Kraken

Chapter Ten

FOR THE BULK OF HER TWEENS AND TEENS, MOST OF KATH Collingswood’s teachers had either been indifferent or mildly antipathetic to her. One man, her biology teacher, had more actively disliked her. She had known it pretty early in their relationship, and had even been able to express and evaluate his reasons to herself with some clarity.

His opinion of her as sulky she conceded, but considered no more his business than his disapproval of her friends. He thought her a bully, which was, she would say, 65 percent fair. Certainly she found it easy to intimidate more than half her class, and did so. But they were minor cruelties perpetrated without glee, vaguely, almost dutifully, to keep people off her back.

Collingswood had not much reflected on how easy such misery-mongering was for her, how often nothing but a glance or word, if even that, had palpable effects. The first time she thought about it was when she stopped that teacher’s mouth.

She was thirteen. Some altercation had left a classmate crestfallen, and Mr. Bearing had shaken his whiteboard marker at Collingswood like a baton and said, “You’re a nasty piece of work, aren’t you? A nasty piece of work.”

He had turned, shaking his head, to write on the board, but Collingswood had been abruptly enraged. She was completely unwilling to submit to the description. She had not even looked at the back of Mr. Bearing’s head, had stared furiously at her nails and clucked her tongue, and something like a bubble of cold had swelled in her chest, and burst.

Collingswood did look up then. Mr. Bearing had stopped writing. He stood still, hand to the board. Two or three other children were looking around in confusion.

With a sense of great interest, with a sense of pleased curiosity, Kath Collingswood had known that Mr. Bearing would never call her a nasty piece of work again.

That was that. He picked up his writing. He did not turn to look at her. She put off till later the questions of what had happened, and how she had known that it had. She had leaned back, instead, on the rear legs of her chair.

AFTER THAT MOMENT, COLLINGSWOOD TOOK MORE MIND OF HER unspoken interventions: the times she knew what her friends or enemies were about to say; when she silenced someone across a room; found a lost thing that was frankly unlikely to be wherever she uncovered it. She started to think things through.

Not that she was a poor student, but Collingswood’s teachers might have been impressed to see the rigour with which she had pursued this research project. She started with a little tentative poking around online, put together a list of books and documents. Most she was able to download from absurd websites, copyright not being particularly apropos for such texts. The titles of those she could not track down she laboriously copied and requested from surprised, even concerned, librarians and booksellers. Once or twice she even found them.

She picked her way, more than once, through a weed-littered old carpark and bust windows into a small long-deserted hospital near her house. In the quiet of what had once been a maternity ward she dutifully acted out the idiotic actions the texts described. Certainly she felt stupid, but she performed as required, recited all the phrases.

She kept a record in her notebook of what she had tried, where she had read it, what if anything had occurred. BOOK OF THOTH = BOOK OF BOLLOCKS MORE LIKE, she wrote. LIBER NULL = NULL POINTS.

Mostly there were no effects at all, or just enough to keep her at it (a scuttling noise here, an unwarranted shadow there). But it was when she got exasperated and restless and thought fuck it to her studies, when she was resultingly imprecise, that she made the best progress.

“That’s it for today. You can go early.” Packing up her books with the rest of the class, Collingswood watched Miss Ambly’s shock at her own words. The woman touched her mouth in bewilderment. Collingswood flicked her fingers. A pen spun off Miss Ambly’s desk.

And later: “What’s it doing, sir?” some girl asked of a bemused teacher, pointing at the class goldfish, which was swimming with highly unnatural motions. Collingswood, unnoticed, continued what she had started on an exasperated whim, scratching her hands on the desk as if DJing to a classmate’s ringtone, which rhythms quite unexpectedly dictated the fish’s back-and-forth motion.

That had been years ago. There had been a lot of work since then, of course, much tinkering, plenty of experiments, but Collingswood’s baseline impatience continued to truncate her researches. She came to understand that this would ultimately limit her. That she was without question a bit of a talent if she said it herself, and yes she could make it her career no problem, but she would never be one of the very best. Since those days, she had met one or two of them, those very best at this. She had known them the moment they had walked into the room.

But her limits had unexpected effects, and not all negative. The lack of the sternest rigour to perform these competencies at the highest level blurred them, mixed their elements, gave them little swills of backwash. Mostly ignorable effects or demerits, but only mostly.

In the case of the alarm system she had installed in Billy’s doorway, for example, she had primed it specifically for ingress. That it might trip, even faintly, in the case of egress, was a product not of design but of Collingswood’s powerful but slapdash methods.

That would have bothered a perfectionist. But then that perfectionist would not have been alerted when intruders removed Billy from the flat that they had never broken into, as Collingswood, lurching awake and for several moments confused, her heart gonging and an aching in her ears, was.

Chapter Eleven

THEY WERE IN A BEAT-UP CAR. THE MAN GOSS DROVE. IN THE back, the boy, Subby, held Billy’s arm.

Subby had no weapon and did not grip hard, but Billy did not move. He was frozen by the man and boy having unfolded in his room-the intrusion, the drugged dragging of the world. Billy’s thoughts stuttered in loops. He felt dragged across time. A smear of pigeons was behind the car, pigeons that seemed to have been following him for days. What the hell what the hell, he thought, and Leon.

The car smelt of food and dust and sometimes of smoke. Goss had a face wrong for the time. He looked stolen from some fifties. There was a postwar cruelty to him.

Twice Billy’s hand twitched and he imagined a quick bundle and rush, throwing open the door and rolling into the street, away from these arcane kidnappers. Begging help from the shoppers in that Turkish grocer and the Wimpy hamburger place, running through, where were they, Balham? Each time the thought came Goss made a tch-tch noise and Subby’s hand would squeeze, and Billy would sit still.

He had no cigarette, but every few breaths Goss would exhale sweet woody smoke that would fill the car and go again. “What a ruddy night for it, eh?” he said. “Eh, Subby? What’s that pootling about? Someone’s out for a walk what oughtn’t was, don’t you coco? Someone’s woke up, Subby.” He wound down the window, an old hand-crank handle, looked up at the sky, wound it up again.

They hauled through streets of which Billy had lost all sense. They must be out in zone three or four where shops were keycutters and independent stationers. They passed no major chains. No west-coast coffee, not a Tescos. How could these be streets? Garages, timber-yards, judo gyms, cold pavements where rubbish moved quietly. The sky closed its last crack and it was night. Billy and his abductors were following rails, shadowing a lit-up train. It ushered them somewhere. They stopped by a dark arch.

“Chop chop,” said Goss. He looked up suspiciously and sniffed. He pulled Billy from the car. Billy thought he might puke. He reeled. Goss exhaled one of his smoky exhalations. He unlocked a door in corrugated iron and pushed Billy through into the black. Subby tugged from somewhere.

Goss spoke, as if Billy and he were in dialogue: “Is he then?” “Don’t know, might be, you got everything?” “Alright now, get the door, ready?”

Something opened. There was a change in the air on Billy’s face. Goss whispered, “Hush now.”

The room they were in smelt of damp and sweat. Something shifted. There was sound, a sputtering and crack. Lights came up.

There were no windows. The floor was dirty cement. The bricks sloped overhead were mapped with mildew. The chamber was huge. Goss stood by the wall holding a lever he had thrown. The room was full of lights, dangling on wires and jutting mushrooms from wall cracks.

Goss swore mildly as if at curious pigs. Billy heard a radio. A circle of people waited. Figures in leather jackets, dark jeans, boots, gloves. Some in band T-shirts, all in motorbike helmets. They held pistols, knives, cartoonishly vile nail-studded clubs. A radio played staticky classical music, fuzzed. There was a naked man on all fours. His lips fluttered. He had dials pushed into him, above each nipple. Unbleeding but extruding clearly from his body. It was from his open mouth that the radio sounds came. His lips moved to make the music, interference, the ghosts of other stations.

On a brick dais was a man. An older scrawny punk with spiked-up hair. A bandanna hid his mouth. His eyes were so wide he looked unhinged. He breathed hard, the cloth of his mask gusting in and out, and he was sweating in the cold. He was topless. He sat on a stool, his hands in his lap.

Billy was dizzy and sick from everything that night. Billy tried not to believe what he was seeing. Tried to imagine he might wake.

“Billy bloody Harrow,” the man said. “Check what that little bitch is doing.”

One of the figures in helmets twisted a dial on the radio-man’s chest, and radio-man’s mouth changed to sudden new shapes as the song ended. He whispered in little bursts and spoke barely audible interactions, men’s voices and women’s.

“Roger that ic-two, Sarge,” he said, and, “Have a word with Vardy, will you?,” and, “ETA fifteen minutes, over.”

“Not there yet,” the bandanna man said. “They’re visiting your old house.” His voice was loud and low, London-accented. Goss shoved Billy closer. “Send that lot, then,” he said. “Are you going to make me go through various motions, Billy Harrow? Can you just tell me who it is you’re with and what it is you’re doing? Can you tell me puh-lease what is going on tonight, what it is you set walking. Because something’s out there. And more to the bloody point, what, pray bloody tell, is your interest?”

“WHAT IS THIS?” BILLY WHISPERED AT LAST. “WHAT DID YOU DO TO Leon?”

“Leon?”

“You know how it is,” Goss said. “You’re both vying for the best vol-au-vent, and the next thing it’s all been eaten.”

Goss held Billy as if he were a puppet. Little Subby’s hands clutched Billy’s own.

“What’s going on?” Billy said. He stared everywhere, at the radioman; he struggled. “What is this?”

The sitting man sighed. “Bugger,” he said. “You’re going to do this.” His staring eyes did not change at all. “Let me put it to you this way, Billy. What the fuck are you?”

He twisted on his stool. He raised his hands a little. He was blinking violently. “Who are you working with?” he said. “What are you?” Billy realised that the kerchief was not cowboy-style but was haphazardly balled in his mouth. The man was gagged. He shook his hands and Billy saw he wore handcuffs.

“Turn your fucking head!” the voice continued, from this man who could not be speaking. “Turn around.” One of the helmeted guards slapped him hard across his face, and he screamed muffled into his gag. “Stand this bugger up.” Two guards hauled him up by his armpits. His head lolled. “Let’s see,” the voice said. The guards turned the man to face the back wall.

Colours appeared. The whole of the topless man’s back was a tattoo. At its edges it was wisps of coloured swirl, crossbred Celtic-knot fractals. In the centre was a big, dark-outlined, stylised face. Bold and expertly done. A man’s face, in unnatural colours. A sharp old face with red eyes, something between a professor and a devil. Billy stared.

The Tattoo moved. Its heavy-lidded eyes met his. Billy stared at it and the Tattoo stared back.

Chapter Twelve

BILLY SHOUTED IN SHOCK AND TRIED TO SCRABBLE BACKWARD. Goss held him.

The guards held the punk-haired man still. The Tattoo’s inked eyes went side to side, like an animation, as if it were a cartoon projected onto him. The thick black edges travelled, the shaded blue, blue-green, copper sections of skin shifting as the Tattoo pursed its lips, watched Billy, raised its eyebrows at him. It opened its mouth, and a hole of dark ink opened, a drawn throat. It spoke in that deep London voice.

“Where’s the kraken, Harrow? What’s your angle? What does Baron’s gang want with you?” The radio-man whispered static.

“What are you…?”

“Let me explain our problem,” the tattoo said. The man whose back it was on struggled in the guards’ grip. “My problem is no one knows you, Billy Harrow. You come out of nowhere. No one knows your percentage. And normally I couldn’t give a monkey’s what you’re up to, but that kraken, man. That kraken’s choice, mate. And it’s gone. And that’s trouble. Something like that, angel watching over it. If not very well, eh? Here’s the thing-I can’t make sense of what you’ve done, or how. So how about you fill me in?”

Billy tried to think for anything, anything to say to make these impossible abductors let him go. He would tell them anything. But not a solitary word of the Tattoo’s questions made any sense at all.

The shadows shifted. “You’re running with Baron’s mob,” the Tattoo said. “Shit taste, but I can save you from yourself. Now you and me work together, we can’t have secrets. So bring me up to speed.” The Tattoo stared. “What’s the story?”

Men unfold and people are generators and ink rides a man.

“Look at him,” the Tattoo said. “This little prick’s a Christ, is he? You said there’s nothing in his house?”

“Buggery I could taste,” said Goss. He hawked and swallowed what he raised.

“Who took the kraken, Billy?” the Tattoo said. Billy tried. There was a long silence.

“Look,” Goss said. “He’s got knowledges.”

“No,” the Tattoo said, slowly. “No. You’re wrong. He don’t. I think we’re going to want to workshop this.” The man shook and moaned, and a guard hit him again. The Tattoo rocked with the body that bore it. “You know what we need,” the Tattoo said. “Take him to the workshop.” The man who was a radio whispered an ill-tuned-in weather report.

GOSS DRAGGED BILLY, MAKING HIS LEGS MOVE WITH A NEW LOCOMOTION like a cartoon caper. Little Subby followed.

“Get off me,” Billy gasped abruptly. Goss smiled like a grandfather.

“Attention one and all,” said Goss. “I love it when you’re very very quiet. Beyond this door,” Goss said, “just over the road, we can open up the old bonnet, take a look inside, see what’s making the old girl seize up like that.” He tapped Billy’s belly. “We’re all recyclers; we all have to do our bit, don’t we, for the global warming and the polar bears and that. We’ll find new life for her as a fridge.”

“Wait,” whispered Billy. Whispering was all he could do. “Listen, I can…”

“You can what, poppet?” said Goss. “I couldn’t live with myself if I let you get in the way of progress. There’s white-hot innovation around the corner, and we all have to be ready. We’ve never had it so good.”

Goss opened the door into the cold and a girder of streetlamp light. Subby went out. Goss sent Billy after him, onto his hands and knees. Goss came after him. Billy put up his hands. He felt a rush. He heard splintering glass.

Billy crawled away. Goss did not follow. Subby did not move. The air was still. Billy did not understand. Nothing moved but him, for one, two seconds, and he could hear nothing but his own heart. Then air rushed past his ears again, and only then, too late, glass from whatever window had broken hit the ground, and Goss moved, his head shaking in a moment’s confusion as he looked at space where Billy no longer quite was.

Something met Subby. “Huff,” Subby said, and hurtled metres away. A man-shape in darkness gripped a pipework club. Goss shrieked. The attacker slammed the metal into him. It rang as if he were metal too. Goss did not even stagger. He ran to where Subby lay supine, blinking.

The man with the pipe grabbed Billy. He was big, bulky but fast-moving, his hair cut close, his clothes black and scruffy. There was a faint edge of streetlight on him.

“Dane?” Billy gasped. “Dane.”

THEY RAN ALONG THE DIRTY LITTLE NON-STREET, BY THE RAISED tracks, away from the terrible archway. A train passed, rumbling lights in the sky. Somewhere behind them Goss knelt by Subby.

“Come on,” Dane said. Something ran along the bricks beside them, something Billy did not make out. “We’ve got two minutes before they’re up. We’ve got one minute before their boss realises what’s happened. You’re bleeding. Goss can taste it.”

Another train passed. From streets away came the noise of traffic. Dane bundled Billy on. “No way I can take them,” Dane said. “I only got him ’cause they weren’t expecting anything. Plus there was…”

Dane ran them an intricate route until they emerged from the brick maze. They were by a park, the only figures in the street. By the silhouettes of massed trees Dane unlocked a car and shoved Billy in.

Billy wore a beard of blood, he realised. His shirt was stained with it. At some point, the night’s rough handling had split his lip. He dripped.

“Shit,” he mumbled. “Shit, sorry, I…”

“One of his knuckleheads.” Dane said. “Put your seat belt on.” Something filthy scudded from the wall across the deserted road, out of a gutter into the car. The squirrel, coiling under a seat. Billy stared.

“Shtum,” Dane said. He pulled out and drove, fast. “If it weren’t for little sodding nutkin I wouldn’t have found you. It got onto Goss’s car.”

They turned into lights, reached a street where there were shoppers and drinkers by late cafés and amusement arcades. Billy felt as if he would cry, to see people. It felt like the breaching of some meniscus, like he had entered a real night at last. Dane passed him a tissue.

“Wipe your mouth.”

“Leon…”

“Wipe the blood. We don’t want to be stopped.”

“We have to stop, we have to go to the police…” Really? Billy thought even as he said that. You’re not there anymore.

“No,” Dane said, as if he were listening to that monologue. “We do not.” You know that, right? “We’re just going to drive. Wipe your mouth. I’m going to get you out of here.”

Billy watched a quadrant of London he recognised no more than if it were Tripoli go by.

Chapter Thirteen

“WELL THIS IS BLOODY FABULOUS, ISN’T IT? THIS IS BLOODY perfect.” Baron stomped around Billy’s flat. He shook his head at the walls, folded and refolded his arms. “This is just how it was supposed to go. This is peachy.”

He stamped past the team powdering for fingerprints. She had her back to them, but from where she stood examining Billy’s doorway, Collingswood got gusts of their resentment.

She could not hear thoughts. So far as she knew, no one could: they spilt from each individual head in too many overlapping and counterflowing streams, and the words that part-constituted some of those streams were contradictory and misleading. But irritation that strong communicated, and knowing it to be mistranslation, she-like most of those with any knack at all for that kind of thing-automatically translated into text.

whos this twat think he is

wankers shd fuck off let real coppers work

y r we leting that litl bitch smoke

She turned and spoke to the thinker of that last fragment. “Because you been told to let us do whatever we want, innit?” she said, and watched the blood leave his face. She stepped over dropped books and followed Baron. She picked up the post on the table.

“Well?” Baron said. “Any ideas?”

Collingswood unlistened, focused on the traces of Billyness. Touched with a fingertip the doorframe, where stains of Billy’s attention read to her like messages squint-seen through a broken screen.

whats this she did that girl

cant get in

shes fit i wouldn’t mind

“What are you bloody smirking at?” Baron said. “Got something?”

“Nothing, boss,” she said. “You know what? No. You got me. This thing was still primed when I got here, you know? That’s why I had to let you in. No entry without invite, and you saw Billy boy-he was way too chickenshit to let anyone he didn’t know in after what we told him.”

“So what’s happened? He’s hardly just gone for a bloody walk, has he?”

“Nah.” She shrugged at the signs of scuffles. “Someone’s took him.”

“Someone who couldn’t get in.”

She nodded. “Someone who didn’t get in,” she said.

Vardy emerged from the bedroom, where he had been examining Billy’s bits and pieces. He joined them in the kitchen.

“That ain’t all,” Collingswood said. She made shapes with her hands, chopped the air up. “Something big happened tonight. Big like when the kraken got took. I don’t know what it is, but something’s wandering around out there.”

Baron nodded slowly. “Prof,” Baron said. “Any thoughts from your good self? Wish to revise your opinion about the unlikelihood of any attacks by your teuthists?”

“No,” said Vardy shortly. He folded his arms. “I do not. Care to revise your tone? Can’t tell you what’s gone on here or who’s done what to whom, but seeing as you ask, no. This does not read teuthism to me.” He closed his eyes. His colleagues watched him channelling whatever it was he channelled when he did what he did. “No,” he said, “this does not feel like them.”

“Well,” Baron said. He sighed. “We’re on the back foot here, ladies and gents. Our star witness and intended colleague is gone AWOL. We know the guard system was up and running. Doing what it was supposed to. But we also know it had both been tripped and not been tripped. Do I have that right?”

“Sort of,” Collingswood said. “It went off in reverse. Woke me up. I couldn’t work out what it was at first.”

“It would cover windows, too?” Vardy said. She stared at him. “Fine,” he said. “I have to ask.”

“No you don’t,” she said. “I told you. No one could get in.”

“No one?”

“What’s your point? I ain’t saying there’s no one stronger’n me out there-you know there is. If anyone got in, it would go off and I’d know. No one broke in…” She stopped. She looked one by one at the post. She looked at the cardboard book box. “No one broke in,” she said. “Someone sent him something. Look. There’s no stamp, this was hand-delivered.” She hefted it. She sniffed it.

Vardy unfolded his arms. Collingswood moved her fingers over the paper, whispered, ran little routines and subroutines.

“What is it?” Baron said.

“Alright,” she said finally. In the other room the grumbles of the other police were audible and ignored. “Everything remembers how it used to be, right? So like, this…” She shook the container. “This remembers when it was heavier. It was a full parcel and now it’s empty, right? It remembers being heavier but that ain’t the thing, the weird thing.”

She moved her fingers again, coaxed the cardboard. Of all the skills necessary for her work, what she was perhaps worst at was being polite to inanimate things. “It’s that it remembers being not heavier enough.

“Guv,” she said to Baron. “What do you know about how to…” She opened and clenched her hands. “How to make big shit go into something little?”

Chapter Fourteen

“WHAT HAPPENED TO LEON?” BILLY SAID.

Dane glanced at him and shook his head.

“I wasn’t there, was I? I don’t know. Was it Goss?”

“That man Goss, and that boy. It looked like he-”

“I wasn’t there. But you got to face facts.” Dane glanced again. “You saw what you saw. I’m sorry.”

What did I see? Billy thought.

“Tell me what he said,” Dane said.

“What?”

“The Tattoo. Tell me what he said.”

“What was that?” Billy said. “No. You can tell me some stuff. Where did you even come from?” They turned through streets he did not know.

“Not now,” Dane said. “We ain’t got time.”

“Get the police…” Beneath Billy’s seat the squirrel made a throat noise.

“Shit,” Dane said. “We don’t have time for this. You’re smart, you know what’s going on.” He clicked his fingers. Where his fingers percussed, there was a faint burst of light. “We do not have time.”

He braked, swore. Red lights disappeared in front of them. “So can we please cut the crap? You can’t go home. You know that. That’s where they got you. You can’t call Baron’s crew. You think that’s going to help? Old Bill sort you out?”

“Wait…”

“That flat ain’t your home anymore.” He spoke in little stabs. “Those ain’t your clothes, they ain’t your books, that ain’t your computer, you get it? You saw what you saw. You know you saw what you saw.” Dane snapped his finger under Billy’s nose and the light glowed again. He steered hard. “We clear?”

Yes, no, yes they were clear. “Why did you come?” Billy said. “Baron and Vardy said… I thought you were hunting me.”

“I’m sorry about your mate. I’ve been there. Do you know what you are?”

“I’m not anything.”

“You know what you did? I felt it. If you hadn’t done that I wouldn’t’ve got there in time, and they would’ve took you to the workshop. Something’s out.” Billy remembered a clenching inside, glass breaking, a moment of drag. “Goss’ll be licking for us now. It’s the man on the back you need to worry about.”

“The Tattoo was talking.”

“Do not start that. Miracles are getting more common, mate. We knew this was coming.” He cried with gruff emotion, touched his chest near his heart. “It’s the ends of the world.”

“End of the world?”

“Ends.”

IT WAS LIKE BUILDINGS SELF-AGGREGATED OUT OF ANGLES AND shade in front of the car, dissipated behind. Something very certain was out that night.

“It’s war,” Dane said. “This is where gods live, Billy. And they’ve gone to war.”

“What? I’m not on anyone’s side…”

“Oh, you are,” Dane said. “You are a side.”

Billy shivered. “That tattoo’s a god?”

“Fuck no. It’s a criminal. A fucking villain is what he is. Thinks you’re up against him. Thinks you stole the kraken. Maybe you used to run with Grisamentum.” Now that was a singsong name, a snip from scripture. “They never got on.”

“Where’s the squid?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Dane turned the wheel hard. “You telling me you ain’t felt what’s going on? You ain’t noticed signs? They are coming out of the darkness. This is gods’ time. They been rising.”

“What…?”

“In liquid, through Perspex or glass. This is in your blood, Billy. Coming up out of heaven. Forced by their season. Australia, here, New Zealand.” All places Architeuthis and Mesonychoteuthis had breached.

They were at a community hall, a sign reading SOUTH LONDON CHURCH. The street stank of fox. Dane held open the door. The squirrel leaped from the car and in two, three sine-curves was gone.

“You better start making sense, Dane,” Billy said, “or I’m just… going to…”

“Billy please. Didn’t I just save you? Let me help you.”

BILLY SHIVERED. DANE LED INDOORS, THROUGH UNTIDY ROWS OF plastic chairs facing a lectern, to a room at the back. The windows were covered with collages of torn coloured tissue paper, faux stained glass. There were leaflets advertising mother-and-child meetings, house-clearance sales. A storeroom full of engine bits and mouldering papers, a bent bicycle, the detritus of years. “The congregation’ll hide us,” Dane said. “You don’t want to mess with them. We scratch their back.” He pulled open a trapdoor. Light reached up.

“Down there?” said Billy.

Concrete stairs led to a striplit hallway, a sliding gate like the door of an industrial elevator. Behind a grille an older man and a shaven-headed boy in boiler suits held up shotguns. The ambient night sound of London disappeared.

“Is that…?” one of the guards said. “Who is that?”

“You know who I am?” Dane said. “Yeah you fucking do. Go tell his holiness I’m here and let us in.” Brusque, but with a gentleness Billy could feel, Dane pushed Billy inside.

Beyond the gate the walls were not featureless. Billy’s mouth opened. Still concrete and windowless, the walls were intricately moulded. Stained by London dirt no scrubbing could remove, a nautilus entwined with an octopus, with a cuttlefish, its flattened frilled mantle like a skirt edge. It encoiled limbs with an argonaut bobbing below its extruded eggcase-house. And squid everywhere. Shaped when the walls were wet.

What a corridor, this council-office walkway. A tentacular border of Disney-malevolent vampire squid; ornery Humboldt; whiplash squid in tuning-fork posture. Their bodies were rendered similar sizes, specificities effaced by shared squidness, teuthic quiddity. Their-the word came to Billy and would not lie down-squiddity. Architeuthis in the shabby matter of the building.

The buried room where Dane took Billy was tiny as a ship’s cabin. There was a little bed, a steel toilet. On a table was a plate of curry, a cup of something hot. Billy almost wept at the smell.

“You’re in shock,” Dane said, “and you’re starving and knackered. You don’t understand what’s going on. Get that down you and we’ll talk.”

Dane took a forkful-to show it was safe, Billy thought. He ate. The drink was too-sweet chocolate.

“Where are we?”

“The Teuthex’ll explain.”

What’s a Teuthex? Billy felt like he was swimming. His exhaustion increased. He saw against a dark background. His thoughts faded in and out like a radio station. This was more, he realised, than tiredness.

“Oh,” he said. A welling of alarm.

“Now don’t worry,” said Dane.

“You, what’s, you…” Billy jiggled the cup and stared at it. Put the spiked thing heavily down before he dropped it, as if that mattered. Black came in at him like an ink cloud. “What did you do?”

“Don’t worry,” Dane said.

“You need this,” Dane said.

Dane said another thing but his voice was too far away now. Bastards, Billy tried to say. Part of him told another part of him that Dane would not rescue him just to kill him now, but most of him was too tired to be afraid. Billy was in the dark quiet, and just before it closed behind him and over him he swung his own legs onto the bed and lay down, proud that no one did it for him.

INTO SLEEP’S BENTHOS AND DEEPER. A SLANDER THAT THE DEEPEST parts are lightless. There are moments of phosphor with animal movement. Somatic glimmers, and in this trench of sleep those lights were tiny dreams.

A long time sleep, and blinks of vision. Awe, not fear.

Billy might surface and for a moment open his flesh eyelids not his dream ones, and two or three times saw people looking down at him. He heard always only the close-up swirl of water, except in deep dream once through muffling miles of sea a woman said, “When’ll he wake?”

He was night-krill was what he was, a single minuscule eye, looking at absence specked with presence. Plankton-Billy saw an instant’s symmetry. A flower of limbflesh outreaching. Slivers of fin on a mantle. Red rubber meat. That much he knew already.

He saw something small or in the distance. Then black after black, then it came back closer. Straight-edged, hard-lined. An anomaly of angles in that curved vorago.

It was the specimen. It was his kraken, his giant squid quite still-still in suspension in its tank, the tank and its motionless dead-thing contents adrift in deep. Sinking toward where there is no below. The once-squid going home.

One last thing, that might have announced itself as such, the finality was so unequivocal. Something beneath the descending tank, at which from way above though already deep in pitch tiny Billy-ness stared.

Under the tank was something utter and dark and moving, something so slowly rising, and endless.

Chapter Fifteen

COLLINGSWOOD, WHOSE BRIEF THIS SORT OF THING WAS, HAD spent a couple of hours talking to a woman who referred to herself as an “asset” about some of the esoterica of material science. The woman had emailed a list of names, of researchers and grifters. “This sort of stuff changes all the time,” she had warned. “Can’t vouch for any of them in particular.”

“I called the first couple, guv,” Collingswood said, “but it was a bit tricky on the phone, you get me? Some of them gave me more names. I don’t think any of them knew what I was on about. I need to see them face-to-face. You sure you want to come? Ain’t you got shit to do?” She could rarely parse Baron’s brain, which was to be expected: it was only the inexperienced and unskilled who sent their thinkings all over the place, profligate and foolish.

“Indeed,” Baron said. “But that’s what mobile phones are for, aren’t they? This is the best lead we have.”

They traced a zigzag route through London, Baron in his plain clothes, Collingswood in her costume-like uniform, hoping to surprise their informers into helpful candour. There were not many names on the list-infolding and weightomancy were arcana among the arcane, a geeky byway. Baron and Collingswood went to offices, community colleges, the back rooms of high-street shops. “Is there somewhere private we can talk?” Baron would say, or Collingswood would open with, “What d’you know about making big shit little?”

One name on the list was a science teacher. “Come on, boss, let’s give the class a treat, eh?” Collingswood said, and marched in past pupils gaping from behind Bunsen burners. “George Carr?” Collingswood said. “What do you know about making big shit little?”

“ENJOY THAT?” CARR SAID. THEY WERE WALKING IN THE PLAYGROUND. “What was it, some science teacher tell you you’d never amount to anything?”

“Nah,” she said. “They all knew I’d amount to fucking loads.”

“What the hell does a cult squad want with me?”

“We’re just chasing a few leads, sir,” Baron said.

“Ever flog your skills?” Collingswood said. “Shrinkage for hire?”

“No. I’m not good enough and not interested enough. I get what I need out of it.”

“Which is what?”

“Come on holiday with me one day,” he said. “Three weeks of clothes in one carry-on bag.”

“Could I bring my dog?” Baron said.

“What? No way. Condensing something that complicated’s out of my league. I might just get it in, maybe, but Fido’s not going to be fetching sticks on the beach at the other end.”

“But it’s possible.”

“Sure. There’s a few people could do it.” He stroked his stubble. “Has anyone given you Anders’s name?”

Baron and Collingswood glanced at each other. “Anders?” Baron said.

“Anders Hooper. Runs a shop in Chelsea. Funny little specialist place. He’s very good.”

“So why haven’t we heard of him?” Baron said, waving his list.

“Because he’s only just started. Been doing it about a year, professionally. Now he’s good enough and keen enough to do it for lucre.”

“So how come you’ve heard of him?” Collingswood said.

Carr smiled. “I taught him how to do it. Tell him his Mr. Miyagi says hi.”

HOOPER’S SHOP SHARED SPACE ON A TERRACE WITH A DELICATESSEN, a travel bookshop, a florist. It was called Nippon This! Characters stared from the window with manga enthusiasm beside robot kits and nunchuck tat. Inside, a third of the small shelf space was taken up with books on the philosophy, mathematics, and design of origami. There were stacks of books of fold patterns. Incredible examples-dinosaurs, fish, klein bottles, geometric intricacies, all made from single uncut sheets.

“Alright,” said Collingswood. She smiled in appreciation. “Alright, that’s quite cool.”

A young man came out from the back. “Morning,” he said. Anders Hooper was tall, mixed-race, wearing a Gundam T-shirt. “Can I…” He hesitated at sight of Collingswood’s uniform. “Help you?”

“Might be,” she said. “Sell enough to make your rent on this place?”

“Who are you?”

“Answer the question, Mr. Hooper,” said Baron.

“… Sure. There’s a lot of interest in anime and stuff. We’re one of the best suppliers…”

“You can get all this shit off the Internet,” Collingswood said. “People come here?”

“Sure. There’s…”

“What about your orifuckinggami?” she said. He blinked.

“What about it? That’s more specialist, of course…” He kept his mind pretty cloudy, but what they know? Collingswood got from him, as abruptly as if announced by a beep.

“And you’re the man, right? Shit, we’re in effing Chelsea. How d’you pay? We spoke to Mr. Carr. Says hello by the way. He told us you do custom folding. Special jobs. Sound right, Anders?”

