The greater spotted woodpecker (dendrocopos major) is a medium sized bird measuring 21 to 23 centimetres in typical adult specimens with a wingspan of approximately 35 centimetres. It is easily identifiable by its black and white plumage with red markings underneath the tail feathers. Male greater spotted woodpeckers are also coloured red on the back of the head. This species is only likely to be confused with the lesser spotted woodpecker (dryobates minor) which can be easily differentiated by its much smaller size and quieter pecking sound. The lesser spotted woodpecker typically measures 15 centimetres, not much larger than a common house sparrow. These were the words that Sam had read the day before in the wildlife section of the local library. This had settled it. Woodpecker was without doubt a greater spotted woodpecker.
This was one of two pieces of information that she had gleaned the previous day, the other being that The Journal of Mathematical and Electrical Control Science existed. Real words on real paper. Neither fact helped much in pushing forward her comprehension of what was happening or what she was supposed to do, but at least now she was rather sure that she wasn't going insane. Whatever it was that she was now involved in was real and this had given her a sudden sense of direction and purpose. Driving home she had decided there and then that she was now all-in on this thing. She committed herself to follow whatever threads she might pull until the whole thing unravelled.
On that drive she had phoned a friend who was a research assistant at University College in London and arranged to borrow her library card for the morning. She needed to see inside that book. She had also phoned work and told them that she wasn't feeling herself, which was no lie, and needed the day off at short notice.
Her friend Kate is waiting for her at the station just as they had agreed. They had known each other since school and whilst they had never been close, they had always remained in touch through social media. Kate seems hurried by the day that is yet to unfurl, but says that she has time for a quick coffee at a place just outside the station. The morning is cold enough that Sam can see her breath. Entering the warmth of the café, steam hissing out of the espresso machines, has her peeling off layers as the heat hits her, abrupt and unexpected. Kate gives Sam the library card, "Give me a call when you're done so I can get it back. So, what are you swatting up on anyway?"
Sam had anticipated the question and already prepared an answer. "I'm thinking about doing an open university degree. Maybe linguistics. I just want to photocopy some material, so I know what I'm talking about," she explains, sounding, she thinks, convincing.
"Good for you Sam. So, what's been going on in your life? It's been ages."
They chat for ten minutes but in a short form, superficial, kind of way, Sam giving a brief synopsis of what had been happening in her life. The divorce, her mother, work. Kate is settled with one child and enjoying academic life. She is still as excited by life and living in the big city as she ever was and couldn't imagine living out in the sticks like Sam. Her child was some kind of art prodigy, but whose offspring isn't, Sam thinks to herself. "Anyway, must be going Sam. It's been lovely to see you, albeit so briefly. Conflab with the professor," Kate says pronouncing the last syllable as a long "orrr".
"Well thanks Kate. It's been great to see you too. I really appreciate you helping me out with the library card like this."
"Glad I can help. You can invite me to the graduation party! Call when you're done okay?"
"Of course. Thanks again."
******
Sam had been anxious that she wouldn't be able to get past the front gate without a university identification card, so she had tried as best she could that morning to dress like a mature student. Casual but conservative. A mix of styles to convey the message that even at her age she hasn't quite worked out what she wants to be yet. To round off the look she carries a ring binder under her left arm as she goes. Now that she is standing outside the main courtyard, she realises this might look a touch dated. Most of the students carry mac-books if they carry anything. Hers is the only ring binder in sight. She needn't have bothered with the charade anyway. The security guard isn't checking anyone or even paying much attention as people pour in busily for morning lectures. Sam tags on to the side of a group of students and walks straight through.
Amongst the youthful bustle she asks someone for directions to the library, the entrance to which is over in the right corner of the courtyard. Entry is through an automatic turnstile which Kate's card unlocks. The university library is on another scale to the local library. Like going from a small bluff to the Himalayas. The lower floor is a sea of computers and areas set aside for scanning and photocopying. The only books are set right at the back of the vast hall in tightly packed rows of shelves. Doors lead off to staircases spiralling to the five floors above, and three lifts are in service, their red numbers ticking up and down as they go. Unlike the small library in town there is no information point and Sam feels a little overwhelmed. The computers. They must have a database of all the books held in the library, she thinks. Things couldn't have changed too much since she was at uni.
