She Is Not Invisible

by Marcus Sedgwick

  “Why, Laureth?”

  “I just do. But I want you to do your best job ever of guiding me. Please. We need to find the reception desk.”

  “Laureth, it’s hot.”

  “I know. It will be cooler inside. They’ll have air-conditioning. Come on. Do you have Stan?”

  “Yes.”

  We went inside, and my heart was already pounding because this was our only lead, and if it turned out that Dad wasn’t here, I would sit down and cry.

  My throat felt dry despite drinking the whole bottle of water Benjamin had bought me, and another blast of tiredness came and went. We pushed through the doors, which decided to leap out and bump me on the shoulder, and then we were greeted by a wall of noise, and an icy blast of air-conditioning.

  The sound of people talking was almost overwhelming.

  “Where are we?” I shouted to Benjamin, and even then he only just heard me.

  “It’s like a coffee shop, or a bar, or something. There’s thousands of people.”

  I guessed he might be exaggerating a bit, but maybe not by much.

  “Are you sure we’re in the hotel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you see the reception desk?”

  “Yes, over here,” he said. “I think.”

  “You think?”

  “I’m doing my best,” he said. “It’s hard to tell. It’s really dark in here.”

  Even I could tell that.

  Benjamin began to steer me over to the desk. He pulled me to a stop.

  “Queue,” he said.

  We waited a minute and I listened to the sprawl of chatter and laughter from the lobby. There was loud music playing, something with a weird beat that seemed to stop, fall over itself, and then start again.

  Benjamin squeezed my hand, and took me up to the desk.

  A young man’s voice greeted us.

  “Hi. I’m Brett. How may I help you?”

  He sounded friendly, but I felt nervous. What would happen if Dad wasn’t here? What would happen if he was?

  “Er, yes, hello,” I said. “I believe you have Mr. Peak staying here? Jack Peak?”

  It can only have been a moment’s pause in which Brett didn’t reply, but it felt like eternity.

  Please, I thought. Please. Please let him be here.

  “Well, yes, we do.”

  I couldn’t help but smile.

  “Yes, good,” I said. “Good.”

  I squeezed Benjamin’s hand.

  “Dad’s here?” Benjamin said.

  “Shh!” I said, quickly. “You know he is. Remember what I told you.”

  “Miss?”

  It was Brett, behind the desk.

  There was a little hesitation in his voice, and I realized that hotels have rules on giving out information about their guests.

  “Oh, it’s okay. He’s our father. We’ve come to join him. He’s been here and we’ve come to join him.”

  “We have no record of other guests on the reservation,” said Brett.

  “Oh, well that’s Dad for you,” I said. “He’ll have forgotten to tell you. We only came into town today. To meet him. We’ve been … upstate.”

  I don’t know why I said that. But I did and it sounded plausible, and that made me feel in control.

  “We’ve been what?” asked Benjamin, and I squeezed his hand so hard I think I might have hurt him, but he was quiet.

  “Mr. Peak isn’t in right now,” said Brett.

  “But he told us to meet him here this afternoon. So could we have a key please? And then we can go and wait.”

  There was another pause.

  “Can I see some ID, please?”

  Brett’s voice was slightly less friendly.

  I showed him our passports and he warmed up again.

  “That’s great,” he said. I didn’t see what was so great, but Brett wasn’t done.

  “I love your father’s books,” he said. “Those funny ones, the ones he used to write?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “So could we have a key, please?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Brett. “Just one thing. For security. You presumably know which room your father is in? He’ll have told you that.”

  We were so close. I didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m sorry to ask,” Brett went on. “But we’ve had some … That is, the hotel manager has told us to be extra careful about security just now. Of course if you don’t know the number you could always phone your father and…”

  “His phone’s not working,” I said, “and we don’t know the room number, but please…”

  “Yes, we do,” said Benjamin. “We do know the number.”

  “Benjamin…” I said, warningly.

  “We do know the number. You must have forgotten. It’s 354.”

  “Benjamin…”

  “That’s the one,” said Brett brightly, and seconds later I heard a piece of plastic clipping down on the metal reception desk.

  I stood dumbfounded at what had just happened.

  “You’re all set,” said Brett. “Have a good day. The elevators are right behind you. Third floor.”

  I fumbled for the card and Benjamin got us in the lift before anyone tried to stop us.

  “How did you know that?” I asked as the doors closed on the noise of the lobby.

  “Because that’s Dad’s number, isn’t it? The co-inky-dink number.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean he’s staying in that room.”

  “Yes, it does,” said Benjamin. “He told me. He always asks for that room when he stays in a hotel. If they have a room 354, I mean.”

  “Benjamin,” I laughed, “you are a totally excellent person.”

  He hugged me, and the lift doors pinged open.

  “Wow,” said Benjamin. “It’s even darker up here.”

  Benjamin pulled my hand, and we stepped onto quiet hotel corridor carpets, looking for room 354.

  354, which is, as Benjamin so rightly said, Dad’s coincidence number.

  I mean, co-inky-dink.

