Kraken (48 page)

The proximity of that worst horizon did not mean they should forget, as they did, the more everyday hunters and knackers after them for the Tattoo’s lucre. The drab and frightening fact of that came back to them that night, as they worked through Cole’s papers, auditioned theories as to who might be behind what terrible action done to Cole’s child, as they walked a dangerous walk to a dingy café where they could access the Internet. A commotion sounded in some alley near them.

“What’s that?”

“It’s …” A drone between the bricks. A bounty-hunting swarm, it sounded like, some baleful hive thinker coming at them for payment in evil apiary kind. Billy and Dane matched each other preparation for preparation. They checked weapons and clung close to the wall, got ready to fight or run while the moan came closer under the noise of the cars and the lorries only around the corner.

“Get onto the main road,” said Billy. “They going to send it out there?”

“Or under?” said Dane, nodding at a lid in the pavement. Billy weighed the options, but hesitated, because there was another sound coming. Dane and Billy heard a glass-and-bone rattle, the slide of a jar on the pavement.

“Jesus,” Billy said. “It’s still following. It’s back.” A quick warning in his head, in an articulate wave of pain. “It’s found me again.”

A bee-mass turned into their sight. Spread out like a chitin-cloud wall, blocking their exit, but through those insects another figure darkly was visible, roll-wobble-walking. There was an eddy among the bloodymoney bees and an inrush of air as a seal was cracked. The buzz faltered. A smoke of insects gushed like reversed film out of sight, like steam back into a kettle, like something, and there was nothing before Billy and Dane but the angel of memory.

It showed itself to Billy for approval, having saved him. The source of his glass and time clench; he, mistakenly, its test-tube prophet. Could it feel his guilt at not being what it thought? Being promised by nothing to no one? Its body was again a Formalin-filled bottle, in which, this time, floated hundreds of specks, evanescing bodies of the attacker. Its bone arms were bones, its head was made of bone.

But it was much reduced. It had been destroyed, probably more than once, on its exhausting treks to track and protect Billy. It had dissipated and reconstituted. This time it had made itself from some preserving jar less than half Billy’s height. This time its skull was an ape’s or a child’s.

It chattered at him from the dark of an alley. He raised his hand to it. Exhaustion came over it—Billy could feel the echo in his head—and it shivered. The glass-bottle-and-bone sculpture settled into a more natural and complete still as its fleshless arms fell from it to become rubbish, as its skull head toppled and rolled from its slanted lid to crack apart on the pavement. Only its jawbone stayed, held on the lid’s glass nub handle. Dissolving bees bobbed in its swill.

Maybe its presiding angel force was remaking itself in another yet-smaller bottle with a yet-smaller bone head, back at its museum nest, and it would set out on its journey again tracking the power it had given Billy, the trace of itself in him, to find him or be broken on the way and try again.

Dane and Billy went to another vagrant shelter. They were glad when it rained: it seemed to batten down the burning smell Cole had brought on them that would not quite go. Billy still smelt it when he slept. He smelt it through the water in which he sank in his dream. Warm, cool as the sea grew dark, cooler darker cold, then warm again. Through black he saw the dream-glow of swimming light things. He was falling into a city, a drowned London. The streets were laid out in glow, the streetlights still illuminated, each glare investigated by a penumbra of fish. Crabs as big as the cars they pushed aside walked the streets made chasms.

From towers and top floors waved random flags of seaweed. Coral crusted the buildings. Billy’s dream-self sank. There were, he saw, men and women, submerged pedestrians walking slow as flaneurs, window-shopping the long-dead long-drowned shops. Figures ambling, all in brass-topped deep-sea suits. Air pipes emerged from the top of each globe helmet and dangled up into the dark.

No cephalopods. Billy thought,
This is someone else’s apocalypse dream
.

But here it came, the intrusion of his own meaning, what he was here for. From the centre of the sunken London came a hot tide. The water began to boil. The walls, bricks, windows and slimy rotting trees began to burn. The fish were gusted away toward the drowned suburbs, the rusting cars and crabs were bowled by the force of what came. And here it came, bowling like a tossed bus the length of this street, this underwater Edgware Road, that skittered under the flyover and turned. The kraken’s tank.

