Collingswood and Baron stared at him. “Which bloke,” Baron said, “would that be?”
“Shit, did something happen? The guy was playing a trick on his mate. Had me make him and his son up like a book. Paid me extra to hand-deliver him. Said he didn’t trust the post. I say said—took me ages to have a clue what he was on about, the way he talked. Pain in my arse getting there, but he made it worth my—”
“Getting where?” Baron said.
He recited Billy’s address. “What happened?” Anders said.
“Tell us everything you can about this man,” Baron said. He held up his notebook. Collingswood spread her hands, tried to feel residues in the room. “And what,” said Baron, “do you mean ‘his son’?”
“The bloke,” Anders said. “Who had me fold him up. It was his kid, too. His boy.” He blinked in Baron’s and Collingswood’s stares.
Baron whispered, “Describe them.”
“The guy was in his fifties. Long hair. Smelt, to be honest. Smoke. I was a bit surprised he could pay—it wasn’t cheap. His son was … a bit not all there.” He tapped his head. “Never said a word … What? What? Jesus, what is it?”
Baron stepped back and dropped his arms to his sides, his notebook dangling. Collingswood stood, her mouth opening, her eyes widening. Their faces went white in time.
“Oh fuck,” whispered Collingswood.
“My good God, this didn’t, this didn’t sound any alarm bells at all?” Baron said. “You didn’t for a bloody second wonder who you might be dealing with?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!”
“He doesn’t fucking know,” Collingswood said. Her voice grated. “This fucking newbie cunt has no idea. That’s why they came here. ’Cause he’s new. That’s why he got the job, ’cause he’s green. They knew he had no clue who the fucking shit he was dealing with.”
“Who was I dealing with?” said Anders, shrilly. “What did I do?”
“It is,” said Collingswood. “It is, isn’t it, guv?”
“Oh my good Christ. It sounds like it. My God, it does sound like it.” They shivered in a room suddenly made cold.
Collingswood whispered, “It’s Goss and Subby.”
Chapter Sixteen
BILLY WOKE. THE FOG, THE DARK WATER IN HIS HEAD, WAS ALL gone.
He sat up. He was bruised but not tired. He wore the same clothes he had gone to sleep in, but they had been removed and cleaned. He closed his eyes and saw the oceanic things from his doped sleep.
By the door was a man in a tracksuit. Billy scrabbled back on the bed to see him, into some half-cringe, half-pugnacious uncoiling. “They’re waiting for you,” the man said. He opened the door. Billy slowly lowered his hands. He felt, he realised, better than he had for a long time.
“You drugged me,” he said.
“I don’t know anything about that,” the man said anxiously. “But they’re waiting for you.”
Billy followed him past the industrial-rendered decapods and octopuses, illuminated by fluorescent lights. The presence of Billy’s dream was persistent, like water in his ears. He hung back until the man turned a corner, then ducked away and ran as quietly as he could, accelerating through the echoes of his footfalls. He held his breath. At a junction he stopped, pressed his back against a wall and looked around.
Different subspecies in cement. Perhaps he could track his way by remembering cephalopods. He had no idea where to go. He heard the footfall of his escort seconds before the man reappeared. The man gestured at him, an uncomfortable beckoning.
“They’re waiting for you,” he said. Billy followed the man through the hollowed-out churchland into a hall big enough and unexpected enough that Billy gasped. All without windows, all scooped out from under London.
“Teuthex’ll be here in a minute,” the man said, and left.
There were pews, each with a slot behind its backrest, a space for hymnals. They faced a plain Shaker-style altar. Above it was a huge, beautifully wrought version of that many-armed symbol, all elongate S-curves in silver and wood. The walls were covered in pictures like ersatz windows. Every one was of giant squid.
There were grainy deep-sea photos. They looked much older than should have been possible. There were engravings from antique bestiaries. There were paintings. Pen-and-ink renditions, pastels, suggestive op-art geometries with fractal suckers. He recognised not a single one. Billy had grown up on pictures of kraken and books of antique monstrosities. He sought an image he knew. Where was de Montfort’s impossible octopus hauling down a ship? Where the familiar old renderings of Verne’s poulpes?
