The Raw Shark Texts. Steven Hall

a way to get down it, for so long. It’s patchy, sketchy. Mostly all I have are the feelings left behind, emotion shadows where the facts should be. I do know that I left Fidorous to go looking for that hole and that I hired someone to help me find it, someone from what is called the Un-Space Exploration Committee (I will write you a letter about the Un-Space Exploration Committee too) but the details of that part, the hows and the whys, when I try to think about them they all come apart like rotten old cloth.

      I did find the hole.

      Down at the bottom there was a place filled with rows and rows of stinking neglected fish tanks with sick, dead and dying fish; a horrible abandoned aquarium. In the heart of the place, that’s where I found the Ludovician. It was younger then, much smaller but still very dangerous. And I let it out of its conceptual loop prison, Eric. I did it. It was me. I gave myself to the thought shark and it ate and ate, growing bigger and bigger and now it’s an adult and there’s no stopping it. I killed myself and I’ve probably killed you too. Why did I do it? Why would I do that?

      I think I thought I could save her.

      I was so stupid. I was so stupid and now everything’s all gone.

      This is the only piece of The Aquarium Fragment I have left, the end of the story. As always, some parts, some meanings, are missing:

      ] stepped inside the tank-circle.

      [missing text] suddenly had a very clear memory of my Granddad, tall and Roman-nosed with silver Brylcreemed hair, hanging wallpaper on old, dark, paint-splattered stepladders. I thought about how since his death my Granddad had become more a collection of scenes than a real man to me, how I could recall him being kind, angry, serious and joking but how the edges of these memory events didn’t quite fit together and left me with a sort of schizophrenic collage rather than the real, rounded-out man I must have known as a child.

      My senses, trying to catch my attention in all this, suddenly broke through to the surface and I came back into the present. A horrific clarity came into the world, a sense of all things being exactly what [missing text] with relevance, obviousness and a bright [missing text]. Without me telling it to, my mind switched itself back to the image of my Granddad up the ladder. And then I saw it, partly with my eyes, or with my mind’s eye. And partly heard, remembered as sounds and words in shape form. Concepts, ideas, glimpses of other lives or writings or feelings. And living, the thing obviously alive and with will and movement. Coming oddly [missing text] light links in my memory, swimming hard upstream against the panicking fast flow of my thoughts. The Ludovician, into my life in every way possible.

      I did it, Eric. I let it out. I’m responsible.

      I really am so sorry.

      Regret and hope,

      Eric

      

      (Received: 1st May)

      Letter #206

      Dear Eric,

      Q) What is un-space?

      A) It is the labelless car parks, crawl tunnels, disused attics and cellars, bunkers, maintenance corridors, derelict industrial estates, boarded-up houses, smashed-windowed condemned factories, offlined power plants, 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

       8

       The Impressionist

      “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,”