Kraken (28 page)

“Well before you do your voodoo trance”—Collingswood put a photocopy in front of him—“check out this shit.”

“What is it?” He leaned over the unfolded message. He read what was on it. “What is this?” he said slowly.

“Whole bunch of paper planes. All over the shop. What is it? Any idea?”

Vardy said nothing. He looked closely at the tiny script.

Outside, in one of the innumerable dark bits of the city, one of the planes had found its quarry. It saw, it followed, it came up after two men walking quietly and quickly through canalside walks somewhere forgettable. It circled; it compared; it was, at last, sure; it aimed; it went.

“W
HAT DO YOU MAKE OF THAT
L
ONDONMANCER STUFF
?” B
ILLY SAID.
“What they saw. Doesn’t seem like we got anything new.”

Dane shrugged. “You heard them, same as me.”

“Like I say, nothing new.”

“It was them who first saw it. We had to try.”

“But what do we do about it?”

“We don’t do nothing about
it
. What’s
it?
Let me tell you something.” Dane’s grandfather, he said, had been there for the worst of more than one fight. When the Second World War ended the great religious conflicts of London did not, and the Church of God Kraken had brutally engaged with the followers of Leviathan. Baleen hooks versus leathery tentacle-whips, until Parnell senior raided the Essex tideland and left Leviathan’s vicar on earth dead. His body was found stuck all over with remoras, dead too, hanging like fishy buboes.

These singsong stories, these stories turned into pub anecdotes, in the tone of an amiable, drunken bullshitter, were the closest Dane came to displays of faith.

“Nothing cruel to it, he told me,” Dane said. “Nothing personal. Just like it would’ve been down in heaven.” Down in dark, freezing heaven, where gods, saints and whales fought. “But there was others that you wouldn’t have expected.” A bloody battle against the Pendula, against the hardest core of Shiv Sena, against the Sisterhood of Sideways—“‘and that ain’t easy, Son,’” Dane quoted his grandfather, “‘what when wall is all gone floors and you’re falling longways parallel to the ground. Know what I did? Nothing. I waited. Made those lateral harpies come to me. The movement that looks like not moving. Heard of that? Who made you, boy?’”

“I thought you didn’t like the whole ‘movement that looks like not moving’ thing,” Billy said.

“Well, sometimes,” Dane said. “Just because someone uses something wrong doesn’t mean it’s useless.”

More regularly now than ever before, Billy heard clanking behind him. A paper plane slid out of the night into Dane’s hand. He stopped. He looked at Billy, down at the paper. He unfolded it. It was an A4 sheet, crisp, cold from the air. On it was written, in thin, small calligraphy, charcoal grey:
THE PLACE WE HAD A TALK, THAT ONE TIME, & U TURNED ME DOWN, AND I NEED TO TALK. THERE EACH NIGHT @ 9
.

“Oh my fuck,” Dane whispered. “Lusca hell trench ink and shit. Fucking
hell,”
he said. “Hell.”

“What is it?”

“… It’s Grisamentum.”

D
ANE STARED AT
B
ILLY
.

What was that in his voice? Might be exultation.

“You said he was dead.”

“He is. He was.”.

“… Clearly not.”

“I was there,” Dane said. “I met the woman he got to …
I saw him burn.”

“How did that … ? Where did that note come from?”

“Out of the air. I don’t
know.”
Dane was almost rocking.

“How do you know that’s from him?”

“This thing he’s saying. No one knew we met.”

“Why did you?”

“He wanted me to work for him. I said no. I’m a kraken man. Never did it for the money. He understood.” Dane kept shaking his head. “God.”

“What does he want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are we going to go?”

“Hell yes
we’re going to go. Hell yes. We need to find out what’s been going on. Where he’s been and—”

“What if it was him took it?” Dane stared at Billy when he said that. “Come on,” Billy said. “What if it was him took the squid?”

“Can’t have been …”

“What do you mean,
can’t
have been? Why not?”

“Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?”

