A plague of ennui afflicted London’s manic prophets. Warning signs were discarded, pamphlets pulped, megaphones thrown into cupboards. Those who could count questionable presences insisted that ever since the Architeuthis had disappeared, something new had been walking. Something driven and intense and intent on itself. And since shortly after that, it had unfolded again and become something a little more itself, emerged from a pupa of unspecificity into sentience, an obsessive moment of now that trod heavy in time.
No, they didn’t really know what that meant, either, but that was their very strong impression. And it was freaking them out.
BILLY STUMBLED AT THE DAY, THE COLD SUNLIGHT, THE PASSERSBY. At people in everyday clothes carrying papers and bags and on their way to south London shops. None of them looked twice at him. The trees leaflessly scratched the sky. It was all washed out by the winter.
A clutch of pigeons rose, wheeled and disappeared over the aerials. Dane stared at their retreating forms with frank suspicion. He beckoned Billy.
“Move,” Dane said. “I don’t like the look of those birds.”
Billy listened to the flatness of his footsteps on tarmac, not echoing at all. His pulse was fast. There was a stretch of low skyline and neglected brickwork. The church behind them was little more than a big shed. “I really do not like the look of those birds,” Dane said.
They went past newsagents, past bins spilling from their rims, dogshit by trees, a row of shops. Dane walked them to a car. It was not the same one as before. He opened the door. There was a whisper.
“What?” Dane said. He looked up. “Was that…?” There was no other noise. He was looking at a crude clay dragon, a little Victorian flourish in the matter of a roof, ajut from its vertex. He hustled Billy into the car.
“What was that?” Billy said. Dane let out a shaking breath as he drove.
“Nothing,” Dane said. “It’s a thought, though. God knows we need some help. We need to put some mileage behind us.” Billy did not recognise any streets. “Any second now London’s going to be teeming with my pissed-off crew. Ex-crew.”
“So where are we going?”
“We get underground. Then we start hunting.”
“And… what about the cops?” Billy said.
“We ain’t going to the police.” Dane smacked the wheel. “They can’t do shit. And if they could, it wouldn’t be what we want them to. Why do you think they’re looking? They want it for themselves.”
“So what are you going to do with it if you find it, Dane?”
Dane looked at him. “I’m going to make sure no one else gets it.”
DANE HAD HIS HIDES. IN EMPTY-LOOKING SHELLS, IN SHABBY squats, in neat-seeming places that appeared to have permanent tenants holding down jobs respectable and unrespectable.
“We move, we stay a day or two at a time,” Dane said. “We get hunting.”
“Surely the church’ll find us,” Billy said. “These are safe houses, right?”
“Not even the Teuthex knows these. When you do the work I do, you have to have leeway. The less they know the better. Keep their hands clean. It ain’t ours to kill, we ain’t the predators, get me? But needs must.” To defend heaven you unleash hell, that sort of sophistry.
“Are you the only one?” Billy said.
“No,” Dane said. “I’m the best, though.”
Billy put his head back on the seat and watched London go. “Goss just opened his mouth,” he said. “And Leon was…” He shook his head. “Is that his… knack?”
“His knack is that he’s an unspeakable bastard,” Dane said. “A jobs-worth.” He unfolded a piece of paper with one hand. “This is a list of movers,” he said. “We’ve got a god to find. This is who might’ve done the job.”
Billy watched Dane for a while, watched anger come and go across his face, and moments of aghast uncertainty. They dossed down finally near the river, in a one-bedroom flat decorated like student digs. There were books on biology and chemistry on cheap shelves, a System Of A Down poster on the wall, the paraphernalia of dope.
“Whose is all this?” he said.
“In case it gets broken into,” Dane said. “Or remote-viewed. Scried or whatever. Got to be convincing.” A toothbrush crusted with paste-spit was in the bathroom, a half-used soap and shampoo. There were clothes in the drawers, all suited to the invented inhabitant: all the same size and unpleasant style. Billy picked up the phone but it was not connected.
Dane checked tiny bones tied in bundles on the windowsill. Ugly little clots of magicky stuff. From a cabinet below the bed he took a machine made of rusty old equipment and nonsense: a motherboard, an old oscilloscope, crocodile-clipped to knickknacks. When he plugged it in there was a thud, waves fluxed on the screen and the air felt dryer.
“Alright,” Dane said. “Bit of security.”
Alarm systems and signal-jammers fucking with the flows of sentience and sensation-magic. Call it “knocking,” Billy told himself. The occult machines left not nothing, not a void that would attract attention like a missing tooth, but projected a shred of presence for remote-sensors, a construct soul. The residue of a pretend person.
When Dane went to the bathroom, Billy did not try to leave. He did not even stand by the door and wonder.
“Why don’t you want this?” Billy said when Dane returned. He raised his hands to indicate everything. “The end, I mean. You say it’s ending. I mean, it’s your kraken doing it…”
“No, it ain’t,” Dane said. “Or not like it’s supposed to.”
It would have made sense to Billy, had Dane hedged and hemmed and hawed, dissembled and evaded. It could not be so uncommon a phenomenon, the last-minute cold feet of the devout. Absolutely I was all signed up for the apocalypse but right now? Like this? It would have made sense, but that was not what this was. Billy knew then and quite certainly that had Dane trusted that this was the horizon of which he had read and catechised since his feisty fervent youth, he would have gone along with it. But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse. That was the problem. It was according to some other plan. Some other schema. Something had hijacked the squid finality. This was and was not the intended end.
“I need to get a message to someone,” Billy said. Dane sighed. “Hey.” Billy was surprised by the speed of his own anger, as he squared up. The big man looked surprised too. “I’m not your pet. You can’t order me around. My best friend died, and his girlfriend needs to know.”
“That’s well and good,” Dane said. He swallowed. His effort to stay calm was alarming. “But there’s one mistake there. You say I can’t order you around. Oh I can. I have to. You do what I tell you or Goss or Subby or the Tattoo or any one of all the others out there looking for you will find you, and then if you’re very lucky you’ll just die. You understand?” He prodded Billy’s chest one, two, three times. “I just exiled myself, Billy. I am not having a good day.”
They stared at each other. “Tomorrow the real shit begins,” Dane said. “Right now, there’s nowhere as much knacking floating around as you’d think. There’s what you could call a power shortage. That gives us opportunities. I don’t just know church people, you know.” He opened his bag. “We might not have to do this totally alone.”
“Let’s make sure,” Billy said carefully. “Just answer me this. I mean… I know you don’t want to get the police in, but… What about just Collingswood? She’s not like the leader of that lot-she’s a constable-but she’s obviously got something. We could call her…” The flat anger of Dane’s face hushed him.