Sitting down at a screen she clicks on the icon "Library Index," and taps in journal of mathematical and electrical control science. A long list showing volume upon volume of the journal stretching back to the nineteen-seventies pops up on the screen. She scrolls down and finds Volume LV, the specific one that Woodpecker had told her to look at. Double click, and there it is. Third floor, row 131, shelf 4, D332. There are pens and small scraps of paper next to the keyboard, so she scribbles the location down and heads for the staircase. There is a cold lonely echo from her shoes as she ascends to the third floor. A bright artificial light, blinding almost, reflects off the white marble floor making Sam squint. She has the feeling of being carried up into the strong light. She can't feel her legs.
Her eyes readjust as she spills through the door onto the third floor of the library, which is so large that the slanted lines of perspective stretch off into the distance. The natural light, muted by row after row of bookshelves, brings her back to herself. The dusty aged scent of books, the smell of knowledge, reminds her of what she is here to do.
On this floor there are mostly only books, tightly packed in and stretching to the roof. The only other objects in the room are a single computer, presumably so that people don't have to go downstairs to search the database, and a double row of desks at the far end near the windows. A girl with thick blonde dreadlocked hair sits at the computer lost in intent concentration. For some reason looking at this girl makes Sam feel a pang, a shot of acidic electricity stretching from her gullet to her stomach. When it subsides it leaves behind a quiet nostalgia for a part of her youth that is now lost. She tries to pluck it from the air, to give what is missing a name. But it's gone. Whatever it was is destroyed rather than lost. It can't be found or recaptured, only remembered.
The rows of bookshelves are all numbered with stuck on signs printed on A4 paper and stuffed inside plastic envelopes. Row 131 is near the middle. She can see that the row stretches maybe forty meters off to the left. Shelf 4 is just above the level of her eyes and the first book has a printed label on its spine, D572. She stalks into the shadowy dusk between the bookshelves following the numbers down one by one towards D332. Being cocooned between these walls of paper is somehow comforting to her. Peering up she wonders how often if ever some of these books are opened. Here it seems, is all human knowledge, developed not from giant leaps forward in understanding, relativity or quantum mechanics, but from thousands of micro-discoveries. Advancing ideas, a millimetre at a time over thousands of years to arrive at some still incomplete and imperfect distillation of meaning. Within these books she knows are all these small advances which only when taken together can be called progress. But she is here to look at just one tiny piece of these endless tomes. Book D332 which is now positioned directly in front of her forehead.
The journal makes a quiet whooshing sound, its rough cover rubbing against its neighbours as Sam slides it off the shelf. It feels weighty in her hands held up so high. She lets it drop level with her waist, cradling it in both hands and walks back down the aisle the same way she had entered. With a thud she dumps it on one of the tables by the window and sits down, shuffling her bottom lightly into place. With her back to the daylight, she runs her hand down the open edge of the book cover. A few students sit at the next table facing her but with their heads down, and several more mill about between the shelves. "Page one hundred and seventy-nine," she whispers under her breath. Her stomach is jumping through hoops, leaping around like a space hopper. What was she about to discover and how would it be connected to the impending end of the world? She opens the book somewhere in the middle and then with her thumb flicks back until she reaches the right page. Flapping the book fully open Sam begins to read:
A Novel Method for the Control of High Dimensional Dynamic Systems with Noise
Prof. Stuart Levitsky (MMath) (Ph.D.)
******
She had caught the early train to London that morning and then the tube from Waterloo to Euston, straight up on the Northern Line. As the carriage roared and scraped its way northward, her mind turned to her father. She had never even seen a photo of him but had a single memory. A short tape real that played over in her mind from time to time. It felt more like a ghost of a memory that she wished she had, and she was never sure if it was real or false. If she couldn't trust her recollection of such important things, then who was she even? How could she pin down what her life meant if she didn't know what it was?