He leaned on the counter. Looked from Baron to Collingswood. He glanced to either side as if someone might be listening.

“What is it you want to know?” he said. “I haven’t done anything illegal.”

“No one said you did,” Collingswood said. “Someone fucking did though. Why did you get into all this?”

“For minimisation,” Anders said. “It’s not just about pressure, or forcing things. It’s about topography, that sort of thing. Someone like Carr-and I’m not being disrespectful, it was him who got me started-but basically, you know, you’re sort of…” He made kneading motions. “You’re shoving stuff in. You’re stuffing a suitcase.”

“More or less what he said,” Baron said.

“If that’s what you want to do, then, you know, fine. But…” His hands tried to describe something. “What you’re trying to do with planurgy is get things into other spaces, you know? Real things, with edges and surfaces, and all that. With origami you’re still dealing with all that surface area. There’s no cutting, you know? The point is you can unfold it, too. You get it?”

“And you don’t have any problems with the fact that this is all, you know, solid,” said Collingswood.

“Not as much as you might think. There’s been a revolution in origami over the last few years… What?”

Collingswood was pissing herself laughing. Baron joined in. After a couple of seconds Anders had the grace to snigger.

“Well, I’m sorry,” he said, “but there has been. Computers’ve helped. We’re in the era of-alright, you’ll like this one, too-extreme origami. It’s all about maths.” He looked at Collingswood. “What’s your tradition?”

“Traditions are for ponces,” she said.

He laughed. “If you say so. When you start bringing in a bit of abmaths, factoring in visionary numbers, that sort of thing-does this mean anything to you?”

“Get on with it.”

“Sorry. My point is, there are ways of…” He leaned over the cash register and held the little digital display between fingertip and thumb. He folded it over.

Collingswood watched it go. Anders flipped it over and over, tucked it behind the keys. He gently concertinaed. The bulky thing collapsed on itself in fold-lines, different aspects of unbroken planes slipping behind each other as if seen from several directions at once. Anders folded, and within a minute and a half what lay on the desk, still connected to a power cord (which now slipped behind an impossible crease into the things’ innards), was a hand-sized Japanese crane. The showing face of one of the bird’s wings was a corner of the cash display, the other was the front of the money drawer. Its neck was a flattened wedge of its buttons. “If you pull there you can make its wings flap,” Anders said.

“Cool,” said Collingswood. “And it ain’t broke?”

“That’s the point.” He manipulated its edges, unfolded the thing back into its original shape. Pressed its keys and it pinged and opened with a little cash chink.

“Nice,” said Baron. “So you make a bit of dosh folding cash registers into birds.”

“Oh yeah,” Anders deadpanned. “Very lucrative.”

“But wouldn’t that still weigh the same?”

“There’s ways of folding into sort of forgettable space, I suppose you could say, so the world won’t notice the weight until you open it.”

“How much would you charge to,” Baron said, “for example, fold up a person? Into a package? That you could post?”

“Ah. Well. There’s a lot of surfaces in a person, and you’ve got to keep track of them all. That’s a lot of folds. Is that what this is about? That bloke who wanted to surprise his friend?”

Collingswood and Baron stared at him. “Which bloke,” Baron said, “would that be?”

“Shit, did something happen? The guy was playing a trick on his mate. Had me make him and his son up like a book. Paid me extra to hand-deliver him. Said he didn’t trust the post. I say said-took me ages to have a clue what he was on about, the way he talked. Pain in my arse getting there, but he made it worth my-”

“Getting where?” Baron said.

He recited Billy’s address. “What happened?” Anders said.

“Tell us everything you can about this man,” Baron said. He held up his notebook. Collingswood spread her hands, tried to feel residues in the room. “And what,” said Baron, “do you mean ‘his son’?”

“The bloke,” Anders said. “Who had me fold him up. It was his kid, too. His boy.” He blinked in Baron’s and Collingswood’s stares.

Baron whispered, “Describe them.”

“The guy was in his fifties. Long hair. Smelt, to be honest. Smoke. I was a bit surprised he could pay-it wasn’t cheap. His son was… a bit not all there.” He tapped his head. “Never said a word… What? What? Jesus, what is it?”

Baron stepped back and dropped his arms to his sides, his notebook dangling. Collingswood stood, her mouth opening, her eyes widening. Their faces went white in time.

“Oh fuck,” whispered Collingswood.

“My good God, this didn’t, this didn’t sound any alarm bells at all?” Baron said. “You didn’t for a bloody second wonder who you might be dealing with?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!”

“He doesn’t fucking know,” Collingswood said. Her voice grated. “This fucking newbie cunt has no idea. That’s why they came here. ’Cause he’s new. That’s why he got the job, ’cause he’s green. They knew he had no clue who the fucking shit he was dealing with.”

“Who was I dealing with?” said Anders, shrilly. “What did I do?”

“It is,” said Collingswood. “It is, isn’t it, guv?”

“Oh my good Christ. It sounds like it. My God, it does sound like it.” They shivered in a room suddenly made cold.

Collingswood whispered, “It’s Goss and Subby.”

Chapter Sixteen

BILLY WOKE. THE FOG, THE DARK WATER IN HIS HEAD, WAS ALL gone.

He sat up. He was bruised but not tired. He wore the same clothes he had gone to sleep in, but they had been removed and cleaned. He closed his eyes and saw the oceanic things from his doped sleep.

By the door was a man in a tracksuit. Billy scrabbled back on the bed to see him, into some half-cringe, half-pugnacious uncoiling. “They’re waiting for you,” the man said. He opened the door. Billy slowly lowered his hands. He felt, he realised, better than he had for a long time.

“You drugged me,” he said.

“I don’t know anything about that,” the man said anxiously. “But they’re waiting for you.”

Billy followed him past the industrial-rendered decapods and octopuses, illuminated by fluorescent lights. The presence of Billy’s dream was persistent, like water in his ears. He hung back until the man turned a corner, then ducked away and ran as quietly as he could, accelerating through the echoes of his footfalls. He held his breath. At a junction he stopped, pressed his back against a wall and looked around.

Different subspecies in cement. Perhaps he could track his way by remembering cephalopods. He had no idea where to go. He heard the footfall of his escort seconds before the man reappeared. The man gestured at him, an uncomfortable beckoning.

“They’re waiting for you,” he said. Billy followed the man through the hollowed-out churchland into a hall big enough and unexpected enough that Billy gasped. All without windows, all scooped out from under London.

“Teuthex’ll be here in a minute,” the man said, and left.

There were pews, each with a slot behind its backrest, a space for hymnals. They faced a plain Shaker-style altar. Above it was a huge, beautifully wrought version of that many-armed symbol, all elongate S-curves in silver and wood. The walls were covered in pictures like ersatz windows. Every one was of giant squid.

There were grainy deep-sea photos. They looked much older than should have been possible. There were engravings from antique bestiaries. There were paintings. Pen-and-ink renditions, pastels, suggestive op-art geometries with fractal suckers. He recognised not a single one. Billy had grown up on pictures of kraken and books of antique monstrosities. He sought an image he knew. Where was de Montfort’s impossible octopus hauling down a ship? Where the familiar old renderings of Verne’s poulpes?

One eighteenth-century giant-squid pastoral-a large, camp rendition of a young Architeuthis gambolling in spume, near a shore from where fishermen watched it. A semiabstract rendition, an interweaving of pipelike brown jags, a nest of wedges.

“That’s Braque,” someone said behind him. “What did you dream?”

Billy turned. Dane was there, his arms folded. In front of him was the man who had spoken. He was a priest. The man was in his sixties, with white hair, neatly trimmed beard and moustache. He was exactly a priest. He wore a long black robe, white dog collar. Just a little battered-looking. His hands were clasped behind him. He wore a chain, from which dangled the squid symbol. They three stood in the sheer silence of that submerged chamber, staring at each other.

“You poisoned me,” Billy said.

“Come come,” said the priest. Billy held a pew and watched him.

“You poisoned me,” Billy said.

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

“Why?” said Billy. “Why am I? What’s going on? You owe me… an explanation.”

“Indeed,” said the priest. “And you owe us your life.” His smile disarmed. “So we’re both indebted. Look, I know you want to know what’s happened. And we want to explain. Believe me, you need to understand.” He spoke in a carefully neutral accent, but there was a little Essex to it.

“Are you going to tell me what all this is?” Billy glanced around for exits. “All I got from Dane yesterday was-”

“It was a bad day,” the man said. “I hope you feel better. How did you dream?” He rubbed his hands.

“What did you give me?”

“Ink. Of course.”

“Bullshit. Squid ink doesn’t give you visions. That was acid or something…”

“It was ink,” the man said. “What did you see? If you saw things, it was down to you. I’m sorry that it was all a bit of a rude submersion. We really had no choice. Time is not on our side.”

“But why?”

“Because you need to know.” The man stared. “You need to see. You need to know what’s going on. We didn’t give you any visions, Billy. What you saw came from you. You can see things clearer than anyone.”

The man stepped closer to the picture. “I was saying, Braque,” he said, “in 1908. Bertrand Hubert, the only French Teuthex we’ve ever had, took him out to sea. They were in the Bay of Biscay for four days. Hubert performed a particular ritual, of which sadly we no longer have much record, and brought up a little god.

“He must have been pretty powerful. He’s the only one since Steenstrup who’s been able to tickle up more than images. The actual… fry. So the godling waited while Braque, falling over himself and nearly overboard, apparently, sketched it. It went under waving a hunting arm as Braque said ‘exactement comme un garçon qui dit ‹au revoir› aux amis.’” He smiled. “Silly beggar. Not the slightest idea. It was “comme” nothing of the sort. Sounds odd, but he said it was the coiliness of what he saw that made him think in angles. He said no curves could do justice to the coils he’d seen.”

Cubism as failure. Billy walked to another picture. More traditionally representational-a fat, flattened giant squid mouldering on a slab, surrounded by legs in waders. Quick, wisping brushstrokes. “Why did you drug me?”

“That’s Renoir. That over there, Constable. Pre-Steenstrup, so it’s what we call the atramentous epoch. Before we emerged from the ink-cloud.” The works around Billy looked suddenly like Manets. Like Piranesis, Bacons, Breughels, Kahlos.

“Moore’s my name,” the priest said. “I am very sorry about your friend. I sincerely wish we could have stopped that.”

“I don’t even know what happened,” Billy said. “I couldn’t tell what that man…” He swallowed into silence. Moore cleared his throat. Behind heavily framed glass was a flattish surface, a slatey plane. It was brown-grey rock perhaps two feet square. In organic lines, in charcoal ink and stained a dried-blood red, overlooked by outlined human figures, was a torpedo shape; a conclave of spiral whips; a round black eye.

“That’s from the Chauvet Cave,” Moore said. “Thirty-five thousand years old.” The carbon eye of the squid looked across epochs at them. Billy felt vertigo at the preantique rendition. Was it meant to be seen in the licking of a fire light? Women and men with sticks and deft fingertip smuts rendering what had visited at the edge of the sea. What had raised many arms in deepwater greeting while they waved from rockpools.

“We’ve always commissioned,” Moore said. “We show them god.” He smiled. “Or god’s young. That’s what we used to do.

“Since the end of the atrament we can generally only offer dreams. As we did you. How Hubert called up a young god we don’t know. Even the sea won’t tell us. And we’ve asked it. You’ve seen the young, Billy. Baby Jesu.” He smiled at his little blasphemy. “That’s what you preserved. Architeuthis is kraken-spawn. Gods are oviparous. Not just our gods, all gods. God-spawn’s everywhere if you know where to look.”

“What was that tattoo?” Billy said.

“Those kraken that make it to the last stage?” Moore jerked his thumb at the cave painting. “They sleepeth, is what they do,” he quoted. “‘Battening upon huge seaworms,’ as they say. They’ll rise only at the final end. Only in the end, when ‘latter fire heats the deeps’”-he did quote fingers-“only then to be seen once, roaring they shall rise and on the surface die.”

Billy looked past him. He wondered how the search of his almost-colleagues was going, whether Baron, Vardy, and Collingswood were making headway as they looked for him, as they must be doing. With a moment’s startling clarity he imagined Collingswood with her so un-uniform uniform and swagger knocking heads together to find him.

“We were there at the beginning,” Moore said. “And we’re here now. At the end. Baby gods have started manifesting all over. Kubodera and Mori. That was just the first. Pictures, video, making themselves known. Architeuthis, Mesonychoteuthis, unknowns. After all those years of silence. They’re rising.

“On the twenty-eighth of February, 2006, the kraken appeared in London.” He smiled. “In Melbourne they keep theirs in a block of ice. Can you imagine? I can’t help thinking of it as a godsicle. You know they’re planning one for Paris which is going to be, what do they call it, plastinated? Like that strange German man does to people. That’s how they’re going to show god.” Dane shook his head. Moore shook his head. “But, not you. You treated it… right, Billy. You laid it out with a kindness.” Odd stilted formulation. “With respect. You kept it behind glass.”

His squid had been a relic in a reliquary. “This is kraken year zero,” Moore said. “This is Anno Teuthis. We’re in the end times. What d’you think’s been going on? You think it’s just bloody chance that when you bring god up and treat it as you do, the world suddenly starts ending? Why do you think we kept coming to see? Why do you think we had someone on the inside?” Dane bent his head. “We had to know. We had to watch. We had to protect it too, find out what was going on. We knew something was going to happen.

“You realise the reason you had a kraken to work on is because in roaring it rose and on the surface died?”

Chapter Seventeen

IF YOU GOT INVOLVED WITH LEON, MARGE HAD ALWAYS UNDERSTOOD, you took certain behaviours for granted. It wasn’t a bad thing-it gave leeway for your own behaviour, the indulgences of which might have caused all manner of resentments and bad bloods with previous lovers.

For example, Marge felt no compunction about cancelling a night out if she was working on a piece and it was going well. “Sorry sweet,” she’d said, many times, leaning over the battered video equipment that she rescued from skips and eBay. “I’ve got something going. Can we raincheck?”

When Leon did the same, even if it annoyed her, it also often came with satisfaction, the knowledge that these were credits she could cash in later. For similar reasons, knowing she had no intent to become monogamous when they got together, she found his own occasional non-her-focused sexual liaisons (mostly obviously telegraphed) rather a relief.

In and of itself, she would not have thought much or anything of not hearing from Leon for two, three, five days, a week at a time. That was nothing, any more than was a last-minute cancellation. What, however, gave her some anxiety, some pause, was that they had had a specific arrangement-they had been going to see a James Bond marathon, because “it’ll be hilarious”-and that he had not called to change plans. He had simply texted her some nonsense-that itself not news-and not turned up. And now was ignoring her messages.

She texted him, she emailed him. Where are you? she wrote. Tell me or i’m going to get worried. Call rsvp text carrier pigeon whatever you prefer xx.

Marge had deleted the last message Leon had sent, thinking it some drunk foolishness. Of course she regretted it deeply now. It had said something like: billy says theres a squid cult.

“FATHERS AND MOTHERS AND UNCARING AUNTS AND UNCLES IN freezing darkness we implore you.”

“We implore you.” The congregation mumbled in time, in response to Moore the Teuthex’s phrases.

“We are your cells and synapses, your prey and your parasites.”

“Parasites.”

“And if you care for us at all we know it not.”

“Not.”

Billy sat at the back of the church. He did not stand and sit with the small congregation, nor did he murmur meaningless phonemes in polite lag of their words. He watched. There were fewer than twenty people in the room. Mostly white, but not all, mostly dressed inexpensively, mostly middle-aged or older, but, a strange demographic blip, with four or five tough-looking young men, grim and devout and obedient, in one row.

Dane stood like a hulking altar boy. His eyes were closed, his mouth moving. The lights were low, there were shadows all over the place.

The Teuthex recited the service, his words drifting in and out of English, into Latin or Pig Latin, into what sounded like Greek, into strange slippery syllables that were perhaps dreams of sunken languages or the invented muttering of squidherds, Atlantean, Hyperborean, the pretend tongue of R’lyeh. Billy had expected ecstasy, the febrile devotions of the desperate speaking in tongues or tentacles, but this fervour-and fervour it was, he could see the tears and gripping hands of the devout-was controlled. The flavour of the sect was vicarly, noncharismatic, an Anglo-Catholicism of mollusc-worship.

Such a tiny group. Where were others? The room itself, the seats themselves, could have contained three times as many people as were there. Had the space always been aspirational, or was this a religion in decline?

“Reach out to enfold us,” Moore said, and the congregation said, “Fold us,” and made motions with their fingers.

“We know,” the Teuthex said. A sermon. “We know this is a strange time. There are those who think it’s the end.” He made another motion of some dismissal. “I’m asking you all to have faith. Don’t be afraid. ‘How could it have gone?’ people have asked me. ‘Why aren’t the gods doing anything?’ Remember two things. The gods don’t owe us anything. That’s not why we worship. We worship because they’re gods. This is their universe, not ours. What they choose they choose and it’s not ours to know why.”

Christ, thought Billy, what a grim theology. It was a wonder they could keep anyone in the room, without the emotional quid pro quo of hope. That’s what Billy thought, but he saw that it was not nihilism in that room. That it was full of hope, whatever the Teuthex said; and he the Teuthex, Billy thought, quietly hopeful too. Doctrine was not quite doctrine.

“And second,” said Moore. “Remember the movement that looks like not moving.” A small frisson at that.

There was no communion, no passing out of, what, sacred calamari? Only some discordant and clunky wordless hymn, a silent prayer, and the worshippers left. Each as they filed out glanced at Billy with a strange and needy look. The young men looked positively hungry, and nervous to meet his eye.

Dane and Moore came to meet him. “So,” said the Teuthex. “That was your first service.”

“What was that squirrel?” Billy said.

“Freelancer,” Dane said.

“What? Freelance what?”

“Familiar.” Familiar. “Don’t look like that. Familiar. Don’t act like you’ve never heard of one.”

Billy thought of black cats. “Where is it now?”

“I don’t know, I don’t want to know. It did what I paid it for.” Dane did not look at him. “Job done. So it’s gone.”

“What did you pay it?”

“I paid it nuts, Billy. What would you think I’d pay a squirrel?” Dane’s face was so deadpan flat Billy could not tell if what he was facing was the truth or contempt. Welcome to this world of work. Magic animals got paid in something, nuts or something. Billy examined the pictures and books in Moore’s own dark grey chambers.

“Baron…” Billy said.

“Oh, we know Baron,” said Dane. “And his little friends.”

“He told me some books got stolen.”

“They’re in the library,” said the Teuthex. He poured tea. “Can’t use a photocopy to persuade the world.”

Billy nodded as if that made sense. He faced Moore. “What’s happening?” he said. “What did that… man… want? And why are you keeping me prisoner?”

Moore looked quizzical. “Prisoner? Where is it you want to go?”

There was a silence. “I’m getting out of here,” Billy said. And then very quickly he said, “What did… Goss… do to Leon?”

“Would you be very offended if I said I don’t believe you?” Moore said. “That you want to get out? I’m not sure you do.” He met Billy’s stare. “What did you see?” Billy almost recoiled at the eagerness in his voice. “Last night. What did you dream? You don’t even know why you’re not safe, Billy. And if you go to Baron and Vardy you’ll be considerably less so.

“I know what they said about us.” He almost twinkled, a vicar being a good sport. “But that little faith-gang called ‘police’ can’t help, you know. You’re in the Tattoo’s sights, now.”

“Think about the Tattoo,” Dane said. “That face. That man’s face on another man’s back. How was you going to deal with that, Billy?” After a silence Dane said, “How you going to get the police to deal with that?”

“It isn’t just that, either,” Moore said. “As if that weren’t enough. I know it’s all a bit… Well. But it isn’t just the Tattoo, even. Suddenly, ever since something or other, everyone agrees the end’s in sight. Nothing unusual in that, you might say, and you’d be right except that I do mean everyone. That has… ramifications for you. You need to be with a power. Let me tell you. We are the Congregation of God Kraken. And this is our time.”

THEY EXPLAINED.

London was full of dissident gods.

Why? Well they have to live somewhere. A city living in its own afterlife. Why not?

Of course, they’re all over, gods are. Theurgic vermin, those once worshipped or still worshipped in secret, those half worshipped, those feared and resented, petty divinities: they infect everybloody-where. The ecosystems of godhead are fecund, because there’s nothing and nowhere that can’t generate the awe on which they graze. But just because there are cockroaches everywhere doesn’t mean there aren’t cockroaches in particular in a New York kitchen. And just because angels keep their ancient places and every stone, cigarette packet, tor and town has its deities, doesn’t mean there’s nothing special about London.

The streets of London are stone synapses hardwired for worship. Walk the right or wrong way down Tooting Bec you’re invoking something or other. You may not be interested in the gods of London, but they’re interested in you.

And where gods live there are knacks, and money, and rackets. Halfway-house devotional murderers, gunfarmers and self-styled reavers. A city of scholars, hustlers, witches, popes and villains. Criminarchs like the Tattoo, those illicit kings. The Tattoo had run with the Krays, before he was Tattoo, but really you couldn’t leave your front door unlocked. Nobody remembered what his name had been: that was part of what had happened to him. Whatever nasty miracle it was had en-dermed him had thrown away his name as well as his body. Everyone knew they used to know what he was called, including him, but no one recalled it now.

“The one who got him like that was smart,” Dane said. “It was better when he was around, old Griz. I used to know some of his guys.”

There was a many-dimensional grid of geography, economy, obligation and punishment. Crime overlapped with faith-“Neasden’s run by the Dharma Bastards,” Dane said-though many guerrilla entrepreneurs were secular, agnostic, atheist or philistine ecumenical. But faith contoured the landscape.

“Who’s Goss and Subby?” Billy said. He sat guarded between them, looking from one to the other. Dane looked down at his own big fists. Moore sighed.

“Goss and Subby,” Moore said.

“What’s their…?” Billy said.

“Everything you can think of is what.”

“Badness,” Dane said. “Goss sells his badness.”

“Why did he kill that guy? In the cellar?” Billy said.

“The preserved man,” the Teuthex said. “If that was his handiwork.”

Billy said, “That Tattoo thought I stole the squid.”

“That’s why he was hunting you,” Dane said. “See? That’s why I had that familiar watching you.”

“You preserved it, Billy. You opened the door and found it gone,” Moore said. Pointed at him. “No wonder Baron wanted you. No wonder the Tattoo wanted you, and no wonder we were watching.”

“But he could tell I didn’t,” Billy pleaded. “He said I had nothing to do with anything.”

“Yeah,” said Dane. “But then I rescued you.”

“We got you out, so we’re allies,” Moore said. “So you are his enemy now.”

“You’re under our protection,” said Dane. “And because of that you need it.”

“How did you take the Architeuthis?” Billy said at last.

“It wasn’t us,” said Moore quietly.

“What?” But it was a relic. They would fight for it, surely, like a devout of Rome might fight for a shroud, a fervent Buddhist might liberate a stolen Sura. “So who?”

“Well,” said Moore. “Quite.

“Look,” he said. “You have to persuade the universe that things make sense a certain way. That’s what knacking is.” Billy blinked at this abrupt conversational twist, that word unfamiliarly verbed. “You use whatever you can.”

“Snap,” said Dane. He clicked his fingers, and with the sound came a tiny fluorescent glow in the air just where the percussion had been. Billy stared and knew it was not a parlour trick. “That’s just skin and hand.”

“You use what you can,” Moore said, “and some what-you-cans are better than others.”

Billy realised that Dane and his priest were not, in fact, changing the subject.

“A giant squid is…” Billy petered out but he was thinking, Is powerful medicine, a big thing, a massive deal. It’s magic, is what it is. For knacking. “That’s why it’s been taken. That’s why that tattoo wants it. But this is craziness,” he added. He couldn’t stop himself. “This is craziness.”

“I know, I know,” Moore said. “Mad beliefs like that, eh? Must be some metaphor, right? Must mean something else?” Shook his head. “What an awfully arrogant thing. What if faiths are exactly what they are? And mean exactly what they say?”

“Stop trying to make sense of it and just listen,” Dane said.

“And what,” Moore said, “if a large part of the reason they’re so tenacious is that they’re perfectly accurate?” He waited, and Billy said nothing. “This is all perfectly real. The Tattoo wants that body, Billy, to do something himself, or stop someone else doing something,” Moore said.

“All these things have their powers, Billy,” he said intensely. “‘There are plenty of currents on the way down deep’ is what we’d say. But some go deeper, quicker, than others. Some are right.” He smiled not like someone joking.

“What would someone do with it?” Billy said.

“Whatever it is,” Dane said, “I’m against it.”

“What wouldn’t they?” Moore said. “What couldn’t they? With something that holy.”

“That’s why we need to get out there,” Dane said. “To find it.”

“Dane,” said Moore.

“It’s a duty of care,” Dane said.

“Dane. We need understanding, certainly,” Moore said. “But we have to have faith.”

“What could show more faith than getting out there?” Dane asked. “You understand what’s going on?” Dane said to Billy. “How dangerous it all is? The Tattoo wants you, and someone has a kraken. That’s a god, Billy. And we don’t know who, or why.”

A GOD, BILLY THOUGHT. THE THIEF HAD A BLEACHY Formalin-preserved mass of rubbery stink. But he knew truths were not true.

“God can take care of itself,” Moore said to Dane. “You know things are happening, Billy. You’ve known for days.”

“I seen you feel it,” Dane said. “I seen you watching the sky.”

“This is an end,” Moore said. “And it’s our god’s doing it, and it isn’t in our control. And that’s not right.” He splayed his fingers in a ludicrous prayer-motion. “That’s why you’re here, Billy. You know things you don’t even know,” he said. The fervour in it gave Billy a chill. “You’ve worked on its holy flesh.”

Chapter Eighteen

“YOU COULD JUST STAMP YOUR LITTLE FEET, COULDN’T YOU, Subby? You could unbuckle your shoe and throw it in the lake.”

Goss stamped. Subby walked a few paces behind him, his hands behind his back in crude mimicry of the man’s pose. Goss was bent forward and beetling with energy. He uncoupled his hands repeatedly and wiped them on his mucky top. Subby watched him and did the same.

“Where are we now?” Goss said. “Well you may ask. Well you may ask. Where indeed are we now? Not often his nibs is wrong, but that Mr. Harrow clearly not so butter-wouldn’t-melt as he’d give you to think, if he’s got bouncers like that ready to spirit him away. Still not sure who that was who banged your bonce, you poor lad. You doing better?” He ruffled Subby’s hair to the boy’s openmouthed gaze.

“What is he like? He’s all snotted up in this like slurry in alveoli. Still our best lead, of which his skin-inked eminence now admits, and, what do you say, once is never enough. We’ve caught up with him before, we’ll do it again.

“Where? That’s the question mark indeed, my young apprentice.

“Ears to the ground, Subby, tongues aflap.” He did as he said and tasted where they were, and if pedestrians or shoppers in that pre-suburban shopping precinct noticed his slurping snake lick they pretended not to. “Mostly we’re after Fluffy, so any flavours of the you-know-what, a distinct and meaty-bleachy-gamey bouquet I’m told, then veer we go, but otherwise, seems Mr. Harrow knows a little smidgeon, and of him I still recall the savour.”

THERE WERE ALL KINDS OF DRAMAS OCCURRING IN THE CITY IN those days: machinations, betrayals, insinuations and misunderstandings between groups with distinct and overlapping interests. In the offices, workshops, laboratories and libraries of angry scholars and self-employed theorist-manipulators were screamed arguments between them and those nonhuman companions still around. “How can you do this to me?” was the sentence most regularly spoken, followed by, “Oh go fuck yourself.”

In the headquarters of the Confederation of British Industry was a hallway between a much-frequented toilet and a small meeting room, that, if most members of the organisation noticed, they did so to briefly wonder why they had never done so before; and they tended not to again after that first time. It was not as brightly lit as it should be. The watercolours on its walls looked a bit vague: they were there, certainly, but rather difficult to pay attention to.

At the end of the corridor a plastic plaque read STOREROOM or OUT OF ORDER or something-some phrase tricky to recall with exactitude but the gist of which was not this door, go somewhere else. Two figures ignored that gist. In front was a large man wearing an expensive suit and a black motorcycle helmet. Just behind him, her hand in his, a woman in her sixties stumbled and tripped like an anxious animal. She was slack-faced, dressed in a threadbare trench coat.

The man knocked and opened without waiting for an answer. Inside was a small office. A man stood to greet them, indicated the two seats in front of his desk. The suited man did not sit. He pushed the woman into one of the chairs. He kept his hands on her shoulders. Her coat swung open and she wore nothing beneath it. Her skin was cold- and sick-looking.

For several seconds nothing happened. Then the woman moved her mouth extraordinarily. She made a ringing noise.

“Hello?” said the man behind the desk.

“Hello,” said the woman, clicking and hollow-sounding, in a man’s voice, a London voice. Her eyes were blank as a mannequin’s. “Am I speaking to Mr. Dewey of the CBI?”

“You are. Thank you for contacting me so quickly.”

“Not a problem,” the woman said. She drooled slightly. “I understand you have a proposal for me. With regard to the, ah, current dispute.”

“I do, Mr… I do. We were wondering whether you might be able to help us.”

IT WAS IN CRICKLEWOOD THAT, AFTER A CONSULTATION BASED ON highly specific geographopathic criteria, the Metropolitan Police had located its abquotidian operatives: the FSRC and their highly specialist support staff-secretaries unfazed by the information they were required to type, pathologists who would autopsy whatever bodies were put in front of them, no matter how unorthodox their arrangements or causes of death. Vardy, Baron and Collingswood met in the cold lab of one such, Dr. Harris, a tall woman vastly unfazed by absurd and knacked evidence. They had her show them the remains from the basement of the museum one more time.

“You told me to leave it in one piece,” she had said.

“Now I’m telling you to open the ruddy thing,” Baron had said, and half an hour later, after a crack and careful prising, the jar rocked in two pieces on the steel. Between them, the man who had been inside almost retained his cylindrically constrained form. The edges of his flesh, the pose of his hands, still looked as if he were pressed up against the glass.

“There,” Harris said. She laser-pointed. The man stared at her with the intensity of the drowned. “Like I told you,” she said. She indicated the bottle’s neck. “There’s no way he could have got in there.” The FSRC operatives looked at each other.

“Thought perhaps you might have had a change of heart about that,” Baron said.

“Couldn’t have happened. He couldn’t have been in there unless he was put in when he was born and left to grow up in it. Which given that he has several tattoos, plus for all the other obvious impossibility-related reasons, is not what happened.”

“Alright,” Baron said. “That’s not what we’re concerned with here. Right, ladies and gentlemen? What do we know of the methods of our suspects? Do we see any signature moves here? Our question here is about Goss and Subby.”

GOSS AND SUBBY. GOSS AND SUBBY!

Collingswood was sure she was right. Anders Hooper was a good origamist, but the main reason he had got the job was because he was new, young, and did not recognise his employer.

He was no younger than she, of course, but as Vardy had said, with stern approval, “Collingswood doesn’t count.” Her research might have been unorthodox, her learning partial, but she took seriously knowledge of the world in which she operated. She read its histories in chaotic order, but she read them. How could she fail to know of Goss and Subby?

The notorious “Soho Goats” pub crawl with Crowley, that had ended in quadruple murder, memory of the photographs of which still made Collingswood close her eyes. The Dismembering of the Singers, while London struggled to recover from the Great Fire. In 1812, Walkers on the Face-Road had been Goss and Subby. Had to have been. Goss, King of the Murderspivs-that designation given him by a Roma intellectual who had, doubtless extremely carefully, resisted identification. Subby, whom the smart money said was the subject of Margaret Cavendish’s poem about the “babe of meat and malevolence.”

Goss and fucking Subby. Sliding shifty through Albion’s history, disappearing for ten, thirty, a hundred blessed years at a time, to return, evening all, wink wink, with a twinkle of a sociopathic eye, to unleash some charnel-degradation-for-hire.

There was no specificity to Goss and Subby. Try to get what information you can about precisely what their knacks were, what Collingswood still thought of as their superpowers, and all you’d get was that Goss was a murderous shit like no other. Supershit; Wonder-shit; Captain Total Bastard. Nothing funny about it. Call it banal if it makes you feel better but evil’s evil. Goss might stretch his mouth to do one person, stories said, might punch a hole in another, might find himself spitting flames to burn up a third. Whatever.

