by Steven Hall
Ian and the doctor snoozed, Scout kept herself to herself up on the flying deck and I kept myself awake by picking splinters from the old wooden floor, listening to the chunk whiiirr of the printer and scanning the swells and dips of the ocean for any shadow, any movement. I looked and looked until my eyes lost all sense of perspective. The sun shone down hot. My skin smelled tangy and the deck smelled of last summer’s seaweed and salt.
Eventually, doctor left his fishing seat. He came back with some badly made sandwiches, beers and pieces of meat for Ian. Scout came down to eat and I thought there might be another explosion, but she took her plate and can without speaking and sat next to the cat in the shade of the cabin’s back wall. All my missed meals caught up with me at once and I bolted down the sandwich in quick and hungry gulps. Fidorous took his plate and beer back to his fishing chair. I watched him eating slowly and thoughtfully, his eyes drifting between the distant seagulls dive-bombing the paper trail, and the fishing line bobbing just beyond the gentle churn of our engines.
“I didn’t realise how hungry I was.” Hours had passed without anyone saying anything and I needed to talk.
The doctor nodded vaguely, staring out to sea.
The sun sat lower now, absently going about its gentle sink from bright white towards deep red.
“But that wasn’t real food, was it?” I tried again to bump a conversation to life. “Just the idea of food. But what I’m wondering is, if the idea of food tastes like food and feels like food when you eat it, where does that put us?”
Without taking his eyes off the sea, Fidorous brought a hand up in a slow quiet signal towards me.
“What?” I whispered, stretching my neck. I stood up carefully and looked out over the stern but I only saw white wet pages rolling in the swell. “What’s wrong?”
The doctor’s fishing reel burst to life with a high-speed ticking, fast unwinding as the line snapped taut and raced away like a cheese cutter through the waves.
“Whoa!” Fidorous put his feet against the backboard and pulled back hard, the heavy-duty rod bending under the strain like a toy bow.
“The Ludovician?” I found myself stepping back “You’ve caught the Ludovician with a fishing rod?”
The doctor fought against the pull from under the waves, hauling and straining the hidden something in with a few hard-fought reel clicks at a time. The line sliced left then right, the whole thing a complicated dance of tension and manoeuvring.
“I don’t think so.”
I turned to see Scout behind me.
“Scout,” the doctor hissed through clamped teeth, “what the hell are you doing? Get up there and cut the engines or we’ll lose him.”
“That’s not the shark. I’ve seen it and an animal as big as that wouldn’t just–”
“Scout, do as you’re told and cut the damn engines.”
She turned on her heel and stalked across the deck.
I looked to Fidorous. “What can I do?”
“Wet down the reel. That bucket there, tip some water on the line or it’s going to overheat.” He heaved and the rod tip dragged forwards, the line slicing angles into the sea. I grabbed the bucket and doused the cable and the reel. “That’s it,” the doctor strained to speak as he fought against the rod. “We’ll wear him out and get him to the surface. Spear. Where’s your spear?”
I’d left it next to Nobody’s laptop.
“I’ll get it.” I crossed the deck as the engine stopped. Scout came down the steps and past me, calling out to the doctor as she headed for the stern.
“Honestly, it’s not our shark. It’s going to be a big something else, some sort of–what are they called–some sort of Remora. You’re not–”
I’d almost made it back with the spear as she stopped talking.
“What’s going on?” I jogged up to see Fidorous’s fishing rod stretched straight and still over the back of the boat, the line hanging loose in the water. “Has it got away?”
Scout looked at me and rolled her eyes.
“This isn’t right.” We both turned to the doctor.
The line hung loose in the water, not giving anything away.
Scout folded her arms and Fidorous turned the reel handle an experimental couple of clicks. This time there was no resistance from under the waves. The doctor wound the reel faster until the severed end of the fishing line came dripping up into the air. He uncoupled the rod from its fastenings and pulled the whole thing in.
