Kraken

  Billy read titles on his way down. A Tibetan Book of the Dead by the Bhagavad Gita, by two or three Qur’ans, testaments old and new, arcana and Aztec theonomicons. Krakenlore. Cephalopod folklore; biology; humour; art and oceanography; cheap paperbacks and antiquarian rarities. Moby-Dick, shapes etched onto its cover. Verne’s 20,000 Leagues. A Pulitzer medal escutcheon stapled to a single page of one book, on which the line “Great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in the cold darkness” was the only part left visible below paint. The Highest Tide, Jim Lynch, nailed upside down like something unholy.

  Tennyson and a book of poems by Hugh Cook faced each other, open to competing pages. Billy read the counter to Alfred Lord.

  THE KRAKEN WAKES

  The little silver fish

  Scatter like shrapnel

  As I plunge upward

  From the black underworld.

  The green waves break from my sides

  As I roll up, forced by my season,

  And before the tenth second

  I can feel my own heat—

  The wind can never cool as oceans do.

  By mid-morning,

  My skin has sweated into agony.

  The turmoil of my intestines

  Bloats out against my skin.

  I’m too sick to struggle—I hang

  In the thermals of pain,

  Screaming against the slow, slow, slow

  Rise toward descent.

  And the madness of my pain

  Seems to have infected everything—

  Cities hack each other into blood;

  Ships sink in firestorm; armies

  Flail with sticks and crutches;

  Obesity staggers toward coronary

  Down the streets of starvation.

  “Jesus,” Billy whispered.

  Samizdat, sumptuous hardbacks, handwritten texts, dubious-looking output from small presses. Apocrypha Tentacula; On Worship of Kraken; The Gospel According to Saint Steenstrup.

  We cannot see the universe, Billy read in a text taken at random. It was cobbled in incompetent typeface.

  We cannot see the universe. We are in the darkness of a trench, a deep cut, dark water heavier than earth, presences lit by our own blood, little biolumes, heroic and pathetic Promethei too afraid or weak to steal fire but able still to glow. Gods are among us and they care nothing and are nothing like us.

  This is how we are brave: we worship them anyway.

  Old volumes bulged with addenda, were embossed Catechismata. Scrapbooks with glued-in snips. Annotated and those notes annotated, and on in unstinting interpretation, a merciless teuthic hermeneutic.

  He read the names Dickins and Jelliss, Alice Chess. A spread about mutant versions of the game with arcane rules, bishops and pawns given strange powers, transmogrified pieces called saurians, torals and anti-kings, and one called a kraken. The “universal leaper” was usually thought the most powerful piece, he read, as it could go from where it was to any other square on the board. But it was not. Kraken was. Kraken = universal leaper + zero, he read, = universal sleeper. It could move to any square including the one it was already on. Anywhere including nowhere.

  On the board & in life for Kraken in the void nothing is not nothing. Kraken stillness is not lack. Its zero is ubiquity. This is the movement that looks like not moving, & it is the most powerful move of all.

  Price rises were a function of neutral buoyancy, Billy read. Art Nouveau was coil-envy. Wars were meagre reflections of speculated kraken politics.

  AFTER UNCOUNTED HOURS BILLY LOOKED UP AND SAW, BY THE room’s raised entrance, a young woman. He remembered her from one of the moments during his visions. She stood in her nondescript London uniform of hoodie and jeans. She bit her lip.

  “Hi,” she said, shy. “It’s an honour. They said that, like, everyone out there’s looking for you. The angel of memory and everything, Dane said.” Billy blinked. “Teuthex said do you want to come, and they’d be glad if you was … if you want follow me because they’re waiting.”

  He followed her to a smaller room, containing one big table and many people. Dane and Moore were there. A few of the other men and women were in robes like the Teuthex’s; most were in civvies. Everyone looked angry. On the table was a digital recorder. The noise of rowdy debate stopped with his entry. Dane stood.

  “Billy,” said Moore after a moment. “Please join us.”

  “I protest,” someone said. There were murmurs.

  “Billy, please join us,” Moore said.

