“YOU ARE LATE,” HE SAID. INSIDE THE MUTT-MADE HOUSE THE rooms were drier, finer and more finished, more roomlike rooms than Marge would have thought. Amid mould-coloured upholstery, paintings the shades of shadows and books that smelt and looked like slabs of dust was a computer, a video-game console. The man in the hoodie was in his fifties. His left eye was obscured by what she thought for a second was some complex Cyberdog-style hat-glasses combination, but was, she realised, without even a flinch or a twist of the lips, these days, the metal escutcheon of a keyhole from a door, soldered or sutured to the orbit of his eye.
It was attached to face toward him. Everything he saw was glimpsed as through a keyhole. Everything he saw was an illicit secret.
“You’re late.”
“You’re Butler, right?” said Marge. “I know, what can you do? Traffic’s a swine.” She took money out of her bag, a roll in a rubber band. If the world doesn’t end, she thought, I’m going to be buggered for cash.
The air in the room eddied, like interruptions in her vision. Things that should not, like ashtrays and lamps, seemed to be moving a tiny bit. “Anyway,” she said. “It’s you who lives where no taxi driver can go.”
“You think this is tricky to find,” he said. “There’s an avenue in W-Five that’s only in the 1960s. You try getting back into that. Protection, right, as I recall? From what?”
“From whatever’s coming.”
“Steady on.” He smirked. “I’m not a magician.”
“Ha ha,” she said. “I’m looking for someone. I’ve been told to leave it alone and I’m not going to. I’m sure you know more than me about whatever, so you tell me what I need.”
The watcher-through-the-keyhole nodded and took the money. He counted it. “Could be djinn,” he said as he did. “Fire’s what’s coming. Maybe someone arsed them off.”
“Djinn?”
“Yeah.” He tapped the keyhole. “That’s the thinking. Fires, you know. Anything you remember never been there, all of a sudden?”
“What?” she said.
“Things are going up in fire and never been there.” When she looked no wiser he said, “There was a warehouse in Finchley. Round between the bath shop and the Pizza Hut. I know there was because I used to go there and because I’ve seen it.” He tap-tapped his eyepiece again. “But ‘seen it’ butters no bleeding parsnips these days. That warehouse burnt down, and now it didn’t ever was there. The bath shop and the Pizza Hut are joined up now, and the only ash blowing around there’s a bit of charred never.
“Burnt out backward.” He headed into another room, raising his voice so she could still hear. “They can’t get it out of everyone’s head yet, but it’s a start. There’ll be more, bet you a thousand quid. Might be that’s what you’re up against.”
“Might be.”
“I mean we’re all up against it but most of us aren’t out hunting for trouble. Anyway that ain’t the only apocalypse right now. You’ll have a choice soon enough. Which is bloody ridiculous.” He returned and threw an iPod to Marge. It was scratched, well used. An older model.
“I’ve got one,” she said.
“Ha ha yourself. Put it on but don’t turn it on, not yet. Wait till you’re out there in the world.”
“What have I got? Bit of Queen?”
“Yeah, ‘Fat-Bottomed Girls’ and ‘Bicycle.’ I don’t know what you’re going up against any more than you, so this is a bit all-purpose and you better be gentle with it. It should give you a little bit”—he held his finger and thumb apart an inch—“if it is djinn, and a little bit if it’s herders, or gunfarmers or Chaos Nazis or anyone else up and about—you hear all bloody sorts—or whatever of your multiple-choice end-times is coming. But don’t push your luck.”
“What do you mean multiple choice?” she said.
“There’s two on the way, turns out, is what I hear. One of which may or may not be the fire. Can you Adam and Eve that? So to speak. Some animal Ragnarok plus some other awful bloody thing.”
“What do you mean, animal?” she said. “What do you mean?”
“In a minute. Listen.” He pointed at the machine he had given her. “You’ve got a little guardchord, is all. It’s in there. Swimming about in the noise, and if you listen to it it’ll keep you safe. A bit. So you better hope you like it and don’t let anyone else listen. If you sniff trouble play it. Just play it all the time, sod it. Keep the bloody thing charged. Keep it fed.”
“What does it eat?”
“Music, gods’ sake. Put some playlists on there. Make sure you give it what it likes.”
“How do I know?”
“Never had a pet? Work it out.”
“How strong is—?”
“Not bloody very. You’re flying blind, like we all are. It’s a lick and a prayer and a spit of goodwill, so don’t piss and moan.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Alright.”
“It might give you a bit of time to get away from whatever, is all. Think of it as a head start for when you run. ’Cause let’s face it, you’ll run.”
“What did you mean about the choice?” she said to the seeing man.
He shrugged. “There’s way too many ends-of-the-world to keep up with, but this is the first conjunction I can remember in a long while. Seems like it’s animals and puritans, this time. Right now with all this going on. Seems a bit—”
“Animals?”
“Some animal god, they reckon—that’s what you hear, that’s what I see.” Tap-tap on the keyhole. “We’ll find out soon enough. I might not miss this one. Takes more than an apocalypse to get me into town these days, but two …? Right now? You should, though. Miss it, I mean.”
