“Jesus,” Billy said. “It’s still following. It’s back.” A quick warning in his head, in an articulate wave of pain. “It’s found me again.”
A bee-mass turned into their sight. Spread out like a chitin-cloud wall, blocking their exit, but through those insects another figure darkly was visible, roll-wobble-walking. There was an eddy among the bloodymoney bees and an inrush of air as a seal was cracked. The buzz faltered. A smoke of insects gushed like reversed film out of sight, like steam back into a kettle, like something, and there was nothing before Billy and Dane but the angel of memory.
It showed itself to Billy for approval, having saved him. The source of his glass and time clench; he, mistakenly, its test-tube prophet. Could it feel his guilt at not being what it thought? Being promised by nothing to no one? Its body was again a Formalin-filled bottle, in which, this time, floated hundreds of specks, evanescing bodies of the attacker. Its bone arms were bones, its head was made of bone.
But it was much reduced. It had been destroyed, probably more than once, on its exhausting treks to track and protect Billy. It had dissipated and reconstituted. This time it had made itself from some preserving jar less than half Billy’s height. This time its skull was an ape’s or a child’s.
It chattered at him from the dark of an alley. He raised his hand to it. Exhaustion came over it—Billy could feel the echo in his head—and it shivered. The glass-bottle-and-bone sculpture settled into a more natural and complete still as its fleshless arms fell from it to become rubbish, as its skull head toppled and rolled from its slanted lid to crack apart on the pavement. Only its jawbone stayed, held on the lid’s glass nub handle. Dissolving bees bobbed in its swill.
Maybe its presiding angel force was remaking itself in another yet-smaller bottle with a yet-smaller bone head, back at its museum nest, and it would set out on its journey again tracking the power it had given Billy, the trace of itself in him, to find him or be broken on the way and try again.
Dane and Billy went to another vagrant shelter. They were glad when it rained: it seemed to batten down the burning smell Cole had brought on them that would not quite go. Billy still smelt it when he slept. He smelt it through the water in which he sank in his dream. Warm, cool as the sea grew dark, cooler darker cold, then warm again. Through black he saw the dream-glow of swimming light things. He was falling into a city, a drowned London. The streets were laid out in glow, the streetlights still illuminated, each glare investigated by a penumbra of fish. Crabs as big as the cars they pushed aside walked the streets made chasms.
From towers and top floors waved random flags of seaweed. Coral crusted the buildings. Billy’s dream-self sank. There were, he saw, men and women, submerged pedestrians walking slow as flaneurs, window-shopping the long-dead long-drowned shops. Figures ambling, all in brass-topped deep-sea suits. Air pipes emerged from the top of each globe helmet and dangled up into the dark.
No cephalopods. Billy thought, This is someone else’s apocalypse dream.
But here it came, the intrusion of his own meaning, what he was here for. From the centre of the sunken London came a hot tide. The water began to boil. The walls, bricks, windows and slimy rotting trees began to burn. The fish were gusted away toward the drowned suburbs, the rusting cars and crabs were bowled by the force of what came. And here it came, bowling like a tossed bus the length of this street, this underwater Edgware Road, that skittered under the flyover and turned. The kraken’s tank.
It shattered. The dead Architeuthis slumped from it, dragged the pavement, its tentacles waving, its rubberising mantle thick and heavy and moving only with the tide, the gush, flailing not like a cephalopod predator but like the drifting dead god it was. The kraken and its tank shards scraped and cracked and disintegrated as the water rushed and heated and a subaquatic fire burned everything away.
ANOTHER INSIGHT DREAM? REALLY? BILLY WOKE FROM IT TO WATI’S voice. He was sweating from the hot black ocean. The smell of the burn Cole had sent was still on him. Wati had come back. He was in the Captain Kirk. Billy found his glasses.
“Here you are,” the toy said in the little plastic voice. “Something’s happening.”
“Yeah?” Dane said. “Really? We nearly got burnt alive by our only lead, yesterday, and we still don’t know what’s going on.”
