The Raw Shark Texts (12 page)

I opened my eyes. Something wasn’t right. I groaned under the weight of heavy mushy-pea clouds and the glass-sharp exotic emotions that roll in at the storm front of a fever.

Sick. God, I couldn’t be sick today.

I stretched for my mobile. 11.33. The meeting at the Manor Infirmary was in less than an hour. Shit. So much for finding the place early and checking the lie of the land.

What to do?
My insides felt like offal splattering down a rabbit hole. I crawled up onto my knees and hugged my arms around my head.
What to do what to do? Think think think.
I stretched out a leg and step-staggered off the bed, weak and dizzy and looking around for the vodka bottle to make sure I hadn’t drunk half or all of it without remembering. I hadn’t; it was still there, just a few mouthfuls lighter.

I put the folded note from Mr Nobody back inside
The Origin of Species
and tucked both away in the chest of drawers. A shower might have helped push the sickness back and clear my mind but there was no time. I decided to take what little comfort I could get from a clean T-shirt and jeans. Closing the wardrobe door I saw Ian, crouched on top and glaring down at me with massive eyes.

“What?” My voice felt sticky and the wrong size for my head.

The cat rumbled a deep growl and backed away until I couldn’t see him over the wardrobe’s top edge.

“Nice,” I said. “Thanks.”

After struggling into the clean clothes, I took a plastic bag out of the
rucksack and placed each of the Dictaphones carefully inside. I grabbed a couple of packs of batteries too.

Anything else? Anything else?

“Anything else?” I asked my reflection in the mirror. The words pulsed in my ears, going wrong and rotten as they sank deeper in. My reflection looked back, all queasy and staggery like it couldn’t understand what I’d said. I put my hand out to the wall to steady myself, turned, and headed for the door.

The Manor Infirmary was a collection of buildings – a dozen square and oblong red brick structures with interlinking corridors. From above it probably looked like a flow chart. The path through the grounds was silted and sanded, and everything that wasn’t concrete squelched.

Aunty Ruth had known how to find the Infirmary and I’d been relieved to hear it was only fifteen minutes’ walk away.

“But it’s all shut down now, love, why on earth would you want to go there?”

“Idle curiosity” had been the best I could manage. She said I looked terrible and I said I’d feel better after a walk. She didn’t seem at all sure about that, but must have decided she didn’t know me well enough to challenge the idea with anything more than silence and a bunched-up brow of concern.

The path led up to a mulchy, leaf-piled porch. The entrance was a set of double doors made from dark wood and the type of thick rippled glass with the wire cross-hatching inside. I pushed the left door and it opened heavily inwards.

“Hello?”

Aunty Ruth was right: the walk hadn’t helped. My insides were hanging slack and wet and loose under my ribs and down into my hips. My
head felt even worse. Like a central heating system with air in the pipes, my mind clanked and struggled to pass thoughts coherently from one area to another – only the most simple and straightforward bursts of thinking seemed to have any chance of making it around the system without being trapped and lost in bubble pockets under the floorboards.
I’m just tired. I’m coming down with something
. These were the only explanations simple enough to survive a full circuit around my mind and although some part of me somewhere – an isolated radiator in the tiny attic bathroom of my brain – worried away about the timing of this and the risk of trusting ready-made solutions (and I was aware of the worry, vaguely, distantly), there simply wasn’t the pressure available for that little radiator to feed back properly into the heart of the system.

I stepped into the foyer.

A weak grey-blue light filled the space, a large window behind the reception area letting in low-grade sun from a damp and forgotten courtyard garden. The air inside tasted flat and lifeless and carried an idle kind of musk – rainwater on old plaster, decaying paper, little circles of black mould – and the faint after-tang of TCP. Black and white tiles covered the floor, the kind you find in disused Victorian swimming pools or due-for-refurbishment school canteens, the chessboard pattern dulled under a slow layer of dust. I took a couple of steps forwards, turned and saw how my wet footsteps left bootgrip zigzags of blacker black and whiter white in the floor behind me. There were no other prints.

Although the foyer itself had its window and the glass doors to feed in some kind of weak illumination, the corridors leading off to the left and to the right soon greyscaled themselves away into total darkness.

