Tindra watched me, one hand tight on her dog’s collar. “A new language,” she said. “I invented it for my app, Ludus Mentis. It’s from ludus mentis, ‘play’ and ‘mind.’ So, Ludus Mentis—like a mind game.
“I got the idea from the Orphic mysteries,” she went on breathlessly. “And some other stories. When the Titans wanted to destroy Dionysus, they gave him toys. A ball, a wheel, a top. A mirror. Dionysus had never seen one before. When he looked into it, he couldn’t look away. He didn’t realize it was a trap. The Titans tore him limb from limb and ate him.”
She thrust the mobile at me again, and now its screen reflected my own face. “You see how it all ties in? The way we’re all sucked in by this? We can’t look away, none of us, no matter how hard we try…”
Her voice trailed off as she lowered the mobile. “But no one’s even trying. And that’s how Ludus Mentis is going to change everything.”
Chapter 13
I felt the hairs on my neck rise. I thought of photographing Harold’s corpse back in the Vale of Health, of all the other terrible things I’ve shot over the decades, because I can’t look away.
“Interesting,” I finally managed. “Though I think an app based on ritual cannibalism is gonna be a hard sell.”
Tindra fixed me with a cobra stare. “The code is in us already. All those paintings on cave walls—the oldest ones, with all those crosshatches and dots and zigzags, like you see when you’re tripping? Those symbols are hardwired into our brains. They mean something. Cave drawings, runes, numerals, alphabets, Linear B, Linux…it’s all code. We’re all code.”
She rapped her skull with her knuckles. “It’s already in here: Ludus Mentis just opens a path to access it. Like those apps where you change your brain waves with biofeedback. Only Ludus Mentis taps into a different part of your consciousness—it mimics the neuroelectric impulses your brain sends when it reacts to powerful emotional memories. Basically, I figured out a way to use optogenetics and the Fourier transform to rewire your brain.”
“Opto-what?”
“Optogenetics is a way of controlling living cells with light. There are neurons which specifically store memories of fear. Scientists experimented with rats and made those neurons light sensitive, so that the rats would respond to certain patterns of light. When those neural pathways were triggered, the rats would act frightened. Do you get it?”
I nodded, wishing I didn’t get it.
She continued, “Those scientists had to use a virus to make the neurons sensitive to light, but I figured out a way to bypass that. Certain symbols used in conjunction with specific light patterns can trigger the same neural response. And if they can trigger one response, it makes sense that a different combination could trigger a very different response. Not fear but forgetfulness, maybe, or remorse, or excitement. There are endless combinations and endless possibilities.”
I fought to keep my voice level. “You really are talking about rewiring the brain.”
“Yes! Because if we erase their traumatic memories, people can get better. We can retrain their thoughts, reprogram the neurons to let go of fear. Or stimulate fear when it’s necessary.”
“What about the other thing, the transform?”
“The Fourier transform? It’s actually a wavelet transform, derived from a mathematical theorem that describes a means of separating any signal into a series of circular paths, or patterns. That’s all our brains are, that’s all consciousness is: a series of electrical and neurochemical signals. A kind of code. And because it’s code, it can be rewritten. I think that The Book of Lamps and Banners is the earliest expression of the Fourier transform, recorded in ancient symbols as well as mathematical ones.”
“But how can you control what happens? How do you know how someone will react?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she snapped. “I mean, it does, but that’s what I’m working on now. I just need to test it, to get different reactions and compare them. But once I get the bugs worked out, the app can be used for all sorts of things. Trauma, insomnia, ADHD. Regulating mood disorders without drugs. Addiction. Libido. Everything.”
She fell silent, eyes glowing, and I wondered how the app was working on her own mood disorder, which was clearly fully operational.