“Look–high-grade heavy duty cable and it’s sliced right through. Some sort of Remora?”
Scout took the line and inspected it.
“Well, I’ve been known to be wrong,” she said, “from time to time.”
“So that was it?” I asked. “The Ludovician?”
Fidorous untangled himself from the fishing chair and stood up, stretching out his arms and shoulders. “I’d say so, wouldn’t you?”
I laid the spear carefully on deck and covered the couple of feet to the back edge of the boat. With one hand placed securely on the laserprinter for balance, I leaned out over the stern and looked down–just the blue of the ocean and two white, waterlogged paper pages.
“So where is it now?” I said, still looking down. “Is it still here?”
“I don’t know,” Fidorous said. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Probably. Eric, I’m going to need another line and fresh bait. I want you to–”
Thud. The entire deck lurched with momentum and I was thrown forwards, smashing my knees into the back of the printer. A shock of hard cracking pain and my weight breaking the machine free of its fastenings, sending me and it tumbling out and down over the side. Me in the air, upside down, falling head first. The ocean rushing up and hitting the back of my neck with a hard splash and then–
The surface receding in hiss and bubbles below my feet.
Fingers clamped my wrist and forearm and dragged me up back towards the surface with a
Fingers clamped my wrist and forearm and dragged me back up towards the surface with a
Fingers clamped my wrist and forearm and dragged me back up towards the surface with a
Fingers clamped my wrist and forearm and dragged me back up towards the surface with a
Fingers clamped my wrist and forearm and dragged me back up towards the surface with a
Fingers clamped my wrist and forearm and dragged me back up towards the surface with a
Fingers clamped my wrist and forearm and dragged me back up towards the surface with a
Fingers clamped my wrist and forearm and dragged me back up towards the surface with a
tug-of-war heave, me hauled kicking and scraping my back and ribs and hips over the stern’s backboard and collapsing to the decking like a half-drowned animal with a thump and splatter of water. Electricity sparking out-of-control panic in every synapse in my brain and my body shaking humming thumping with fear and Scout still clutching me and shouting you fucking moron stop falling in the fucking water and her arms around me and me wrapping my arms around her and clutching for dear life and her still saying you fucking moron, you fucking moron into my ear and my hand on the back of her head holding her against me and saying Jesus and sorry, God, I’m so sorry over and over and me kissing the side of her neck like I’ll never see it again and her kissing me on my face and then us kissing each other properly and then Fidorous shouting Scout Scout–
“–Scout, come on, he’s going round to the front.”
She lifted away from me, pushing the hair out of her face and climbing up to her feet. “Are you okay?”
“I think so. Go on, I’ll catch up.”
Scout jogged off in the direction of the doctor’s voice and I struggled upright. I felt a sharp jab of pain in my left knee and I hissed as I tried to put my weight on it. I saw Scout disappearing around the side of the cabin and heard Fidorous saying, “He went for the boat, attacked it. He came straight at us.”
I limped, dripping, around the cabin and
onto the front deck. Fidorous stood at the end of the railed gang plank which extended out over the water from the prow. He was holding something, a strange sort of gun.
“Eric Sanderson,” he called on seeing me. “Come on. He’s up and he’s a monster.”
“I know,” I managed, shock-shaking and weak. “I know he is.”
“Come over, come over. We’ve got him now. Scout, how are you doing?”
“Almost there.”
I looked around the deck but I couldn’t see her.
“He’s coming around,” the doctor called back to me and to the wherever-she-was Scout, pointing with his gun contraption. “He’s coming around.”
I looked out in the direction the doctor pointed and I saw it, I saw it–a high, hard triangular fin cutting through the blue, making a slow turn towards the Orpheus. A long, dark shadow under the waves.
The fin rose higher in the water, rolling out a long V of white foam as the shark picked up speed towards us.
My heart pumped sour milk and liquid nitrogen.
