“That is the sort of thing that gets us interested,” Baron said.
“‘Us’?” Billy said at last. “Who is ‘us’?”
“We,” said Baron, “are the FSRC.”
“The what?”
Baron folded his hands. “Do you remember that lot calling themselves New Rosicrucians?” he said. “Who kidnapped that girl in Walthamstow?” Baron thumbed in Vardy’s direction. “Found them. And he was I suppose you’d call it consulting during seven/seven, too. That sort of thing. It’s an area of concern.”
“What area?”
“Alright, alright,” Baron said. “You sound like you’re about to cry.” Vardy handed Billy a piece of paper. It was, oddly, his CV. His PhD was in psychology, but his master’s was in theology. His first degree divinity. Billy pushed his glasses on and scanned the publications list, the Positions Currently Held.
“You’re an editor of The Journal of Fundamentalism Studies?” Billy said. This was a test.
Baron said, “The FSRC is the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit.”
Billy stared at him, at Vardy, at the CV again. “You are a profiler,” he said. “You’re a cult profiler.”
Vardy even smiled.
“THERE’S …” BARON COUNTED ON HIS FINGERS. “AUM SHINRIKYO … The Returner Sect … Church of Christ Hunter … Kratosians, close to home some of them … Do you have any idea the increase in cult-related violence in the last ten years? Of course you don’t, because unless it’s, boo, Al Qaeda and the Al-Qaedalinos, it doesn’t come close to the news. But they’re the least of our worries. And part of the reason you haven’t heard about this is because we are good at our job. We’ve been keeping the streets safe.
“That’s why you were encouraged to keep shtum. But you told someone something. Which A, you should not have done, and B, is not unimpressive. Collingswood’s going to have to ask you again, a bit harder.
“It’s not as if we’re exactly secret,” he said. “It’s not so much ‘plausible denial’—that’s not the best strategy these days. It’s more ‘plausibly uninteresting.’ Everyone’ll be like, ‘FSRC? Why on earth you asking about them? Silly nonsense, bit of an embarrassment …’” He smiled. “You get the idea.”
Billy could hear officers in the corridors outside. Phones were ringing.
“So,” said Billy at last. “So you’re cult people. So what’s this got to do with that poor sod in the basement? And what’s it got to do with me?”
Vardy brought up a video file on his laptop and placed it where all three men could watch. An office, a tidy desk, books on the walls, a printer and PC. There was Vardy, sitting three-quarters toward the camera, another man with his back to the lens. All that could be seen of him was slicked-back thinning hair and a grey jacket. The colours were not very good.
“… so.” Billy heard the hidden-faced man say. “I done a stint with that bunch in Epping, bog-standard manickies they are I think, balance balance balance not very interesting, I wouldn’t waste your time.”
“What about this?” said video-Vardy, and held out what Billy could see was the symbol he himself had drawn.
The obscured man leaned in. “Oh right,” he said. He spoke in a breathless conspiratorial drone. “The tooths, the toothies,” he said. “Yeah no I don’t know,” he said. “The toothies they’re new I think I hen’t seen them much except they been drawing that leaving it about. A sign a sign. You been to Camden? Saw it and I thought I’ll have some of that but they’re odd ones, they sort of wave hello but then you can’t find much of them. So. Are they secret?”
“Are they?” said video-Vardy.
“Well you tell me you tell me. I can’t get to them and you know me so it’s, you know it’s tantalising is what it is.”
“Tenets?”
“Got me. What I hear,” the man made gossip-talk movements with his fingers, “all I can tell you is they talk about the dark, the rise, the you know the reaching out. They love that the outreaching, hafay …”
“What?”
“Hafay hafay, where’s your Greek professor? Alpha phi eta, hafe, hapsis if you like, touchy touchy, that’s what they say—it’s a haptic story, this one.”
Vardy froze the picture. “He’s sort of a freelance research assistant. A fan. He’s a collector.”
“Of what?” Billy said.
“Religions. Cults.”
“How the hell do you collect a cult?”
“By joining it.”
OUTSIDE THE WINDOW WERE THE WIND-BOISTEROUS LIMBS OF trees. The room felt very close. Billy looked away from the light outside.
