by Steven Hall
“I’m guessing this is it.”
“Yeah.” I traced out the route out on the map for Scout to see–
“I think we’re in the ‘a’.”
“Very good,” she smiled. “See? I knew you had it in you.”
A cry and half an hour’s quiet sitting had been enough to melt the cold from her eyes. Except for some slight apprehension, which could easily have been me projecting, Scout was back on form. Added to that, Ian was back in his carrier under his tried and trusted thundercloud and I’d just passed my basic skills in wordmap reading. As far as these things went, our team was back on an even keel. And we’d made it to the ‘a’. Which was something else altogether.
The ‘a’ chamber seemed slightly smaller than the ‘R’ and much less tidy, the floor buried under scrunched and tipped-over piles of biroed papers. Just like the ‘R’, a single hanging bulb lit the space and the walls were made from hardback books interlocking like bricks. Mostly though, this workmanship was obscured by the scruffy drifts and mounds of written-on paper which piled up to waist and shoulder height against it. A spiral staircase stood in the middle of the room, winding itself up into the ceiling. The staircase was made of old leather-bound books the size of paving slabs, not overly grand or complex but functional and serious like a great industrial drill. At the top of the stairs, six or seven feet above our heads, was what looked like a small ledge.
“That’s us,” Scout said, pointing up to the ledge.
“That’s where we’re going?”
“The end of the trail.”
“What’s up there?”
“You’ll see in about thirty seconds.”
For better or for worse, our journey was over.
I heard a noise. At the shadier edge of the room a stack of paper sheets collapsed in a sliding, fluttery foosh.
Scout looked at me. I looked at Scout.
“What was that?”
Palm flat down, she made a lower your voice sign.
“Is there something in there?”
“Look,” she said, “there.”
Near the collapsed pile, another of the heaps moved. The papers lifted up momentarily then sank back down. It happened again a few seconds later and then we saw a ripple, something travelling under the stacked sheets and making its way around the edge of the room.
Scout put her arm out in front of my body and mouthed back up. We stepped backwards as quietly as we could towards the entrance, slow-crunching the papers under our feet.
“No, it’s not,” I said. “But it can’t get in–”
“Hello?” Scout said.
The shuffling movement under the heaps stopped. There was a shudder. A couple of paper piles started to slide. A mound of sheets and pages domed upwards like a landfill bubble. Then in a sloosh of skidding papers a man burst out.
“Good grief,” the man said staring at us.
Scout made a big sigh and let her arms flop to her side.
“Eric Sanderson,” she said, “Dr Trey Fidorous.”
24
The Doctor of Language
I thought about the phrase gone to seed.
Maybe there should be types of gardener who visit bookish old men to trim and prune and generally tidy them up occasionally, because the real and actual Dr Trey Fidorous was as overgrown and tangled as an abandoned allotment. His thick salt-and-pepper hair had grown beyond Einstein-esque into a sort of mad rogue plume. A pen between his teeth, two tucked behind his ears and several others tucked and knotted and sticking out of his wild hair, made his head look like one of those deceptively fluffy cactuses. Blue, black, red and green biro writing covered the backs of his hands, creeper-vined its way up around wrists and forearms, and towards his rolled-up shirtsleeves, which themselves hadn’t been entirely spared. Scrumpled chunks of paper and collected pages bulged from the pockets of his black schoolboy trousers and patchy threadbare dressing gown. He was smallish and probably somewhere in his late sixties. The harsh light from the single bulb didn’t make it down through his hair canopy too well and the effect was like looking at a man who was peering out at you from the depths of a wardrobe. What I could see of his face was wrinkled and brown like an elastic band ball, only more active and capable–it reminded me of one of those big springs that can go down stairs on its own–and I got the feeling it had spent a lifetime being stretched around expressions of shock, delight, horror and God knows what else. All I could see of his eyes were a big pair of glasses with black plastic frames, like the ones Michael Caine wore in the sixties.
Dr Trey Fidorous. After all this time I’d actually found him. I could only stare.
The doctor took the pen out of his mouth, stared back.
“Eric Sanderson.” There was something hard in the way he said my name, something that shocked me. “What are you doing here?”
“He doesn’t remember anything,” Scout said, tucking her arm around me, thumb under the back of my waistband, pulling me towards her.
“Doesn’t he? Doesn’t he now?”
“I found him trying to follow the East to West Text Trail, but there’s nothing left of it really and there’s no way he could have–”
“And what on earth made you think I’d want to see him?”
“Where else would he go?”
“I’m sure I don’t have the faintest idea.”
“For Christ’s sake, Trey. He’s come back to you for help, he needs help.”
“He needs help. And that’s the reason you’ve brought him here is it, Scout?”
A silent second hung all fat and heavy, like a spider.
“Hello,” I said, not knowing what to say but desperate to say something, to crack the mood, to break up this argument I didn’t understand but was suddenly in the middle of at the same time. “Hello, hello. It’s me. I am actually here.”