  “What is this?” Billy said.

  “There’s never been a time like this,” Moore said. “Are you interested in the future?” Billy said nothing. “Do you ever read your horoscope?”

  “No.”

  “Sensible. You can’t see the future, there’s no such thing. It’s all bets. You’ll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn’t mean either of them’s wrong.”

  “Might be,” Dane said.

  “They might,” Moore said. “But it’s all degrees of might. You want your prognosticators to argue. You never told us what you dreamed, Billy. Something coming up? Everyone can feel something coming up. Since the kraken disappeared. And no one disagrees.” He brought together his hands in a reverse explosion. “And that’s wrong.

  “This is a recording we made of a consultation with the Londonmancers,” he said.

  “What’s …?” Billy said.

  “Well you may ask,” said Dane.

  “Voices of the city,” Moore said.

  “They wish.”

  “Dane, please. Oldest oracles in the M25.”

  “Sorry,” Dane said. “But Fitch has been off for years. Just tells you what you want to hear. People just go for tradition …”

  “Some of the others are sharper,” said someone else.

  “You’re forgetting,” the Teuthex said. “It was the Londonmancers called it first. Fitch may be past it, true. People go out of tradition, true.”

  “Sentiment,” Dane said.

  “Maybe,” Moore said. “But this time it was him called it. He’s been begging people to pay attention.” He pressed Play.

  “—best if you ask,” said a curt digital voice.

  “That’s Saira,” Moore said.

  “—what you’re here for.”

  “Something’s coming up, underneath everything.” It was the Teuthex. “We’re looking for a path between possible—”

  “Not this time.” An old man’s voice. He muttered in and out of sense. He sounded urgent, in a confused way. “Have faith, but you have to do something, understand? You’re right, it’s coming, and you have to … It’s all ending.”

  “Have faith in what?” the Teuthex said. “In London?”

  The old man Fitch maundered about back streets and hidden histories, described pentacles in the banalities of town planning. “Time was I’d have said that,” he abruptly said.

  “I don’t understand …”

  “No one does. I know what you think. What did they tell you? Did anyone tell you what’s coming? Did they? No. They all know something is. None of them saw any way past it, did they? Something,” Fitch said, and his voice sounded like the voice of dust, “is coming. London’s been telling you. Something happened and there’s no running the numbers. No argument this time. No getting away from it.”

  “What is it?”

  “The world’s closing in. Something rises. And an end. If any augur augurs you otherwise, sack ’em.” Billy heard despair. “Because they’re lying, or they’re wrong.”

  “We need to be looking,” Dane said. “We need to be out there finding God. The Tattoo runs things. He won’t let anyone else have something that powerful.”

  “What about the man you said was his enemy?” Billy said. “Might it be him who took it?”

  “Grisamentum,” Dane said. “No. He weren’t a villain and he weren’t a man of gods. And he died.”

  “Don’t people think you took it?” said Bill
y. Everyone stared at him.

  “Everyone knows we wouldn’t,” the Teuthex said. “It’s not ours. It’s no one’s.” They were, Billy understood, the last people who would take it, that asymptote of their faith.

  “What is it you want to do?” Dane said. “You say we need to understand the situation, but we have to hunt. We can deliver it from evil.”

  “Enough,” the Teuthex said, silencing everyone else. “Does it not occur to you that this is a test? You really think God … needs rescuing?” He held himself like the head of a church, for the first time. “Do you know your catechism? What’s the most powerful piece on the board?”

  At last Dane muttered, “Kraken’s the most powerful piece on the board.”

  “Why?”

  “… The movement that looks like not moving.”

  “Act like you understand what that means.”

  Moore stood and walked out. Billy waited. Dane walked out. The congregation left, one by one.

  Chapter Twenty

  FSRC HEADQUARTERS, ONE MIDDLE-SIZED ROOM CONTAINING cheap armchairs and Ikea office furniture. Collingswood rarely used a desk and had never claimed one of the various of them for herself, working instead with a laptop in a deep chair.

  “What’s up with grumpy twat?” Collingswood said.