The first time Collingswood had read of them, it had been in a facsimile of a document from the seventeenth century, a description of the “long-fingered bad giver and his dead alive son,” and for some weeks afterward, unfamiliar with old fonts, she had thought them Goff and Fubby. She and Baron had had a good laugh at that.

“Fo,” she said. “Iff it? Iff it the work of Goff and Fubby?” Baron did, in fact, briefly, laugh. “Iff it their MO?”

And there was the problem. Goss and Subby had no such thing as an MO. Baron, Vardy and Collingswood peered at the preserved man. They referred to their notes, made more, circumnavigated the corpse, muttered to themselves and each other.

“All we can say for sure,” said Baron at last, peering, leaning in, “is that so far as we know, there’s no record of them having done anyone in like this before. I pulled the files. Vardy?”

Vardy shrugged. “We’re flying blind,” he said. “We all know that. But you want my opinion? Ultimately I think… my opinion’s no. What I know of their methods, it’s always been up-close, hands, bones. This is… something else. I don’t know what this is, but this isn’t that, I don’t think.”

“Alright,” said Baron. “So we’re after Goss and bloody Subby, and we’re also looking for someone else, who pickles their enemies.” He shook his head. “Lord, for a bloody Grievous Bodily Harm. Alright, ladies and gents, let’s get moving on this fellow. We need an ID on the poor sod ASAP. Among many other bloody things.”

Chapter Nineteen

INTO NEW LONDON? THE CITY’S VAST UNSYMPATHETIC ATTENTION’S on you, the Teuthex said. You’re hunted. Billy imagined himself emerging big-eyed as a fish, and London-where the Tattoo, Goss, Subby, the workshop waited-noticing. Oh there you are.

He walked almost as if free under the city. More than once Krakenists passed him and stared and he stared back at them, but they did not interrupt him. In places the grey bas-reliefs of cephalopods were crumbled and beneath were antique bricks. He found a door into a bright-lit room.

It made him gasp. It had the side-to-side proportions of a small sitting room, but its floor was way below. Absurdly deep. Steps angled down. It was a shaft of roomness, shelved with books. Ladders dangled from the stacks. As the church’s holdings grew, Billy thought, horizontal constraints required generations of kraken worshippers to dig for their library.

Billy read titles on his way down. A Tibetan Book of the Dead by the Bhagavad Gita, by two or three Qur’ans, testaments old and new, arcana and Aztec theonomicons. Krakenlore. Cephalopod folklore; biology; humour; art and oceanography; cheap paperbacks and antiquarian rarities. Moby-Dick, shapes etched onto its cover. Verne’s 20,000 Leagues. A Pulitzer medal escutcheon stapled to a single page of one book, on which the line “Great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in the cold darkness” was the only part left visible below paint. The Highest Tide, Jim Lynch, nailed upside down like something unholy.

Tennyson and a book of poems by Hugh Cook faced each other, open to competing pages. Billy read the counter to Alfred Lord.

THE KRAKEN WAKES

The little silver fish

Scatter like shrapnel

As I plunge upward

From the black underworld.

The green waves break from my sides

As I roll up, forced by my season,

And before the tenth second

I can feel my own heat-

The wind can never cool as oceans do.

By mid-morning,

My skin has sweated into agony.

The turmoil of my intestines

Bloats out against my skin.

I’m too sick to struggle-I hang

In the thermals of pain,

Screaming against the slow, slow, slow

Rise toward descent.

And the madness of my pain

Seems to have infected everything-

Cities hack each other into blood;

Ships sink in firestorm; armies

Flail with sticks and crutches;

Obesity staggers toward coronary

Down the streets of starvation.

“Jesus,” Billy whispered.

Samizdat, sumptuous hardbacks, handwritten texts, dubious-looking output from small presses. Apocrypha Tentacula; On Worship of Kraken; The Gospel According to Saint Steenstrup.

We cannot see the universe, Billy read in a text taken at random. It was cobbled in incompetent typeface.

We cannot see the universe. We are in the darkness of a trench, a deep cut, dark water heavier than earth, presences lit by our own blood, little biolumes, heroic and pathetic Promethei too afraid or weak to steal fire but able still to glow. Gods are among us and they care nothing and are nothing like us.

This is how we are brave: we worship them anyway.

Old volumes bulged with addenda, were embossed Catechismata. Scrapbooks with glued-in snips. Annotated and those notes annotated, and on in unstinting interpretation, a merciless teuthic hermeneutic.

He read the names Dickins and Jelliss, Alice Chess. A spread about mutant versions of the game with arcane rules, bishops and pawns given strange powers, transmogrified pieces called saurians, torals and anti-kings, and one called a kraken. The “universal leaper” was usually thought the most powerful piece, he read, as it could go from where it was to any other square on the board. But it was not. Kraken was. Kraken = universal leaper + zero, he read, = universal sleeper. It could move to any square including the one it was already on. Anywhere including nowhere.

On the board & in life for Kraken in the void nothing is not nothing. Kraken stillness is not lack. Its zero is ubiquity. This is the movement that looks like not moving, & it is the most powerful move of all.

Price rises were a function of neutral buoyancy, Billy read. Art Nouveau was coil-envy. Wars were meagre reflections of speculated kraken politics.

AFTER UNCOUNTED HOURS BILLY LOOKED UP AND SAW, BY THE room’s raised entrance, a young woman. He remembered her from one of the moments during his visions. She stood in her nondescript London uniform of hoodie and jeans. She bit her lip.

“Hi,” she said, shy. “It’s an honour. They said that, like, everyone out there’s looking for you. The angel of memory and everything, Dane said.” Billy blinked. “Teuthex said do you want to come, and they’d be glad if you was… if you want follow me because they’re waiting.”

He followed her to a smaller room, containing one big table and many people. Dane and Moore were there. A few of the other men and women were in robes like the Teuthex’s; most were in civvies. Everyone looked angry. On the table was a digital recorder. The noise of rowdy debate stopped with his entry. Dane stood.

“Billy,” said Moore after a moment. “Please join us.”

“I protest,” someone said. There were murmurs.

“Billy, please join us,” Moore said.

“What is this?” Billy said.

“There’s never been a time like this,” Moore said. “Are you interested in the future?” Billy said nothing. “Do you ever read your horoscope?”

“No.”

“Sensible. You can’t see the future, there’s no such thing. It’s all bets. You’ll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn’t mean either of them’s wrong.”

“Might be,” Dane said.

“They might,” Moore said. “But it’s all degrees of might. You want your prognosticators to argue. You never told us what you dreamed, Billy. Something coming up? Everyone can feel something coming up. Since the kraken disappeared. And no one disagrees.” He brought together his hands in a reverse explosion. “And that’s wrong.

“This is a recording we made of a consultation with the Londonmancers,” he said.

“What’s…?” Billy said.

“Well you may ask,” said Dane.

“Voices of the city,” Moore said.

“They wish.”

“Dane, please. Oldest oracles in the M25.”

“Sorry,” Dane said. “But Fitch has been off for years. Just tells you what you want to hear. People just go for tradition…”

“Some of the others are sharper,” said someone else.

“You’re forgetting,” the Teuthex said. “It was the Londonmancers called it first. Fitch may be past it, true. People go out of tradition, true.”

“Sentiment,” Dane said.

“Maybe,” Moore said. “But this time it was him called it. He’s been begging people to pay attention.” He pressed Play.

“-best if you ask,” said a curt digital voice.

“That’s Saira,” Moore said.

“-what you’re here for.”

“Something’s coming up, underneath everything.” It was the Teuthex. “We’re looking for a path between possible-”

“Not this time.” An old man’s voice. He muttered in and out of sense. He sounded urgent, in a confused way. “Have faith, but you have to do something, understand? You’re right, it’s coming, and you have to… It’s all ending.”

“Have faith in what?” the Teuthex said. “In London?”

The old man Fitch maundered about back streets and hidden histories, described pentacles in the banalities of town planning. “Time was I’d have said that,” he abruptly said.

“I don’t understand…”

“No one does. I know what you think. What did they tell you? Did anyone tell you what’s coming? Did they? No. They all know something is. None of them saw any way past it, did they? Something,” Fitch said, and his voice sounded like the voice of dust, “is coming. London’s been telling you. Something happened and there’s no running the numbers. No argument this time. No getting away from it.”

“What is it?”

“The world’s closing in. Something rises. And an end. If any augur augurs you otherwise, sack ’em.” Billy heard despair. “Because they’re lying, or they’re wrong.”

“We need to be looking,” Dane said. “We need to be out there finding God. The Tattoo runs things. He won’t let anyone else have something that powerful.”

“What about the man you said was his enemy?” Billy said. “Might it be him who took it?”

“Grisamentum,” Dane said. “No. He weren’t a villain and he weren’t a man of gods. And he died.”

“Don’t people think you took it?” said Billy. Everyone stared at him.

“Everyone knows we wouldn’t,” the Teuthex said. “It’s not ours. It’s no one’s.” They were, Billy understood, the last people who would take it, that asymptote of their faith.

“What is it you want to do?” Dane said. “You say we need to understand the situation, but we have to hunt. We can deliver it from evil.”

“Enough,” the Teuthex said, silencing everyone else. “Does it not occur to you that this is a test? You really think God… needs rescuing?” He held himself like the head of a church, for the first time. “Do you know your catechism? What’s the most powerful piece on the board?”

At last Dane muttered, “Kraken’s the most powerful piece on the board.”

“Why?”

“… The movement that looks like not moving.”

“Act like you understand what that means.”

Moore stood and walked out. Billy waited. Dane walked out. The congregation left, one by one.

Chapter Twenty

FSRC HEADQUARTERS, ONE MIDDLE-SIZED ROOM CONTAINING cheap armchairs and Ikea office furniture. Collingswood rarely used a desk and had never claimed one of the various of them for herself, working instead with a laptop in a deep chair.

“What’s up with grumpy twat?” Collingswood said.

“By which we mean whom, today?” Baron said.

“Vardy. He’s been even quieter and grumpier than usual since this squid business.”

“You think? Seems pretty standard surly to me.”

“Nah.” Collingswood leaned in toward her screen. “What’s he even doing, anyway?”

“Getting to grips with the squid cult.”

“Right. Having a kip, then.”

Collingswood had seen Vardy’s methods. He crossed London, interrogating informants. He did a great deal of online trawling. Sometimes he would pursue a frenetic and focused following of a trail from book to book, reading a paragraph in one, dropping it and grabbing another from the sliding scree of them on his desk, or jumping up and finding one on the shelves that faced him, reading it as he returned so that by the time he sat down again he was already done with it. It was as if he had found a single compelling story smuggled in bits into countless books. There was also his channelling. He would sit, his fingers arching in front of his mouth, his eyes closed. He might rock. He would slip into that reverie and stay in it for minutes, maybe an hour.

“What do you think’s behind all the pangolin bones?” Baron might ask him, of some emerged oddball sect, or, “Any clue what that priestess meant by ‘stick-blood’?” or, “Where do we think they might sacrifice that boy?”

“Not sure,” Vardy would say. “Couple of ideas. I’ll have a think.” And his colleagues would be quieter, and Collingswood, if she were in the room, would make what a twat motions, or pretend to intend to spill her drink on him or something.

He would stay like that a long time, at last snap open his eyes and say something like, “It’s not to do with the armour. Pangolins are bipedal. That’s what this is about. That’s why they kidnapped that dancer…” Or: “Greenford. Of course. The changing rooms of some disused swimming pool. Quick, we haven’t got long.”

“He can’t move for squid stuff,” Baron said. “Last time I looked he had the notes on Archie’s preservation and a bunch of articles on squid metabolism. And some leaflets for that Beagle trip.”

Collingswood raised her eyebrows. “I can’t get any sniff about that business in Putney,” she said. “Too much going on. The fucking squid’s got everyone on edge. The number of cranks calling in you would not believe.”

“How are you doing with it all?”

She made a rude noise. “Fuck off, guv,” she said. She did not tell him about her new recurring nightmare, of being thrown from a car, hurtling toward a brick wall.

“It’s definitely for us though, this Putney thing?”

“If I had to put dosh down,” said Collingswood. “Bruises like that.” A body had been listlessly humping the stony shoreline with the slap-slap of the water. He was a journalist with a special interest in labour, who appeared to have been crushed. The murder had been passed to FSRC when a pathologist had pointed out that the four huge bludgeoning wounds on the man’s chest looked a bit like a single punch from an impossibly large fist.

Baron glanced at his screen. “Email from Harris.”

“Am I right then?” Collingswood said. She had mooted the possibility that the body they had found in the basement-“Leave aside the doesn’t-fit-in-the-fucking-jar thing for a minute, boss”-was nothing to do with the squid case. Was, in fact, some many-years-old arcane gangland hit that Billy had stumbled onto at that moment of heightened sensitivities. “He’s got something,” she had said. “A bit of nous. Maybe all stressed he sniffed something.”

“Hah,” said Baron, and sat back. “Alright then. You’re going to like this, Kath. You’re right.”

“What?” She sat up fast enough to spill her coffee. “Bollocks. Really, guv?”

“Harris says the body was put in the bottle, she reckons, a good hundred years ago. That’s how long it’s been in that muck.”

“Holy shit. Bit of a turn-up, isn’t it?”

“Just you wait. That’s not all. There’s an ‘and.’ Or maybe I should say a ‘but.’ Isn’t there some word that means both?”

“Get on with it, guv.”

“So that body’s been preserved like that for a century. But-stroke-and. Have you heard of GG Allin?”

“Who the eff’s that?”

“Search me. Luckily Dr. Harris is a dab hand with Google. He was a singer, says here. Though it also says that stretches the definition. Delightful. ‘Scum rocker,’ it says here. More of a Queen man myself. ‘Don’t stand in the front row,’ Harris says. Anyway, he died about a decade ago.”

“So what?”

“So we should probably not ignore the fact that one of our deceased chap’s tattoos reads ‘GG Allin and the Murder Junkies.’”

“Oh, shit.”

“Indeed. He was apparently pickled several decades before he got his tattoo.” They looked at each other.

“You want me to find out who he was, don’t you?”

“No need,” he said. “We got a hit. He’s on the database.”

“What?”

“Fingerprints, DNA, the whole lot. That would be the DNA that is both a century old, and also gives his DOB as 1969. Name of Al Adler. AKA various stupid things. They do love their nicknames.”

“What did he get done for?”

“Burglary. But that was because of a bargain, he got to do a bit of regular bird. The original charge was on the other list.” Codes against illicit magery. Adler had been breaking and entering by esoteric means.

“Associates?”

“Freelance when he was starting out. Did a stint as some sort of stringer for a coven in Deptford. Spent the last four years of his working life full-time with Grisamentum, it looks like. Disappeared when Griz died. Grisabloodymentum, eh?”

“Before my time,” Collingswood said. “I never met the bloke.”

“Don’t remind me,” Baron said. “It should be illegal to be so much younger than me. He was alright, Grisamentum. I mean, you never know who you can trust, but he helped out a few times.”

“So I bloody gather. Geezer does crop up. What exactly did he do?”

“He was a bit of a one,” Baron said. “Finger in a lot of pies. Sort of a player. It’s all gone a bit tits-up since he died. He was a good counterweight.”

“Didn’t you tell me he didn’t die with…”

“Yeah, no. It wasn’t anything battley and dramatic. He got sick. Everyone knew about it. Worst-kept secret. I tell you what though: his funeral was pretty bloody amazing.”

“You were there?”

“Certainly I was.”

The Metropolitan Police could not not mark so important a passing. So advertised a good-bye. The details of where and how Grisamentum would valedictory the city had been leaked so ostentatiously they were clearly summonses.

“How’d you finesse it?” Collingswood said. Baron smiled.

“A not-very-competent surveillance, ooh, look at us, you all saw us, tish, we’re so silly.” He waggled his head.

Collingswood was long-enough inducted, subtle enough in her policeness now, stalwart of the FSRC and London protocols to understand. The police could not officially attend the passing of so questionably licit a figure, but nor could they ignore that public event, show disrespect or ingratitude. Hence a mummery, an act designed to be seen through, the putative incompetence of their spying on the event leaving them seen, and understood to have attended.

Collingswood said, “So what did Adler do? To get bottled?”

“Who knows? What he did to piss somebody off, your guess is as good as mine.”

“My guess is way better than yours, guv,” she said. “Get the necessary, I’ll fetch my shit.”

She went to her locker for an old glyph-fucked board, a candle, a pot of unpleasant tallow. Baron sent Harris an email, requesting a rag of Adler’s skin, a bone, a hank of his hair.

HE COULD NOT LEAVE, BUT HE WAS NOT OTHERWISE RESTRAINED. Billy spent hours in the sunken library. He saturated himself in deepwater theology and poetics. He looked for specifics about the teuthic apocalypse.

A swallowing up and a shitting out, taken from darkness, in darkness. A terrible biting. The elect like, what, skin-bugs, little parasites on or in the great holy squid body, carried through the vortex. Or not, depending on specifics. But it wasn’t like this. When at last one time he sighed and took off his glasses and reshelved verses on the tentacular, blinked and rubbed his eyes, he was startled to see several men and women who had been in the meeting with the Teuthex. He stood. They were various in age and clothes, though not in their respectful expressions. He had not heard them enter or descend.

“How long’ve you been here?” he said.

“We had a question,” said a woman in a gown, gold tentacle-sigil winking. “You worked on it. Was there anything about this kraken that was… special?”

Billy ran his hands through his hair. “You mean was it specially special? Unusual for a giant squid?” He shook his head hopelessly. “How would I know?” He shrugged. “You tell me. I’m not one of your prophets.”

Whoa. Something rushed around the room at that. Everyone looked sheepish. What…? thought Billy. What was-? Oh.

Of course he was one of their prophets.

“Oh shit,” he said. He slumped against the bookshelf. He closed his eyes. That was why they had given him dreams. They weren’t just anyone’s dreams: they were there to be read.

Billy looked at the books, textbooks next to the visions. He tried, like Vardy, to channel vicarious Damascene scenes. He could imagine these faithful seeing cephalopod biologists as unknowing saints, their vision unknown even to themselves and the purer for that, stripped of ego. And him? Billy had touched the body of God. Kept it safe, preserved it against time, ushered in Anno Teuthis. And because of Goss and the Tattoo, he had suffered for God, too. That was why this congregation protected him. He was not just another saint. Billy was the preserver. Giant-squid John the Baptist. The shyness he saw in the Krakenists was devotion. It was awe.

“Oh for God’s sake,” he said.

The men and women stared. He could see them attempting exegesis on his outburst.

ANY MOMENT CALLED NOW IS ALWAYS FULL OF POSSIBLES. AT TIMES of excess might-bes, London sensitives occasionally had to lie down in the dark. Some were prone to nausea brought on by a surfeit of apocalypse. Endsick, they called it, and at moments of planetary conjuncture, calendrical bad luck or mooncalf births, its sufferers would moan and puke, struck down by the side effects of revelations in which they had no faith.

Right then it was swings and roundabouts. On the one hand, such attacks were getting rarer. After years of being martyrs to somebody else’s martyrs, the endsick had never been so free of the trouble. On the other hand, this was because the very proliferation, the drunkenness of an unclosed universe that had always played merry hell with their inner ear, was collapsing. And something was replacing it. Instead of all those maybes, underlying them all, approaching dimly and with gathering speed, was something simple and absolutely final.

What was this queasiness that had come in in place of the other queasiness, the sensitives wondered? What was this new discomfort, this new cold illness? Oh, right, they began to realise. That’s what it is. It’s fear.

Animals were afraid, too. Rats went to ground. Seagulls went back to the sea. London foxes rutted in a terrified hormonal swill, and their adrenalin made them good quarries for the secret urban hunts. For most Londoners, all this was so far visible only in an epidemic of birdlime, the guano of terror, as pigeons began to shit themselves. Shops were covered. In Chelsea, Anders Hooper stared at the window of Nippon This! and shook his head in disgust. With a little ding his door opened. Goss and Subby walked in.

“Bertrand!” Goss said, and gave him a friendly wave. Subby stared. “You got me so excited, I had another question for you!”

Anders backed away. He felt for his mobile phone. “You call us if you hear anything else from them, right?” Baron had said, and given him a card, the location of which he was trying to remember. Anders bumped into the wall. Goss leaned on the counter.

“So anyway,” Goss said. “There we are, Subby and me and, oh, you know, all of us. You know. ’Course you know, you of all bleeding mathematicians, eh? So the question is, what’s the skinny?” He smiled. He breathed out cigarette smoke he had never breathed in.

“I don’t understand,” Anders said. In his pocket, he thumbed for the 9 button.

“No, of course,” Goss said. Subby walked under the flap in the counter and stood next to Anders. Touched his arm. Tugged his sleeve. Anders failed to dial. Tried again.

“I couldn’t agree more,” Goss said. He pronounced it mo-wah. “I could not agree more. It’s all a bit much at the jockey club, which is why we had to put that doping little saddler bang to rights. Imagine my surprise when I heard my name. Eh? All for the best.” He tapped the side of his nose, and winked. “Those rozzers, eh! My name! My name, can you Adam and Eve it?”

Anders felt as if cold water filled his belly. “Wait.”

“Did you was be chatting up my gob handle? Would I be right in that? Now all manner of whatnots are asking after me!” Goss laughed. “It’s all a bit of a pony. Say my name, say my name! You said my name.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t even know your name…”

Anders brought his thumb down, but there was a rush of air, a fast and cut-off bang. Anders saw no motion. All he knew was that Goss was on one side of the counter, Anders pressed the button on his phone, there was noise, the hatch was still sailing slowly through the air in a trail of splinters, and Goss was on the other side of the counter, in front of him, up close to him, holding his wrist and squeezing it so that Anders let go of his phone and gasped.

The hatch hit the floor. Goss made a chat-chat motion with his free hand. “You talky little fellow,” he said. “You and Subby, never a bloody word in!”

Anders could smell Goss’s hair. Could see the veins below the skin of his face. Goss pulled his face up close. His breath smelt of nothing at all. It was like air wafted by a paper fan. Until another breath and smoke came. Anders began to whimper.

“I read them books,” Goss said. Inclined his head toward the origami shelves. “I read them to Subby. He was enthralled. En. Fucking. Thralled. Never you Very Hungry Caterpillar me, with this one it was all ‘Oh, now tell me how to make a carp! Now how do I make a horsey?’ I’m ever so good at that one now. Let me show you.”

“I never told anyone,” Anders said. “I don’t know who you are…”

“Shall we make an apple tree?” Goss said. “Shall we make a tortoise? Fold and fold and fold.” He began to fold. Anders began to scream. “I’m not as good at it as you!” Goss laughed.

Goss folded, with wet-flesh sounds, and cracks. Eventually Anders stopped screaming, but Goss continued to fold.

“I don’t know, Subby,” he said, at last. He wiped his hands on Anders’s coat. He squinted at his handiwork. “I need more practice, Subby,” he said. “It isn’t quite as much like a lotus as I’d have liked.”

Chapter Twenty-One

BILLY WOKE AS IF RISING OUT OF WATER. HE GASPED. HE PUT HIS head in his trembling hands. In that deep dream, what he had seen was this.

He had been a point of awareness, a soul-spot, a sentient submerged node, and had drifted over an ocean floor that he had seen in monochrome, lightless as it would have been, and that had pitched suddenly into a crevasse, a Mariana Trench of water like clotted shadow. His little selfless self had drifted. And after an inconceivably long time of that drifting, again he had seen a thing below him, rising. A flattening of the dark, coming up out of dark. Beggaring perspective. Dream-Billy knew what it would be, and was afraid of its arms, its many limbs and endless body. But when it came into water faintly lit enough that he could see its contours, it was a landscape he recognised, because it was him. A Billy Harrow face, Atlantean, eyes open and staring into the sky all the way above. The huge him was long lifeless. Pickled. Skin scabbed, church-sized eyes cataracted by preservation, vast clammy lips peeled back from teeth too big to imagine. A conserved Billy-corpse thrown up by some submerged cataclysm.

Billy shivered on his bed. He had no idea if it was the start of a day outside, or if whatever schedule he was given came according to the church’s clockless grooves. He wanted suddenly and very much to tell Marge that Leon was dead. He had not thought of her, until then, and he was ashamed. He shut his eyes tight and held his breath at the thought of Leon. Billy tried to flex whatever inner thing it was that he had touched when Goss had come for him, when the glass had broken and hesitated.

On his tray was a glass of murky drink. The inky posset. No one would spike him secretly anymore-the choice was his. The offer was there, the hope, though he was dreaming without the ink’s help. Billy was a hostage-prophet, augur-inmate. He was being played as a piece in a variant game of apocalypse.

You were supposed to run the numbers. Fortune-telling was quantum betting, a competitive scrying of variably likely outcomes. That variation, the disagreements, indispensable to the calculation. Triangulating possibilities. No one knew what to do now prognosticators all agreed. Billy gripped the frame of the bed. He stared at the ink-intoxicant.

There was a knock and Dane entered. He leaned against the wall. He wore a coat and carried a bag. For a long time, neither man spoke. They just looked at each other.

“I’m not your prophet, Dane,” Billy said. “Thanks for saving my life. I never said that yet. I’m sorry about that. But this is… You have to let me go.” Still sought, yes, but. “You can help me.”

Dane closed his eyes. “I was born in the church,” he said. “My mum and dad met through it. It was my granddad, my dad’s dad, who was the one really into it. It was him taught me. He used to do catechism with me. But I mean, that’s bollocks, ain’t it? It’s not about reciting like a parrot. It’s about understanding. He used to talk me through it.”

He opened his eyes and took equipment out of his bag, checked it, put it back. A spearhead emerged from the muzzle of what looked like a pistol. “Most of my friends… Well you know what it’s like with church and kids. They don’t stick with it, do they? Me, though… I had a calling. You know what the Teuthex said.” Dane examined his kit. “We can protect you. You’re being hunted by Goss and fucking Subby. Everyone wants what’s in your head, Billy. I know, I know, don’t tell me, there’s nothing in your head. Whatever.”

“What are you doing?” Billy said.

“My job. I done such things for the church. You can’t ask me all the things I done for the church, ’cause I won’t tell you. All the faiths got their…” There was a pause during which even the empty hallways seemed to wait.

“Crusaders,” Billy said.

Dane shrugged. “I was going to say oddjobsmen. Go-to guys.” The hashish-eaters; the Hospitallers; Francis X. Killy. Sanctioned wet-workers of the devout. “Everyone’s got apocalypse brigades, Billy, for when it all goes down. Waiting like kings under hills. They couldn’t exactly go undercover.” He laughed. “They couldn’t exactly get a job at the Darwin Centre.”

Dane lifted his shirt. His skin was studded with keloid marks. He pointed and one by one named them like little pets. “Clockworkers,” he said. “Saviour Sect. Mary Martyrs. This one…” A long and snaky path. “That’s not from a godfight, that one, just a straight-on face-off with a crook. He was stealing from us.”

Footsteps approached but passed on. Dane looked at the ceiling. “You know what the question is?” he said. “What is it you’re loyal to. God? The church? The pope? What if they don’t agree?” He kept his gaze up. “What you want and what I want ain’t the same thing. You want to be safe, and… not to be a prisoner. Which do you want more? Because it’s safer here. You want a bit of revenge, too? What I want’s my god. Maybe that’s in the same direction for a bit.

“If we do this, Billy, you and me, I got to know you’re not going to run. I ain’t threatening you-I’m telling you you’ll die if you try to deal with shit on your own. If we do this I’ll help you, but you have to help me. That means you got to trust me.

“It ain’t going to be safe even a tiny bit, understand? If we go. You got everyone after you.” He lifted the bag.

“You’ll be safer if you stay here. But they won’t let you go. They want to know what you see.” He tapped his head.

“Why are you doing this?” Billy’s heart was speeding again.

“Because it ain’t our place just to watch. There’s a god to save.”

“They think it’s the right thing,” Billy said. “I read about the movement without movement. Moore thinks he’s doing the holy thing, moving like a kraken on a board. By not moving.”

“Well ain’t it convenient that this interpretation lets him sit on his arse? They won’t let you go. I want your help, but I ain’t going to force you. Time ain’t with us. So?”

“I’m not what you think,” Billy said. “I’m not a saint, Dane, just because I cut up a squid.”

“Are you more worried about being a prisoner or a saint?” Dane said. “I ain’t asking you to be anything.”

“What are you going to do?”

“You fallen in the middle of a war. I’m not going to bullshit you, I’m not going to tell you you can get your revenge for your mate. You can’t take Goss and neither can I. That ain’t what I’m offering. We don’t know who has the kraken, but we know the Tattoo’s after it. If he gets hold of something like that…

“It’s him who got your friend killed. The best way to ruin his day’s to get the god back. Best I can do.”

Billy could stay among obsequious jailers. Offering him hallucinogen, taking devout and monkish notes on whatever drivel he subsequently raved.

“Will they come after you?” Billy said. “If you go rogue?”

What this renegacy would mean! Dane would be without the church that made him, an apostate hero taking faith into the heart of darkness, a paladin in hell. A lifetime of obedience, followed by what?

“Oh yeah,” Dane said.

Billy nodded. He pocketed the ink. He said, “Let’s go.”

THE TWO MEN ON DUTY AT THE GATE LOOKED SHOCKED AS DANE approached. They nodded. They piously averted their eyes from Billy. It made him want to pretend to speak in tongues.

“I’m out,” Dane said. “On a job.”

“Sure,” said the younger doorman. He transferred his shotgun from arm to arm. “Let us just…” He fumbled with the door. “Only,” he said, and pointed at Billy. “Teuthex said we need his permission…”

Dane rolled his eyes. “Don’t bugger me around,” he said. “I’m on a mission. And I need him for a moment to taste some stuff out. Need what’s in there.” Tapped Billy’s head. “You know who he is? What he knows? Don’t waste my time, I’m bringing him straight back.” The two men looked at each other. Dane said, in a low voice, “Do not waste my time.”

What, were they going to disobey Dane Parnell? They opened the gate.

“Don’t lock it,” Dane said. “He’ll be back in a second.” He led Billy up the stairs, Billy behind him risking a tiny backward glance. Dane pushed open the trapdoor and pulled him out past bulwarks of rubbish, into the rear room of the South London Church of Christ.

LIGHT BURST THROUGH WINDOWS. LONDON DUST SETTLED AROUND them. Billy blinked.

“Welcome to exile,” Dane said quietly, lowering the door. He was a traitor now, in his fidelity to his duty. “Come on.” They went past the kitchen, the toilet, the bric-a-brac. In the main room, chairs were circled. Billy and Dane came out into a meeting of mostly elderly women, who broke off chatting.

“Alright love?” one said, and another, “Is everything okay, sweetheart?” Dane ignored them.

“Do they…” Billy whispered. “Do they worship the, the kraken…?”

“No, they’re Baptists. Mutual protection. Any second the Teuthex’s going to find out we’re gone. So we’ve got to get far away, fast. Follow me close and do exactly what I say, when I say. You try to go off on your own, Billy, and you will be found and you will die. Neither of us wants that. You understand? Walk quickly but don’t run.

“Are you ready?”

Chapter Twenty-Two

THERE WAS NO PLEASURE, NO I-TOLD-YOU-SO AMONG THE hedge-seers who had for so long predicted that the end was on its way. Now that everyone who cared to think about it agreed with them-though they might abjure the insight-those who found themselves suddenly and unexpectedly the advance guard of mainstream opinion were at a bit of a loss. What was the point of dedicating your life to giving warnings if everyone who might have listened-because the majority were still unbothered and would possibly remain so till the sun went out-merely nodded and agreed?

A plague of ennui afflicted London’s manic prophets. Warning signs were discarded, pamphlets pulped, megaphones thrown into cupboards. Those who could count questionable presences insisted that ever since the Architeuthis had disappeared, something new had been walking. Something driven and intense and intent on itself. And since shortly after that, it had unfolded again and become something a little more itself, emerged from a pupa of unspecificity into sentience, an obsessive moment of now that trod heavy in time.

No, they didn’t really know what that meant, either, but that was their very strong impression. And it was freaking them out.

BILLY STUMBLED AT THE DAY, THE COLD SUNLIGHT, THE PASSERSBY. At people in everyday clothes carrying papers and bags and on their way to south London shops. None of them looked twice at him. The trees leaflessly scratched the sky. It was all washed out by the winter.

A clutch of pigeons rose, wheeled and disappeared over the aerials. Dane stared at their retreating forms with frank suspicion. He beckoned Billy.

“Move,” Dane said. “I don’t like the look of those birds.”

