underground facilities, storerooms, abandoned hospitals, fire escapes, rooftops, vaults, crumbling churches with dangerous spires, gutted mills, Victorian sewers, dark tunnels, passageways, ventilation systems, stairwells, lifts, the dingy winding corridors behind shop changing rooms, the pockets of no-name-place under manhole covers and behind the overgrow of railway sidings.
Q) Who are the Un-Space Exploration Committee?
A) They map and chart and explore and research un-space.
I’m sorry for the format. Today is a bad day. All my structure is gone.
Regret and hope,
Eric
(Received: 22nd May)
Letter #214
Dear Eric,
I hope you’ve been able to master the techniques I sent to you about dealing with receipts. And the internet, remember there is no safe procedure for electronic information. Avoid it at all costs (refer to letter #5 for ATMs, and bank account management).
Regret and hope,
E
(Received: 30th May)
Letter #222
Dear Eric,
Much of what I learned, this little box of tricks and tactics I’m leaving behind for you, it came directly from Dr Trey Fidorous. He knows about the waterways of thought and the conceptual fish. He knows about Clio Aames and what I thought I could do to save her. He knows all of it, all the things I’ve lost, I’m sure he does. You need to find him again, Eric. Find Dr Trey Fidorous. He knows about the Ludovician, so maybe he knows a way to stop it too.
Hull. Leeds. Sheffield. Manchester. Blackpool.
Regret and hope,
E
(Received: 16th June)
Letter #238
Dear Eric,
I hope the job search is going well. Be careful in selecting the right person to study. A well planned, fully-realised false identity will provide the most versatile day-to-day protection should you decide to make the journey. It requires months of hard work to perfect someone else’s mannerisms, movements and attitudes but this will allow you to move through the world without generating a single recognisable ripple.
The Ludovician will circle forever if it needs to. All it needs, all it’s waiting for, is for you to stir the waters in a familiar way – a recognisable way – to cross its path with yours by one or two degrees of separation. Practice practice practice. The disguise may not hold up close, but from any distance you will be invisible.
Regret and hope,
Eric
“How have things been at work this week?”
I’d had the job for months, but Dr Randle was still pleased about it.
“They’ve been fine. Well, boring. You know.”
“Boring is okay, Eric. It’s been over a year since your last recurrence. I think you could count boring as a triumph, even.”
“This is good then, you’d say?”
“Well, you’re certainly not taking any backwards steps.”
“I still don’t remember anything.”
“No, but one thing at a time. You really should be counting boring as an achievement compared to where you were when we started. Sometimes you have to do a lot of work to arrive at stability.”
“Now here, you see, you have to run just as fast as you can to stay in the same place.”
“Eric.”
Dr Randle wore a big red knitted jumper with a llama on it, or maybe a badly done horse. She’d been growing her hair over the last twelve months and now she had it tied back in a ponytail. The odd copper coil sprig still escaped here and there, sticking out of her head at fiercely demented angles. Her eyes were just the same though, heavy and oppressive and powerful and also not very observant.
“You’re the doctor,” I said. “I’m in your capable hands.”
“This is a team effort, Eric. Rest assured we’ll get there in the end.”
I’d been learning that Dr Randle mostly saw what she expected to see rather than what was actually in front of her. I’m in your capable hands? I didn’t always speak like that. When I first came to her I didn’t speak like that at all but – whoosh – over it goes, over her big stormy head along with everything else. Maybe most people don’t notice half of what they actually see.
“I trust you,” I said.
Rusty, Dr Randle’s dog, sniffed around my legs, happy and excited by the smell of Ian. Ian, if the past was anything to go by, would sniff the dog smell on my jeans when I got home, give me a you disgust me stare and then march off, ginger tail in the air showing me his arsehole as a sign of contempt.
“He’s hungry,” Randle smiled, looking at the scruffy little dog. “If I don’t feed him he’ll start throwing himself at the fridge door again.”
I reached down and scratched Rusty’s ear. He flopped over onto his back, belly up.
“I’ll head off,” I said, rubbing the dog’s belly. “I’ll see you again on Friday.”
The dog looked at me for a split second, as if he knew I was telling a lie.
Outside, I picked a couple of brown soggy leaves off the yellow Jeep’s windscreen before getting in. I closed the door and fired up the engine. It was a cold, bright breathy autumn afternoon. I slid all the heater levers on, rubbed my hands on my legs to warm them and found some old rock ’n’ roll on the radio. The yellow Jeep crunched away from the curb. I edged my way out into the traffic.
•
I clicked open the front door and stepped into the skeleton house inside. It’s funny how a house can look just the same on the outside when everything inside is changed. The hallway, the living room, through to the kitchen; it all looks so empty now. All clean. Everything washed and wiped and dusted and vacuumed and put away. Bleached bones. Anything valuable, I’ve stacked in packing crates in the locked room. Everything dangerous, I’ve buried in protective post.
I let down the kitchen blinds, drew