“Maybe this’ll help,” said Wati. “Maybe this is it. Apocalypse.”
“We know that,” Billy said. “That’s why we’re here.”
“Sorry,” said Wati. “That’s not what I mean. I mean there are two of them.”
Chapter Sixty-One
THE WIZARD WHO HAD SOLD HER THE PROTECTION HAD, IN A gruff way, been too kind to answer her question and tell her where to go, if he even knew. But knowing where to look, now, with her own online contacts and link trails, it was not too hard for Marge to find out when, and even hints of where, these competing, overlapping or collaborative apocalypses were due to occur. The Internet debates were over how to respond.
bottl whisky & head under covers
got 2 b squid this is it
C U all in L
“Jesus, really?” Marge said out loud.
have to go cant miss whole world there
It was not that she did not care if she lived or died: she cared about it a great deal. But it turned out that she would not play safe at any price—and who would have predicted that? There were more messages from her friends on her machine. This time she felt as if by not answering them she was less turning her back on than protecting them.
Leon, she thought. We’re going deeper. She had her iPod bodyguard. She needed a lay of the land. If everyone who was everyone in that heretic cityscape would be there, there were things she could learn. And if it was the squid behind it, if this animal thing was it, if as the insinuations insinuated this was the thing incoming, then she might find Billy.
Anyone up for going? she wrote. Keep each other safe? Go as team see wots wot?
I duno
no
no
u crazee???
Screw them, that didn’t matter. Billy might be there. She knew that Leon would not.
Marge loaded playlists onto the iPod. She grabbed them at almost random from her computer, a big mix, using up all the available memory. When she was out, now, she felt watched by the world, under threat, pretty much all the time. She went walking, and she went as it grew dark, before she put her earphones in. She pressed random play.
The streetlights shone at her through the haze of branches, woody halos. She walked through her nearest cheerful row of kebaberies, small groceries and chemists. A voice started in her ear, a tuneless, happy, piping voice, singing push push pushy push really really good pushy good, accompanied by the noise of a record player being turned on and off, and something hit with a stick.
Marge felt bewildered and instantly cosseted, wrapped in that tuneless voice. The iPod screen told her this was supposed to be Salt’ N Pepa’s “Push It.” She skipped forward. Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab,” she read, and heard not the familiar orchestration and that magnificent, once-in-an-epoch growl but a little throat-clearing noise and the same reedy querulous asexual tones as before singing in the roughest approximation of the track they try make me to go to the rehab no no no no no. She heard the repeat-twanging of one guitar string.
The singer did not sound so enthusiastic this time, and the envelope around Marge cooled, as if a gust of air got in. She skipped, to Kanye West’s “Gold Digger.” gimme she gimme money money. The little singer was happy again and Marge was safer.
The voice liked Run-DMC. Marge walked patiently through its incompetent renditions of old-skool hip-hop classics. It liked some of the Specials—this town town aaah ah this is a is ghost town, with a double-tempo clapping. It did not like Morrissey. To Marge’s horror, it raised an enthusiastic rorty voice during “Building a Mystery,” a guilty Sarah McLachlan track that she could not remember why she had.
“Jesus,” she said to the iPod. “If you’re
into Lilith Fair I’d rather take my chances with Goss and Subby.”
But though it sulked a bit when she fast-forwarded out of that, she was able to raise the little singer’s happiness on a repeating loop of Soho’s “Hippychick,” the initial Smiths’ guitar sample of which it rendered with a warbling badadadada. She had not been able to get the song out of her mind since she had heard it in the hidden pub. There were worse noises to have to listen to.
Marge walked into the most unwelcoming estate she knew of in her neighbourhood. She stood for several minutes in the hollow at the centre of the high-rises, listening to her protective companion croon, waiting to see what it would do when whatever happened happened. But she was left perfectly alone. Once two passing children on their bikes called something, some incoherent tease, at her, then pedalled furiously off cackling, but that was all, and she felt silly and ashamed at treating herself like bait.