  I was so happy.

  Dad was here. He was staying in the hotel. Even if he was out right then, we were almost there; we’d found him.

  354

  It’s a pretty weird number to choose if you’re setting out to choose a lucky number, but Dad says that’s not what it is.

  For ages, he’s had this thing about the number 354. He says he first started spotting this number years ago, when he was a teenager, that he sees it again and again, so often that he decided it had to mean something.

  He calls it his number, or sometimes just the number. As if there are no other numbers in the world, which is obviously far from the case. There are an infinite number of numbers, or so our maths teacher would have us believe.

  A while back, Dad decided to record every instance he comes across of this number. It was on his first trip to New York as a published writer when he started thinking about it again. He was up for some book award, and there was a big dinner happening in Manhattan. His publisher sent a limo to collect him from the airport, and it had a three-digit number on it: 354.

  He checked in at his hotel—a hotel his publisher had booked for him—and the girl behind the desk handed him his key—yes, that’s right: 354.

  Since then, as we found out in the Black Book, he’s recorded every single time he’s seen it since; it goes on for four closely written pages, according to Benjamin. It’s as if he’s collecting them. Like, I suppose I have to say it, he’s obsessed.

  It’s appeared in phone numbers, on lockers, in limited-edition prints, as page counts in books, as flight numbers, as the price of things, as house numbers, and software versions. In short; it’s appeared in every single way a number can appear, frequently more than once.

  Dad believes this number appears more than any other number, and he also believes it means something.

  I told him he only thinks he comes across it more often because he’s looking for it. And that if he
concentrated on some other number, he’d see that one more often instead.

  “I know what you’re saying,” he said. “Every day, you’re bombarded by numbers, usually long strings of phone numbers. And yes, you’re right, occasionally I see 354 in the middle of those numbers and they’re the ones I focus on. But tell me why it is I see this number all the time when there are only three digits in question? The chances of seeing 354 when given a three-digit number should be about one in 899, right? In 899 times, every number from 100 to 999 should come up once. Yes?

  “I promise you,” he said. “I see 354 way more than once every 899 times.”

  I thought I had him then.

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “If there were an equal chance of each number coming up. But there isn’t.”

  “No?”

  “No. Like the lockers at the swimming pool. I always go for the one on the end if I can so I know where my stuff is. But Benjamin goes for the highest number there is, but that’s only two hundred and something.”

  Dad was thinking, I could tell.

  “You might have something there. When I stayed in room 354 in New York that time for the award … The hotel only had five floors of rooms, so the highest number it had would have been 599.”

  “Exactly. Sequences of numbers always start at one, don’t they? So there must be more instances of lower numbers in the world than high ones.”

  “Laureth,” he said, “you might be right about that. But I still think my number comes up more than it should. Be that as it may, I’m going to investigate what you said.”

  If he says he’ll do something, he does. Usually.

  So off he went and spoke to an old friend of his who is a professor of maths, and he told him two things, which Dad wrote down in his notebook. I know that because it was one of the pages that Michael Walker had mailed back, that Benjamin had read at the airport.

  * * *

  First, he told Dad I was right. I was rather pleased with myself about that, but then this guy told Dad there was something really weird about numbers, a thing called Benford’s Law.

  BENFORD’S LAW: WHAT THIS SAYS IS TRULY STRANGE.

  Suppose you have a large set of numbers, such as the amounts of a thousand electricity bills, or the lengths of the rivers of South America, or death rates in Asia, or stock prices, or population numbers. You might think that there would be the same chance that any of these numbers started with a one, as with a nine. Or any other number for that matter. After all, any number in your set can start with any one of the nine digits, so they ought to all have the same chance of being the first one, right?

  Well, apparently not. APPARENTLY 1 will be the first digit of the number 30% of the time, whereas 9 will be the first digit only 5% of the time. And in the middle of these two, the numbers 2 to 8 appear with a precisely measurable decreasing frequency, so 2 appears about 17% of the time, 3 about 12% and so on down to poor old 9 with that measly 5%.

  Strange.

  * * *

  Ah! You say.

  Ah! I have an idea! It’s to do with the units involved; it biases things toward the lower numbers in some way.

  * * *

  But here’s the really weird thing: change the units you’re measuring those rivers in from miles to kilometers, and the effect is the same. Change death rates from per year to per month, and the result is the same. It doesn’t matter. The universe simply favors the lower numbers in some way. There are a few explanations of why Benford’s Law is true, but not everyone agrees; it’s a bit of a mystery.

  Benford’s Law is so little known, and so misunderstood, that it’s even been used in court cases to catch people guilty of fraud. For example, they’re making up some numbers to put in their company accounts, and they think they’ll look more random if they’re evenly spread out across all the nine digits that a number can start with. But they’re wrong, and clever lawyers have had people sent to jail as a result.

  * * *

  When Dad told me all this, I didn’t understand it at first. But I wanted to, so I got him to tell me over and over again, until I did. And when Benjamin read it, he didn’t get it, either, but I wasn’t as good at explaining it to him as Dad had been to me, so I don’t think he got it even when I tried.

