Kraken

Chapter One

AN EVERYDAY DOOMSAYER IN SANDWICH-BOARD ABRUPTLY walked away from what over the last several days had been his pitch, by the gates of a museum. The sign on his front was an old-school prophecy of the end: the one bobbing on his back read FORGET IT.

INSIDE, A MAN WALKED THROUGH THE BIG HALL, PAST A DOUBLE stair and a giant skeleton, his steps loud on the marble. Stone animals watched him. “Right then,” he kept saying.

His name was Billy Harrow. He glanced at the great fabricated bones and nodded. It looked as if he was saying hello. It was a little after eleven on a morning in October. The room was filling up. A group waited for him by the entrance desk, eyeing each other with polite shyness.

There were two men in their twenties with geek-chic haircuts. A woman and man barely out of teens teased each other. She was obviously indulging him with this visit. There was an older couple, and a father in his thirties holding his young son. “Look, that’s a monkey,” he said. He pointed at animals carved in vines on the museum pillars. “And you see that lizard?”

The boy peeped. He looked at the bone apatosaurus that Billy had seemed to greet. Or maybe, Billy thought, he was looking at the glyptodon beyond it. All the children had a favourite inhabitant of the Natural History Museum’s first hall, and the glyptodon, that half-globe armadillo giant, had been Billy’s.

Billy smiled at the woman who dispensed tickets, and the guard behind her. “This them?” he said. “Right then, everyone. Shall we do this thing?”

HE CLEANED HIS GLASSES AND BLINKED WHILE HE WAS DOING IT, replicating a look and motion an ex had once told him was adorable. He was a little shy of thirty and looked younger: he had freckles, and not enough stubble to justify “Bill.” As he got older, Billy suspected, he would, DiCaprio-like, simply become like an increasingly wizened child.

Billy’s black hair was tousled in halfheartedly fashionable style. He wore a not-too-hopeless top, cheap jeans. When he had first started at the centre, he had liked to think that he was unexpectedly cool-looking for such a job. Now he knew that he surprised no one, that no one expected scientists to look like scientists anymore.

“So you’re all here for the tour of the Darwin Centre,” he said. He was acting as if he thought they were present to investigate a whole research site, to look at the laboratories and offices, the filing, the cabinets of paperwork. Rather than to see one and only the one thing within the building.

“I’m Billy,” he said. “I’m a curator. What that means is I do a lot of the cataloguing and preserving, stuff like that. I’ve been here awhile. When I first came here I wanted to specialise in marine molluscs-know what a mollusc is?” he asked the boy, who nodded and hid. “Snails, that’s right.” Mollusca had been the subject of his master’s thesis.

“Alright, folks.” He put his glasses on. “Follow me. This is a working environment, so please keep the noise down, and I beg you not to touch anything. We’ve got caustics, toxins, all manner of horrible stuff all over the place.”

One of the young men started to say, “When do we see-?” Billy raised his hand.

“Can I just…?” he said. “Let me explain about what’ll happen when we’re in there.” Billy had evolved his own pointless idio-superstitions, according to one of which it was bad luck for anyone to speak the name of what they were all there for, before they reached it.

“I’m going to show you a bunch of the places we work,” he said lamely. “Any questions, you can ask me at the end: we’re a little bit time constrained. Let’s get the tour done first.”

No curator or researcher was obliged to perform this guide-work. But many did. Billy no longer grumbled when it was his turn.

They went out and through the garden, approaching the Darwin with a building site on one side and the brick filigrees of the Natural History Museum on the other.

“No photos please,” Billy said. He did not care if they obeyed: his obligation was to repeat the rule. “This building here opened in 2002,” he said. “And you can see we’re expanding. We’ll have a new building in 2008. We’ve got seven floors of wet specimens in the Darwin Centre. That means stuff in Formalin.”

Everyday hallways led to a stench. “Jesus,” someone muttered.

“Indeed,” said Billy. “This is called the dermestarium.” Through interior windows there were steel containers like little coffins. “This is where we clean up skeletons. Get rid of all the gunk on them. Dermestes maculatus.”

A computer screen by the boxes was showing some disgusting salty-looking fish being eaten by insect swarms. “Eeurgh,” someone said.

“There’s a camera in the box,” said Billy. “Hide beetles is their English name. They go through everything, just leave bones behind.”

The boy grinned and tugged his father’s hand. The rest of the group smiled, embarrassed. Flesh-eating bugs: sometimes life really was a B-movie.

Billy noticed one of the young men. He wore a past-it suit, a shabby-genteel outfit odd for someone young. He wore a pin on his lapel, a design like a long-armed asterisk, two of the spokes ending in curls. The man was taking notes. He was filling the pad he carried at a great rate.

A taxonomiser by inclination as well as profession, Billy had decided there were not so many kinds of people who took this tour. There were children: mostly young boys, shy and beside themselves with excitement, and vastly knowledgeable about what they saw. There were their parents. There were sheepish people in their twenties, as geeky-eager as the kids. There were their girlfriends and boyfriends, performing patience. A few tourists on an unusual byway.

And there were the obsessives.

They were the only people who knew more than the young children. Sometimes they did not speak: sometimes they would interrupt Billy’s explanations with too-loud questions, or correct him on scientific detail with exhausting fussy anxiety. He had noticed more of such visitors than usual in the last several weeks.

“It’s like late summer brings out the weirdos,” Billy had said to his friend Leon, a few nights back, as they drank at a Thames pub. “Someone came in all Starfleet badges today. Not on my shift, sadly.”

“Fascist,” Leon had said. “Why are you so prejudiced against nerds?”

“Please,” Billy said. “That would be a bit self-hating, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, but you pass. You’re like, you’re in deep cover,” Leon said. “You can sneak out of the nerd ghetto and hide the badge and bring back food and clothes and word of the outside world.”

“Mmm, tasteful.”

“Alright,” Billy said as colleagues passed him. “Kath,” he said to an ichthyologist; “Brendan,” to another curator, who answered him, “Alright Tubular?”

“Onward please,” said Billy. “And don’t worry, we’re getting to the good stuff.”

Tubular? Billy could see one or two of his escortees wondering if they had misheard.

The nickname resulted from a drinking session in Liverpool with colleagues, back in his first year at the centre. It was the annual conference of the professional curatorial society. After a day of talks on methodologies and histories of preservation, on museum schemes and the politics of display, the evening’s wind-down had started with polite how-did-you-get-into-this?, turned into everyone at the bar one by one talking about their childhoods, these meanderings, in boozy turn, becoming a session of what someone had christened Biography Bluff. Everyone had to cite some supposedly extravagant fact about themselves-they once ate a slug, they’d been part of a foursome, they tried to burn their school down, and so on-the truth of which the others would then brayingly debate.

Billy had straight-faced claimed that he had been the result of the world’s first-ever successful in vitro fertilisation, but that he had been disavowed by the laboratory because of internal politics and a question mark over issues of consent, which was why the official laurel had gone to someone else a few months after his birth. Interrogated about details, he had with drunken effortlessness named doctors, the location, a minor complication of the procedure. But before bets were made and his reveal made, the conversation had taken a sudden turn and the game had been abandoned. It was two days later, back in London, before a lab-mate asked him if it was true.

“Absolutely,” Billy had said, in an expressionless teasing way that meant either “of course,” or “of course not.” He had stuck by that response since. Though he doubted anyone believed him, the nickname “Test-tube” and variants were still used.

THEY PASSED ANOTHER GUARD: A BIG, TRUCULENT MAN, ALL SHAVED head and muscular fatness. He was some years older than Billy, named Dane Something, from what Billy had overheard. Billy nodded and tried to meet his eye, as he always did. Dane Whatever, as he always did, ignored the little greeting, to Billy’s disproportionate resentment.

As the door swung shut, though, Billy saw Dane acknowledge someone else. The guard nodded momentarily at the intense young man with the lapel pin, the obsessive whose eyes flickered in the briefest response. Billy saw that, in surprise-and just before the door closed between them-Dane looking at him.

DANE’S ACQUAINTANCE DID NOT MEET HIS EYES. “YOU FEEL IT GET cool?” Billy said, shaking his head. He sped them through time-release doors. “To stop evaporation. We have to be careful about fire. Because, you know, there’s a fair old bit of alcohol in here, so…” With his hands he made a soft explosion.

The visitors stopped still. They were in a specimen maze. Ranked intricacies. Kilometres of shelves and jars. In each was a motionless floating animal. Even sound sounded bottled suddenly, as if something had put a lid on it all.

The specimens mindlessly concentrated, some posing with their own colourless guts. Flatfish in browning tanks. Jars of huddled mice gone sepia, grotesque mouthfuls like pickled onions. There were sports with excess limbs, foetuses in arcane shapes. They were as carefully shelved as books. “See?” Billy said.

One more door and they would be with what they were there to see. Billy knew from repeated experience how this would go.

When they entered the tank room, the chamber at the heart of the Darwin Centre, he would give the visitors a moment without prattle. The big room was walled with more shelves. There were hundreds more bottles, from those chest-high down to those the size of a glass of water. All of them contained lugubrious animal faces. It was a Linnaean décor; species clined into each other. There were steel bins, pulleys that hung like vines. No one would notice. Everyone would be staring at the great tank in the centre of the room.

This was what they came for, that pinkly enormous thing. For all its immobility; the wounds of its slow-motion decay, the scabbing that clouded its solution; despite its eyes being shrivelled and lost; its sick colour; despite the twist in its skein of limbs, as if it were being wrung out. For all that, it was what they were there for.

It would hang, an absurdly massive tentacled sepia event. Architeuthis dux. The giant squid.

“IT’S EIGHT POINT SIXTY TWO METRES LONG,” BILLY WOULD SAY AT LAST. “NOT THE largest we’ve ever seen, but no tiddler either.” The visitors would circle the glass. “They found it in 2004, off the Falkland Islands.

“It’s in a saline-Formalin mix. That tank was made by the same people that do the ones for Damien Hirst. You know, the one he put the shark in?” Any children would be leaning in to the squid, as close as they could get.

“Its eyes would have been twenty-three or twenty-four centimetres across,” Billy would say. People would measure with their fingers, and children opened their own eyes mimicry-wide. “Yeah, like plates. Like dinner plates.” He said it every time, every time thinking of Hans Christian Andersen’s dog. “But it’s very hard to keep eyes fresh, so they’re gone. We injected it with the same stuff that’s in the tank to stop it rotting from the inside.

“It was alive when it was caught.”

That would mean gasps all over again. Visions of an army of coils, twenty thousand leagues, an axe-fight against a blasphemy from the deep below. A predatory meat cylinder, rope limbs unrolling, finding a ship’s rail with ghastly prehensility.

It had been nothing like that. A giant squid at the surface was a weak, disoriented, moribund thing. Horrified by air, crushed by its own self, it had probably just wheezed through its siphon and palsied, a gel mass of dying. That did not matter. Its breach was hardly reducible to however it had actually been.

The squid would stare with its handspan empty sockets and Billy would answer familiar questions-“It’s name is Archie.” “Because of Architeuthis. Get it?” “Yes, even though we think it’s a girl.”

When it had come, wrapped in ice and preservative cloth, Billy had helped unswaddle it. It was he who had massaged its dead flesh, kneading the tissue to feel where preservatives had spread. He had been so busy on it it was as if he had not noticed it, quite, somehow. It was only when they were done and finished, and it was tanked, that it had hit him, had really got him. He had watched refraction make it shift as he approached or moved away, a magic motionless motion.

It wasn’t a type-specimen, one of those bottled Platonic essences that define everything like them. Still, the squid was complete, and it would never be cut.

Other specimens in the room would eventually snare a bit of visitor attention. A ribbon-folded oarfish, an echidna, bottles of monkeys. And there at the end of the room was a glass-fronted cabinet containing thirteen small jars.

“Anyone know what these are?” Billy would say. “Let me show you.”

They were distinguished by the browning ink and antique angularity of the hand that had labelled them. “These were collected by someone quite special,” Billy would say to any children. “Can you read that word? Anyone know what that means? ‘The Beagle’?”

Some people got it. If they did they would gape at the subcollection that sat there unbelievably on an everyday shelf. Little animals collected, euthanized, preserved and catalogued on a journey to the South American seas, two centuries before, by the young naturalist Charles Darwin.

“That’s his writing,” Billy would say. “He was young, he hadn’t sorted out his really big notions when he found these. These are part of what gave him the whole idea. They’re not finches, but these are what got the whole thing started. It’s the anniversary of his trip soon.”

Very rarely, someone would try to argue with him over Darwin’s insight. Billy would not have that debate.

