Kraken (11 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

G
OSS DRAGGED
B
ILLY, MAKING HIS LEGS MOVE WITH A NEW LOCOMOTION
like a cartoon caper. Little Subby followed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dane?” Billy gasped.
“Dane.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Shit,” he mumbled. “Shit, sorry, I …”

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

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

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

“Wipe your mouth.”

“Leon …”

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

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

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

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

Chapter Thirteen

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

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

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

whos this twat think he is

wankers shd fuck off let real coppers work

y r we leting that litl bitch smoke

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

“Well?” Baron said. “Any ideas?”

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

whats this she did that girl

cant get in

shes fit i wouldn’t mind

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

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

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

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

“Someone who couldn’t get in.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No one?”

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

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

“What is it?” Baron said.

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

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

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

Chapter Fourteen

“W
HAT HAPPENED TO
L
EON
?” B
ILLY SAID
.

Dane glanced at him and shook his head.

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

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

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

What did I see?
Billy thought.

“Tell me what he said,” Dane said.

“What?”

“The Tattoo. Tell me what he said.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Wait …”

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

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

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

“I’m not anything.”

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

“The Tattoo was
talking
.”

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

“End of the world?”

“Ends.”

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

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

“What? I’m not on anyone’s side …”

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

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

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

“Where’s the squid?”

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

“What …?”

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

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

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