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6

Time and the Hunter

Bang.

I jumped awake, blinking in the electric light. I didn’t know if the noise had been part of some dream I’d been having or a real, external thing. The cat was upright and alert at the end of the bed, staring with huge eyes at the wall. I stayed as quiet as I could, counting off the seconds of silence in my head: One Mississippi … Two Mississippi … Three Mississippi … Four Mississippi … Fi –

Bang.

Ian disappeared in a ginger bounce of nervous energy and I knotted up in shock.

Another bang.

A slam.

A thud. A bang. Another slam.

Chemical instincts flooded through me, numbing fingertips, lips and ears. My stomach dropped slack and sick and every hair on my body pulled upright, an electrical conductor. My biology primed me to run, to escape. But I didn’t run. Some higher logic took control as I sat up carefully, a steady hand taking hold of my strings and turning my actions away from panic and towards – something else. I found myself taking four, five deep breaths then, quietly as I could, getting out of bed and creeping onto the landing.

The banging and slamming, clattering and rattling sounds were coming from behind the locked door, and they were building up, growing more and more aggressive. As I stood there, shaking, controlling my breathing, keeping quiet, I started to realise something about the noise was wrong. It took a few seconds to work out what that something was, and then I got it: the banging and crashing from behind the door seemed to be coming from a distance. From the dimensions of the house, the locked room couldn’t be large, slightly smaller than my bedroom at the biggest, and perhaps only a box room. An impossibility then, but still: the sounds seemed to be bouncing off bare walls, as if travelling from the far end of a huge, empty warehouse.

The violence cranked up even further into an angry thrashing of violent bangs and metal crashes. I leant forward, listening for some clue. My ear brushed the surface of the locked door, gently, barely at all. The instant it happened, the split second my body made contact with the paintwork, the noise, the smashing, banging, slamming, everything, stopped dead.

Shock jerked me backwards like burned fingers. I tried not to move, tried not to breathe, my hand covering my mouth.

Deep thick silence thundered from behind the closed door. Pure. Heavy. Pregnant. The sound of being stared at.

I waited.

I waited for something to happen.

One minute.

Two minutes.

Nothing happened at all.

Ten minutes later I had the hammer out of the toolbox and was searching through the kitchen cupboard full of unopened letters from the First Eric Sanderson. I found the envelope with the card square inside, ripped it open at one end and shook it. The key fell into my hand.

•

“I’m coming in,” I said outside the door, surprised by the clarity and pitch of my voice in the silence. My guts felt like dangling elastic bands. Hot nervous fluid pressed in my bladder. “I’m coming in. I’m unlocking the door.”

The key clicked around in the keyhole. I pushed down the handle and swung the door slowly open. Silence. Holding the hammer up by my right ear, ready to bring it down on anyone or anything that lurched out of the darkness, I edged inside, fumble-reaching at the walls. Eventually I found a switch and clicked on the light.

There was a bright red filing cabinet standing in the middle of the room.

And nothing else.

There was no one there.

The room was smaller than the bedroom, much too tiny to make any sense of those ringing echoes. The single window was locked and undamaged. As far as I could see, there was no way anyone could have got in or out, but I kept the hammer ready.

Four of the five drawers in the filing cabinet were empty. In the fifth drawer, I found a single red cardboard suspension folder with a single sheet of printed paper inside.

I didn’t take out the folder or read the sheet of paper. I didn’t do anything for one, two, three, four seconds. Finally, I closed the drawer, pressed my back against the cabinet and tried a grip on the wrongness of it all. It wasn’t just the noises. From my second day in the world, I’d imagined this room containing all the facts and figures and pictures of my lost self, a paper trail life of the First Eric Sanderson, and photographs – of him, of Clio Aames, and of all the people close to them. Permanent records in colour print and text proving those lives had happened, those people and times and events had been real and once had their place in the working of things. I’d half expected to find this room filled with Clio’s belongings – it would have been a logical explanation for the room being sealed up in the first place. But there was nothing. I checked through the cabinet and the rest of the room again to make sure. Pulling the red folder off its runners and tucking it under my arm, I got myself out of there, clicked off the light and locked the door behind me.