Fidorous flashed back to me. “Oh, I doubt that, Eric,” he said, “because if you were you, here is the last place you would want to be.”
I felt myself take half a step back.
“I don’t–” I managed, feeling something turning hard and heavy in my stomach.
From the beginning I’d been focused on nothing but finding Dr Trey Fidorous, this legend, this half-myth from my long lost past, the only person in the world who might be able to help me. Now I realised the weight and size of my single-mindedness had been acting as a dangerous dam, holding back all the important, practical things I should have been asking myself.
I had no idea who this man really was or what his relationship with the First Eric Sanderson had been like. I’d walked into this completely unprepared.
“I don’t–” my mouth was still trying to say–“what’s–”
“But you did, didn’t you? You went and you did, and you didn’t give a shit about–”
“Stop it, Trey,” Scout said and I felt that force, that power inside her again. “He doesn’t remember what happened. He doesn’t remember anything. He’s lost it all, it’s all been taken. He’s hardly even the same person anymore. Look at him.”
He doesn’t remember what happened? How would she know what happened? I looked sideways, catching Scout’s eye for the smallest moment. There it was again, that bleakness, the empty beach. And something else too; some other emotion I didn’t quite understand; something secret hiding inside the anger tightening the muscles in her face. She blinked whatever it was it back, squeezed her hand gently against the back of my jeans and mouthed the word later, all without taking her attention away from the doctor.
The old man was about to come back with an explosion of his own, a shouting stretch-faced barrage from under that mass of hair. It almost happened, the world sucking in breath like the sea pulling back before a tsunami wave, but then it didn’t, he didn’t. In the heart of the pressure cooker, something gave.
Fidorous pulled his thick-rimmed glasses off, rubbed them carefully on the inside of his dressing gown sleeve. Old and tired, now the anger had gone, he squeezed at the bridge of his nose wit
h a finger and a thumb before slipping the glasses back on.
“Well,” is all he said, quietly.
“Yes,” Scout nodded.
I thought it best to say nothing at all.
“Well,” Fidorous said again, looking around himself and seeming to notice for the first time that he was thigh-deep in paper. “I suppose all this will be something of a shock to you?”
The sharpness was gone from his voice now, replaced with a more measured politeness-to-strangers tone.
“Just a little,” I said. I tucked my hand behind my back, hooking a couple of my fingers around a couple of Scout’s and squeezing. Her squeezing back was all the scaffolding in the world.
“No. It’s hardly the most efficient of filing systems, is it?” Fidorous began to kick his way out of the drift of papers in a procession of wumphs, crumps, flutters and sliding hisses. Ian shifted around in his carrier at the noise. “Still, I subscribe to the principle that if I’m meant to find what I happen to be looking for in here, I will. Usually, however…”
A response was required. I lifted my eyebrows, just a little, hoping I’d got it right.
The doctor cleared the deepest drifts of paper and dusted himself down. “Usually, however, I don’t.”
I squeezed Scout’s fingers.
“Doctor,” Scout said, “can we–”
The muffled howl of an alarm sounded somewhere up above us.
Fidorous jumped, stared wide-eyed up at the ceiling.
I followed his eyes up, risked a glance at Scout. “What’s that?”
“Fry.” The old man was suddenly on full alert, like a cat on its toes. “Fry in the system. Scout, did you close down the tunnel entrance after you?”
“I didn’t think we needed to.”
“It’s the season, they’re migrating. All the tunnels have to be shut.”
“What’s happening? Oh God, the Ludovician?”
“No,” Scout said, “fry–little thought fish. Harmless by themselves but if enough of them get in here, there’s a chance something bigger might be able to follow their trail.”
The doctor nodded. “–and if they ever made it all the way to the research centre–Scout, I need you to go back and close off the entrance you used. I want you to check the Milos and Ios tunnels too, in case they’re coming in through there. I’ll take Eric with me to help with the flush.”
“I think Eric should come with me.”
I nodded, turned to Scout. “I am coming with you. If it’s out there–”
“If in the very unlikely event the Ludovician is out there, then she’ll be much safer, and quicker, without you tagging along. Come on, time is of the essence, if too many fry find their way into the tunnels, we’ll never get them out.”
“He’s right,” Scout said to me. “I’ll be fine, and we need to keep the defences tight here.”
“Defences?”
“I’ll explain everything when I get back,” then, turning to Fidorous. “Doctor. Before…”
“Hmmm?”
“I have to bring you up to speed with a few things.”
“I imagine there are a lot of things you need to bring me up to speed with, but please, Dorothy, we have to have those tunnels closed. I’ll take care of the Tin Man here.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Oh.” The doctor took a second to look confused. “Isn’t it? I lose track sometimes.”
“Stop it. I need to–”
“Scout, the tunnels. Please.”
The alarm howled on.
Scout looked from him to me. I could only bring my palms up in a tell me what to do gesture. Her face set, Scout seemed to reach a conclusion. She nodded to the doctor then turned towards me, slid her hand around my waist.
