by Steven Hall
I turned back to the doctor. “Drink it?”
“Yes, you have to drink the concept of the water, to be able to taste it and be refreshed by it.”
“How am I going to do that?”
“There are two types of people in the world, Eric. There are the people who understand instinctively that the story of The Flood and the story of The Tower of Babel are the same thing, and those who don’t.”
I was about to speak but–
“You must have drunk the water and written your story by tomorrow morning. I’ll come back to collect you then.” Without waiting for a reply, the doctor turned and headed off down the corridor. I thought about shouting after him but I delayed a few seconds, waited too long, and then he was gone.
Ian wasn’t too pleased when I turned on the bedroom light. He had the expression big tomcats sometimes have when they’ve been poked awake for a family photograph.
“Sorry,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed.
Ian’s ear went flick.
I picked up the glass and poked around inside it. The paper strips made a swishing hissing sound as my finger disturbed them. Conviction. I closed my eyes and tried to convince myself that the swishing was the hiss of water running through a long hollow pipe. When I’d got the thought fixed as firmly and intently as I could, I took my finger out of the glass and tipped it up against my mouth. The papers rolled up against my lips in an airy ball-chunk, a few dry tickly strands finding their way to my teeth and tongue. I opened my eyes, picked and spat them out one at a time, rolled the last one into slightly pulpy ball and flicked it away.
I stared into the glass for a while. The little white paper strips sat tangled together each one with the word WATER showing or half-showing, or not showing at all. I vaguely remembered something about a small vial of powder that turns into blood when enough devoted religious people stare at it. The wine becomes the blood of Christ came into my head from somewhere and I thought Oh great.
Conviction. Conviction. Conviction. I picked up the glass again and knocked it back, opening my mouth wide and fully expecting the taste and feel of water to come flooding in all cold and heavy. Instead, the paper tumbled down and my mouth became a hamster cage. I spat the strips out into the glass, some wet and sticky with mucus strings. At least one stuck to the roof of my mouth so far back it was almost in my throat. I poked my finger in, trying to peel it away with my nail, almost retching.
I put the glass down on the bedside table. The idea of water? If the seams between the physical and the conceptual were there, I couldn’t find them let alone start unpicking, so instead I took up Fidorous’s ancient paintbrush. You have to write your story with this. As much of it as you can remember and in as much detail as possible.
I stood up.
The paintbrush pointed out level and steady.
I began.
I was unconscious. I’d stopped breathing…
Holding your arm out in front of you for any length of time takes much more strength than you might expect.
I finally put the paintbrush down onto the bedside table and rubbed my face with my hands. The whole thing had taken–how many hours? Two, three? Hard to tell in a world of electric lighting but I’d done what the doctor asked, written out my story into the air. I felt sick. I hadn’t eaten for a long, long time and although I wasn’t especially hungry, I knew the sick feeling would only go away if I found myself some food. I started to need the toilet too and it occurred to me that whatever I might be going through, the mechanics of my body would only ever run silently in the background for so long. There was something reassuring in that, the repetition, the anchor of it. Shaking out my aching arm to stop it cramping, I headed for the bedroom door.
I flushed the toilet and washed my hands, thinking absently about a shower in the small yellowy cubicle in the corner of the room but also knowing I was too tired, too dead on my feet; the edges of my thoughts were already fluttering out of the reach of my sluggish shutting-down brain. I needed to eat and collapse; everything else would have to wait.
I left the bathroom and went around the book corridor corner to the kitchen door.
It was open, the blue of an electric striplight shining a stripe across the floor and up the book spines on the opposite wall. I heard the sounds of a kettle, a coffee spoon rattling in a mug. I leaned around the doorframe. Scout. Something–my nerves, my blood–jumped and froze at seeing her, a fountain turning to ice and static inside of me.
She saw me before I could pull my head back, her thumb coming up and wiping under her eyes as she turned away.
“I didn’t hear you coming,” she said.
“The corridors.” I didn’t know what to say. “The books on the walls dampen the sound down, I think.”
She nodded, facing the kettle, waiting for it to boil.
We both stood there. Slow seconds ticking.
“How’s it going?”
“Alright,” she said. “I think I’ve got the laptop connection stabilised.”
I nodded even though she couldn’t see me. “That’s good.”
“You know what,” she said, “can we just not do this?” She turned around and her eyes were glassy and drawn under in red where she’d been crying. “I’m tired and I’m trying to stay awake and concentrate and anyway, I don’t need to pretend to give a shit about you anymore, do I? Remember? That’s right, isn’t it?”
“You’re the one who lied.” A childish thing to say. “How am I supposed to–”
“That’s right, because you know everything, don’t you? You know everything I’m thinking and feeling.”
Something cold inside me said, “I know the facts.”
“I know the facts.” She shoved her unmade coffee away. “Just fuck yourself, alright, Eric? Just go and fuck yourself,” and she pushed past me, out of the room.
On my own, staring at the floor, standing in the doorway.
At some point, the bubbling kettle turned itself off with a loud click.