  “By which we mean whom, today?” Baron said.

  “Vardy. He’s been even quieter and grumpier than usual since this squid business.”

  “You think? Seems pretty standard surly to me.”

  “Nah.” Collingswood leaned in toward her screen. “What’s he even doing, anyway?”

  “Getting to grips with the squid cult.”

  “Right. Having a kip, then.”

  Collingswood had seen Vardy’s methods. He crossed London, interrogating informants. He did a great deal of online trawling. Sometimes he would pursue a frenetic and focused following of a trail from book to book, reading a paragraph in one, dropping it and grabbing another from the sliding scree of them on his desk, or jumping up and finding one on the shelves that faced him, reading it as he returned so that by the time he sat down again he was already done with it. It was as if he had found a single compelling story smuggled in bits into countless books. There was also his channelling. He would sit, his fingers arching in front of his mouth, his eyes closed. He might rock. He would slip into that reverie and stay in it for minutes, maybe an hour.

  “What do you think’s behind all the pangolin bones?” Baron might ask him, of some emerged oddball sect, or, “Any clue what that priestess meant by ‘stick-blood’?” or, “Where do we think they might sacrifice that boy?”

  “Not sure,” Vardy would say. “Couple of ideas. I’ll have a think.” And his colleagues would be quieter, and Collingswood, if she were in the room, would make what a twat motions, or pretend to intend to spill her drink on him or something.

  He would stay like that a long time, at last snap open his eyes and say something like, “It’s not to do with the armour. Pangolins are bipedal. That’s what this is about. That’s why they kidnapped that dancer …” Or: “Greenford. Of course. The changing rooms of some disused swimming pool. Quick, we haven’t got long.”

  “He can’t move for squid stuff,” Baron said. “Last time I looked he had the notes on Archie’s preservation and a bunch of articles on squid metabolism. And some leaflets for that Beagle trip.”

  Collingswood raised her eyebrows. “I can’t get any sniff about that business in Putney,” she said. “Too much going on. The fucking squid’s got everyone on edge. The number of cranks calling in you would not believe.”

  “How are you doing with it all?”

  She made a rude noise. “Fuck off, guv,” she said. She did not tell him about her new recurring nightmare, of being thrown from a car, hurtling toward a brick wall.

  “It’s definitely for us though, this Putney thing?”

  “If I had to put dosh down,” said Collingswood. “Bruises like that.” A body had been listlessly humping the stony shoreline with the slap-slap of the water. He was a journalist with a special interest in labour, who appeared to have been crushed. The murder had been passed to FSRC when a pathologist had pointed out that the four huge bludgeoning wounds on the man’s chest looked a bit like a single punch from an impossibly large fist.

  Baron glanced at his screen. “Email from Harris.”

  “Am I right then?” Collingswood said. She had mooted the possibility that the body they had found in the basement—“Leave aside the doesn’t-fit-in-the-fucking-jar thing for a minute, boss”—was nothing to do with the squid case. Was, in fact, some many-years-old arcane gangland hit that Billy had stumbled onto at that moment of heightened sensitivities. “He’s got something,” she had said. “A bit of nous. Maybe all stressed he sniffed something.”

  “Hah,” said Baron, and sat back. “Alright then. You’re going to like this, Kath. You’re right.”

  “What?” She sat up fast enough to spill her coffee. “Bollocks. Really, guv?”

  “Harris says the body was put in the bottle, she reckons, a good hundred years ago. That’s how long it’s been in that muck.”

  “Holy shit. Bit of a turn-up, isn’t it?”

  “Just you wait. That’s not all. There’s an ‘and.’ Or maybe I should say a ‘but.’ Isn’t there some word that means both?”

  “Get on with it, guv.”

  “So that body’s been preserved like that for a century. But-stroke-and. Have you heard of GG Allin?”

  “Who the eff’s that?”

  “Search me. Luckily Dr. Harris is a dab hand with Google. He was a singer, says here. Though it also says that stretches the definition. Delightful. ‘Scum rocker,’ it says here. More of a Queen man myself. ‘Don’t stand in the front row,’ Harris says. Anyway, he died about a decade ago.”

