by Steven Hall
“Sorry about that,” he said. “Conference call. The office. Conference conference calls. The curse of the twenty-first century.”
Liquid streamed off him into small brown pools around the legs of his chair.
Get out. Get out. Get out. I shifted my weight onto the balls of my feet, slowly slowly, taking the strain in thighs and calves, ready to spring my sick body into some attempt at a run.
Nobody stared from behind his glasses.
No. He wasn’t staring. It took a few seconds for me to realise he wasn’t moving at all. Apart from the trickling water, he’d come to a complete stop. As I watched, a change began to creep across Nobody’s features; the tension slipped out of his body along with the water. His wet white face became serene and angelic, the way a face in a coffin is serene and angelic, calm and wise. His head tilted a little, mechanically.
“The important thing now is to give up,” he said, quietly. His voice was different, there was something far away behind the word sounds. “You know the truth. You know you’re already dead. Deep down you know it. Eric Sanderson’s gone, a long time gone. And Clio Aames. All of it, everything he was is over now. You should let his body go too. You should stop kicking and let it float, bob and slip all away. Let it sink down to the bottom with the quiet and the stones and the crabs. It will be alright, storms on the surface can’t hurt us anymore.”
Constant brown water flowed off the ends of his fingers and elbows as he pushed himself up in the chair. It ran from his trouser bottoms and leaked from his shoes, making dirty growing puddles that smelled of seaweed rotting in the sun.
“You don’t know who I am, do you?” his new voice said. Standing now, he gave a big bony stretch, splattering water droplets. “I’m you, of course. We’re the same dead not-person.”
I looked down and was horrified to see my own blue T-shirt wet and sticky. I battled away the un-logic of it–it’s just sweat, you’re ill, it’s just sweat and you’re not thinking straight. He shuffled forward a few steps, trailing brown water. I couldn’t make myself stand up. My stomach lurched and I dry-heaved again.
“I’m going to show you something now. It will be difficult for you to see at first, but what it represents is peace.”
He reached up and took hold of the arm of his sunglasses.
“Don’t,” I said. “I don’t want it. I don’t want this.”
Nobody pulled the glasses off his face.
Both his eyes were missing.
The structure was there: membrane, lens, iris, but the sense, the communication, the understanding, the fundamental eyes-are-the-windows-of-the-soul-ness of them, was all gone. Two black conceptual sockets, crawling with tiny thought-prawns and urge-worms, stared out of his face at me.
I heaved again and this time I really was sick; bile and matter and juices and oils, jellies and snots of thick green slime reeked and splattered out of me all over the black and white tiled floor.
15
Luxophage
The stink of sick found my mind and woke it up.
I’d passed out.
As soon as I opened my eyes, my stomach wrung itself tight again and I retched, chest pressed against my knees, folded double on the chair. I spat tangy acidy mucus down onto a pile of vomit splayed and splattered out in front of me. I grabbed at a breath before another heave forced its way out. This one was dry, a face-purpling empty retch. Another came, and another. Finally, I pulled myself upright, shaking and wiping more tears from my face.
“My employer is a scientist, I told you that didn’t I?” Mr Nobody was standing by his chair, glasses back on. He had his leather bag open and turned away to swallow tablets from a small plastic tub. “Chemicals,” he said, popping the cap back on and dropping the tub into the bag. “He can remake a person out of chemical stuffing and wire, keep them walking and talking…the miracles of modern science.” He sat down, lifting the laptop back onto his knee. Already some of the colour had come back into his face, the rivulets of water from his cuffs and trouser legs had slowed to an irregular dripping. “There are certain procedures, experiments and so on which are vital for my employer to fully study the Ludovician. As a result of these, you’ll come to rely, as I have, on certain chemical prosthetics. It’s not perfect but it is better than the alternative.”
The sickness tide was ebbing from my cheeks and my throat. My stomach settled a little and my mind began to clear. Everything from when I’d woken up sick in bed at the Willows Hotel to finding my way through the hospital, to Nobody and his horrible physical and mental collapse–it all seemed fractured and out of focus. Why the fuck was I still here? It was razorblade obvious that if there’d been any sense in me at all over the past few hours, I would have made a break for it a long time ago.
“Thank you,” I said it as calmly as I could, “but I’m going to leave now.”
Nobody looked up. His eyebrows knotted behind his sunglasses and he folded down the laptop screen. I tensed myself to run, expecting something sudden and horrible; for him to hurl himself off his chair and come screaming all inhuman at me across the floor. He didn’t. He tilted his head down, moving his attention from me to the thick pile of sick at my feet.
“Oh dear,” he said, “it’s difficult when this happens.”
I leaned forward and risked a glance down to where he was looking.
Something was moving inside the vomit.
I shock-jumped backwards up onto my feet, sending the chair skidding out behind me.
The something unwound itself carefully from the mucus and bile and slither-swam up into the air, coiling in loops around the vaporous remains of my thoughts and feelings of nausea. It was small–maybe nine inches, maybe the length of a worry that doesn’t quite wake you in your sleep–a primitive conceptual fish. I backed away slowly. The creature had a round sucker-like mouth lined with dozens of sharp little doubts and inadequacies. I could feel it just downstream from me in the events and happenings of the world, winding at head height, holding itself in place with muscled steady swimming against the movement of time.
