The Liar's Dictionary

Clear and white against the dark beyond, Sophia Slivkovna’s face was framed in the window, staring down at the group. She looked calm, regal, as relaxed as an audience member glancing down from their box at the opera.

It was not fancy on his part: even at this distance, Winceworth could tell she was looking directly at him, her finger to her lips.

W is for

wile

(n.)

The fire alarm was so loud it made my teeth hurt – the kind of sound that makes every neuron sit up and beg, and forces shock to fizz along your gums.

‘Pip?’

I dropped the telephone receiver, grabbed the fake-words envelope and sprang for the office door. I made it into the hallway before the surface of my eye began to itch. Out in the passage my vision became milky as if the walls and balustrades and skirting boards were in a state of flux, unsteady in my eyeline. I tried to focus and a familiar shape dashed past my ankles. Tits the cat, faster than I had ever seen, striped down the stairs and out of sight.

Smoke was filling the hall.

My heart dopplered. There was a muffled clatter from above as if something falling to the floor, and then the sound of wood or metal or stone lurching. I covered the ground in record speed up to the stairs, their banisters smoothed by the wear of century’s past lexicographers’ hands, and ran up to the forbidden upper storeys. A door was open some way down the corridor and I charged towards it. When I think back about this moment, there was the smell of something chemical burning in the air – but that might just be the mind playing tricks. I raced to the door, saw smoke pluming in creamy hurtles around its frame, and I lurched inside.

The smoke was thick in the room and the struggling figures I found there appeared as if through fog: I was able to first make out the darkened angles of their elbows and their knees. Both figures were coughing. I could recognise Pip’s cough from over 1,000 metres – another way perhaps of defining love – and I made my way towards it, repeating her name. It sounded like bleating. The proportions of the contents of this room were unclear and impossible, transformed into bitter clouds and shadows, its details all completely lost. I knocked into a desk or a table or a ghost with my hip as I stumbled forward, calling Pip’s name.

‘Here!’ Pip said. ‘I’ve got him!’

And I was by her side and coughing in time with her, pushing my hands out in front of me and scrabbling at her shoulder, at some unknown fabric, at another’s shoulder within it, within the smoke. All was greys and heats and angles, at our feet a shattered spray of glass. I rubbed my eyes again, focused on the floor and saw the remnants of a small flaming parcel of wiring. It stank and popped and gushed more smoke, and a man – David, I recognised his height and his movements now at such close quarters – stamped and stamped and tried to shake Pip from his elbow while bringing his foot down upon the package.

He was saying, hissing, desperate, ‘Shit-shit-shit—’

That voice without the robo-disguiser: I’d be able to pick it out of a million.

There was a roaring, zipping sound above our heads and we all twisted to stare through the fog above us. The smoke was thickest there and running up the corner of the room and to the ceiling tiles, we saw a terrible line of flame. Yellow and red and amber, apricot, auburn, aurelian, brass, cantaloupe, carrot, cinnabar, citric, coccinate, copper, coral, embered, flammid, fulvous, gilt, ginger, hennaed, hessonite, honeyed, laharacish, marigold, marmaladled, mimolette, ochraceous, orang-utan, paprikash, pumpkin, rubedinous, ruddy, rufulous, russet, rusty, saffron, sandy, sanguine, spessartite, tangerine, tawny, tigrine, Titian, topazine, vermilion, Votyak, xanthosiderite—

‘Shit shit shit.’ David’s voice again right by my ear. It was in time with the peal of the fire alarm. I tripped on the smoke-spuming package as he spoke, seizing Pip’s arm to steady myself.

The roar of orange above us took on a sudden new gulping intensity, and all three of us blundered backwards. The whole of the ceiling was suddenly sheeting with a ripple of flame and the heat of it glanced across my scalp.

Pip’s hand was on my collar and she was shouting and pulling at David’s sleeve. Who knows the instinct that was flushing through her, dictating her movements and willing her onwards, but she heaved both of us spluttering Swansbyites out of the smoke-filled, fire-filling room, threw us down the stairs just as a beam or bressummer or architrave fell to the ground in a hiss and bang of masonry.

We rolled down the steps and staggered to our feet. A wordless choking heap, we grabbed each other’s lapels and ran headlong for the front door and out into the evening air.

X is for

x

(v.)