Even those thirteen glass eggs of evolutionary theory, and all the centuries’-worth of tea-coloured crocodiles and deep-sea absurdities, evinced only a little interest next to the squid. Billy knew the importance of that Darwin stuff, whether visitors did or not. No matter. Enter that room and you breached a Schwarzschild radius of something not canny, and that cephalopod corpse was the singularity.

That, Billy knew, was how it would go. But this time when he opened the door he stopped, and stared for several seconds. The visitors came in behind him, stumbling past his immobility. They waited, unsure of what they were being shown.

The centre of the room was empty. All the jars looked over the scene of a crime. The nine-metre tank, the thousands of gallons of brine-Formalin, the dead giant squid itself were gone.

Chapter Two

AS SOON AS BILLY STARTED CLAMOURING HE WAS SURROUNDED by colleagues, all gaping and demanding to know what was going on and what the hell, where was, where was the goddamn squid?

They hurried the visitors out of the building. Afterward, all Billy recalled of that rushed dismissal was the little boy sobbing, desolate that he had not been shown what he had come to see. Biologists, guards, curators came and stared with stupid faces at the enormous lack in the tank room. “What…?” they said, just like Billy had, and “Where did…?”

Word spread. People ran from place to place as if they were looking for something, as if they had misplaced something, and might find it under a cupboard.

“It can’t have, it can’t have,” a biophysicist called Josie said, and yes, no, it couldn’t have, not disappeared, so many metres of abyss meat could not have gone. There were no suspicious cranes. There were no giant tank-nor squid-shaped holes cartoon-style in the wall. It could not have gone, but there it was, not.

There was no protocol for this. What to do in the event of a chemical spill-that was planned. If a specimen jar broke, if results did not tally, even if a tour member became violent, you run a particular algorithm. This though, Billy thought. What the hell?

THE POLICE ARRIVED AT LAST, COMING IN A STAMPY GANG. THE staff stood waiting, huddled exactly as if cold, as if drenched in benthic water. Officers tried to take statements.

“I don’t understand, I’m afraid…” one might say.

“It’s gone.”

The crime scene was off-limits, but since Billy was the discoverer he was allowed to stay. He gave his statement, standing by the lack. When he was done and his questioner distracted, he stepped aside. He watched the police work. Officers looked at the antique once-animals that eyed them back, at the no giant tank, at the nowhere anything so big and missing as Architeuthis could be.

They measured the room as if maybe the dimensions were hiding things. Billy had no better ideas. The room looked huge. All the other tanks looked forlorn and far away, the specimens apologetic.

Billy stared at the stands on which the Architeuthis tank should be. He was still adrenalized. He listened to the officers.

“Search me for a fucking clue, mate…”

“Shit, you know what this means, don’t you?”

“Don’t even get me started. Hand me that tape measure.”

“Seriously, I’m telling you, this is a handover, no question…”

“What are you waiting for, mate? Mate?” That was to Billy, at last. An officer was telling him just-courteously to fuck off. He joined the rest of the staff outside. They milled and muttered, congregating roughly by jobs. Billy saw a debate among directors.

“What’s that about?” he said.

“Whether or not to close the museum,” Josie said. She was biting her nails.

“What?” Billy said. He took off his glasses and blinked at them aggressively. “What’s the sodding debate? How big does something have to be before its nickage closes us down?”

“Ladies and Gents.” A senior policeman clapped his hands for attention. His officers surrounded him. They were muttering to and listening to their shoulders. “I’m Chief Inspector Mulholland. Thanks for your patience. I’m sorry to’ve kept you all waiting.” The staff huffed, shifted, bit their nails.

“I’m going to ask you to please not talk about this, ladies and gents,” Mulholland said. A young female officer slipped into the room. Her uniform was unkempt. She was speaking on some phone hands-free, muttering at nothing visible. Billy watched her. “Please don’t talk about this,” Mulholland said again. The whispering in the room mostly ceased.

“Now,” Mulholland said, after a pause. “Who was it found it gone?” Billy put up his hand. “You, then, would be Mr. Harrow,” Mulholland said. “Can I ask the rest of you to wait, even if you’ve already told us what you know? My officers’ll speak to you all.”

“Mr. Harrow.” Mulholland approached him as the staff obeyed. “I’ve read your statement. I’d be grateful if you’d show me around. Could you take me on exactly the route you did with your tour?” Billy saw that the young female officer had gone.

“What is it you’re looking for?” he said. “You think you’re going to find it…?”

Mulholland looked at him kindly, as if Billy were slow. “Evidence.”

Evidence. Billy ran his hand through his hair. He imagined marks on the floor where some huge perfidious pulley system might have been. Drying puddles of preserver in a trail as telltale as crumbs. Right.

Mulholland summoned colleagues, and had Billy walk them through the centre. Billy pointed out what they passed in a terse parody of his usual performance. The officers poked at bits and pieces and asked what they were. “An enzyme solution,” Billy said, or, “That’s a time sheet.”

Mulholland said: “Are you alright, Mr. Harrow?”

“It’s kind of a big thing, you know?”

That wasn’t the only reason Billy glanced repeatedly behind him. He thought he heard a noise. A very faint clattering, a clanking like a dropped and rolling beaker. It was not the first time he had heard that. He had been catching little snips of such misplaced sound at random moments since a year after he had started at the centre. More than once he had, trying to find the cause, opened a door onto an empty room, or heard a faint grind of glass in a hallway no one could have entered.

He had concluded a long time ago that it was his mind inventing these just-heard noises. They correlated with moments of anxiety. He had mentioned the phenomenon to people, and though some had reacted with alarm, many told some anecdote about horripilation or twitches when they were under pressure, and Billy remained fairly sanguine.

In the tank room the forensic team was still dusting, photographing, measuring tabletops. Billy folded his arms and shook his head.

“It’s those Californian sods.” When he returned to where most of the staff were waiting he joked quietly about rival institutes to a workmate outside the tank room. About disputes over preservation methodology that had taken a dramatic turn. “It’s the Kiwis,” Billy said. “O’Shea finally gave in to temptation.”

HE DID NOT GO STRAIGHT BACK TO HIS FLAT. HE HAD A long-standing arrangement to meet a friend.

Billy had known Leon since they had been undergraduates at the same institute, though in different departments. Leon was enrolled in a PhD course in a literature department in London, though he never talked about it. He had since forever been working on a book called Uncanny Blossom. When Leon had told him, Billy had said, “I had no idea you were entering the Shit Title Olympics.”

“If you didn’t swim in your sump of ignorance you’d know that title’s designed to fuck with the French. Neither word’s translatable into their ridiculous language.”

Leon lived in a just-plausible rim of Hoxton. He camped up his role as Virgil to Billy’s Dante, taking Billy to art happenings or telling him about those he could not attend, exaggerating and lying about what they entailed. Their game was that Billy was in permanent anecdote overdraft, always owed Leon stories. Leon, skinny and shaven-headed and in a foolish jacket, sat in the cold outside the pizzeria with his long legs stretched out.

“Where’ve you been all my life, Richmal?” he shouted. He had long ago decided that blue-eyed Billy was named for another naughty boy, the William of Just William, and had illogically rechristened him for the book’s author.

“Chipping Norton,” said Billy, patting Leon’s head. “Theydon Bois. How’s the life of the mind?”

Marge, Leon’s partner, inclined her face for a kiss. The crucifix she always wore glinted.

He had only met her a few times. “She a god-botherer?” Billy had asked Leon after he first met her.

“Hardly. Convent girl. Hence tiny Jesus-shaped guilt trip between her tits.”

She was, as Leon’s girlfriends were more often than not, attractive and a little heavy, somewhat older than Leon, too old for the dilute emo-goth look she maintained. “Say Rubenesque or zaftig at your peril,” Leon had said.

“What’s zaftig?” Billy said.

“And fuck you ‘too old,’ Pauley Perrette’s way older.”

“Who’s that?”

Marge worked part-time at Southwark Housing Department and made video art. She had met Leon at a gig, some drone band playing in a gallery. Leon had deflected Billy’s Simpsons joke and told him that she was one of those people who had renamed herself, that Marge was short for Marginalia.

“Oh what? What’s her real name?”

“Billy,” Leon had said. “Don’t be such a wet blanket.”

“We’ve been watching a weird bunch of pigeons outside a bank is what we’ve been up to,” Leon said as Billy sat.

“We’ve been arguing about books,” said Marge.

“Best sort of argument,” said Billy. “What was the substance?”

“Don’t sidetrack him,” said Leon, but Marge was already answering: “Virginia Woolf versus Edward Lear.”

“Christ Alive,” said Billy. “Are those my only choices?”

“I went for Lear,” said Leon. “Partly out of fidelity to the letter L. Partly because given the choice between nonsense and boojy wittering you blatantly have to choose nonsense.”

“You obviously haven’t read the glossary to Three Guineas,” said Marge. “You want nonsense? She calls ‘soldiers’ ‘gutsgruzzlers,’ ‘heroism’ equals ‘botulism,’ ‘hero’ equals ‘bottle.’”

“Lear?” Billy said. “Really? In the Land of the Fiddly-Faddly, the BinkerlyBonkerly roams.” He took off his glasses and pinched the top of his nose. “Alright, let me tell you something. Here’s the thing,” he said at last and then whatever, it stalled. Leon and Marge stared at him.

Billy tried again. He shook his head. He clucked as if something were stuck in his mouth. He had at last almost to shove the information past his own teeth. “One of… Our giant squid is missing.” Saying it felt like puncturing a lid.

“What?” Leon said.

“I don’t…” Marge said.

“No, it doesn’t make any more sense to me.” He told them, step by impossible step.

“Gone? What do you mean ‘gone’? Why haven’t I heard anything about it?” Leon said at last.

“I don’t know. I’d have thought it would have… I mean, the police asked us to keep it secret-oops, look what I did-but I didn’t expect that to actually work. I’d thought it would be all over the Standard by now.”

“Maybe it’s a what-d’you-call-it, a D-Notice?” Leon said. “You know, one of those things where they stop journalists talking about stuff?”

Billy shrugged. “They’re not going to be able to… Half that tour group have probably blogged the shit out of it by now.”

“Someone’s probably registered bigsquidgone dot com,” Marge said.

Billy shrugged. “Maybe. You know, when I was on my way, I was thinking about maybe I shouldn’t… I almost didn’t tell you myself. Obviously put the fear of God in me. But the big issue for me’s not that the cops didn’t want us to tell: it’s the whole ‘totally impossible’ thing.”

THERE WAS A STORM THAT NIGHT AS HE HEADED HOME, A HORRIBLE one that filled the air with bad electricity. Clouds turned the sky dark brown. The roofs streamed like urinals.

As he entered his Haringay flat, precisely at the second he crossed the threshold, Billy’s phone rang. He stared through the window at the sodden trees and roofs. Across the street, a twirl of rubbishy wind was gusting around some klaggy-looking squirrel on a rooftop. The squirrel shook its head and watched him.

“Hello?” he said. “Yeah, this is Billy Harrow.”

“… somethingsomething, ’bout damn time you got back. So you’re coming in, yeah?” a woman on the line said.

“Wait, what?” The squirrel was still staring at him. Billy gave it the finger and mouthed Sod off. He turned from the window and tried to pay attention. “Who is this, sorry?” he said.

“Will you bloody listen? Better at shooting your mouth than listening, ain’t you? Police, mate. Tomorrow. Got it?”

“Police?” he said. “You want me back to the museum? You want-”

“No. The station. Fuck’s sake clean your ears.” Silence. “You there?”

“… Look, I don’t appreciate the way you’re-”

“Yeah, I don’t appreciate you gabbing away when you was told not to.” She gave him an address. He frowned as he scribbled it on some takeout menu.

“Where? That’s Cricklewood. That’s nowhere near the museum. What’s…? Why did they send someone from up there down to the museum…?”

“We’re done, mate. Just get there. Tomorrow.” She rang off and left him staring at the mouthpiece in his chilly room. The windows made sounds in the wind, as if they were bowing. Billy stared at the phone. He was annoyed that he felt obliged to acquiesce to that last order.

Chapter Three

BILLY HAD BAD DREAMS. HE WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE. THERE WAS no way yet he could know that night sweats were citywide. Hundreds of people who did not know each other, who did not compare their symptoms, slept harried. It was not the weather.

It meant a trek, that meeting to which he had been ordered, that he pretended to himself to consider ignoring. He considered, or, again, pretended to consider, calling his father. Of course he did not. He started to dial Leon’s number but again did not. There was nothing to add to what he had said. He wanted to tell someone else about the disappearance, that strange theft. He auditioned recipients of that phone call in his mind, but his energy to do so, to say anything, kept spilling out, left him repeatedly.