“It’s solid,” I said. “It’s real. It’s a real shark.”
“No, it just looks like it. He’s just like everything else here. Scout, come on, he’s coming. My God, look at the size of him.”
Huge and sleek and dappled grey, the Ludovician seemed to glide, weightless, in the clear sunny water just below its own tumbling bow wave. My legs backed me up against the cabin wall.
“Shit, Jesus, he’s going to ram us again.”
“No, no,” Fidorous raised the gun up to his eye.” He’s circling around and he’s going to give us the perfect–Scout?”
“Clear. Go.”
Something between a bang and an air pressure thwap erupted from Fidorous’s shoulder. A black bolt trailing cable striped across the waves and punctured the shark just behind the dorsal fin as the doctor bounced back from the recoil. Harpoon. A noise up close to my left made me jump and turn in surprise. One of the barrels of phone books and speed diallers leapt, threw itself across the deck, tumbled overboard and raced skidding across the ocean after the retreating Ludovician.
“Got him!” Fidorous whipped his cap off and threw it across the deck. “Did you see that? I got a barrel on your shark.” Flushed and adrenaline-pumped, the old man waved the harpoon gun up to me like proof. “Tekisui and Susumu. It’s like in the old stories, Eric, just like in the old stories.”
I watched the clear barrel bounce, hop and spray fast and away through the waves, then let myself sink slowly and painfully down the wooden slats on the cabin’s side.
31
Feelings or Whatever
The barrel chased the shadow of the shark and we chased the barrel, Scout at the wheel with the boat full ahead, thump-rising every wave and heaving out black smoke like an escaped Victorian factory. Fidorous, still out at the end of the Orpheus’s prow plank activated a remote control. Collapsed and soaking on the deck I could just hear the beep sequences of dialled phone numbers and an electronic ringing tone–burr burr, burr burr–over the angry growl of the engine and the smack-eyed spray of the waves.
“It works,” the Doctor shouted, waving as the wind and bounce buffeted his wild hair. He struggled to push his Michael Caines back up his nose and waved over at me again. “It works. The phone books and the diallers create drag. All the lives and flows and interactions the shark has to pull along behind him slow him down, tire him out. And we’re using this year’s books and real-time phone calls, current events. They’ll keep him up on the surface where we want him.”
Using the cabin wall, I pulled myself up to my feet.
The barrel skidded and hiss-bounced across the water ahead of us.
“It doesn’t look like it’s slowing him down enough.”
“No, but he won’t be able to keep that up for long. I’m going to put another one on him just to make sure. What are you like at knots?”
“I’m, well–”
I cut myself off, pointing over the doctor’s shoulder and out to sea. He turned around just in time to see the barrel suck down under the water and vanish.
“Well.” He was quiet for a moment, staring at the empty ocean. “Scout, cut the engine. Eric, that lever over there. Drop the anchor.”
“Where did he go?” Scout called down from the flying bridge.
“He went under,” I said.
“Can he do that?”
“Evidently,” Fidorous climbed back down onto the deck proper. “But not for long. That barrel will drag him up and when it does we’ll be here waiting.”
“He’s clever,” I said, maybe to myself. “It’s like–it’s like he was waiting to knock me over the side.”
“A Ludovician shark is just a big stupid eating machine.” Fidorous scooped up his cap and pulled it into place over his salt and pepper mop. “He attacked the boat and you were standing near the edge, that’s all.”
I nodded, looking out to sea.
“And you’re absolutely sure there’s no way that big stupid eating machine can get to us?” Scout asked, coming around the cabin.
Fidorous looked from Scout to me and back again, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“How many times? No. The Orpheus is built on a conceptual loop three times stronger than the one that’s been keeping Eric safe all this time. We’ll stay in here, he’ll stay out there, and when that barrel drags him up we’ll finish the job. The Ludovician and Mycroft Ward will be gone for good and we’ll go home. Now, Sanderson, the anchor, if you please.”
