Kraken (53 page)

So Collingswood asked the question not for elucidation—stepping into the ruins of the housing of the London Stone, the obvious signs that there had been murder there, though all they could do was log it and move on—but to make it clear that Baron had no answer. He was on the doorstep, looking in and shaking his head with the studied mildness that Collingswood had grown into her job witnessing. Around the room constables brushed things and pretended they were looking for fingerprints—conventional protocols increasingly ridiculous. They glanced at Baron to see if he would tell them what to do.

“Bloody hell,” he said, and raised his eyebrows at her. “This is all a bit much.”

Fucking no
, she thought. She crossed her arms and waited for him to say something else.
Not this time
. She was so used to reading his nonchalance, his asides, his patient waiting for suggestions as if pedagogically, as signs that there was nothing that could faze him, as symptomatic of absolute police-officerly control, that it was not only with surprise but rage that she realised he had no idea what to do.

When was the last fucking time you came up with shit?
she thought.
When did you tell us what to do?
She shamed him into meeting her eye, and what she saw in the deeps of his, like a lighthouse a long way away, was fear.

kollywood? She brushed the tiny voice out of the way as if her hair had irritated her. She did not need Baron knowing that Perky, her little pig-spirit friend, was with her.

“So,” he said at last. If you hadn’t known him a long time you might buy it. You might think he was calm. “Still no word from Vardy?”

“You already asked me. I told you. No.” Vardy had gone to speak to Cole, he’d said, to sound him out. That was the last anyone had heard. They could not track him down, nor could they Cole. Baron nodded. Looked away and back again. “It was his sodding idea that we decoy the end of the world; it was him who pulled whatever he does and tweaked the dates,” Baron said.

“Exfuckingscuse me, you reckon it was him spent a day with his head in the fucking astral persuading constellations to fart around a bit quicker?” she said. “Fuck off it was him, he had me do it.”

“Alright, well. I thought the whole idea was to flush everyone out and that it certainly did.”

“I think I was never a hundred percent sure what exactly the sodding idea was, boss.”

“Perhaps he’ll be good enough to join us,” Baron said.

“I’m going,” Collingswood said.

“What’s that?”

“Can’t help the London-tossers now. I’m
going
. I’m going out.” She pointed, in any direction. They could hear the rumpus of the night. “I been thinking. I know what I’m good at and I know what I can get. This information about this right here? That ain’t it. They got me here too early. I was
supposed
to hear about this. This was a fucking fake duck noise.” She blew a raspberry. “I’m police,” she said. “I’m going policing. You.” With three points she commandeered three officers. All obeyed her summons immediately. Baron opened his mouth as if he would call her back, then hesitated.

“I think I’ll come with,” he said.

“No,” she said. She left with her little crew following.

She trod over the smashed-up entrance into the night street. “Where to, guv?” one of the officers asked her.

where we goin kollywood? Perky said.

She had been trying to gather friends; given her druthers Collingswood would have been completely enveloped in amiable presences. But it was hard to get their attention, now. As time stretched toward whatever was at its end, the minds, wills, spirits, quasi-ghosts and animal intents she might have had flit around her in better times were skittish, and too nervy to be much help. She had Perky, with its uncanny porcine affection, and a very few diffuse policely functions too vague to do more than emit words so drawled in her hidden hearing that she could not tell if they were words or imitation of a siren, whispered
now-then-now-then
or
nee-naw-nee-naw
incessantly. Just her, three men, a fidgety pig and lawful intent.

“Perky,” she said. The officers looked at her, but they had learned on recent FSRC-seconded business not to ask questions like
Who are you talking to?
or
What the fuck is that thing?
“Perky, scoot off a bit, tell me where there’s fighting. Let’s see what we can do.”

kay kollywood sminit

Collingswood thought of Vardy, and what came to her mind was a tug of anger and concern comingled.
You better be okay
, she thought.
And if you are, I’m fucking livid with you. Where the fuck are you? I need to know what this is
.

Although—did she? Not really. It would not have made a great deal of difference.