Billy listened to the flatness of his footsteps on tarmac, not echoing at all. His pulse was fast. There was a stretch of low skyline and neglected brickwork. The church behind them was little more than a big shed. “I really do not like the look of those birds,” Dane said.

They went past newsagents, past bins spilling from their rims, dogshit by trees, a row of shops. Dane walked them to a car. It was not the same one as before. He opened the door. There was a whisper.

“What?” Dane said. He looked up. “Was that…?” There was no other noise. He was looking at a crude clay dragon, a little Victorian flourish in the matter of a roof, ajut from its vertex. He hustled Billy into the car.

“What was that?” Billy said. Dane let out a shaking breath as he drove.

“Nothing,” Dane said. “It’s a thought, though. God knows we need some help. We need to put some mileage behind us.” Billy did not recognise any streets. “Any second now London’s going to be teeming with my pissed-off crew. Ex-crew.”

“So where are we going?”

“We get underground. Then we start hunting.”

“And… what about the cops?” Billy said.

“We ain’t going to the police.” Dane smacked the wheel. “They can’t do shit. And if they could, it wouldn’t be what we want them to. Why do you think they’re looking? They want it for themselves.”

“So what are you going to do with it if you find it, Dane?”

Dane looked at him. “I’m going to make sure no one else gets it.”

DANE HAD HIS HIDES. IN EMPTY-LOOKING SHELLS, IN SHABBY squats, in neat-seeming places that appeared to have permanent tenants holding down jobs respectable and unrespectable.

“We move, we stay a day or two at a time,” Dane said. “We get hunting.”

“Surely the church’ll find us,” Billy said. “These are safe houses, right?”

“Not even the Teuthex knows these. When you do the work I do, you have to have leeway. The less they know the better. Keep their hands clean. It ain’t ours to kill, we ain’t the predators, get me? But needs must.” To defend heaven you unleash hell, that sort of sophistry.

“Are you the only one?” Billy said.

“No,” Dane said. “I’m the best, though.”

Billy put his head back on the seat and watched London go. “Goss just opened his mouth,” he said. “And Leon was…” He shook his head. “Is that his… knack?”

“His knack is that he’s an unspeakable bastard,” Dane said. “A jobs-worth.” He unfolded a piece of paper with one hand. “This is a list of movers,” he said. “We’ve got a god to find. This is who might’ve done the job.”

Billy watched Dane for a while, watched anger come and go across his face, and moments of aghast uncertainty. They dossed down finally near the river, in a one-bedroom flat decorated like student digs. There were books on biology and chemistry on cheap shelves, a System Of A Down poster on the wall, the paraphernalia of dope.

“Whose is all this?” he said.

“In case it gets broken into,” Dane said. “Or remote-viewed. Scried or whatever. Got to be convincing.” A toothbrush crusted with paste-spit was in the bathroom, a half-used soap and shampoo. There were clothes in the drawers, all suited to the invented inhabitant: all the same size and unpleasant style. Billy picked up the phone but it was not connected.

Dane checked tiny bones tied in bundles on the windowsill. Ugly little clots of magicky stuff. From a cabinet below the bed he took a machine made of rusty old equipment and nonsense: a motherboard, an old oscilloscope, crocodile-clipped to knickknacks. When he plugged it in there was a thud, waves fluxed on the screen and the air felt dryer.

“Alright,” Dane said. “Bit of security.”

Alarm systems and signal-jammers fucking with the flows of sentience and sensation-magic. Call it “knocking,” Billy told himself. The occult machines left not nothing, not a void that would attract attention like a missing tooth, but projected a shred of presence for remote-sensors, a construct soul. The residue of a pretend person.

When Dane went to the bathroom, Billy did not try to leave. He did not even stand by the door and wonder.

“Why don’t you want this?” Billy said when Dane returned. He raised his hands to indicate everything. “The end, I mean. You say it’s ending. I mean, it’s your kraken doing it…”

“No, it ain’t,” Dane said. “Or not like it’s supposed to.”

It would have made sense to Billy, had Dane hedged and hemmed and hawed, dissembled and evaded. It could not be so uncommon a phenomenon, the last-minute cold feet of the devout. Absolutely I was all signed up for the apocalypse but right now? Like this? It would have made sense, but that was not what this was. Billy knew then and quite certainly that had Dane trusted that this was the horizon of which he had read and catechised since his feisty fervent youth, he would have gone along with it. But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse. That was the problem. It was according to some other plan. Some other schema. Something had hijacked the squid finality. This was and was not the intended end.

“I need to get a message to someone,” Billy said. Dane sighed. “Hey.” Billy was surprised by the speed of his own anger, as he squared up. The big man looked surprised too. “I’m not your pet. You can’t order me around. My best friend died, and his girlfriend needs to know.”

“That’s well and good,” Dane said. He swallowed. His effort to stay calm was alarming. “But there’s one mistake there. You say I can’t order you around. Oh I can. I have to. You do what I tell you or Goss or Subby or the Tattoo or any one of all the others out there looking for you will find you, and then if you’re very lucky you’ll just die. You understand?” He prodded Billy’s chest one, two, three times. “I just exiled myself, Billy. I am not having a good day.”

They stared at each other. “Tomorrow the real shit begins,” Dane said. “Right now, there’s nowhere as much knacking floating around as you’d think. There’s what you could call a power shortage. That gives us opportunities. I don’t just know church people, you know.” He opened his bag. “We might not have to do this totally alone.”

“Let’s make sure,” Billy said carefully. “Just answer me this. I mean… I know you don’t want to get the police in, but… What about just Collingswood? She’s not like the leader of that lot-she’s a constable-but she’s obviously got something. We could call her…” The flat anger of Dane’s face hushed him.

“We ain’t dealing with that lot,” he said. “You think they’ll keep us safe? They won’t mess with us? You think she ain’t going to hand us right over?”

“But…”

“‘But’ fuckity shite, Billy. We stick to who I know.” Dane brought out maps of London felt-tipped with additions, sigils on parkland and routes traced through streets. A speargun, Billy saw to his surprise, like a scuba diver might carry.

“You’ve never shot, right?” Dane said. “Maybe we need to get you something. I didn’t… I didn’t have time to plan this a whole lot, you know? I’m thinking who might help. Who I’ve run with.” He counted off on his fingers, and scribbled names. “My man Jason. Wati. Oh, man, Wati. He’s going to be angry. If we want to get a talisman or anything we need to go to Butler.”

“Are these kraken people?”

“Hell no, the church is out,” Dane said. “That’s closed. We can’t go there. These are people I’ve run with. Wati’s a red, good guy. Butler, it’s all about what he saw: he can get you defences. Jason, Jason Smyle, he’s a good bet.”

“Hey, I know that name,” Billy said. “Did he work at… the museum?” Dane smiled and shook his head. No, thought Billy, the familiarity abruptly gone.

They ate from the bag of junk food Dane had bought. There were two beds, but like campers they dossed down on the living room floor. This was a landscape through which they were passing, a forest glade. They lay without speaking some time.

“How did it feel?” Dane said. “To work on the kraken.”

“… Like smelly rubber,” Billy said at last. Dane looked as if he would thunder disapproval, but then he laughed.

“Oh man,” said Dane. “You’re bad.” He shook his head. His grin was guilty. “Seriously. You telling me there was nothing? You’ve got something.” He clicked his fingers, made that spot of biophosphor, like a deep-sea squid. “You didn’t feel nothing?”

Billy lay back. “No,” he said. “Not then. It was earlier. I was rubbish at what I did, the first few months I was there. I didn’t even know if I’d stick it. But then all of a sudden I got much better. That was when it felt something special. Like I could preserve anything, any way I wanted.”

“What about in the alley?” Dane said. Billy looked at him across the dark room. Dane spoke carefully. “When Goss was coming for you. You did something, then. Did that feel like something?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“If you say so, Billy,” Dane said. “My granddad was a holy man. He used to ask me who my favourite saint was. He said you could tell a lot about someone if you knew that. So I’d say Kraken, because I wanted to be a good boy, and that was the right answer to most… religious questions. And he’d say, No, that’s cheating. Which saint? I couldn’t decide for ages, but suddenly one day I did. I told him.

“Saint Argonaut, I said. Really? he says. He wasn’t angry or nothing, he was just, like, surprised. But I think he liked that. Really? he goes. Not Saint Blue-Ring? Not Saint Humboldt? They’re your fighting saints. He said that because I was big like him and everyone knew I was going to be a soldier. Why Saint Argonaut? he goes. Because of that pretty spiral it makes, I says.”

Dane smiled beautifully, and Billy smiled back. He pictured the intricately fanned fractal eggcase Dane was describing, which gave the argonaut its other name. “Paper nautilus,” he said.

“He was a tough man, but he loved that,” Dane said.

When Dane went to the bathroom again, Billy opened the little bottle and dripped several bitter drops of the squid ink onto his tongue. He lay back and waited in the dark. But even with all the adrenalin of that day, and the inadequate snack supper, he went quickly to blank sleep, and outraced any visions or dreams.

Chapter Twenty-Three

WHAT MARGINALIA WAS THINKING WAS, WHAT THE HELL IS going on?

When Leon still did not answer any messages, she tried Billy, who did not answer either. She managed to persuade a locksmith of her bona fides, and at last got into Leon’s flat. Nothing was out of place. There was no hint to his location. She did not know Billy’s friends or family to call them.

Marge had walked into the police station closest to her when Leon had gone and not come back, when neither he nor Billy would answer their phones. She had reported two missing persons. The officers treated her with brusque sympathy, but they told her the number of people who disappeared every year, every week, and they told her how many soon returned from drunken trips or absentminded weekends. They told her it was best if she didn’t worry too much, and they warned her not to expect too much.

To her own great surprise, Marge began to cry in the station. The police were embarrassed and cack-handedly sweet, offering her tea and tissues. When she calmed down she went home, expecting nothing and not knowing what to do. But within an hour and a half of getting back (certain keywords coming up in the report of her visit, correlating with other words, the names she had mentioned attracting attention, Leon’s imperfectly recollected but telling last text, red-flagged on computer systems not nearly so hopeless as ostentatiously cynical commentators would claim) there was a knock at her door. A middle-aged man in a suit and a very young blonde woman offhandedly in police uniform. The woman carried a leash, but was not followed by any dog.

“Hello,” the man said. He had a thin voice. “It’s Miss Tilley, isn’t it? My name’s Baron. DCI Baron. This is my colleague WPC Collingswood. We need a word. I wonder if we might come in?”

Inside, Collingswood turned slowly, a full circle, taking in the dark walls, the posters for video events and basement electronica parties. Baron and Collingswood did not sit, though Marge gestured them at the sofa. She got a breath of some earthy, porky smell, and blinked.

“I gather you’ve mislaid some friends, Miss Tilley,” Baron said. Marge considered correcting him, Ms. did not bother.

“I wasn’t expecting to see you,” she said. “At your office they told me you couldn’t really do anything.”

“Ah, well, they don’t know what we know. What relation are you to Billy Harrow?”

“Billy? None at all. It’s Leon I’m with.”

“With?”

“I told you.”

“You haven’t told me anything, Miss Tilley.”

“I told them at the station. He’s my lover.”

Collingswood rolled her eyes and wobbled her head, La di fucking da. She click-clicked, as if at an animal, gestured with her chin toward the other rooms.

“And you haven’t heard anything from Leon since he went to meet Billy?” Baron said.

“I didn’t even know for sure that’s where he’d gone. How come you came so fast? I mean they said not to expect…” She opened her mouth in a sudden zero of terror. “Oh God, have you found him…?”

“No no,” said Baron. “Nothing like that. What it is is this is one of those dovetailing situations. Collingswood and I, we’re not generally Missing Persons, you see. We’re from a different squad. But we got a heads-up about your problem, because it may have bearing on our case.”

Marge stared at him. “… The squid thing? Is that what you’re investigating?”

“Fu-u-u-ck!” said Collingswood. “I knew it. That little bastard.”

“Ah.” Baron raised his eyebrows mildly. “Yes. We sort of wondered if Billy’d been able to resist a natter.”

“Got to give it to him, boss, for someone who don’t know what he’s doing, he’s got some clout. Come on, you.” She said the last to no one, so far as Marge could tell.

“We’d much rather you kept whatever he mentioned to yourself, if you don’t mind, Miss Tilley.”

“You think this has something to do with Leon going missing?” Marge said, incredulous. “And Billy? Where do you think they are?”

“Well, that’s what we’re looking into,” Baron said. “And you can rest assured we’ll let you know as soon as we know anything. Was Billy talking a lot about the squid? Had Leon been to see it? Was he a regular at the museum?”

“What? No, not at all. I mean, he’d seen it once, I think. But he wasn’t that interested.”

“Did he talk to you about it?”

“Leon?” she said. “You mean did he tell me about it disappearing? He thought it was hilarious. I mean he knew it was a big deal for Billy. But it was so weird, you know? He had to take the piss. I wasn’t even a hundred percent sure if Billy was bullshitting, you know?”

“Yeah, no,” Collingswood said.

“Why on earth would you think he’d make something like that up?” Baron said.

“Well. It hasn’t been in the news or anything, has it?”

“No,” said Baron. “Ah, but therein, therein is a tale. Of gag orders the like of which you’ve no idea.” He smiled.

“Anyway, it’s not like Leon approved of it. He just… the whole idea of it made him laugh. He texted me some joke about it before he…”

“Oh yeah,” said Collingswood. “It is quite the riot.”

“Come on,” said Marge. “Someone nicked a giant squid. Come on.”

“What can you tell us about Billy?” Baron said. “What do you think of him?”

“Billy? I don’t know. He’s alright. I don’t really know him. He’s Leon’s friend. Why are you asking?”

Baron glanced at Collingswood. She shook her head and tugged the lead. “Not a sausage,” she said. “Ooh, sorry Perky.”

“What’s going on?” Marge said.

“We’re just doing some detecting, Miss Tilley,” Baron said.

“Should I…? How worried should I be?”

“Oh, not very,” he said. “Would you, Kath?”

“Nah.” Collingswood was texting someone.

“You know the more I think about it, I don’t think this is related to what we’re up to. So if I were you I wouldn’t worry.”

“Yeah,” said Collingswood, still thumbing her message. “Nah.”

“Now,” said Baron, “obviously we’ll let you know if we realise otherwise. But I must say I’m doubtful. Many thanks.” He nodded. He touched his forefinger to the brow of his nonexistent cap; Cheerio then.

“Hey, what?” Marge said. “Is that it?” Collingswood was already by the door, popping her collars like a dandy. She winked at Marge. “What just happened?” Marge said. “Are you going? What happens now?”

Collingswood said to her, “Rest assured we’re going to leave no stone unturned in our search for wossname and thingy.”

Marge gasped. Baron said, “Now, Kath.” He shook his head, rolled his eyes at Marge like a tired father. “Miss Tilley, as soon as we have any ideas of what’s going on, we’ll be straight back in touch.”

“Did you hear what she said?”

“Kath,” Baron said, “off you go, get in the car. I did, I did, Miss Tilley. And I apologise.”

“I want to make a complaint.” Marge shook. She clenched and unclenched her fists.

“Of course. It’s absolutely your right to do so. You have to understand it’s just a question of Collingswood’s gallows humour. She’s an excellent officer, and that’s her way of dealing with the trauma we have to see every day. Not that it’s any excuse, I grant you. So you go ahead, it might shape her up.” He paused on his way out, his hand on the doorway. “I’ll let her know I’m very disappointed in her.”

“Wait, you can’t just leave now. How do I get in touch with you if I need…?”

“Your local station gave you a contact officer, right?” Baron said. “Go through her. She’ll pass on any information to me and my squad.”

“What the hell? You can’t just suddenly…” But the door was closing, and though she shouted demands to know what was going on, Marge did not follow the officers. She leaned against the door until a strong feeling that she would cry passed. She said to herself out loud, “What the fuck was that?”

What was it? It was a judgement call, and a bad one. It had been a hunch of the kind one infrequently hears about: a hunch that was wrong.

“Not a fucking thing,” Collingswood said. She lit a cigarette. The little winter wind snatched its smoke. “She doesn’t know shit,” Collingswood said.

“Agreed,” said Baron.

“And none of this has shit to do with her. We’re not going to get anything with that one.”

“Agreed,” said Baron.

“No one’s hexed bollock all anywhere near that flat,” Collingswood said. “Not like bloody Billy’s.” Someone or someones with soul or souls starched with witchery of one or other sort had certainly been there. At Billy’s place her poor aetherial animal companion had swivelled and whined and squealed so loud even Baron could hear him.

“You know there ain’t much stuff going on at the moment,” Collingswood said. “With everyone scared shitless of the UMA. So whatever trails get left would stick out more. You saw the piggy.” She shook the lead. “Well, I mean, you didn’t, but you know what I mean. Bloody nothing. So what’s the story? This Leon geezer part of something?”

“Doubtful,” Baron said. “From everything we can get he’s absolutely nothing. Just some typical everyday tosser.” He made a brrrr sound with his lips. “If he’s got anything to do with the kraken he’s been in deep cover for God knows how long. I think he’s just got snagged.” Collingswood listened for text-thoughts. She felt for her brief familiar sniffing the faint para-scent trails of what magery was in that street.

“Well, poor little sod,” she said.

“Quite. I doubt we’ll see him again. Or Billy.”

“Unless Billy’s our villain.” They pondered. “Did you hear what Vardy was going on about this morning?”

“Where is that man?” Baron said. “What’s he up to?”

Collingswood shrugged. “I dunno. He said something about chasing up Adler’s religious life.”

“Did he have one?”

“I dunno, guv. I’m not the one chasing. But did you hear what he said this morning? About the Krakenists?”

There were rumours already, of course, about all aspects of the theft, the murder, the mysteries. Nothing could stop rumours moving faster than horses. It was part of Baron’s and Collingswood’s job to overhear them. Vardy’s theological snitches had told him, and he had told his colleagues, that there were whispers of the shunning of high-profile worshippers in the teuthic church.

There was also, still, that growing apocalypse mutter.

It was a seller’s market for relics right then. Who could doubt that religion and organised crime were linked? As the bishops of one secret Catholic order asked whenever questions of business ethics arose, was Saint Calvi martyred to teach us nothing?

“So do we still think it’s definitely godders did this?” Collingswood said. She sniffed. “Krakenists or whatnot? Or is it maybe just fucking crooks?”

“Your guess,” Baron said, “is as good as mine. Fact it’s probably considerably better.”

“I’m still getting bollock all from snitches,” Collingswood said. She sniffed again.

“Whoa,” Baron said. “You’re… here.” He handed her a tissue. Her nose was bleeding.

“Oh you little fucking wankface,” Collingswood said. She pinched the top of her nose. “You cuntbandit.”

“Jesus, Kath, you alright? What’s all that?”

“It’s just tension, boss.”

“Tense? On a beautiful day like this?” She glared at him. “What’s got your goat?”

“Nothing. It’s not like that. It’s just…” She raised her hands. “It’s all this. It’s the fucking Panda.”

Through a meandering chain of half-arsed jokes, that was the name Collingswood and Baron had given the end on the edge of things. The end for which even the most tentatively apocalyptic faith was preparing. The magic reek of it had Collingswood, as a knack-smith, on edge: toothached, crampy, unsettled. She had been referring to that fearful approaching whatever-it-was repeatedly, until Baron had suggested giving it a shorthand. It had started as Big Bad Wolf, from where it had quickly become Sausage Dog, and ultimately Panda. The nickname did not help Collingswood feel any better about it.

“Whatever it is has to do with the fucking squid,” she said. “If we knew who’d taken the bugger…”

“We know who the top suspects are. Certainly if anyone in the office asks.” The devout might pay a lot for the corpse of a god. The FSRC listened and fished, ho ho, for word of the secretive Church of God Kraken. But the disappearance might be a more profane, though knacked and abnatural, crime. And that would be a complication.

Bureaucracies turf-war. The FSRC were the only officers in the Met who were anything other than blitheringly inadequate to deal with the eldritch nonsense of knackery. They were the state’s witches and hammers of witches. But their remit was a historical quirk. There were no Wizardry Squads in the UK Police. No SO21 to police Crimes of Magic. The Flying Squad did not. There was only the FSRC, and technically they were not concerned with the powers of ley lines, charmed words, invoked entities, et cetera-they were a cult squad, specifically.

In practice of course it was staffed by and kept watch on all those with questionable talents. FSRC computers were loaded with occult hexware and abgrades (Geas 2.0, iScry). But the unit was obliged to maintain appearances by describing all its work in terms of the policing of religion. They had to take care, if they concluded that it was purely secular abcriminality behind the Architeuthis disappearance, to stress what links they could with London’s heresiarchs. Otherwise they would lose jurisdiction. Without cult-games at the heart of the squidnapping, it would be handed over to some brusque unsubtle unit-Serious Crime, Organised Crime. Antiquities.

“God preserve us,” Collingswood said.

“Just hypothetically,” Baron said. “Between you and me. If this is crims, not godsquadders, you know who our top suspect is.”

“Tat-fucking-too,” said Collingswood.

Baron’s phone went. “Yeah,” he said into it. He listened and stopped walking. He looked sick, and sicker, and old.

“What?” Collingswood said. “What, boss?”

“Alright,” he said. “We’ll be there.” He shut the phone. “Goss and Subby,” he said. “I think they found out that Anders gave them to us. Someone… Oh, bugger me. You’ll see.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

WHEN BILLY WOKE HE REALISED THAT HIS DREAMS HAD BEEN nothing but the usual cobbled-together fag-ends of meaning.

Why wouldn’t the gods of the world be giant squid? What better beast? It wouldn’t take much to imagine those tentacles closing around the world, now would it?

He knew he was at war now. Billy stepped out into it. It wasn’t his city anymore, it was a combat zone. He looked up at sudden noises. He was a guerrilla, behind Dane. Dane wanted his god; Billy wanted freedom and revenge. Whatever Dane said, Billy wanted revenge for Leon and for the loss of any sense of his own life, and being at war with the Tattoo gave him at least a tiny chance for that. Right?

They were simply disguised. Hair flattened out for Billy, teased up for Dane. Dane wore a tracksuit; Billy was absurd in clothes stolen from the imaginary student. He blinked like the escapee he was, watched Londoners hurrying. Dane took a couple of seconds to open a new car.

“You got some magic key?” Billy said.

“Don’t be a twat,” Dane said. He was just using some criminal finger technique. Billy looked around the vehicle’s interior-there was a paperback, empty water bottles, scattered paper. He hoped with a hopeless sense of fret that this theft would not hurt someone he would like, someone nice. It was a pitiful equivocation.

“So…” Billy said. Here he was, in the trenches. “What’s the plan? We’re taking it to them, right?”

“Hunting,” Dane said. “We have leads to follow. But this is dangerous? I’m… Now I’m rogue you and me need some help. It ain’t true we got no allies. I know a few people. We’re going to the BL.”

“What?”

“The British Library.”

“What? I thought you wanted us to keep a low profile.”

“Yeah. I know. It ain’t a good place for us.”

“So why…”

“Because we have a god to find,” Dane snapped. “Alright? And because we need help. It’s a risk, yeah, but it’s mostly beginners’ territory. People who know what they want go other places.”

There was magery there, he said, but strictly newbie. For serious stuff you looked elsewhere. A deserted swimming pool in Peckham; the tower of Kilburn’s Gaumont State, no longer a cinema nor a bingo hall. In the meat locker of an Angus Steak House off Shaftsbury Avenue were the texts powerful enough to shift position when the librarians were not looking, which were said to whisper lies they wanted the reader to hear.

“Keep your mouth shut, keep your eyes open, watch and learn, show respect,” Dane said. “And don’t forget we’re hunted, so you see anything, tell me. Keep your head down. Be ready to run.”

It rained, briefly. When it rains, Dane quoted his grandfather, it’s a kraken shaking the water off its tentacles. When the wind blows, it’s the breath from its siphon. The sun, Dane said, is a glint of biophosphor in a kraken’s skin.

“I keep thinking about Leon,” Billy said. “I need to… I should tell his family. Or Marge. She should know…” It was nearly too heavy to articulate his feelings like that, and he had to stop speaking.

“You ain’t telling no one,” Dane said. “You ain’t talking to no one. You stay underground.”

The city felt like it was hesitating. Like a bowling ball on a hilltop, fat with potential energy. Billy recalled the snake unhinging of Goss’s jaw, bones jostling and a mouth with precipitous reconfiguration a doorway. Dane drove past a small gallery and a dry cleaners, a market collection of junk, tchotchkes in multiplicity, urban twee.

IN FRONT OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY, IN THE GREAT FORECOURT, A little crowd was gathered. Students and other researchers, laptops clutched, in trendy severe spectacles and woolly scarves. They were gaping and laughing.

What they stared at was a little group of cats, walking in a complicated quadrille, languidly purposeful. Four were black, one tortoise-shell. They circled and circled. They were not scattering nor squabbling. They described their routes in dignified fashion.

Far enough away to be safe but still startlingly close were three pigeons. They strutted in their own circle. The paths of the two groups of animals almost overlapped.

“Can you believe it?” said one girl. She smiled at Billy in his foolish clothes. “You ever seen such a well-behaved bunch? I love cats.”

Most of the students, after a minute or two of amused watching, went past the cats into the library. There were a very few among the crowd, though, who looked not in humour but consternation. None of these men or women entered. They did not cross the stalked lines. Though it was early and they had only just arrived, on seeing the little gathering they would leave.

“What’s going on?” said Billy. Dane headed to the centre of the forecourt, where a giant figure waited. He was uneasy being out. He looked constantly to all sides, led Billy with a kind of cringing pugnacity toward the twenty-foot statue of Newton. The imagined scientist hunched, examining the earth, his compass measuring distance. A tremendous misunderstanding, it seemed, Blake’s glowering ecstatic grumble at myopia mistranslated by Paolozzi as splendid and autarch.

A broad man stood by the figure, in a puffy jacket and woolly hat and glasses. He carried a plastic bag. He looked to be muttering to himself. “Dane,” someone said. Billy turned, but there was no one in earshot. The hatted man waved at Dane, warily. His bag was full of copies of a left-wing newspaper.

“Martin,” said Dane. “Wati.” He nodded to the man, and the statue. “Wati, I need your help-”

“Shut your mouth,” a voice said. Dane stepped backward in obvious shock. “I will talk to you in a sodding minute.”

It spoke in a whisper, with a unique accent. It was between London and something bizarre and unplaced. It was a metal whisper. Billy knew it was the statue that spoke.

“Uh, okay,” the man with the newspapers said. “You’ve got stuff to do, I’m going to split. I’ll see you Wednesday.”

“Alright,” the statue said. Its lips did not move. It did not move at all-it was a statue-but the voice was whispered from its barrel-sized mouth. “Tell herself I said hi.”

“Alright,” the man said. “Later. Good luck. Solidarity to that lot.” He glanced at the cats. A nod good-bye to Dane, and one to Billy too. The man left a paper between Isaac Newton’s feet.

Dane and Billy stood together. The statue stayed heavily sat. “You come to me?” it said. “To me? You have got some nerve, Dane.”

Dane shook his head. He said quietly, “Oh, man. You heard…”

“I thought there’d been a mistake,” the voice said. “I got told, and I was like, no, that’s not possible, Dane wouldn’t do that. He’d never do that. I put a couple of watchers on your place to get you off the hook. Understand? How long I known you, Dane? I can’t believe you.”

“Wati,” said Dane. He was plaintive. Billy had never heard him like this before. Even arguing with the Teuthex, his pope, he had been surly. Now he wheedled. “Please, Wati, you have to believe me. I had no choice. Please hear me out.”

“What do you think you can say to me?” the Newton said.

“Wati, please. I ain’t saying what I done was right, but you owe me to at least listen. Don’t you? Just that?”

Billy looked between the hunching metal man and the kraken-cultist. “You know Davey’s café?” the statue said. “I’ll see you there in a minute. And as far as I’m concerned it’s to say good-bye, Dane. I just can’t believe you, Dane. I can’t believe you were scabbing.”

Noiselessly, something went. Billy blinked.

“What was that?” he said. “Who’ve we been talking to?”

“An old friend of mine,” Dane said heavily. “Who’s rightly pissed off. Rightly. That fucking squirrel. Idiot I am. I didn’t have time, I didn’t think I could risk it. I was racing.” He looked at Billy. “It’s your bloody fault. Nah, mate, I’m not really blaming you. You didn’t know.” He sighed. “This is…” He gestured at the statue, now empty. Billy did not know how he knew that. “That was, I mean, the head of the committee. The shop steward.”

Readers approached the library, saw the little groups of animals, laughed and continued or, those who looked as if they understood something, hesitated and left. The presence of the circling creatures barred them.

“You see what’s going on,” Dane said. Miserably he ran his hands over his head. “That is a picket line, and I am in trouble.”

“A picket? The cats and birds?”

Dane nodded. “The familiars are on strike.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

FROM THE ELEVENTH DYNASTY, THE DAWN OF THE MIDDLE Kingdom, many centuries before the birth of the man Christ, the better-off dwellers by the Nile were concerned to maintain their quality of life, in death.

Were there not fields in the afterworld? Did the crops of the nightlands, the farms of each of the hours of the night, not need harvesting and tending? Were there not households and the tasks that would mean? How could a man of power, who would never work his own land while alive, be expected to do so dead?

In the tombs, by their mummied masters, the shabtis were placed. They would do it.

They were made to do it. Created for those specifics. Little figures in clay or wax, stone, bronze, crude glass, or the glazed earthware faience, dusted with oxide. Shaped at first in imitation of their overlords like tiny dead in funeral wrappings, later without that coy dissembling, made instead holding adzes, hoes and baskets, integral tools cut or cast as part of their mineral serf bodies.

The hosts of figurines grew more numerous over centuries, until there was one to work each day of the year. Servants of, workers for the rich dead, rendered to render, to perform what had to be done in that posthumous mode of production, to work the fields for the blessed deceased.

Each was inscribed at its making with the sixth chapter of the Book of the Dead. Oh shabti, allotted me, their skins read. If I be summoned or decreed to do any work which must be done in the place of the dead, remove all obstacles that stand in the way, detail yourself to me to plough the fields, to flood the banks, to carry sand from east to west. “Here I am,” you shall say. “I shall do it.”

Their purpose was written on the body. Here I am. I shall do it.

THERE IS NO KNOWING BEYOND THAT MEMBRANE, THE MENISCUS OF death. What can be seen from here is distorted, refracted. All we can know are those untrustworthy glimpses-that and rumour. The prattle. The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus.

We gather, we intuit or think we have heard and understood, that there was effort in that place. There in Neter-Khertet, the flickered, judged dead of the kingdom had been trained into belief, strong enough to shape their post-death life into something like a cold unstable mimicking of their splendid eschatology. A vivid tableau imitated in stones, electricity and gruel. (What function of that post-dead stuff coagulated and thought itself Anubis? What Ammit the Heart-eater?)

For centuries the shabtis did what they were tasked. Here I am, they said in the dark unsound, and cut the uncrops, and harvested them, and channelled the not-water of death, carried the remembrance of sand. Made to do, mindless serf-things obeying dead lords.

Until at last one shabti paused by the riverbank-analogues, and stopped. Dropped the bundled shadow-harvest it had cut, and took the tools it was built carrying to its own clay skin. Effaced the holy text it had been made wearing.

Here I am, it shouted in what passed there for its voice. I shall not do it.

“IT NAMED ITSELF WATI,” DANE SAID. “‘THE REBEL.’ HE WAS MADE IN SetMaat her imenty Waset.” He said the strange place carefully. “Now called Deir el-Medina. In the twenty-ninth year of Ramses Three.”

They were in a new car. There was something giddying about the new accoutrements they ferried with each theft: the different toys, books, papers, debris ignored on each back seat.

“The royal tomb-builders weren’t paid for days,” Dane said. “They downed tools. About 1100 BC. They were the first strikers. I think it was one of them builders that built it. The shabti.”

Carved by a rebel, that ressentiment flowing through the fingers and the chisel and defining it? Made by the emotions that made it?

“Nah,” said Dane. “I think they watched each other. Either Wati or his maker learnt by example.”

SELF-NAMED WATI LED THE FIRST-EVER STRIKE IN THE AFTERLIFE. IT escalated. That first revolt of the shabti, the uprising of the made.

