“What was …?” he said.
“Try chatting now,” she said. “For your own sake. Trust me.”
“I do not trust you.”
“Wise man.”
“Pay attention. This is my number.” Baron gave him a card.
“You don’t get mine yet,” Collingswood said. “You got to earn that sort of shit.”
“Anything worrying, anything strange,” Baron said, “or, on the other hand, when you decide you’re on board …”
“If,” Billy said.
“When you decide you’re on board, call.”
Anything strange. Billy remembered the bottled corpse. That greyed skin, those drowned eyes.
“Seriously.” He spoke quietly. “What did they do to that guy? How did they get the squid out of there?”
“Now, Mr. Harrow,” Baron said. He shook his head, friendly. “I told you. All those whys is not a helpful way of looking at things. And blimey, there’s plenty of stuff you’ve not even seen yet. How could you possibly understand what’s going on? If you even wanted to. Which, as I say, dot dot dot.
“So. Rather than trying to get to grips with things you can’t possibly, I’d just say wait. Wait and see. Because you will see. There’s more to come. Good-bye now.”
Chapter Nine
AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE FLAT, WHERE COLLINGSWOOD HAD fiddled, there were marks. Tiny scratches. A little balsa lid, flush with the wood. He flicked it with his fingernail.
Billy was hesitant to trust whatever protection it was he’d been afforded. He double-locked his door. He stared out through glass at the rooftop where that dirty bloody squirrel lay unseen. He wished it drowned in rainwater.
He hunted online but failed to find a single detail of the FSRC. Thousands of organisations of those initials, but Baron’s unit was nowhere. On his university page Billy read Vardy’s publications list. “Oedipus, Charisma and Jim Jones;” “Sayyid Qutb and the Problem of Psychological Organisation;” “The Dialectics of Waco.”
Billy drank wine in front of the television on mute, a bottled shadow-show. How often, he thought, are such offers made? A knight emerging from a wardrobe with the offer of another place but you have to come now. Was the squid out there, or destroyed? He did not trust his potential colleagues. He did not appreciate their recruitment methods.
In the television light he watched the curtains hang limply, remembering the obscene discovery in the museum basement. He did not think he was particularly exhausted. He imagined the window beyond the fabric. He woke abruptly in a panic on his sofa.
When the hell had he fallen asleep? He remembered no transition. The book he did not even remember starting to read slid from him like an inadequate blanket. It was dark. Billy realised he had heard tapping at his door.
A patter like the feet of a gecko on the other side of the wood. A nail scratching and, yes, a whisper. Billy was silent. He told himself it was some remnant dream, but it was not. It sounded again.
Billy crept to the kitchen and picked up a knife. The faint faint noise continued. He pressed his ear to the door. He unlocked it, watching his own bravery and ninja stealth, bewildered. As he pushed, Billy realised that he should be calling Baron, of course, instead of indulging this incompetent vigilantism. But momentum had him, the door was opening.
The hallway was empty.
He peered at his neighbours’ entrances. There were no evidential drafts, no slips of air to insinuate doors quickly closed. No dust dancing. Billy looked at nothing. He stood there for moments, then minutes. He leaned out like a figurehead, to see as far down those corridors as he could, keeping his feet inside his flat. Still there was nothing.
He did not sleep in his bed that night. He took his duvet to the sofa, closer to the front door, so he could hear. There were no more sounds, but he slept hardly at all.
IN THE MORNING HE ATE TOAST IN A TOO-SILENT FLAT, WITH MORE silence from outside weighing on the windows. He pulled the curtains apart enough to look at a grubby grey day, at knots of wood and leaves and blown plastic bags, at the unlikely haunt of the squirrel voyeur.
He was never one with a plethora of friends, but Billy did not often feel lonely, not like this. CN U COME OVER, he texted Leon. STUFF 2 TELL U. PLEASE. He felt he was yanking out of a trap in which Collingswood and Baron had placed him. Brave, rebellious animal. He hoped this escape was not a gnawing off of his own limb.
