by Steven Hall
After about fifteen minutes I came through an archway into what must have been my ninth or tenth corridor. But this corridor was different to all the others because this one wasn’t dark; a tall and bright electric standing lamp had been positioned at one end. I made my way towards it. As I got closer, I could see the lamp was straight out of a 1970s living room, a big faded green tasselled shade and a stem of bulbs and curves made from dark stained wood.
“Hello?”
There was no one around, just me and the lamp standing together at the end of a long lonely hallway.
I found him by following the flex. The flex from the standing lamp connected to an orange extension lead which connected to a white extension lead which connected to another orange extension lead which connected to a black extension lead. Upstairs, downstairs, through storerooms and staffrooms and restrooms and toilets and offices and physiotherapy gyms.
The flex led me into a large ward. Most of the space was gloomy with the blinds drawn but a second standing lamp in the centre of the room gave out a white-yellow circle of light about twelve feet across. Under the lamp, sitting on a chair was a man busily typing on a laptop.
As I walked towards him he looked up, smiled, hurried the laptop off his knee and stood up to meet me.
“You made it, thank goodness. Sorry for all the–“he gestured around. “I’d been hoping to meet you in the foyer but this report–deadlines are still deadlines apparently.”
The man was about my height but more slightly built, in his late twenties or early thirties, with a smart blue shirt, casual but expensive-looking jeans and a banker’s haircut. He also wore a pair of gold rimmed aviator sunglasses and a chunky gold watch. There was a clean just-shaved-at-the-barbers freshness about him that made me feel dirty and sickly looking.
“Mr Nobody?” I asked.
The man laughed an embarrassed laugh.
“Yes. Very pleased to meet you.” He overstretched as he moved to shake my hand, giving a slight bow. “It’s a little melodramatic, isn’t it? Still, I hope you understand the–undesirable nature of names given the circumstances.” Nobody collected a chair from the shadows and dragged it quickly into the circle of light to face his own. “I hope you can forgive the sunglasses too,” he said, gesturing for me to sit down. “Eyestrain. The doctor said no work with a computer screen for two weeks and I’ve got a mountain of pills to take, but–”
“Reports?” I said, taking the chair. Nobody sat opposite me.
“Endless reports,” he smiled. “Computers. The blessing and the curse of the twenty-first century.” Then, looking at me and actually noticing the state I was in: “God, are you alright?”
“I’m okay, coming down with something I think. Anyway, I thought the mobile phone was the blessing and curse of the twenty-first century?”
“Ahhh, that’s the other blessing and curse of the twenty-first century. These blessing and curse things, they’re everywhere. You can lose count.”
I smiled a watery smile.
“Well,” Nobody said. “You’re not here to discuss my Luddite tendencies, are you? I should probably start by apologising for–”
“No, wait,” I said, finally remembering the plastic bag with the Dictaphones hooked over my wrist. Stupid, slow feverish brain. “There’s something important I need to do first.”
Mr Nobody watched me load up the Dictaphones with batteries and set them up in a rough square around us, at the edges of the lamplight. He didn’t say anything until I’d finished.
“A sound-based association loop,” he smiled at me like a boss smiles at an employee who’s done something clever with the figures. “Wow, can I ask how it was developed?”
I sat down again. My stomach bubbled and lurched and I swallowed back the bile.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not going to be much of a conversationalist today. My brain’s all jammed up with, well, with whatever it is I’ve managed to catch. Could I be blunt and rude and ask if we can just get straight down to it?”
Mr Nobody sat easy, relaxed and alert. He thought for a moment then nodded once, efficiently. “Yes, of course. Do you want me to start with what I know about you, or what I know about the shark?”
“You know about the Ludovician? I mean, you believe in it?”
Nobody’s brow dropped a little behind his sunglasses.
“Yes,” he said simply. There was a touch of confusion, as if I’d asked him if he believed in trees or aeroplanes or China.
“Yes,” I said back to myself, still a little stunned.