The man on-screen was not the only one, Vardy said. A small obsessive tribe. Heresy geeks, going sect to sect, accumulating creeds as greedy as any Renfields. Soldiers of the Saviour Worm one week, Opus Dei or the Bobo Dreds the next, with genius for devotion and sudden brief bursts of sincerity sufficient to be welcomed as neophytes. Some were always cynically in it for the notch on the bedpost, others Damascene certain for two or three days that this one was different, until they remembered their own natures and excommunicated themselves with indulgent chuckles.
They gathered to compare gnoses, in Edgware Road cafés over sheesha or pubs in Primrose Hill or somewhere called Almagan Yard, mostly their favoured hangouts in the “trap streets,” Vardy said. They traded dissident mysteries in vague competition, as if faiths were Top Trumps cards.
“What about your apocalypse, then?” “Well, the universe is a leaf on the time-tree, and come autumn it’s going to shrivel and fall off into hell.” Murmurs of admiration. “Ooh, nice one. My new lot say ants are going to eat the sun.”
“HE WANTS TO JOIN THESE ‘TOOTHIES,’ YOU SEE,” VARDY SAID. “HE’S a completist. But he can’t find them.”
“What’s a trap street?” Billy was ignored.
“Toothies,” Baron said. “Get it? Harrow, sit down.” Billy had stood up and was walking toward the door. “Toothies,” Baron said. “Get it? Tyuh-tyuh-tyuh-Tyoothies.”
“I’ve had enough,” Billy said.
“Sit down,” Vardy said.
“We’re the bloody cult squad, Harrow,” Baron said. “Why d’you think we’re called in? Who do you think’s responsible for what’s going on?”
“Teuthies.” Vardy smiled. “Worshippers of the giant squid.”
Chapter Six
“THE ARTICLE THAT GOT NICKED,” SAID BARON. BILLY STOOD still, his hand on the doorknob. “It’s where old Japetus names Architeuthis for the first time. ’Course you can get hold of a reprint, but originals are a bit special, aren’t they?”
“He was refuting folklore,” said Vardy. “The whole piece is him pooh-poohing some fairy story, and saying, ‘No no, there’s a rational explanation, gentlemen.’ You could say it’s where the sea monster meets …” He gestured around him. “This. The modern world.” The stress was mockery. “Out of fable into science. The end of an old order. Right?” He wagged his finger no. Baron watched him indulgently.
“Death of legend?” Vardy said. “Because he gives it a name? He said it was Ar-chi-teu-this. Not ‘great’ squid, Billy. Not ‘big,’ not even ‘giant.’ ‘Ruling’.” He blinked. “It rules? That’s him being faithful to the Enlightenment? He shoves it into taxonomy, yeah, but as what? As a bloody demiurge.
“He was a prophet. At the end of the lecture, you know what he did? Oh, he had props. He was a performer like Billy Graham. Brings out a jar, and what’s in it? A beak.” Vardy snap-snapped his fingers. “Of a giant squid.”
The light was going: some cloud cover arriving, as if summoned by drama. Billy stared at Vardy. He had his glasses in his hand, so Vardy was a touch hazy. Billy had actually heard this story, or its outlines, he remembered: an anecdote in a lecture hall. Where they could, his lecturers, with vicarious panache, would spice the stories of their forebears’ theories. They told anecdotes of a polymath Faraday; read Feynman’s achingly sad letter to his dead wife; described Edison’s swagger; eulogised Curie and Bogdanov martyr
ed to their utopian researches. Steenstrup had been part of that dashing company.
The way Vardy spoke was almost as if he could no-shit see Steenstrup’s performance. As if he were looking at the black weapon thing Steenstrup had lifted from the jar. That leviathan part, more like a tool of alien design than any mouth. Preserved, precious, manifest like the finger bone of a saint. Whatever he had claimed, Steenstrup’s bottle had been a reliquary.
“That article,” Vardy said. “It’s a fulcrum. With a certain way of looking at things, it would easily be worth breaking the law for. Because it’s sacred text. It’s gospel.”
