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.
(Received: 22nd September)
Letter #2
Dear Eric,
I used to know so many things. The things I learned, the ways I learned to see and the things I believed possible, I think they might amaze you. Mostly now, all I have are splinters. Remains of things I was quick enough to write down and preserve; fragments which seem to be increasingly incomplete and confusing to me now.
This is what I know, what at the middle of me I feel is true: all the lost research, the journeys, the dangerous choices, I did it all for a girl called Clio Aames. I loved her, Eric. So much. And she died. I only get the general senses of things and they pass so quickly, like childhood smells touching you and then being gone on the breeze. But. But but but. It feels strange to be writing this down – I think I believed I could change what happened, undo it, prevent it, save her life somehow after she was already gone. Of course I couldn’t. Dead is dead is dead is dead. If you are reading this then I’m dead too and you’ll shortly be fighting for your own life.
Eric, I am so sorry.
There’s so much I’ve lost, so much that’s been eaten all away from the insides of my head, but I’ve worked hard to squirrel away enough to help you. I don’t have any answers, I’m almost as empty as you must be now, but I do have a few tools and a little knowledge. Some weapons and some fragments. The rest is up to you. You always have a choice.
I’m so forgetful. The creature will find something I’ve missed because it never stops looking and its senses are very sharp. It will find a way to