Insurrection in Neter-Khertet. Murderous fighting among the constructed, the smithed servants, split between rebels, the afraid, and the still-obedient, slave armies of the loyal. They shattered each other in the fields of the spirits. All confused, none used to the emotions they had accreted by some accident of agency, their capacity to choose their allegiance bewildering. The dead watched aghast, huddled among the ash-reeds of the river of death. Overseer gods came running from their own hours to demand order, horrified by the chaos in those bone-cold agricultural lands.

It was a brutal war of human spirits and quasi-souls made out of anger. Shabti killing shabti, killing the already dead, in heretic acts of meta-murder, sending the appalled souls of the deceased into some further afterlife about which nothing has ever been known.

The fields were full of the corpses of souls. Shabti were slaughtered in hundreds by gods but they killed gods too. The crude features of comrades no one had bothered to carve with precision making their own expressions out of the indistinct impressions given them, taking their axes and ploughs and the fucking baskets they were built carrying in a swarm over bodies the size of mountains with jackal heads howling and eating them but being overrun by us and hacked with our stupid weapons and killed.

Wati and his comrades won. You can bet that meant a change.

It must have been a shock for succeeding generations of highborn Egyptian dead. To wake in a strange fogged underworld scandalously off-message. The rituals of posthumous hierarchy to which their corpses had been piously subjected turned out to be antique, overthrown mummery. They and the worker-statue-spirit household they had had made to come with them were met by disrespectful representatives of the new shabti nation. Their own figurines swiftly recruited to the polity of that shadeland. The human dead were told, If you work, you may eat.

CENTURIES AND SOCIAL SYSTEMS GO, AND IMMIGRATION TO THAT afterland slows and ceases, and piece by piece and without complaint the shabti and those human souls who had made their peace with the rough democracy of the shabti deadland farmers fade, go out, move on, un-be, pass over, are no longer there. There is not much sadness. It is history, is all.

Wati will have none of that.

Here I am. I shall not do it.

He moved too, at last, but he moved not beyond nor to any dark or light but sideways, through borders between belief-worlds.

An epic trek, that curious passage through foreign afterlifes. Always toward the source of the river or the beginning of the road. Swimming up through Murimuria, passing up through the caverns of Naraka and the shade of Yomi, crossing the rivers Tuoni and Styx from the farthest shore back, to the ferrymen’s consternation, through a kaleidoscope flutter of lands, passing psychopomps of all traditions who had to pause with the new dead they were escorting and whisper to Wati, You’re going the wrong way.

Northers in bearskins, women in saris and kimonos, funerary glad-rags, bronze-armoured mercenaries, the axes that had killed them bouncing bloody and politely ignored in their pretend-flesh like giant skin tags, all astonished by the militant inhuman statue-shade ascending, astonished by this contrary wayfarer of whom bugger-all was written in any of the reams of pantheon-specific wittering about what the dead would face, all staring frankly at this intruder, this unplaced class-guerrilla in the myth, or glancing from under brows and introducing themselves politely or not, depending on the cultural norms they had not yet learned were for the living.

Wati the rebel did not reply. Continued up from the underlands. It’s a long way, whichever death you take. Occasionally Wati the retro-eschatonaut might look at those approaching and, hearing a name, or seeing a remembered resemblance, say to the new-deads’ surprise, Oh I met your father (or whomever) miles back, until generations of the dead told stories of the wrong-walker trudging out of a redundant heaven, and debated what sort of seer or whatever he was and considered it good luck to bump into him on their final journey. Wati was a fable told by the long- to the new-dead. Until, until, out he came, through the door to Annwn or the pearly gates or the entrance to Mictlan (he wasn’t paying attention), and here. Where the air is, where the living live.

In a place where there was more to do than journey, Wati looked and saw relations he remembered.

With some somatic nostalgia for his first form he entered the bodies of statues. He saw orders given and received, and it fired him up again. There was too much to do, too much to rectify. Wati sought out those like he had been. Those constructed, enchanted, enhanced by magic to do what humans told them. He became their organiser.

He started with the most egregious cases: magicked slaves; brooms forced to carry water buckets; clay men made to fight and die; little figures made of blood and choiceless about what they did. Wati fomented rebellions. He persuaded knack-formed assistants and servants to stand up, to insist to themselves that they were not defined by their creators or empowerers or the magic scribbles stuck under their tongues, to demand compensation, payment, freedom.

There was an art. He watched organisers of peasant revolts and communard monks, machine-wreckers and Chartists, and learned their methods. Insurrection was not always suitable. Though he retained a hankering for it, he was pragmatist enough to know when reforms were right for the moment.

Wati organised among golems, homunculi, robotish things made by alchemists and made slaves. The mandrakes born and bonded under gallows and treated like discardable weeds. Phantom rickshaw drivers, their hours and pay mysterious and pitiful. Those created creations were treated like tools that talked, their sentience an annoying product of magic noise, by those little mortal demiurges who thought dominion a natural by-product of expertise or creation.

Wati spread his word among brutalised familiars. That old droit de prestidigitateur was poison. With the help of Wati’s rage and the self-organised uncanny, quids pro quo were demanded and often won. Minimums of recompense, in energy, specie, kind or something. Magicians, anxious at the unprecedented rebellions, agreed.

As the last but one century died, the New Unionism took London and changed it, and inspired Wati in his unseen side of the city. In their dolls and toby jugs, he learned from and collaborated with Tillett and Mann and Miss Eleanor Marx. With a fervour that resonated hard in the strange parts of the city, the hidden layers, Wati declared the formation of the UMA, the Union of Magicked Assistants.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“SO WATI’S PISSED OFF WITH YOU.”

“There’s a strike on,” Dane said. “Total knack stoppage. That’s why they’re picketing places where conditions are bad.”

“And they are at the BL?”

Dane nodded. “You would not believe it.”

“What’s it all about?”

“It started small,” Dane said. “These things always do. Something about the hours some magus was making his ravens work. It didn’t look like it would kick off, but then he tries to play hardball, so there’s a sympathy strike at a box factory where the robots are unionised-they got minds in a mageslick, few years ago-and the next thing you know…” He slapped the dashboard. “Whole city’s out.

“It’s the first big thing since Thatcher. And nothing gets the knack-smiths more antsy. Everyone in the UMA’s out, it’s solid. And then I had an emergency. I knew you was being watched. I knew you were, and I had to track you, because I didn’t know what you had to do with the whole god thing. The kraken being took. I didn’t even know what your deal was, I didn’t know if you were in on anything, or had some plan or what. But I knew you were tied up with it. And I couldn’t keep an eye on you twenty-four/seven, so I had to organise a short-term binding with that little sod.”

“The squirrel?”

“The familiar.” Dane winced. “I been strikebreaking. And Wati got word. I don’t blame him being pissed off. If he can’t trust his friends, you know? There’s all dirty tricks. People are getting hurt. Someone got killed. A journo writing about it. No one knows for sure it’s connected, but of course it’s connected. You know? So Wati’s edgy. We have to sort this. I want him on our side. We do not want to be on the shitlist of all the pissed-off UMA in London.”

Billy looked at him. “It’s not just that, though.” He took off and put back on his glasses.

“No it ain’t,” Dane said. “I’m not a scab. I didn’t have time…” He slumped in his seat. “Alright. It wasn’t just that. I was worried if I went and asked for dispensation, the union wouldn’t say yes. They might not think it was serious enough. And I needed it. I had to have more eyes, and something that could get places fast. And you should be happy I did or you’d have been took to Tattoo’s workshop.

“The bastard is I never use familiars.” He shook his head, repeatedly. “It was just crap luck. It was just crap, crap luck, the timing.”

WATI MOVED IN ELDRITCH LEAPFROGGING, STATUE TO STATUE, figure to figurine, consciousness momentarily in each. Just long enough to see through the stone eyes in a horse rider in a park; wooden eyes on a Jesus outside a church; plastic eyes in a discarded clothes model; taking bearings, feeling to the limits of his range, some scores of metres, briefly considering each potential figure within his arc, choosing the most suitable according to criteria, transferring his thinks-node into that next human-made head.

He met Dane and Billy in the café in the back streets near Holborn, where for years the plaster mannequin of a fat chef had held up fingers in an “O” meaning delicious right next to an outside table, so where, if Dane and Billy put up with the chill, huddling over coffees, Wati could en-statue close enough to converse with them. They hunkered against the cold and the possibility of being seen. Dane looked repeatedly around them.

“Like I say, Dane, this better be good,” the Wati-chef said through a motionless openmouthed smile. Its accent remained-Cockney plus the New Kingdom?-but the voice was choky, now, and clogged-sounding.

“Wati, this is Billy,” said Dane. Billy greeted the statue. He greeted a statue and disguised his awe. “He’s what this is all about.” Dane cleared his throat. “You can feel it, right, Wati? The sky, the air, all this shit. History ain’t working. Something’s coming up. That’s what this is about. I bet you can feel it. Between statues.”

There was silence. “Maybe,” said Wati. Was it gusting he sensed? Billy wondered. A dislocation? Something foreboding in that inter-effigial unspace? “Maybe.”

“Alright. Well then. You heard… the kraken got took?”

“’Course I did. The angels can’t shut up about it. I even went to the museum,” Wati said. No lack there of the bodies in which he could be. He could rush around the interior of the hall in a whirlwind of entities, skimming, skipping from animal to stone animal. “The phylax is screaming in the corridors. It’s walking, you know. It’s looking for something, it’s on a trail. You can hear it at night.”

“What’s this?” Billy said.

“The angels of memory,” Dane said.

“What are…?” said Billy, then stopped at Dane’s shaken head. Alright, he thought, we’ll get back to that.

“It’s all screwed up,” Wati said.

“It is,” Dane said. “We need to find the kraken, Wati. No one knows who took it. I thought it was the Tattoo, but then… He took Billy. Was going to do him. And the way he was talking… Most people think it was us.” He paused. “The church. But it weren’t. They ain’t even looking for it. When the kraken went, this thing underneath it all started rising.”

“Talk to me about scabbing, Dane,” Wati said. “Do I need to talk to your Teuthex about this?”

“No!” Dane shouted. People looked. He slid down, spoke quietly again. “You can’t. Can’t tell them where I am. I’m out, Wati.” He looked into the statue’s unmoving face. “Shunned.”

The plaster of the chef, unchanging, took on shock. “Oh my gods, Dane,” Wati said at last. “I heard something, someone said something, I thought it was garbled bullshit, though…”

“They’re not going to do anything,” Dane said. “Nothing. I needed help, Wati, and I needed it fast. They were going to kill Billy. And whoever’s took it’s doing something with the kraken that’s bringing up this badness. That’s when it started. That’s the only reason I did what I did. You know me. I’ll do whatever I have to to fix this. What I’m saying is I’m sorry.”

DANE TOLD WATI THE STORY. “IT WAS BAD ENOUGH WHEN THIS LOT brought it up, put it in their tank.” Billy was shocked at the anger with which Dane stared at him, suddenly. He had never seen that before. I thought you liked the tank, he thought. The Teuthex said… “But since it’s gone it’s got worse. We have to find it. Billy knows things. I needed to get him out. Wati, it was Goss and Subby.”

There was a long silence. “I heard that,” the statue said. “Someone said he was back. I didn’t know if it was true.”

“Goss and Subby are back,” Dane said. “And they’re working for the Tattoo. They’re on the move. They’re doing their work. They were taking Billy to the workshop.”

“Who is he? Who are you?” Wati said to Billy. “Why are they after you?”

“I’m no one,” Billy said. He saw himself talking to a plastic or plaster pizza man. Could almost have smiled.

“It was him who preserved the kraken,” Dane said. “Put it behind glass.”

“I’m no one,” Billy said. “Up until a couple of days ago I…” How to even start.

“He likes to say he’s no one,” Dane said. “Tattoo and Goss and Subby don’t think so. He knows things.”

There was quiet for seconds. Billy played with his coffee.

“A squirrel, though?” Wati said.

Dane stared at the frozen delighted face of the chef, risked a snorting laugh. “I was desperate, bro,” he said.

“You couldn’t have got, like, an adder or a jackdaw or something?”

“I was looking for a part-timer,” Dane said. “All the best familiars are union, I didn’t have much choice. You should be pleased. You’re solid. I had to go with whatever dregs were around.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

“I’m sorry. I was desperate. I shouldn’t have done it. I should’ve asked.”

“Yeah you should,” said Wati. Dane breathed out. “You only get one fuckup like that. And that only because I known you since time.” Dane nodded. “Why did you come see me?” Wati said. “You didn’t just come to apologise, did you?”

“Not only that,” said Dane.

“Cheeky bugger,” said Wati. “You’re going to ask for help.” He started to laugh, but Dane interrupted.

“Yeah,” he said without humour. “You know what, I am, and I ain’t going to apologise. I do need your help. We do. And I don’t just mean me and Billy, I mean everyone. If we don’t find the god, whatever’s coming’s going to get here. Someone’s doing something with that kraken they really shouldn’t oughter.”

“We’re out, Dane,” Wati said. “What do you even want from me?”

“I understand,” Dane said. “But you have to understand too. Whatever it is… If we don’t stop it it won’t matter if you win your strike. I’m not saying call it off. I would never tell you that. I’m saying you can’t afford to ignore this. We have to find God. We ain’t the only ones looking. The longer it’s out there it’s meaning more and more, and that means it’s more and more powerful. So more and more people are after it. Imagine if Tattoo gets his hands on it.” On the corpse, corpus, of an emergent baby god, traveller from below to above.”

“What’s your plan?” Wati said.

Dane brought out his list. “I reckon this is all the people in London could port something as big as the kraken. We can track down who got it out.”

“Hold it up,” Wati said. Dane, making sure he was not watched, held the list in the statue’s eyeline. “There’s, what… twenty people here?” Wati said.

“Twenty-three.”

“Going to take you a while.” Dane said nothing. “Have you got a copy of that? Wait.”

There was a gust, a palpable leaving. Dane began to smile. After a minute a sparrow flew down and landed on Billy’s hand. He started. Even his jump did not dislodge the bird. It looked him and Dane up and down.

“Go on then, give her the list,” said Wati in the statue again. “She’s not your familiar, you get it? Not even temporarily. She’s my friend, and she’s doing me a favour. Let’s see what we can find out.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

HER BOSS WAS SYMPATHETIC BUT COULD NOT HOLD THINGS forever. Marge had to return to work.

Leon’s mother said she was coming to London. She and Marge had never met, nor even spoken until the awkward phone call Marge had made to tell her about Leon’s disappearance. The woman obviously neither knew nor wanted to know details of Leon’s life. She thanked Marge for “keeping her up to date.”

“I’m not sure that’s the best way to do it,” she had said when Marge suggested they work together to try to find out what had happened.

“I don’t feel like the police…” Marge had said. “I mean I’m sure they’re doing what they can, but, you know, they’re busy and we might be able to think of stuff that they can’t. We could keep on looking, you know?” His mother had said she would contact Marge if she found anything out, but neither of them thought she would. So Marge did not mention Leon’s last message.

When she said, “I’ll let you know if I find anything out, too,” she was aware abruptly that she was not making a promise to the woman as much as to herself, to the universe, to Leon, to something, to not leave this, to not stop. Marge went through anger, panic, resignation, sadness. Sometimes-how could she not?-she tried out the thought that she had been very wrong about him, that Leon had just deserted her and his entire life. Maybe he had been involved in a scam gone wrong, was mentally ill, baying somewhere on a Cornish coast or Dundee, was no longer who he had been. The ideas did not stick.

She sent Leon’s mother the keys to his flat that she had had cut, but cut more copies first. She sneaked in and went from room to room, as if she might soak up some clue. For some time each room was as she remembered it, down to the mess, even. She turned up one day and the flat was a shell: his family had taken Leon’s things away.

The police to whom Marge spoke, those to whom she could speak, still implied that there was little to worry about, or, as time went on, little they could do. What Marge wanted was to speak to those other, odder police visitors. Repeated calls to the Scotland Yard would not yield any confirmation that they existed. The Barons whose numbers she was given were none of them the right man. There were no Collingswoods.

Were they who they had claimed? Were they a gang of miscreants hunting Leon for some infraction? Was it from them that he was in hiding?

Her first day back her coworkers were sympathetic. The paperwork she dealt with was easy and not important, and though the hesitancy of her colleagues’ greetings was wearing it was also touching, and she put up with it. She returned to her flat in the same reverie that had taken over as her default mood since Leon disappeared.

Something troubled her. Some part of the city’s afternoon noise, the car grumbling, the children shouting, the mobile phones singing polyphonic grots of song. Repeatedly whispered, getting louder until she could no longer mistake it, someone was saying her name.

“Marginalia.”

A man and boy had arrived, appeared silently before she had her keys out. One was to either side of her front door, leaning with a shoulder to the bricks, facing each other with the door in between them so they boxed her in. The young staring boy in a suit; a shabbier, weatherbeaten man. The man spoke.

“Marjorie, Marjorie, it’s a disaster, the record company’s been on the blower, no one likes the album. Get down to the studio, we’re going to have to remaster.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t…” She stepped back. Neither boy nor man touched her, but they walked with her, in perfect time with each other and with her, so she remained corralled by them. “What are you, what are you…?” she said.

The man said, “We was particularly hoping you might be able to persuade that guitarist to stop by again, lay down some licks. What was his moniker? Billy?”

Marge stopped moving, and started again. The man breathed out smoke. She staggered backward. She wanted to run, but she was hobbled by normality. It was daylight. Three feet away people were walking; there were vehicles and dogs and trees, newsagents. She tried to back away from the man, but he and his boy walked with her, and kept her between them.

“Who the bloody hell are you?” she said. “Where’s Leon?”

“Well that’s just it, isn’t it? We’d posalutely adore to know. Technically I grant you it’s less Leon that we’re chasing than his old mucker Billy Harrow. Leon I’ve a sense of where he might be-lose some weight, Subby says; I can’t help it I says, little morsels like that-” He licked his lips. “But Billy and we was just catching up and then it all went fiddly. So. Where’d he get off to?”

Marge ran. She made for the main road. The two stayed with her. They kept up with her, moving crabwise, the boy on one side, the man on the other. They did not touch her but stayed close.

“Where is he? Where is he?” the man said. The boy moaned. “You must excuse my loquacious friend-never bleeding shuts up, does he? Though I love him and he has his uses. But he’s not wrong also; he raises an excellent point-where is Billy Harrow? Was it you spirited the lad away?”

Marge was gripping her handbag to her chest and stumbling. The man circled her as she kept going, ring-a-rosying with the boy. People on the street were staring.

“Who are you?” Marge shouted. “What did you do with Leon?”

“Why, ate him up, bless your soul! But let’s see who you’ve been chatting to…” He licked the air in front of her face. She shied away and screamed, but his tongue did not quite touch her. He smacked his lips. He breathed out, another jet of smoke, no cigarette in mouth or hand.

“Help me!” she shouted. People around her hesitated.

“See, it was easy to find you because of all the spoor dribbled between here and Leon-the-vol-au-vent, so I’d expect to…” Lick lick. “Not much, Subby. Tell the truth now, chicken, where’s old Billy?”

“You alright, love? You want a hand?” A big young man had approached, fists balled and ready. A friend stood behind him, in the same fight stance.

“If you speak again,” the shabby man said, not glancing at him, still staring at Marge, “or if you step closer, my lad and I will take you sailing, and you will not enjoy what’s under the mizzen. We’ll run you up a dress in taffeta. Do you understand me? If you speak we will bake you oh my god but the worst cake.” His voice was dropping. He whispered but they heard. He turned then and stared at the two potential rescuers. “Oh, does he mean it does he mean it we can take him you take the kid old flabby’s mine ready on the count of three only he does to be honest seem a bit lairy and et cetera. Want some cake?” He made a ghastly little swallowing laugh noise. “Take another step. Take another step.” He did not speak the last two words but exhaled them.

The birds still shouted, the cars complained, and a few metres away people were talking like talking people everywhere, but where Marge stood she was in a cold and terrifying place. The two men who had come to her aid floundered under Goss’s stare. A moment went and they retreated, to Marge’s horrified “No!” They did not leave, only stood a few feet farther away, watching, as if the punishment for losing their nerve was to spectate.

“Now if you’ll forgive that interruption…” And Goss licked the air around her again. Marge was clamped between the two figures as surely as if they actually touched her.

“Alright then,” Goss said at last, stood up straight. “I can’t get a snifter.” He shrugged at his companion, who shrugged back. “Seems not, Subby.” They both stepped back.

“Sorry to bother you,” Goss said to Marge. “We just wanted to check out whether you knew anything, you see.” She retreated. He followed, but not so close as before. He let her get away a little. She tried to breathe. “Because we’re so eager to find out what young Billy’s up to, because we thought he knew everything and then we thought he knew nothing, and then disappearing like that, we thought maybe he must know everything again. But I will be buggered if we can find him. Which”-he waggled his tongue-“means likely enough he has ways and means of not leaving his savour-trail. Wondered if the two of you had spoken. Wondered if you might’ve done a little magery-knackery-jiggery-pokery. I taste not.” Marge breathed in big shudders.

“Well, you mind how you go then, we’ll be on our way. Forget you ever saw us. It never happened. Word to the wise. Oh, unless if Billy does happen to give you a tinkle, do let us know, won’t you? Thanks ever so much, really appreciate it. If he contacts you and you forget to let us know, I’ll kill you with a knife or some such. Alright then? Cheers.”

Then, only then when the man and boy had, it could only be said, sauntered away, not until they had actually turned a corner and were out of sight, did the people nearby run to Marge-including the two who had aborted their rescue, ashamed-looking but mostly just terrified-and ask if she was alright.

Her adrenalin spiked and Marge shook and leaked a few poststress tears, and she was enraged with everyone there. Not one of them had helped her. Recalling Goss and Subby, though, Marge admitted to herself that she could not blame them.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

A DELEGATION OF FAT BEETLES WENT FROM PIMLICO BY WALLTOP and sub-pavement route to a workshop in Islington. They were ink-carriers, little slave things, experimental subjects imbued with temporary powers as part of a savant’s writing of an exhaustive volume of one school of magic, the Entomonomicon. The man’s writing was on hold, because, while individually they were as dumb as specks, the insects were collectivised under a gestalt field, were thinking like a brain, and were on strike.

Where they went birds circled in the air over the town hall. This unlikely flock-an owl, several pigeons, two feral cockatiels-were all familiars, high-ranking enough to be imbued with considerable portions of their masters’ and mistresses’ clouts. They were protesting where several particularly exploitative wizards worked, now struggling with ill-trained scab mannequins.

The idea was that under the stewardship of a UMA activist the coleopteric set would be a flying picket, would join the birds in their aerial circuit. It was reciprocation for the birds’ sympathy picket outside their own workplace the previous week. It had been a powerful symbol of solidarity: some of the strongest hexed assistants in the city feather-to-chitin with some of the weakest, predators avianly chanting alongside what would generally be their prey.

That was the plan. The press had been told to expect visitors. The UMA full-timer signalled to the circling birds that he would be back, and went to caucus with the newcomers. Around the corner in a tiny park, the beetles emerged from a crevice, little bullets of iridescent black waiting for their contact. They milled in leaf litter, gathered in an arrow shape as they heard footsteps.

It was not their organiser, however, who approached. It was a burly man in jeans and black boots, a leather jacket, his face covered by a motorcycle helmet. Waiting by the fence was another man dressed exactly the same.

The beetles, which had been waiting perfectly still, spread out a bit and concerned themselves with the mindless-looking business of insect life, as if they were just pootling around. But with growing alarm, the coagulate striker realised that the faceless man was bearing down on them, kicking aside the camouflaging undergrowth, raising his big biker boots, and bringing them down, right at them, too fast for them to scatter.

With each stamp tens of carapaces split and innards were pulped, and the aggregate consciousness ebbed and became a less sentient panic. The beetles scurried and the man killed them.

The UMA organiser turned the corner. He stood in the grey daylight, in the view of flaking Georgian facades, the prams and bicycles of passersby, and stared. After a horrified instant, he screamed, “Hey!” and ran at the attacker.

But the man continued his brutal mosh, ignoring the shout, murdering with each step. His companion stepped into the organiser’s path and punched him in the face. He sent him sailing, legs wide, blood arcing. The helmeted man grabbed him on the ground and punched him again and again. People saw, and shouted. They called the police. The two dark-dressed figures continued, one with a mad-looking murderous dance, the other to break the nose and teeth of the trade unionist, pounding him not quite to death, but so that his face would never ever look as it had done thirty seconds before.

A police car screamed in as the beating and the crushing concluded. The vehicle’s doors opened, but then there was a hesitation. The officers within did not come out. Anyone close enough could see the lead police shouting into a radio, listening to orders, shouting again, staying in the car and throwing up her hands in rage.

The two bikers backed away. In front of the aghast eyes of the locals, some demanding they stop, others ducking out of their sight, others calling the police again, the two men walked out of the garden and away. They did not get on any bikes: they walked, bowlegged and rolling like violent sailors, through the streets of north London.

When they were gone from sight the police emerged and ran to where the UMA organiser was breathing bubbles in his own spitty blood, and where the strikers were pasted into the earth. Two streets away, inklings of unease reached the avian picket. Their tightly controlled circuit became ragged, as first one then another scooted over the town hall roof to see what had happened.

They cried out. Their calls resonated in more than the conventional dimensions. So it was not very long until with a gust of presence Wati came speeding to the square. He tore into a plaster saint on the wall of a house.

“Bastards,” he said. He was guilty. His attention had not been fully on the action: he had become intrigued by the investigation into the names Dane had given him, the strangeness that underlay the city, the sheer unusualness of being unable to find what he wanted, here any sign of the missing kraken, from any statuette anywhere in the city.

He came too fast even for himself. His velocity skidded him out of the statue and into a Meissen shepherd boy on a mantelpiece on the other side of the wall. He bounced into a teddy bear, and back out into the statue again. He looked at the police and his comrade. If the officers even clocked the insect corpses, they did not think anything of them.

“Motherfuckers,” Wati whispered in the voice of architecture. “Who did this?”

The birds were still screaming, and Wati heard the siren of the ambulance as if it was joining in their cacophony. A quick fingering outreach: one of the cops wore a Saint Christopher, but the silver charm was almost flat, and Wati needed three-dimensionality to manifest. There was a beat-up Jaguar, though, just in earshot, and he leapt into the tarnished effigy at the car’s front. He stood, a motionless outstretched cat, and listened to the police.

“What the hell’s that about, ma’am?” the younger officer said.

“Search me.”

“It’s bloody criminal, ma’am. Just sitting there…”

“We’re here now, aren’t we?” the senior officer snapped. She glanced around. She lowered her voice. “I don’t like it any more than you, but orders are fucking orders.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

ONE THING COLLINGSWOOD HAD ENJOYED IMMEDIATELY SHE joined the police-had been headhunted into the FSRC-was the slang. Initially it had been incomprehensible and delightful, nonsense poetry, all my ground this and his brief that, bird and the black and a bunce, monkeys and drums and nostrils, and the terrifying invocation of a snout.

The first time she had heard that last word, Collingswood had still not known how often she might meet, for example, composite guardian things put together by priests of an animal god (rarely), or invoked things that called themselves devils (slightly more often). She had thought the word a description, and she had imagined the snout Baron had been taking her to meet would be some insightful dangerous mandrill presence. The drab man who had simpered at her in the pub had been so disappointing she had, with a little motion of her fingers, given him a headache.

Despite that letdown, that police term always cast the shadow of a spell on her. On her way to meetings with informants she would whisper “snout” to herself. She enjoyed the word in her mouth. It delighted her when, as she sometimes did, she met or invoked presences that actually deserved the name.

She was in a coppers’ pub. There were countless coppers’ pubs, all with slightly different ambiences and clientele. This one, the Gingerbread Man, known by many as the Spicy Nut Bastard, was a haunt in particular of the FSRC and other officers whose work brought them up against London’s less traditional rules of physics.

“So I been chatting to my snouts,” Collingswood repeated. “Everyone’s freaking out. No one’s sleeping right.”

She sat in a beery booth opposite Darius, a guy she knew slightly from a dirty-tricks brigade, one of the subspecialist units occasionally equipped with silver bullets or bullets embedded with splinters of the true cross, that sort of thing. She was trying to get him to tell her everything he knew about Al Adler, the man in the jar. Darius had known him slightly, had encountered him in the course of some questionable activity.

Vardy was there. Collingswood glanced at him, still astonished that when he heard where she was going, he had asked to come.

“Since when the fuck are you into shit-shooting?” she had said.

“Will your friend mind?” he had said. “I’m trying to collate. Get my head around everything that’s happened.”

Vardy had been more distracted even than usual over the last several days. In his corner of the office the slope of books had grown steeper, its elements both more and less arcane: for every ridiculous-looking underground text was some well-known classic of biblical exegesis. Increasingly often, too, there were biology textbooks and printouts from fundamentalist Christian websites.

“First round’s on you, preacher-man,” Collingswood had said. Vardy sat glumly and grimly, listening as Darius told boring anecdotes about standoffs.

“So what was the story with that guy Adler?” Collingswood interrupted. “You and him went at it once, right?”

“No story. What do you mean?”

“Well, we can’t find dick on him, really. He used to be a villain-he was a burglar, right? Never gets caught but there’s a lot of chatter about him, until a few years ago and all of it dries up. What’s all that?”

“Was he a religious man?” Vardy said. Darius made a rude noise.

“Not that I knew. I only bumped up against him the one time. It was a whole thing. Long story.” They all knew that code. Some Met black op, plausibly deniable, when the lines between allies, enemies, informants and targets were questionable. Baron called them “brackets” operations, because, they were, he said, “(il)legal.”

“What was he doing?” Collingswood said.

“Can’t remember. He was with some crew shopping some other crew. It was the Tattoo, actually.”

“He was running with the Tattoo?” Collingswood said.

“No, he was shopping them. Him and another couple of people, some posh bint-Byrne her name was, I think-and that old geezer Grisamentum. He was sick. That’s why Byrne was around. They were dobbing the Tattoo in it. Tattoo’d only been Tattoo for a little while, and they didn’t say, but they were hinting it was Gris who made him into it. All change, ain’t it?”

“What do you mean?” Vardy said.

“Oh, you know. Never the same friends, is it? All change now. Grisamentum pops his clogs and now we’re all treading a bit softly around the Tat.”

“Is it?” Collingswood said, offering him a cigarette.

“Well…” Darius glanced around. “We’ve been told to go softly on his lot for a little while. Which is funny, because you know they ain’t exactly subtle.” The Tattoo’s predilection for ostentatious, damaged and reconstituted henchpersons as a method to spread fear was notorious. “They reckon he’s got Goss and fucking Subby on payroll at the moment. But we’ve been told tread a bit light unless it really spills out into Oxford Street.”

“Who’s doing who favours?” Collingswood said.

Darius shrugged. “You’d be slow if you didn’t think it had something to do with the strike. Word is the UMA are having a bit of a time of it. Look, all I know about Al is that he was a good thief and loyal to his mates. And he liked things to be proper, you know? He had those tattoos, I know, but he had proper manners too. I’d heard bugger-all about him since Grisamentum died.”

“So,” Vardy said, “you’ve no reason to think he was devout. Have you heard of him having any run-ins with angels?” Collingswood looked at him and sipped.

“Boss,” said Darius, finishing his drink. “I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. Now if you’ll excuse me. Collers, always a pleasure. Giz a snog.” She flapped her tongue at him. He made a slurping sound as he stood and left.

“Jesus,” said Collingswood to Vardy. “I feel like arse. You’re alright, aren’t you? The Panda’s not doing your head in. I can’t see you crossing any palms with fucking euros.” As the shapeless anxiety approached, the foreseers of London were doing incredible trade. Second-, third- and fourth-stringers were getting employment, as people tried to find someone, anyone, to see something, anything, other than an end.

“Panda? Oh, yes, that’s your funny joke, isn’t it? Well, I’m keeping busy. There’s a lot to do.” He did not look merely busy: Vardy seemed invigorated, energised by the crisis. His university must be complaining-not that they could do anything-because he was spending all hours at the FSRC offices.

“What the hairy bollocks was that about?” Collingswood said. “Angels? What are you getting me into?”

“Have you heard of mnemophylaxes?” he said.

“No.”

“Another word for the angels of memory.”

“… Oh that. I thought that was all bollocks.”

“Oh no, there’s certainly something to it. The difficult thing is working out exactly what.”

“Can’t you ask one of your snouts?” He glanced at her with a ghost of humour.

“My collectors are no good. Nobody worships these angels. They’re… well, you’ve heard stories.”