“I mean, I’m not familiar with the particular shark you’ve been in contact with, but I’m very familiar, too familiar, with the species.” He looked at me again. “You seem surprised.”
“It’s just–for so long there’s only been me. To hear someone else talk about it–”
“I understand,” Nobody said, sliding down the chair a little and crossing his forearms on his knees. “The man I work for is a scientist. He’s studied conceptual fish for years; Heletrobes, Ticking Remoras, Ludogarians, Dream Tips. He’s an expert, perhaps the greatest expert of our time.”
“Scientific study? How is that possible?”
“My employer has the tongue-twisting pleasure of being a crypto-conceptual oceanologist. It isn’t what you’d describe as mainstream. It’s currently a field of one.”
“Right.” I belched and my mouth filled with a sharp, tangy sick taste. “Right,” I said again.
Nobody looked at me for a second. “Listen, you really don’t look good. Do you want some painkillers or paracetamol or something?” He gently kicked a brown leather bag under his chair. “I’ve got some in here, I think.”
“No,” I said. “I think I’ll be okay. I just need to keep still and not think about it.”
“Well, if you change your mind. Actually, I need to take the pills for my eyes at 2 p.m.. I’m always forgetting. You couldn’t do me a favour and remind me, could you?”
I took the mobile out of my pocket and glanced at the clock on screen: 13.32.
“No problem,” I said, swallowing again to get the taste out of my mouth. “Your employer–do you work for Trey Fidorous?”
“Ahhh. The great Dr Fidorous. No, I’m afraid not. Although you could say he founded the school and my employer expanded on it. No, no one has heard from Fidorous in years. If he’s still alive, he’s keeping it very much to himself.”
I filed this away to think about when there was more space in my head.
“What do you know about the ecology of the Ludovician, Mr Sanderson?”
“It’s a conceptual fish, a shark. It eats memories.” I looked down at my fingers. “What else? Practical things mainly; how to hide from it, trick it, how to protect myself.”
Nobody looked out at the Dictaphones chattering quietly at the edge of our circle of lamplight. He nodded a thoughtful nod.
“The Ludovician is the largest and most aggressive of all the conceptual sharks,” he said. “It’s an apex predator, top of the food chain. They’re very rare animals and, mostly, they wander the flows taking a meal here and there. Any frail mind kicking and struggling in the world, if they’re passing they’ll take a chunk out of it. Especially out of old people.”
“I thought they stuck to one target? One victim again and again until–” I let the sentence die; my stomach wasn’t up to it.
“That’s territoriality. Once in a while you’ll find that a Ludovician–a big rogue male as likely as not–fixates on one particular food source. No one knows why they do it. What I’m trying to say is, no one knows very much about these animals at all.”
Nobody’s sentences were sinking into the flu-muck in my head. I realised I couldn’t easily dredge them again up once they’d disappeared.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you’re getting at something but I don’t–”
“It boils down to this: if you want to study one of these creatures, territoriality is your only real hope. If you can find someone who sh
ows all the tell-tale signs of repeated Ludovician injuries, you can find yourself a shark.”
“And that’s how you found me.”
“My employer keeps his ear very close to the ground. Your doctor is thinking about writing a paper on your ‘condition’. She showed some draft notes to a colleague.”
Randle.
I didn’t say anything.
Nobody pushed his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose.
“There’s another problem with studying Ludovicians. Even if you can track down a decent-sized adult it’s almost impossible to keep one alive in captivity. An infant, yes, but not a mature animal. My employer is the only person who has ever had any success with this; he once kept a fully grown Ludovician alive in a specially made containment facility for almost forty days. Since then, he’s been moving heaven and earth to find another specimen. Which, yes, is why he sent me to find you.”
I couldn’t quite believe any of this.
“You’re saying you can trap it?”
“Yes, we can trap it.”
“And take it away?”
“Yes. With your help we can capture it, take it away safely and keep it alive indefinitely.”