One eighteenth-century giant-squid pastoral—a large, camp rendition of a young Architeuthis gambolling in spume, near a shore from where fishermen watched it. A semiabstract rendition, an interweaving of pipelike brown jags, a nest of wedges.
“That’s Braque,” someone said behind him. “What did you dream?”
Billy turned. Dane was there, his arms folded. In front of him was the man who had spoken. He was a priest. The man was in his sixties, with white hair, neatly trimmed beard and moustache. He was exactly a priest. He wore a long black robe, white dog collar. Just a little battered-looking. His hands were clasped behind him. He wore a chain, from which dangled the squid symbol. They three stood in the sheer silence of that submerged chamber, staring at each other.
“You poisoned me,” Billy said.
“Come come,” said the priest. Billy held a pew and watched him.
“You poisoned me,” Billy said.
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
“Why?” said Billy. “Why am I? What’s going on? You owe me … an explanation.”
“Indeed,” said the priest. “And you owe us your life.” His smile disarmed. “So we’re both indebted. Look, I know you want to know what’s happened. And we want to explain. Believe me, you need to understand.” He spoke in a carefully neutral accent, but there was a little Essex to it.
“Are you going to tell me what all this is?” Billy glanced around for exits. “All I got from Dane yesterday was—”
“It was a bad day,” the man said. “I hope you feel better. How did you dream?” He rubbed his hands.
“What did you give me?”
“Ink. Of course.”
“Bullshit. Squid ink doesn’t give you visions. That was acid or something …”
“It was ink,” the man said. “What did you see? If you saw things, it was down to you. I’m sorry that it was all a bit of a rude submersion. We really had no choice. Time is not on our side.”
“But why?”
“Because you need to know.” The man stared. “You need to see. You need to know what’s going on. We didn’t give you any visions, Billy. What you saw came from you. You can see things clearer than anyone.”
The man stepped closer to the picture. “I was saying, Braque,” he said, “in 1908. Bertrand Hubert, the only French Teuthex we’ve ever had, took him out to sea. They were in the Bay of Biscay for four days. Hubert performed a particular ritual, of which sadly we no longer have much record, and brought up a little god.
“He must have been pretty powerful. He’s the only one since Steenstrup who’s been able to tickle up more than images. The actual … fry. So the godling waited while Braque, falling over himself and nearly overboard, apparently, sketched it. It went under waving a hunting arm as Braque said ‘exactement comme un garçon qui dit
aux amis.’” He smiled. “Silly beggar. Not the slightest idea. It was “comme” nothing of the sort. Sounds odd, but he said it was the coiliness of what he saw that made him think in angles. He said no curves could do justice to the coils he’d seen.”
Cubism as failure. Billy walked to another picture. More traditionally representational—a fat, flattened giant squid mouldering on a slab, surrounded by legs in waders. Quick, wisping brushstrokes. “Why did you drug me?”
“That’s Renoir. That over there, Constable. Pre-Steenstrup, so it’s what we call the
atramentous epoch. Before we emerged from the ink-cloud.” The works around Billy looked suddenly like Manets. Like Piranesis, Bacons, Breughels, Kahlos.
“Moore’s my name,” the priest said. “I am very sorry about your friend. I sincerely wish we could have stopped that.”
“I don’t even know what happened,” Billy said. “I couldn’t tell what that man …” He swallowed into silence. Moore cleared his throat. Behind heavily framed glass was a flattish surface, a slatey plane. It was brown-grey rock perhaps two feet square. In organic lines, in charcoal ink and stained a dried-blood red, overlooked by outlined human figures, was a torpedo shape; a conclave of spiral whips; a round black eye.
“That’s from the Chauvet Cave,” Moore said. “Thirty-five thousand years old.” The carbon eye of the squid looked across epochs at them. Billy felt vertigo at the preantique rendition. Was it meant to be seen in the licking of a fire light? Women and men with sticks and deft fingertip smuts rendering what had visited at the edge of the sea. What had raised many arms in deepwater greeting while they waved from rockpools.
