Kraken (41 page)

“I’m not here to fight,” the man shouted.

“Stop, Billy,” Wati said. The angel wheezed with windows. “He’s here to help,” Wati said.

“Billy Harrow,” the man said. “I’m from the Brotherhood of the Blessèd Flood. I’m not here to fight. Marge came to us.”

“What?
What?
Marge? Oh Jesus, what’s she doing, what does she
want?
She’s got to stay out of all this …”

“This isn’t about her. I’m here to help. I’ve got a message from the sea. It wants to meet you.”

Chapter Fifty-Two

T
HE SEA IS NEUTRAL
. T
HE SEA DIDN’T GET INVOLVED IN INTRIGUES,
didn’t take sides in London’s affairs. Wasn’t interested. Who the hell could understand the sea’s motivations, anyway? And who would be so lunatic as to challenge it? No one could fight that. You don’t go to war against a mountain, against lightning, against the sea. It had its own counsel, and petitioners might sometimes visit its embassy, but that was for their benefit, not its. The sea was not concerned: that was the starting point.

Same at the embassies of fire (that constantly scorching café in Crouch End), the embassy of earth (a clogged crypt in Greenwich), the embassies of glass and wire and other more recherché elements. The same standoffishness and benignly uninterested power. But this time, this time, the sea had an opinion. And the Brotherhood of the Blessèd Flood were useful.

They were a faith themselves, not dictated to nor created by the sea. Though the sea, so far as any Londoners could judge, took the worship of the Brotherhood wryly and graciously enough. That was always disingenuous. What the Brotherhood offered was plausible deniability: the sea itself did nothing, of course; it was the Brotherhood of the Blessèd Flood that sought out Billy Harrow, and if they brought him back to the sea’s embassy, well?

It was an urgent journey. It was raining, which made Billy feel better in some way, as if water wanted to protect him.

“What’s going on with Marge?” Billy said again.

“I don’t know,” Sellar said. “She came to see me. She thought
we
took the kraken. We thought you and Dane did. So when she said that wasn’t right, I went and spoke to the sea, and—”

“Is Marge alright?”

“No.”

“Right,” Billy said. “No one is.” He looked again at his phone, but he had missed no calls. Jason had not called him.
Maybe he didn’t go yet
, Billy thought and did not believe.
Maybe he’ll get back to me soon
.

A row of semidetached Victorian houses in the northwest of London. A Tube train, emerged from the tunnels, drummed through the night, behind bricks. Cars moved slowly. There were few pedestrians. The houses were three storeys high and only a little dilapidated, bricks well weathered, stained, pointing eroded, but not slums nor derelicts. They were fronted by little gardens with their few plants and coiffed patches. Billy could see children’s bedrooms with pretty animals and monsters on wallpaper, kitchens, sitting rooms with the cocoon-light of television. From one address came laughter and conversation. Smoke and music came out of its open windows. The building next to it was quiet and unlit.

Closer, and Billy saw that was not quite the case. Its curtains were drawn, on all three floors. There was perhaps something very faintly illumined, visible, just, through the curtains, as if someone carried candles in the deeps of the rooms behind.

“Have you been here before, Wati?” he said.

“Never inside,” the figure he carried said to him. “There’s nothing I can get in.”

Sellar tapped at the door, a complicated code staccato. By his ankles were a collection of empty bottles. Sellar pressed his ear to the wood, waited, then beckoned Billy. The ground-floor curtains were heavy oxblood cotton; the first floor, in blue-green paisley; the top, with cartoon plants. All were pressed up against the inside of the glass.

“Come then,” said Sellar.

Sellar wrote a message Billy could not see, rolled it up and placed it inside a bottle. He screwed its lid on tight and pushed it through the door’s post flap. Several moments passed, but only several. Billy started when the flap opened and the bottle dropped back out and smashed against the concrete step. The barks of dogs did not abate, nor the calls of children playing late. Billy picked up the paper. He held his doll so Wati could read, too.

The paper was damp. The ink was spread in stain-coronas around the written words, in an intricately curling font, spreading beyond its lines.