Yet I could still see that vision of my twenty-three-year-old self projected on my mind’s eye, drunk on a downtown street after partying all night at CBGB; a man whispering Miss, miss and me hearing Cass, Cass; the flash of a zip knife and blood mingling with semen as I ran screaming down the alley, bare feet slashed by broken glass. Whatever Ludus Mentis was, it had unlocked a gateway to the single event I’d spent decades trying to forget. I looked up to see Tindra watching me intently. She nodded.
“I know,” she said softly. “Me too.”
I stared at her with a shiver of apprehension. “How could you know?”
“I could tell, when I met you. Don’t you find that sometimes? That you just know?”
I recalled what I’d sensed within her, a hole where trauma had been. Had she burned away her own memories? If so, what had replaced them?
I hesitated, then asked, “What happened to you?”
She didn’t reply but continued to stare at me with that unnerving, nearly unblinking gaze. I felt like I had as a teenager, playing some stoned game with a friend: If you stared long enough into another’s eyes, could you tell what they were thinking? Could you make them see what you saw in your mind’s eye?
Only Tindra really did seem able to intuit something. Not what I was thinking at that moment, but the underlying strata of damage and rage, grief and loss, which were at my core. As I stared back, there was an instant when I sensed the same thing within her: a limit to the abyss behind her eyes, a place where the darkness stopped and something else, someone else, survived. Then she blinked, and it was gone.
“When I was thirteen,” she said, “a friend of my father’s—we started having sex. It went on for a long time before someone at my school reported it to the police. They did nothing. Someone must have threatened the teacher, because it never came up again. But people in school knew, my friends knew. They said I was slampa, a slut.”
“That’s horrible.”
“The worst was my father not believing me. Or, he believed me, but it didn’t matter. He acted as though nothing bad had happened. He and…the man, they stayed friends. That was when I left. I haven’t talked to him since I was fourteen.” She fell silent.
“Where was this?”
“In the town where I grew up in Sweden.”
“I didn’t think stuff like that happened in Sweden.”
“Of course it does. It happens everywhere.”
“What about your mother?”
“She died when I was much younger. Cancer.”
“And the guy who raped you?”
“He’s still alive. But it doesn’t matter. It’s gone now.” Her fingers splayed across her white T-shirt. “Almost gone. I’m not afraid of him anymore. When the code is finished, I’ll be able to make him disappear completely.”
“Bugs.” I forced the word out. “The app, you said you’re still working out the bugs.”
Tindra leaned back to sit on her heels. “That’s why I need The Book of Lamps and Banners. It’s like a beta version of Ludus Mentis. Whoever wrote it had figured out how a combination of lights and symbols can change the way we think. Their book drew on knowledge that had already been around for thousands of years, things the ancient Egyptians knew, and the Sumerians, the Minoans. So ‘lamps and banners’ is just shorthand for what we call code.”
“But no one’s really ever seen the book,” I broke in. “How can you know any of this is true?”
“Because I’ve researched it more thoroughly than anyone ever has. Once I have the actual book, I’ll incorporate everything inside it—every detail, every thumbprint, every bit of DNA on every page. It’s all there, not a line missing. I’ll be able to complete writing a code that was begun thousands of years a
go.”
Tears spilled from her eyes. She looked exhausted, all that manic energy spent. The dog Bunny whined, put its paws on her lap, and licked her cheeks.
“I’ve been working on it since I was fifteen,” she whispered. “It will change everything.”
It already had changed everything for Harold Vertigan, yet Tindra seemed barely to have registered his murder. I bit my tongue and asked, “What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice was a child’s. “I don’t want to go to the police right away.”
“Because you and Gryffin and Harold did the deal under the table?”
“No,” she insisted, but her pale cheeks flushed. “I told you. Whoever stole it, they might want to sell it back to me. Or if I can find out who they are, I can track them down. I have Lyla and Tommy. And Bunny.” A spark glinted in her eyes. “It’s my book.”
I thought of the loose page I’d nicked from Harold’s place and slipped into a copy of the TLS. Tindra didn’t know it was missing. If I somehow managed to find The Book of Lamps and Banners, the fact that I retained that page would mean the book was intact. If Tindra located the book before me, she’d desperately want the missing page. Maybe she’d pony up serious money for it.
