“Come then,” said Sellar.
Sellar wrote a message Billy could not see, rolled it up and placed it inside a bottle. He screwed its lid on tight and pushed it through the door’s post flap. Several moments passed, but only several. Billy started when the flap opened and the bottle dropped back out and smashed against the concrete step. The barks of dogs did not abate, nor the calls of children playing late. Billy picked up the paper. He held his doll so Wati could read, too.
The paper was damp. The ink was spread in stain-coronas around the written words, in an intricately curling font, spreading beyond its lines.
Teuthis no longer our creature. No longer creature. Not of ocean. We have spoken to the kraken within us to know why this. Neither they nor we are indifferent to what might come. It is no princeling commissar chosen by them or us in the tank.
Billy looked at Wati. “Well? Do you get this?”
“I think…” Wati said. “It’s saying it’s just a kraken.”
“Just?”
“Like not a, a particular kraken. I think. And… but, I mean… it’s not theirs no more, I think.”
“Dane thought there might be something about that one in particular, that was why it was taken. That it might be a hostage.” A part of the incomparable squabbles of kraken. Warlords in feud, battles conducted at the pace of continental drift. A century for the creep of each province-long arm around an enemy’s; a bite excising cities’-worth of flesh clenching over the duration of several human dynasties. Even the fleetingly majestic altercations of their krill, the Architeuthis, were just squibs by the bickering of their parents.
“There has to be something,” Billy said. “There are other giant squid in the world. Why this one? Why’s this one the deal? What’s its… parentage? Where’s it from?”
“It said that ain’t it,” Wati said. “The sea.” Billy and the figure stared at each other.
“So why are we here?” Billy said. “Why does this kraken baby lead to the end of everything?” He stared into the doll’s eyes. “What does the sea really know, or the krakens? What about…? How about this, Wati-you could ask the krakens direct.”
If they took a boat. They should take a boat and a big iron or brass Buddha, say. Where the water was deep, above a trench in the Atlantic, they could tip the statue over the side and Wati could begin a long wobbling voyage down, a precipitation into very crushing dark. Come to rest at very last in mud and hagfished bones, and Wati could politely clear his throat, and wait to attract the attention of some eye that had no business being that big. “Hello. Any particular reason your little plankton baby’s going to set the world on fire?” he might say.
“How’m I supposed to get out again?” Wati said. There was a litter of statues on the seafloor, but how far might they all be from his abyssal interview? What if they were out of reach, and he had to sit there in the black in terrified boredom, fingered by glowing fish until the ocean eroded him out of statuehood and self? So: put his heaviest anchor-statue on the end of a chain strung with other made bodies, so when the questioning was done he could rise through them back up into the ship’s figurehead-
“What are we doing?” Billy interrupted himself. There was another breaking-bottle sound. Another message.
We are not indifferent. To the end in fire. We do not wish London gone. You and the exile Krakenist and we wish the same thing. Our self a product of concatenate development. The kraken would not have this, this is not about them.
Were the giant squid themselves, or their parents, god instars, their apotheosed others, helping with this? Out of, what, divine irritation at some misrepresentation? “Why this squid?” Billy whispered.
Others are against us. We had thought otherwise. We know now. You must get to the kraken and keep it safe from fire.
“Ooh, d’you think?” Billy muttered. “Thanks for that, hadn’t occurred…” He continued reading.
You must free the exile.
“That’s Dane,” he said.
You will be shown.
“Why will we?” said Billy. “What does ‘concatenate development’ mean?” He frowned and tilted his head and read.
Destroy this paper. You will be helped.
AND DANE?
Dane was hanging upside down, and dripping. He had been reciting to himself stories of his grandfather, his grandfather’s courage. “Once,” he said inside his own head, in his grandfather’s voice, “I got caught.” Was it a memory or an invention on Dane’s part? Never mind. “So there was this time there was some scuffle going on with the ringstoners. You ever gone toe-to-toe with a ringstoner? Anyway, we were at it over something or other, can’t even remember, some saint bone of some church we said we’d help so they’d help us, I don’t know…” Concentrate! Dane thought. Come on. “Anyway, so there it was and they had me all trussed like in a bloody cat’s-cradle, and in they come to give it all this, yadda yadda, like. So.” Sniff. Dane as his grandfather, sniffing. “I let them get all close. I was all letting my head go all over the place, you know? They were crowing. You’ll never this, we’ll always that. But when they got right up to it, right up to me, I didn’t say nothing. Till they were right there. Then I said a prayer and like I knew they would, like I bloody knew they would, all the ropes that they had were just what they always were, which is the arms of God, and God unrolled them, and I was free, and then, boy, there was some reckoning.”
Hurray. At some point the echoes of the room Dane was in changed, as people came in. Dane stopped talking to himself and tried to listen. He could not see who was there, with what had been done to his eyes. He could not see, but even through waves of pain he could hear, and he knew that the voice he heard was that of the Tattoo.
“Seriously, nothing?” the Tattoo said.
“Lot of screaming, but you don’t count that,” said the voice of one of the Nazis. “You alright? You seem stressed.”
“I am a bit stressed. Truth to tell I’m a bit bloody stressed. Remember the monsterherds?”
“No.”
A snuffling, a slobber, canine whickering. That dogman was there. That mage-knacked member of this crew, a man made himself half German shepherd, a pitiful fascist meat pun that Dane scorned even as the teeth and muzzle that pun occasioned mauled him.
“Well… They used to run with Grisamentum, back when I… Back when. Well, one of my factories just got interrupted by a bunch of dust or something acting very much like some kind of bloody dragon.”
“I don’t know what that means…”
“It means there’s stuff coming back I wasn’t expecting to face again. This little shitfucker has to know something. He’s in on something. He knows where the fucking squid is-it’s his god, isn’t it? And he knows where Billy Harrow’ll be. Keep at it.”
Keep at it. Dane prayed without ceasing. He prayed silently and motionlessly. Tentacled God in darkness please give me strength. Strength to listen, and to learn. Krakens in your vast silent and ammoniac wisdom have mercy. He knew that he should listen, that he should wait and say nothing, if even he could answer the questions, which mostly he could not even if he would, which he would not, because this would not end. He knew that it would not be too long now, weak as he was and unblooding from all the holes the Nazis had made, woozy and too tired and done to even scream, a thing hanging in thermals of pain-he knew that this was a pitch of this that was its own limit, and that therefore, again, for the second time, before that moment when he would spill enough of himself out that a critical mass of lack would be reached and he would have nowhere to go but into death, the ghastly chaos sunwheel he could no longer see would be rotated. The swastika was, as its hippy antifash defenders insisted, a sign of life, even when deployed like this.