•

I pulled the vodka bottle out of the freezer drawer – I’d got into the habit of having a shot or two with the Friday night video, and maybe the occasional shot with afternoon TV – and poured myself a big half-glass over ice. Ian reappeared in the kitchen, now all brave and never-been-scared-in-my-life, doing his fat cat slink around my legs. I opened a tin of tuna for him and took the vodka and the bottle through to the living room.

Television, the great normaliser. I switched it on and dropped onto the sofa, vodka at my feet, red folder at my side. I drank back a few deep, hot throatfuls to calm my nerves before opening the folder and taking out the piece of paper inside. This is what it said:

Imagine you’re in a rowing boat on a lake.

It’s summer, early morning. That time when the sun hasn’t quite broken free of the landscape and long, projected shadows tigerstripe the light. The rays are warm on your skin as you drift through them, but in the shadows the air is still cold, greyness holding onto undersides and edges wherever it can.

A low clinging breeze comes and goes, racing ripples across the water and gently rocking you and your boat as you float in yin-yang slices of morning. Birds are singing. It’s a sharp, clear sound, clean without the humming backing track of a day well underway. There’s the occasional sound of wind in leaves and the occasional slap-splash of a larger wavelet breaking on the side of your boat, but nothing else.

You reach over the side and feel the shock of the water, the steady bob of the lake’s movement playing up and down your knuckles in a rhythm of cold. You pull your arm back; you enjoy the after-ache in your fingers. Holding out your hand, you close your eyes and feel the tiny physics of gravity and resistance as the liquid finds routes across your skin, builds itself into droplets of the required weight, then falls, each drop ending with an audible tap.

Now, right on that tap – stop. Stop imagining. Here’s the real game. Here’s what’s obvious and wonderful and terrible all at the same time: the lake in my head, the lake I was imagining, has just become the lake in your head. It doesn’t matter if you never know me, or never know anything about me. I could be dead, I could have been dead a hundred years before you were even born and still – think about this carefully, think past the obvious sense of it to the huge and amazing miracle hiding inside – the lake in my head has become the lake in your head.

Behind or inside or through the two hundred and eighteen words that made up my description, behind or inside or through those nine hundred and sixty-nine letters, there is some kind of flow. A purely conceptual stream with no mass or weight or matter and no ties to gravity or time, a stream that can only be seen if you choose to look at it from the precise angle we are looking from now, but there, nevertheless, a stream flowing directly from my imaginary lake into yours.

Next, try to visualise all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, see the size and awesome complexity of it. This huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves.

Now, go back to your lake, back to your gently bobbing boat. But this time, know the lake; know the place for what it is and when you’re ready, take a look over the boat’s side. The water is clear and deep. Broken sunlight cuts blue wedges down, down into the clean cold depths. Sit quietly, wait and watch. Don’t move. Be very, very still. They say life is tenacious. They say given half a chance, or less, life will grow and exist and evolve anywhere, even in the most inhospitable and unlikely of places. Life will always find a way, they say. Be very quiet. Keep looking into the water. Keep looking and keep watching.

I read through the text couple of times. I put the page back in its folder. I drained my vodka. I rubbed my eyes. I said Jesus. I poured another drink and slouched back into the sofa. The cat slid past, ignoring me completely. The fridge hummed. Everything else was rain on the windows and the night-time dramas of insects. Nothing made any kind of sense at all, or if it did, I was too tired and frazzled to see how. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the burn, swirl and chink of the vodka and on the simple sliding weights of breathing.

•

I woke up on the sofa in the middle of some vivid memory playback of my second meeting with Dr Randle.

“But it’s not –” I said out loud, and then stopped, recognising the dream for what it was.

While I’d been asleep, something had changed.

My groggy half-awake attention turned inwards like a brilliant sweeping searchlight and the sudden clarity of it shocked me. I saw the whole of my sixteen-week-old mind and my sixteen-week-old self perfectly, completely, vivid and obvious in every detail. I could even see the memory dream still playing in the back of my head, tape winding down, losing cohesion and forward momentum.