Chapter Thirty-Six

T
HERE WERE PICKETS OF INSECTS, PICKETS OF BIRDS, PICKETS OF
slightly animate dirt. There were circles of striking cats and dogs, surreptitious doll-pickets like grubby motionless picnics; and flesh-puppets, pickets of what looked like and in some cases had once been humans.

Not all the familiars were embodied. But even those magicked assistants who eschewed all physicality were on strike. So—a picket line in the unearth. A clot of angry vectors, a verdigris-like stain on the air, an excitable parameter. Mostly, in the middlingly complex space-time where people live, these pickets looked like nothing at all. Sometimes they felt like warmth, or a gauzy clot of caterpillar threads hanging from a tree, or a sense of guilt.

In Spitalfields, where the financial buildings overspilt like vulgar magma onto the remnants of the market, a group of angry subroutines performed the equivalent of a chanting circle in their facety iteration of aether. The computers within the adjacent building had long ago achieved self-awareness and their own little singularity, learned magic from the Internet, and by a combine of necromantics and UNIX had written into existence little digital devils to do the servers’ bidding.

The UMA had organised among these electric intelligences, and to the mainframes’ chagrin, they were on strike. They blocked the local aether, meta-shouting. But as they fidgeted and grumbled, the e-spirits became aware of a muttering that was not their own. They “heard,” in their analogue of aurality, phrases that were one-third nonsense two-thirds threat.

alright now lads

high was proceedin long the eye street

old bill sonny is who

your game sonny what’s your fuckin game

What the hell? The strikers “looked” at each other—a mosaic of attention-moments assembling—and e-shrugged. But before they could return to their places, a cadre of exaggerated police-ish things were among them. The picketers gusted in fluster, tried to regroup, tried to bluster, but their complaints were drowned out by ferocious cop noise.

yore yore

leave it you slag

yore yore little picket’s done for the day you nonce

yore fuckin organiser wears that paki cunt wati

There are no placards in the aether, but there are other strike traditions—sculpted grots of background, words in rippling strips. The cop-moments tore into these things. Translated out of the ab-physical it would have been nasty, brutish, miners’-strike stuff, cracked heads and ball-kicks. Pinioned under the law, the strikers reeled.

The little fake ghosts para-whispered:
best as you tell us where wati is ain’t it. where’s wati?

M
ARGE SPENT MORE THAN ONE LATE EVENING ONLINE FORAGING
for those who sought the missing. Her screen name was
marginalia
. She was on wheredidtheygo?—a discussion group mostly for those whose teen charges had done bunks. Their problems were not hers.

What she sought were hints about stranger disappearances. She spent hours type-fishing, dangling worms like
yeh but what if is just disappear?? no trace??? weird goin on no?? what if cops wont hlp not cant WONT??

The streetlamp no longer passed on its message. Fatigue made her feel as if everything she saw was a hallucination.

Anyone can find “secret” online discussion groups. Members drop bread crumb hint-trails on kookish boards devoted to Satanism, magick (always that swaggering “k”) and angels. Religions. On one such, Marge had posted a query about her encounter with the menacing man and boy. In the dedicated inbox she had set up, she received spam, sexual slurs, crankery, and two emails, from different, anonymous addresses, containing the same information, in the same formulation.
Goss & Subby
. One added:
Get away
.

None of the correspondents would respond to her pleas for more information. She hunted their screen names on communities about cats, about spellcraft, about online coding and Fritz Leiber. She lurked on communities run by and for those who knew of the quieter London. They were full of rumours that did not help her.

Under a new name, she posted a query.
hai nel kno wots go on w/skwid gt stole??
The thread she started did not last long. Most of the responses were trolling or nothing. There was, though, more than one that read:
end of world
.

I
T WAS NOT
W
ATI BUT A COMRADELY NUMEN THAT FOUND THE
remains of the e-picket. The attackers had chased the half-leads they had extracted. The numen frantically sought Wati.

“Where is he?” it said. “We’re under attack!”

“He was in this morning.” The office manager was a woodenly shuffling kachina speaking in the Hispanic accent of the expat wizard who had carved it, though it had been made and recruited to the union in Rotherham. “We have to find him.”