Above the word tunnels, at the corridor edge of the library’s underground stacks, a great and streamlined notion glides slowly to a stop. It tips and bobs slightly in sluggish event-currents created by occasional librarians and visiting scholars. The mouth of Occam’s razors and malice of forethought gapes and then closes. Slashed ellipsis gills flush and flare. The Ludovician’s eye is a void-black zero, a drop of ink, a dark hole sunk deep into the world. The thought-shark seems to be listening, or thinking.
Somewhere down below, my eyes flicker in dream-sleep.
Nightmares.
I woke up with a jolt, panicking at the unfamiliar covers over me and the blur of a strange ceiling up above. And then I remembered where I was. The First Eric Sanderson’s bedroom. My muscles relaxed. I tried to chase after the dream, get a look at it, but it was already gone, evaporated and forgotten like so many others.
What time was it? The light I’d left on glowed the exact same yellow as before and it could have been any-when, seconds or hours after I’d finally climbed into the bed. The days and the nights were meaningless here, replaced with switches and a steady electric forever.
I thought about the yellow Jeep, the rain, the air.
“You’ve missed something.”
I shuffled up onto my elbows, peered down the line of the duvet to see someone sitting at the bottom of the bed. Fidorous.
I’d crawled under the covers still dressed so I swung myself slowly up into a sitting position.
“What?”
“In these books, you’ve overlooked something. It really is very clever.”
I tried to shake focus myself. Fidorous was reading my Light Bulb Fragment books.
“Hey. You can’t just walk in and go through my stuff.”
“I didn’t. You left it behind last night.”
He was right. I’d forgotten the plastic bag, left it in the room with the table and the candles.
“It still doesn’t mean you should be reading them.”
Th
e doctor’s eyes settled on me. Always so clear and empty, there was no way to tell what might be brewing behind them. I felt the smallest twist of anxiety.
“So, you don’t want to know what it is you’ve missed?”
Still foggy and drowsy, I lifted my hand, half wanting him to give me the books and half preparing to snatch them. The result was a not quite anything gesture which wasn’t strong enough to get either thing done, especially as I really did want to know what he was talking about.
“This QWERTY code,” the doctor said, ignoring me. “Your notes here, and here, and, yes, here, suggest it’s random. I’m not sure it is.”
I rubbed my fingers through my hair as if the extra static might help fire up my brain.
The QWERTY code was part of the encryption used on The Light Bulb Fragment text. In one big mouthful, it meant that a correctly decoded letter could always be found adjacent to the letter it had been encoded as on a standard QWERTY keyboard layout, like this:
Here, the encoded letter is an F, so the correctly decoded letter must be either E, R, T, D, G, C, V or B. As the first Eric Sanderson wrote, there didn’t seem to be any pattern which might predict which of the eight possible letters would turn out to be the correct one and this made the decoding process very slow and painstaking.
“You mean you think there’s a system?”
“Yes,” Fidorous nodded. “But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Look.” He took a pen from the inside of his jacket pocket and found a clean page in one of the notebooks. “The very first letter of the whole Light Bulb Fragment is the C from ‘Clio’s masked and snorkelled head’, correct?”
“Yeah.”
“But before you applied the QWERTY to decode it, your notes say this letter was originally a V–”
“–meaning the correct letter was one space to the left of the given letter, yes?”
“Yes.”
“So we take our pen and we draw a horizontal arrow running from right to left, like this:”
“Okay.”
“The second letter you translated was the L in Clio, but originally this letter appeared as a Z. It gets a bit tricky here because of the way the letters roll around at the edges, but the connection works like this:”
“From Z to L is effectively a diagonal up and left move, so, going from where we finished the first arrow, we draw another, this one going diagonal up and left, like this:”
“With me so far?”
Groggy, I was straining to take any of this in. “Completely with you,” I lied.
“Good. Almost there. The third letter you translated was the I. Originally, this appeared as a J. The I is diagonal up and right from the J, so our next line goes like this:”
“The fourth letter is the O. This was a K originally. This is one of the few letters we have a choice with. We can either draw another line going diagonal up right or, with the roll-around, we can decide to draw a line going diagonal down right. Let’s choose down.”
“Now the ‘D’ decodes into the ‘S’. That’s a horizontal left to right…
“There. So what do you see?”
I looked at the page and the ground shifted inside my head.
“It’s a letter. The letter e.”
“I thought so too. The system isn’t perfect–as you’ve seen there are a few lines which can go one of two ways–but with a little work it should be possible to understand how the letters have been formalised and recognise each of them as they appear.”
“So wha–”
“Well, if I’m right, this QWERTY encryption doesn’t just encode a single piece of writing, it meshes two together. What you’re looking at is the first letter of a second text, smaller but quite distinct from the first.”
“So there’s more to The Light Bulb Fragment?”
“Yes. At least, there’s certainly more of something.”
I stared at the letter made from biro arrows.
“Unfortunately,” Fidorous said, closing the Light Bulb books and handing them to me, “we can’t give this any more time now.”