BILLY SHOOK HIS HEAD. HE FELT AS IF HIS EARS WERE RINGING.
“And that,” Baron said, audibly amused, “is what the professor gets paid for.”
“What our thieves have been doing is building a library,” said Vardy. “I bet you good money that over the last few months stuff by Verrill and Ritchie and Murray and other, you know, classic teuthic literature has also been nicked.”
“Jesus,” said Billy. “How do you know so much about this?” Vardy swatted the question away—literally, with his hand—as if it were an insect.
“It’s what the man do,” Baron said. “Zero to guru in forty-eight hours.”
“Let’s move on,” said Vardy.
“So,” Billy said. “You think this cult nicked the book, took the squid, and killed that guy? And now they want me?”
“Did I say that?” Vardy said. “I can’t be sure these squiddists did anything. Something doesn’t add up, to be honest.”
Billy started up unhappy performed laughter at that. “D’you think?” he said.
But Vardy ignored him and went on. “But it’s something to do with them.”
“Come on,” said Billy. “This is batshit.” He pleaded. “A religion about squid?”
The little room felt like a trap. Baron and Vardy watched him. “Come on now,” Vardy said. “You can have faith in anything,” Vardy said. “Everything’s fit to be worshipped.”
“You going to say this is all a coincidence?” Baron said.
“Your squid just disappeared, right?” Vardy said.
“And no one’s watching you,” Baron said. “And no one did anything to that poor sod downstairs. It was suicide by bottle.”
“And you,” said Vardy, staring at Billy, “you don’t feel anything’s wrong with the world, right now. Ah, you do, though, don’t you? I can see. You want to hear this.”
A silence. “How did they do it?” said Billy.
“Sometimes you can’t get bogged down in the how,” Baron said. “Sometimes things happen that shouldn’t, and you can’t let that detain you. But the why? we can make headway with.”
Vardy walked to the window. He was against its light, a dark shape. Billy could not tell if Vardy was facing him or facing out.
“It’s always bells and smells,” Vardy said, from his obscurity. “Always high-church. They might … abjure the world”—he rolled the pomp of the phrase around—“but for sects like this it’s all rites and icons. That’s the point. Not many cults have had their reformation.” He walked out of the window’s glare. “Or if they have, hello you poor buggers in Freezone, along comes a Council of Trent and the old order bites back. They really have to have their sacraments.” He shook his head.
Billy paced between posters, cheap artworks and pinboard message exchanges between colleagues he did not know. “If you worship that animal … I’ll put it simply,” Vardy said. “You, your Darwin Centre …” Billy did not understand the scorn there. “You and your colleagues, Billy—you put God on display. Now, who would a devotee be not to liberate it?
“It’s lying there pickled. Their touchy hunter god. You can imagine how that plays out in psalms. How God’s described.”
“Right,” Billy said. “Right, you know what? I really need to get out of here.”
Vardy seemed to quote: “‘It moves through darkness, emptying into that ink ink of its own.’ Something like that. Shall we say a black cloud in water already black? There’s a koan for you, Billy. It’s a tactile god with as many tentacles as we have fingers, and is that coincidence? Because that,” he added, in a more everyday voice, “is how this works, you see?”
Baron beckoned Billy to the door. “They’ll have verses about its mouth,” Vardy said behind them. “The hard maw of a sky-bird in the deep trenches of water.” He shrugged. “Something like that. You’re sceptical? Au contraire: it’s a perfect god, Billy. It’s the bloody choicest perfect simon-pure exact god for today, for right now. Because it’s bugger-all like us. Alien. That old beardy bully was never plausible, was he?”
“Plausible enough for you, you bloody hypocrite,” Baron said jovially. Billy followed him into the corridor.
“They venerate the thing,” Vardy said, following. “They have to save it from the insult of what I strongly suspect is your cheerful affection. I bet you have a nickname for it, don’t you?” He tilted his head. “I bet that nickname is ‘Archie.’ I see I’m right. Now, you tell me. What person of faith could possibly allow that?”
THEY TRACED THROUGH THE MUSEUM’S CORRIDORS, AND BILLY HAD no idea where they were going. He felt absolutely untethered. As if he were not there. The hallways were all deserted. The darks and woods of the museum closed up behind him.
