Woodpecker

Chapter 14 / Sam 6 / 2 x 13 Days Left

A terminus. This is what Woodpecker had told Sam she was. She couldn't remember the exact words but the universe she was told is made up of information, and she sat at some important terminus of this information. Threads had come to crisscross with her life, and this was how she came to find herself in this parallel universe of sorts. This universe in which Woodpecker existed as flesh, bone, feather, beak, motion, and noise. She hadn't really understood what this meant until DCI John Geering showed up in the office of Professor Stuart Levitsky four days ago. As soon as he spoke his name, the three of them, her, Ben, and Stuart, had all immediately understood several things that they hadn't before grasped.

The first was which part of the newsprint page that they had been looking at was significant. This small story about the discovery of the body in a flat in London which mentioned John Geering by name. The second was that Sam wasn't some crazy woman with a crazy story. Even she hadn't been sure of this until the policeman stood, tall and definite, in front of her. The chain of events that led her to the office of a mathematics professor in London were now too improbable to be put down to coincidence, and nor could they be a function of some suppressed memories now resurfacing. A maths professor and a policeman, named by name, previously unconnected and standing in the same room as her and Ben. The third was that something was very wrong with the world, but none of them had the slightest idea what it could be.

As well as this joint epiphany Sam had in that moment experienced a private revelation. Woodpecker was real! More real and vivid than her mother had been in life even. Her parent she could now see had become like a ghost to her before she had died. She was a voice at the end of a phoneline or a presence in a room, but not real living matter to bump up against. In that moment she had felt joy that Woodpecker existed, giving her another chance to be present with her mother, or some form of her. Woodpecker seemed to have all the strength and none of fragility that had beset her mother in her last months. As if her death was to be celebrated because it brought forth this wonderous creature. She also understood now more of what it meant to be a "terminus". The people, places, and events of her life were meaningful because of their disorder. Quite by chance it seemed, this disorder had converged in that office to bring the four of them together, each significant in ways that she still couldn't comprehend.

Professor Stuart Levitsky she thought already knew, or at least strongly suspected, that what she told him was true. It had been as if the conversation, extraordinary as it was, was the most natural thing in the world to him. Whatever the project was that he was involved in, he had known that something was amiss. Yet until that day he had clearly thought that whatever he was involving himself with was just numbers on a page. Yet between them walking in, and half an hour later, he had come to fully accept that his work was now part of something that was causing the earth to barrel towards oblivion. In that same window of time, he had also learned of the oblivion that had beset his friend Joshua Matheson. News that had shaken him. Exactly who the dead man was and how he was connected to everything that Woodpecker had told her, Sam still didn't know. Was he a friend? The sole contact on the consulting project that Levitsky mentioned? Maybe the mysterious Nucleon?

If Stuart Levitsky's work was the reason that she had been led to him, and DCI John Geering had been led to them by the death of Joshua Matheson, then why is Ben here she wonders? Is he just involved by coincidence because she was too stupid to work out what to do by herself? Maybe she still needed him as crutch to lean on. No, she thinks. All of the people at the terminus were predestined to be there, and were unable to fight the logic of whatever had carried them to that place. The same must be true of Ben. He had an important role to play, and she trusted now that it would later reveal itself or be revealed by Woodpecker.

Finally, she wonders if she had been right to steal the envelope and put in Geering's pocket like she'd been told to?

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