The Raw Shark Texts. Steven Hall

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 the living room curtains. I sat for a few minutes on the sofa and thought about what Randle would think when I didn’t show up on Friday, what she would think when she realised I’d gone. Maybe she’d feel good. Maybe she’d think that her fugue theories had been right all along. Probably she’d think that. I hoped she’d miss me a little too.

      I’m at my desk now, at my typewriter in the bedroom. Ian is on the bed, sleeping on a pile of my notebooks. The Dictaphone noise doesn’t bother him anymore. After all this time I don’t really hear it either. Soon I’ll wrestle the cat into his carry box, pack up the Dictaphones and leave the house, maybe for good.

      Two nights after my living room floor disintegrated into a wet, deep concept and I’d swum and recited the Ryan Mitchell Mantra for my life, the shark came back. Two a.m. and me sitting up in bed, cold with panic sweat and covers bunched up in my white knuckled fists. The walls strained and stretched, sending odd shadows and strange associations rippling around the room. But the First Eric Sanderson’s newly unpackaged Dictaphones chattered away to themselves in each corner of the bedroom and the memory shark, the Ludovician, stayed locked out behind the plaster. It couldn’t cross the perimeter. It couldn’t break through the non-divergent conceptual loop. The First Eric Sanderson’s letters ranged from lucid to almost indecipherable, but his tactics worked. They all worked.

      And so, tentatively at first and then with careful but growing confidence, I became a pupil of my last self. I learned about the Ludovician and about the word-trails of Dr Trey Fidorous. I learned what little Eric could remember about the labelless car parks, access tunnels and buried places that made up un-space. I learned how to set up fake conceptual flows and short-circuit the existing ones, how to attach the bracken and lichen of foreign ideas to my scalp and work the mud and grass of another self into and over my skin and clothes until I could become invisible at will, until anyone or anything could be looking straight at me and never see the real me at all.

      The First Eric Sanderson sent me a CV and I got a job. The First Eric Sanderson sent me a list of useful character attributes to look out for and that’s how I chose Mark Richardson, the data analyst. We worked in the same office. At work, I learned about Richardson’s family, his past, his beliefs, his worldview, his hopes. I studied his voice, mannerisms, expressions. I practised in front of a mirror, with a video camera and with a tape recorder. I practised them for days and months until I could build him around me in seconds, until I could disappear, until I could move around at will without sending a single ripple of my real self out into the world. If the Ryan Mitchell Mantra was a clumsy crisis shield for those early months, then my fake Mark Richardson persona was a stronger, more flexible, more advanced replacement – an almost perfect mask.

      When the First Eric Sanderson wrote the letters he was an empty box of tactics and manoeuvres, a broken wind-up soldier. It took me a while to realise: he was training me to do something he should have done himself. Something he didn’t have the strength for.

      The months of my new life stretched out until they became a year. Eventually I’d done everything I could, become as good at all the tricks and the tactics as I could be.

      The letters from the First Eric Sanderson stopped four days ago. Just like Clio’s idea for a tattooed face on her big toe, Eric had ghost-projected the last whispers of himself into the future, bacon-sliced up into 300 envelopes and boxes. And finally the last one had arrived. A man lives so many different lengths of time. And each one has its own end.

      •

      If I don’t come back, or if I do come back without my mind, I’m leaving a copy of this account in the red filing cabinet with all the first Eric’s letters. If there is another Eric Sanderson reading this, I’ve left you everything I can. I’m sorry it’s not much.

      I’m going to look for Dr Trey Fidorous.

      All I have done here is learn to protect myself, I haven’t made a single step towards understanding anything. The First Eric Sanderson was right; if there are any answers, they will be with him. My plan is to follow the route the first Eric took to find Fidorous when all of this began. I’m going to start in Hull and work my way across the country. Hull. Leeds. Sheffield. Manchester. Blackpool. East to west. Fidorous’s trail of words must be years old now, but it’s the only lead I have. I can’t stay here and try to defend myself like the last Eric did.

      And there’s something else: I have dreams about Clio Aames. I have dreams where I’ve seen her and recognised her and known her and held her. But in the morning, they go, lifted from me like the low-hanging mists lift from the playing fields and I have nothing. Just emotion, and a general sense of something lost. The truth is; I can’t be only this anymore.

      In the garden across the street, the shadow of the telegraph pole creeps its way slowly around the world. At its top, there’s a starling, hunched down against the end of summer.

       TWO

      At night the salmon move out from the river and into the town

      Raymond Carver

       9

       On the Trail of Trey Fidorous – Recovered Palaeontology and Finds (Hull to Sheffield)

      1. Single-celled animals

      The first of two flyposted texts discovered in Leeds and possibly created by Dr Fidorous (although, in appearance, these could not be further from the biro-swarmed sheets described in the first Eric’s letters). This and the following text were exposed as part of the refurbishment of