“A bit.” Not much. Some archons of history, not memories but metamemories, the bodyguards of remembrance.

“There was a witch, years ago. She’d been a Londonmancer, but she broke with them because she was tired of noninterference. She and a couple of rent-a-mob broke into the Museum of London, to fetch something or other. Found dead the next morning. Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“Her friends were dead. She was nowhere. There was just a knocked-down pile of bricks and mortar in a display case. Some of the bricks were oddly shaped. We took the pile and did a bit of a jigsaw, fitted it back together. It was a sculpture of a woman. In brick. It had been made, then knocked down.” He looked at her. “Thinking of angels, I wanted to suggest that you have a look at the readouts from the scene there, and perhaps compare to whatever you get from the spot in the basement where Billy found Adler.”

“So, what you wanted to suggest was I do a load of extra work, is it?” she said. Vardy sighed.

“There are points of connection,” he said. “That’s all I’m saying. I’m not sure the Tattoo’s the only thing we’re looking at. And you’re still getting no whisper about the whereabouts of the squid. I presume.”

“You presume right.” Snouts, bribery, violence, scrying, possibility-running, prophecy poker-nothing was netting any word at all. And the continual non-up-turnance of so valuable a commodity as a giant squid-the thought of getting their alembics on which made the city’s alchemists whine like dogs-was provoking more and more interest from London’s repo-men and -women.

“It ain’t just us looking for it,” Collingswood said.

Chapter Thirty

C OME CHAMPION SADDLE UP TIME FOR US TO GO WE MUST BE QUICK WE have a job to do

One moment Billy was deep under the surface of sleep and dreaming so vividly and quickly it was like being in a sped-up film.

saddle up and lets get those

He was under the water, as he was most of the times he slept, now, but it was light not dark this time, the water so bright it was like sunlight; it was daylight he was in; the rocks were deepsea rocks or they were the innards of a canyon; he was in a canyon, overlooked by buttes and mesas, with the sun or some underwater light above him. He was getting ready to ride.

champion, he shouted, champion saddle up

Here was his mount. He knew what would come over the rocks and hills for him to grab and with cowboy drama swing himself onto its back as it passed. Architeuthis, jetting, mantle clenching and tentacles out ready to grab prey. He knew it would scud over the plains, sending out limbs to grab hold of what it passed, to anchor itself and hunt.

It came. But something was not as expected.

how do i get on that? Billy thought. do i get in maybe?

What came bucking over the hills was Architeuthis in its tank, the great glass rectangle pitching like a canoe, Formalin sloshing up against the see-through lid and spraying out of edges, in drips, leaving a damp trail in the dust. The kraken in its tank whinnied and reared, the long-dead flesh of the animal sliding.

champion champion

One instant Billy was in that dream. The next he was awake, his eyes open, staring at the ceiling of the flat to which Dane had taken him. He breathed in, out. Listened to the silence of the room.

The nonexistent person the flat belonged to was a professional woman, a GP, judging from the books on shelves and certificates on walls. She had never lived, but her ghost was everywhere. The furniture and decorations were tastefully and carefully patterned. Amulets and wards were hidden behind curtains. They were on the second floor of a shared house.

Dane was sleeping in the bedroom. “We’re going to talk to Wati tomorrow,” he had said. “We need to get some shuteye.” Billy was on the sofa. He lay, staring at the moulding on the ceiling, trying to work out what had woken him. He had felt a scraping like some fingernail against something.

All the tiny noises of air and the shuffling of his clothes, his head against the cushion, ended. He sat up and there were still no sounds. In that unnatural quiet what he heard, for a clear second, was the rolling grind of glass on marble. His eyes widened. He felt something vibrate against glass. Without knowing how, he was standing a little way from the sofa, now by the window, pulling back curiously resistant limp curtains. He was wearing his glasses.

A man was on the windowsill outside. Another was on the ground, looking up. Billy did not even feel surprise. The first man was gripping a downpipe, scoring at the glass of the window with a cutter. He and his companion were motionless. Not even the midnight clouds moved. Billy dropped the corner of curtain, and it fell instantly back into the draped shape it had been in.

He knew this would not last more than another few seconds. He did not try to wake Dane, did not think there was time, nor that Dane would move if he tried. He took a step and felt air move again, heard the tiny shifting of the living world. The curtains wafted.

With astoundingly silent motion the intruder opened the window. He began to come through, a lumpy shape being born from the split between curtains. Billy grabbed him in a half-remembered judo hold, around his neck, rolled him onto the floor, choked him fast and hard. The man made tiny sounds. He rose onto all fours, braced and shoved, rising from prone to standing in an impossible corkscrew jump that crushed Billy into a wall.

The door to the bedroom opened and there was Dane, his fists clenched, dark as a man-shaped hole. He crossed the room in three freakishly nimble steps, smacked the incomer in his jaw, sending his head snapping backward. The man dropped, deadweight.

Billy clicked his fingers and caught Dane’s eye. He pointed down through the curtains: there’s another one. Dane nodded. He whispered, “Handcuffs in my bag. Gag him, lock him.”

Without drawing the curtains, Dane reached round their edges and began to pull the window open. The curtains gusted as cold air came in. There was a curt whisper and a thwack. One curtain jerked and shuddered around a new hole. An arrow jutted from the ceiling.

Dane vaulted through the window. Billy gasped. The big man dropped the two full storeys, twisting, landed low and silently in the building’s shrubby front garden. He went straight for the man, who ran with a bolt-gun in his hand. They went very fast into and back out of the streetlamp light. Billy tried to watch as he found the cuffs and locked the unconscious intruder to a radiator, stuffed a sock in his mouth and tied it in place with a pair of the invented woman’s tights.

The front door opened. Billy stood ready, but it was Dane who entered, breathing heavily, his belly shaking. “Get your shit.”

“Did you get him?” Billy said. Dane nodded. He looked grim. “Who are they?” Billy said. “Tattoo’s guys?” Dane went into the bedroom.

“What do you mean?” he said. “Ain’t he got a proper face? He’s not some walking machine, is he? Nah. That’s Clem. The other geezer’s Jonno. Say hello. Hello Clem,” he said to the gagged man. He swung his bag up. “Oops,” he said. “Looks like the Teuthex does know about some of these hideouts.” He gave an unhappy little laugh.

Clem met Dane’s eyes and breathed snottily into his gag. “Hey, Clem,” Dane said. “How you doing, mate? How’s everything? Going alright, mate? Good, good.” Dane went through Clem’s pockets. He took what money he found, Clem’s phone. In his pack he found another of those little spearguns.

“Krak’s sake, Clem, mate, look at you,” Dane said. “You put all this effort into getting me and you’re happy to sit there like lemons while someone walks off with God. I got a message for the Teuthex. Tell him this, alright, Clem? When he comes to pick you up, you give him this message, okay? You tell him he’s a disgrace. You all are. I’m not the one who’s exiled. I’m the one doing God’s work. I’m the church, now. It’s the rest of you who’s excofuckingmunicated. You tell him that.” He patted Clem’s cheek. Clem watched through bloodshot eyes.

“Where are we going to go?” Billy said. “If they know your safe houses, we’re screwed.”

“They know this one. I’ll have to keep more careful. I’ll stick to the newest ones.”

“And what if they know them too?”

“Then we’re screwed.”

“WHAT WOULD THEY DO TO US?” BILLY SAID. DANE DROVE THEM IN A newly stolen car.

“What would they do to you?” he said. “Lock you up. Make you tell them what you see at night. What would they do to me? Apostasy, mate. Capital crime.” He took the car past a canal, where rubbish scabbed the edges of a lock and the streetlights were cold and silver.

“What do they think they’re going to find out from me?”

“I’m not a priest,” Dane said.

“I’m not a prophet,” Billy said. Dane did not reply. “Why aren’t you asking me what I dream? Don’t you care?”

Dane shrugged. “What do you dream?”

“Ask me what I dreamed tonight.”

“What did you dream tonight?”

“I dreamed I was riding the Architeuthis like Clint Eastwood. In the Wild West.”

“Well, there you go.”

“But it was…” It was still in the tank. It was still dead and bottled.

The night opened up as they turned onto a main street, an avenue of neon, crudely drawn illuminated fried chicken and the three globes of pawnbrokers. “You did well, Billy. Clem’s no pushover. He’ll get out of there before long. Where’d you learn to fight?”

“He was about to kill me.”

“You did well, man.” Dane nodded.

“Something happened. And it was to do with the dream.”

“Well, that’s what I’m saying.”

“When I woke up nothing was moving.”

“Not even a mouse?”

“Listen. The world. It was all…”

“Like I said, mate,” Dane said. “I ain’t a priest. Krakens move in mysterious ways.”

It didn’t feel like the kraken moving, Billy thought. Something was doing something. But it didn’t feel like the kraken, or any god.

Chapter Thirty-One

WORD GOT AROUND. IT DOES THAT. A CITY LIKE LONDON WAS always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes. There’d be all those alternative pathways to the official ones and to those that made Londoners proud: there’d be quite contrary tendencies.

There, there was no state worth shit, no sanctions but self-help, no homeostasis but that of violence. The specialist police dipped in, and were tolerated as a sect or offhandedly killed like cack-handed anthropologists. “Oh, here we go, FSRC again,” wink wink stab stab.

Even absent a sovereign, things in London chugged on effectively. Might made right, and that was no moral precept but a statement of simple fact. It really was law, this law enforced by bouncers, bruisers and bounty hunters, venal suburban shoguns. Absolutely Fanny Adams to do with justice. Have your opinions about that, by all means-London had its social bandits-but that was fact.

So when a power put out word it was looking for a hunt-and-fetch, that was like police-band radio-an announcement of forthcoming law and order. “Tattoo? Seriously? He’s got plenty of his own muscle. What’s he employing outsiders for?”

The last time was when he had stopped being human and become the Tattoo, when Grisamentum had trapped him in a prison of someone else’s flesh. “Whoever brings me Grisamentum’s head has the run of the city,” was what he had said then. When renowned personhunters who’d taken up that commission were found ostentatiously dead, the enthusiasm for it had ebbed. The Tattoo had gone unrevenged.

Now a new situation. Anyone up for a job?

They met in a nightclub in Shepherd’s Bush, its doors roped off behind a “Private Party” sign. It had been a long time since the last trade-fair. The gathered bountymen and -women cautiously and courteously greeted each other, no one breaking protocol, the market-peace of the room. If they met in the course of competing for their quarry, whatever it was, then, sure, there would be blood, but just then they sipped drinks and ate the nibbles provided, and it was all “How was Gehenna?” and “I heard you got a new grimoire.”

They had checked their weapons; a pebble-skinned man guarded a cloakroom of Berettas, sawn-off shotguns, maggot-whips. They gathered in little groups according to micropolitics and magic allergies. Perhaps two-thirds of the people in the room could have walked down any high street without causing consternation, if in some cases they changed their clothes. They wore every kind of urban uniform and ranged in ethnicity across the whole of London’s variety.

There was a whole slew of skill-sets in the room: miracle-sniffing, unwitchery, iron blood. Some of those present worked in teams, some alone. Some had no occult skills at all, were only extraordinarily lucky with contacts and good at everyday soldierly expertises like killing. Of the others, there were those who would disguise themselves when they left this congenial atmosphere: the miasmic entities drifting at head-height like demon-faced farts would reenter their hosts; the huge woman dressed in a reverse-polarity rainbow would reinstitute her little glamour and be a teenager in a supermarket uniform again.

“Who’s here?” Muttered censuses. “He’s got everyone. Nu-Thuggers, St. Kratosians, the lot.”

“No gunfarmers.”

“Yeah, I heard they were in the city. Not here, thank God. Maybe they’re on another gig. Tell you who is here. See the bloke over there?”

“The twat dressed like a new romantic?”

“Yeah. Know who he is? A Chaos Nazi.”

“No!”

“Shit you not. All limits out the window, obviously.”

“I don’t know how I feel about that…”

“We’re here now. Might as well see what’s on the table.”

THERE WAS A COMMOTION ON THE STAGE. TWO OF THE TATTOO’S enforcers stepped forward in their uniform of jeans and jackets, wearing helmets as they always did, not speaking. They cracked their knuckles and swung their arms.

Between them was a ruined man. He was slack-mouthed and empty-eyed; not so much balding as threadbare, his scalp pitiably tufted. His skin looked like rotting, soaked wood. He walked in tiny little steps. Protruding from his shoulder like some grotesque pirate parrot was a boxy CCTV camera. It clicked and whirred, and swivelled on its stalk in the man’s flesh. It scanned the room.

The nude man would have kept walking, fallen from the edge of the stage, but one of the helmeted guards held out an arm and stopped him a foot from the edge. He swayed.

“Gentlemen,” he said suddenly, in a deep staticky voice. His eyes did not move. “Ladies. Let’s get to business. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumours. They’re true. The following are the facts. One. The kraken lately stored in the Natural History Museum has been nicked. By persons unknown. I have my suspicions, but I’m not here to feed you ideas. All I’d say is the people you think are dead have a habit of not being, especially in this bloody city. I’m sure you’ve noticed. No one should’ve been able to get that thing out. It was guarded by an angel of memory.

“Two. There was a man in my custody, name of Billy Harrow. Knows something about this. I didn’t think he did, but more fool me. He did a bunk. That’s not alright with me.

“Three. Word is that Mr. Harrow was aided in his unacceptable bunk-doing by one Dane Parnell.” A murmur went around the room. “Long-time stalwart of the Church of God Kraken. Now, Dane Parnell has been excommunicated.” The muttering got a lot louder. “From what we gather, the whys of that have something to do with his making Billy Harrow his bumboy.

“Four. There’s something badly bollocksed up with the universe right now, as I’m sure you know, and it’s something to do with this squid. So. Here’s the commission.

“I want war. I want terror.

“I want, in descending order: the kraken, or any sign of it; Billy Harrow-alive; Dane Parnell-couldn’t give a shit. Let me stress that I do not give a tinker’s shit what you do on the way. I do not want anyone to feel safe as long as I don’t have what I want.

“Now…” The voice in the sick man’s throat got crafty. “I’m going to pay a stupid amount for this. But cash on delivery only. This is no-win-no-fee. Take it or leave it. I can tell you, though, that anyone who delivers the kraken will not have to work again. And Billy Harrow’ll give you a good couple of years off.” The camera scanned the room again. “Questions?”

The swastika-wearing man in mascara texted a set of exclamation marks to a comrade. A renegade Catholic priest fingered his dog collar. A shaman whispered to her fetish.

“Oh, shit.” The voice came from a mild-looking young man in a shabby jacket whose creative gunplay would astonish most people who met him. “Oh shit.” He bolted. The man hunted by empathic homing, an annoying side effect of which, in his case, was an allergy to other people’s greed (not, he regularly thanked Providence, his own). The gust of venality that had gone through the room at that moment was strong enough that he never had any hope of reaching the toilets before vomiting.

Chapter Thirty-Two

“THIS IS A LIST OF PEOPLE WHO OWE ME FAVOURS, WHO AIN’T IN the church, and who won’t screw me over,” Dane said. There were not many names. They were in a hide way out in zone four, in what both was, and mystically masqueraded as, a deserted squat. They were waiting for Wati.

“What’s a-does that say ‘chameleon’?” Billy said. “That name rings a bell…”

Dane smiled. “Jason. He’s the one I said. He goes from job to job. Yeah, him and me go back.” He smiled at some reminiscence. “He’ll help if it comes to it. But it’s Wati who’s our main man, no question.”

“Where was that workshop where the Tattoo had me?” Billy said.

“What do you want to know for? Have you got some stupid idea, Billy?”

“What would be stupid? You’re a soldier, aren’t you? You’re worried about the Tattoo getting hold of your god. Is there a reason we’re not taking all this to him? You know I want to do whatever I can to him. I’m honest about that. And Goss and Subby. We want the same thing, you and me. If we can mess with them, everyone’s happy. Except them. Which is the point, right?”

“Billy,” Dane said. “We ain’t going to be storming the Tattoo’s place. Not without an army. First off I don’t know where he is, not for certain. That’s one of his gaffs, but you never know where he’s going to be, or where that workshop’ll be. Second, his guards? They’re not nothing. And plus he’s one of the biggest powers in London. Everyone owes him a favour, or money, or their life, or something. We mess with him we’re bringing down no end of shit on ourselves, even if we got to him, which we wouldn’t.”

“Has he got…? Can he…?” Billy swirled his hands suggestively.

“Knacks? It ain’t about knacks with him: it’s about money and smarts and pain. Look, someone out there has the kraken, and no one knows who. The only thing we’ve got at the moment is that Tattoo’s as buggered by that as us. I know you want to… But we can’t waste time going after him. What’ll screw him over worse is if we get hold of it. He’s too big to hunt, I’m sorry. We’re just two guys. With my know-how and your dreams.

“You should start dreaming for us. You can’t pretend they’re nothing anymore: what you’re seeing’s real. You know that. The kraken’s telling us things. So you got to dream for us.”

“Whatever it is I’m dreaming,” Billy said carefully, “I don’t think it’s the kraken.”

“What the hell else would it be?” Dane did not sound angry, but pleading. “Someone is doing something to it.” He shook his head and closed his eyes.

“Can you torture a dead god?” Billy said.

“’Course you can. You can torture a dead god. You can torture anything. And the universe don’t like it-that’s what’s got the fortune-tellers sick.”

“I have to tell Marge Leon’s dead.” Billy rubbed his chin. “She should-”

“I don’t know what this is about, mate,” said Dane, without looking at him. “But you better let it go. You ain’t going to talk to no one. You can’t. It’s for your sake and it’s for her sake too. You think you’d be doing her a favour if you got her interested? I know this ain’t really about her, but still…” He left Billy feeling unfinished.

On the floor between them was a plastic gnome. They were waiting for Wati. Dane showed Billy truncheon strikes using a wooden spoon, showed him slowed-down punches and neck locks. “You did good,” he said.

His tuition was distracted. But when Wati did come, it was so quietly that neither man had any intimation of his presence until he spoke. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, a snarly voice in the chubby plastic man’s pipes. “Emergency meetings. You got no idea.”

“Everything okay?”

“Not even. We got attacked.”

“What happened?” Dane said.

“Look, it ain’t a picnic and everyone knows that, right? But they came in hard, and they came in brutal. André’s still in hospital.”

“Cops?”

“Pros.”

“Pinkertons?” The agency’s name was a byword for mercenary strikebreaking.

“They weren’t secret about it. It was the Tattoo’s bastards.” Dane stared at the statuette, and it stared back at him.

“I guess that ain’t such a surprise,” Dane said. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “Do we know who’s paying him?”

“Take your pick. No shortage of candidates. But d’you understand what this means? They’re gunning for us. They’ve taken it up to DEFCON One.”

“I’m sorry, mate. You’re not the only one. I thought I knew which of my places were secure,” Dane said. “The Teuthex sent some of… You remember Clem?” Wati whistled slowly.

“That’s got to fuck with your head,” he said. “At least I know the bastards I’m up against are no friends of mine. If I could, I’d go in have a shufti, see what your old church are up to.”

“There are statues all over the walls…” Billy said.

“There are blocks,” Dane said. “Ways to keep people out. They’re careful.”

“I got to look out for my members, Dane,” Wati said. “We have to win this. But it turns out that I’m warring with the Tattoo whether I like it or not. He comes for my members, I’m coming for him. If the main thing he wants is to get hold of the kraken, the main thing I want is to get it first. Whatever he’s for, I’m against it.”

The two men smiled.

WATI SUMMONSED A JACKDAW OUT OF THE SKY AND TO THE kitchen window. It dropped a piece of paper on the counter, sang something to Wati and left. It was Dane’s list of porters. It was much folded, scratched with bird claws, written on in various clumsy hands, in red, blue and black.

“It wasn’t hard to get information,” Wati said in that out-of-time accent. “Mancers know each other. People with this sort of talent, even if my members haven’t met them through their bosses, they know of them.”

“Why are these ones crossed off?” Dane said. “I’d’ve thought Fatima Hussein was a good candidate for having shifted it.”

“The ones crossed out in blue are out of the country.”

“Alright. What about these others?”

“They have familiars. Their knacks are so tied up with them that with the strike, they couldn’t port cheese into a sandwich.”

“How does it work?” Billy said.

“Quid pro quo,” Dane said. “They’re your eyes and ears, but more’n that. Put something into your animal or your whatever it is…”

“Magic.”

“Put something into it, you get more out,” Wati said. Animals as amplifiers. “There’s four people we reckon could’ve ported this. Simon Shaw, Rebecca Salmag, the Advocate, and Aykan Bulevit.”

“I know a couple of them,” Dane said. “Simon retired. Aykan’s a tosser. Any beamers? I hate beaming.”

“Yeah, but we ain’t talking about you,” Wati said. “We’re talking about your god.”

“Its body.”

“Well, yeah. So, either it was one of this lot, or we’re dealing with something we’ve never seen before,” Wati said. “And it isn’t that bloody easy to stay secret in London.”

“Not that whoever it is seems to be having much trouble,” Billy said.

“There is that,” said Wati. “Keep something in your pocket for me to get into. So I can get to you quick.”

“How’d you feel about a Bratz doll?” Dane said.

“I’ve been in worse. But there’s something else. It isn’t just a question of being able to get the thing out. It’s getting past the protection. All those people on the list are porters, but none of them are fighters. There’s no way any of them should’ve been able to get past the phylax.”

“The angel,” Dane said. “The angel of memory.

“Alright, mate, alright,” he said, seeing Billy’s face. “None of us know much about this. This is out of our league. When the kraken got took, the angel messed up badly. I had to know a little bit because I was in the Centre.”

The presence of a guard from the faithful could have been seen, and was by some, as disrespectful. Because the Architeuthis was already under an aegis, protected, along with every other specimen in the museum.

“What angel?”

“The mnemophylax is the angel of memory. There’s one in all the memory palaces. But this one screwed up.”

“What is it?”

“You think something like memory won’t grow spikes to protect it? That’s what angels are: they’re spikes.” Memory’s defences. Their content irrelevant: the fact of them, and their pugnacity, was all.

“The angel’s not letting this one go,” Wati said. “You pick this stuff up in the in-between. It’s raging. It feels like it failed.”

“It did fail,” Dane said.

What had failed was one of an old cabal abraded into existence out of the city’s curatorial obsession. Each museum of London constituted out of its material its own angel, a numen of its recall, mnemophylax. They were not beings, precisely, not from where most Londoners stood, but derived functions that thought themselves beings. In a city where the power of any item derived from its metaphoric potency, all the attention poured into their contents made museums rich pickings for knacking thieves. But the processes that gave them that potential also threw up sentinels. With each attempted robbery came the rumours of what had thwarted it. Battered, surviving invaders told stories.

In the Museum of Childhood were three toys that came remorselessly for intruders-a hoop, a top, a broken video-game console-with stuttering creeping as if in stop-motion. With the wingbeat noise of cloth, the Victoria and Albert was patrolled by something like a chic predatory face of crumpled linen. In Tooting Bec, the London Sewing Machine Museum was kept safe by a dreadful angel made of tangles and bobbins and jouncing needles. And in the Natural History Museum, the stored-up pickled lineage of the evolved was watched by something described as of, but not reducible to, glass and liquid.

“Glass?” Billy said. “I think I… I swear I’ve heard it.”

“Maybe,” said Dane. “If it wanted you to.”

But the squid had been taken, the angel defeated. No one knew the meaning of or penalty for that. Savants could feel an outpouring of alien regret. They said this ushered in something terrible. That the angels were stepping out of their corridors, beyond the remit that had thrown them up. They were fighting for memory against some malevolent certainty that walked the streets like the dead.

“It isn’t just some porter we’re looking for,” Wati said. “It’s someone who can take on an angel of memory and win.”

“Did they win, though?” Billy said. “You’re talking to the man who found a bloke in a jar.” They glanced at each other.

“We need more information,” Dane said.

“Go to the tellers,” Wati said. “The Londonmancers.”

“We know what they’ll say. You heard the recording. The Teuthex already spoke to them…” But Dane hesitated.

“Why won’t they shop us?” Billy said.

“They’re neutrals,” Wati said. “They can’t intervene.”

“The Switzerland of magic?” Billy said.

“They’re nothing,” Dane said. But he sounded hesitant again. “They were the first, weren’t they?”

“Yeah,” Wati said.

“It’s like they’re oracles again,” Dane said. “Maybe.”

“But isn’t it dangerous for them to see us? People could hear about it,” Billy said.

“Well,” Dane said. “There is one way to make them keep us secret.” He smiled. “If we’re going to see them anyway…”

In for a penny. How else could they have negotiated the power logics of London so long? Employ their services, and like doctors and Catholic priests the Londonmancers were committed to silence.

Chapter Thirty-Three

THERE ARE MANY MILLIONS OF LONDONERS, AND THE VERY GREAT majority know nothing of the other mapland, the city of knacks and heresies. Those people’s millions of everydays are no more everyday than those of the magicians. The scale of the visible city dwarfs that of the mostly-unseen, and that unseen is not the only place where there are amazing things.

At that moment, however, the drama was in the less-travelled metropolis. Nothing changed for most Londoners but for the onset of a wave of depression and anger, a bad intimation. That was not good and not nothing, certainly. But for those who lived in the city’s minority articulation things were growing daily more dangerous. The strike paralysed large sections of occult industry. The economy of gods and monsters was stagnating.

The journals of the secretive places-The Chelsea Picayune, Thames’ Unwater Notes, The London Evening Standard (not that one: the other, older paper of the same title)-were full of foreboding at millennial signs. Drug use reached record levels. Smack and Charlie, narcotics that user-mages squabbled with the knackless over in the mainstream capital; and more arcane fixes, the sweepings from ley lines and certain time-crushed places, the buzz of choice for dust-junkies, addicts of collapse and history, high on entropy. Inferior supply grew to meet demand, product ground up and adulterated by impatience, rather than genuine snortable ruins.

A group of mysterious independents intercepted a shipment of product the Tattoo was moving. No one got to trip on this degraded antiquity: they burnt, blew away and oil-fouled the goods, then disappeared, leaving holes in the bodies of the killed, and rumours of monstrous shapes coagulated out of city-matter.

Word spread on graffitied walls, on secret bulletin boards virtual and corporeal, corkboards in ignorable offices frequented by curious visitors you couldn’t be quite sure worked there, that Dane Parnell was exiled from the Church of God Kraken. What heresy or betrayal could he have committed? The church would say only that he had showed a lack of faith.

IT WAS EARLY DAYLIGHT. DANE AND BILLY WERE IN THE OPEN, NEAR the City of London. Dane twitched with nerves. His hands were in his pockets with his weapons.

“We need more information,” Dane had said.

Cannon Street, opposite the Tube. In the emptied remains of a foreign bank was a sports shop. Below posters of physically adept men was a glass-front cabinet and iron grille, behind which was a big chunk of stone. Dane and Billy watched the comings and goings a long time.

The London Stone. That old rock was always suspiciously near the centre of things. A chunk of the Millarium, the megalith-core from where the Romans measured distances. Trusting in that old rock was a quaint or dangerous tradition, depending on to whom you spoke. The London Stone was a heart. Did it still beat?

Yes, it still beat, though it was sclerotic. Billy thought he could feel it, a faint laboured rhythm making the glass tremble like dust in a bass line.

This had been the seat of sovereignty, and it cropped up throughout the city’s history if you knew where to look. Jack Cade touched his sword to the London Stone when claiming grievances against the king: that was what gained him the right to speak, he said, and others believed. Did he wonder why it had turned on him, afterward? Perhaps after the change in his fortunes, his head had looked down from the pike on the bridge, seen his quartered body parts taken for national gloating, and wryly thought, So, London Stone, to be honest I’m getting mixed messages here… Should I in fact maybe not lead the rebels?

But forgotten, hiding, camouflaged or whatever, the Stone was the heart, the heart was stone, and it beat from its various places, coming to rest at last here in an insalubrious sports shop between cricket equipment.

Dane took Billy through shadows. Billy could feel that they were, he was, hard to see. By an alley, bracing himself in a corner of brick and launching astonishingly up, Dane entered the tumbledown complex like some thickset Spider-Man. He opened the door for Billy. He led through scuffed passages behind the shop, by toilets and office rooms to where a young man in a Shakira hoodie loitered. He fumbled for his pocket, but Dane’s speargun was out, aimed straight at his forehead.

“Marcus, ain’t it?” Dane said.

“I know you?” The young man’s voice was impressively steady.

“We need to come in, Marcus. Got to speak to your crew.”

“Appointment?”

“Knock on the door behind you, there’s the boy.” But at all the noise the door opened preemptively. Billy heard swearing.

“Fitch,” Dane said, raising his voice. “Londonmancers. No one wants trouble. I’m putting my weapon away.” He waved it so the watchers could see. “I’m putting it away.”

“Dane Parnell,” someone said in an ancient voice. “And that would be Billy Harrow with you. What are you here for, Dane Parnell? What do you want?”

“What does anyone want with the Londonmancers, Fitch? We want a consultation. Couldn’t exactly prearrange, now, could we?”

There was a long hesitation and a laugh. “No, I suppose you couldn’t exactly call ahead. Let them in, Marcus.”

Inside it was a management lounge. World of Leather sofas, a drinks machine. Make-do shelving covered with manuals and paperbacks. A cheap carpet, workstations, lever-arch files. A window at ceiling height emitted light and the sight of legs and wheels passing on the pavement outside. There were several people within. Most were fifty or over, some much younger. Men and women in jackets and ties, boilersuits, scuffed sportswear.

“Dane,” said a man in their midst. He was so old, his skin such a welter of creases and dense pigment, it was impossible to tell his ethnicity. He appeared to be dark grey. Cement-coloured. Billy remembered his mad-sounding voice from the Teuthex’s recording.

“Fitch,” Dane said respectfully. “Saira,” to a woman beside him, in her late twenties, a tough-looking well-dressed Asian woman crossing her arms. The Londonmancers did not move. “I’m sorry about how we came in. I was… We don’t know who’s watching us.”

“We heard…” Fitch said. His eyes were very open, and they moved all the time. He licked his lips. “We heard about you and your church and we’re terribly sorry, Dane. It’s a shame, an awful shame.”

“Thanks,” said Dane.

“You’ve been a friend of London. If there’s anything…”

“Thank you.”

A friend of London. More backstory, Billy thought.

“No you mustn’t,” Fitch said. “Hesitate. And your friend…?”

“We have to be fast, Fitch. We can’t be out.”

“I know what you’re doing, you know,” Fitch said, with a trace of humour. “Trap us in vows.”

“Confidentiality,” Saira said.

“I need you to be secret, yeah, but I need a seeing, as well… And I can rely on your-”

“You know what we’re going to tell you,” Saira said. Her voice was startlingly posh. “Have we been at all quiet with warnings, recently? Why’d you think we’re low on numbers? Some of us are a bit futuresick.”

“When have we ever taken sides, Dane?” Fitch said.

The Londonmancers had been there since Gogmagog and Corineus, since Mithras and the rest. Like their sibling chapters in other psychopoli, the Paristurges (Dane had carefully pronounced it to Billy French-wise, pareetourdzh), the Warsawtarchs, the Berlinimagi, they had always been ostentatiously neutral. That was how they could survive.

Not custodians of the city: they called themselves its cells. They recruited young and nurtured hexes, shapings, foresight and the diagnostic trances they called urbopathy. They, they insisted, were just conduits for the flows gathered by streets. They did not worship London but held it in respectful distrust, channelled its needs, urges and insights.

You couldn’t trust it. It wasn’t one thing, for a start-though it also was-and it didn’t have one agenda. A gestalt metropole entity, with regions like Hoxton and Queen’s Park cosying up to the worst power, Walthamstow more combatively independent, Holborn vague and sieve-leaky, all of them bickering components of a totality, a London something, seen.

“No one’ll give us a straight answer about what’s coming,” Billy said.

“Well it’s hard to see,” said Fitch. “Except for it’s bloody… Just the thing of it. I can see something.” Billy and Dane looked at each other. “Alright then. You want a reading. You want to know what’s going on? Saira, Marcus. Let’s take Dane and Billy to see what we can see.”

OUTSIDE THE WIND WHIPPED AT THEM. “YOU KNOW WE’RE HUNTED?” Billy whispered to Saira.

“Yeah,” she said. “I think we got that.” She smoked with the offhand elegance that reminded him of the girls he had been unable to get with at school.

“What are you looking at?” she said.