That squirrel was still there. He was sure it was the same animal that watched him from behind the gutter, like a dug-in soldier. Billy did not go in to work. Was not even sure if anyone was in that day and did not call to check. He called no one.

At last-late, as the sky became grey and flat, later than his rude interlocutor had desired, in some feeble faux disobedience-he set out from his block by a commercial yard near Manor House for a 253 bus. He walked through scuffing food wrappers, through newspapers, through flyers urging repentance being peeled one by one by the wind from a discarded pile. In the bus he looked down on the low flat roofs of bus shelters, plinths for leaves.

In Camden he took a Tube, came up again a few steps on for another bus. He checked his mobile repeatedly, but all he received was one text from Leon-LOST NE MORE TREASURES?? On that last leg Billy looked into areas of London he did not know but that felt tuggingly familiar, with their middling businesses and cheap eateries, the lampposts where unlit Christmas street ornaments put up early in readiness or left unplucked a whole year dangled like strange washing. He wore headphones, listened to a soundclash between MIA and an up-and-coming rapper. Billy wondered why he had not thought to insist the police just pick him up, if they were going to have their HQ in this ridiculously out-of-the-way patch.

Walking, even through his headphones Billy was startled by noises. For the first time ever outside the corridors of the Darwin Centre, he heard or imagined that glass noise. The light in that early evening was wrong. Everything’s screwed up, he thought. As if the fat spindle of the Architeuthis’s body had been slotted in and holding something in place. Billy felt like a lid unsecured and banging in the wind.

The station was just off the high street, much larger than he expected. It was one of those very ugly London buildings in mustard bricks that, instead of weathering grandly like their red Victorian ancestors, never age, but just get dirtier and dirtier.

He waited a long time in the waiting area. Twice he got up and asked to see Mulholland. “We’ll be with you shortly, sir,” said the first officer he asked. “And who the fuck’s he?” said the second. Billy grew more and more irritated, turning the pages of old magazines.

“Mr. Harrow? Billy Harrow?”

The man coming toward him was not Mulholland. He was small and skinny and trimly kempt. In his fifties, in plain clothes, a dated brown suit. He had his hands behind his back. As he waited, he leaned forward and up on his toes more than once, a dancey little tic.

“Mr. Harrow?” he said in a voice thin like his moustache. He shook Billy’s hand. “I’m Chief Inspector Baron. You met my colleague, Mulholland?”

“Yeah, where is he?”

“Yes, no. He’s not here. I’m taking over this investigation, Mr. Harrow. Sort of.” He tilted his head. “Apologies for keeping you waiting, and thank you very much for coming in.”

“What do you mean you’re taking over?” Billy said. “Whoever it was spoke to me last night didn’t… She was bloody rude, to be honest.”

“Though I suppose with us lot taking over your labs,” Baron said, “where else were you going to go, eh? I suppose there’ll be no pickling for you till we’re done, I’m afraid. Maybe you can think of it as a holiday.”

“Seriously, what’s the score?” Baron led Billy down striplit corridors. In the white light Billy realised how dirty his glasses were. “Why’ve you taken over? And you’re way out here… I mean, no offense…”

“Anyway,” said Baron. “I promise we won’t keep you any longer than we have to.”

“I’m not sure what it is I can do for you,” Billy said. “I already told you lot everything I know. I mean, that was Mulholland. Did he mess up then? Are you a cleaner-upper?”

Baron stopped and faced Billy. “It’s like a film, this, isn’t it?” he said. He smiled. “You say, ‘But I’ve told your officers everything,’ and I say, ‘Well now you can tell me,’ and you don’t trust me and we dance a little bit and then eventually after a few more questions you get to look horrified and say, ‘What, you think I had something to do with this?’ And we go round and round.”

Billy was speechless. Baron did not stop smiling.

“Rest assured, Mr. Harrow,” he said. “That is not what’s going on here. My absolute honour.” He held his hand up in a scout pledge.

“I never thought…” Billy managed to say.

“So having made that clear,” Baron said, “do you reckon we can dispense with the rest of the script and you can give me a hand? That’s a blinder, Mr. Harrow.” His little voice fluted. “That’s peachy. Now let’s get this done.”

It was Billy’s first time in an interview room. It was just like on telly. Small, beige, windowless. On the far side of a table were a woman and another man. The man was in his forties, tall and powerful. He wore a nondescript dark suit. His hair was receding, his haircut severe. He clasped his heavy hands and regarded Billy levelly.

The first thing Billy noticed about the woman was her youth. She was out of her teens maybe, but not by much. She was, he realized, the policewoman who’d done a brief cameo at the museum. She had on a blue Metropolitan Police uniform, but it was worn more informally than he would have expected her to get away with. It was not buttoned up, was a bit thrown-on. Clean, but rucked, hitched, and tweaked. She had on more makeup than he would have thought permissible, too, and her blonde hair was messily fancily styled. She looked like a pupil obeying the letter but straining against the spirit of school uniform rules. She did not even glance at him, and he could not see her face more clearly.

“Right then,” said Baron. The other man nodded. The young WPC leaned against the wall and fiddled with a mobile phone.

“Tea?” said Baron, gesturing Billy to a chair. “Coffee? Absinthe? I’m joking of course. I would say ‘Cigarette?’ but these days, you know.”

“No, I’m fine.” Billy said. “I’d like to just-”

“Of course, of course. Alright then.” Baron sat and pulled bits of paper from his pockets and searched through them. The scattiness was not convincing. “Tell me about yourself, Mr. Harrow. You’re a curator, I think?”

“Yeah.”

“Which means what?”

“Preserving, cataloguing, that sort of stuff.” Billy fiddled with his glasses so he did not have to meet anyone’s eye. He tried to see which way the woman was looking. “Consulting on displays, keeping stuff in good nick.”

“Always done it?”

“Pretty much.”

“And…” Baron squinted at a note. “It was you who prepared the squid, I’m told.”

“No. It was all of us. I was… it was a group effort.” The other man sat by Baron, saying nothing and looking at his own hands. The young woman sighed and prodded her phone. She appeared to be playing a game on it. She clicked her tongue.

“You were at the museum, weren’t you?” Billy said to her. She glanced at him. “Was it you who called me? Last night?” Her Wine-housey hair was distinctive. She said nothing.

“You…” Baron was pointing at Billy with a pen, still sorting through the papers, “are too modest. You are the squid man.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Billy shifted. “Something like that comes in, you know… We were all working on it. All hands on deck. I mean…” He indicated hugeness with his hands.

“Come come,” said Baron. “You’ve got a way with them, haven’t you?” Baron met his eye. “Everyone says so.”

“I don’t know.” Billy shrugged. “I like molluscs.”

“You are an endearingly modest young man,” Baron said. “And you are fooling no one.”

Curators worked across taxonomies. But it was a standing claim in the centre that Billy’s molluscs in particular were special. The stress could be on either word-it was Billy’s molluscs, and Billy’s molluscs, that kept pristine for ages in their solutions, that fell into particularly dramatic enjarred poses and held them well. It made no sense: one could hardly be any better at preserving a cuttlefish than a gecko or a house mouse. But the joke did not die, because there was a tiny something to it. Though in truth Billy had been pretty cack-handed when he had started. He had shattered his way through a fair few beakers, tubes, and flasks; had splayed more than one dead animal sodden on the lab floor before rather abruptly coming into his skills.

“What’s this got to do with anything?” Billy said.

“It has the following to do with what for,” Baron said. “See we’ve got you down here, or up here, depending which way you hold your map, for two reasons, Mr. Harrow. One, you’re the person who found the giant squid missing. And two, something a bit more specific. Something you mentioned.

“You know, I have to tell you,” Baron said. “I’ve never seen anything like this. I mean I’ve heard of stealing horses before. Plenty of dogs, of course. A cat or two. But…” He chuckled and shook his head. “Your guards’ve got a lot to answer for, haven’t they? I gather there’s a fair old degree of mea culpa-ing going on right now, as it goes.”

“Dane and that lot?” Billy said. “I guess so, I don’t know.”

“I didn’t mean Dane, actually. Interesting you bring him up. I was referring as they say to the other guards. But certainly Dane Parnell and his colleagues, too, must be feeling a bit daft. And of them more later. Recognise this?”

Baron slipped the page of a notepad across the table. On it was a vaguely asterisk design. Maybe it was a burst of radial sunbeams from a sun. Two of the several arms coiled at their ends, longer than the others.

“Yeah,” said Billy. “I drew that. It was what that bloke on the tour was wearing. I drew it for the guy interviewing me yesterday.”

“Do you know what this is, Mr. Harrow?” said Baron. “Can I call you Billy? Do you know?”

“How should I know? But the bloke who had this on, he was with me all the time. He never had any time to go off and do anything, you know, dodgy. I would’ve seen…”

“Have you seen this before?” The other man spoke, for the first time. He gripped his hands as if holding them back from something. His accent was classless and without any regional pitch-neutral enough that it had to have been cultivated. “Does it jog your memory?”

Billy hesitated. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Can I just… Who are you?”

Baron shook his head. The large man’s face did not change but for a slow blink. The woman glanced up from her phone, at last, and made some little tooth-kissing noise.

“This is Patrick Vardy, Mr. Harrow,” Baron said. Vardy clenched his fingers. “Vardy’s helping with our investigation.”

No rank, Billy thought. All the police he had met had been Constable So-and-so, DC This, Inspector That. But not Vardy. Vardy stood and walked to the edge of the room, out of the immediate light, made himself an illegitimate topic.

“So have you seen this before?” said Baron, tapping the paper. “Little squiggle ring any bells?”

“I don’t know,” said Billy. “Don’t think so. What is it? Do I get to know?”

“You told our colleagues back Kensington-side that the man wearing this seemed quote het up unquote, or something?” Baron said. “What about that?”

“Yeah, I told Mulholland,” Billy said. “What were those names you said?” he said to Vardy, who did not answer. “I don’t know whether the bloke was weird or what,” Billy said to Baron. He shrugged. “Some people who come see the squid are a bit…”

“Seen more like that recently?” Baron said. “The, ah, oddballs?” Vardy leaned forward and muttered something in his ear. The policeman nodded. “Any people getting unusually excited?”

“Squid geeks?” Billy said. “I don’t know. Maybe. There’s been a couple in costumes or weird clothes.” The woman made a note of something. He watched her do so.

“Alright, now tell me this,” Baron said. “Has anything strange been going on outside the museum recently? Any interesting leaflets being handed out, any pickets? Any protests? Have you clocked any other interesting bits of jewellery on any other visitors? I know, I’m asking as if you’re a magpie, all googly-eyed at shinies. But you know.”

“I don’t,” Billy said. “I don’t know. It has happened that we get nutters outside. As for this bloke, ask Dane Parnell.” He shrugged. “Like I said yesterday, I think he recognised the guy.”

“We would of course indeed like to have words with Dane Parnell. What with him and Mystery Pin Man seeming like they know each other and so forth. But we can’t.” Vardy whispered something else to him and Baron continued. “Because a bit like the specimen he was paid to look after, and indeed like Pin Man, Dane Parnell’s disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

Baron nodded. “Whereabouts unknown,” he said. “No one on the phone. Give the dog a bone. Not at home. Why might he disappear, you might ask. We are very keen to have him help us with the old enquiries.”

“You spoken to him?” said the WPC abruptly. Billy jumped in his chair and stared at her. She put her weight on one hip. She spoke quickly, with a London accent. “You talk a lot, don’t you? All sorts of chatting you shouldn’t be supposed to.”

“What…?” Billy said. “We haven’t said more than ten words to each other since he started working there.”

“What did he do before that?” Baron said.

“I’ve got no clue…”

“Listen to him squeak!” The woman sounded delighted.

Billy blinked. He tried to take it in good humour, smiled, tried to get her to smile back, failed. “To be honest,” he said, “I don’t even like the bloke. He’s chippy. Couldn’t be bothered to say hello, let alone anything else.”

Baron, Vardy and the woman looked at each other in speechless conclave. They communicated something with waggled eyebrows and pouted lips, repeated quick nods.

Baron said, slowly, “Well if you should think of anything, Mr. Harrow, do please let us know.”

“Yeah.” Billy shook his head. “Yeah, I will.” He put up surrender hands.

“Good man.” Baron stood. He gave Billy a card, shook his hand as if the gratitude were genuine, pointed him to the door. “Don’t go anywhere, will you? We might want to have another chat.”

“Yeah, I think we will,” the woman said.

“What did you mean ‘Pin Man’s disappeared’?” said Billy.

Baron shrugged. “Everything and everyone’s vanishing, isn’t it? Not that he ‘disappeared’ really; that would imply he was ever there. Your visitors have to book and leave a number. We’ve called everyone you were escorting yesterday. And the gentleman with the sparkle on his lapel…” Baron tap-tapped the design. “Ed, he told your desk his name was. Right, Ed. The number he gave’s unregistered, and no one’s answering.”