“How do you …? What is it you’re doing?” he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense.
Vardy even smiled. “Paranoia,” he said. “Theology.”
They reached an exit Billy had never used, and he gasped in the cool air of the outside. The day blustered: the trees wriggled in wind and clouds raced as if on missions. Billy sat on the stone steps.
“So the guy in the basement …” he said.
“Don’t know yet,” Vardy said. “He got in the way. Dissident, guard, sacrifice, something. At the moment I’m talking about the shape of something.”
“None of this should be your business,” Baron said. With his hands in his pockets he addressed his remarks to one of the building’s stonework animals. The air shoved Billy’s hair and clothes around. “You shouldn’t have to fuss with any of this. But here’s the thing. What with Parnell on the bus, what with that sort of attention, it just seems like for whatever reasons … they’ve noticed you, Mr. Harrow.”
He caught Billy’s eye. Billy twitched in the attention. He glanced around the grounds, beyond the gate to the street, into the shifting plant life. Bits of rubbish shifted in gusts, crawled on the pavement like bottom-feeders.
“You’re part of some conspiracy that trapped their god,” Vardy said. “But more than that. You’re the go-to squid guy, Mr. Harrow. You seem to have got someone interested. As far as they’re concerned, you’re a person of interest.”
He stood between Billy and the wind. “You found the squid gone,” he said. “You put it there in the first place. It’s always been you who’s had magic mollusc fingers.” He twiddled his own. “Now you found this dead bloke. Is it any wonder they’re interested?”
“You’ve been feeling … like stuff’s going on,” Baron said. “Would that be fair to say?”
“What’s happening to me?” Billy managed to speak calmly.
“Don’t worry, Billy Harrow. That’s perspicacity, not paranoia, that, what you’re feeling.” Baron turned, taking in the London panorama, and wherever he looked, whenever he paused facing some particular patch of blackness, Billy looked too. “There is something wrong. And it’s noticed you. That’s not always the best place to be.” Billy sat in the middle of that world’s notice, like a tiny prey.
“What is it you want to do?” Billy said. “I mean, find out who killed that guy. Right? But what about me? Are you going to get the squid back?”
“That would be our intent, yes,” Baron said. “Cult robbery, after all, is part o
f our remit. And now there’s murder, too. Yes. And your safety is of, shall we say, no little concern to us.”
“What do they want? What’s Dane in all this?” Billy said. “And you’re some secret cult squad, right? So why are you telling me this?”
“I know, I know, you’re feeling a little exposed,” Baron said. “A bit out in the glare of it all. There are ways we might help. And you could help us back.”
“Like it or not, you’re already part of this,” Vardy said.
“We have a proposal,” Baron said. “Come on in out of the cold. Shoot on over with us back to the Darwin Centre. There’s a proposition on the table, and there’s someone you should meet.”
Chapter Seven
THE ROOMS SETTLED AROUND THEM, AS IF FINICKETY GENII LOCI were adjusting. Billy felt like an outsider. Was that glass he heard, clank-sliding out of sight? A clatter that might be bones?
The two uniforms guarding the tank room did not react to Baron with any visible respect. “Clocked that, did you?” Baron muttered to Billy. “Right now they’re coming up with hilarious jokes about what FSRC stands for. The first half is always ‘Fucking Stupid.’”
Inside was the disdainful young woman again, glancing at Billy perhaps a shade more friendly than before, her uniform as casual as ever. She had a laptop open on the table where the squid no longer was. “Alright?” she said. She mock-saluted Vardy and Baron, raised an eyebrow at Billy. She typed one-handed.
“I’m Billy.”
She looked oh-really? “There’s trace, man,” she said to Baron.
“Billy Harrow, WPC Kath Collingswood,” Baron said. She clucked her tongue or chewing gum and turned her computer round, but not enough that Billy could see.
“Quite a spike,” Vardy murmured.
“With the strike and all that, you wouldn’t expect to see shit like this,” she said. Vardy looked lengthily around the room, as if the dead animals might be responsible.
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