We’ll have to see when it comes to it, she thought. As she walked home, the sprite in her iPod chattered fighty fighty fighty powers that be, its take on Public Enemy.
The night after that, she went, alone as she had no other option, to an outskirt of the city, an imperfect roadway helix, that she had not had too much difficulty establishing would be the epicentre. She arrived early, and waited.
“LISTEN, ONE OF THESE TWO GODS IS SOME KIND OF ANIMAL,” WATI said. That brought them up short. “With that, and what with all these rumours about the djinn and the fire, and stuff, I can’t help wondering if this might be it.”
“An animal church keeping itself secret,” Billy said. “Dane?”
“It ain’t my lot,” Dane said slowly. “I know scripture.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time there’d been a split, would it, Dane?” Wati said. “Some new interpretation?”
“Could there be another squid church …?” Billy hesitated, but Dane seemed not offended. “Could there be another one out there? Could this be some other kraken apocalypse?”
“A cell?” Dane said. “Inside? Doing a deal with the djinn? Behind all this? But they don’t have the kraken. We know—”
“They don’t have it now,” Wati said. “We don’t know what their plans were. Or are. Just that they involve the squid and burning.”
“What if this is it?” Dane said. He was looking out at nothing. “What do we do?”
“Jesus,” Billy said. “We go, we find out, we stand in its way. We’re not going to sit here while the world ends. And if it’s nothing, we keep looking.”
Dane did not look at him. “I got nothing against the world ending,” Dane said quietly.
“Not like this,” said Billy at last. “Not like this. This isn’t yours.”
“I gave your message to the Londonmancers,” Wati said. “They’re keeping the kraken as far away from this as they can.” Because if this were, if this did intend, if an event can intend, to be it, to be the end, then the kraken must not be near enough to burn. That would seem to be what might send the universe up with it.
“Good,” said Billy. “But we don’t know what capabilities these people have.”
“It’s tonight?” Dane said. “Where did this even come from? We should’ve heard about this ages ago. It’s obviously proper, and things like that don’t just spring out of nowhere. There should’ve been tekel upharsins and shit. I guess everyone’ll be there to find out what it’s about. The church’ll be there too.”
“I think everyone will,” Wati said.
“A conjunction,” Dane said. “Been a long time.”
It was inevitable that from time to rare time, two apocalypses might clash, but people should have known about it in advance. In such situations, guardians of continuance—declared saviours, the salaried police and the enemies of whoever was declaring an end—would have not only to end the ends, but step in between the rival priests, each vying to rout a vulgar competing ruination that potentially stood in the way of their noble own.
DANE AND BILLY TREATED FENCES AS SOMETHING OTHER THAN barriers, walls as stairways, roofs as uneven floors. Billy wondered if his angel of memory would be where they went, how it might move across this terrain.
Around the lit-up trenches of streets, where police were. As they came closer to where rumour said the event or events would be, at the limits of vision, Billy glimpsed other of London’s occult citizens—its, what, unhabitants? Word of the locus had spread among the cognoscenti, by whispers, text message and flyer, as if the ends-of-the-world were an illegal rave.
A space between concrete sweeps of flyovers. Where the world might end was turp-industrial. Scree of rejectamenta. Workshops writing car epitaphs in rust; warehouses staffed in the day by tired teenagers; superstores and self-storage depots of bright colours and cartoon fonts amid bleaching trash. London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness. Here was an arena of scrubland, overlooked by suspended roads.
“We have to keep out of sight,” Dane whispered. “Let’s find out what’s going on, check who this is.” Wati muttered to him, coming and going from their pockets.
Seers were on the roofs. Billy saw them, silhouettes sitting with their backs to chimneys. He saw the fuddled air where some made themselves not visible. Dane and Billy clung to service ladders on flyovers’ undersides. They dangled, while cars and lorries illuminated the wasteland. “Be ready,” Dane said, “to get out of here.”