“Hie thee to your books, Billy,” Vardy said as Billy opened the door. “I’m disappointed in you.” He tapped the paper. “See what Kooby Derry and Morry can show you.” The words were weird but weirdly familiar.

“Wait, what?” said Billy from the doorway. “What was that?” Vardy waved him away.

BILLY TRIED AND FAILED TO PARSE THE ENCOUNTER ON HIS BEWILDERED way south. He had not been under arrest: he could have left at any time. He had his phone out, ready to do a tirade for Leon, but again for reasons he could not put into words, he did not make the call.

Nor did he go home. Instead, full of an unending sense of being under observation, Billy went to the centre of London. From café to bookshop café, mooching through paperbacks on his way through too much tea.

He did not have a phone with Internet connection, nor did he have his laptop with him, so could not test his intuition that his own reveal the previous night notwithstanding, there would be no information about the squid’s disappearance in the news. The London papers certainly did not cover it. He did not eat, though he stayed out late enough, hours, that it was past time, until it was evening, then early night. He did not really do anything but moodily consider and grow frustrated, did not call the centre, only tried to consider possibilities.

What came back and back to him, what grew to gnaw him most throughout those hours, were the names that Vardy had said. Billy was absolutely certain he had heard them, that they meant something to him. He regretted that he hadn’t insisted on more from Vardy: he did not even know how to spell them. He scribbled possibilities on a scrap of paper, kubi derry, morry, moray, kobadara, and more.

Got some bloody poking around to do, he thought.

On his way home at last his attention was drawn, he was not sure why, to a man on the backseat of his bus. He tried to work out what he had noticed. He could not get a clear view.

The guy was big and broad, in a hoodie, looking down. Whenever Billy turned, he was hunched over or with his face to the glass. Everything they passed tried to grab Billy’s attention.

It was as if he were watched by the city’s night animals and buildings, and by every passenger. I shouldn’t feel like this, Billy thought. Neither should things. He watched a woman and man who had just got on. He imagined the couple shifting straight through the metal chair behind him, out of his sight.

A gust of pigeons shadowed the bus. They should be sleeping. They flew when the bus moved, stopped when it stopped. He wished he had a mirror, so he could watch without turning his head, see that man in back’s evasive face.

They were on the top deck, above the most garish of central London’s neon, by low treetops and first-floor windows, the tops of street signs. The light zones were reversed from their oceanic order, rising, not pitching, into dark. The street on which lamps shone and that was glared by shopwindow fluorescence was the shallowest and lightest place: the sky was the abyss, pointed by stars like bioluminescence. In the bus’s upper deck they were at the edges of deep, the fringe of the dysphotic zone, where empty offices murked up out of sight. Billy looked up as if down into a deep-sea trench. The man behind him was looking up, too.

At the next stop, which was not his, Billy waited until the doors had closed before bolting from his seat and down the stairs, shouting, “Wait, wait, sorry!”

The bus left him and headed into the dark like a submersible. Through the dirty window at the rear of the top, he saw the man look straight at him.

“Shit,” Billy said. “Shit.”

He jerked his hand defensively out. The glass flexed and the man jerked backward as the bus receded. Billy’s own glasses shivered on his face. He saw no one moving behind the window, past a crack in the glass that had suddenly bisected it. The man he had seen was Dane Parnell.

Chapter Four

BILLY SAT UP LATE THAT WEIRD DEEP NIGHT. HE CLOSED THE curtains of his living room, imagining the unsavoury squirrel watching him as he poked around on his laptop. Why would Dane have followed him? How? He tried to think like a detective. He was bad at it.

He could call the police. He’d seen Dane commit no crime, but still. He should. He could call Baron, as he had requested. But despite his discomfort-call it fear-Billy did not want to do that.

There had been such a strange gaming edge to all his interactions with Baron, Vardy and the woman. It had been so clear that he was being played, that information was being held from him, that they had no consideration for him at all except insofar as he pushed forward whatever their opaque agenda was. He did not want to be involved. Or, and or, he wanted to understand this himself.

He slept a very little at last. In the morning, he discovered that it was not as hard to regain entry to the Darwin Centre as he had imagined. The two police at the entrance were not terribly interested, and examined his pass peremptorily. They interrupted his carefully constructed story of why he had to go back in to sort out some stuff on his desk that wouldn’t wait but that he’d be careful and quick and blah blah. They just waved him past.

“Can’t go to the tank room,” one of them said. Alright, Billy thought. Whatever.

He was looking for something, but he had no idea what. He hesitated by retorts and sinks, by plastic containers of diaphanised fish, their flesh made invisible by enzymes, their bones made blue. A common room was full of stacks of posters for the Beagle Project, a retracing of those crucial early days of Darwin’s journeys, a rerun in a floating laboratory kitschly made to look like the Beagle.

“Hey, Billy,” said Sara, another curator who’d been granted entry, for whatever reason. “Did you hear?” She looked around and lowered her voice, passed on some rumour so evanescent and vapid it left his head as soon as she said it. Folklore was self-generating. Billy nodded as if he agreed, shook his head as if it were a shocking possibility, whatever it was she was talking about.

“Did you hear?” she said as well. “Dane Parnell’s disappeared.”

Well that he heard. It gave Billy another cold sensation, as he had had the previous night when he had seen Dane all those yards away, through the bus’s glass, and as if Billy had touched him back.

“I was talking to one of the police,” Sara said, “doing stuff in the tank room, and he was saying that they’ve heard things since, you know, it went. Something clattering.”

“Whooo,” said Billy, like a ghost. She smiled. But Those are my hallucinations, he thought. It was like theft. Those were his imaginings that the police were hearing.

He logged in at a workstation and searched, trying endless different spellings of the names Vardy had said, referring to his scribbled paper and crossing them off, one by one. Eventually he entered the renditions “Kubodera” and “Mori.” “Oh man,” he whispered. Stared at the screen and sat back. “Of course.”

No wonder those names had tantalised. He was ashamed of himself. Kubodera and Mori were the researchers who, a few months previously, had been the first researchers to catch the giant squid on camera in the wild.

He downloaded their essay. He looked again at the pictures. “First-ever observations of a live giant squid in the wild” the paper was called, as if ten-year-olds had taken control of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. First ever.

More than one of his colleagues had printouts of those pictures above their desks. When the images were released, Billy himself had turned up at the office with two bottles of Cava, and had proposed that the anniversary should henceforth be an annual holiday, Squid-day. Because these pictures, as he had said to Leon at the time, were momentous shit.

The first was the most famous, the one they had used on the news. Ajut into view in dark water almost a kilometre down, an eight-metre squid. Its arms blossomed, curved left and right around the bait at the end of the perspectived line. But it was the second picture at which Billy stared.

Again the line descended; again there in ominous water was the animal. But this time it was coming mouth-on. It was caught in a near-perfect radial limb-burst: at the apex, the bite. The two hunting arms, longer limbs with paddle-shaped hands, were recoiled in the dark.

A tentacular explosion. That picture banished all slanderous theories of Architeuthis as sluggish predator-by-accident, tentacles adangle in deepwater lethargy for prey to bumble into, no more a hunter than some idiot jellyfish.

That image had been cherished by fan-partisans of Mesonychoteuthis, the “colossal squid,” Architeuthis’s huge, squat-bodied rival. Which, Mesonychoteuthis, yes, had also been emerging into the camera and video gaze with highly and historically unusual enthusiasm recently. And it was, yes, a terrifying animal. True, it had greater mass; its mantle was longer; granted, its tentacles grabbed not with suckers but with cruel cat-curved claws. But whatever its shape, however its stats and the Architeuthis’s compared, it would never be the giant squid. It was a parvenu monster. Hence the trash-talk of those who researched it, eager to demote the long-term kraken for their new favourite: “without parallel,” “… even larger,” “an order of magnitude meaner.”

But observe the Kubodera/Mori images. Hardly the weak opportunist the haters had dreamed up. Architeuthis did not wait and dangle. Architeuthis loomed, jetted from the abyss, hunting.

Billy stared at the screen. Ten arms, five lines crisscrossing; two longer than the others. The silver design on the pin he’d seen was of this predator incoming. As seen by prey.

HE WALKED THE CORRIDORS CARRYING PAPERS SO HE LOOKED AS IF he was going from somewhere to somewhere else. He entered rooms he was allowed to enter, nodded in greeting to the police guarding those he was not. His revelation notwithstanding, he still had no idea what it was he was hoping to find.

He left the Darwin Centre for the main museum. He saw no police there. He walked the route he used to take as a boy, past the staring ichthyosaur, stone ammonites, past where was now the café. There at last, in the middle of everything and everyone, he thought perhaps he heard a sound. The noise of a jar rolling. Very faint.

It came-or sounded as if it did to him, he corrected himself-from a door off-limits to visitors, that led downstairs to storage areas and undercorridors. He listened at it, crowds to his back. He heard nothing. He entered the keycode and descended.

Billy walked windowless halls underground. He told himself that he did not think he was listening for anything real. That whatever hint it was he was looking for came from inside him. So alright, he said to himself. Help me out. What am I looking for? What are you-what am I-on about?

Guards and curators raised their hands as he passed in brief greetings. The rooms and hallways were lined with industrial shelving, on which were cardboard boxes labelled in thick pen; glass cases empty, or full of surplus specimens; papers; unneeded furniture. There below the heating pipes, by high brick walls and pillars, Billy heard the noise again. From around a corner. He followed it like bread crumbs.

The corridor opened out, not a room but a sudden large hallway. It was stacked quite full of taxidermy, charnel Victoriana. Mammal heads watched from walls, like a hundred Faladas; bisons stiff as aging soldiers by a plaster iguanodon and a tatty emu. There was a thicket of the preserved necks-up of giraffes, their heads a canopy above.

A clink, a clack. Under the striplights the stuffed bodies shed hard shadows. Billy heard another tiny noise. It came from the dark by the wall, deep in the specimen undergrowth.

Billy stepped off the path. He pressed through unyielding antique bodies, shouldering deeper into the little forest of animal remains. He glanced up as if at birds and pressed toward the whitewashed walls. He did not hear another of the sounds, only his own efforts and the brush of his clothes on dry skins. He rounded a stack of hippo parts, and came abruptly up against something of which he could for moments not make sense.

Glass, an old glass container as large as any he had seen. A chest-high lidded cylinder with scalloped base, full of pee-coloured preserver, and a specimen at which he stared. Something rather too big for the container, shoved crudely inside. Part-peeled, with eyes and paws up against the glass and ragged skin suspended like open wings, but even as he thought that he shook his head no.

Billy saw that what he had thought pelt was a ruined shirt, what he had thought peeled was hairlessness and bloat, that oh my Jesus fucking Christ what stared deadly at him in broken pose pressed up and misshaped against the bottle’s inside was a man.

BILLY STAYED OUT OF THE POLICE’S WAY. IT WAS NOT EVEN HIM WHO called them. In those initial terrified moments, when he had torn upstairs unable to breathe, he had not thought to make the call. He had instead run to the two officers guarding the Darwin Centre and screamed, “Quick! Quick!”

Their colleagues came quickly in numbers, cordoning off more of the museum, declaring the basement out of bounds. They took Billy’s prints. Gave him hot chocolate for shock.

No one questioned him. They put him in a conference room and told him not to leave, but no one asked how he had found what he had found. Billy waited by an overhead projector, a TV on a rolling base. He listened to the museum being cleared, the consternation of the crowds.

He wanted solitude more than he wanted fresh air. He wanted his body to stop the last of its panicked shaking, so he sat and waited, as he had been told to, his glasses steaming when he sipped, until the door opened and Baron peered in.

“Mr. Harrow,” Baron said, and shook his head. “Mister Hah-row…

“Mr. Harrow, Billy, Billy Harrow. What have you been up to?”

Chapter Five

BARON SAT NEXT TO BILLY AND SHRUGGED AT HIM SYMPATHETICALLY.

“Bit of a shock,” he said.

“What the hell?” Billy said. “What the hell, how did they get that…? What even happened?”

“Gives a whole new meaning to ‘Someone getting bottled,’ doesn’t it? I apologise, I apologise,” Baron said. “Morgue humour. Defence mechanism. You’ve had a horrible shock, I do know. Believe me.”

“What’s going on?” Billy said. Baron said nothing. “I saw Dane,” Billy said.

“Is that right?” Baron said slowly. “Really now?”