“Doctor, if there’s more text here, I need to know what it says.”
“I’m afraid events are already catching up with us. Scout has stabilised a connection between the laptop and Mycroft Ward’s online self. We have to get underway.”
I tried to say get underway where? but I didn’t get a chance.
“Now, how did you do last night, with the water and the brush?”
“I finished with the brush,” I said, “but the paper in the glass is still just paper. There’s–I didn’t know how to make it happen.”
“Hmmm. Where’s the brush?”
I found it and passed it to Fidorous. He weighed it in his hand, thinking for a moment. “You’re sure you wrote everything out with this?”
I nodded. “I was doing it for hours. I didn’t get to sleep till–what time is it now?”
“Eight o’clock.”
“I’ve had three hours’ sleep.”
“Well,” the doctor tucked the brush away in an inside pocket. “That will have to do. Bring the glass with you. You’ll just have to keep working on it at the Orpheus.”
“The Orpheus?”
“Our boat,” the doctor said, getting to his feet. “Use the bathroom and pack whatever you need to pack. I’ll be back for you in fifteen minutes. Make sure you bring a coat and those Dictaphones too, we might well need them.”
With my hair still wet from the shower and wearing combat pants, boots and a heavy, high-collared jacket from First Eric Sanderson’s room, with the Light Bulb books and all my other finds in the rucksack on my back, with the glass of papers in one hand and a carrier bag full of Dictaphones in the other, I followed Fidorous through book-lined corridors.
“What about Ian?”
“Your cat already found his way down there. He’s a curious sort of animal, isn’t he?”
“You said you’ve got a boat in here?” Tired and overloaded, I was getting past the point of being surprised by anything.
“You’ll see, not far now.”
A few minutes later, our corridor ended in a staircase leading down to a door.
“This is the dry harbour,” Fidorous said.
We stepped out into a supermarket-sized cellar with a flat concrete floor, a high ceiling and row after row of light bulbs hanging on long spiderwebbed cables.
Scout was there. She was working on something in the middle of the space.
Come on, I told myself. This is it. This is how it all finishes, one way or the other. You just have to be strong for a little while longer. I followed Fidorous out onto the floor.
Scout was wearing a heavy blue waterproof coat I hadn’t seen before. It looked like she was making something, a big something, some sort of floor plan from planks and strips of wood, with boxes and tea chests and other odd bits and pieces carefully arranged inside. I recognised Nobody’s laptop standing on an upturned plastic crate in the middle of the assemblage. A cable, presumably the all-important internet connection, unwound from its back and disappeared up into the ceiling. I spotted five other computers too, ancient 1980s models with thick cream plastic casings. One of these computers had been placed at each corner of the floor plan, like this:
Two things hit me about that layout. I didn’t know which realisation rocked me harder.
“Those white computers,” I said, “they’re for creating a conceptual loop, aren’t they?”
“Correct, an extremely powerful one using streaming data instead of recorded sound.”
“And,” I said, “they’re arranged in the shape of a boat.”
“Yes, they are.” Fidorous swept out his arm in the direction of the assemblage. “Welcome to the Orpheus.”
Scout glanced up from a nest of plugs and adaptors then turned away.
“Come over, come over,” the doctor said, leading me towards the collection of things laid out on the floor. “Take a closer look.”
I hesitated.
“Ther
e are gaps at this end,” Scout said, straightening up. Hearing her speak made something alive jerk in my throat but she looked calm, unruffled, as if last night hadn’t happened. “Doctor, do you reckon you’re going to need more wood for the back?”
Fidorous must have been totally caught up in the idea of the assemblage because he seemed completely wrong-footed by the sudden thickness of the air. “Yes,” he said, after a second. “Yes, I think more wood would be useful.”
“Okay then, I’ll see what I can find.” And then she turned towards the door.
The doctor watched her until she’d left the room and then he looked at me but he decided not to say anything.
“What is it?” I said, walking towards the assemblage, trying to change the subject.
“It’s a boat,” Fidorous said, catching up with me. “A shark-hunting boat. The shark-hunting boat you might say. Come this way around, I’ll show you.”
1. Planks. The outline of the Orpheus mainly described in flat planks of wood. More planks had also been placed inside this outline to fill empty spaces. The planks were a mixture of fresh wood and old floorboards, shelves, skirting boards, slats, windowsills, parts of door panels etc. Some planks were old and fossilised under layers of chipped white gloss paint, some holed and marked where bolts and fasteners had once been, some snapped and rough and splintery, and some new and smelling of sweet sappy sawdust. Pieces of hardboard, plywood and chipboard had been included, but basic wooden planking made up the majority of the floor plan.
2. Boxes. A large oblong central section of the floor plan had been built up to about waist height with a collection of boxes. These included cardboard boxes, tea chests, plastic packing crates etc. Most of the boxes appeared to be empty but there were several exceptions to this: a box which had once been the packaging for a small fridge was now loaded with cookbooks and a large tea chest had been plastered on the inside with pages from an interior design catalogue, while another contained greasy machine parts, cogs and a car battery.