“Once it’s trapped, I don’t care if it’s alive or dead. Though to be honest, I’d feel safer if it was dead.”
“Yes,” said Mr Nobody. “I can understand that.”
“But. How do you know? How can you be sure it can be done?”
“I’m sure.”
“How?”
For a moment I didn’t think he’d answer.
“Because I’ve seen it,” he said slowly. “The first one, the Ludovician my employer captured, it was mine. It had been feeding on me.”
“Is it time for me to take those pills yet?”
I pulled the mobile out of my coat pocket.
“About ten minutes.”
“About?”
“Nine minutes just,” I said.
He nodded, thinking. The change in him was small but it was there. Some of the breezy confidence, the high-gloss polish had rubbed away. He seemed to sit a little lower in his chair, hunched down with his shoulders poking up either side of his neck. In this position, the blue shirt which had looked well-fitted and expensive now seemed a little baggy, hanging loose across his chest. There were sweat marks where the material had pulled up under his armpits.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine, fine.” He straightened up but it was unconvincing, somehow he didn’t fill out his own body like he had before. “Bad memories,” he said. “It’s, well, I don’t need to tell you how it is.”
“How did it happen? I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”
Nobody didn’t answer straightaway.
“I was a research scientist,” he said finally. “A physicist. Young, dynamic, making a name for myself, all that.”
I looked at him.
“It isn’t all lab coats and dandruff you know.”
“No,” I said. “Sorry.”
“I got myself a position with the University of London. It was a really big deal. Do you know what Superstring Theory is?”
I tried to think. “Something complicated to do with life, the universe and everything?”
“Actually, yes, more or less. It’s very exciting, very where it’s at. Anyway, I went to stay with an aunt and uncle down in the city. I wasn’t really at a point in my career where I could ask for the same salary as the more established academics, but my aunt and uncle had an empty attic room and they turned it over to me as a study. That’s where I did my work.” Nobody looked out across the chequerboard floor and then down at his hands. “When we first heard the noises coming from up there in the middle of the night my aunt was convinced we had a rat. You see, the work I was doing, the subject, it’s pure thought, pure concept.”
“The work you were doing?” I scrubbed my knuckles against my scalp, trying to clear my head. “You mean it attracted the shark?”
“I think it happened because there’s no physical anchor. At that level a subject like mine is essentially thought and abstracted maths. Every day, when I sat at my desk working with the figures and models, I was actually paddling that small attic room further and further out into a sea of ideas, further away from the bricks and stone of the house. There aren’t that many people who can take a boat out as far as I could, who could get out over such depths.”
His sweating was getting worse. The wet patches under his arms had spread and new ones were forming around his neck.
“Geniuses don’t go mad,” he said. “That’s what people don’t understand. They get out so far out that the water is like glass and they can see for miles and see so much, and in ways people have never seen before. They go out over such depths, down down down and down, and some of them get taken. Something rushes up out of their thoughts, from the insides of their own heads and through the act of looking and the thinking itself–because the deep blue is in there too, do you understand? And it takes them.”
He trailed off, hands shaking and clutched around his knees.
“How long now until I need to take my pills?”
“Listen,” I said, “I’m sorry for asking. If it’s too much going over all this–”
“How long until I need to take my fucking pills?”
Shocked, my hand reached automatically for the mobile phone.
“Seven minutes,” I said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry.”
He said nothing back, just sat there looking down at his hands on his knees, his sweaty shirt clinging up under his surprisingly skinny ribs. His hair had lost some of its shape too and it stuck lank in places to his scalp and forehead. A ball of sweat striped the left lens of his sunglasses and fell away.
We sat in silence.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally, still looking at his hands.
“It’s okay. You really don’t have to talk about it. I’m just sorry I asked.”
Nobody looked up. His sweaty face seemed even more sunken, sallow, drawn than it had a minute before. He stared at me, then he just opened his mouth and–as if he were reciting something rather than having a conversation–launched into his story again.