The real clicked and the tape rolled forward before her eyes. The inside of the train carriage faded to the edges. In this memory she is about four years old and stands on bright green grass in a meticulously manicured garden. It is set on three levels with whitewashed stone walls marking the step from one lawned level up to the next. At the sides the grass gives way to contoured flower beds full of colour. At the bottom are neatly trimmed hedges with perfectly squared edges as if they were made from plastic. These hedges frame a cherry tree in full blossom, a chaos of petals in the breeze. Sam stands on the middle of the three grassy levels looking up at a house. The house is beautiful, not large, but charming and well proportioned. It's the type of house that might make an artist want to pull out a brush and canvas and start painting. It has white walls matching the stone in the garden and wisteria growing up one side towards a semi-circular balcony set in the middle. Part art-deco, part classical English country, it feels modern but warm. Welcoming.
At this point in the memory the scene always turns to black and white, the colours dissolving into the air. The only colour is a bright turquoise ball with a dolphin on the side bouncing down the garden towards her. She looks up and sees that it has been kicked in her direction by a man. Her father. She doesn't know how she knows that this is her father, but she knows. She is more certain each time the memory comes than the time before. As the man approaches, she can't see any details of his face. It is blurred out as if to protect his identity. How he moves is there. He's confident, and strong. She can't see but senses the broad warm smile too, but not much else. Then he bends down, and she can smell him, like cardboard and faint aftershave, floral and sharp with solvent. Unmistakably a fatherly smell that makes her surer still that it's him. A daughter knows her father's scent, doesn't she? Is it not stamped on her brain from the first seconds after birth? She has goosebumps.
He whispers something into her ear, but in this memory, she cannot hear what he says. If only she could hear him, she might learn something. Sometimes she would try and stop the film playing at this point and rewind. She would try hard to listen, biting her teeth together to open her ear holes. But she can only hear static, the beat of blood in her head. She is aware now of her mother's presence, nearby but not visible. Standing beside her or behind her perhaps. Her warm nicotine breath in the air. Sam is watching the man, her father, straighten his posture and walk back up towards the house. She is waving, an insecure spindly wave of the hand. The wave of a little girl. She is biting her bottom lip so hard that she splits the skin and can taste the colour red. Here the memory ends.
******
Sam tries to read the academic paper from the book in front of her, but it may as well be written in Chinese. Unlike languages, she realises, with their beautiful often inexact structural and grammatical rules, mathematics is a reductionists subject. Complicated ideas broken down into their fundamental parts and expressed in a shorthand that she has no hope of comprehending. Between the formula, some stretching to several pages, are paragraphs of an English nested within the common language which is only a whisker more decipherable than the maths itself. Still Sam reads every word hoping that some of it will stick, or that something might jump out at her. A clue to what all this is about. Some parts make a little sense to her, but she feels partially blind, able to see shading and shadow but not the picture.
".......practical applications for this method are beyond the scope of this paper. Possible uses might include the reduction of electrical noise in telemetry, applications in the manufacture of microchips or in the control of autonomous or semi-autonomous dynamic systems...."
She thinks about this for a moment. Perhaps this technology, whatever it is, was being used in one of these areas. But how can you destroy the world with telemetry or a microchip? She doesn't really know what a semi-autonomous dynamic system is, other than it was probably something that moves.
She rubs her tired eyes and tries to read the whole thirty-one-page paper again. It's no good though. Even if she studied for a decade, her genetics were a limiting factor that would never allow her to understand what she was looking at. She may as well be trying to break ten seconds for the hundred metre sprint. She holds her head in her hands and clenches great handfuls of her wiry hair. The thought that she is in thrall to some sort of mental episode grips her again. Nothing made sense and everything seemed too unbelievable to be real. Yet everything felt too real to be anything else. She was, after all holding in her hands the book that Woodpecker had told her to look at. A book that she couldn't possibly have known existed either consciously or subconsciously.
A melodious tapping like a small bell being rung brakes her free of her thoughts. Then it stops. She strains to listen. There it is again. The sound reminds her of a wine glass being chimed to call dinner party guests to toast. She turns around to where the sound is coming from, and there sitting on the masonry outside the window sits Woodpecker tapping on the glass behind her. Instead of being surprised to see her there, her presence brings a rationality back to the world that washes her mind clear. She looks at Woodpecker and slowly nods in acceptance of what she is seeing with her eyes, but then is caught by the thought of what the other students in the room must be thinking. What was this woodpecker doing there and why was this strange woman nodding at it? She turns to peer into the gloom of the library, but now it is empty except for her and all that information held in the books around her. It is as if the students have evaporated into the air. She's sure there were people not thirty seconds ago.
