Kraken (7 page)

“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
.”

B
ILLY SHOOK HIS HEAD
. H
E 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?”

T
HEY TRACED THROUGH THE MUSEUM’S CORRIDORS, AND
B
ILLY 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

T
HE 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.”