  But that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if it meant anything to Benjamin, or to me, because I could tell it meant something to Dad. He was trying to show me that there are hidden patterns in the universe, that maybe there are some secrets still to be found. Secrets that lie inside the numbers that the universe is built on.

  And that maybe the number 354 is one of them.

  THE EMPTY ROOM

  Never in my life had I felt so tired, and so excited at the same time. Maybe I was being foolish, but to me it seemed we’d done it. We’d found Dad, or as good as, and I was just desperate to see him and for everything to be okay.

  “Can you see 354?” I asked Benjamin as we stepped out of the lift.

  “It’s hard,” he said. “The corridor is so dark. There’s no lights.”

  “There must be some.”

  “Well, hardly any.”

  “There’ll be a sign showing which way to go.”

  “I know, Laureth,” he said. “I’m not stupid. But it’s really dark. This hotel is what Dad would call too cool for school.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. But he’d say that, I know he would.”

  He pulled my hand and we set off down the length of the corridor.

  “This is stupid!” he said, grumbling all the way. “It’s so dark. Anyway, we’re here.”

  Benjamin showed me where to put the plastic key card that opened room 354. We had to try it about four different ways before it worked, until finally it made an annoying little click, and we let ourselves in.

  “Well?” I said, and shut the door behind us.

  “What?”

  “Is his stuff here?”

  “Yes,” said Benjamin. “His bag’s on the table, and his laptop’s on the desk. And there’s a bunch of jumpers hanging on a rail.”

  I thought about the heat outside.

  “It’s Dad, all right. Always packing the wrong clothes.”

  “Wow!” said Benjamin. “It’s big. There’s another room through a door. Where the bed is.”

  I thought about Mum and Dad. I thought about Mum telling Dad he spends too much money, and here he was, paying for a suite in a hotel, in New York. It can’t have been cheap.

  “So do we meet Dad here?” asked Benjamin.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  There seemed nothing else to do. His phone wasn’t working; there was no way of reaching him. But he had to come back sooner or later.

  And we were tired.

  We sat on the bed for a bit. Then we both needed the loo, so I went, and then Benjamin did, and while he was in the bathroom, I found Dad’s jumpers on the rail. I held on to one of the sleeves for a long time, as if I were trying to prove to myself that Dad still existed. I lifted the sleeve and touched my cheek with it, trying to will him to walk through the door. He didn’t.

  Benjamin flushed the loo, and I dropped the sleeve.

  We sat on the bed again. It was cool in the room; there was an air-conditioning unit under the window, which made a loud hum all the time, but it was good to have.

  From outside there was the rumble and honk of traffic; horns and cries from the street below.

  We fell asleep, lists of 354s in our heads, but I don’t remember anything after that, as if the numbers had hypnotized us.

  * * *

  I woke up to the sound of someone knocking on the door.

  I pulled my arm out from underneath Benjamin, who had turned into a dead weight.

  “Coming!” I said, and though I’d not really been there long enough to memorize it fully, I managed to get from the bedroom, through the other room, and to the door by following the sound of the knocking. I had no idea how long we’d been asleep. It felt like days.


  I checked my phone. It had only been fifteen minutes.

  “Yes,” I said, opening the door.

  “Ah, Miss Peak? May I come in?”

  It was a woman’s voice.

  I’d forgotten to put my sunglasses on. She’d see I was blind, but I supposed that didn’t matter anymore.

  “I’m Margery Lundberg,” said the woman in a voice that can only be described as smooth. So I wasn’t surprised when she added, “I’m the hotel manager.”

  “Er, yes,” I said, already panicking. “Come in.”

  I let her step inside, and shut the door behind her.

  “Just a minute,” I said. “My brother’s asleep. He’s tired out.”

  I was tired out, too, but I didn’t want to show it. I found my way to the bedroom door, and tried to close it. I couldn’t. For some reason it wouldn’t move.

  “Here, let me help you with that,” said Margery Lundberg. “It’s a sliding door.”

  I felt her brush past me and heard her slide the door closed, easily.

  “Is something wrong?” I said.

  Of course something was wrong. Why else would she be here?

  “No,” she said, in that way that means yes. “No, only I understand from Brett on the front desk that you’ve joined your father at our hotel.”

  “Yes,” I said, as breezily as I could manage. “We’ve just got here.”

  “Brett mentioned that you are … sixteen, miss?”

  “I am.”

  “And is your mother here, too?”

  “Oh, yes, she’s on her way. Maybe later, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Yes. Is there something wrong, Mrs. Lundberg?”

  “Margery, please,” she said. Smoothly. “It’s just that we have a policy about minors staying alone in the hotel.”

  “Minors? Oh, you mean … But we’re not alone. Dad’s here.”

  “Your father checked in to the hotel yesterday, but he did not sleep here last night.”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “So I wonder if we should check that your father is coming back tonight. Because we have a policy about minors staying alone.”

  “Yes,” I said, and I thought, and I’ll bet it’s not a policy I want to hear right now.