  “So what?”

  “So we should probably not ignore the fact that one of our deceased chap’s tattoos reads ‘GG Allin and the Murder Junkies.’”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Indeed. He was apparently pickled several decades before he got his tattoo.” They looked at each other.

  “You want me to find out who he was, don’t you?”

  “No need,” he said. “We got a hit. He’s on the database.”

  “What?”

  “Fingerprints, DNA, the whole lot. That would be the DNA that is both a century old, and also gives his DOB as 1969. Name of Al Adler. AKA various stupid things. They do love their nicknames.”

  “What did he get done for?”

  “Burglary. But that was because of a bargain, he got to do a bit of regular bird. The original charge was on the other list.” Codes against illicit magery. Adler had been breaking and entering by esoteric means.

  “Associates?”

  “Freelance when he was starting out. Did a stint as some sort of stringer for a coven in Deptford. Spent the last four years of his working life full-time with Grisamentum, it looks like. Disappeared when Griz died. Grisabloodymentum, eh?”

  “Before my time,” Collingswood said. “I never met the bloke.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Baron said. “It should be illegal to be so much younger than me. He was alright, Grisamentum. I mean, you never know who you can trust, but he helped out a few times.”

  “So I bloody gather. Geezer does crop up. What exactly did he do?”

  “He was a bit of a one,” Baron said. “Finger in a lot of pies. Sort of a player. It’s all gone a bit tits-up since he died. He was a good counterweight.”

  “Didn’t you tell me he didn’t die with …”

  “Yeah, no. It wasn’t anything battley and dramatic. He got sick. Everyone knew about it. Worst-kept secret. I tell you what though: his funeral was pretty bloody amazing.”

  “You were there?”

  “Certainly I was.”

  The Metropolitan Police could not not mark so important a passing. So advertised a good-bye. The details of where and how Grisamentum would valedictory th
e city had been leaked so ostentatiously they were clearly summonses.

  “How’d you finesse it?” Collingswood said. Baron smiled.

  “A not-very-competent surveillance, ooh, look at us, you all saw us, tish, we’re so silly.” He waggled his head.

  Collingswood was long-enough inducted, subtle enough in her policeness now, stalwart of the FSRC and London protocols to understand. The police could not officially attend the passing of so questionably licit a figure, but nor could they ignore that public event, show disrespect or ingratitude. Hence a mummery, an act designed to be seen through, the putative incompetence of their spying on the event leaving them seen, and understood to have attended.

  Collingswood said, “So what did Adler do? To get bottled?”

  “Who knows? What he did to piss somebody off, your guess is as good as mine.”

  “My guess is way better than yours, guv,” she said. “Get the necessary, I’ll fetch my shit.”

  She went to her locker for an old glyph-fucked board, a candle, a pot of unpleasant tallow. Baron sent Harris an email, requesting a rag of Adler’s skin, a bone, a hank of his hair.

  HE COULD NOT LEAVE, BUT HE WAS NOT OTHERWISE RESTRAINED. Billy spent hours in the sunken library. He saturated himself in deepwater theology and poetics. He looked for specifics about the teuthic apocalypse.

  A swallowing up and a shitting out, taken from darkness, in darkness. A terrible biting. The elect like, what, skin-bugs, little parasites on or in the great holy squid body, carried through the vortex. Or not, depending on specifics. But it wasn’t like this. When at last one time he sighed and took off his glasses and reshelved verses on the tentacular, blinked and rubbed his eyes, he was startled to see several men and women who had been in the meeting with the Teuthex. He stood. They were various in age and clothes, though not in their respectful expressions. He had not heard them enter or descend.

  “How long’ve you been here?” he said.

  “We had a question,” said a woman in a gown, gold tentacle-sigil winking. “You worked on it. Was there anything about this kraken that was … special?”

  Billy ran his hands through his hair. “You mean was it specially special? Unusual for a giant squid?” He shook his head hopelessly. “How would I know?” He shrugged. “You tell me. I’m not one of your prophets.”