Teuthis no longer our creature. No longer creature. Not of ocean. We have spoken to the kraken within us to know why this. Neither they nor we are indifferent to what might come. It is no princeling commissar chosen by them or us in the tank
.

Billy looked at Wati. “Well? Do you get this?”

“I think …” Wati said. “It’s saying it’s just a kraken.”

“Just?”

“Like not a, a
particular
kraken. I think. And … but, I mean … it’s not theirs no more, I think.”

“Dane thought there might be something about that one in particular, that was why it was taken. That it might be a hostage.” A part of the incomparable squabbles of kraken. Warlords in feud, battles conducted at the pace of continental drift. A century for the creep of each province-long arm around an enemy’s; a bite excising cities’-worth of flesh clenching over the duration of several human dynasties. Even the fleetingly majestic altercations of their krill, the
Architeuthis
, were just squibs by the bickering of their parents.

“There has to be something,” Billy said. “There are other giant squid in the world. Why
this
one? Why’s
this
one the deal? What’s its … parentage? Where’s it from?”

“It said that ain’t it,” Wati said. “The sea.” Billy and the figure stared at each other.

“So why are we here?” Billy said. “Why does
this
kraken baby lead to the end of everything?” He stared into the doll’s eyes. “What does the sea really know, or the krakens? What about …? How about this, Wati—you could ask the krakens direct.”

If they took a boat. They should take a boat and a big iron or brass Buddha, say. Where the water was deep, above a trench in the Atlantic, they could tip the statue over the side and Wati could begin a long wobbling voyage down, a precipitation into very crushing dark. Come to rest at very last in mud and hagfished bones, and Wati could politely clear his throat, and wait to attract the attention of some eye that had no business being that big. “Hello. Any particular reason your little plankton baby’s going to set the world on fire?” he might say.

“How’m I supposed to get out again?” Wati said. There was a litter of statues on the seafloor, but how far might they all be from his abyssal interview? What if they were out of reach, and he had to sit there in the black in terrified boredom, fingered by glowing fish until the ocean eroded him out of statuehood and self? So: put his heaviest anchor-statue on the end of a chain strung with other made bodies, so when the questioning was done he could rise through them back up into the ship’s figurehead—

“What are we doing?” Billy interrupted himself. There was another breaking-bottle sound. Another message.

We are not indifferent. To the end in fire. We do not wish London gone. You and the exile Krakenist and we wish the same thing. Our self a product of concatenate development. The kraken would not have this, this is not about them
.

Were the giant squid themselves, or their parents, god instars, their apotheosed others, helping with this? Out of, what, divine irritation at some misrepresentation? “Why
this
squid?” Billy whispered.

Others are against us. We had thought otherwise. We know now. You must get to the kraken and keep it safe from fire
.

“Ooh, d’you think?” Billy muttered. “Thanks for that, hadn’t occurred …” He continued reading.

You must free the exile
.

“That’s Dane,” he said.

You will be shown
.

“Why will we?” said Billy. “What does ‘concatenate development’ mean?” He frowned and tilted his head and read.

Destroy this paper. You will be helped
.

A
ND
D
ANE?

Dane was hanging upside down, and dripping. He had been reciting to himself stories of his grandfather, his grandfather’s courage. “Once,” he said inside his own head, in his grandfather’s voice, “I got caught.” Was it a memory or an invention on Dane’s part? Never mind. “So there was this time there was some scuffle going on with the ringstoners. You ever gone toe-to-toe with a ringstoner? Anyway, we were at it over something or other, can’t even remember, some saint bone of some church we said we’d help so they’d help us, I don’t know …”
Concentrate!
Dane thought.
Come on
. “Anyway, so there it was and they had me all trussed like in a bloody cat’s-cradle, and in they come to give it all this, yadda yadda, like. So.”
Sniff
. Dane as his grandfather, sniffing. “I let them get all close. I was all letting my head go all over the place, you know? They were crowing.
You’ll never this, we’ll always that
. But when they got right up to it, right up to me, I didn’t say nothing. Till they were right there. Then I said a prayer and like I knew they would, like I bloody
knew
they would, all the ropes that they had were just what they always were, which is the arms of God, and God unrolled them, and I was free, and then, boy, there was some reckoning.”