I backed away further, towards the edge of the circle of light.
“The conceptual crabs, the jellies, some of the simple fish.” Nobody had put the laptop down and was moulding his hair back into something like its previous flawless style. “My employer can direct them, encourage certain behaviours. As I said, he’s an expert in the field.”
The blood thudded under my jaw, in my ears, in my eyes.
“Call it off.”
“This is a Luxophage,” Nobody said pleasantly, as if he hadn’t heard me, as if he were giving an informative talk. “It’s one of a family of what you might call idea lampreys. This particular species feeds by finding its way inside human beings and sucking on their ability to think quickly, to react. They tend to make their hosts quiet, well behaved and firmly entrenched in whatever rut they happen to be in. It’s a useful little parasite,” Nobody smiled, “although it does occasionally cause nausea.”
“That was inside me?” I wasn’t taking my eyes off the slow-winding idea fish hanging just a few feet of separation away.
“It was,” Nobody agreed. He stood and casually closed in on the fish from behind. “We were worried you might change your mind about helping us capture your Ludovician when you saw–” He paused. “I was going to say ‘the extent of your involvement’ but what I really mean is, ‘what we’re going to do to you’.”
“Not really selling it to me, I’m afraid.” I said, still watching the fish, taking another slow step backwards.
Nobody shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. In a second my assistant here will be back inside you and you’ll do whatever you’re told.”
“I don’t–” I started, but the fish, the Luxophage, sprung suddenly to life, darting blink-quick forwards at my face. I stepped jumped stumbled tripped fell backwards, landing with a crack of shooting pain in my elbow. The little lamprey shot over my head, hitting a something, a churning thundering invisible something whic
h pound-hammered and tumbled it away in a gigantic current. I took a careful breath and turned my head to the side. Barely six inches away, one of my Dictaphones stood like a miniature obelisk, its tiny tape winding between its spools with a low hum, the recording playing out as a sharp little clatter. The non-divergent conceptual loop. The Luxophage had swum into its flow and been washed away.
I pressed my boot heels against the smooth tiles and pushed myself across the floor, sliding on my back until I was outside the circle of light and square of Dictaphones. I sat up, cradling my throbbing elbow against my chest.
The jumbled Luxophage tumbled around the inside of the loop, once, twice, like water down a plughole, before regaining control of itself. It swam back to Mr Nobody and began circling him in a slow waist-high orbit.
“Hmmm.” Nobody’s clothes were dry again now, his blue shirt tailor-made and pressed, his hair perfect, his jeans well fitted and expensive.
“That was lucky,” he said.
I forced myself painfully up onto my feet. It was lucky. The Dictaphones had saved me but for them to keep me safe, to keep Nobody’s Luxophage trapped, I’d have to leave them behind.
“I’m going now,” I said.
“No, you’re not.”
One, two, three, four more Luxophages pulled, wriggled and squirmed their primitive conceptual bodies out from behind Nobody’s big dark sunglasses. More came; five, six, seven, eight, coiling and dropping from his face. I started backing towards the archway but Nobody moved suddenly and quickly, striding to the edge of the circle of light and–stamping on one of the Dictaphones.
“No!” the word, the air came out of me like a wound.
Nobody smashed his heel down hard again and the little plastic casing split, cracked and broke apart. The sickly ball of lampreys around him buffeted and bobbed as the conceptual loop collapsed in on itself and was gone. The ball unribboned and Luxophages launched themselves at me in a wet black hail of guilts and phobias. But with half the distance covered, the swarm went haywire. They looped and jumbled in a mad dance of eights and zeros before disappearing through the ceiling and walls and floor and up under the window blinds. One shot back to Nobody, circled him in two quick loops and vanished with a splatter of panic into a broken strip light overhead. In an instant every one of them had gone.
I thought they’re going to come back at me from all directions, but even as I thought it I knew it wasn’t true. This wasn’t hunting. It was more like the way a shoal breaks up when a diver or a–
I looked over at Nobody. The confused look on his face turned into panic.
When a diver or a–
With a deep deep horror I realised what was happening.
“You idiot!” I screamed, before I could help it, all my fear of Nobody swallowed up by something greater, more terrible, more familiar. “It’s here.
It’s been waiting. That loop was the only thing keeping us safe and you’ve destroyed it. You fucking fucking idiot.”
Nobody opened his mouth to speak but changed his mind.
Clarity and silence came.
I stood statue still, listening, feeling for any sign of it and trying not to make myself obvious. I wanted to run, more than anything I wanted to run, but that would mean splashing, churning the flows and spreading the scent of my panic and fear out through the waterways. All I could do was stay still and try not be seen.
A distant thud inside my mind and inside the hospital at the same time.
‘Ludovician,’ Nobody mouthed.
“You said you could capture it,” I whispered, painfully loud in the quiet.