And if the book was never found, I could sell the loose page—worst-case scenario, to some random collector on eBay.
I knew these ideas were crazy. Whoever wanted this book had no compunction about killing for it, and there was a good chance Tindra wouldn’t, either. The only person who might be able to help me was Quinn, whose black-market connections might extend to some shady corner of the antiquarian book trade. Long shot, but the only one I had. And I still had to find Quinn: another big if.
“Look, I know you want it for your app,” I said at last to Tindra. “But do you have any idea how much that book is worth? It’s like the Rosetta stone and the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Quran all rolled into one. It’s worth a fucking fortune. Whoever has it is not going to just hand it back to you.”
Tindra buried her head in her dog’s neck. For a long time neither of us spoke. All the booze and speed had leached from my system. Along with a throbbing headache and the memory of the nightmarish flashback triggered by her app, I had the familiar sense that I was staring through the windshield of a car about to plow into a brick wall.
When at last Tindra looked up again, the tears were gone. An odd expression played across her face—appraisal, contempt, and, again, a strange recognition. “What kind of photography do you do?” she asked. “Digital?”
“No. Analog. Old-school.”
“‘Old-school.’” She gave me a derisive smile. “You’re one of those analog saints.”
“More like a shaman. And what about your old computer games?”
“People like to play games. No one cares about photographs. Or books.”
“You’re obviously wrong about the books.”
She laughed. “You really are an immutable object.”
“A what?”
“A piece of code that doesn’t change. Or it changes incrementally, and that change has an unanticipated effect on subsequent lines of code. And you know the dead,” she said, as though this were a logical thought progression.
I shook my head. “I only met Harold for a few minutes.”
She stood, and I could see that her pupils had shrunk to poppy-seed specks. “That’s not what I mean. I can see it, there—”
Her finger extended toward my right eye. The scar beside it started to ache. “It’s why I showed you Ludus Mentis.”
She withdrew her hand, as though suddenly afraid of some contagion. Her mobile chimed. She glanced down at it, did a double take, swiped at the screen, reading a series of texts, then furiously tapped out a response. Seconds later, another chime. Her eyes widened as she stared at whatever had appeared on the screen. Disbelief, horror, relief, all flickered in her eyes, along with a yearning so pronounced it resembled fear.
She looked up at me, and immediately her features resolved into that same disturbing composure. The mobile disappeared into her pocket, and she picked up her computer.
“I have to go,” she said.
“Wait—”
I whipped out Gryffin’s mobile and found the photos I’d shot of Harold, zooming in on the one that showed the emblem on his forehead, three linked triangles drawn in blood.
“You know about symbols. Do you recognize this?”
Her face went from pale to paper white. “Who is that?”
“Harold Vertigan.”
She took the mobile from me and scrolled through the other photos, barely glancing at them before she returned to the close-up of Harold. “Have you sent these to the police?”
“No.”
“Good.”
Her fingers tapped at the screen. The photos disappeared, all save the close-up. Then that, too, was gone.
I grabbed the mobile from her. “What the fuck?”
“I deleted them from the phone. And the cloud.” Tindra shrugged. “Better this way.”
She turned, Bunny at her side. I started after her, ignoring the dog’s soft growl.
“You didn’t tell me what it means,” I called. “That symbol on his forehead.”
“You’ll figure it out.”
She slipped through the door to her flat. I got my bag and waited as the garage door silently opened, then the security gate, and walked out onto the dark road. When I glanced back, the gate to Tindra Bergstrand’s house had already closed behind me.
Chapter 14
I wandered the streets of Brixton, head pounding from the virulent speedball of fear, alcohol, drugs, and sheer weirdness I’d absorbed over the last few hours. I needed to find Quinn. But I had only a vague idea as to where Brixton was in relation to the rest of London, and no idea how to find my way to Rotherhithe.
