He entered the FSRC office. The only person in the room was Collingswood, prodding a keyboard as if at idle random. She glanced up at him and he nodded, crossed to the filing cabinets against the far wall. “Alright, Kath,” he said. “Just got to find some files.” He opened the drawers. He heard Kath stand. A silence went on. He turned. She held a pistol in her expert grip, aimed at his chest.
“And just who,” she said, “the motherfuck, are you?”
Chapter Fifty-One
“I WANT TO TALK TO SOMEONE WHO UNDERSTANDS THE ANGELS,” Billy said, and the middleman made phone calls, sent emails, got on instant messenger and dropped queries in chatrooms. Eventually he told Billy where to go.
“Okay, it knows you’re coming. Otherwise it would be bad.”
“What am I looking for?” Billy said. “Who’s going to meet me?”
“Duh. An ex-angel.”
This was more than Billy had expected. Not a specialist or an angel-geek, but a semi-member of the jar’s tribe itself, to whom he might sort-of speak. The custodians of the museums could hardly be comprehended: their agenda was memory’s, which is not human. What they spoke was not like language. But redundant, they lingered, a few last years, and then they would become more like women and men out of a kind of loneliness.
The shell of the Commonwealth Institute was a conquistador helmet sweep of building at the southern edge of Holland Park. It had closed in the early 2000s. The ludicrous collection of exhibits honouring its member countries, that baffled and polite imperial aftermath, was long dispersed. But it was not all empty. When it grew dark Billy broke in—that was easy now with his new skills. He listened to his own reverberating steps.
The dust was only millimetres thick but thick enough. He felt as if he were wading in it, toward the last unmoved display cases. In many rooms the darkness should have been absolute, and Billy wondered what faint light it was that let him see. Once he heard a guard—some human guard—on halfhearted rounds. All he did was stand still in a cupboard and wait until the echo was gone from that section of hall.
A few exhibit pieces were left, forgotten, unworthy of rehousing, or hidden and, later in the solitude, they reemerged. Billy walked into a hall where though it was windowless there was not only light but shafts of it, ajut from the ceiling, each starting at a random point in the unbroken surface and crazy-pillaring down in random cross-hatched directions, as if the room were nostalgic for moonbeams it had never seen and grew its own simulacra. He walked through and under those interlaced fat fingers of imagined light toward a waiting thing.
God, he thought as he approached. God. I remember you.
The decommissioned angel of Commonwealth memory eyed him. “Hello again,” he said. He had seen it on its day job, when he was a child, and it, in the daylight, an exhibit.
Plastic in the shape of a little cow. It eyed him sideways, so it could display its flank made of glass. Inside were its four stomachs, which had lit up, one by one, he remembered, and there, they still did, repeatedly, one at a time. Paunch, king’s-hood, fardel and maw, digestion glimmering in each in turn toward its lactic telos, stalwart of some Commonwealth economy. From the New Zealand room, Billy thought.
He could feel its attention, its waning self. When the institute was open, this mnemophylax had after hours stamped the hallways with a gait modelled on Taurus myth. It had protected that mooncalf memory-palace from the forces of angry time or postcolonial rage-magic. Public uninterest had killed it finally and left it lonely and post-dead and full of stories.
Heard you were coming. Its voice was distant. It tried to tell Billy about the fights it had had. The references were inhuman. It tried to tell stories that made no sense and faded into nothing, leaving Billy nodding politely at each absent anecdote. With a cough, as genteel as at a tea party, Billy brought it back to the matter in hand.
“I was told you could tell me what’s happening,” he said. “One of you’s been following me. Keeping an eye out for me. From the Natural History Museum. Can you tell me why?”
Can, it said. It was eager to answer. You’re what it waited for, it said.
“The jar? The angel of the Natural History Museum? How do you know?”
They telled. The others. We speaked. Dead it might be, but it kept in touch with its still-active cousins. It failed, the thing said. Behind him was a gust of air, as swing doors opened and closed to help it speak. Its voice was building sounds. The kraken went. It did bad. It’s full of guilt.
“It’s left the museum,” Billy said.