I walked over to the mouth of the left corridor and flicked the light switch there. Nothing happened. I did the same at the mouth of the right corridor but got the same result. No power, no light. I thought about my torch, still in the glove box of the yellow Jeep. A queasy kind of anger bubbled up through the vagueness. I pinched myself hard on the inside of my arm, hoping the pain would bring me more into focus, clear my head.

“Hello?” I called again, louder this time. The walls and the dust and the chequerboard floor gave only a quick snap of echoes.

Left or right? I chose the right corridor. I set off into the dark, feeling my way along the walls, trying doorhandles as they presented themselves under my spidering fingers.

I found my way into and through a storeroom stacked with collapsed wheelchairs and dusty boxes, coming out into a windowed staff office with faint silhouettes of computer keyboards and table lamps still visible in the dust of all the left-behind desks. I edged along dark corridors with confusing alcoves and pitch black T-junctions and I crossed rooms with ranks of bare mattresses and big windows with broken blinds. The hospital presented itself to me like this, as a progression of strange unfitting jigsaw pieces. Places which couldn’t, wouldn’t, be reassembled into any kind of mental floor plan. Before long, I was lost.

Was there even anybody here? Had my low-pressure brain missed something obvious by the entrance and sent me stumbling off in the wrong direction? Normally, I’d be able to answer with a definite
no
. But not today, feeling like this. Today, all bets were off.

After about fifteen minutes I came through an archway into what must have been my ninth or tenth corridor. But this corridor was different to all the others because this one wasn’t dark; a tall and bright electric standing lamp had been positioned at one end. I made my way towards it. As I got closer, I could see the lamp was straight out of a 1970s living room, a big faded green tasselled shade and a stem of bulbs and curves made from dark stained wood.

“Hello?”

There was no one around, just me and the lamp standing together at the end of a long lonely hallway.

I found him by following the flex. The flex from the standing lamp connected to an orange extension lead which connected to a white extension
lead which connected to another orange extension lead which connected to a black extension lead. Upstairs, downstairs, through storerooms and staffrooms and restrooms and toilets and offices and physiotherapy gyms.

The flex led me into a large ward. Most of the space was gloomy with the blinds drawn but a second standing lamp in the centre of the room gave out a white-yellow circle of light about twelve feet across. Under the lamp, sitting on a chair was a man busily typing on a laptop.

As I walked towards him he looked up, smiled, hurried the laptop off his knee and stood up to meet me.

“You made it, thank goodness. Sorry for all the – “ he gestured around. “I’d been hoping to meet you in the foyer but this report – deadlines are still deadlines apparently.”

The man was about my height but more slightly built, in his late twenties or early thirties, with a smart blue shirt, casual but expensivelooking jeans and a banker’s haircut. He also wore a pair of gold rimmed aviator sunglasses and a chunky gold watch. There was a clean just-shaved-at-the-barbers freshness about him that made me feel dirty and sickly looking.

“Mr Nobody?” I asked.

The man laughed an embarrassed laugh.

“Yes. Very pleased to meet you.” He overstretched as he moved to shake my hand, giving a slight bow. “It’s a little melodramatic, isn’t it? Still, I hope you understand the –
undesirable
nature of names given the circumstances.” Nobody collected a chair from the shadows and dragged it quickly into the circle of light to face his own. “I hope you can forgive the sunglasses too,” he said, gesturing for me to sit down. “Eyestrain. The doctor said no work with a computer screen for two weeks and I’ve got a mountain of pills to take, but –”

“Reports?” I said, taking the chair. Nobody sat opposite me.

“Endless reports,” he smiled. “Computers. The blessing and the curse of the twenty-first century.” Then, looking at me and actually noticing the state I was in: “God, are you alright?”

“I’m okay, coming down with something I think. Anyway, I thought the mobile phone was the blessing and curse of the twenty-first century?”

“Ahhh, that’s the other blessing and curse of the twenty-first century. These blessing and curse things, they’re everywhere. You can lose count.”

I smiled a watery smile.