“Not,” he said, “not without–I need a team, and equipment. It isn’t possible without–”
The circle of lamplight rippled the way tea ripples in a teacup. Nobody stopped mid-sentence and took a careful step back from the edge. “Territoriality,” he said. “It’s you it’s come for. You, not me.”
It’s come for me. I started to focus on my Mark Richardson personality, felt the tensions and weight of expression changing on my face. This closeup it might not be enough to hide me, but it was something. I had to try.
“What about the things you said about us being the same person?” I said, pushing the Mark Richardson attitude out in front of me like a shield.
“What?” Nobody backed further away from the edge of the light. “I didn’t say that. Why would I say we were the same person?”
I felt my eyebrows come down. “You said–”
There was another bang, louder this time. The bow wave of something large and just out of sight washed through the light circle, distorting the geometry of the black and white tiles with rolling dips and waves.
“Oh, Christ.” Nobody held onto the neck of the standing lamp with one hand and circled slowly around it, looking out into the dark.
Mark Richardson, I focused with everything I had. Mark Richardson Mark Richardson Mark Richardson.
“So far out,” Nobody was saying quietly to himself and I could hear his feet stepping around and around the lamp. “So far out. The beauty of it, the simplicity. So big and so deep. Over such depths. The things I. The things I–”
He screamed a high-pitched and horrible scream.
I thought he’d dropped onto his knees but he hadn’t–his left leg had been pulled through the black and white tiled floor up to the thigh. The ground stayed solid and real under the rest of his body–his hands and elbows pushing and scrambling against it and the foot on the end of his stretched-out right leg kicking and squealing against the varnish–but his left leg had passed down into the tile and concrete as if the ground were completely insubstantial.
His thrashing body made a single powerful downwards jerk.
He became silent and still. He gulped, spat, gulped again. His head lolled.
“Oh, God,” he said.
For a few seconds he just hung there, then–another jerk. His mouth opened to scream and his entire body vanished under the floor.
The standing lamp rocked from side to side on its wide round base, stretching the circle of light into a swinging yellow oval–back and forth and back and forth. The white tiles flushed red for a moment in an under-the-ice plume. The colour dispersed in swirls and was gone. The lamp slowed its rocking–back and forth and back and forth. The circle of light steadied, stopped.
Everything was still.
I was alone.
I screwed down my eyes again–Mark Richardson Mark Richardson Mark Richardson. But the fear had me shaking and my lips juddered out sound as I thought the name over and over in my head. “Mmm, mm–mmm.” Trying not the think about the floor, trying not to think about the solid flat surface abandoning me and my being dragged down into deep waters. “Mmm, mmm–mmmm.”
A hand landed on my shoulder.
“Shhh,” a girl’s voice said, close behind my ear.
I froze.
“Do you still smoke those horrible menthol cigarettes?”
“No. No, I–” Babbling not thinking. “No, I don’t–”
“Well, you do now.”
Another hand reached around me and pushed a lit cigarette into my mouth.
16
Ludovician
The tang and noseburn sharpness of the cigarette lifted me out of my panicking self like a slap. The hand on my shoulder squeezed a little.
“Okay,” the girl’s voice whispered. “Stay still and listen. Here’s what’s going to happen. On the count of three, I’m going to sprint across the room and I’m going to grab one of those chairs, then I’m going to use it to smash one of the windows at the far end of the ward. You’re going to come with me, grabbing Nobody’s laptop on the way. Got it?”
The cigarette unwound smoke into my eyes. I squinted and nodded.
“Good. You’ll have to run as fast as you can. Make sure you get in and out of the lamplight quickly. Keep moving forwards. Don’t stop, don’t look down more than you have to and don’t look behind you at all. Are you clear on everything?”
&n
bsp; I nodded again.
“Okay. Are you ready to try this now?
“Yes.”
“One. Two. Three.”
I threw myself towards the circle of light as quickly as I could but the whisperer overtook me within a few paces, striking forwards in a flat-out sprint. The pumping adrenaline only gave me snapshots of her as she broke into the circle of light ahead–black hair, army jacket, the flashing yellow soles of her boots. She snatched the chair by the back as she ran, her momentum sending it whipping out behind her and then she was gone again into the dark. I hit the light half a second later, slowed to a jogging crouch and scooped up the laptop from the black and white tiles. Picking up speed, I hoisted it up with a forearm muscle wrench and pinned it flat against my chest and then–my foot skidded on something on the floor. I fell forwards out of control, hands out into a heap and the laptop skipping away over the tiles in front of me like a skimming stone. Sprawled out and half-winded, I turned to see what I’d fallen over. One of the Dictaphones. For the smallest slice of a second–not enough time for thought, just urge and impulse–my mind pulled in two directions. I looked ahead of me to see the faint silhouette of the girl pulling at the blinds over the window, trying to rip them down. I turned back. The tape player was only inches from my boot. Jumping to my feet, I reached for it, grabbed it and ran the few paces back into the circle of light. Without stopping I threw the Dictaphone into Nobody’s leather bag, still open on the floor. I grabbed the second tape player, and then the third, throwing them into the bag. Where was the fourth, the broken one?