“We’ve always commissioned,” Moore said. “We show them god.” He smiled. “Or god’s young. That’s what we used to do.
“Since the end of the atrament we can generally only offer dreams. As we did you. How Hubert called up a young god we don’t know. Even the sea won’t tell us. And we’ve asked it. You’ve seen the young, Billy. Baby Jesu.” He smiled at his little blasphemy. “That’s what you preserved. Architeuthis is kraken-spawn. Gods are oviparous. Not just our gods, all gods. God-spawn’s everywhere if you know where to look.”
“What was that tattoo?” Billy said.
“Those kraken that make it to the last stage?” Moore jerked his thumb at the cave painting. “They sleepeth, is what they do,” he quoted. “‘Battening upon huge seaworms,’ as they say. They’ll rise only at the final end. Only in the end, when ‘latter fire heats the deeps’”—he did quote fingers—“only then to be seen once, roaring they shall rise and on the surface die.”
Billy looked past him. He wondered how the search of his almost-colleagues was going, whether Baron, Vardy, and Collingswood were making headway as they looked for him, as they must be doing. With a moment’s startling clarity he imagined Collingswood with her so un-uniform uniform and swagger knocking heads together to find him.
“We were there at the beginning,” Moore said. “And we’re here now. At the end. Baby gods have started manifesting all over. Kubodera and Mori. That was just the first. Pictures, video, making themselves known. Architeuthis, Mesonychoteuthis, unknowns. After all those years of silence. They’re rising.
“On the twenty-eighth of February, 2006, the kraken appeared in London.” He smiled. “In Melbourne they keep theirs in a block of ice. Can you imagine? I can’t help thinking of it as a godsicle. You know they’re planning one for Paris which is going to be, what do they call it, plastinated? Like that strange German man does to people. That’s how they’re going to show god.” Dane shook his head. Moore shook his head. “But, not you. You treated it … right, Billy. You laid it out with a kindness.” Odd stilted formulation. “With respect. You kept it behind glass.”
His squid had been a relic in a reliquary. “This is kraken year zero,” Moore said. “This is Anno Teuthis. We’re in the end times. What d’you think’s been going on? You think it’s just bloody chance that when you bring god up and treat it as you do, the world suddenly starts ending? Why do you think we kept coming to see? Why do you think we had someone on the inside?” Dane bent his head. “We had to know. We had to watch. We had to protect it too, find out what was going on. We knew something was going to happen.
“You realise the reason you had a kraken to work on is because in roaring it rose and on the surface died?”
Chapter Seventeen
IF YOU GOT INVOLVED WITH LEON, MARGE HAD ALWAYS UNDERSTOOD, you took certain behaviours for granted. It wasn’t a bad thing—it gave leeway for your own behaviour, the indulgences of which might have caused all manner of resentments and bad bloods with previous lovers.
For example, Marge felt no compunction about cancelling a night out if she was working on a piece and it was going well. “Sorry sweet,” she’d said, many times, leaning over the battered video equipment that she rescued from skips and eBay. “I’ve got something going. Can we raincheck?”
When Leon did the same, even if it annoyed her, it also often came with satisfaction, the knowledge that these were credits she could cash in later. For similar reasons, knowing she had no intent to become monogamous when they got together, she found his own occasional non-her-focused sexual liaisons (mostly obviously telegraphed) rather a relief.
In and of itself, she would not have thought much or anything of not hearing from Leon for two, three, five days, a week at a time. That was nothing, any more than was a last-minute cancellation. What, however, gave her some anxiety, some pause, was that they had had a specific arrangement—they had been going to see a James Bond marathon, because “it’ll be hilarious”—and that he had not called to change plans. He had simply texted her some nonsense—that itself not news—and not turned up. And now was ignoring her messages.
She texted him, she emailed him. Where are you? she wrote. Tell me or i’m going to get worried. Call rsvp text carrier pigeon whatever you prefer xx.
Marge had deleted the last message Leon had sent, thinking it some drunk foolishness. Of course she regretted it deeply now. It had said something like: billy says theres a squid cult.