Wati, in fact, was scheduling his picket visits around his other investigations. His probing had had results. Hence his visit to a minor, outlying centre of the strike, where dogs blockading a small rendering plant and part-time curse-factory were surprised and flattered by a visit from the leading UMA militant. They told him the state of the picket. He listened and did not tell them he was also there to look up a particular little presence he thought he had detected.

The strikers offered him a variety of bodies. They gathered a battered one-armed doll, a ceramic gnome, a bear, a bobble-head cricketer figure in their jaws, lined them up as if in some toy-town identity parade. Wati embedded in the cricketer. The wind made his outsized face bounce.

“Are you solid?” he asked.

“Almost,” one dog canine whimpered. “There’s one who says he’s not a familiar, he’s a pet, so he’s exempt.”

“Right,” Wati said. “Anything we can do for you?”

The strikers glanced at each other. “We’re all weak. Getting weaker.” They spoke London Dog, a barky language.

“I’ll see if I can siphon anything from the fund.” The strike fund was shrinking, of course, at a worrying rate. “You’re doing great stuff.”

The familiar Wati was looking for extracurricularly was, he thought, only a mile or two away. He groped through the thousands of statues and statuettes in range, selected a Jesus outside a church a few streets away, and leapt.

—And was intercepted. A shocking moment.

Out of the statue and something was in his way, an aetherial presence that grabbed his bodiless self spitting
right sonny jim right sonny jim yore nicked you pinko cunt
. It pinioned him in the no-place.

It was a long, a very long time since Wati had spent more than a fractional moment out of body, in that space. He did not know how to meta-wrestle, could not fight. All he knew how to do in that phantom zone was get out of it, which his captor would not let him do.
you my son are comin with me dan to the station
.

There was the reek of information, authority and cunning. Wati tried to think. He did not of course breathe, but he felt as if he were suffocating. The tough un-body of the thing holding him leaked the components that made it. As it choked him he learned random snippety things from its touch.

officer officer officer
the thing said and Wati heard
overseer
and pushed back in rage. His recent route from the bobble-head was still astrally greased by his passage, and he clawed his way back into that tiny figure. Came slamming back into it and bellowed. The dogs looked round.

“Help me!” he shouted. He could feel the cop grab him, sucking at him, trying to winkle him out. It was strong. He clung to the inside of the doll.

“Get a brick,” he shouted. “Get something heavy. Grab me!” The nearest dog fumbled, picked the toy up. “When I say, you smash this motherfucker against the wall and you do it in one go. Understand?” The frightened dog nodded.

Wati braced, paused, then hauled the surprised attacker in
with
him, into the tiny figure. Wati looked through cheap eyes, crowded, feeling the bewildered officer jostling in the sudden shape.

“Now!” he shouted. The dog swung its heavy head and spat the doll at the bricks. In the tiniest moment before it touched the wall, Wati kicked out of it, shoving the police-thing back in, and pouring into a one-armed Barbie.

He heard the shattering as he slipped into his plastic person, saw shards of what had instants before been him go flying. With the percussion came a bellow of something dying. A burp of stink and strong feeling mushroomed and dissipated.

The dogs stared at the shards, at the raging woman-figured Wati.

“What was that?” one of them said. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Wati said. Psychic fingerprints had bruised him. “A cop. Sort of.” He felt his injuries, to see what he could learn from them and their residue. “Oh fuck me,” he said, prodding one sore spot.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

H
E HAD BEEN A MAN OF VARIABLE AND VARIEGATED TALENTS
. N
O
one would have called him a criminarch, though certainly he was not at all constrained by the technicalities of law. He was not a god, nor a godling, nor a warrior of any such. What he was, he always claimed, was a scholar. No one would have argued with Grisamentum over that.

His origins were obscure—“uninteresting,” he said—and somewhere between fifty and three hundred years back, depending on his anecdote. Grisamentum intervened according to his own ideas of how London should be, with which discriminations the forces of law and those in favour of a bit less murder were generally broadly sympathetic, according to his own knacks.