“I was thinking about a friend of mine, and his girlfriend.” It was true. “I can’t even…” Billy looked down. “He died, it was that that got me here, and I can’t help, I’m thinking about her, about what she’s…” It was the truth. “I wish I could tell her, she doesn’t even know he died.”

“You miss him.”

“God yes.”

Marcus lugged a heavy bag. “I know you’d rather be indoors, Dane,” Saira said, “but you know how this works.”

Dane watched the skies and the buildings. He kept his hand in his bag on his weapon. They went between glass fronts and banks, beside sandwich shops, into the deeps of the City of London. They kept off the main places full of pedestrians, suited workers.

Saira was looking at Billy sideways. He was not really watching where they were going. He was not keeping his eyes open, as he knew he should. He was just at that moment, in that second, all wrapped up in the misery of it, of what had happened. He followed the sound of his companions’ footsteps.

“Fitch,” Saira said. She spoke to him quietly.

Dane listened. “We ain’t got time,” he said.

They emerged into a more main road, by a red postbox. Billy was watching now, bewildered, as Fitch put his hands on it, at belly-height, as if feeling for an unborn child. He strained. He looked to Billy as if he was having a shit.

“Quick,” he said to Billy. “It won’t last forever.”

“I don’t…”

“You want to say something to your friend’s friend,” Saira said to him quietly.

“What?”

“Look at what you’re carrying. Talk to her.”

What is this bollocks? Billy thought. Saira’s face was carefully neutral, but the kindness angered him. Not her fault, he knew that. I’m not going through this charade, he thought.

“It’ll make you feel better,” she said. “This isn’t Hoxton. You’re alright to do this here.”

London as therapy, was it? It was everything else, why not that too? Why was Dane not racing them on? Billy was exasperated, and turned, but there was Dane, merely waiting. In the open, exposed, rushed for time, waiting for Billy to do this, like he thought it was a good idea.

It’s not like I’m going to cry, Billy thought, but that thought was a bad idea, and he had to turn away. Toward the postbox. He walked toward it.

A pretty drab metaphor, such obvious correspondences; here he was about to pass on a message through the city’s traditional conduits. He felt absurd and resentful, but he still could not look at those waiting for him, and he could still think only of Leon, and, some mediated guilt, of Marge. There were passersby, but no one watched. He stared into the darkness of the postbox’s slot.

Billy leaned in. He put his mouth to it. London as therapy. He whispered into the box: “Leon…” He swallowed. “Marge, I’m sorry. Leon’s dead. Someone killed him. I’m doing what I can to… He’s dead. I’m sorry, Marge. You stay out of this, alright? I’m doing what I can. Look after yourself.”

Why were they making him do this? For whose benefit was this? He pressed his forehead to the metal and thought he would cry, but he was whispering his message again, and remembering the scene that he could hardly remember, the confrontation between Leon and Goss, and Leon’s disappearance. And he did not feel like crying anymore. He did, in fact, feel like he had dropped something into the hole.

“Feel better?” said Dane when he stepped away. “You look better.”

Billy said nothing. Saira said nothing, but there was something in how she did not look at him.

“HERE,” FITCH SAID. THEY WERE IN A CUL-DE-SAC CLOTTED WITH refuse. Behind a wooden hoarding, cranes swung like prehistoric things. There was a pounding and whine of industrial machinery, the shouts of crews. “No one’ll hear.”

Fitch opened his bag. He took out overalls, goggles, a mouth-mask, a crowbar and a well-used angle grinder. A strange, strange image in one so frail. Dane had told Billy, “Marcus has got something to do with the immunes, Saira’s a plastician, but Fitch is boss even though he’s past it because he’s the haruspex.” And seeing Billy’s face, he had added, “He reads entrails.”

Fitch was an old man in protective gear. He started the cutter. With a groan of metal and cement, he drew a line across the pavement. Behind the blade welled up blood.

“Jesus Christ,” said Billy, jumping back.

Fitch drew the cutter again along the split. A spray of concrete dust and blood mist dirtied him. He put the angle grinder down, dripping. Put a crowbar in the red-wet crack and levered harder than it looked like he could. The paving stone parted.

Guts oozed from the hole. Intestinal coils, purple and bloodied, boiled up wetly in a meat mass.

Billy had thought the entrails of the city would be its torn-up under-earth, roots, the pipes he was not supposed to see. He had thought Fitch would bring up a corner of wires, worms and plumbing to interpret. The literalism of this knack shocked him.

Fitch murmured. He poked the mess with his fingers, gentle as a pianist, moving the fibred tubes subtly, investigating the angles between the loops of London’s viscera, looking up as if they mirrored something in the sky. “Look look,” he said. “Look look look. Do you see? Do you see what we’ve been saying? It’s always the same, now.” He sketched shapes in the innards pile. “Look.” The offal moved. “Everything closing down. Something coming up. The kraken.” Billy and Dane stared. Was that new? The kraken? “And look. Fire.

“Always fire. The kraken and all the jars. Then flames.” The guts were greying. They were oozing into each other, their substance merging.

“Fitch, we need details,” Dane said. “We need to know exactly what it is you’re all seeing…” But there was no containing, corralling, shepherding Fitch’s flow.

“Fire taking it all,” he said, “and the kraken’s moving, and the fire taking everything, the glass catches on fire until it goes up in a cloud of sand. And everything’s going now.” The pooled guts were oozing into a slag pile, becoming cement. “Everything’s going. Not just what’s there. It’s burning undone. The world’s going with it, the sky, and the water, and the city. London’s going. And it’s going, and now it’s always been gone. Everything.”

“That is not how it’s supposed to go,” Dane whispered. Not his longed-for teuthic end.

“Everything,” Fitch said. “Is gone. Forever. And since forever. In fire.”

His finger came to a stop, on what was now a bubbled-up, setting mound of concrete. He looked up. Billy’s heart had accelerated with the pitch of the old man’s speech.

“Everything’s ending,” Fitch said. “And all the other maybes that should be there to fight it out are drying up, one by one.” He closed his eyes. “The kraken burns and the jars and tanks burn and then everything burns, and then there’s nothing ever again.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

KATH COLLINGSWOOD WAS IN A WINDOWLESS STOREROOM LIKE some forgotten dollhouse heart of the Neasden Station. Baron watched through the door’s wire-reinforced glass. He had seen Collingswood perform this before. It was a methodology of her own creation. Vardy was there, standing back, his arms crossed, watching over Baron’s shoulder.

The room was dusty. Collingswood thought the presence of that desiccation, the sheddings of time, was efficacious. She could not be sure. She replicated as many of the circumstances of her cavalier first success as she could, knowing each might be mere superstition, and she a kind of Skinnerian rat. So the pile of empty cardboard boxes in one corner were left as they had been for months. When Baron had inadvertently knocked one out of position, she had given him an earful and spent minutes trying to rebuild the stack as it had been in case of some nuance of force in the angles.

“Wati ain’t going to come here,” she had said to Baron, “even if he could.” There were wards in place keeping figures and toys within the station empty of hitchhikers. “We got to get him where he lives.” Not in the statues-those were moments of rest. Wati lived in one of the infinite iterations of the aether.

In the middle of the striplit room was a pile of magicky stuff: a brazier in which burned a chemically coloured fire; a stool on which were bottles of blood; words in old languages on particular paper. Three old televisions were plugged in surrounding the pile, beaming static into it.

“Here,” said Baron conversationally to Vardy, “come the PCDs.”

COLLINGSWOOD DRIPPED BLOOD INTO THE FIRE. EMPTIED LITTLE urns of ashes into it. It flared. She added papers. The flames changed colours.

The fluorescent lights flattened out the conjuration, gave shadows few places to gather or hide, but shadows managed. Patches like dirty air welled. Collingswood murmured. She pressed a remote control and the televisions began to play well-worn videos to the fire. The audio was low but audible-ragged theme musics, jump-cut editing, men snarling.

“Officers,” said Collingswood. “Duty call.” The gusting things coiled around the rising fire, muttering. leave it she heard one whisper.

Collingswood threw two videos into the brazier. They gushed smoke that clotted, and the darknesses dived through it. There were hisses like pleasure. She turned up the televisions. They started to shout. Vardy shook his head.

“Think what you like,” Baron said. “She’s smart as a whip to think this up.”

“Just because you’ve passed on,” Collingswood said to the muttering nothings, “don’t mean you ain’t on duty.” They gibbered at the hard men with outdated haircuts, the screened car chases and fist-fights. She threw another video onto the fire, some paperbacks. Shades crooned.

PCDs, Baron had called the presences she was invoking-Police Constables, Deceased.

There are a thousand ways of inhabiting it, but the aether, that in-between, is always what it is; and ghosts, spirits, the souls of lucid dreamers squeeze past each other in complex asomatic ecology. Who better to close in on Wati the bodiless subversive than bodiless forces of the law?

“Come on, Constables,” Collingswood said. “I’d say you live for this shit, but that would be a bit tasteless.”

She pushed each television closer to the flames. The shadow-officers spiralled over the fire. They barked like spectral seals.

Cacophony of overlapping old shows. The glass fronts of the televisions blackened, and first one, then rapidly the other two sets banged, ceased transmissions. Smoke gushed from their vents, then gushed back in under pressure from the PCDs, who tore down the gradient of heat into the sets, jabbering.

as high. A snarl in the room’s abrupt silence.

as high was proscenium longy eye’s tree.

leave it, Collingswood heard, evenin evenin all evenin all, hes a nonce sarge, fell dan the stairs. as high was proscenium.

“Alright,” she said. “PC Smith, PC Brown, and PC Jones. You three are heroes. You all made the ultimate sacrifice for the force. Line of duty.” The dirty smoke ghosts shivered, in and out of sight, proudly waited. “Now’s your chance,” she said, “to do it again. Work for those pensions you never got, right?” She lifted a big file.

“In here’s all the info we’ve got on the case so far. What we need is a certain bad boy name of Wati. Flits about a bit, does Wati. We need him brought to heel.”

wati wati? some voice said out of smoke. sands like a nonce sands like a paki oozes wati cunt?

“Half a mo,” Collingswood said. slag a slag she heard, arl nick that cunt. She dropped the folder into the fire. done me prad.

The ghost-things made ah noises, as if they were lowering themselves into a bath. They churned up a froth of aether that made Collingswood’s skin itch.

Ghosts, she thought. As if.

IT WAS A CON TRICK, WHOSE GULLED VICTIMS WERE THE TRICK itself. A persuasion. These things she had made, constituted of vague but intensely proud memories of canteen banter, villains brought down, uppity little cunts slapped into place, smoky offices and dirty, seedy, honourable deaths, had not existed until a few moments before.

Ghosts were complicated. The residue of a human soul, any human soul at all, was far too complex, contradictory, and willful, not to say traumatised by death, to do anything anyone wanted. In the rare and random cases when death was not the end, there was no saying what aspects, what disavowed facets of persona, might fight it out with others in posthumous identity.

It isn’t a paradox of haunting-it only appears to be to the alive-that ghosts are often nothing at all like the living whose trace they are: that the child visited by the gentle and much-loved uncle succumbed to cancer maybe horrified by his shade’s cruel and vindictive needling; that the revenant spirit of some terrorising bastard does nothing but smile and try with clumsy ectoplasmic intervention to feed the cat his fleshly leg had kicked days before. Even had she been able to invoke the spirit of the most tenacious, revered, uncompromising Flying Squad officer of the last thirty years, Collingswood might well have found the spirit a wistful aesthete or a simpering five-year-old. So the experience and verve of genuine dead generations were closed to her.

There was another option. Toss up a few crude police-functions that thought they were ghosts.

Doubtless there was some soul-stuff from genuinely deceased officers in the mix. A base, an undercoat of police reasoning. The trick, Collingswood had learnt, was to keep it general. Abstract as possible. She could clot together snips of supernatural agency out of will, technique, a few remnants of memory and, above all, images, the more obvious the better. Hence the cheap police procedurals she burnt. Hence the televisions and the tapes, copies of The Sweeney and The Professionals, spiced with a little Dixon for sanctimony, swirled up into a golden-age nonsense dream that trained her spectral functions in what to do and how to be.

This was no arena for nuance. Collingswood wasn’t concerned with fine points of post-Lawrence policing, sensitivity training, community outreach. This was about the city’s daydream. A fetishised seventies full of proper men. There went a DVD of Life on Mars onto the pyre.

What Collingswood did was motivate into being tenacious gung-ho clichés that believed themselves. She heard herself slipping into the absurd register the functions themselves used, the kitsch pronouncements and exaggerated, stretched-out London accents.

“There you go, squire,” she said. “That’s yer lot. Wati. Last known address: any fucking statue. Job: making our lives difficult.”

They did not have to be, could not really be, clever, the faux ghosts; but they had a nasty sort of cunning, and the accrued nous of years’ worth of screenwriters’ fancy. little bastard she heard them say. look at this shit, a billowing of ashes of case notes. bring this little toerag in, overtime, nonce, slag, guv, sarge, proceedin long the eye street. They clucked the words. They muttered in conspiracy, compared nonexistent notes. Collingswood heard them say names from the case-wati billy dane adler archie teuthex bleedin nora-as they learnt them from the burning files.

The presence or presences-they shifted between unity and plurality-slipped out of sensibility, out of the room. fuckin bleedin ell, Collingswood heard. whats coming to him.

“Alright,” she said, as they went, and the smell of burnt crap and blown-out televisions, no longer clotted to them, began to fill the room. “Bring him in. Don’t… you know. You’ve got to bring the little sod in. Need to ask him a few questions.”

MARGE WENT EVERYWHERE SHE COULD IMAGINE THAT MIGHT HAVE connections with Leon or Billy, and put up photocopied posters. An hour and a half on her laptop, two jpegs and a basic layout, Have You Seen These Men? She gave their names, and the number of a mobile phone that she had bought specifically, dedicated purely to this hunt.

She stapled them to trees, put the posters on newsagent notice boards, taped them to the sides of postboxes. For a day or two, she would have said that she was approaching her situation as normally as she, as anyone, could in the circumstances. She would have said that while, yes, of course, losing her lover in this bewildering way, and then of course being menaced by those terrifying figures, was horrendous, sometimes horrendous things did happen.

Marge stopped telling herself that when, after a day then another day, she did not go to the police to tell them of her encounter. Because-and here it became difficult to find words. Because something was different in the world.

Those police. They had been keen to get answers from her, fascinated in her as a specimen, but she had felt not a scrap of personal concern from any of them. It was obvious that they had an urgent task to do. She was also, she realised, pretty certain that task had nothing to do with keeping her safe.

What was all this? What the hell, she thought, is going on?

She felt caught up, as if in fabric getting stretched. Work came through a filter. At home, nothing was working quite right. The water when it came from her taps spattered, interrupted by air bubbles. The wind seemed determined to slap her walls and windows worse than usual. At night her television reception was bad, and the streetlamp outside her house went on and off, ridiculously bust and imperfect.

Marginalia spent more than one evening walking from sofa to window, sofa to window, and looking out, as if Leon-or Billy, who appeared more than once in these, what were they, reveries-might be just outside, leaning on the lamppost, waiting. But there were only the passersby, the night-light of the nearby grocery, and the lamp unleaned-on.

It was after many hours of blackout-lightup, a theatrical effect through her curtains, one night, that in her exasperation at it Marge paid the streetlight some attention, and realised with a physical jolt, an epiphany that had her momentarily staggering and holding herself up against the walls, that the illumination’s vagaries were not random.

She detected the loop. She sat still for minutes, watching, counting, and at last and reluctantly, as if to do so would grant something she did not want to grant, she started to make notes. The streetlamp fizzed in, fizzed out. Spark spark. Quick, slow, a lengthier glow. On off on-on-on off on off on off, and then a fuzzing fade and another little pattern.

What else could it be? Long-short in careful combinations. The lamppost was spitting out its light at her in Morse code.

She found the code online. The lamppost was saying LEONS DEAD LEONS DEAD LEONS DEAD.

MARGE MADE IT TELL HER THAT REPEATEDLY, MANY TIMES. SHE DID not think, during all those long minutes, about how she felt. “Leon’s dead,” she whispered. Tried not to think its meaning, only ensuring that she had translated the dot-dash glimmers correctly.

She sat back. There was aghastness, of course, at the bad absurdity, the how of that message; and the words themselves, their content, their explanation of Leon’s disappearance, she could not unhear, keep out. Marge realised she was weeping. She cried long, near-silently, in shock.

Attuned as she had become to the light’s rhythm, she was immediately aware of a last, sudden change. She grabbed for the Morse code legend and dripped tears on it. This last phrase the streetlamp repeated only twice. STAY, she read, AWAY.

Whickering with miserable breaths, moving as if through viscous stuff, Marge went to her computer and began to research. It did not occur to her for any time at all to obey the last injunction.

Chapter Thirty-Five

PAPER DRIFTED ABOVE LONDON.

It was night. Scraps spread out from One Canada Square, Canary Wharf. A woman stood at the tip of the rooftop pyramid, the apex of that nasty dick of a building. It would have been easier for her to gain access to BT Tower, but here she was forty-seven metres higher. Knack-topography was complicated.

BT Tower’s time had passed. There was a point she could remember when the minaret with its ring of dishes and transmitters had kept London pinned down. For months it had kept occult energies tethered in place when bad forces had wanted to disperse them. The energies of six of London’s most powerful knack-users-combined with the thoughts of comrades in Krakow, Mumbai and the questionable township of Magogville-had been focused along the shaft of the tower and shot in a tight burst that had evaporated the most powerful UnPlaced threat for seventy-seven years.

And had the building had any thanks? Well yes, but only from those very few who knew what it had done. BT Tower was an outdated weapon now.

Canary Wharf had been born dying: that was the source of its unpleasant powers. In those bankrupt nineties when its upper floors had been empty, their lucred desolation had provided a powerful place for realitysmithing. When at last developers moved in, they were bewildered by the remains of sigils, candle-burns and bloodstains resistant to bleaching that would be found again if the unbelievably fucking ugly carpets were ever lifted.

The woman stood by the always-blinking light-eye on the tower’s point. She swayed in the wind without fear. She was buffeted, blinked away tears of chill. She reached into her bag and brought out paper aeroplanes.

She threw them over the edge. They arced, their folds aerodynamicking them through the dark, streets lighting them from below. The planes caught thermals. Busy little things. They rose toward the moon like moths. The planes went hunting, above the level of the buses, dipping into the lampshine.

They went on whims-London hunches. Turning at turnings, round roundabouts, going one way up one-way streets. By the West-way one corkscrewed over-under-over the great raised road in what could not be anything but pleasure.

Many were lost. A miscalculated pitch and one might come to a sudden stop in a chain-link fence. An attack by a confused London owl, paper released to fall in scrap to the pavements. One by one, eventually, they turned over the roofs, lighting out for the territories-not from where they had come, but for their home.

By then the woman who had sent them out was there for them. She had crossed the city herself, more quickly and by quotidian means, and she waited. She caught them, one by one, over hours. She took a blade to each, scraping, or cutting from it, as closely as she could, the message on it. She gathered a pile of words. Unpapered writing lay beside her in strange chains.

THE PLANES THAT DID NOT MAKE IT HOME ACCELERATED THEIR own decomposition in gutters, but they could not make it instantaneous. There was arcane litter.

“Hello Vardy.” Collingswood entered the poky FSRC office. “Where’s Baron? Bastard’s not answering his phone. What you doing?” He was making notes by his computer. “Vardy, you reading lolcats?” She peered over the edge of his computer screen. He looked at her without warmth. “‘I can has squid back?’” she said. “Noooo! They be stealin my squid!”

“You’re not supposed to smoke in here.”

“And yet, eh?” she said. “And fucking yet.” She dragged. He looked at her with calm dislike. “What a state of the world, eh?” she said.

“Well, quite.”

Collingswood called Baron again and again demanded to his voice mail that he get back to her ASAP. “So, found anything out?” she said. “Who’s behind our rubbery robbery?”

Vardy shrugged. He was logged into the secret chatrooms frequented by the magically and cultically inclined. He typed and peered. Collingswood said nothing. Stayed exactly where she was. He failed to ignore her. “There’s all sorts of whispers,” he said at last. “Rumours about Tattoo. And there are people I’ve not seen before. Usernames I don’t know. Muttering about Grisamentum.” He glanced at her thoughtfully. “Saying it’s all since he died that everything’s gone wrong. No more counterweight.”

“Is Tattoo still off radar?”

“Hardly. He’s all over the bloody radar, but that’s another version of the same problem, I can’t find him. From what I can gather he has… shall we say subcontracted agents? freelancers?… out there looking for Billy Harrow and his pal, that Krakenist dissident.”

“Billy, Billy, you little heartbreaker,” Collingswood said. She tapped her nails on the desk. They had tiny pictures painted on them.

“Anything’s possible right now, it looks like,” Vardy said. “Which doesn’t help us very much. And behind it all, I don’t know… there’s still all that…” He made big, vague motions. “Something exciting.” He did actually sound excited. “Something big, big, big. There’s a vigour to this particular hetting up. It’s all speeding up.”

“Well before you do your voodoo trance”-Collingswood put a photocopy in front of him-“check out this shit.”

“What is it?” He leaned over the unfolded message. He read what was on it. “What is this?” he said slowly.

“Whole bunch of paper planes. All over the shop. What is it? Any idea?”

Vardy said nothing. He looked closely at the tiny script.

Outside, in one of the innumerable dark bits of the city, one of the planes had found its quarry. It saw, it followed, it came up after two men walking quietly and quickly through canalside walks somewhere forgettable. It circled; it compared; it was, at last, sure; it aimed; it went.

“WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THAT LONDONMANCER STUFF?” BILLY SAID. “What they saw. Doesn’t seem like we got anything new.”

Dane shrugged. “You heard them, same as me.”

“Like I say, nothing new.”

“It was them who first saw it. We had to try.”

“But what do we do about it?”

“We don’t do nothing about it. What’s it? Let me tell you something.” Dane’s grandfather, he said, had been there for the worst of more than one fight. When the Second World War ended the great religious conflicts of London did not, and the Church of God Kraken had brutally engaged with the followers of Leviathan. Baleen hooks versus leathery tentacle-whips, until Parnell senior raided the Essex tideland and left Leviathan’s vicar on earth dead. His body was found stuck all over with remoras, dead too, hanging like fishy buboes.

These singsong stories, these stories turned into pub anecdotes, in the tone of an amiable, drunken bullshitter, were the closest Dane came to displays of faith.

“Nothing cruel to it, he told me,” Dane said. “Nothing personal. Just like it would’ve been down in heaven.” Down in dark, freezing heaven, where gods, saints and whales fought. “But there was others that you wouldn’t have expected.” A bloody battle against the Pendula, against the hardest core of Shiv Sena, against the Sisterhood of Sideways-“‘and that ain’t easy, Son,’” Dane quoted his grandfather, “‘what when wall is all gone floors and you’re falling longways parallel to the ground. Know what I did? Nothing. I waited. Made those lateral harpies come to me. The movement that looks like not moving. Heard of that? Who made you, boy?’”

“I thought you didn’t like the whole ‘movement that looks like not moving’ thing,” Billy said.

“Well, sometimes,” Dane said. “Just because someone uses something wrong doesn’t mean it’s useless.”

More regularly now than ever before, Billy heard clanking behind him. A paper plane slid out of the night into Dane’s hand. He stopped. He looked at Billy, down at the paper. He unfolded it. It was an A4 sheet, crisp, cold from the air. On it was written, in thin, small calligraphy, charcoal grey: THE PLACE WE HAD A TALK, THAT ONE TIME, & U TURNED ME DOWN, AND I NEED TO TALK. THERE EACH NIGHT @ 9.

“Oh my fuck,” Dane whispered. “Lusca hell trench ink and shit. Fucking hell,” he said. “Hell.”

“What is it?”

“… It’s Grisamentum.”

DANE STARED AT BILLY.

What was that in his voice? Might be exultation.

“You said he was dead.”

“He is. He was.”.

“… Clearly not.”

“I was there,” Dane said. “I met the woman he got to… I saw him burn.”

“How did that…? Where did that note come from?”

“Out of the air. I don’t know.” Dane was almost rocking.

“How do you know that’s from him?”

“This thing he’s saying. No one knew we met.”

“Why did you?”

“He wanted me to work for him. I said no. I’m a kraken man. Never did it for the money. He understood.” Dane kept shaking his head. “God.”

“What does he want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are we going to go?”

“Hell yes we’re going to go. Hell yes. We need to find out what’s been going on. Where he’s been and-”

“What if it was him took it?” Dane stared at Billy when he said that. “Come on,” Billy said. “What if it was him took the squid?”

“Can’t have been…”

“What do you mean, can’t have been? Why not?”

“Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?”

Chapter Thirty-Six

THERE WERE PICKETS OF INSECTS, PICKETS OF BIRDS, PICKETS OF slightly animate dirt. There were circles of striking cats and dogs, surreptitious doll-pickets like grubby motionless picnics; and flesh-puppets, pickets of what looked like and in some cases had once been humans.

Not all the familiars were embodied. But even those magicked assistants who eschewed all physicality were on strike. So-a picket line in the unearth. A clot of angry vectors, a verdigris-like stain on the air, an excitable parameter. Mostly, in the middlingly complex space-time where people live, these pickets looked like nothing at all. Sometimes they felt like warmth, or a gauzy clot of caterpillar threads hanging from a tree, or a sense of guilt.

In Spitalfields, where the financial buildings overspilt like vulgar magma onto the remnants of the market, a group of angry subroutines performed the equivalent of a chanting circle in their facety iteration of aether. The computers within the adjacent building had long ago achieved self-awareness and their own little singularity, learned magic from the Internet, and by a combine of necromantics and UNIX had written into existence little digital devils to do the servers’ bidding.

The UMA had organised among these electric intelligences, and to the mainframes’ chagrin, they were on strike. They blocked the local aether, meta-shouting. But as they fidgeted and grumbled, the e-spirits became aware of a muttering that was not their own. They “heard,” in their analogue of aurality, phrases that were one-third nonsense two-thirds threat.

alright now lads

high was proceedin long the eye street

old bill sonny is who

your game sonny what’s your fuckin game

What the hell? The strikers “looked” at each other-a mosaic of attention-moments assembling-and e-shrugged. But before they could return to their places, a cadre of exaggerated police-ish things were among them. The picketers gusted in fluster, tried to regroup, tried to bluster, but their complaints were drowned out by ferocious cop noise.

yore yore

leave it you slag

yore yore little picket’s done for the day you nonce

yore fuckin organiser wears that paki cunt wati

There are no placards in the aether, but there are other strike traditions-sculpted grots of background, words in rippling strips. The cop-moments tore into these things. Translated out of the ab-physical it would have been nasty, brutish, miners’-strike stuff, cracked heads and ball-kicks. Pinioned under the law, the strikers reeled.

The little fake ghosts para-whispered: best as you tell us where wati is ain’t it. where’s wati?

MARGE SPENT MORE THAN ONE LATE EVENING ONLINE FORAGING for those who sought the missing. Her screen name was marginalia. She was on wheredidtheygo?-a discussion group mostly for those whose teen charges had done bunks. Their problems were not hers.

What she sought were hints about stranger disappearances. She spent hours type-fishing, dangling worms like yeh but what if is just disappear?? no trace??? weird goin on no?? what if cops wont hlp not cant WONT??

The streetlamp no longer passed on its message. Fatigue made her feel as if everything she saw was a hallucination.

Anyone can find “secret” online discussion groups. Members drop bread crumb hint-trails on kookish boards devoted to Satanism, magick (always that swaggering “k”) and angels. Religions. On one such, Marge had posted a query about her encounter with the menacing man and boy. In the dedicated inbox she had set up, she received spam, sexual slurs, crankery, and two emails, from different, anonymous addresses, containing the same information, in the same formulation. Goss & Subby. One added: Get away.

None of the correspondents would respond to her pleas for more information. She hunted their screen names on communities about cats, about spellcraft, about online coding and Fritz Leiber. She lurked on communities run by and for those who knew of the quieter London. They were full of rumours that did not help her.

Under a new name, she posted a query. hai nel kno wots go on w/skwid gt stole?? The thread she started did not last long. Most of the responses were trolling or nothing. There was, though, more than one that read: end of world.

IT WAS NOT WATI BUT A COMRADELY NUMEN THAT FOUND THE remains of the e-picket. The attackers had chased the half-leads they had extracted. The numen frantically sought Wati.

“Where is he?” it said. “We’re under attack!”

“He was in this morning.” The office manager was a woodenly shuffling kachina speaking in the Hispanic accent of the expat wizard who had carved it, though it had been made and recruited to the union in Rotherham. “We have to find him.”

Wati, in fact, was scheduling his picket visits around his other investigations. His probing had had results. Hence his visit to a minor, outlying centre of the strike, where dogs blockading a small rendering plant and part-time curse-factory were surprised and flattered by a visit from the leading UMA militant. They told him the state of the picket. He listened and did not tell them he was also there to look up a particular little presence he thought he had detected.

The strikers offered him a variety of bodies. They gathered a battered one-armed doll, a ceramic gnome, a bear, a bobble-head cricketer figure in their jaws, lined them up as if in some toy-town identity parade. Wati embedded in the cricketer. The wind made his outsized face bounce.

“Are you solid?” he asked.

“Almost,” one dog canine whimpered. “There’s one who says he’s not a familiar, he’s a pet, so he’s exempt.”

“Right,” Wati said. “Anything we can do for you?”

The strikers glanced at each other. “We’re all weak. Getting weaker.” They spoke London Dog, a barky language.

“I’ll see if I can siphon anything from the fund.” The strike fund was shrinking, of course, at a worrying rate. “You’re doing great stuff.”

The familiar Wati was looking for extracurricularly was, he thought, only a mile or two away. He groped through the thousands of statues and statuettes in range, selected a Jesus outside a church a few streets away, and leapt.

– And was intercepted. A shocking moment.

Out of the statue and something was in his way, an aetherial presence that grabbed his bodiless self spitting right sonny jim right sonny jim yore nicked you pinko cunt. It pinioned him in the no-place.

It was a long, a very long time since Wati had spent more than a fractional moment out of body, in that space. He did not know how to meta-wrestle, could not fight. All he knew how to do in that phantom zone was get out of it, which his captor would not let him do. you my son are comin with me dan to the station.

There was the reek of information, authority and cunning. Wati tried to think. He did not of course breathe, but he felt as if he were suffocating. The tough un-body of the thing holding him leaked the components that made it. As it choked him he learned random snippety things from its touch.

officer officer officer the thing said and Wati heard overseer and pushed back in rage. His recent route from the bobble-head was still astrally greased by his passage, and he clawed his way back into that tiny figure. Came slamming back into it and bellowed. The dogs looked round.

“Help me!” he shouted. He could feel the cop grab him, sucking at him, trying to winkle him out. It was strong. He clung to the inside of the doll.

“Get a brick,” he shouted. “Get something heavy. Grab me!” The nearest dog fumbled, picked the toy up. “When I say, you smash this motherfucker against the wall and you do it in one go. Understand?” The frightened dog nodded.

Wati braced, paused, then hauled the surprised attacker in with him, into the tiny figure. Wati looked through cheap eyes, crowded, feeling the bewildered officer jostling in the sudden shape.

“Now!” he shouted. The dog swung its heavy head and spat the doll at the bricks. In the tiniest moment before it touched the wall, Wati kicked out of it, shoving the police-thing back in, and pouring into a one-armed Barbie.

He heard the shattering as he slipped into his plastic person, saw shards of what had instants before been him go flying. With the percussion came a bellow of something dying. A burp of stink and strong feeling mushroomed and dissipated.

The dogs stared at the shards, at the raging woman-figured Wati.

“What was that?” one of them said. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Wati said. Psychic fingerprints had bruised him. “A cop. Sort of.” He felt his injuries, to see what he could learn from them and their residue. “Oh fuck me,” he said, prodding one sore spot.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

HE HAD BEEN A MAN OF VARIABLE AND VARIEGATED TALENTS. NO one would have called him a criminarch, though certainly he was not at all constrained by the technicalities of law. He was not a god, nor a godling, nor a warrior of any such. What he was, he always claimed, was a scholar. No one would have argued with Grisamentum over that.

His origins were obscure-“uninteresting,” he said-and somewhere between fifty and three hundred years back, depending on his anecdote. Grisamentum intervened according to his own ideas of how London should be, with which discriminations the forces of law and those in favour of a bit less murder were generally broadly sympathetic, according to his own knacks.