“I was coming home. Last night. On a bus. He was on there. He must’ve been following me. Unless he could’ve just… no. He must’ve been there deliberately. It wouldn’t be hard for him to find out where I live…”

“Alright. Alright, now, listen…”

“I feel like I’m going mad,” Billy said. “Even before that… Before what’s in the basement. I’ve been feeling like I’m being followed. I didn’t say anything because, it’s stupid, you know…” The wind shook the windows abruptly. “I tell you I’m losing it… What happened downstairs? Did Dane do that?”

“Let me think for a second, Mr. Harrow,” Baron said.

“When I was in with you, why was there a psychology professor there? Vardy. That’s what he does. I looked him up. Come on, Baron, don’t look like that-all it took was a bit of an online poke about. I could tell he wasn’t a cop.”

“Is that so? You can ask him yourself in a bit.”

“Was he there because… Is it that you think I’m mad, Baron?” There was another silence. “Is that what you think’s going on with me? Because, Jesus…” Billy breathed out shakily. “Right at the moment, I think you have a point.”

“No,” said Baron. “None of us think you’re losing it. Rather the opposite.” He glanced at his watch. This time, when he arrived, Vardy shook Billy’s hand. He had one of those unpleasant too-hard grips. He was carrying a briefcase.

“Did you have a look?” Baron said.

“It’s pretty much as you’d expect,” Vardy said.

“What?” Billy shouted. “What you’d expect? What about it did you expect, exactly?”

“We’ll discuss that,” Vardy said. “We’ll discuss that, Billy. Now wait. I gather you saw Dane Parnell.”

Billy ran his fingers through his hair. Vardy seemed too large for the chair he was in: he squeezed his shoulders together, as if to avoid spilling himself. He and Baron looked at each other, sharing another unspoken moment.

“Right then,” said Baron. “Let’s have another go. Patrick Vardy, Billy Harrow, curator. Billy Harrow, Patrick Vardy. Professor of psychology at Central London University. As I gather you know.”

“Yeah, like I say,” Billy muttered. “My Google-fu is strong.”

“I owe you an apology, Mr. Harrow,” Baron said. “I sort of assumed you’d be as half-arsed as most people. Wouldn’t even occur to them to look up our names.”

“So how much do you know about us?” Vardy said. “About me?”

“You’re a psych.” Billy shrugged. “You work with the cops. So I figure… You’re a profiler, aren’t you? Like Cracker? Like Silence of the Lambs?” Vardy smiled, a bit. “That poor sod shoved into the bottle, downstairs,” Billy said. “He’s not the first. Is that it? That’s it, isn’t it. You’re looking for someone… You’re looking for Dane. Dane’s some kind of serial killer. You’re here to work out what his thing is. And, oh Christ, he wants me, doesn’t he? He’s following me. And it’s something to do with…”

But he stopped. How did any of this make sense of the squid? Baron pursed his lips.

“Not exactly,” said Baron. “It’s not quite right.” He chopped his hands through the air onto the tabletop, organising invisible thoughts.

“Look, Mr. Harrow,” Baron said. “Here’s the thing. Go back a step. Who’d want to steal a giant squid? Never mind how just yet. That’s not important. Right now, focus on why. It seems like you might be able to help us, and we might be able to help you. I’m not saying you’re in danger, but I’m saying that-”

“Oh Christ…”

“Billy Harrow, listen to me. You need to know what’s going on. We’ve talked it over. We’re going to tell you the full story. And this is in confidence. Which this time please keep, thank you. Now, all this is not the sort of thing we normally lay out for people. We think it might help you to know, and to be perfectly frank we think it might help us too.”

“Why does Dane want me?” Billy said.

“I wasn’t on this case originally, as you know. There are certain flags that go up, you might say, under certain circumstances. Certain sorts of crime. The disappearance of your squid. Plus there are aspects of what’s downstairs that are… relevant. Like for example the fact that the diameter of that jar’s opening isn’t big enough to have got that gentleman inside.”

“What?”

“But what really clinched our interest,” Baron said, “what really rang my bell-and I mean that literally, there’s a bell on my desk-is when you drew us that picture.”

From his briefcase Vardy pulled a photocopy of the druggily exaggerated asterisk.

“I know what that is,” said Billy. “Kubodera and Mori-”

“So,” Baron said, “I head up a specialist unit.”

“What unit?”

Vardy pushed another piece of paper across the table. It was the sign again, the ten-armed spread with two longer limbs. But not the one Billy had drawn. The angles, the lengths of the arms, were slightly different.

“That was drawn a little over a month ago,” Baron said. “A bookshop got busted into one night and a bunch of stuff was taken. Bloke wearing this sign had come in a couple of days running beforehand, not buying anything, looking around. Nervous.”

“If this were a question of a couple of kids both wearing Obey Giant T-shirts, we’d not be bothered,” Vardy said, quickly, in his deep voice. “This is not a bloody meme. Though it may be going that way and thank you very much that’ll complicate things very nicely.” Billy blinked. “Are you a graffiti aficionado? It’s started to crop up. Early days. It’ll be on stickers on lampposts and student rucksacks soon. Turns out that this”-he flicked the paper-“is appropriate for the times.”

“It just fits,” said Baron.

“But not quite yet,” Vardy said. “So when it turns up twice, we sniff a pattern.”

“The guy who was burgled,” Baron said. “It’s Charing Cross Road. He stocks a lot of junk and a little bit of proper antiquarian stuff. Six books nicked that night. Five had just come in. Maybe two, three hundred quids’ worth. They were all on the desk up front, waiting to be sorted. At first he thought that was all that was gone.

“But where there are locked cabinets, the glass’s broken and something’s missing from a top shelf.” He held up a finger. “One book. From a bunch of old academic journals. He worked out what it was was gone.”

Baron looked down and read laboriously. “For-hand-linger… ved de Skandinav-something,” he said. “The 1857 volume.”

“How’s your Danish, Billy?” said Vardy. “Ring any bells?”

“Some villain wants to make it look like he’s rushed in and snagged at random,” Baron said. “So he grabs a load of books off the counter. But he then runs twenty feet down a corridor, to one specific locked bookshelf, breaks one specific pane of glass, takes one specific old book.” Baron shook his head. “It was that one journal. That’s what this was all about.”

“So we asked the Danish Royal Academy for the contents,” Vardy said. “Too old to be on databases.”

“To be honest, we didn’t think much of it at the time,” Baron said. “It wasn’t a priority. It only got passed to us because we’d seen that symbol knocking around a bit. When the list came in from Copenhagen nothing stood out. But. When we heard the symbol’d turned up here, and just what’d happened, one of those articles nicked weeks ago came back sharpish.”

“Pages one eighty-two to one eighty-five,” Vardy said.

“I won’t try the Scandiwegian,” Baron said, reading. “It’s an article about blaeksprutter, so they say. Translation: Japetus Steenstrup. ‘Several Particulars about the Giant Cuttlefish of the Atlantic.’”

“TO RECAP,” BARON SAID. “WEEKS BEFORE YOUR SQUID WAS SNAFFLED, someone pinched an original copy of that article.”

“You’ll have heard of the author,” Vardy said. Billy’s mouth was open. He had. The giant squid was Architeuthis dux, but its genus was named for the man who had taxonomised it: Architeuthis Steenstrup.

“Now,” Vardy said. “Two crimes united by a questionable necklace do not a conspiracy make. However. Two crimes-three, now, with the chap downstairs-united by such jewellery and by giant squid, and our radar does indeed tend to ping.”

“That is the sort of thing that gets us interested,” Baron said.

“‘Us’?” Billy said at last. “Who is ‘us’?”

“We,” said Baron, “are the FSRC.”

“The what?”

Baron folded his hands. “Do you remember that lot calling themselves New Rosicrucians?” he said. “Who kidnapped that girl in Walthamstow?” Baron thumbed in Vardy’s direction. “Found them. And he was I suppose you’d call it consulting during seven/seven, too. That sort of thing. It’s an area of concern.”

“What area?”

“Alright, alright,” Baron said. “You sound like you’re about to cry.” Vardy handed Billy a piece of paper. It was, oddly, his CV. His PhD was in psychology, but his master’s was in theology. His first degree divinity. Billy pushed his glasses on and scanned the publications list, the Positions Currently Held.

“You’re an editor of The Journal of Fundamentalism Studies?” Billy said. This was a test.

Baron said, “The FSRC is the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit.”

Billy stared at him, at Vardy, at the CV again. “You are a profiler,” he said. “You’re a cult profiler.”

Vardy even smiled.

“THERE’S…” BARON COUNTED ON HIS FINGERS. “AUM SHINRIKYO… The Returner Sect… Church of Christ Hunter… Kratosians, close to home some of them… Do you have any idea the increase in cult-related violence in the last ten years? Of course you don’t, because unless it’s, boo, Al Qaeda and the Al-Qaedalinos, it doesn’t come close to the news. But they’re the least of our worries. And part of the reason you haven’t heard about this is because we are good at our job. We’ve been keeping the streets safe.

“That’s why you were encouraged to keep shtum. But you told someone something. Which A, you should not have done, and B, is not unimpressive. Collingswood’s going to have to ask you again, a bit harder.

“It’s not as if we’re exactly secret,” he said. “It’s not so much ‘plausible denial’-that’s not the best strategy these days. It’s more ‘plausibly uninteresting.’ Everyone’ll be like, ‘FSRC? Why on earth you asking about them? Silly nonsense, bit of an embarrassment…’” He smiled. “You get the idea.”

Billy could hear officers in the corridors outside. Phones were ringing.

“So,” said Billy at last. “So you’re cult people. So what’s this got to do with that poor sod in the basement? And what’s it got to do with me?”

Vardy brought up a video file on his laptop and placed it where all three men could watch. An office, a tidy desk, books on the walls, a printer and PC. There was Vardy, sitting three-quarters toward the camera, another man with his back to the lens. All that could be seen of him was slicked-back thinning hair and a grey jacket. The colours were not very good.

“… so.” Billy heard the hidden-faced man say. “I done a stint with that bunch in Epping, bog-standard manickies they are I think, balance balance balance not very interesting, I wouldn’t waste your time.”

“What about this?” said video-Vardy, and held out what Billy could see was the symbol he himself had drawn.

The obscured man leaned in. “Oh right,” he said. He spoke in a breathless conspiratorial drone. “The tooths, the toothies,” he said. “Yeah no I don’t know,” he said. “The toothies they’re new I think I hen’t seen them much except they been drawing that leaving it about. A sign a sign. You been to Camden? Saw it and I thought I’ll have some of that but they’re odd ones, they sort of wave hello but then you can’t find much of them. So. Are they secret?”

“Are they?” said video-Vardy.

“Well you tell me you tell me. I can’t get to them and you know me so it’s, you know it’s tantalising is what it is.”

“Tenets?”

“Got me. What I hear,” the man made gossip-talk movements with his fingers, “all I can tell you is they talk about the dark, the rise, the you know the reaching out. They love that the outreaching, hafay…”

“What?”

“Hafay hafay, where’s your Greek professor? Alpha phi eta, hafe, hapsis if you like, touchy touchy, that’s what they say-it’s a haptic story, this one.”

Vardy froze the picture. “He’s sort of a freelance research assistant. A fan. He’s a collector.”

“Of what?” Billy said.

“Religions. Cults.”

“How the hell do you collect a cult?”

“By joining it.”

OUTSIDE THE WINDOW WERE THE WIND-BOISTEROUS LIMBS OF trees. The room felt very close. Billy looked away from the light outside.

The man on-screen was not the only one, Vardy said. A small obsessive tribe. Heresy geeks, going sect to sect, accumulating creeds as greedy as any Renfields. Soldiers of the Saviour Worm one week, Opus Dei or the Bobo Dreds the next, with genius for devotion and sudden brief bursts of sincerity sufficient to be welcomed as neophytes. Some were always cynically in it for the notch on the bedpost, others Damascene certain for two or three days that this one was different, until they remembered their own natures and excommunicated themselves with indulgent chuckles.

They gathered to compare gnoses, in Edgware Road cafés over sheesha or pubs in Primrose Hill or somewhere called Almagan Yard, mostly their favoured hangouts in the “trap streets,” Vardy said. They traded dissident mysteries in vague competition, as if faiths were Top Trumps cards.

“What about your apocalypse, then?” “Well, the universe is a leaf on the time-tree, and come autumn it’s going to shrivel and fall off into hell.” Murmurs of admiration. “Ooh, nice one. My new lot say ants are going to eat the sun.”

“HE WANTS TO JOIN THESE ‘TOOTHIES,’ YOU SEE,” VARDY SAID. “HE’S a completist. But he can’t find them.”

“What’s a trap street?” Billy was ignored.