That bleakness inside her again.
You okay? I mouthed.
She flashed me a slight, dry smile, then slipped her hand into my pocket and took the torch. “You’ll be fine here. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
I managed a quick okay as she turned and kicked off through the papers in a half-jog.
Just like that, Scout was gone. I felt a bump inside me, like when a train changes tracks at a junction.
“Come on.” Fidorous was already on his way to the spiral staircase. “We need to be at the control centre.” Then, turning to see me picking up Ian’s carrier–“No, no, no, leave your things. Get them later.”
“No, I can’t. My cat.”
The doctor came to a stop, turned, craned his neck. “You have a cat?”
The spiral staircase took us up to a ledge just below the ceiling and the ledge turned out to be the back of a shelf, the bottom shelf in a tall, wide bookcase. At first I thought the books had all been put on the shelf backwards, spines facing in and pages facing out but then I realised we–and the room of papers, the word tunnels, all of it–we were behind the bookcase, looking at it from the back. I struggle-balanced my way up after Fidorous, cat carrier in my left hand and my right arm stretched out like a tight-rope walker, trying to compensate for Ian who turned around and around in his box, probably not liking the way the floor disappeared below us as we climbed. I didn’t blame him, I wasn’t keen either. Missing books in the centre of the shelf made a space large enough to crawl through and that’s just what the doctor did, unexpectedly flexible for his age.
“Come on, pass the box through.”
I passed Ian through to Fidorous then squeezed through after them.
I found myself crawling out onto a carpet, a red one, expensive but old-fashioned. The alarm was louder up here.
Getting up to my feet, the room made me think gentlemen’s smoking lounge. Two green leather wingback chairs, a desk lamp with a green glass shade and dangling pull chain, a table with a cut glass or crystal decanter full of a brown, and probably alcoholic, drink. Except for a facing doorway, all the walls had been completely covered in book cases. Or had they? Taking a closer look, I couldn’t tell whether the walls were covered in book cases or whether the walls themselves were made of books and mahogany; horizontal and vertical planes slotted in afterwards to give the impression of shelving. Is a zebra a white animal with black stripes or a black animal with white stripes? The room seemed balanced to go either way.
As I got myself together Fidorous let Ian out of his carrier and the two of them faced each other in the middle of the room.
“And you must be Toto,” Fidorous said.
“Meow,” the cat said back. He looked over to let me know he wasn’t at all pleased with the noise of the alarm or with this old man suddenly being in his personal space.
“Schools of fry like to pick at commas and the more old-fashioned letters. Nothing too big or obvious at first.” The doctor moved along quickly in a sort of stiff-legged superwalk, like a headmaster late for assembly. I had to jog to keep up with him. “In my experience,” he said, “they seem particularly keen on the long s.”
Ian pattered down the corridor ahead of us, ears back, tail low, running in that way cats run when they don’t like it that people are coming up fast behind them. The corridor itself branched left and right, doors appeared and there were cabinets and glass cases; displays of things I had no time to look into as we passed. At one point it opened up into a wide room piled up with radios, hundreds and hundreds of them all in heaps and most of them playing, tuned or half-tuned or just hissing out noise. Recording equipment hung down from the ceiling on cables, dangling over the highest point of each heap.
“What’s this?” I asked the doctor as we jogged the winding path between the plastic piles.
“What?”
“What are the radios for?”
“Fertiliser,” the doctor said.
The alarm became louder and louder the further we went. The place was huge. Eventually, the doctor ducked to the left, up a smaller branch corridor and through a doorway into a room filled with computers and televisions and microphones, wires and cables everywhere, disappearing into the ceiling and winding out of control all ov
er the floor.
“No no no no no. Come on.” Fidorous slapped his palm against the side of one of the computer tower units.
The alarm was deafening in here. Fidorous slapped again at the tower then changed tack, frantically inspecting, untangling and chasing cables, wiggling sockets and ports. Abruptly, the alarm stopped.
“Aaahhh.” Fidorous looked up from a bundle of sockets and jacks. “There now. Come on, come on, you’re no use out there, are you?”
I took a few steps into the room. The doctor climbed over a box of machinery half-covered in wires then ducked to inspect a monitor, tapping frantically on a nearby keyboard. “Where are you, where are you?…Nope.” He turned, clambered, moved to another screen. Tap tap tap. Taptaptaptaptap. “No…Ah, yes. There you are.” He looked up at me. “A shoal of fry in Thera. Come over to this panel, no, this one here.”
I crossed the room, climbing over wires and cables, over part-dissected servers and hard drives.
“Now then. When I say, I want you to press control, alt and delete on that keyboard there. Do you understand?”
“What are you going to do?”
“I asked you if you understood.”
That edge again. “Sorry,” I said. “Yes, I understand.”
“Okay,” Fidorous placed his fingers and pressed down on two different keyboards. “Now.”
I hit the buttons.