I pushed myself upright on the sofa. The sensation of clarity expanded. Everything in the room, all things and their spatial relationships, all colours, light, shades, textures, all space, all air pressure and all bouncing wave sounds became cutting-edge sharp, everything tuned to a hot brilliant focus. My wide-open skipping-around eyes found the vodka glass on my lap. I became transfixed. I lifted it as carefully and gently as I could, working hard not to affect events inside. The three ice cubes had melted into round-edged lozenges, each with its own complex puzzle of faultlines, ghost planes and fractures. Around each cube, the run-off water and the slightly thicker vodka curled together in miniature weather systems and storm fronts. I thought about fragile colour spirals of oil in water, about the sad rolling and dispersing of the galaxy, about cogwheel daisies on green grass driving the vast machinery of evolution, about a whirl of cream unwinding its spiral arms in a left-behind coffee cup and all this coming from somewhere all at once but not distracting; perfectly in line with the beautiful, almost traumatic actuality of substance, form, movement and light in the glass. It was breathtaking, too clear, too much. My eyes were hot and prickly, and I realised I was crying.

A movement unlocked my attention. I re-focused my eyes, looking past the vodka glass and into the static buzz of the TV. I stayed very still for a few seconds before lowering the glass to the floor, careful not to take my eyes off the screen. There was something distant and alive in the depths of the white noise – a living glide of thoughts swimming forward, a moving body of concepts and half felt images.

I moved slowly off the sofa and crawled across the floor towards the television, trying to see deeper into the vast depths of no-signal hiss behind the glass. I got nearer and the creature became aware of me. It picked up speed and powered out of sight, disappearing in a fast flick of movement below the bottom right corner of the screen.

I crawled closer, closer, closer, trying to pick out another glimpse or recollective flash of the thing deep in the vast distances of static, and then –

The screen threw itself forward with a screaming electric flash and the lights all died. The TV landed with a heavy glassy thud in the black and I scrambled backwards on balls of feet and heels of hands in animal panic. My shoulders hit the sofa and I clumsily reverse-clambered onto it, pulling my knees up off the floor until they were tucked under my chin, hands locked together around my shins. My body squeezed, desperate to run, but the dark, silence and panic locked me still, petrified in place. I tried for silent breaths but my breathing and my thinking were all ripped, chopped, torn-up, ragged. I couldn’t hear anything else and couldn’t see anything either. The room was pitch-black.

No.

Not totally pitch-black. The little green smoke detector light on the ceiling became my distant North Star. Gently releasing the most fragile light, it remade the edges of the bookcase and the magazine stand and the back of the upturned TV out of the darkness. I focused on this circle and on my breathing. With a little longer to adjust, even this thin polleny dusting of illumination would be enough to see by. And once I could see, and see the door, I’d be able to force my legs out of their deep-freeze and run.

A violent something slammed into the far end of the sofa shunting everything sideways with a hard, wrenching pressure lurch. I barrelled right, digging my fingers deep into the soft fabric arm, trying to resist the travelling momentum taking me tumbling over the side and managing it, just. Rocking myself hard back into my seat, I kept one hand gripped tight on the arm and the other stretched out across the sofa back, elbows locked and braced, wedging myself deep and tight in the corner. No thoughts – my thinking like a pile of smashed glass and my breathing so fast the darkness started to swarm. An impulse came to run at the wall and hope to hit the door or at least near the door and fumble for it, but I couldn’t break the panic locking my legs. Bang – another hit directly behind and under me, much harder, like a slow-motion car crash and the back end of the sofa thrown up and coming toppling forward, sending me sprawling off into empty space and then the carpet and the floor came up at me and it – broke.

The idea of the floor, the carpet, the concept, feel, shape of the words in my head all broke apart on impact with a splash of sensations and textures and pattern memories and letters and phonetic sounds spraying out from my splashdown. I went under, deep, carried by the force of my fall and without the thought or image or any recollection of oxygen or breathing at all.