“I can’t. That sounds like what … people’ve been waiting for. And anyway, what with my little …” She shook her iPod, and he his head.
“It’ll just give you time to run,” he said.
“About that,” she said. Her mouth moved, but no sound came for a moment. “One thing I might have to get away from … Can this, can the music-thing you … I might see Goss and Subby.”
She waited for those names to do their bad magic. For the man to gasp. He only looked sad and winced.
“I know,” he said. “Think you get to be on that sort of shitlist and people don’t hear? That’s why you should stay away.”
“This, though?” she said, raising the iPod. “It’ll help, if I do … if they …”
“Against them?” he said flatly. “That thing? No it won’t. It won’t do nothing.”
“Thanks for the warning,” she said at last. “I’ll be careful. Still if … if you could please give me the details of those, of the animal Armageddon … I think someone I know might be there.”
Chapter Sixty
ON THE CAMPUS OF THE SUBURBAN UNIVERSITY, BILLY AND Dane’s vaguely purposeful scruffiness was camouflage. It had not taken long at an Internet café to check which room was Professor Cole’s. They knew his office hours, too.
While they were online Billy had poked around to find and check Marge’s MySpace. He saw the picture of Leon, the call for help, the number that was not her number, must be some dedicated phone. It shocked him how much it made emotion fill him. He printed more than one copy.
“If this bloke’s such a powerful knacker,” said Billy, “why’s he work at Shitechester Central Poly? And is it not a bit nuts for us to go up against him?”
“Who said we was going up against anyone?” said Dane. “Is that the plan? We’re just looking for information.”
“We might. Like you said, it sounds like this might all be down to him. The fire, the everything. So what can we—”
“Yeah. I know. We might.”
Wati would not come. The strike was dying, and even now his first allegiance had to be to his members.
“We don’t have time to wait. We have to find out whatever there is to find out,” Dane said. “This is the first lead we’ve had. So yeah.” That long stare had come with him out of the basement. “We do w
hat we have to, and we be ready.”
Every one of their moves now might plausibly be the last, but they could not do everything, could not take care of all business. They did their best, just in case there was an aftermath. Dane spoke to rabbi Mo, a quick connection through stolen phones. Simon was curing. They were purging him of all those angry ex-hims. “He’s drained and weak, but he’s getting better,” he said she had said. “Good.” As if it were likely that it would, ultimately, make a difference.
Billy and Dane waited in the corridor, forcing smiles when Cole’s secretary, a middle-aged woman, and the three students waiting glanced at them curiously. Cole must have protections. They had made what desperate plans they could. When at last the student who had been with the professor left the room, they walked to the head of the waiting line. “You don’t mind, do you?” Billy said to the young man in front. “It’s really important.”
“Hey, there’s like a queue?” the boy whined, but that was all he did. Billy wondered passing if he had been so feeble at that age.
They entered, and Cole looked up. “Yes …?” he said. He was a middle-aged man in an ugly suit. He frowned at them. He was cave-pale, and his eyes were shaded ridiculously dark. “Who …?” His stare widened and he stood, grabbing at the clutter on his desk as he came. Billy saw papers, journals, books open. A photo of a young girl in school uniform between Cole and a bonfire.
“Professor,” said Dane, smiling, holding out his hand. Billy closed the door behind them. “We had a question.”
Cole’s face went between expressions. He hesitated and took Dane’s hand in his shaking own. Dane twisted and pulled him down.
“I ain’t going to take him if we go knack to knack,” Dane had said when they prepared. “If he’s what we think. At the very least it sounds like he knows what’s going on, and just in case he is the burner … the only chance we’ve got is to be stupid, and brutal, and fucking base.”
Dane brought Cole’s body down beneath him, expelling the man’s breath and locking him into place. He struck Cole twice with the weapon he pulled from his pocket. The way he held him Cole could make no sound.
“Billy?” Dane said.
“Yeah.” Billy found two places in the doorway where there were drill holes. He gouged with the knife he had brought, uncovering a scrap of flesh and thin chains, a wire figurine. He could see no other magics. “Done,” he said.
“Exit?” Dane said. Billy went fast to the window.
“One floor down, onto grass,” he said. He aimed the phaser at the groaning Cole.
“Professor,” Dane said. “I’m sorry about this, genuinely, but I’ll do it again the second I think you’re knacking. We need you to answer some questions. What do you know about the kraken? It was you wanted to burn it, wasn’t it? Why?”
Billy riffled urgently through the papers on the desk with his non-gun hand. He went to the bookshelves, found the collection of books and papers by Cole himself: A Particle Physics Primer, offcuts, an edited volume on the science of heat. He took the latter and saw, behind it, a second row of works. A slim book, that he grabbed, that was also by Cole, that was called Abnatural Burnings. He took another look at the photograph of Cole and his daughter.
“Come on,” Dane said. Billy shoved the papers into a bag. “Could be this is all nothing,” Dane said. “We got to get you so you can’t do anything, in case it’s not nothing. You’re going to come with us, and if it turns out you’ve got bugger-all to do with it and we owe you an apology, then what can I tell you? We’ll apologise. What did you want with the kraken? Why burn everything?”