All of them. All of us. There’s a fight on against the end thing. No point staying still. They fight the endingness. But it. Was the first to walk. Wants to make amends. Tries always to find you. Look after you.
“Why?”
Billy backed away and bumped into the open-closing door. He stood away from it so the phylax could say in its hinge-squeak, Remembers you. You’re chosen.
“What? I don’t … How? Why’s it chosen me?”
Angels wait for their christs.
Angels wait for their christs?
And you came, born not of woman but of glass.
“I don’t understand.”
Gives you strength—you are christ of its memory.
“This thing with time? It gave me that? Dane said it was because of the kraken … Oh. Wait, wait. Are you …?”
Billy began to laugh. Slowly at first, then more. He sat on the floor. He made himself laugh silently. He knew he was hysterical. It did not feel like release. The cow moved toward him. It was just one moment at the end of the room, one moment two or three feet closer and eyeing him with its sideways glass eye. “I’m alright, I’m alright,” Billy said to the decaying memory.
“You know why Dane thinks those things happen?” he said. He smiled like at a drinking buddy. “He thinks it’s because of the kraken. He thinks I’m some kind of John the Baptist, or something. But, so, that’s the wrong direction. It’s nothing to do with the squid.
“None of this is anything to do with the squid. It’s the sodding tank.
“Come on,” he said. “You’ve got to admit that’s funny. You know what’s even funnier? The best of it? I was joking.”
Billy had kept a straight face during all his claims to be the first person born of in vitro fertilization. That ridiculous, meaningless gag, made in that place, that for the sake of the rigour of humour he had stuck to, had been overheard by the genius loci, the spirit of the museum. Maybe it was attuned to any talk of bottles and their power. Maybe it did not understand the idea of a joke or a lie. “It’s not true,” he said. The bovine angel of memory said nothing. Clack clack clack clack went its four stomachs, lighting in time.
Billy leaned over. “I’m not a kraken prophet, I’m the bottle messiah.” He laughed again. “But I’m just not, I’m not.”
The bottle-angel was diminished, diminished and receding daily, by its wanderings beyond its demesne, by its failure, its efforts, the smashing of that iteration of glass, preserver and bone. It would look for him again, pulling itself another self out of bits and pieces from its palace, though, sniffing out that portion of its own self it had put inside him. That gave him these unearned powers. Until it was gone it would strive to find Billy again, and through him the Architeuthis it had lost.
“I WISH IT WOULD COME BACK,” HE SAID.
Will.
“Yeah, but now. My partner’s gone. I need all the help I can get.”
You are the memory christ.
“Yeah, only I’m not.” Slowly, he looked up. Slowly he stood and smiled. “But you know what, I’ll take that. I’ll take whatever.” He reached and clenched, and thought maybe there was a tiny scutter of time. Maybe there was. “You going to come? Outside?” The cow said nothing. Dead as it was it did not have the strength to fight in the war that its living siblings were waging. “Alright,” Billy said. “Alright, it doesn’t matter. You stay here, look after this place. It needs you.” He felt kind.
From
some other part of the building came a noise that was not part of the cow’s voice. Billy was at the door, his weapon out, listening, ready, without knowing how he had got there. The cow angel tried to speak, but Billy held the door closed, and it had nothing with which to make noise. “Hush,” he whispered. Ordering an angel around. It was gone, though, in a series of those being-elsewhere steps. Billy thought for a moment that it would bring a human guard running in consternation. (He did not know that they were all aware something old and melancholy walked in the building, that they tried never to disturb.)
“Godammit,” he said, and he went after the dead angel, holding his phaser out. He followed the screech of hinges and things falling from last shelves. He came suddenly into an unwindowed room where the plastic cow screamed with the voice of the building at a tall man.
Billy ducked and fired, but the man moved faster, and the phaser beam scored over the ineffectual cow and dissipated across the wall. “Billy Harrow!” the man was shouting. He held a weapon himself, but did not fire. “Billy!” The word came from behind him too, Billy thought, but realised that the second, tinier voice was in his pocket. It was Wati.
“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
THE SEA IS NEUTRAL. THE 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 w
ith 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.
AND DANE?
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.”