When Leon arrived Billy hung out from the doorframe again. “What kind of arsing around is this?” said Leon. “It’s a bloody weird night, I just had about three fights on the way here, and me such a peaceable soul. I brought your mail up. Also wine.” He held out a plastic bag. “Early though it is. What the hell’s going on? To what do I owe …? Jesus, Billy.”
“Come in.” Billy took the bag and envelopes.
“As I was saying, to what do I owe two visits in such quick succession?”
“Have a drink. You aren’t going to believe this.”
Billy sat opposite Leon and opened his mouth to tell him everything. But could not work out whether to start with the body in the jar, or the police and their strange offer. His tongue flopped over, momentarily meatlike. He swallowed. As if recovering from some dental treatment.
“You don’t understand,” he told Leon. “I never had a big bust-up with my dad, we just sort of dropped out of touch.” He was continuing a conversation from months before, he realised. “My bro I never liked. That was deliberate, dropping him. My dad, though …”
He had found his father boring, was all. He had always had the sense that the faintly aggressive man, who lived alone after Billy’s mother’s death, had found Billy the same. It had been several years since he had let contact wither.
“Do you remember Saturday morning television?” he said. He had meant to tell Leon about the man in the jar. “I remember this one time.” Showing his father some cartoon that had enthralled him, Billy had seen the bewilderment on the man’s face. The inability to empathise with his boy’s passion, or pretend to. Years later he reflected that that was the moment—and he no older than ten—Billy started to suspect that the two of them did not have much of a shot of it.
“I’ve still got that cartoon, you know,” he said. “I found it recently, streamed on some website. You want to see it?” A 1936 Harman-Ising production, he had watched it many times. The glass-jar inhabitants of an apothecary’s shelves on an adventure. It was extraordinary, and frightening.
“You know what happens,” Billy said. “Sometimes when I’m preserving something or doing something in the wet labs or whatever, I clock that I’m singing one of the songs from it. “Spirits of amo-o-o-onia …’”
“Billy.” Leon held out a hand. “What’s going on?”
Billy stopped and tried again to say what had happened. He swallowed and worked against his own mouth, as if expelling some glutinous intruder. And with a breath finally he began to speak what he had intended. What he had found in the basement. He told him what the police had offered.
Leon did not smile. “Should you be telling me this?” he said at last. Billy laughed.
“No, but, you know.”
“I mean, it’s literally impossible, what happened,” Leon said.
“I know. I know it is.”
They stared at each other a long time. Leon said, “There are … maybe there are more things in heaven and earth …”
“If you quote Shakespeare at me I will kill you dead. Jesus, Leon, I found a dead man in a jar.”
“This is heavy shit. And they’ve asked you to join? You going to be a cop?”
“A consultant.”
When Leon had visited the squid, months before, he had said wow. Wow like you might wow a dinosaur skeleton, the Crown Jewels, a Turner watercolour. Wow said like the parents and partners who came to the Darwin Centre for someone else. Billy had been disappointed.
“What are you going to do?” Leon said.
“I don’t know.” Billy looked at the mail that Leon had brought fr
om downstairs. Two bills and a card and a heavy package in brown paper, tied up old-style with hairy string. He put on his glasses and cut the string.
“Are you seeing Marginalia later?” he said.
“Yeah, and don’t take that tone when you say her name or I’ll get her to explain it to you,” Leon said. He fiddled with his phone. “She has a whole riff.”
“Please,” said Billy. “Let me guess. ‘The key to the text is not the actual text itself, but …’” He frowned. He did not understand what he was unwrapping. Inside the package was a rectangle of black cotton.
“I’m texting her, she’ll love this,” Leon said.
“Oh Leon, don’t tell her what I’ve been saying,” Billy said. “I’ve already said more than I should …” He prodded the cloth.
The package moved.
“Fuck …”
“What? What? What?”
They were both standing. Billy stared at the package, unmoving on the table where he had dropped it. There was silence. Billy took a pen from his pocket and poked the cotton gently.
The cloth gave. The package opened.
It bloomed. With a gasp of air it concertinaed, expanding, out-flicking and filling out, and what reached from its end was a hand. A man’s arm, in a dark jacket sleeve. The flash of white shirt at its end. The emergent hand grabbed Billy by the neck.