“Toothies,” Baron said. “Get it? Harrow, sit down.” Billy had stood up and was walking toward the door. “Toothies,” Baron said. “Get it? Tyuh-tyuh-tyuh-Tyoothies.”

“I’ve had enough,” Billy said.

“Sit down,” Vardy said.

“We’re the bloody cult squad, Harrow,” Baron said. “Why d’you think we’re called in? Who do you think’s responsible for what’s going on?”

“Teuthies.” Vardy smiled. “Worshippers of the giant squid.”

Chapter Six

“THE ARTICLE THAT GOT NICKED,” SAID BARON. BILLY STOOD still, his hand on the doorknob. “It’s where old Japetus names Architeuthis for the first time. ’Course you can get hold of a reprint, but originals are a bit special, aren’t they?”

“He was refuting folklore,” said Vardy. “The whole piece is him pooh-poohing some fairy story, and saying, ‘No no, there’s a rational explanation, gentlemen.’ You could say it’s where the sea monster meets…” He gestured around him. “This. The modern world.” The stress was mockery. “Out of fable into science. The end of an old order. Right?” He wagged his finger no. Baron watched him indulgently.

“Death of legend?” Vardy said. “Because he gives it a name? He said it was Ar-chi-teu-this. Not ‘great’ squid, Billy. Not ‘big,’ not even ‘giant.’ ‘Ruling’.” He blinked. “It rules? That’s him being faithful to the Enlightenment? He shoves it into taxonomy, yeah, but as what? As a bloody demiurge.

“He was a prophet. At the end of the lecture, you know what he did? Oh, he had props. He was a performer like Billy Graham. Brings out a jar, and what’s in it? A beak.” Vardy snap-snapped his fingers. “Of a giant squid.”

The light was going: some cloud cover arriving, as if summoned by drama. Billy stared at Vardy. He had his glasses in his hand, so Vardy was a touch hazy. Billy had actually heard this story, or its outlines, he remembered: an anecdote in a lecture hall. Where they could, his lecturers, with vicarious panache, would spice the stories of their forebears’ theories. They told anecdotes of a polymath Faraday; read Feynman’s achingly sad letter to his dead wife; described Edison’s swagger; eulogised Curie and Bogdanov martyred to their utopian researches. Steenstrup had been part of that dashing company.

The way Vardy spoke was almost as if he could no-shit see Steenstrup’s performance. As if he were looking at the black weapon thing Steenstrup had lifted from the jar. That leviathan part, more like a tool of alien design than any mouth. Preserved, precious, manifest like the finger bone of a saint. Whatever he had claimed, Steenstrup’s bottle had been a reliquary.

“That article,” Vardy said. “It’s a fulcrum. With a certain way of looking at things, it would easily be worth breaking the law for. Because it’s sacred text. It’s gospel.”

BILLY SHOOK HIS HEAD. HE FELT AS IF HIS EARS WERE RINGING.

“And that,” Baron said, audibly amused, “is what the professor gets paid for.”

“What our thieves have been doing is building a library,” said Vardy. “I bet you good money that over the last few months stuff by Verrill and Ritchie and Murray and other, you know, classic teuthic literature has also been nicked.”

“Jesus,” said Billy. “How do you know so much about this?” Vardy swatted the question away-literally, with his hand-as if it were an insect.

“It’s what the man do,” Baron said. “Zero to guru in forty-eight hours.”

“Let’s move on,” said Vardy.

“So,” Billy said. “You think this cult nicked the book, took the squid, and killed that guy? And now they want me?”

“Did I say that?” Vardy said. “I can’t be sure these squiddists did anything. Something doesn’t add up, to be honest.”

Billy started up unhappy performed laughter at that. “D’you think?” he said.

But Vardy ignored him and went on. “But it’s something to do with them.”

“Come on,” said Billy. “This is batshit.” He pleaded. “A religion about squid?”

The little room felt like a trap. Baron and Vardy watched him. “Come on now,” Vardy said. “You can have faith in anything,” Vardy said. “Everything’s fit to be worshipped.”

“You going to say this is all a coincidence?” Baron said.

“Your squid just disappeared, right?” Vardy said.

“And no one’s watching you,” Baron said. “And no one did anything to that poor sod downstairs. It was suicide by bottle.”

“And you,” said Vardy, staring at Billy, “you don’t feel anything’s wrong with the world, right now. Ah, you do, though, don’t you? I can see. You want to hear this.”

A silence. “How did they do it?” said Billy.

“Sometimes you can’t get bogged down in the how,” Baron said. “Sometimes things happen that shouldn’t, and you can’t let that detain you. But the why? we can make headway with.”

Vardy walked to the window. He was against its light, a dark shape. Billy could not tell if Vardy was facing him or facing out.

“It’s always bells and smells,” Vardy said, from his obscurity. “Always high-church. They might… abjure the world”-he rolled the pomp of the phrase around-“but for sects like this it’s all rites and icons. That’s the point. Not many cults have had their reformation.” He walked out of the window’s glare. “Or if they have, hello you poor buggers in Freezone, along comes a Council of Trent and the old order bites back. They really have to have their sacraments.” He shook his head.

Billy paced between posters, cheap artworks and pinboard message exchanges between colleagues he did not know. “If you worship that animal… I’ll put it simply,” Vardy said. “You, your Darwin Centre…” Billy did not understand the scorn there. “You and your colleagues, Billy-you put God on display. Now, who would a devotee be not to liberate it?

“It’s lying there pickled. Their touchy hunter god. You can imagine how that plays out in psalms. How God’s described.”

“Right,” Billy said. “Right, you know what? I really need to get out of here.”

Vardy seemed to quote: “‘It moves through darkness, emptying into that ink ink of its own.’ Something like that. Shall we say a black cloud in water already black? There’s a koan for you, Billy. It’s a tactile god with as many tentacles as we have fingers, and is that coincidence? Because that,” he added, in a more everyday voice, “is how this works, you see?”

Baron beckoned Billy to the door. “They’ll have verses about its mouth,” Vardy said behind them. “The hard maw of a sky-bird in the deep trenches of water.” He shrugged. “Something like that. You’re sceptical? Au contraire: it’s a perfect god, Billy. It’s the bloody choicest perfect simon-pure exact god for today, for right now. Because it’s bugger-all like us. Alien. That old beardy bully was never plausible, was he?”

“Plausible enough for you, you bloody hypocrite,” Baron said jovially. Billy followed him into the corridor.

“They venerate the thing,” Vardy said, following. “They have to save it from the insult of what I strongly suspect is your cheerful affection. I bet you have a nickname for it, don’t you?” He tilted his head. “I bet that nickname is ‘Archie.’ I see I’m right. Now, you tell me. What person of faith could possibly allow that?”

THEY TRACED THROUGH THE MUSEUM’S CORRIDORS, AND BILLY HAD no idea where they were going. He felt absolutely untethered. As if he were not there. The hallways were all deserted. The darks and woods of the museum closed up behind him.

“How do you…? What is it you’re doing?” he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense.

Vardy even smiled. “Paranoia,” he said. “Theology.”

They reached an exit Billy had never used, and he gasped in the cool air of the outside. The day blustered: the trees wriggled in wind and clouds raced as if on missions. Billy sat on the stone steps.

“So the guy in the basement…” he said.

“Don’t know yet,” Vardy said. “He got in the way. Dissident, guard, sacrifice, something. At the moment I’m talking about the shape of something.”

“None of this should be your business,” Baron said. With his hands in his pockets he addressed his remarks to one of the building’s stonework animals. The air shoved Billy’s hair and clothes around. “You shouldn’t have to fuss with any of this. But here’s the thing. What with Parnell on the bus, what with that sort of attention, it just seems like for whatever reasons… they’ve noticed you, Mr. Harrow.”

He caught Billy’s eye. Billy twitched in the attention. He glanced around the grounds, beyond the gate to the street, into the shifting plant life. Bits of rubbish shifted in gusts, crawled on the pavement like bottom-feeders.

“You’re part of some conspiracy that trapped their god,” Vardy said. “But more than that. You’re the go-to squid guy, Mr. Harrow. You seem to have got someone interested. As far as they’re concerned, you’re a person of interest.”

He stood between Billy and the wind. “You found the squid gone,” he said. “You put it there in the first place. It’s always been you who’s had magic mollusc fingers.” He twiddled his own. “Now you found this dead bloke. Is it any wonder they’re interested?”

“You’ve been feeling… like stuff’s going on,” Baron said. “Would that be fair to say?”

“What’s happening to me?” Billy managed to speak calmly.

“Don’t worry, Billy Harrow. That’s perspicacity, not paranoia, that, what you’re feeling.” Baron turned, taking in the London panorama, and wherever he looked, whenever he paused facing some particular patch of blackness, Billy looked too. “There is something wrong. And it’s noticed you. That’s not always the best place to be.” Billy sat in the middle of that world’s notice, like a tiny prey.

“What is it you want to do?” Billy said. “I mean, find out who killed that guy. Right? But what about me? Are you going to get the squid back?”

“That would be our intent, yes,” Baron said. “Cult robbery, after all, is part of our remit. And now there’s murder, too. Yes. And your safety is of, shall we say, no little concern to us.”

“What do they want? What’s Dane in all this?” Billy said. “And you’re some secret cult squad, right? So why are you telling me this?”

“I know, I know, you’re feeling a little exposed,” Baron said. “A bit out in the glare of it all. There are ways we might help. And you could help us back.”

“Like it or not, you’re already part of this,” Vardy said.

“We have a proposal,” Baron said. “Come on in out of the cold. Shoot on over with us back to the Darwin Centre. There’s a proposition on the table, and there’s someone you should meet.”

Chapter Seven

THE ROOMS SETTLED AROUND THEM, AS IF FINICKETY GENII LOCI were adjusting. Billy felt like an outsider. Was that glass he heard, clank-sliding out of sight? A clatter that might be bones?

The two uniforms guarding the tank room did not react to Baron with any visible respect. “Clocked that, did you?” Baron muttered to Billy. “Right now they’re coming up with hilarious jokes about what FSRC stands for. The first half is always ‘Fucking Stupid.’”

Inside was the disdainful young woman again, glancing at Billy perhaps a shade more friendly than before, her uniform as casual as ever. She had a laptop open on the table where the squid no longer was. “Alright?” she said. She mock-saluted Vardy and Baron, raised an eyebrow at Billy. She typed one-handed.

“I’m Billy.”

She looked oh-really? “There’s trace, man,” she said to Baron.

“Billy Harrow, WPC Kath Collingswood,” Baron said. She clucked her tongue or chewing gum and turned her computer round, but not enough that Billy could see.

“Quite a spike,” Vardy murmured.

“With the strike and all that, you wouldn’t expect to see shit like this,” she said. Vardy looked lengthily around the room, as if the dead animals might be responsible.

“Do you want to know what any of these things are?” said Billy.

“No no,” said Vardy thoughtfully. He approached the oarfish caught decades before. He looked at an antique alligator baby. “Ha,” he said.

He circumnavigated. “Ha!” he said again abruptly. He had reached the cabinet of Beagle specimens. He wore an unrecognisable expression.

“This is them,” he said after awhile.

“Yeah,” said Billy.

“My good God,” Vardy said softly. “Good God.” He leaned very close and read their labels a long time. When finally he rejoined Collingswood, as she ran information through the computer, he glanced back at the Beagle cabinet more than once. Collingswood followed his glance.

“Oh yeah,” she said to the jars. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

“Are you who I’m supposed to meet?” Billy said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m him. Come down the pub.”

“Uh…” Billy said. “I don’t think that’s in my plans…”

“Best thing for you, a drink,” Baron said. “Best thing. Coming?” he said to Vardy.

Vardy shook his head. “I’m not the persuasive one.” He waved them out.

“Nah,” said Collingswood to Billy. “Not so much. It ain’t that he’s not interested in, like, persuasiveness, get me? He’s interested in it. Like something in a jar.”

“Come on, Billy,” Baron said. “Come and have a drink on the Metropolitan Police.”

The world was swaying when they left. Too many people speaking in too many street-corner hushes, too much foreclosure, the sky closing some deal. Collingswood frowned at the clouds, like she did not like what they wrote. The pub was a dark drinkerie decorated with old London road signs and copies of antique maps. They sat in an out-of-the-way corner. Even so, the other punters, a mix of seedy geezers and office workers, were clearly unsettled by Kath Collingswood’s uniformed-if unorthodoxly-presence.

“So…” Billy said. He had no idea what to say. Collingswood seemed unbothered. She just watched him while Baron went to the bar. Collingswood offered a cigarette.

“I think it’s no smoking,” Billy said. She looked at him and lit. The smoke surrounded her in dramatic shapes. He waited.