“Well,” Nobody said. “You’re not here to discuss my Luddite tendencies, are you? I should probably start by apologising for –”

“No, wait,” I said, finally remembering the plastic bag with the Dictaphones hooked over my wrist.
Stupid, slow feverish brain
. “There’s something important I need to do first.”

Mr Nobody watched me load up the Dictaphones with batteries and set them up in a rough square around us, at the edges of the lamplight. He didn’t say anything until I’d finished.

“A sound-based association loop,” he smiled at me like a boss smiles at an employee who’s done something clever with the figures. “Wow, can I ask how it was developed?”

I sat down again. My stomach bubbled and lurched and I swallowed back the bile.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not going to be much of a conversationalist today. My brain’s all jammed up with, well, with whatever it is I’ve managed to catch. Could I be blunt and rude and ask if we can just get straight down to it?”

Mr Nobody sat easy, relaxed and alert. He thought for a moment then nodded once, efficiently. “Yes, of course. Do you want me to start with what I know about you, or what I know about the shark?”

“You know about the Ludovician? I mean, you believe in it?”

Nobody’s brow dropped a little behind his sunglasses.

“Yes,” he said simply. There was a touch of confusion, as if I’d asked him if he believed in trees or aeroplanes or China.

“Yes,” I said back to myself, still a little stunned.

“I mean, I’m not familiar with the particular shark you’ve been in contact with, but I’m very familiar, too familiar, with the species.” He looked at me again. “You seem surprised.”

“It’s just – for so long there’s only been me. To hear someone else talk about it –”

“I understand,” Nobody said, sliding down the chair a little and crossing his forearms on his knees. “The man I work for is a scientist. He’s studied conceptual fish for years; Heletrobes, Ticking Remoras, Ludogarians, Dream Tips. He’s an expert, perhaps the greatest expert of our time.”

“
Scientific
study? How is that possible?”

“My employer has the tongue-twisting pleasure of being a crypto-con-ceptual oceanologist. It isn’t what you’d describe as mainstream. It’s currently a field of one.”

“Right.” I belched and my mouth filled with a sharp, tangy sick taste. “Right,” I said again.

Nobody looked at me for a second. “Listen, you really don’t look good. Do you want some painkillers or paracetamol or something?” He gently kicked a brown leather bag under his chair. “I’ve got some in here, I think.”

“No,” I said. “I think I’ll be okay. I just need to keep still and not think about it.”

“Well, if you change your mind. Actually, I need to take the pills for my eyes at 2 p.m.. I’m always forgetting. You couldn’t do me a favour and remind me, could you?”

I took the mobile out of my pocket and glanced at the clock on screen: 13.32.

“No problem,” I said, swallowing again to get the taste out of my mouth. “Your employer – do you work for Trey Fidorous?”

“Ahhh. The great Dr Fidorous. No, I’m afraid not. Although you could say he founded the school and my employer expanded on it. No, no one has heard from Fidorous in years. If he’s still alive, he’s keeping it very much to himself.”

I filed this away to think about when there was more space in my head.

“What do you know about the ecology of the Ludovician, Mr Sanderson?”

“It’s a conceptual fish, a shark. It eats memories.” I looked down at my
fingers. “What else? Practical things mainly; how to hide from it, trick it, how to protect myself.”

Nobody looked out at the Dictaphones chattering quietly at the edge of our circle of lamplight. He nodded a thoughtful nod.

“The Ludovician is the largest and most aggressive of all the conceptual sharks,” he said. “It’s an apex predator, top of the food chain. They’re very rare animals and, mostly, they wander the flows taking a meal here and there. Any frail mind kicking and struggling in the world, if they’re passing they’ll take a chunk out of it. Especially out of old people.”

“I thought they stuck to one target? One victim again and again until –” I let the sentence die; my stomach wasn’t up to it.

“That’s territoriality. Once in a while you’ll find that a Ludovician – a big rogue male as likely as not – fixates on one particular food source. No one knows why they do it. What I’m trying to say is, no one knows very much about these animals at all.”

Nobody’s sentences were sinking into the flu-muck in my head. I realised I couldn’t easily dredge them again up once they’d disappeared.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you’re getting at something but I don’t –”