After half an hour, it became clear that the Ludovician wasn’t coming up any time soon, no matter what Dr Trey Fidorous might say or think. I volunteered to stay on deck and keep watch for the barrel while Scout and the doctor went below to organise a meal and drinks. I’d meant to change my clothes again, but the shorts and the Hawaiian shirt were light and had dried out quickly in the heat. I’d lost my glasses and straw hat when I went over the side though and the back of my neck was hot, burned and painful whenever my collar rubbed against it. I felt the sting across my forehead and cheekbones too.
Evening came. The sky began to turn dusty and I decided to stay out by the prow in the cabin’s long shadow, keeping up my watch on the waves. Scout did something to Nobody’s laptop and the doctor cleared the remains of our food away and did whatever else needed to be done on boats in the quiet times. Ian reappeared and walked around the deck in clockwise circles for a while, then disappeared below deck as the air started to get chilly.
More time passed, still no sign of the barrel or the shark. The sky turned from deep red to blue-grey and the ocean swell subsided into an unconscious sort of rocking. A cool breeze breathed between the deck railings and soothed my sore neck with gentle fingers.
I knew something inside me had changed.
Partly, I’d offered to stay on deck and keep watch so I’d have time to sit and think about what the something might be. I kept visualising an old coin fallen by the side of an overgrown path, one face on show and exposed to the elements for years and years, the other face hidden and almost forgotten in the mud. When the word water turned to real water in the cellar, it was as if the coin had flipped over. The familiar face became buried and the other face came out into the air. The change wasn’t huge–none of the memories the Ludovician had taken were back and none of the earlier Light Bulb dreams were any clearer–but it was there. The coin had flipped. From somewhere inside me a phrase rose up, the view becomes the reflection, and the reflection, the view.
“Hey.”
Scout stood behind me on the deck. She was wearing that big waterproof coat I’d last seen in Fidorous’s cellar.
“Hey,” I said back.
“I brought you a jacket. It’s sort of grunge circa 1992, but, you know–”
“Thanks,” I said, pulling it on. “And listen–”
“Yeah, I know. Me too.”
She sat cross-legged next to me on the deck.
“I should have told you,” she said. “It wa
s stupid not to.”
“No,” I said, “it wasn’t. I completely get why you did it. I just–”
“You just have trust issues.”
I looked at her. “I have trust issues?”
We stared out at the quiet sea. I pulled the jacket over my shoulders and watched her playing with her thumbs. “Is the laptop okay?”
“Oh, I was just tinkering with the connection. I’ve managed to crack its priority ranking so that Ward’s less likely to notice it’s open. Should buy us more time.”
“Nice going.”
“Thank you.”
The quiet sea. The distant gulls. Scout sitting next to me.
“I said some horrible things, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” she said. “You did. But I pulled you out of the water anyway.”
“Scout.”
“I thought you were going to die, you tool.”
“So did I. And I just–no, God that’s so lame.”
“Tell.”
“I was scared of leaving you thinking I meant any of that stuff.”
She nudged against me. “Awww.”
“Of course, I was also scared of that gigantic fucking shark.”
“Shush now,” she said, “you’re spoiling it.”
I tucked my arm around her and she leaned into me. “Forgive me?”
“You were an arsehole.”
“Hey, with some encouragement.”
“Yeeaah, but your arsehole-ness wasn’t for the greater good, was it?”
“No,” I said, embarrassed, “that’s true.”
“You were doing it because you’re emotionally stunted.”
“Damaged. Emotionally damaged.”
“Whatever.”
I ran my fingers through her fine dark hair and she squeezed her arms together around my waist. The breeze rolled around us, the gentle sea tipping the boat this way and that way.
“I’m going to say something now,” I said.
“Okay.”
“It’s going to make me look like an idiot.”
“Okay.”
“It might make you angry too.”
“Hmmm. Okay.”