“Here’s the thing,” Baron said, delivering the drinks. “You heard Vardy. Parnell and the toothies have eyes on you. So you aren’t necessarily in the safest of all situations.”

“But I’m nothing,” Billy said. “You know that.”

“Hardly the point,” Baron said. It surprised him how hard it jarred him to see Collingswood drink and smoke in uniform. “Let’s take stock,” Baron said. “Now, Vardy… You saw him in action. You know the sort of thing he does. For all our expertise, in this case, vis-à-vis-that is to say, what’s going on at the moment-we could do with some input. From a specialist. Like yourself. We’re dealing with fanatics. And fanatics are always experts. So we need experts of our own. And that is where you come in.”

Billy stared at him. He even laughed a bit. “I wondered if you were going to say something like this, but then I was like, don’t be mad.”

“None of us knows shit about giant squid,” Collingswood said. The animal’s name sounded absurd in her sarky London voice. “’Cause we don’t give a shit about it, granted, but, you know.”

“Fine, then, so leave me alone,” Billy said. “Not as if I’m an expert anyway.”

“Oh come on, don’t be like that.”

“Don’t just mean book-smarts, Harrow.” Baron said. “I have a healthy respect for cultists. And they think you’re something special, which says a lot, no matter what you think. Remember when you saw Dane Parnell? Remember about the bus window?”

“What?” said Billy. “That it was broken?”

“What you said to us was you saw it break. How do you suppose that happened?” Baron let the question sit. “The way we, the FSRC I mean, do things… we need a subtler approach than the rest of the force. It’s handy to have members outside of the actual service.”

“You actually are actually trying to get me to join,” Billy said, incredulous.

“There’s certain privileges,” Baron said. “A few responsibilities. Official Secrets, whatnot. Bit of dosh. Not enough to really make a big difference, to be honest, but, you know, it’s a couple of pizzas…”

“And tell me, does anyone in the FSRC,” Billy said, “ever make a blind bit of sense?” He looked at his drinking partners blearily. “I was not expecting to be recruited today.”

“Yeah, and by the filth, too,” Collingswood said. She blew gusts, gave him a little smirk. Still no one was telling her to stop smoking.

“We want you onside, Billy,” Baron said. “You could help Vardy. You know the books. You’ll understand the squid stuff. Any investigation, we always start with beliefs, but the biology’s going to be part of all that.

“You know, I have to tell you…” Baron shifted as if broaching a painful subject. “You might have heard, it’s an old standard that if you’re looking for whodunit, you start with whoever finds the body. And you did have access to the tank, too.”

Billy’s eyes widened. He began to rise. Baron pulled him back down, laughing. “Sit down, you pillock,” he said. “I’m just saying that if we wanted to, we could approach this a whole other way. Where were you on the night of, et cetera and so on. But you and us can scratch each other’s backs. We want insight and you want protection. Win-win, mate.”

“So why are you threatening me?” Billy said. “And I told you, I don’t have any insight…”

“You going to tell me,” Baron interrupted, tilting his chin in a come now look, “you’ve got no sense of the bloody awesomeness of that thing?”

“… The squid?”

“The Archi-bloody-teuthis, Billy Harrow, yes. The giant squid. That thing in the jar. That. That got took. And is been and gone. Are you really surprised someone might worship it? Don’t you want a better idea why? What the stakes are? You know stuff’s going on, now. Don’t you want to know more?”

“There’s new life and new civilisations,” Collingswood said. She did her face in a hand mirror.

Billy shook his head and said, “Bloody hell.”

“Nah,” Collingswood said. “That’s a different unit.”

Billy closed his eyes, opened them at the sound of the glasses vibrating on the table. Collingswood and Baron looked at each other. “Did he just…?” Collingswood said. She looked at Billy again, with interest.

“We know you’ve been unsettled,” Baron said carefully. “Makes you a great candidate…”

“Unsettled?” Billy thought of the jarred man. “That’s one way to put it. And now you want me to, to go looking stuff up for you? That’s it?”

“For a starter.”

“I do not think so,” Billy said. “I’d rather go home and forget all about whatever’s going on.”

“Right,” said Collingswood. She took a drag. The low light glimmered on her gold trimmings. “Like you can forget about it. Like you can forget about all this.” She swayed in her chair. “Good luck with that, bruv.”

“No one doubts you’d rather,” Baron said. “But choice, alas, is not given to all of us. Even if you’re not interested in it, it’s interested in you. Let me just let that stand for a tick.

“Thing is, Billy, we should be outdated. FSRC got set up a little bit before 2000. Cobbled together from a couple of older outfits. Supposed to be temporary. It was the millennium: we were waiting for some devout nutters to set fire to the Houses of Parliament. Sacrifice Cherie Blair to their goat overlords, something.”

“No luck there,” Collingswood said. She did the French breathing thing with her smoke. Disgusting as it was, Billy couldn’t take his eyes off it.

“Sweet FA,” said Baron. “A little bit of silly buggery, but the big Y2K explosion of… well, millennialism, that we’d been expecting… didn’t happen.”

“Not then,” said Collingswood.

“Do you even remember the millennium?” Billy said. “Weren’t you watching Teletubbies?” She smirked.

“She’s right,” Baron said. “Stuff was delayed. It came after. Eventually we ended up busier than ever. Look, I don’t care what these groups want to do, so long as they keep to themselves. Paint yourself blue and boff cactuses, just do it indoors and don’t involve civilians. Live and let live. But that’s not what causes the trouble.” He tapped the table with each word that followed. “All these groups are all about revelations, apocrypha…”

“Always boils down to the same thing,” Collingswood said.

“It does a bit,” said Baron. “Any holy book, it’s the last chapter that gets us interested.”

“John the fucking Divine,” Collingswood said. “Bish bash fucking bosh.”

“What my colleague is getting at,” Baron said, “is we’re facing a wave of St. Johns. A bit of an epidemic of eschatologies. We live,” he said, too flatly for any humour to be audible, “in the epoch of competing ends.”

Collingswood said, “Ragnarok versus Ghost Dance versus Kali Yuga versus Qiyamah yadda yadda.”

“That’s what gets converts these days,” Baron said. “It’s a buyers’ market in apocalypse. What’s hot in heresy’s Armageddon.”

“It was all chat, for ages,” Collingswood said. “But since suddenly, something’s actually going on.”

“And they’re all still insisting it’s their apocalypse that’s going to happen,” Baron said. “And that means trouble. Because they’re fighting about it.”

“What do you mean something’s going on?” Billy said, but what with his head all over the place and the blatantly actual fact of impossibilities, the scorn he tried to put in it didn’t really take. Collingswood prodded the air, rubbed her fingers together to indicate that she felt something, as if the world had left residue on her.

“You got to be worried when they’re agreeing about anything,” she said. “Prophets. That’s the last bloody thing you want prophets to do. Even if, especially if, they still don’t agree on details. Heard about them hoodies and asbos rucking in East London?” She shook her head. “Brothers of Vulpus went at it with a bunch of druids. Nasty. Them sickles are sharp. And all over how the world’s going to end.”

“We’re overstretched, Harrow,” said Baron. “’Course we do other stuff; sacrificed kiddies, animal cruelty, whatnot. But it’s ends-of-the-world where the action is. It’s harder and harder to deal with the apocalypse rumbles. We can’t cope,” he said. “I’m being frank with you. Let alone now something this big has happened. Don’t get me wrong-I got no more time for fortune cookies than you have. Still though. Little while ago, half the prophets in London began to know-know-that the world’s on its way out.” He did not sound as if he was mocking the knowledge. “And I am utterly buggered if I know what that’s about, but then it suddenly got a lot more definite. Round about when you-know-what happened.”

“Your squid went poof,” Collingswood said.

“It is not my squid.”

“Oh it is, though,” she said. “Come on, it is, though.” It felt like his, when she said that. “It happened again,” she said to Baron. “It got closer again.”

“They brought the public into it,” Baron said. “And that is not on. We go out of our way to keep civies out. But if someone like you, someone with knowledge I mean, does get his face rubbed in it, well, we take advantage.”

“Some people make better recruits’n others,” Collingswood said. She watched Billy closely. She leaned closer. “Open your gob a minute,” she said. He did not consider saying no. She peered past his teeth. “You shouldn’t have told your mates about the squid,” she said. “You shouldn’t have could.”

“Vardy doesn’t need me,” Billy said. “He can research all this himself. And I don’t need you.”

“The professor can be a touch off-putting, I know,” Baron said. He took one of Collingswood’s cigarettes.

“The way he was talking,” Billy said. “About the squid people. It was like he was one of them.”

“You’ve put your finger on it,” Baron said. “It is just like he’s one of them. He has a little revelation.”

“Takes one to know one,” said Collingswood. “Oh yeah.”

“What?” said Billy. “He was one of…?”

“Man of faith,” Baron said. “Grew up one of your ultra-born-agains. Creationist, literalist. His dad was an elder. He was in it for years. Lost his faith but not his interest, lucky for us, and not his nous, neither. Every group we look at, he gets it like a convert”-Baron thumped his chest-“because for a moment or two he is.”

“It’s more than that,” Collingswood said. “He don’t just get it,” she said. She grinned smoke at Billy. She put her hand to her lips, as if she were whispering, though she was not. “He misses it. He’s miserable. He didn’t used to have to put up with none of this random reality cack. He’s pissed off with the world for being all godless and pointless, get me? He’d go back to his old faith tomorrow if he could. But he’s too smart now.”

“That’s his cross to bear,” said Baron. “Boom-boom! I thank you.”

“He knows religion is bollocks,” Collingswood said. “He just wishes he didn’t. That’s why he understands the nutters. That’s why he hunts them. He misses pure faith. He’s jealous.”

Chapter Eight

IN LATE DRAB RAIN, BARON DROVE BILLY BACK TO HIS FLAT. “KATH’S going to take a look at your security,” he said.

“Haven’t got any.”

“Well quite.”

“I don’t want to let nothing happen to you now,” she said. “Not now you’re precious.” He looked at her sideways. “And don’t let anyone in you don’t know for a few days, either.”

“Are you joking?”

“Look, they’re not stupid,” Baron said. “They’re going to know we’re watching. But they’ve got some questions about you, for obvious, and curiosity can be a bit of a millstone. So safety first, eh?” He turned to look at Billy in the backseat. “I don’t like it any more than you. Alright, perhaps you like it even less than me.” He laughed.

“Shouldn’t you be protecting me?” Billy said.

“Wanna be in my gang, my gang, my gang,” Collingswood sang.

“Gary Glitter?” Billy said. “Really?”

“I wouldn’t say danger,” said Baron. “I’d say at the very worst it’s dangish. We’re not saying don’t have anyone over-”

“I bloody am,” said Collingswood, but Baron continued, “if it’s someone you trust, that’s all peachy. Just being cautious. You’re small fry. They’ve got what they want.”

“The squid,” said Billy.

“Collingswood’s going to install a good solid security set. You’ll be fine. And you know, if you take us up on our offer, we might upgrade it.”

Billy stared at them. “This isn’t a job offer. It’s a protection racket. Literally, protection.”

Collingswood tutted. “Little drama queen, ain’t you?” she said. She patted his cheek. “It’s benefits, innit? All jobs have them.”

Baron steered Billy toward the kitchen while Collingswood milled by the front door. She looked thoughtfully around the hallway, the cabinet on which Billy left his keys and post. She made a sight, trendily unkempt, up on tiptoe, cigarette loose between her lips as if in a French film, prodding at the upper corner of his doorway with confidence and precision Billy did not associate with someone so young.

“Understand what we’re talking about,” Baron said. He poked around without asking, looking for coffee. “You’d keep your job. Just a day off a week, something, to put in time with us. For training. Extreme theology, self-defence. And there’d be that bit of dosh.” He sipped. “I suppose this must all be a bit much.”

“Are you taking the piss?” Billy said. “A bit much? I just found a man pickled. I’m being recruited by cops who tell me the Cthulhu cult might be after me…”

“Alright,” Baron said. He did not, Billy noticed, need any explanation as to what Cthulhu was. “Calm down. Let me tell you what I think. Someone’s watching you. As in, look-but-don’t-touch. Maybe they’re going to go for a conversion. You know how creationists are chuffed to the bollocks when they have members who are scientists or whatever? Think what it would be to this lot to have a genuine squidologist in the congregation.”

“Oh good,” said Billy. “That’s very reassuring. Unless it’s that they want to cut out my heart.”

“Vardy can get into these headspaces,” Baron said. “If he doesn’t think these cultists are out for you, they’re not.”

There was a banging, a rasp, from the other room. “What’s she doing?” said Billy.

“Focus, Harrow. In my professional opinion, and Vardy’s, the squiddoes are trying to work out what you represent.”

