eric Sanderson’s house. My house, the place where I’d woken up on the bedroom floor and called Dr Randle and watched snooker and made the celebrity chef meals. The place I’d left behind to set out on this whole journey now printed here on this little square of card. I looked from the picture in my hand to the island on the horizon. The view becomes the reflection, and the reflection, the view.
I turned around to see Fidorous standing behind me. I held up the postcard for him to see. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know, Eric.” The doctor said quietly. He had the dust jacket with the secret note I’d found in the First Eric Sanderson’s room in his hand. “I’m afraid, I really don’t know.”
“Guys,” Scout’
s voice from inside the cabin. “You might want to come and look at this.” I tucked the postcard into my back pocket.
Back inside the cabin, Scout had managed to get the hatch open and was sitting on the edge, legs dangling down the hole
“How’s it looking?” I said.
Scout looked up. “Not too good.”
“Not too good as in–?”
“As in full of water.”
Fidorous kneeled down next to her, staring down. “The engine’s gone and the boat’s filling up faster than we can pump it out.” He stared up at us. “But this isn’t possible. It can’t happen.”
“What were you saying about the delicate nature of truth?” I said.
“Yes,” Fidorous flung his arm out at the hole. “But it shouldn’t–it can’t cause this.”
Scout’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully at me before turning back to the doctor. “So, what are you telling us? We’re sinking?”
He nodded, once. “Yes. We’re sinking. I just don’t–”
Scout stayed in professional mode. “How long do we have?”
“Maybe an hour.”
She nodded. “And then we’re in the water.”
“The Ludovician,” I said. “That’s why it led us out to sea and attacked the boat: to put us in the water.”
It looked as if Fidorous was about to give us his stupid eating machine speech again, but he didn’t. “There’s still time,” he said instead, “those barrels will exhaust him. Nobody’s laptop is still working and still connected to Ward, so if Eric can hit him with the spear–”
“I don’t think he’ll give us the chance,” Scout said. “He’s put a couple of holes in the boat and now he’s gone away to wait for it to sink. I’m betting we’ll be swimming by the time he comes back.”
Fidorous stared down the hatch.
“Fine,” I said. “So we’ve failed. We give up. We go back.”
Fidorous shook his head. “It’s not a simple thing. If anything, it’s a more complicated process than getting here. It needs concentration and, even if we could concentrate–we don’t have the time.”
“So we’re stuck here?”
“Yes, I’m afraid we are.”
“There’s no place like home,” Scout said absently.
The doctor smiled a washed-out sort of smile.
“Okay, but I’m the only one the shark’s interested in, I’m the one it wants.” I dropped down onto the bed.
“Not anymore,” the doctor said. “We’re all mixed up together in this now.”
I realised it was probably true. Both of them, especially Scout, were so strongly connected to me here and like this, that the shark probably wouldn’t stop to think about the difference.
Ian climbed on my knee, nuzzling up. I put a protective arm around him.
“I’m sorry, guys.”
Scout smiled a small smile at me. “Don’t you be sorry. It was my plan, remember? You were the one who got conned into it.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, trying out a smile of my own.
All three of us were quiet.
“Right then.” Scout pushed her hair back and crossed her legs. “What we need is logical thinking. Where are we up to? We’ve lost the engine. The boat’s sinking. We still have the laptop and we still have the spear. Like the doctor said, if Eric can spear the shark before the boat sinks, we still win.”
Fidorous nodded. “Very succinct.”
“Our one big problem,” Scout continued, “is getting the Ludovician to come in close enough and stay still enough to be speared before the boat goes under.” She did a size-of-things sigh. “Any ideas?”
“We could lure him in,” I said.
Both of them turned to me.
“Go on,” the doctor said.
“If I get into the water, he’ll come.”
“Eric, you’re not getting into the water.” Scout stared at me. “That’s crazy.”
“No, it isn’t,” Fidorous said, his face brightening up. “No, it isn’t, because we still have the Dictaphones. We have another conceptual loop.”
The Dictaphones. Like the Orpheus itself and so many other things on board, they’d become something else on the way here. In fact, they’d become what the First Eric Sanderson always said they were–a real, live shark cage.
Scout and I manoeuvred the parts of the cage out of the storage locker and onto the deck one at a time. Each of the four sides was solid and heavy, a tough frame striped with heavy black plastic bars. We held them in place as Fidorous bolted them together and to the cage base with a series of rubber plugs and bolts that might once have been stop, play and record buttons. When the thing was finished, the doctor went back down into the cabin to find the scuba equipment.
The two of us stood on the sloping deck, both looking at the cage.