And I had no assurance that Quinn was still in London. He’d fled to Reykjavík decades ago. Now that he’d left Iceland, he was in danger of being extradited to the U.S., and probably several other countries as well. It would be disastrous if the cops found him.
The thought of losing Quinn terrified me. For decades I’d assumed he was dead. I’d found him around the same time I picked up my camera after nearly thirty years, and for a few weeks it seemed like it might be possible for me to have some semblance of a life again. Not a normal life, but I don’t expect miracles.
My shivering got worse, a bad sign. It was cold, but not that cold. I paused in front of a shuttered halal butcher to gulp down more whiskey, kept walking.
The shaking subsided, but not the dread that had gripped me since my encounter with Tindra’s app. Bad enough to have the experience of my assault replaying in my brain like a skip on scratched vinyl. Even more disturbing was the sense that there was something I’d missed all those years ago—a flash of forgotten light or shadow at the corner of my vision that Ludus Mentis had revealed. Every time I thought of it, my stomach knotted, but the image never resolved into anything I could recognize or name.
After about twenty minutes, I reached the high street. The drum of traffic and distant music calmed me, along with the sight of people on the sidewalks, the familiar stink of diesel and cigarette smoke. I ducked into a Starbucks, got a latte, and sat at a table in the back.
I pulled out Gryffin’s mobile, hesitated, then entered Quinn’s number. The call rolled directly into voice mail.
You’ve reached Eskimo Vinyl in Reykjavík. Leave a message, I’ll get back to you.
I disconnected and sipped my coffee. After a few minutes, I googled the two words that were my sole clue as to where Quinn might be:
rotherhithe darwin
A quick Google search told me that Rotherhithe was in East London—not too far from Canary Wharf, which was where I’d last seen Quinn, but a long way from Brixton.
“Darwin” presumably meant…Darwin? My search brought up a brasserie in Southwark, now closed for renovation, and not much else. No other pubs or restaurants, no
Darwin memorials, no one by that last name.
I finally gave up. I found an online Tube map, figured out how to get to Rotherhithe, and headed for the Brixton station. On the train, I nodded out till I had to change to the Overground, nodded out again, and didn’t wake until a recorded voice announced we were approaching Whitechapel.
I stared out at the malign pageantry of Canary Wharf. Blindingly lit construction cranes loomed over the city like an army of alien mantids, another marker of the slow apocalypse. Cataclysmic storms and epidemics, mass extinctions, and bizarre viruses, mass entertainment indistinguishable from mass graves. When I was a teenager, I dreamed of dancing at the end of the world. Now it seemed I’d have my chance.
The train pulled out of the station. Several skinheads had boarded, along with three bearded guys who looked like they’d materialized from Sunset Park. The skinheads were a decade or more older than their hirsute companions and wore leather jackets or hoodies emblazoned with Iron Crosses, swastikas, band names heavy on the umlauts. Their hands and necks were tattooed with stylized hammers or severed heads. One guy had the words BURN EM inked above the knuckles of both hands. They spoke animatedly, switching between English and German.
In contrast, their younger companions across the aisle might have stepped out of a craft beer ad: Timberland boots, barn jackets, knit caps. All three sported T-shirts emblazoned with the word SVARLIGHT beneath an S-shaped lightning bolt bisecting a scarlet oak leaf. Pinned to their jackets were large buttons that showed a blue eye, its iris a stylized sun. They pored over a Tube map, consulting one another in what sounded like Swedish.
The symbols on their T-shirts and buttons reminded me unsettlingly of Ludus Mentis, and Svarlight’s lightning bolts resembled those in the Nazi SS symbol. Then again, so did the twinned S’s in the Kiss logo. Maybe Svarlight was a band.
I watched as the few other passengers checked out the newcomers. Two young black women whose faces twisted in disgust, a middle-aged white businessman who glanced up, then quickly returned his attention to a book.
The Book of Lamps and Banners Page 8