“What? I don’t… How? Why’s it chosen me?”
Angels wait for their christs.
Angels wait for their christs?
And you came, born not of woman but of glass.
“I don’t understand.”
Gives you strength-you are christ of its memory.
“This thing with time? It gave me that? Dane said it was because of the kraken… Oh. Wait, wait. Are you…?”
Billy began to laugh. Slowly at first, then more. He sat on the floor. He made himself laugh silently. He knew he was hysterical. It did not feel like release. The cow moved toward him. It was just one moment at the end of the room, one moment two or three feet closer and eyeing him with its sideways glass eye. “I’m alright, I’m alright,” Billy said to the decaying memory.
“You know why Dane thinks those things happen?” he said. He smiled like at a drinking buddy. “He thinks it’s because of the kraken. He thinks I’m some kind of John the Baptist, or something. But, so, that’s the wrong direction. It’s nothing to do with the squid.
“None of this is anything to do with the squid. It’s the sodding tank.
“Come on,” he said. “You’ve got to admit that’s funny. You know what’s even funnier? The best of it? I was joking.”
Billy had kept a straight face during all his claims to be the first person born of in vitro fertilization. That ridiculous, meaningless gag, made in that place, that for the sake of the rigour of humour he had stuck to, had been overheard by the genius loci, the spirit of the museum. Maybe it was attuned to any talk of bottles and their power. Maybe it did not understand the idea of a joke or a lie. “It’s not true,” he said. The bovine angel of memory said nothing. Clack clack clack clack went its four stomachs, lighting in time.
Billy leaned over. “I’m not a kraken prophet, I’m the bottle messiah.” He laughed again. “But I’m just not, I’m not.”
The bottle-angel was diminished, diminished and receding daily, by its wanderings beyond its demesne, by its failure, its efforts, the smashing of that iteration of glass, preserver and bone. It would look for him again, pulling itself another self out of bits and pieces from its palace, though, sniffing out that portion of its own self it had put inside him. That gave him these unearned powers. Until it was gone it would strive to find Billy again, and through him the Architeuthis it had lost.
“I WISH IT WOULD COME BACK,” HE SAID.
Will.
“Yeah, but now. My partner’s gone. I need all the help I can get.”
You are the memory christ.
“Yeah, only I’m not.” Slowly, he looked up. Slowly he stood and smiled. “But you know what, I’ll take that. I’ll take whatever.” He reached and clenched, and thought maybe there was a tiny scutter of time. Maybe there was. “You going to come? Outside?” The cow said nothing. Dead as it was it did not have the strength to fight in the war that its living siblings were waging. “Alright,” Billy said. “Alright, it doesn’t matter. You stay here, look after this place. It needs you.” He felt kind.
From some other part of the building came a noise that was not part of the cow’s voice. Billy was at the door, his weapon out, listening, ready, without knowing how he had got there. The cow angel tried to speak, but Billy held the door closed, and it had nothing with which to make noise. “Hush,” he whispered. Ordering an angel around. It was gone, though, in a series of those being-elsewhere steps. Billy thought for a moment that it would bring a human guard running in consternation. (He did not know that they were all aware something old and melancholy walked in the building, that they tried never to disturb.)
“Godammit,” he said, and he went after the dead angel, holding his phaser out. He followed the screech of hinges and things falling from last shelves. He came suddenly into an unwindowed room where the plastic cow screamed with the voice of the building at a tall man.
Billy ducked and fired, but the man moved faster, and the phaser beam scored over the ineffectual cow and dissipated across the wall. “Billy Harrow!” the man was shouting. He held a weapon himself, but did not fire. “Billy!” The word came from behind him too, Billy thought, but realised that the second, tinier voice was in his pocket. It was Wati.
“I’m not here to fight,” the man shouted.
“Stop, Billy,” Wati said. The angel wheezed with windows. “He’s here to help,” Wati said.
“Billy Harrow,” the man said. “I’m from the Brotherhood of the Blessèd Flood. I’m not here to fight. Marge came to us.”
“What? What? Marge? Oh Jesus, what’s she doing, what does she want? She’s got to stay out of all this…”
“This isn’t about her. I’m here to help. I’ve got a message from the sea. It wants to meet you.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
THE SEA IS NEUTRAL. THE SEA DIDN’T GET INVOLVED IN INTRIGUES, didn’t take sides in London’s affairs. Wasn’t interested. Who the hell could understand the sea’s motivations, anyway? And who would be so lunatic as to challenge it? No one could fight that. You don’t go to war against a mountain, against lightning, against the sea. It had its own counsel, and petitioners might sometimes visit its embassy, but that was for their benefit, not its. The sea was not concerned: that was the starting point.
Same at the embassies of fire (that constantly scorching café in Crouch End), the embassy of earth (a clogged crypt in Greenwich), the embassies of glass and wire and other more recherché elements. The same standoffishness and benignly uninterested power. But this time, this time, the sea had an opinion. And the Brotherhood of the Blessèd Flood were useful.
They were a faith themselves, not dictated to nor created by the sea. Though the sea, so far as any Londoners could judge, took the worship of the Brotherhood wryly and graciously enough. That was always disingenuous. What the Brotherhood offered was plausible deniability: the sea itself did nothing, of course; it was the Brotherhood of the Blessèd Flood that sought out Billy Harrow, and if they brought him back to the sea’s embassy, well?
It was an urgent journey. It was raining, which made Billy feel better in some way, as if water wanted to protect him.
“What’s going on with Marge?” Billy said again.
“I don’t know,” Sellar said. “She came to see me. She thought we took the kraken. We thought you and Dane did. So when she said that wasn’t right, I went and spoke to the sea, and-”
“Is Marge alright?”
“No.”
“Right,” Billy said. “No one is.” He looked again at his phone, but he had missed no calls. Jason had not called him. Maybe he didn’t go yet, Billy thought and did not believe. Maybe he’ll get back to me soon.
A row of semidetached Victorian houses in the northwest of London. A Tube train, emerged from the tunnels, drummed through the night, behind bricks. Cars moved slowly. There were few pedestrians. The houses were three storeys high and only a little dilapidated, bricks well weathered, stained, pointing eroded, but not slums nor derelicts. They were fronted by little gardens with their few plants and coiffed patches. Billy could see children’s bedrooms with pretty animals and monsters on wallpaper, kitchens, sitting rooms with the cocoon-light of television. From one address came laughter and conversation. Smoke and music came out of its open windows. The building next to it was quiet and unlit.
Closer, and Billy saw that was not quite the case. Its curtains were drawn, on all three floors. There was perhaps something very faintly illumined, visible, just, through the curtains, as if someone carried candles in the deeps of the rooms behind.
“Have you been here before, Wati?” he said.
“Never inside,” the figure he carried said to him. “There’s nothing I can get in.”
Sellar tapped at the door, a complicated code staccato. By his ankles were a collection of empty bottles. Sellar pressed his ear to the wood, waited, then beckoned Billy. The ground-floor curtains were heavy oxblood cotton; the first floor, in blue-green paisley; the top, with cartoon plants. All were pressed up against the inside of the glass.