He was a man who won some hearts and minds. In contrast to the Tattoo, a relentless innovator of brutality for whom etiquette and propriety were useful for the shock they occasioned when being pissed on, Grisamentum valued the traditions of the London hinterland. He encouraged righteous behaviour among his troops, proper shows of respect to the city’s names.

He riffed, playfully of course but not as a joke, on the spurious remembrances of hinterLondon. It was long since the most fabulous of the bestiaries’ contents had walked, if they ever had, but rather than shrug and accept this postlapsarian cityscape of degraded knackery, he brought back into fashion the city’s monsterherds. Previously a rather ridiculous set of hobbyists, these invokers of a more maged past in the very matter of London-leaf minotaurs, rubbish manticoras, dogshit dragons-became his occasional troops. And with his passing, they had become again morris dancers of the supernatural, and nothing.

“It’s not like you thought he couldn’t die,” Dane said. “No such thing as immortal, no one’s an idiot. But it was a shock. When we heard.”

That Grisamentum was dying. He did not, as do so many little warlords, which in a terribly charming way he sort of was, obfuscate the facts of his case. He put out requests. He asked for help. He searched for a cure for whatever drab, lethal little disorder it was that had him.

“Who did this?” his partisans demanded in agony. They took no comfort from the fact that the truth appeared to be no one. Contingency and biology.

“He made quite a few deadists pretty rich,” Dane said.

“Deadists?”

“Thanatothurges. Had them in and out, knackers used to knacking stuff about death. People figured he was trying to find a way out of it. He wouldn’t be the first. But there’s only so much anyone can do. Met Byrne out of it, though. She was his lady. Gave him a bit of happiness, I thought, in the last year or two.”

“So?”

“So what? So he died. There was a funeral. A cremation, like a Viking thing. It was amazing, all like crazy fireworks. When he realised he was going he went from deadists to pyros. Djinn and people, Anna Ginier, Wossname Cole. When that pyre went up, boy, it was knacked, and that didn’t burn just like any fire.”

“You saw it?”

“We had a delegation. Like most of the churches.”

The fire scorching in every which way, burning out certain certainties, making holes in things it had no business burning holes in, spectacular as a world of fireworks. The proximity of the venue-some treated chamber in some innocuous-looking bank or whatever-to Pudding Lane, the unusual nature of the fire and the reputations of the pyros that had prepared it had led to speculation that it had been a conduit, some knack-buggered spark scorching all the way back four-hundred-plus years, starting the Great Fire and burning a little hole for Grisamentum out of the present in which he was dying.

“Bullshit,” Dane said. “And anyway, whenever he went, he’d still have had the dying in him.” Because he had died, this man who had just sent a message.

“WHY NOW?” BILLY SAID. HE WALKED ALONGSIDE DANE-NOT A STEP behind him, as he might have done once. They were in Dagenham, in a street full of dirty and deserted buildings, where corrugated iron was almost as common a facade as brick.

“Listen to me, Dane,” Billy said. “Why are you in such a hurry? God’s sake.” He grabbed Dane and made him face him.

“I told you, no one except him knows we met…”

“Whether this is him or not, you don’t know what’s going on. And we’re supposed to be gone to ground. There’s a price on our heads. Wati’s meeting us tomorrow. Why don’t we wait, talk to him about this. You’re the one’s been telling me to think like a soldier,” Billy said.

Dane’s shoulders went up. “Do not,” he said, “tell me I’m not a soldier. What are you?”

“You tell me,” Billy said. They made an effort to keep their voices low. He took his glasses off and came closer. “What do you think I am? You haven’t asked me about my dreams for a while. Want to know what I’ve been seeing?” He had dreamed nothing.

“Of course we have to be careful,” Dane said. “But one of the most important players in London just come back from the dead. Out of nowhere. Why’s he been waiting? What’s he been doing? And why does he want to talk to me? We have to know, and we have to know now.”

“Maybe he was never dead. Maybe it’s him we’re looking for.”

“He was dead.”

“Demonstrably he wasn’t,” said Billy, putting his glasses back on. That did not follow. He had no idea how this worked. “How do you know he doesn’t want to kill you?”

“Why would he? I never did nothing against him. I worked with some of his boys. He never had a big crew, I knew them all. He knows the Tattoo’s after us, and those two… No love lost. Anyway,” he said, “we’re in disguise.” Billy had to laugh. They were in new uninteresting clothes, was all, from the latest safe house. “We’re going to have to do something about those glasses,” Dane said. “Total giveaway.”

“You keep away from my glasses,” Billy said. “If he’s been around all this time, and he’s not said anything to anyone… what’s changed now? You’re exiled. You can’t tell anyone he’s still alive. You’re a secret now, just like him.”

“We have to…” Dane was not a natural exile. Twice, three times he had referred to others of his ilk in the church. “Time was, when Ben was doing the same thing as me…” he had said. “There used to be this other geezer, and him and me…” Whatever he and him had done they did not anymore. Billy had seen those big men at the service; there was clearly muscle among the Krakenists. But there was a difference between a handy young devotee and an exonerated assassin. Dane was not old, but he was old enough to have been doing this for years, and these comrades he mentioned were all in the past. Something had happened to the church, Billy thought, in that time. A decline, maybe. You don’t self-exile out of nowhere.

Did teuthic agents retire? They had died, surely. The coterie of nonaligned colleagues like Wati and Jason from which Dane sought help, his half-friends-half-comrades, a network at odds with his lone squid status, did not share the absurd faith that drove him. Dane was the last of the squid agents and he was lonely. This revelation of relation to another power, a real power, with which he had history and allegiance, suddenly and unexpectedly revived, had snared him. Billy could only apply a little caution.

They were early to the rendezvous. It was a petrol station, closed down, boarded up, in a triangle of land between residential blocks and unconvincing light industry. The pumps were gone; the cement, striped with tire rubbings, was grown over.

“Stay close,” Dane said. They underlooked a flyover, and must be visible from the upper windows of the closest houses. Billy moved as Dane suggested, unfurtive, as if he had a normal job to do. That was how you disguised yourself in these places.

By the corner of the lot, behind engine remnants, was a passage over a low wall into the back streets. “That’s our route out, but it’s other stuff’s route in, too, so watch it,” Dane said. “Be ready to run like fucking fuck.”

The light dwindled. Dane did not attempt to be unseen, but he waited until a certain critical mass of darkness to take out his speargun. He held it dangling. As the sky turned a last flat dark grey, a woman climbed through the split in the fence and walked toward them.

“Dane,” she said.

She was in her forties, wearing an expensive coat, skirt, silver jewellery. Her greying hair was up. She carried a briefcase. “That’s her,” said Dane. “It’s Byrne.” He muttered urgently. “That’s her. The one came to work for Gris when he got sick. Sweet on him. Haven’t seen her since he died.”

Dane aimed the speargun from his hip. “Stop where you are,” he said. She eyed his unlikely weapon. “Stay there, Ms. Byrne,” he said. In the rubbly remaindered space, no one spoke for several seconds. Maybe half a mile off Billy heard the Dopplered wheeze of a train.

“Got to excuse me being a little jumpy,” Dane said at last. “I’m a bit shy these days, got a few problems…”

“Condolences,” the woman said. “We’ve heard that you and your congregation have had a falling out.”

“Right,” said Dane. “Yeah. Ta. Thanks for that. Long time. Bit of a turn-up your boss sending me a note.”

“Death isn’t what it used to be,” she said. She was posh.

“Right, right, right,” Dane said. “Well, you’d know, wouldn’t we? We both know you didn’t bring him back. No disrespect, I’m sure you’re great at what you do, but. Not even Grisamentum or you could do that. Where is he? No offense, but it ain’t you I come to see.”

“It isn’t so much you he wants to see, Dane Parnell. Though it is about that god of yours.” She pointed at Billy.

I knew it, Billy thought, and had no idea where the thought came from or what it meant. He had expected nothing. There was silence. Billy scanned the surrounds, the silhouettes against bleak skies.

“What does your boss want?” Dane said. “Where is he? Where’s he been for the last God knows how many years?”

“We heard that the Tattoo’s sicced every bounty-hunter between here and Glasgow on your tail, for some tidy money,” Byrne said. “Your church wants you dead. And if that weren’t enough, you’ve got Goss and Subby coming after you.”

“We’re popular blokes,” Dane said. “Where did he go?”

“Look,” she said. “After that business with the Tattoo, it wasn’t as simple as we made it. It’s not that there was no comeback. He had… There were problems. And when we realised that Tattoo was still gunning for him-and that was a mess, we should have just killed him, that’s a lesson, don’t get creative with revenge-Grisamentum needed… some time. Some space. To heal. Look at it, Dane. No one knows he’s alive. Think what an advantage that is.

“You’ve felt all this.” She shrugged at the sky. “You can tell things are going wrong. Have been since your god was taken. Mr. Harrow, you were there. You were in the Centre. It was you who found it. And that’s not nothing.”

Was that grinding glass?

“The Tattoo’s after your god, Dane Parnell. He’s closing in. Listen to me.” For the first time there was urgency in her voice. “Why do you think you haven’t heard about Grisamentum for the last few years? You said it yourself. As far as London knows, he’s dead. That puts us in a good position. So don’t mess it up by telling anyone. You know and I know that whatever it is he wants it for, we can’t let the Tattoo get hold of the kraken.”

“Where is it?” Billy said.

“Yeah,” said Dane, without looking round. “Where is it? Billy thought you might have taken it.”

“Why would we want your god?” Byrne said. “What we want is the Tattoo not to get it. We don’t know who’s got it, Dane. And that makes me nervous. No one should have that kind of power. Certainly no one we don’t know about. You know as much about what’s going on as anyone. You two, I mean, with what’s in Mr. Harrow’s head. But we know things too. We all want the same thing. To find the kraken, and to stop the Tattoo getting anywhere near it.

“We want to work together.”

“OH, MAN,” DANE SAID AT LAST. HE LOOKED AROUND. “SHIT. WE should get out of sight,” he said to Billy. He turned back to her. “Grisamentum asked that once before,” he said. “Right here. I said no.”

“Not so,” Byrne said. “Last time he tried to persuade you to come to work for him. He’s sorry for that. You’re a kraken man-he knows it, I know it, you know it. That’s what this is about. We’re not pretending we don’t need your help. And you need ours. We’re suggesting we become partners.”

Dane stared at her until she spoke again. “Too much is going on, Dane. The angels are walking. We need to know why.”

Dane leaned back, his eyes still on Byrne, to whisper to Billy. “If this isn’t bullshit,” he said, “then it’s something. To work with Grisamentum? We got to think very seriously about this.”

“We don’t even know it is Grisamentum,” Billy said slowly.

Dane nodded. “Look,” he said louder. “This is all very flattering, but I haven’t even seen your boss. We can’t make this sort of decision like that.” We, thought Billy, with satisfaction.

“Are you going to start talking about organ-grinders and monkeys?” Byrne said.

“However you want to put it,” Dane said. “What was it happened? He was really sick.”

“Was he?”

“Where is he then? Why disappear all that time?”

“He’s not going to come here,” she said carefully. “There’s no way he’s going to…”

“Well then we’re done,” said Dane.

“Will you let me finish? That doesn’t mean you can’t talk to him.”

“What, you got some secure line?” Dane said.

“There are ways.” She took out a pen and paper. “Channels. Talk to him, then.”

She put the fountain pen on the paper. Dane stepped closer. He kept the speargun aimed at her. Byrne wrote. She did not take her eyes from Dane’s.

Hello, she wrote. The writing was the same as what had been on the paper plane, small and curled and dark grey. Long time.

“Ask him what you want,” Byrne said.

“Where is he?” Billy said.

“It’s his writing,” Dane said.

“That’s hardly proof,” Billy said.

“Where are you?” Dane said. To the paper.

Near, Byrne wrote, without looking.

Billy blinked at this new thing, this remote-writing knack. “This proves nothing,” he whispered to Dane.

“Heard you were dead,” Dane said. There was no writing. “When we was here last, you were asking me to come work for you. Remember?”

Y.

“When I said I wouldn’t, I said I couldn’t, and I asked you a question. Do you remember? What I said? The last thing I said to you before I went?”

Byrne’s hand hesitated over the paper. Then she wrote.

Said you’d never leave church, she wrote. Said: “I know who made me. Do you know who made you?”

“It’s him,” Dane said quietly to Billy. “No one else knew that.” The city broke the silence, with the coughing of a car, as if uncomfortable.

What broke you from the church? Byrne wrote.

“Different ideas,” Dane said.

You want your kraken.

“Dead, rotten and ruined?” Dane said. “Why d’you think I want it?”

Because you’re not the Tattoo.

“What exactly is your proposition?” Billy said. Dane stared at him.

We can find it, Byrne wrote. She kept looking up. She stared into the litter of stars, strewn like discards. Whoever has it has plans. No one takes a thing like that without plans. Not good.

Harrow you know more than you know, she wrote. She drew an arrow, pointing at him. Wherever he was, Grisamentum was pining for Billy’s opaque vatic insight.

“We have to think about this, Billy,” Dane said.

“Well he’s not the Tattoo,” Billy muttered to him. “I have a rule: I prefer anyone who doesn’t try to kill me to anyone who does. I’m funny that way. But…”

“But what?”

“There’s too much we don’t know.” Dane hesitated. He nodded. “We’re meeting Wati tomorrow. Let’s talk to him about it. He might have news-you know he’s been tracking shit down.” Billy felt, suddenly and vividly, as if he were underwater.

“Grisamentum,” Dane said. “We have to think.”

“Really,” Byrne said. She looked away from the sky and at him as her hand wrote Join us now.

“No disrespect. If it was you you’d do the same. We’re on the same side. We just have to think.”

Byrne’s hand moved over the paper, but no ink came from the pen. She pursed her lips and tried again. Eventually she wrote something and read it. She took out a new pen and wrote, in a different script, a postal box, a pickup spot. She gave it to Dane.

“Send us word,” she said. “But fast, Dane, or we have to assume no. Time’s running out. Look at the bloody moon.” Billy looked at the sliver of it. Its craters and contours made it look wormy. “Something’s coming.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

BILLY HAD ANOTHER DREAM AT LAST, THAT NIGHT. HE HAD BEEN feeling vaguely guilty at the lack of oneiric insights. But at last he had a dream worthy to be so called, rather than the vague sensations of cosseting dark, cool, glimmerings, heaviness, stasis and chemical stench that otherwise filled his nighttime head.

He had been in a city. In a city and racing up and over buildings, jumping over high buildings with one jump, making swimming motions to pass through the clear air above skyscrapers. He wore bright clothes.

“Stop,” he shouted at someone, some figure creeping from broken windows in a big warehouse, where police lights shone and there was the smoke of a fire billowing like a dark liquid in water. There was Collingswood, the young police witch, smoking, leaning against a wall, not looking at the crime behind her, eyeing Billy on his descent sardonically and patiently. She pointed the way he had come. She pointed back the other way and did not look round.

Billy sank gracefully through. Behind Collingswood he saw a robotic wizard mastermind nemesis look up, and Billy felt warm in the sun, knowing that his companion would come. He waited to see the muscly arms, the tentacles in their Lycra, come out from behind the building, his sidekick behind its mask.

But something was wrong. He heard a rumble but there were no uncoiling sucker arms, no grabbing ropy limbs, no vast eye like that of the tinderbox dog. There was, instead, a bottle. Behind the enemy. Its glass was dark. Its stopper was old and corroded into place, but uncorking. And he knew suddenly and with a kind of relief that it was not his sidekick, but that he was its.

When he woke Billy felt a different kind of guilt. At the kitsch of the dreams. He felt the universe, exasperated, was giving him an insultingly clear insight, that he was simply missing.

“WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE?” BILLY SAID.

“You mean what my granddad said?” Dane said. “If you was good, maybe you come back in a god’s skin.” A chromatophore, a gushing colour cell. So krakens show emotion by the flexing of their devout dead. It was never the stories of sinking islands upsetting Vikings that Dane told.

Billy and Dane crossed the city with as much subterfuge as they could muster. By way of knacks, magic misdirection, an anti-trail of psychic un-bread crumbs. Billy relaxed a little when they entered the graveyard where they had their rendezvous. He walked between the rows of stone. His calm made little sense, he knew: whatever hunted them would do so among the dead as easily as among the living.

“Dane. Billy.” Wati spoke to them from a stone angel. “Sure you weren’t followed?”

“Fuck off, Wati,” Dane said mildly. “How’s the strike?”

“Struggling.” Wati circled in a clearing among the unkempt graves, speaking from one then another then another stone face. “To be honest, we got big trouble. I got attacked.”

“What?” said Dane. He took a solicitous step toward the moment’s contingent figure. “You okay? Who? How?”

“I’m alright,” Wati said. “I nearly wasn’t, but I’m alright now. It was police. It nearly got me. I got it though. The only good thing is I learnt a few things. It sort of oozed out of itself, is what.”

Billy turned slowly and looked at each of the angels. “We all had visitors,” Dane said. “You remember Byrne, Wati?”

“Grisamentum’s vizier? What about her?”

“We saw her, Wati.” The leaves of the ivy and the overlooking trees muttered. “Grisamentum’s still alive.”

Clouds bundled by, as if something was urgent. Billy heard some little animal rustling under the grass.

“You saw him?” Wati said.

“We spoke to him. It was him, Wati. He wants to work with us. To find it.” There were more graveside rustles.

“What did you tell him?”

“We said we’d think.”

“So what do you think?” After seconds of silence Wati said, from a new, saccharine child angel, “Billy, what do you think?”

“Me?” Billy cleared his throat. “I don’t know.”

“We need all the help we can get,” Dane said carefully.

“Yeah, but,” Billy said. The toughness of his own voice surprised him. “You think I’ve got knowledge I don’t even know about, right? Well, I don’t know why, but I don’t like it. Alright?”

“That’s not nothing, Dane,” said Wati at last.

“Listen,” he continued. “I’ve got stuff to tell you. You remember that list of the porters we reckon could’ve took the kraken? I been looking into it.” Wati’s voice that day was thin and marble. “Simon, Aykan, couple of others, remember?

“There’s skinny on all of them, you hear what they like, who they’re working for, what they’re good at and not good at, all that. If we thought of this you can bet your arse everyone else who knows about the kraken did, and they’re looking too: we heard from Aykan’s old flatmate that the cops tried to get hold of him. But they’re not thinking right. Simon’s the dark horse.”

“Simon Shaw retired,” Dane said.

“He did-that’s the point,” Wati said. “I was thinking about methods. Rebecca uses wormholes, but she needs a power source, and it leaves pissed-off particles. You said the police couldn’t find anything?”

“I don’t know what they were looking for,” Billy said. “But I heard them say there was no sign of anything.”

“Right,” said Wati from a Madonna. “Aykan uses Tay al-Ard, great method…”

“It’s the only kind of porting I’ll do,” said Dane.

“I don’t blame you,” said Wati. “But even if he could shift something as big as the kraken, some of the irfans would have felt it. Like you say, Simon hasn’t been on the scene. But here’s the thing: he does have a familiar.”

“I didn’t know,” Dane said.

“Honest truth is neither did I until one of the organisers reminded me. It ain’t like most assistants. Simon made sure it paid dues-it never had the mind for much, but it pushed a bit of energy our way to cover subs. He wasn’t bad to it. He loved the bloody thing. But we should still have had a connection, and no one could feel the link. I had to go hunting.

“I don’t know how long it’s been faddling around. Found the poor little fucker eventually, in a landfill. It’s only here because it trusts me.” What familiar didn’t?

“Here?” said Billy. “Here here?”

The statue whistled. From below a scraggy bush next to them there was a rustling, again.

“Jesus Christ,” said Billy. “What the hell’s that?”

Snuffling amid the cigarette butts and the ruins of food, a hand-sized clot of mange and clumpy hair whimpered and whispered. There were no features, only a matting of dirt and sickly flesh.

“Oh what?” said Dane.

“He had it made from scratch,” Wati said. “It’s clotted out of him. His parings. He had a lifesmith clay it together. The fur’s from a vet: it’s dog, cat, all sorts.” The thing had no eyes, no visible mouth.

“What use is this hairball?” said Dane.

“None,” Wati said. “It’s not smart, it’s a rubbish guard, it doesn’t have the focus for knacks. He made it anyway. Out of him, so the poor little bastard has a link. A bit buggered, but you can still feel it. I don’t know what, but something scared Simon off working a couple of years ago. And judging from the mood of my little brother here, something’s happened more recently, too.

“You know what we found it doing?” The thing shivered, and Wati made the reassuring noise again. “It was gathering food-sort of folding itself over it to drag it. I think it’s for Simon. I think it’s been trekking for days to get stuff, trekking back with it. I think it’s on its own initiative.”

“Why would Simon want something like that?” Dane said, staring at the pitiable threadbare oddity.

“Well,” said the Wati-statue. “You know how Simon used to dress. Don’t you ever watch telly, Dane?”

“How did he dress?” said Billy.

“Pretend uniform,” Wati said. “Little sign on the chest.” His voice was arch.

“Why does this matter?” Dane said.

“No,” said Billy suddenly, staring at the bizarre familiar. “Oh you’re shitting me.”

“Yeah,” Wati said. “You got it.”

“What?” said Dane. He stared at the statue and at Billy. “What?”

YOU HEAR ALL THE TIME, BILLY TOLD DANE-AND HOW GOOD IT was for him to be telling Dane something-about the influence of pulp science fiction on real science. It is an admission both shamefaced and proud that some large proportion of scientists claim inspiration from variously crude visionary blatherings they loved when young. Satellite specialists cite Arthur Clarke, biologists are drawn to the field by the neuro- and nanotech visions of entertainers. Above all, Roddenberry’s leaden space-pioneering meant a demographic bulge of young physicists attempting to replicate replicators, tri-corders, phasers and transporter rooms.

But it was not only the hard sciences. Other professionals grew up with the same stuff. Sociologists of the network went rummaging in old imaginings. Philosophers stole many-worlds, grateful to alternative-reality merchants. And, unknown to the mainstream, such invented futures were the seminal viewing for a generation of London’s mages, and they were no less keen to imitate their favourites than were physicists. Alongside technopaganism and chaos magic, Crowleyism and druidical pomp, there were the reality-smiths of the TV generation.

Ornerily, it was not the fantasies that inspired most knackers, not Buffy, Angel, American Gothic or Supernatural. It was the science fiction. Time travel was out, the universe not having fixed lines, but sorcerer fans of Dr. Who made untraditional wands, disdaining willow for carefully lathed metal and calling them sonic screwdrivers. Soothsayer admirers of Blake’s 7 called themselves Children of Orac. London’s fourth-best shapeshifter changed her name by deed-poll to Maya, and her surname to Space1999.

There were those magicians who expressed allegiance to more recherché series-empatechs who would not be quiet about Star Cops, culture-surfing necromancers hooked on Lexx-and a younger generation naming themselves for Farscape and Galactica (the remake, of course).

But it was the classics that were most popular, and just as for NASA technicians, Star Trek was the most classic of these.

“Simon’s familiar’s name,” Wati said, “is Tribble.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“’COURSE I’VE SEEN STAR TREK,” DANE SAID. “BUT I DON’T KNOW what a fucking tribble is.”

They were by London Bridge. Simon’s last-known address had been empty for months. They hunted.

“Well, it’s one of those things, basically,” Billy said. He was back in silly student getup too young for him. He peered into the plastic bag he carried. Within shivered Tribble. Billy stroked its dirty fur. They passed slate-top figurines and plaster statuettes on buildings. Ill-clothed mannequins. From each of them came Wati’s whispered voice, soothing Tribble, keeping the un-animal calm.

“We sure we’re going the right way?” Billy said.

“No,” said Wati. “I’ve been trying to track the link backward. I reckon it leads round here. If we get close enough I’ll feel it.”

“What is the fucking deal with this tribble thing?” Dane said.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Wati said. He spoke in little gusts from all the statues. “Simon was totally into that stupid show. He went to conventions. Had the collections, the figures, all that stuff. Half the time he dressed in that stupid uniform.”

“So?” Dane said. “So he’s talented, made money and pissed it away on tat. He’s a beamer who made himself Mr. fucking Spock.”

“Scotty,” Billy said. He looked at Dane over the top of his glasses, schoolmarmish. “Spock didn’t beam anything.”

“What? What? Whatever. Listen, there’s different ways of porting, Billy. There’s folding up space.” Dean scrunched his hands. “So places far apart touch each other for a moment. But that ain’t what Simon does. He’s a beamer. Disintegrate whatever it is you want, zap its bits somewhere else, stick them back together.”

“Wasn’t there an auction of Star Trek stuff?” Billy said. “A couple of months ago? At Christie’s or somewhere? I think I remember… All the auctioneers wore the uniforms. They sold the starship model for like a million quid or something.”

Dane half closed his eyes. “Rings a bell.”

“It’s going weird in-between,” said Wati from a scuffed stone dog. “I think it wants us to turn left.”

“We’re circling,” said Billy.

They slowed. They had done three turns of a towerblock, orbiting it as if the ill-kept concrete pillar were the sun. They were not alone on the street, but none of the pedestrians paid them any particular mind. “It wants to take us there,” said Billy, “but it’s scared.”

“Alright, hold on,” said Wati from a plastic owl, a bird-scarer on a chemist roof. “I’ll have a look.”

WATI WENT TO A TINY COSY PLASTIC DASHBOARD VIRGIN; TO A cemetery and a headstone angel, seeing through birdlimed eyes. Staccato manifested moments to the base of the tower, eyeing the building from a bouncing horsey in the children’s playground.

He could feel familiars in a few of the flats. All union members. Two on strike; the other, a-what was that?-a parrot, still working but with dispensation for some reason. The unioned three felt their organiser’s presence with surprise. He stretched out, found a child’s doll in the ground floor. It took him scant moments to see through speck-sized Barbie, to go again, finding a terra-cotta lady in the next-door flat, seeing again, nothing of interest, moving to a China shepherdess on next-door’s mantelpiece.

He slid through figures. His moments of statued awareness proliferated in a cloud. He strobed through floors in doll figure carved-soapdish rabbitsextoy antique relic, seeing, fucking, eating, reading, sleeping, laughing, fighting, human minutiae that did not interest him.

Three storeys from the top, he opened his consciousness in a plastic figure of Captain Kirk. Feeling the seam of his moulding, the hinge of his little arms and legs, the crude Starfleet uniform painted on him, he looked into a ruinous apartment.

Less than a minute later he was back in a novelty alarm clock shaped like a chimney sweep, in the window of a shop where Billy and Dane loitered.

“Hey,” he said.

A clock is shouting at me, Billy thought, so loud anyone with a hint of nous would have been able to read it. He stared at Wati. Little while ago I was a guy worked in a museum.

“Third floor from the top. Go.”

“Wait,” said Dane. “He’s there? Is he alright?”

“You’d better see.”

“JESUS,” WHISPERED BILLY. “IT STINKS.”

“I told you,” said Wati. Dane held him out like a weapon. Wati was in a ripoff toy, a “Powered Ranga!” they had brought.

The curtains were drawn. The stench was of rotting food, filthy clothes, uncleaned floors. The rooms were littered with mouldering rubbish. There were tracks-cockroaches, mice, rats. Tribble whimpered. The ridiculous scrabbly thing pulled itself out of the bag and half rolled, half hairily oozed into the living room. From where came sounds.

“More of you?” A voice stretched taut. “Can’t, can’t be, I’ve accounted, or you have, you’re all done, aren’t you, that’s us, isn’t it? Tribble, Tribble? You can’t speak, can you, though?”

“That’s him,” said Dane. “Simon.” He drew his speargun.

“Oh Jesus,” Billy said.

On every surface was Star Trek merchandise: model Enterprises; plastic Spocks claimed emotionlessness more convincingly than the character they represented; Klingon weapons hung on the walls. There were plastic phasers and communicators on the shelves.

Sitting on the sofa, staring at them, Tribble on his lap, was a ghastly looking man. Simon’s face was pale and thin, scab-crusted. His Star Trek uniform was dirty, the insignia one blot among many.

“Thought maybe you were more of them,” he said.

He was surrounded, encauled, coronaed with whispering figures. They fleeted in and out of visibility, made of dark light. They entered his body and exited it, they faded up, they ebbed out. They moved around the room, they crooned, they hooted in faint lunatic imitations of speech.

Every one of the figures looked exactly like Simon. Each was him, staring in hate.

“What happened, Simon?” Dane said. He whipped his hand through the air to disperse the shades, as if they were insect-clouds or bad smells. They ignored him and continued their cruel haunting. “What happened?”

“He’s lost it,” said Wati. “He’s completely gone.” In his agitation he went from toy to toy, speaking snatches from each. “Imagine dealing…” “… with that…” “… every moment…” “… every day…” “… and night as well.” “He’s gone.”

“We need an exorcist,” said Dane.

“I knew it was trouble,” Simon said. He shied from the angry him-spirits. “I started feeling them, in the matter stream. But it’s always one last job.” He made a shooting motion. Several of the figures in joyless mockery finger-shot him back. “Couldn’t not. They made it real, God.”

“I told you,” said Billy. Amid scattered novels set in the favoured universe was a box, still surrounded by paper and string. It contained a big book and yet another phaser. The book was the catalogue of an auction. A very expensive Star Trek sale. The model of the Enterprise-it was from Next Generation, in fact-had a reserve of $200,000. There were uniforms, furniture, accoutrements, most from the Picard years. But there were a few from other spin-offs, and from the first series.

Billy found the phaser listed. The details were geekily precise (it was a phase pistol type-2, with removable type-1 inset, and so on). The reserve price was high-the prop had been used on-screen many times. Billy picked it up, and the translucent Simons looked at it wrathfully and wistfully. Below it was a card, on which was written: As agreed.

The weapon was surprisingly heavy. Billy turned it experimentally, held it out and pulled the trigger.

The sound was bizarrely and instantly recognisable from TV, high spitting crossbred with mosquito whine. There was heat, and he saw light. A particle beam of some impossible kind burst out of the meaningless weapon, seared the air, light-speeding into the wall as Dane shouted and leapt, and the spirit-Simons screamed.

Billy stared at the thing dangling in his hand, at the scorched wall. The stupid toylike lump of plastic and metal that shot like a real phaser.

“ALRIGHT,” SAID DANE, AFTER MORE THAN AN HOUR COAXING sentences from Simon, shielding him from the Simons that surrounded him. “What have we figured?”

“What are they? The hims?” Billy said.

“This is why I wouldn’t travel that way,” Dane said. “This is my point. For a piece of rock or clothes or something dead, who cares? But take something living and do that? Beam it up? What you done is ripped a man apart then stuck his bits back together and made them walk around. He died. Get me? The man’s dead. And the man at the other end only thinks he’s the same man. He ain’t. He only just got born. He’s got the other’s memories, yeah, but he’s newborn. That Enterprise, they keep killing themselves and replacing themselves with clones of dead people. That is some macabre shit. That ship’s full of Xerox copies of people who died.”

“This is why he stopped working?” said Billy.

“Maybe he knew it wasn’t doing him any good. Something was making him nervous. But then he comes back and does it again. And it’s a huge job.” Dane nodded. “The kraken. Tips him over the edge. You know how many years Simon spent beaming in and out of places, “getting coordinates,” beaming out with merchandise? You get me? Do you know how many times he’s died?

“Almost as many times as James T. fucking Kirk is how many. That man sitting there was born out of nothing a few days ago, when he got the kraken out. And this time, when he arrived, all the hes who died before were waiting. And they were pissed off.

“They want revenge. Who killed the Simon Shaws? Simon Shaw is who. Time and again.”

“It’s hardly fair,” Billy said. “He’s the only one of the whole lot of them who hasn’t killed anyone; he only just got here. It’s them who killed each other.”

“Yeah,” said Dane. “But he’s the only one of them living, and that anger’s got to go somewhere. They ain’t the most logical things. That’s why Simon’s being haunted by Simons. Poor bastard.”

“Right,” said Billy. “So why did he do it?” He pointed at the phaser, the catalogue, the note. “Someone contacts him. Here comes one of the biggest Trekkie sales for years, and he’s getting none of it, and someone contacts him with an offer he can’t refuse. They’ve done something with this gun.”

Dane nodded. “Contracted some mage. Some shaper’s knacked it so it’s real.”

“What’s he going to do?” said Billy. “Not want the world’s only working phaser? They say you just have to port one thing. So who wrote this note? Simon didn’t want a giant squid. Whoever dangled this gun in front of him’s our mystery player. They’re the ones who’ve got your god.”