“My uncle was a taxi-driver. If you want to be a taxi-driver in London you have to take an exam to prove you know the entire city. My uncle never forgot a single street, never a single road. He could find every building in London but he couldn’t remember where he lived. They said it was short-term memory damage, but it wasn’t.”
“Wait, you’re saying the shark attacked him too?”
Nobody nodded a vague nod as if the question had come from somewhere inside his own head.
“All of us. My aunt didn’t know who people were at the end. She had nightmares. A shadow in her brain, teeth and eyes. She would wake up in the night, see my uncle in bed next to her and sneak downstairs to phone the police. She’d tell them there was an intruder in the house. Sometimes she’d call them three, four times a night. Sometimes she’d get violent because she was scared.”
“Jesus,” I said. Nobody’s story, the way it was affecting him as he told it, this deterioration, it was hard to for me to pin it down exactly, but something was going wrong. Something here was going very wrong. My stomach felt like a loose bag of warm water.
“It happened and it kept happening, one or other of us, night after night. They came again and they checked the house for gas leaks, they checked our food and they checked the walls and they checked the ceilings for anything that could cause it, a poison. But there wasn’t anything. I had the nightmares. I saw it in my dreams. My theories were what drew it in. Numbers and maths. It wouldn’t stop coming in the night. Who’s it going to be? Trying to stay awake. Who’s next what’s next what will be taken now? By the end, being in that house. It was–”
My insides locked up and I heaved. A long slither of spit choked out of me, but no vomit. I swallowed, gagged, swallowed again. Nobody stopped talking and watched, his wet face all hollow cheeks and
sharp bones behind his glasses. I wiped away the tears.
“Christ,” I said, rubbing my mouth with my shirtsleeve. “Christ, I’m sorry.”
“Yes,” said Nobody. “I’ve got to take some pills soon. Do you think you could remind me when it’s time to take them?”
“I will,” I said, trying to pull my head back together, “but I think it’s only a minute or two since–”
“I can’t take them before two o’clock,” Nobody interrupted gently. “I know you think it doesn’t matter because it’s only a few minutes. But it does. The amounts are perfectly balanced. Like seconds. Sixty seconds perfectly balanced against a minute. And dividing it up. You can’t carry a second over.”
I realised I’d put my hand in the wrong coat pocket and reached around to the other.
“You are going to come with me, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, pulling out the phone. Something here was going very wrong. Even if the specifics kept slipping away in the mud, instinct made sure I held onto that one basic fact. I needed to get away, rest, clear my head and think. “I’ll have to go back to my hotel and pack a few things, and then–”
“How many minutes?” Nobody whispered, chewing on a knuckle.
He looked awful now. His shirt was a soaking, sticky mess plastered to his ribs and painfully hollow stomach. His hair was loose, lank and shapeless. Even his big aviator sunglasses looked old and dirty. And he was so wet. The sweat literally dripped off him, drops hanging and falling from his nose, his chin, the bottoms of his jeans even. Drip drip drip drip.
“Four,” I said. My hands were shaking. I couldn’t think what to do.
“You know I’m dead, don’t you?” Nobody said. “Look.” He held out a flat palm. Liquid dripped from the ends of his fingers with a steady tapping. Drip drip drip drip. “See?”
“I don’t–”
“You do know. All of it. It’s obvious.” Then, as if something dawned on him, he quickly swivelled around in his chair, turning his bony back to me. “Shhh, what are you doing? You’re giving away too much, giving it all away, don’t let him talk. It doesn’t matter. Yes, of course it matters. But I can’t keep the keel level without the pills. You’ll damn well have to keep it level won’t you because we never know what he’s going to say. But it’s too long, the weave has all come apart–loose threads and holes, he’s showing through, you know how it gets just before the pills. I don’t care about that, I don’t care about your holes and threads, the job’s almost done you’ll just have to. Shhh, shut up, he’s going to hear.” Nobody spun back around towards me. His glasses edged up his cheeks as his face split with a huge grin of brown teeth and purpley-black gums.