“I represent bugger-all!”

“Yeah, but they don’t know that. And in this world where you now are, everything represents something. Get it? It’s really important you get that. Everything represents something.”

“It ain’t going to win any prizes,” Collingswood said, entering, hands in her pockets. She shrugged. “It’ll do the necessary. Invite only. It’ll hold till Doc Octopus here makes up his mind. Don’t touch.” She wagged her finger at Billy. “Hands off.”

“You said Vardy thought I had nothing to be worried about,” Billy said. “I thought he was never wrong.”

“Never is,” she said, and shrugged. “Never know, though, know what I mean?”

“This is just basic precautions,” Baron said. “You should see my house. Stick around here a couple of days, while you chew stuff over. We’ll keep you in the loop. We’ve got feelers out, we know what we’re looking for. The offer’s on the table. Get back to us soon, eh?”

Billy shook his head hopelessly. “Jesus, give me a chance…”

“Think all you want,” Baron said, “but think to yourself, alright? Kath?” Collingswood lightly touched his Adam’s apple. He recoiled.

“What was…?” he said.

“Try chatting now,” she said. “For your own sake. Trust me.”

“I do not trust you.”

“Wise man.”

“Pay attention. This is my number.” Baron gave him a card.

“You don’t get mine yet,” Collingswood said. “You got to earn that sort of shit.”

“Anything worrying, anything strange,” Baron said, “or, on the other hand, when you decide you’re on board…”

“If,” Billy said.

“When you decide you’re on board, call.”

Anything strange. Billy remembered the bottled corpse. That greyed skin, those drowned eyes.

“Seriously.” He spoke quietly. “What did they do to that guy? How did they get the squid out of there?”

“Now, Mr. Harrow,” Baron said. He shook his head, friendly. “I told you. All those whys is not a helpful way of looking at things. And blimey, there’s plenty of stuff you’ve not even seen yet. How could you possibly understand what’s going on? If you even wanted to. Which, as I say, dot dot dot.

“So. Rather than trying to get to grips with things you can’t possibly, I’d just say wait. Wait and see. Because you will see. There’s more to come. Good-bye now.”

Chapter Nine

AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE FLAT, WHERE COLLINGSWOOD HAD fiddled, there were marks. Tiny scratches. A little balsa lid, flush with the wood. He flicked it with his fingernail.

Billy was hesitant to trust whatever protection it was he’d been afforded. He double-locked his door. He stared out through glass at the rooftop where that dirty bloody squirrel lay unseen. He wished it drowned in rainwater.

He hunted online but failed to find a single detail of the FSRC. Thousands of organisations of those initials, but Baron’s unit was nowhere. On his university page Billy read Vardy’s publications list. “Oedipus, Charisma and Jim Jones;” “Sayyid Qutb and the Problem of Psychological Organisation;” “The Dialectics of Waco.”

Billy drank wine in front of the television on mute, a bottled shadow-show. How often, he thought, are such offers made? A knight emerging from a wardrobe with the offer of another place but you have to come now. Was the squid out there, or destroyed? He did not trust his potential colleagues. He did not appreciate their recruitment methods.

In the television light he watched the curtains hang limply, remembering the obscene discovery in the museum basement. He did not think he was particularly exhausted. He imagined the window beyond the fabric. He woke abruptly in a panic on his sofa.

When the hell had he fallen asleep? He remembered no transition. The book he did not even remember starting to read slid from him like an inadequate blanket. It was dark. Billy realised he had heard tapping at his door.

A patter like the feet of a gecko on the other side of the wood. A nail scratching and, yes, a whisper. Billy was silent. He told himself it was some remnant dream, but it was not. It sounded again.

Billy crept to the kitchen and picked up a knife. The faint faint noise continued. He pressed his ear to the door. He unlocked it, watching his own bravery and ninja stealth, bewildered. As he pushed, Billy realised that he should be calling Baron, of course, instead of indulging this incompetent vigilantism. But momentum had him, the door was opening.

The hallway was empty.

He peered at his neighbours’ entrances. There were no evidential drafts, no slips of air to insinuate doors quickly closed. No dust dancing. Billy looked at nothing. He stood there for moments, then minutes. He leaned out like a figurehead, to see as far down those corridors as he could, keeping his feet inside his flat. Still there was nothing.

He did not sleep in his bed that night. He took his duvet to the sofa, closer to the front door, so he could hear. There were no more sounds, but he slept hardly at all.

IN THE MORNING HE ATE TOAST IN A TOO-SILENT FLAT, WITH MORE silence from outside weighing on the windows. He pulled the curtains apart enough to look at a grubby grey day, at knots of wood and leaves and blown plastic bags, at the unlikely haunt of the squirrel voyeur.

He was never one with a plethora of friends, but Billy did not often feel lonely, not like this. CN U COME OVER, he texted Leon. STUFF 2 TELL U. PLEASE. He felt he was yanking out of a trap in which Collingswood and Baron had placed him. Brave, rebellious animal. He hoped this escape was not a gnawing off of his own limb.

When Leon arrived Billy hung out from the doorframe again. “What kind of arsing around is this?” said Leon. “It’s a bloody weird night, I just had about three fights on the way here, and me such a peaceable soul. I brought your mail up. Also wine.” He held out a plastic bag. “Early though it is. What the hell’s going on? To what do I owe…? Jesus, Billy.”

“Come in.” Billy took the bag and envelopes.

“As I was saying, to what do I owe two visits in such quick succession?”

“Have a drink. You aren’t going to believe this.”

Billy sat opposite Leon and opened his mouth to tell him everything. But could not work out whether to start with the body in the jar, or the police and their strange offer. His tongue flopped over, momentarily meatlike. He swallowed. As if recovering from some dental treatment.

“You don’t understand,” he told Leon. “I never had a big bust-up with my dad, we just sort of dropped out of touch.” He was continuing a conversation from months before, he realised. “My bro I never liked. That was deliberate, dropping him. My dad, though…”

He had found his father boring, was all. He had always had the sense that the faintly aggressive man, who lived alone after Billy’s mother’s death, had found Billy the same. It had been several years since he had let contact wither.

“Do you remember Saturday morning television?” he said. He had meant to tell Leon about the man in the jar. “I remember this one time.” Showing his father some cartoon that had enthralled him, Billy had seen the bewilderment on the man’s face. The inability to empathise with his boy’s passion, or pretend to. Years later he reflected that that was the moment-and he no older than ten-Billy started to suspect that the two of them did not have much of a shot of it.

“I’ve still got that cartoon, you know,” he said. “I found it recently, streamed on some website. You want to see it?” A 1936 Harman-Ising production, he had watched it many times. The glass-jar inhabitants of an apothecary’s shelves on an adventure. It was extraordinary, and frightening.

“You know what happens,” Billy said. “Sometimes when I’m preserving something or doing something in the wet labs or whatever, I clock that I’m singing one of the songs from it. “Spirits of amo-o-o-onia…’”

“Billy.” Leon held out a hand. “What’s going on?”

Billy stopped and tried again to say what had happened. He swallowed and worked against his own mouth, as if expelling some glutinous intruder. And with a breath finally he began to speak what he had intended. What he had found in the basement. He told him what the police had offered.

Leon did not smile. “Should you be telling me this?” he said at last. Billy laughed.

“No, but, you know.”

“I mean, it’s literally impossible, what happened,” Leon said.

“I know. I know it is.”

They stared at each other a long time. Leon said, “There are… maybe there are more things in heaven and earth…”

“If you quote Shakespeare at me I will kill you dead. Jesus, Leon, I found a dead man in a jar.”

“This is heavy shit. And they’ve asked you to join? You going to be a cop?”

“A consultant.”

When Leon had visited the squid, months before, he had said wow. Wow like you might wow a dinosaur skeleton, the Crown Jewels, a Turner watercolour. Wow said like the parents and partners who came to the Darwin Centre for someone else. Billy had been disappointed.

“What are you going to do?” Leon said.

“I don’t know.” Billy looked at the mail that Leon had brought from downstairs. Two bills and a card and a heavy package in brown paper, tied up old-style with hairy string. He put on his glasses and cut the string.

“Are you seeing Marginalia later?” he said.

“Yeah, and don’t take that tone when you say her name or I’ll get her to explain it to you,” Leon said. He fiddled with his phone. “She has a whole riff.”

“Please,” said Billy. “Let me guess. ‘The key to the text is not the actual text itself, but…’” He frowned. He did not understand what he was unwrapping. Inside the package was a rectangle of black cotton.

“I’m texting her, she’ll love this,” Leon said.

“Oh Leon, don’t tell her what I’ve been saying,” Billy said. “I’ve already said more than I should…” He prodded the cloth.

The package moved.

“Fuck…”

“What? What? What?”

They were both standing. Billy stared at the package, unmoving on the table where he had dropped it. There was silence. Billy took a pen from his pocket and poked the cotton gently.

The cloth gave. The package opened.

It bloomed. With a gasp of air it concertinaed, expanding, out-flicking and filling out, and what reached from its end was a hand. A man’s arm, in a dark jacket sleeve. The flash of white shirt at its end. The emergent hand grabbed Billy by the neck.

“Jesus-” Leon pulled Billy away, and the package, still gripping, pulled back, braced against nothing.

Billy was held, and the package continued to unfold. Tongues of cotton flap-flapped open, black and blue and shoes now at the end of limbs bulking into presence, as if the matter of them was uncramping. More arms unrolled clumsy as fire hoses and shoved Leon hard away.

Like plants in sped-up motion, emitting grunts of release, a stale sweat-and-fart smell, and a man and a boy stood suddenly on Billy’s table. The boy stared at Leon staggering to rise. The man still gripped Billy’s throat.

“BLOW ME,” THE MAN SAID. HE JUMPED OFF THE TABLE, WITHOUT releasing Billy. The man was wiry, wore old jeans and a dirty jacket. He shook long greying hair. “Shiver me, that was horrible.” He looked at Leon. “Eh?” he shouted, as if wanting sympathy.

The boy stepped slowly onto a chair and then to the floor. He wore a clean, oversized suit: Sunday best. “Come here, lad.” The man licked the fingers of his free hand and pressed down the boy’s mussed hair.

Billy couldn’t breathe. Darkness closed on him. The man threw him against the wall.

“Right then.” The man pointed at Leon, who froze, as if pinned by the gesture. “Watch him, Subby. Watch him like a little night-badger.” He pointed two fingers at his own eyes, then at Leon. “He makes a move, give him what-for. Now then.” The boy stared at Leon with too-wide eyes.

“Yeah,” the man said. He sniffed at the doorframe. “She ain’t bad. Good notion, this, if I say so my own self, out of my boy’s head. As because what we do not have here is anything nixing egress. Now we’re in there’s nothing to stop us getting out.” He leaned toward Billy. “I say, there’s nothing to stop us getting out. Didn’t think of that, did you? You ferocious little whatnot.”

Billy made a scratchy sound in his throat. The man put a finger to his lips, glancing expectantly at the boy, who slowly did as he did, and gestured shhhh at Billy, too.

“Goss and Subby do it again,” the man said. He unrolled his tongue and tasted the air. He clamped his hand over Billy’s mouth and Billy sputtered into the cool palm. The man went room to room, tugging Billy, licking floor, walls, light switches. He drew his tongue across the face of the television, leaving a spit-path in the dust.

“What what what specimens have you got here, lepidopterist?” he said to the bookshelves. He pulled out books and dropped them. “Nah,” he said. “I can’t taste not but shit of it.”

Leon was suddenly up and running at him. The man whoops-a-daisy-ed and sent Leon sprawling. “And who might you be?” he said. “One of the young master’s friends, hm? I’m afraid the doctors all agree that the lad needs complete isolation, and while your hijinks I’m sure are a tonic, they’re not what young Mr. Billiam needs. I may have to eat you, you unfortunate young macaroon.”

Leon moved and the boy stepped toward him, all predator-fish eyes. The man wheezed out smoke, though he had no cigarette, had sucked no smoke in.

“No…” Leon said. The man opened his mouth, the mouth kept going, and Leon was gone. The man dabbed the corners of his mouth like a cartoon cat.

“Alright you,” he said to Billy, who gasped and fought the relentless fingers. “Got your jim-jams? Toothbrush packed? Left a message for the milkman? Good then, let’s off. You know what airports are like and little Thomas doesn’t travel well and I don’t want to get stuck in a queue behind a group-booking to Ayia Napa, can you imagine? You promised and promised me a quiet weekend away and it’s time, Billy, it’s really time.” He clasped his hands and raised an eyebrow. “You can hush your noise and all,” he said to the boy. “I don’t know, I really don’t, you two! Onward.”

Tugging him by the neck, the man took Billy out.