She had spent some hours watching CCTV footage. Like radiographers, the FSRC knew what to look at, how to make sense of what shadows, which filters to switch on to bring which whats to the fore. What was artefact on the electric image and what a witch really breaking the world.

Rumours and scabby video came through of two figures who did not attempt to stay hidden. Goss and Subby. Goss
completely unperturbed
by all the salvos against him, unfussed by damage, killing offhandedly. “Where’s my boss?” he demanded of those he crippled, the few not murdered attested. “I’ve counted to a hundred over by the wall and it’s time to go in for tea and he’s still in the garden somewhere, Aunty’s getting tetchy,” and so on. After a strange and blessed absence, he was manifesting with his mute boy all over the place.

Did Collingswood’s less specialist colleagues think it was an endless day and night of causeless burglary, ferocious muggings and dangerous driving? Perhaps they might allow themselves to think here and there in terms of
gang fights
, muttered about Yardies or Kosovans or whatever, even with the reports of what she knew must be refugees from the Tattoo’s workshop—women and men shambling nude and altered, with lightbulbs, diodes, speakers and oscilloscope screens in them—horrifying everyday citizens who could only tell themselves for so long that they witnessed an art event.

Collingswood leaned on the wall and smoked while her companion zipped through the city looking for trouble like a pig for truffles, so that she could do something to look after London. It was better than nothing, she thought.
Really?
she asked herself, and,
Yeah, really
, she answered back.

T
HE WORLD LURCHED AGAIN
. R
EELED, IN THE WAS
PUNCHED
SENSE
, rather than the
dancing
. Marge felt it. She had not gone home since the foiled Armaggedons. There were places to stay if you didn’t much care. She did not know if she had a home left, and if she did she assumed it was not safe anymore, that she had been brought back into the attention of the dying city.

You say it best, hmm hmm it best
. Boyzone was not one of her iPod-devil’s favourites, but it was muttering its version into her ears gamely enough. This was the track that had kept her safe in the brief moment when she had felt a hungry mammal consciousness of one of the gods notice her.

She was in an arriviste corner of Battersea, where late bars stayed open and proudly displayed doctored B-movie posters, and she could feel the
bang bang
of dance bass through doors, through the pavement and her feet. There were lights in the windows of offices, people working late as if in a month’s time they would still have a job and the world would still revolve. Gangs outside fast-food restaurants and cafés that pottered along as if it were not after midnight, their premises abutting the alleys that were the conduits to the other city that, over the incompetent supernatural impersonation of Ronan Keating, Marge could hear.

The littler streets were as lit as the main ones, but they were furtive. A landscape of degenerating knackery, violence and eschatological terror. Marge would swear she could hear shots, metres, only metres from where laughing hipsters drank.

She was beyond fear, really. She just drifted, she just went. Trying to ride out the night, which felt to her like a last night.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

S
OME HOSPITALS WERE KNOWN TO BE FRIENDLY, TO ASK NO
questions about odd wounds and sicknesses. There were quiet wings, where you could get treatment for lukundoo, for jigsaw disease, where no one would be put out if a patient spasmed out of phase with the world. The worst wounded of the Londonmancers were delivered, with whispered warnings that the bullets inside them might hatch.

Dane was lashed in place on the lorry roof like some Odysseus. He was pushed, lit up and darkened by the lorry’s passage. Dane held his Kirk and waved it, called Wati’s name. He made it an aerial. It was a long time until Wati found it.

“Oh God, Dane,” the figurine suddenly said.

“Wati, where’ve you
been?”
Dane hammered on the hatch. Billy looked through. The wind made him blink. Around him the city, like something fat, staggered toward a heart attack. The statuette coughed as if it had something caught in its nonexistent throat, as if its nonexistent lungs were bruised. “You heard about the Londonmancers?”

“Oh man,” Wati said. “I been, oh, God. They beat us, Dane. They brought in scabs. Goss and Subby are back.”

“They’re fighting you?” Billy said. “Even without the Tattoo around?”

