‘Diane?’
‘I’m here, Owen.’
‘How’s the search for the password going?’
It was a stupid question. As long as Diane registered no success, he didn’t need to worry about where things went from here. But talking to the computer made him feel as if he was in charge of a little team that was doing everything in its power.
‘You’ll be the first to know,’ said Diane.
Jericho gave a start. Was that humour? Not bad. He lay down on the huge bed with its gaudy yellow cover and felt terribly tired and useless. Owen Jericho, cyber-detective. Hilarious. He had been supposed to find Yoyo, and instead he’d put a psychopath on her trail. How in God’s name would he explain that to Tu, let alone to Chen Hongbing?
‘Owen?’
‘Diane?’
‘Someone’s uploading a post to Brilliant Shit.’
Jericho jolted upright.
‘Read it to me.’
At first he was disappointed. It was a list of coordinates, with no sender or any kind of accompanying text. Time, input code, nothing else.
An address in Second Life.
Did it come from Yoyo?
With leaden head and arms, he pulled himself upright, walked over to the little desk where he’d put his screen and keyboard, and took a look at the short text. At length he found a single letter that he’d probably overlooked: a D.
Demon.
Jericho took a look at his watch. Just after eleven. At twelve o’clock Yoyo was waiting for him in the virtual world. As long as the message really did come from her and wasn’t another attempt by Kenny to locate him. Had he given away the address of the blog to the hitman? Not as far as he remembered. Kenny surely couldn’t be so cunning as to turn up all of a sudden in Brilliant Shit as well, but caution was plainly advised. Jericho decided not to take a risk. From now on he would put any online communication through the anonymiser.
He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
There was nothing he could do.
After a few minutes the turbulent sea of his nerves was calm once more. He dozed off, but he didn’t sink into a relaxing sleep. Just below the surface of his consciousness, he was haunted by images of creeping torsos that weren’t human beings, but failed designs of human beings, grotesquely distorted and incomplete, covered with blood and mucus like newborn babies. He saw legless creatures, their faces nothing but smooth, gleaming surfaces, split down the middle by obscenely twitching pink openings. Half-charred lumps teetered towards him like spiders on a thousand legs or more. Eyes and mouths suddenly opened up in a scab of shapeless tissue. Something blind stretched towards him, darting a gnarled tongue between fanged jaws, and yet Jericho felt no fear, just a weary sadness, since he knew that in another life all these monstrosities had been as human as he was himself.
Then he fell, and found himself back on a bed, but it was a different bed from the one on which he had lain down. Dark and damp, lit by feeble moonlight that fell through a dirty window and outlined the bleak, bare room where he had ended up, it seemed to exert a curious power over him. Lucidly dreaming, he realised that he must be in his comfortable, boringly furnished room, but he couldn’t sit up and open his eyes. He was bound to this rotting mattress as if by magnetic force, swathed in weird, dry silence.
And in the midst of that silence he suddenly heard the click of chitin-armoured legs.
Jagged feet scratched at the edges of the bedcover, snagged in the fabric and drew fat, segmented bodies up to him. A wave of anxiety washed over him. His horror was due less to the question of what the armoured creatures wanted to do to him, than to the most terrible of all realisations: that a perfidious dream had slung him back into the past, to a phase of his life that he thought he had long since overcome. His rise through society in Shanghai, the peace that he had made with Joanna, his arrival in Xintiandi, it was all revealed as a fantasy, the real dream, from which the invisible insects were now waking him with their rustles and clicks.
Close beside him, someone had begun to whimper, in high, singing tones. Everything sank back into darkness, because the fact that his eyes were closed was starting to defeat the vision of that terrifying room. His mind found its way back to reality, except that nobody seemed to have told his body. It didn’t respond, it wouldn’t move. He was starting to fight against that weird rigidity by emitting those whimpers, real sounds that anyone who had been in the room could have heard as clearly as he did himself, and finally, by summoning all his powers, he managed to move the little finger of his left hand. He was wide awake by now. He remembered stories about people who – having apparently passed away – had been carried to the grave, while they actually saw every moment with crystal clarity, and without the slightest chance of being able to attract anyone’s attention, and he whimpered still louder in his panic and despair.
It was Diane who rescued him.
‘Owen, I’ve cracked Yoyo’s password.’
A twitch ran through his paralysed body. Jericho sat up. The computer’s voice had broken the spell, dream images gurgled away down the drain of oblivion. He took a few deep breaths before asking:
‘What was it?’
‘Eat me and I’ll eat you alive.’
My God, Yoyo, he thought. How overdramatic. At the same time he was grateful that she had clearly chosen the access code in a fit of rebellious romanticism, rather than opting for the more secure variation of a random sequence of letters and digits, which would have been much harder to decode.
‘Download the content,’ he said.
‘I’ve done it.’
‘Save it in Yoyofiles.’
‘With pleasure.’
Jericho sighed. How was he going to wean Diane off her habit of saying With pleasure? Much as he liked her voice, her tone, the words bothered him more each time. There was something servile about it that he found repulsive. He rubbed his eyes and squatted on the edge of the desk chair, his eyes fixed on the monitor.
‘Diane?’
‘Yes, Owen?’
‘Can you— I mean, would it be possible for you to delete the phrase With pleasure from your vocabulary?’
‘What do you mean exactly? With pleasure? Or the phrase with pleasure?’
‘With pleasure.’
‘I can offer to suppress the phrase for you.’
‘Great idea. Do that!’
He almost expected the computer to grant his wish with another With pleasure, but Diane just said silkily, ‘Done.’
And how amazingly simple. Why hadn’t he thought of it years ago? ‘Show me all the downloads in Yoyofiles from May of this year, sorted by time of day.’
A short list appeared on the screen, totalling about two dozen entries. Jericho skimmed them and concentrated his attention on the time leading up to Yoyo’s escape.
There was something.
His weariness fled instantly. About half an hour before Yoyo left her flatshare, data had been transferred to her computer, two files in different formats. He asked Diane to open one of them. It was a shimmering symbol of intertwined lines. It pulsed as if it were breathing. Jericho took a closer look.
Snakes?
It actually did look like a nest of snakes. Snakes twining into a kind of reptilian eye. It seemed to rest in the centre of a body, from which the snake bodies emerged: a single, surreal-looking creature that somehow reminded Jericho of school visits.
Where did snakes go creeping around all over the place in mythology?
He looked at the second file.
friends-of-iceland.com
en-medio-de-la-suiza-es
Brainlab.de/Quantengravitationstheorie/Planck/uni-kassel/32241/html