It shattered. The dead
Architeuthis
slumped from it, dragged the pavement, its tentacles waving, its rubberising mantle thick and heavy and moving only with the tide, the gush, flailing not like a cephalopod predator but like the drifting dead god it was. The kraken and its tank shards scraped and cracked and disintegrated as the water rushed and heated and a subaquatic fire burned everything away.

A
NOTHER
INSIGHT DREAM
?
R
EALLY
? B
ILLY WOKE FROM IT TO
W
ATI’S
voice. He was sweating from the hot black ocean. The smell of the burn Cole had sent was still on him. Wati had come back. He was in the Captain Kirk. Billy found his glasses.

“Here you are,” the toy said in the little plastic voice. “Something’s happening.”

“Yeah?”
Dane said. “Really? We nearly got burnt alive by our only lead, yesterday, and we still don’t know what’s going on.”

“Maybe this’ll help,” said Wati. “Maybe this is it. Apocalypse.”

“We know that,” Billy said. “That’s why we’re here.”

“Sorry,” said Wati. “That’s not what I mean. I mean there are two of them.”

Chapter Sixty-One

T
HE WIZARD WHO HAD SOLD HER THE PROTECTION HAD, IN A
gruff way, been too kind to answer her question and tell her where to go, if he even knew. But knowing where to look, now, with her own online contacts and link trails, it was not too hard for Marge to find out when, and even hints of where, these competing, overlapping or collaborative apocalypses were due to occur. The Internet debates were over how to respond.

bottl whisky & head under covers
got 2 b squid this is it
C U all in L

“Jesus, really?” Marge said out loud.

have to go cant miss whole world there

It was not that she did not care if she lived or died: she cared about it a great deal. But it turned out that she would not play safe at any price—and who would have predicted that? There were more messages from her friends on her machine. This time she felt as if by not answering them she was less turning her back on than protecting them.

Leon
, she thought.
We’re going deeper
. She had her iPod bodyguard. She needed a lay of the land. If everyone who was everyone in that heretic cityscape would be there, there were things she could learn. And if it
was
the squid behind it, if this animal thing was it, if as the insinuations insinuated this was the thing incoming, then she might find Billy.

Anyone up for going?
she wrote.
Keep each other safe? Go as team see wots wot?

I duno
no
no
u crazee???

Screw them, that didn’t matter. Billy might be there. She knew that Leon would not.

Marge loaded playlists onto the iPod. She grabbed them at almost random from her computer, a big mix, using up all the available memory. When she was out, now, she felt watched by the world, under threat, pretty much all the time. She went walking, and she went as it grew dark, before she put her earphones in. She pressed random play.

The streetlights shone at her through the haze of branches, woody halos. She walked through her nearest cheerful row of kebaberies, small groceries and chemists. A voice started in her ear, a tuneless, happy, piping voice, singing
push push pushy push really really good pushy good
, accompanied by the noise of a record player being turned on and off, and something hit with a stick.

Marge felt bewildered and instantly cosseted, wrapped in that tuneless voice. The iPod screen told her this was supposed to be Salt’ N Pepa’s “Push It.” She skipped forward. Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab,” she read, and heard not the familiar orchestration and that magnificent, once-in-an-epoch growl but a little throat-clearing noise and the same reedy querulous asexual tones as before singing in the roughest approximation of the track
they try make me to go to the rehab no no no no no
. She heard the repeat-twanging of one guitar string.

The singer did not sound so enthusiastic this time, and the envelope around Marge cooled, as if a gust of air got in. She skipped, to Kanye West’s “Gold Digger.”
gimme she gimme money money
. The little singer was happy again and Marge was safer.

The voice liked Run-DMC. Marge walked patiently through its incompetent renditions of old-skool hip-hop classics. It liked some of the Specials
—this town town aaah ah this is a is ghost town
, with a double-tempo clapping. It did not like Morrissey. To Marge’s horror, it raised an enthusiastic rorty voice during “Building a Mystery,” a guilty Sarah McLachlan track that she could not remember why she had.