Now Woodpecker is tapping the window again. The melody has become a rattle. Insistent and impatient. Sam rises to her feet and walks to the window. She smiles down at Woodpecker. It is good to see her again, and it makes her feel close once more to her mother. She shrugs her shoulders. What? Woodpecker tilts her little head behind her pointing her beak to a bench under a fine oak tree down in the circular courtyard nestled between the library walls. Students mill around down in the sunlight, lost in thought or conversation. Woodpecker launches from the window ledge. Flap, flap, drop. Flap, flap, drop. Sam watches her graceful silky movements, plotting a trajectory to the tree. Leaving the scientific journal on the table, she hurries to the lift and hits the down button. The light flashes on and immediately off again. Broken or suspended in time, Sam isn't sure. She rushes to the stairs and races down, eager to confirm what she had seen. Not wanting to miss the chance to see Woodpecker again.
Out in the courtyard it is now still and deserted too. Just like the library, she thinks. She looks up into the oak tree, but she can't see Woodpecker. She's either gone or hiding. Instinctively she sits down on the bench to wait. She would come. Sam just knows that she will come. She can feel herself being watched again. Eyes spearing through the stillness.
She doesn't have a good sense of how long it takes, but she looks across and woodpecker is there sitting on the arm of the bench. "Hello darling. How are you? This must have all been quite a shock to you," she says. The voice, the mannerisms, unmistakably those of her mother.
"Mum. I mean Woodpecker. I'm fine. Confused by it all but I'm fine. I just have no idea what I'm supposed to do. What any of this means."
"Well don't worry too much darling," Woodpecker says. "You'll work it out. You always were a bright girl."
"But I found the book you told me about when we met in the woods and it's beyond me. It will be forever beyond me to understand it. What am I supposed to do with it?"
"Well, I'm sure it's beyond me too of course. A woodpecker's brain is much smaller than a human brain after all. Anyway, I have a feeling that I'm not really here to answer the questions darling."
"Then why are you here?" Sam asks and then realizes that her voice sounds harsh, accusatory. She corrects herself, "Not that I don't like having you here. I really like it. It comforts me to have you close. I thought I'd lost you and now I've got you back, or a part of you. I just mean," she trails off because she doesn't know what she means.
"Samantha darling if I wasn't here, you wouldn't know how important you are. You have to stop this thing. Whatever it is you must stop it. I'm just a conduit now. I have to help you understand."
"But I don't think I can do this," Sam huffs sounding defeated. "If the end of the world is coming then what am I supposed to do? If it really is coming, then it's all pointless. All of these people going about their lives are just living from one meaningless moment to the next."
"Now, now darling you always were dramatic. If you can stop it or even slow it down, then maybe what you say isn't as true as you think."
"But how!?" Sam shouts her shoulders slouching in despair. She looks down at Woodpecker once more, who sits serenely looking up at her. "Right. You aren't here to answer the questions."
"Correct darling. But I do have some more information that might be useful. Who knows?"
"Some more information?"
"Yes. Or something else to look at while you are here."
"What then?"
"You should look at the Guardian newspaper from 31st March earlier this year darling. Page 7."
"Okay. The Guardian. 30th March. Page 7. Got it," Sam says gathering her composure once more.
"Good. See what you can find darling. You can do this. You're the only one who can."
As Woodpecker says these words her eyes twinkle and Sam swears that she can feel the warmth of motherly love still there. She realises that whatever difficulties they had endured, however separated they had been at parts of their lives, this warmth could never be extinguished. Even in death she can see this unspoken love is unspoken only because no words can exist for it. Instead, it made Woodpecker's eyes sparkle, and those without it look dull and patined with a loss they didn't know they possessed.
Without saying another thing, Woodpecker launches herself onto the oak tree trunk and spirals up into the branches. Sam watches as she flies across the courtyard, dipping up high to the guttering of the library. From there she flutters back over Sam's head, over the tree, and then she's gone.
"Mum..." Sam says into the air. She wanted to ask her about her father. About her memory. But it was too late.