• • •
“COLLINGSWOOD, I MAY NOT FORCE YOU TO ALPHA LIMA FOXTROT, but if I ask you if you’re receiving me and you are I expect a bloody answer. I can hear you breathing.”
Collingswood made an on and on motion to the unhappy young officer in the car next to her. “Alright, Barone.” She said Bah Roany. She flicked the earpiece. No lapel radios. She, and the few officers seconded to the FSRC that night, were in mufti. She sat slouched in a beat-up car near the gathering ground. “Yes, coming through, big up to the Metropolitan Massive. Rewind. How’s it your end?”
“We can see some predictable players pitching up,” Baron’s crackling voice said. “Nothing from our lost boys yet. You not heard from Vardy, then?” Collingswood shucked as if his plaintiveness were a mosquito in her ear.
“Nah. Said he had to go see a professor. I told him he was one already, but apparently that wouldn’t do.” She looked around at the fag-end landscape, her head thrumming like a bad receiver, aware with near certainty and very swiftly when the few late-night passersby passed by whether they were innocent or guilty of knowledge about the sort of thing that was going on. Spectators hieing for hides. Twitchers if dooms were birds. Her companion stared as she laughed and nudged him, as if she had spoken that aloud.
“Where is the sod? Bit much given this was his idea,” Baron said into her skull.
She had quite enjoyed organising it. It had mostly been Vardy driving, suggesting what to suggest to whom, when and how, what rumours to seed on what bulletin boards, which implications to leave unsaid. She had been happy to cede that to him. She liked the tinkering, but the strategic overview he was welcome to.
Her own enquiries, in venues less epochally inclined than those where Vardy did his musings, closer to that everyday border between religion and murder, proceeded slowly. It was the gunfarmers she was trying to track down. No matter how bloody monkish they were, ultimately they got paid to kill people, and that meant, in some form or other be they ever so abstracted and magic, receipts. And where there was that sort of trail, there would be chatter, a smidge of which, slow though it still was, was wending into her shell-likes.
Collingswood kept only the most vague tabs on who Vardy was manipulating how: she simply did not care enough. Perhaps a part of her thought that wasn’t sensible, that she’d do well to learn that game, but, she thought, she would always be happy to subcontract to the Machiavellis of this city. What she liked doing was what she was good at. And what clues she had sowed about the questionable ends she and Vardy had cooked up were eminently, obviously persuasive. Soon, perhaps, she might do some arresting.
MARGE FINGERED HER CRUCIFIX AND IGNORED THE HUMMING tunes from her iPod, like the singing of a young child. Every few minutes people passed her, or she walked a little farther and passed them, talking into their phones and walking quickly, paying no attention to the scrubby afterthought waste where whatever it was was due to happen. Marge was watching the space, she would have said all alone, when a woman emerged from behind a lamppost too narrow to have hidden her.
Hey, the woman’s mouth shaped, but Marge could not hear her. The woman was in late middle age, in a stylish dark coat. Her face was sharp, her long hair styled, and all sorts of oddness about her. You’re here for this, she mouthed, and was abruptly much closer than she should have been with so few steps.
Marge turned up her iPod in fear. The tuneless singing enveloped her. Wait, the woman said, but the voice in the iPod made its way through “Eye of the Tiger” and it gusted Marge away, a London motion sped up and strange. It was all a bit unclear, but within moments she was in another place and the woman had gone. Marge gawped. She stroked her iPod thank you. She looked around and took up watch again.
• • •
WAS IT STARTLING THAT TWO RELIGIONS SHOULD NOT ONLY SHARE their last night, but commence the unravelling in the same spot? There had been repeated insistences of where the ends might occur, competing declarations, prophecies “examined more closely,” the venues growing closer until they met.
Representatives of many factions were near. Cult collectors took bets on the outcome; the vagrant magicians of London, many with familiars come crawling and defeated back as the strike entered its endgame, were ready to scavenge for shreds of power and energy that would be given off. “Oh no,” said Wati from Billy’s pocket, seeing his shamefaced members. “I have to … I need to make some rounds.”
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