“Jesus,” she said to the iPod. “If you’re into Lilith Fair I’d rather take my chances with Goss and Subby.”

But though it sulked a bit when she fast-forwarded out of that, she was able to raise the little singer’s happiness on a repeating loop of Soho’s “Hippychick,” the initial Smiths’ guitar sample of which it rendered with a warbling
badadadada
. She had not been able to get the song out of her mind since she had heard it in the hidden pub. There were worse noises to have to listen to.

Marge walked into the most unwelcoming estate she knew of in her neighbourhood. She stood for several minutes in the hollow at the centre of the high-rises, listening to her protective companion croon, waiting to see what it would do when whatever happened happened. But she was left perfectly alone. Once two passing children on their bikes called something, some incoherent tease, at her, then pedalled furiously off cackling, but that was all, and she felt silly and ashamed at treating herself like bait.

We’ll have to see when it comes to it
, she thought. As she walked home, the sprite in her iPod chattered
fighty fighty fighty powers that be
, its take on Public Enemy.

The night after that, she went, alone as she had no other option, to an outskirt of the city, an imperfect roadway helix, that she had not had too much difficulty establishing would be the epicentre. She arrived early, and waited.

“L
ISTEN, ONE OF THESE TWO GODS IS SOME KIND OF ANIMAL
,” W
ATI
said. That brought them up short. “With that, and what with all these rumours about the djinn and the fire, and stuff, I can’t help wondering if this might be it.”

“An animal church keeping itself secret,” Billy said. “Dane?”

“It ain’t my lot,” Dane said slowly. “I know scripture.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time there’d been a split, would it, Dane?” Wati said. “Some new interpretation?”

“Could there be another squid church …?” Billy hesitated, but Dane seemed not offended. “Could there be another one out there? Could this be some
other
kraken apocalypse?”

“A cell?” Dane said. “Inside? Doing a deal with the djinn? Behind all this? But they don’t have the kraken. We know—”

“They don’t have it
now,”
Wati said. “We don’t know what their plans were. Or are. Just that they involve the squid and burning.”

“What
if
this is it?” Dane said. He was looking out at nothing. “What do we do?”

“Jesus,” Billy said. “We go, we find out, we stand in its way. We’re not going to sit here while the world ends. And if it’s nothing, we keep looking.”

Dane did not look at him. “I got nothing against the world ending,” Dane said quietly.

“Not like this,” said Billy at last. “Not like this. This isn’t yours.”

“I gave your message to the Londonmancers,” Wati said. “They’re keeping the kraken as far away from this as they can.” Because if this
were
, if this did intend, if an event can intend, to be it, to be the end, then the kraken must
not
be near enough to burn. That would seem to be what might send the universe up with it.

“Good,” said Billy. “But we don’t know what capabilities these people have.”

“It’s
tonight?”
Dane said. “Where did this even
come
from? We should’ve heard about this ages ago. It’s obviously proper, and things like that don’t just spring out of nowhere. There should’ve been
tekel upharsins
and shit. I guess everyone’ll be there to find out what it’s about. The church’ll be there too.”

“I think everyone will,” Wati said.

“A conjunction,” Dane said. “Been a long time.”

It was inevitable that from time to rare time, two apocalypses might clash, but people should have known about it in advance. In such situations, guardians of continuance—declared saviours, the salaried police and the enemies of whoever was declaring an end—would have not only to end the ends, but step in between the rival priests, each vying to rout a vulgar competing ruination that potentially stood in the way of their noble own.

D
ANE AND
B
ILLY TREATED FENCES AS SOMETHING OTHER THAN
barriers, walls as stairways, roofs as uneven floors. Billy wondered if his angel of memory would be where they went, how it might move across this terrain.

Around the lit-up trenches of streets, where police were. As they came closer to where rumour said the event or events would be, at the limits of vision, Billy glimpsed other of London’s occult citizens—its, what, unhabitants? Word of the locus had spread among the cognoscenti, by whispers, text message and flyer, as if the ends-of-the-world were an illegal rave.