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.