“Jesus—” Leon pulled Billy away, and the package, still gripping, pulled back, braced against nothing.
Billy was held, and the package continued to unfold. Tongues of cotton flap-flapped open, black and blue and shoes now at the end of limbs bulking into presence, as if the matter of them was uncramping. More arms unrolled clumsy as fire hoses and shoved Leon hard away.
Like plants in sped-up motion, emitting grunts of release, a stale sweat-and-fart smell, and a man and a boy stood suddenly on Billy’s table. The boy stared at Leon staggering to rise. The man still gripped Billy’s throat.
“BLOW ME,” THE MAN SAID. HE JUMPED OFF THE TABLE, WITHOUT releasing Billy. The man was wiry, wore old jeans and a dirty jacket. He shook long greying hair. “Shiver me, that was horrible.” He looked at Leon. “Eh?” he shouted, as if wanting sympathy.
The boy stepped slowly onto a chair and then to the floor. He wore a clean, oversized suit: Sunday best. “Come here, lad.” The man licked the fingers of his free hand and pressed down the boy’s mussed hair.
Billy couldn’t breathe. Darkness closed on him. The man threw him against the wall.
“Right then.” The man pointed at Leon, who froze, as if pinned by the gesture. “Watch him, Subby. Watch him like a little night-badger.” He pointed two fingers at his own eyes, then at Leon. “He makes a move, give him what-for. Now then.” The boy stared at Leon with too-wide eyes.
“Yeah,” the man said. He sniffed at the doorframe. “She ain’t bad. Good notion, this, if I say so my own self, out of my boy’s head. As because what we do not have here is anything nixing egress. Now we’re in there’s nothing to stop us getting out.” He leaned toward Billy. “I say, there’s nothing to stop us getting out. Didn’t think of that, did you? You ferocious little whatnot.”
Billy made a scratchy sound in his throat. The man put a finger to his lips, glancing expectantly at the boy, who slowly did as he did, and gestured shhhh at Billy, too.
“Goss and Subby do it again,” the man said. He unrolled his tongue and tasted the air. He clamped his hand over Billy’s mouth and Billy sputtered into the cool palm. The man went room to room, tugging Billy, licking floor, walls, light switches. He drew his tongue across the face of the television, leaving a spit-path in the dust.
“What what what specimens have you got here, lepidopterist?” he said to the bookshelves. He pulled out books and dropped them. “Nah,” he said. “I can’t taste not but shit of it.”
Leon was suddenly up and running at him. The man whoops-a-daisy-ed and sent Leon sprawling. “And who might you be?” he said. “One of the young master’s friends, hm? I’m afraid the doctors all agree that the lad needs complete isolation, and while your hijinks I’m sure are a tonic, they’re not what young Mr. Billiam needs. I may have to eat you, you unfortunate young macaroon.”
Leon moved and the boy stepped toward him, all predator-fish eyes. The man wheezed out smoke, though he had no cigarette, had sucked no smoke in.
“No …” Leon said. The man opened his mouth, the mouth kept going, and Leon was gone. The man dabbed the corners of his mouth like a cartoon cat.
“Alright you,” he said to Billy, who gasped and fought the relentless fingers. “Got your jim-jams? Toothbrush packed? Left a message for the milkman? Good then, let’s off. You know what airports are like and little Thomas doesn’t travel well and I don’t want to get stuck in a queue behind a group-booking to Ayia Napa, can you imagine? You promised and promised me a quiet weekend away and it’s time, Billy, it’s really time.” He clasped his hands and raised an eyebrow. “You can hush your noise and all,” he said to the boy. “I don’t know, I really don’t, you two! Onward.”
Tugging him by the neck, the man took Billy out.
PART TWO
UNIVERSAL SLEEPER
Chapter Ten
FOR THE BULK OF HER TWEENS AND TEENS, MOST OF KATH Collingswood’s teachers had either been indifferent or mildly antipathetic to her. One man, her biology teacher, had more actively disliked her. She had known it pretty early in their relationship, and had even been able to express and evaluate his reasons to herself with some clarity.