“Most of the Tattoo’s guys must be screwed,” Dane said. “But if Goss and Subby’re still at it …”

“Griz’s got gunfarmers working for him.”

“It is,” Dane said. “It
is
him bringing the war.
Grisamentum
…
Why
the Londonmancers?”

“Wait,”
Wati said. “Wait.” Coughing again. “I can’t move like I should. That’s why it took me so long to find you.”

“Take it easy,” said Dane.

“No, listen,” Wati said. “Oh God, Dane, no one’s told you, have they? It ain’t just the strike or the London Stone. There’s
no
neutrals now.”

“What do you mean?”

“It weren’t just the Londonmancers. They went for your people too.”

“What?” said Dane.

“What?” said Billy.
That ostentatious assault of Fitch’s comrades, as if it were meant to be seen
. “Who? Goss and Subby? Who’ve they—?”

“No. Gunfarmers. For the Krakenists. They attacked your church.”

D
ANE STOLE A CAR
. H
E WOULD NOT LET ANYONE BUT
B
ILLY COME
with him.

“They didn’t even have anyone
out
there,” Dane kept saying, slamming his hands on the dash. “They kept their heads down. How could anyone …? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“I was the only one, and I’m not …”

“I don’t know.”

A little crowd was outside the community church. Tutted at the smouldering from the windows, the broken glass, the obscene graffiti that now covered it.

“Hooligans.” “Awful.” Dane shoved through them and inside. The hall was smashed up. It was very much as it would be had the perpetrators been a rampaging group of fools. Dane went through the junk room and pulled the hatch open. Billy could hear how he was breathing. There was blood in the corridors below.

There, in that buried complex, were the ruins left by the real attack. Very different from the foolish display above.

Throughout the halls were bodies. They were punctured and blood-sodden, hosts for grubbing little bullets. There were those who looked killed in other ways—by bludgeons, suffocation, wetness and magic. Billy walked as if in a slowed-down film, through carnage. The ruined bodies of Dane’s erstwhile congregation lay like litter.

Dane stopped to feel pulses, but without urgency. The situation was clear. There were no sounds but their footsteps.

Desks had been ransacked. As well as mud, in a few places on the floor were trampled origami planes, like the one that had alerted Dane to Grisamentum’s attention. Billy picked up two or three of the cleanest. On each folded dart was the remain or smudge of a design in grey ink—a random word, a symbol, two sketched eyes.

“Grisamentum,” he said. “It’s him. He sent them.” Dane looked at him without any sign of emotion.

In the church, before the altar, was the bullet-ruined body of the Teuthex. Dane made no sound. The Teuthex lay behind the altar, reaching for it with his right hand. Dane gently held the dead man. Billy left him alone.

Like arrows drawn on the floor, more fallen planes pointed in higgledy-piggledy direction to the library. Billy followed them. When he pushed open the library door, he stopped, at the top of the shaft of shelves, and stared.

He walked back to where Dane mourned. He waited as long as he could bear. “Dane,” he said. “I need you to see this.”

The books were gone. Every single book was gone.

“T
HIS MUST BE WHAT THEY CAME FOR
,” D
ANE SAID
. T
HEY STARED
into the empty word-pit. “He wanted the library.”

“He’s—Grisamentum must be researching the kraken,” Billy said.

Dane nodded. “That must be why … Remember when he wanted us to join him? That’s why. Because of what I know. And you. Whether you know it or not.”

“He’s taken it all.” Centuries of dissident cephalopod gnosis.

“Grisamentum,” Dane whispered.

“It is him,” Billy said. “Whatever it is, it is his plan. He’s the one who wants the kraken, and he wants to know everything about it.”

“But he doesn’t
have
it,” Dane said. “So what’s he going to do?”

Billy descended the ladder. There was blood from something on his glasses. He shook his head. “He can’t read even a
fraction
of these. It would take centuries.”

“I don’t know where he is.” Dane made fists and raised them and could only lower them again. “The last time I even saw him was …” Dane did not smile. “Just before his funeral.”