“FATHERS AND MOTHERS AND UNCARING AUNTS AND UNCLES IN freezing darkness we implore you.”
“We implore you.” The congregation mumbled in time, in response to Moore the Teuthex’s phrases.
“We are your cells and synapses, your prey and your parasites.”
“Parasites.”
“And if you care for us at all we know it not.”
“Not.”
Billy sat at the back of the church. He did not stand and sit with the small congregation, nor did he murmur meaningless phonemes in polite lag of their words. He watched. There were fewer than twenty people in the room. Mostly white, but not all, mostly dressed inexpensively, mostly middle-aged or older, but, a strange demographic blip, with four or five tough-looking young men, grim and devout and obedient, in one row.
Dane stood like a hulking altar boy. His eyes were closed, his mouth moving. The lights were low, there were shadows all over the place.
The Teuthex recited the service, his words drifting in and out of English, into Latin or Pig Latin, into what sounded like Greek, into strange slippery syllables that were perhaps dreams of sunken languages or the invented muttering of squidherds, Atlantean, Hyperborean, the pretend tongue of R’lyeh. Billy had expected ecstasy, the febrile devotions of the desperate speaking in tongues or tentacles, but this fervour—and fervour it was, he could see the tears and gripping hands of the devout—was controlled. The flavour of the sect was vicarly, noncharismatic, an Anglo-Catholicism of mollusc-worship.
Such a tiny group. Where were others? The room itself, the seats themselves, could have contained three times as many people as were there. Had the space always been aspirational, or was this a religion in decline?
“Reach out to enfold us,” Moore said, and the congregation said, “Fold us,” and made motions with their fingers.
“We know,” the Teuthex said. A sermon. “We know this is a strange time. There are those who think it’s the end.” He made another motion of some dismissal. “I’m asking you all to have faith. Don’t be afraid. ‘How could it have gone?’ people have asked me. ‘Why aren’t the gods doing anything?’ Remember two things. The gods don’t owe us anything. That’s not why we worship. We worship because they’re gods. This is their universe, not ours. What they choose they choose and it’s not ours to know why.”
Christ, thought Billy, what a grim theology. It was a wonder they could keep anyone in the room, without the emotional quid pro quo of hope. That
’s what Billy thought, but he saw that it was not nihilism in that room. That it was full of hope, whatever the Teuthex said; and he the Teuthex, Billy thought, quietly hopeful too. Doctrine was not quite doctrine.
“And second,” said Moore. “Remember the movement that looks like not moving.” A small frisson at that.
There was no communion, no passing out of, what, sacred calamari? Only some discordant and clunky wordless hymn, a silent prayer, and the worshippers left. Each as they filed out glanced at Billy with a strange and needy look. The young men looked positively hungry, and nervous to meet his eye.
Dane and Moore came to meet him. “So,” said the Teuthex. “That was your first service.”
“What was that squirrel?” Billy said.
“Freelancer,” Dane said.
“What? Freelance what?”
“Familiar.” Familiar. “Don’t look like that. Familiar. Don’t act like you’ve never heard of one.”
Billy thought of black cats. “Where is it now?”
“I don’t know, I don’t want to know. It did what I paid it for.” Dane did not look at him. “Job done. So it’s gone.”
“What did you pay it?”
“I paid it nuts, Billy. What would you think I’d pay a squirrel?” Dane’s face was so deadpan flat Billy could not tell if what he was facing was the truth or contempt. Welcome to this world of work. Magic animals got paid in something, nuts or something. Billy examined the pictures and books in Moore’s own dark grey chambers.
“Baron …” Billy said.
“Oh, we know Baron,” said Dane. “And his little friends.”
“He told me some books got stolen.”
“They’re in the library,” said the Teuthex. He poured tea. “Can’t use a photocopy to persuade the world.”
Billy nodded as if that made sense. He faced Moore. “What’s happening?” he said. “What did that … man … want? And why are you keeping me prisoner?”
Moore looked quizzical. “Prisoner? Where is it you want to go?”