His opinion of her as sulky she conceded, but considered no more his business than his disapproval of her friends. He thought her a bully, which was, she would say, 65 percent fair. Certainly she found it easy to intimidate more than half her class, and did so. But they were minor cruelties perpetrated without glee, vaguely, almost dutifully, to keep people off her back.
Collingswood had not much reflected on how easy such misery-mongering was for her, how often nothing but a glance or word, if even that, had palpable effects. The first time she thought about it was when she stopped that teacher’s mouth.
She was thirteen. Some altercation had left a classmate crestfallen, and Mr. Bearing had shaken his whiteboard marker at Collingswood like a baton and said, “You’re a nasty piece of work, aren’t you? A nasty piece of work.”
He had turned, shaking his head, to write on the board, but Collingswood had been abruptly enraged. She was completely unwilling to submit to the description. She had not even looked at the back of Mr. Bearing’s head, had stared furiously at her nails and clucked her tongue, and something like a bubble of cold had swelled in her chest, and burst.
Collingswood did look up then. Mr. Bearing had stopped writing. He stood still, hand to the board. Two or three other children were looking around in confusion.
With a sense of great interest, with a sense of pleased curiosity, Kath Collingswood had known that Mr. Bearing would never call her a nasty piece of work again.
That was that. He picked up his writing. He did not turn to look at her. She put off till later the questions of what had happened, and how she had known that it had. She had leaned back, instead, on the rear legs of her chair.
AFTER THAT MOMENT, COLLINGSWOOD TOOK MORE MIND OF HER unspoken interventions: the times she knew what her friends or enemies were about to say; when she silenced someone across a room; found a lost thing that was frankly unlikely to be wherever she uncovered it. She started to think things through.
Not that she was a poor student, but Collingswood’s teachers might have been impressed to see the rigour with which she had pursued this research project. She started with a little tentative poking around online, put together a list of books and documents. Most she was able to download from absurd websites, copyright not being particularly apropos for such texts. The titles of those she could not track down she laboriously copied and requested from surprised, even concerned, librarians and booksellers. Once or twice she even found them.
She picked her way,
more than once, through a weed-littered old carpark and bust windows into a small long-deserted hospital near her house. In the quiet of what had once been a maternity ward she dutifully acted out the idiotic actions the texts described. Certainly she felt stupid, but she performed as required, recited all the phrases.
She kept a record in her notebook of what she had tried, where she had read it, what if anything had occurred. BOOK OF THOTH = BOOK OF BOLLOCKS MORE LIKE, she wrote. LIBER NULL = NULL POINTS.
Mostly there were no effects at all, or just enough to keep her at it (a scuttling noise here, an unwarranted shadow there). But it was when she got exasperated and restless and thought fuck it to her studies, when she was resultingly imprecise, that she made the best progress.
“That’s it for today. You can go early.” Packing up her books with the rest of the class, Collingswood watched Miss Ambly’s shock at her own words. The woman touched her mouth in bewilderment. Collingswood flicked her fingers. A pen spun off Miss Ambly’s desk.
And later: “What’s it doing, sir?” some girl asked of a bemused teacher, pointing at the class goldfish, which was swimming with highly unnatural motions. Collingswood, unnoticed, continued what she had started on an exasperated whim, scratching her hands on the desk as if DJing to a classmate’s ringtone, which rhythms quite unexpectedly dictated the fish’s back-and-forth motion.
That had been years ago. There had been a lot of work since then, of course, much tinkering, plenty of experiments, but Collingswood’s baseline impatience continued to truncate her researches. She came to understand that this would ultimately limit her. That she was without question a bit of a talent if she said it herself, and yes she could make it her career no problem, but she would never be one of the very best. Since those days, she had met one or two of them, those very best at this. She had known them the moment they had walked into the room.
But her limits had unexpected effects, and not all negative. The lack of the sternest rigour to perform these competencies at the highest level blurred them, mixed their elements, gave them little swills of backwash. Mostly ignorable effects or demerits, but only mostly.
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