Hurray
. At some point the echoes of the room Dane was in changed, as people came in. Dane stopped talking to himself and tried to listen. He could not see who was there, with what had been done to his eyes. He could not see, but even through waves of pain he could hear, and he knew that the voice he heard was that of the Tattoo.

“Seriously, nothing?” the Tattoo said.

“Lot of screaming, but you don’t count that,” said the voice of one of the Nazis. “You alright? You seem stressed.”

“I am a bit stressed. Truth to tell I’m a bit bloody stressed. Remember the monsterherds?”

“No.”

A snuffling, a slobber, canine whickering. That dogman was there. That mage-knacked member of this crew, a man made himself half German shepherd, a pitiful fascist meat pun that Dane scorned even as the teeth and muzzle that pun occasioned mauled him.

“Well … They used to run with Grisamentum, back when I … Back when. Well, one of my factories just got interrupted by a bunch of dust or something acting very much like some kind of bloody dragon.”

“I don’t know what that means …”

“It means there’s stuff coming back I wasn’t expecting to face again. This little shitfucker has to know something. He’s in on something. He knows where the fucking squid is—it’s his god, isn’t it? And he knows where Billy Harrow’ll be. Keep at it.”

Keep at it. Dane prayed without ceasing. He prayed silently and motionlessly.
Tentacled God in darkness please give me strength
. Strength to listen, and to learn.
Krakens in your vast silent and ammoniac wisdom have mercy
. He knew that he should listen, that he should wait and say nothing, if even he could answer the questions, which mostly he could not even if he would, which he would not, because this would not end. He knew that it would not be too long now, weak as he was and unblooding from all the holes the Nazis had made, woozy and too tired and done to even scream, a thing hanging in thermals of pain—he knew that this was a pitch of this that was its own limit, and that therefore, again, for the second time, before that moment when he would spill enough of himself out that a critical mass of lack would be reached and he would have nowhere to go but into death, the ghastly chaos sunwheel he could no longer see would be rotated. The swastika
was
, as its hippy antifash defenders insisted, a sign of life, even when deployed like this.

Who made you? Kraken made me
. As a by-product. Uncaring. Was the comfort in that, or in the secret hope that secretly the secret kraken cared?
We are all squidshit
, Dane thought.

The Chaos swastika mightn’t be able to return those actually passed for much time, but it was thuggishly fecund enough to infect him, up to the very point of death, into livingness again. It would rotate with him swastikad on it, and it would wind in life out of all control, pouring it back into him, so blood would drip up, ruined organs reinflate, splayed bone ends grope for each other, grizzling as they slotted shard back into shard hole, fixing him all up, back into pain.

Chapter Fifty-Three

A
“TWO-WAY MIRROR”—ONCE A LONG TIME AGO PERHAPS
intended to dissemble, but now a lie that drew attention to itself. Behind it were Baron and Vardy, standing in such similar poses that it would have been comical to an observer. On the other side of the glass, Collingswood questioned Jason.

“So how come I can notice him now?” Vardy said. “I should think I recognise him, presumably.”

“Collingswood,” Baron said.

“She’s not bad, is she?”

“She’s bloody good,” Baron said. “That’s how she saw him in the first place.” Her questions to Jason had been tempered, nuanced, enhanced by various knacked enhancements: from an uncanny form of unbearable wheedling to the imposition of unphysical pain. “If you’d been here when you were supposed to … Where the bloody hell have you been, Professor?”

“Professor
is it now?”

“Well.” Baron turned to him. “Look, you can’t say I haven’t given you your head, right? Thank God Collingswood isn’t in here to hear me say that—we’d never hear the end of her giggling. I know your job’s to channel the bleeding divine, and when have I ever stood in your way? Aren’t I the bloke puts ‘Do Not Disturb, Eschatology Being Revelationed’ on your door? Eh? But you’re supposed to keep me in the loop, and turn up when I need you, and do me the sheer minimum modicum of salutage and whatnot, right? You were supposed to be here for this questioning about two hours ago. So where the
bloody hell
have you been?”