There was a noise. Cole was staring up at Billy. Dark smoke was coming out of his scalp. Dane sniffed at the burning.
“Oh piss …” he said. Cole was not looking at him. He was staring at Billy, holding his papers, his picture. “Shit …” The smoke came from Cole’s clothes now. Dane gritted his teeth. “Billy, Billy,” he said. “Go.”
Cole smouldered and Dane swore and scrambled off him, shaking his hot hands, and Cole rose onto all fours and bared his teeth in the smoke that coiled like mad hair around him.
“What have you done with her?” he shouted. Flames came out of his mouth.
Billy shot him. The inventy phaser-beam slammed him into unconsciousness and the smoke dissipated. They stared at him supine, in the sudden quiet.
“We have to move,” Dane said.
“Hang on, you saw him,” Billy said. “He thought we were—” There was a knock on the door behind him.
“Professor?”
“Window,” Billy said to Dane. “We got to go.”
But the door was shoved suddenly and sent Billy staggering. The secretary stood in the threshold, shadow coagulating around her raised hands. Billy fired at her, missed, as she ducked animal fast into the room. He tightened his gut, and time slowed for her, held an instant, and he fired again and sent her spinning.
Dane smashed the window and gripped Billy, cantripped. He pulled them out. His weak little knack slowed their fall by a second, still depositing them on the verge with a breathtaking smack, but without breaking bones. People stared at them from around the irregular quad. Billy and Dane rose and ran raggedly. A few braver and bigger men halfheartedly tried to get in their way, but at the sight of Dane’s face and the phaser Billy waved they got out of the way.
There was a shout. Cole leaned out of the window. He spat in their direction. The stench of burning hair swamped Billy and Dane as they ran, making them gag. They kept running, did not stop, out of the university grounds, back into the city proper and away.
“THAT WENT WELL,” BILLY SAID. DANE SAID NOTHING.
“You saw the picture?” Billy said.
“You still got it?”
“Why the hell would he want to end the world?” Billy said. “He’s not a nihilist. See the way he was looking at it?”
“Could be unintentional. Side effect. By-product.”
“Jesus, I hurt,” Billy said. “By-product of what? Burning the kraken? He sent Al to get it? Why’d he want to do that? Okay, maybe. But you heard what he said. Someone’s took her. He thought it was us. That’s part of this.”
In the boarded-up building they squatted, they went through the papers. They scanned the mainstream physics, but it was the arcana that gripped them.
“Look at this shit,” Billy said, turning the pages of Abnatural Burnings. He could not follow it, of course, but the abstracts of the essays-cum-experiments-cum-hexes gave glimpses. “‘Reversible ashes,’” he said. “Jesus. ‘Frigid conflagration.’” It was a textbook of alternative fire.
“What’s reversible ashes?” Dane said.
“If I’m reading this right, it’s what you get if you burn something with something called ‘memory fire.’” Billy read the conclusion. “If you keep them hot, they’re ashes: if they get cold again, they go back to what they were before.” There was endless fire, that burned without consuming—notorious, that one. Antifire, that burnt colder and colder, into untemperatures below absolute zero.
Papers were folded between the book’s pages, bookmarks. Billy read them. “‘Behave and you get her back. Prepare three charges of,” hold on, “katachronophlogiston. Delivery TBA.’” He and Dane looked at each other. “It’s like a ransom note. He’s making notes for his work on it.” Under the typed words were scrawled pen and pencil.
“I suppose using that as your pad would inspire your bloody researches,” Dane said.
“See what’s weird about this?” Billy said. He held out the photo. “Look. Look at it. The little girl’s in the middle, Cole to one side.” The two of them were smiling.
“It’s bonfire night, maybe.”
“No, that’s what I’m saying. Look.” The layout was skewed, the fire to the other side of the girl from Cole, very close, lighting them strangely. “He’s on one side of her and the fire’s on the other.” Billy shook it. “This isn’t a picture of the two of them, it’s the three of them. This is a family shot.”
>
Dane and Billy squinted at it. Dane nodded slowly.
“The djinns are freaking out, people reckon,” Dane said. “Maybe it’s got something to do with all this. This was a mixed marriage.”
“And now someone’s got his daughter. He thought it was us.”
“He’s obeying orders. Even if it’s his stuff behind the burning, this isn’t his plan, he’s just doing as he’s told.”
“His kid. Find the kidnapper …” Billy said.
“Yeah, which he thinks is us.”
DID THAT MEAN ANOTHER PURSUER? WELL. THEY HAD NEVER BEEN unhunted anyway. That was why they stayed well away from the kraken on its circling journey. No matter how out of sight the Londonmancers were, obscured by the matter of the city of which they were functions, Billy and Dane were the targets of the greatest personhunt in memory, and they could not risk bringing that sort of attention to the enjarred god. Dane prayed to it, quietly but visibly, quite unembarrassed. He hankered to be in its presence but would not endanger it—any more than it was already endangered, what with the whole end of the world.
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.