“You can’t go into the water in that.”
“Why can’t I?” Scout said. “You were ready to go into the water with nothing.”
“Scout, it might as well be nothing.”
“It kept you safe all this time.”
“But things have changed. This boat is built on a conceptual loop ten times more powerful than the Dictaphones and the Ludovician still punched holes in it. He’ll rip this thing to pieces.”
“Three times more powerful.” She came over and put her hands against my arms, gave me a squeeze and a tight smile. “Believe me, if you’ve got something else in mind, I’d really love to hear it.”
There was nothing for me to say.
“See,” she said.
“I really don’t want you to do this.”
“I don’t want me to either, but you’re the only one who can spear the Ludovician and Fidorous is the only one who knows how to get us back. That means I’m the one who has to go down in the cage.”
I looked at her.
“Come here.” She wrapped her arms around me and I held her tight.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I’ve got to,” she said quietly against the side of my face. “This is how it goes, it’s what happens next.” She kissed my cheek. “This has to happen and we both know it.”
And the thing was, I did know it. The postcard, the island, Fidorous, Randle, even the Ludovician. Everything that had happened to me from the moment I woke up on the bedroom floor, in some way I couldn’t quite understand, was all a part of the same great big something, and Scout going down in the cage was part of it too. It had to happen. I just knew.
“Scout,” I said, “what’s going on?”
She let out a tiny breath. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
I nodded, pulling her tight against me.
A few moments later, Fidorous came up from the cabin with a scuba diver’s air cylinder and something like an inflatable life jacket squeezed under one arm.
“I’ve got something to say,” he said, after we’d helped him lay the cylinder down next to the cage. “I’m sorry, sorry to both of you. I let you down once, Eric, and now I’ve done it again. I’ve let both of you down.” As he spoke, all the guards and masks and personas dropped away. Finally, here was the real Fidorous: a tired and apologetic old man stepping out from behind his grand curtain.
“There’s no need to–”
“No, Eric, please don’t make excuses for me. This is my fault. I’m a stupid, egotistical old fool who thought he could put everything right just like one of the old stories. But the truth is, I’m no Tekisui.”
“Hey, hang on a minute,” Scout said. “Don’t forget all of this was my idea and he was mad enough to go along with it. If anything, we’re sorry for dragging you into this whole mess.”
“Yeah,” I said.
The doctor looked at us for a moment then he nodded a small nod of thanks.
In the heat of the sun, I felt a sad wintry smile blowing over my face.
“Anyway,” Scout said, “what is that?”
Fidorous held out the thing he’d carried out of the cabin along with the air tank. I’d thought it was a life jac
ket but it wasn’t, it was a child’s inflatable dinghy.
“It’s the cat’s,” he said, “his carrier.”
And we laughed then, me and Scout holding each other and Fidorous holding the blow-up boat. We laughed the way people laugh on the edge of dark and dangerous times, like little sparklers out in the night.
The Orpheus was listing strongly now, the starboard side several feet nearer the water than the port and the mast pointing to five past the hour. It made matters worse that the winching arm was fixed to starboard and when we lowered the cage down over the side it added maybe another minute to the ticking-away mastclock.
Scout wore a wetsuit, a scuba tank and had her mask pulled up on top of her head. She also had a couple of my T-shirts on to lend her some extra Eric Sanderson.
Scout was ready. The cage was ready. It was time.
“Okay, hero,” she said. “Shark comes at the cage, you stab shark with spear. Shark and Ward are connected. No more shark. No more Ward. Easy, right?”
“Easy,” I said, reaching out and taking hold of her hand.
Fidorous brought the spear over, trailing cable.
“Scout–” I started. “There are things I want to–”
“Don’t. Save it and tell me when I get back.”
“They say that in war films, bomber pilots usually.”
She laughed, “I can’t believe you just said that.” She put her arms around my waist and kissed me. When we broke apart she smiled. “You’re a bit of a geek sometimes, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Scout, please be careful.”
“I will.”
Walking across to sit on the edge of the boat, she wet her goggles and climbed down into the cage. We closed the top and the winch arm rattled and lowered it further into the water. I held up my hand in a low little wave. Scout did the same small wave back as she disappeared down into the blue.
For the next fifteen minutes there was only a still and tense nothing. Scout’s bubbles breaking the surface, Fidorous going from port to starboard, from stern to bow watching the water, Ian padding the deck and wanting to stand as near to me as he could, an occasional protesting creak of timbers, the mastclock counting away our time as the sinking Orpheus tipped further towards the sea. Me standing by the winch arm with the spear.