I came up coughing, gasping for air, the idea of air. A vague physical memory of the actuality of the floor survived but now I was bobbing and floating and trying to tread water in the idea of the floor, in fluid liquid concept, in its endless cold rolling waves of association and history.

Everything dark and black except for the faint green of the North Star. No more outlines, no edging of the bookcase or back of the upturned TV, just me treading water alone in the middle of this vast and fundamental conceptual form; concept as environment, with its own characteristic depths and swells, moving and shifting and altering with time and perspective the way all words and ideas and concepts do. No no no. I tried to shake that mode of being, to force the idea back behind the physical, force my body to find and accept the hard reality of the floor as an entity of sand and stones and cement, hard physical atoms with no words or ideas or attachments, but my mind could only find the words, ideas, signs and attachments for these things, never anything solid at all, and my body couldn’t act without my mind’s instruction. I screwed down my eyes again, trying to will myself back to the familiar world of solids and space. But even the vague body-memory of hard ground had gone, my legs kicking in insubstantial watery black. The world, my mind, the way these connected, whatever the root of the perception shift, I didn’t have control of it, and I couldn’t undo what had happened. But I had to get away. The deep deep liquid black below my feet, the creature in the TV and the violence that threw me here, I had to get out, now, regardless of how everything re-viewed and re-focused itself. I looked up at the North Star, used it to guess-navigate where the living room door should be and began swimming hard in that direction.

I didn’t get far.

Something huge rushed fast in the water under my body, pulling me in a mini whirlpool twist of unravelling thought drag in its wake. The thing from the static. Jesus. I kicked faster, scrabbling against liquid, trying to pull up a solid thought of dry land in my mind. But I could only beat out splashes and scatter sprays of mind fragments. Then another undertow and I’m pulled and buffeted, the thing passing under again and I’m knocked and rolled and ducked under by a fierce ripping after-wake.

Coming up for air and coughing out: shark. The word coming in a tangle-breathed shudder and then me screaming: help. Shark. Help me. Me screaming: oh God oh God oh God and kicking and thrashing and thrashing and screaming. And then, somehow, tumbling from the back of my desperate spark-spraying thought train, a memory of something – Eric Sanderson’s emergency envelope and the Ryan Mitchell Mantra pinned to the notice board in the kitchen. I fought to remember the text on those sheets of paper. Exam results? The colour history of rooms?

“Blue and black and grey and yellow,” I shouted the words out, grasping, shock-stripped of any thinking or logic. I shouted and kicked against the water, grabbing in the dark. “Blue and black and grey and yellow. Blue and –” Something rushed upwards from below and smashed hard against my hip and side, throwing me up and backwards out of the water in a lift of spray, my mouth opening like a scream but my airways crushed and winded and only a sucking nothing coming through my throat. I came down hard in a splash of disassociating fragments.

And then –

And then it was raining, a heavy downpour of letters, words, images, snatches of events, faces, places – a forest, a late-night city – the sea around me mixing in and confusing with so much falling everything else. And me lost in there somewhere and everywhere in it all, sinking away, diffusing, losing all mind and thoughts and consciousness.

•

I opened my eyes. Wet, new light dribbled under the curtains – morning arriving, bringing the solid world back into focus with it. I found myself inside the lower part of the living room bookcase, the upper part having broken apart and collapsed, leaving me avalanched in books and splintered wood. I coughed and winced out a hiss. Cracked rib. A minor bookslide happened as I slowly and painfully manoeuvred myself up into a twisted sitting position. The TV face-down on the carpet at the end of its stretched-out flex, the sofa upended. Things were broken and thrown and chipped and smashed but they were there. Solid, physical things. Things in a room made of bricks on a planet made of rocks and water. Silent truthful matter.

When I pulled together the strength, I hauled myself out of the debris and up onto my feet, swayed, steadied. The words came back without my looking for them: Dr Randle can neither help nor protect you.

I limped into the kitchen and started taking the First Eric Sanderson’s letters out of the cupboard.