Dark Matter by Brett Adams Page A

close to his shoulder. For a moment he was faintly
aware of the TV’s flicker and Jordy’s sagging arm, before he focused his attention
on the nimble-footed clerk.
    He was intoxicated by the familiar sense of
being embodied within his mind. It was so crisp, vivid, rich. His imagination
spared no detail as it manifest the process of sifting his memory in search of
something consumed in the past and put aside. The clerk’s footsteps ricocheted
from the walls, and his breath huffed. The smell of dust and archival fluid
grew heavy in the musty air.
    The clerk searched backward in time, in
halls pocked by nooks lit by green-shaded lamps, Rasputin clamped to his side.
Other halls branched off at regular intervals. The clerk’s balding head tracked
their advance, and he turned down some without hesitation.
    Rasputin looked beneath this illusion to
the reality. Time was orderly and linear. Days, weeks, months, years, all
packed together in known ways. And such was the route his little clerk
navigated. Straight halls, sharp corners, no-nonsense doors.
    But no sooner had he made this observation
than the environment changed.
    He noticed the clerk’s steps slow, and
suddenly they wheeled downwards on the steps of a spiral staircase. They were
plunged into gloom. He felt the smooth wooden steps give way to irregular rock,
and knew a moment of the sickly sensation of misjudging a step. Then light
bloomed again and drove the darkness back.
    By the light of a flaming torch, Rasputin
stole a glance at the errand carrier and suppressed a shudder. Gone was the
officious little clerk. Rasputin had no name for what padded next to him now.
It had arms, or rather, limbs. With one it held aloft the torch, with others it
moved. But it wasn’t picky about which did what. A cluster of its limbs came
and went amid a shagpile of fur, now rising to grasp, now falling to stride.
Nothing Rasputin could see in the wavering light resembled a face, but a wet,
snuffling sound evidenced a nose.
    After a moment’s hesitation, he thrust his
hand into the creature’s coarse hair and clung on.
    The sphere of light bobbled to the
stairwell’s base, and revealed rough-hewn tunnels departing in every direction.
Their dark mouths gaped to the left, right, and centre, and covered the roof
and floor. From somewhere came the sound of water dripping, and other, furtive
noises.
    Without warning, the creature shuffled to
the lip of a tunnel mouth and tumbled over its edge. Its hair slipped through
Rasputin's grasp and he plunged in weightless free-fall.
    The shock made his heart hammer, and his
hands flailed after the creature.
    For a moment his mind raced to understand
the implications of ending in a bloody heap in the bowels of his own memory.
    Then his hand snagged a tuft of hair. He hung
on until his forearm burned.
    Again the horizon swung, and he found
himself walking upright along the tunnel, leaving the one they had exited a
dark hole in the floor behind.
    Soon the creature clambered up a wall to
another tunnel mouth. He let it haul him up, and on reaching the tunnel’s lip, felt
gravity self-correct again, washing away the drag of the old and leaving him
feeling buoyant.
    Gradually he began to see method in the
madness. His imagination was mapping a new journey through his memory. Whereas
before with the clerk he had regressed in the rectilinear halls of time, he now
foraged in the twisting labyrinth of things , the remembrance of which
was a tangled web of connotation and cue. The clerk had brought him to the
storehouse of his mind occupied by memories of a time in the previous year. The
creature by his side now sought a path to a particular object, the preface to a
book entitled The Second World War, by a man named Winston Churchill. Finding
remembrance of it was not straightforward. The task required a bloodhound. He
had the smell of it, that mildewy, almost salty smell of old paper, and on the
strength of that lead they hunted.
    The first quarry the