Kraken

by China Miéville

  There was a silence. “I’m getting out of here,” Billy said. And then very quickly he said, “What did … Goss … do to Leon?”

  “Would you be very offended if I said I don’t believe you?” Moore said. “That you want to get out? I’m not sure you do.” He met Billy’s stare. “What did you see?” Billy almost recoiled at the eagerness in his voice. “Last night. What did you dream? You don’t even know why you’re not safe, Billy. And if you go to Baron and Vardy you’ll be considerably less so.

  “I know what they said about us.” He almost twinkled, a vicar being a good sport. “But that little faith-gang called ‘police’ can’t help, you know. You’re in the Tattoo’s sights, now.”

  “Think about the Tattoo,” Dane said. “That face. That man’s face on another man’s back. How was you going to deal with that, Billy?” After a silence Dane said, “How you going to get the police to deal with that?”

  “It isn’t just that, either,” Moore said. “As if that weren’t enough. I know it’s all a bit … Well. But it isn’t just the Tattoo, even. Suddenly, ever since something or other, everyone agrees the end’s in sight. Nothing unusual in that, you might say, and you’d be right except that I do mean everyone. That has … ramifications for you. You need to be with a power. Let me tell you. We are the Congregation of God Kraken. And this is our time.”

  THEY EXPLAINED.

  London was full of dissident gods.

  Why? Well they have to live somewhere. A city living in its own afterlife. Why not?

  Of course, they’re all over, gods are. Theurgic vermin, those once worshipped or still worshipped in secret, those half worshipped, those feared and resented, petty divinities: they infect everybloody-where. The ecosystems of godhead are fecund, because there’s nothing and nowhere that can’t generate the awe on which they graze. But just because there are cockroaches everywhere doesn’t mean there aren’t cockroaches in particular in a New York kitchen. And just because angels keep their ancient places and every stone, cigarette packet, tor and town has its deities, doesn’t mean there’s nothing special about London.

  The streets of London are stone synapses hardwired for worship. Walk the right or wrong way down Tooting Bec you’re invoking something or other. You may not be interested in the gods of London, but they’re interested in you.

  And where gods live there are knacks, and money, and rackets. Halfway-house devotional murderers, gunfarmers and self-styled reavers. A city of scholars, hustlers, witches, popes and villains. Criminarchs like the Tattoo, those illicit kings. The Tattoo had run with the Krays, before he was Tattoo, but really you couldn’t leave your front door unlocked. Nobody remembered what his name had been: that was part of what had happened to him. Whatever nasty miracle it was had en-dermed him had thrown away his name as well as his body. Everyone knew they used to know what he was called, including him, but no one recalled it now.

  “The one who got him like that was smart,” Dane said. “It was better when he was around, old Griz. I used to know some of his guys.”

  There was a many-dimensional grid of geography, economy, obligation and punishment. Crime overlapped with faith—“Neasden’s run by the Dharma Bastards,” Dane said—though many guerrilla entrepreneurs were secular, agnostic, atheist or philistine ecumenical. But faith contoured the landscape.

  “Who’s Goss and Subby?” Billy said. He sat guarded between them, looking from one to the other. Dane looked down at his own big fists. Moore sighed.

  “Goss and Subby,” Moore said.

  “What’s their …?” Billy said.

  “Everything you can think of is what.”

  “Badness,” Dane said. “Goss sells his badness.”

  “Why did he kill that guy? In the cellar?” Billy said.

  “The preserved man,” the Teuthex said. “If that was his handiwork.”

  Billy said, “That Tattoo thought I stole the squid.”

  “That’s why he was hunting you,” Dane said. “See? That’s why I had that familiar watching you.”

  “You preserved it, Billy. You opened the door and found it gone,” Moore said. Pointed at him. “No wonder Baron wanted you. No wonder the Tattoo wanted you, and no wonder we were watching.”

  “But he could tell I didn’t,” Billy pleaded. “He said I had nothing to do with anything.”

  “Yeah,” said Dane. “But then I rescued you.”

  “We got you out, so we’re allies,” Moore said. “So you are his enemy now.”

  “You’re under our protection,” said Dane. “And because of that you need it.”

  “How did you take the Architeuthis?” Billy said at last.

  “It wasn’t us,” said Moore quietly.

  “What?” But it was a relic. They would fight for it, surely, like a devout of Rome might fight for a shroud, a fervent Buddhist might liberate a stolen Sura. “So who?”

  “Well,” said Moore. “Quite.

  “Look,” he said. “You have to persuade the universe that things make sense a certain way. That’s what knacking is.” Billy blinked at this abrupt conversational twist, that word unfamiliarly verbed. “You use whatever you can.”

  “Snap,” said Dane. He clicked his fingers, and with the sound came a tiny fluorescent glow in the air just where the percussion had been. Billy stared and knew it was not a parlour trick. “That’s just skin and hand.”

  “You use what you can,” Moore said, “and some what-you-cans are better than others.”

  Billy realised that Dane and his priest were not, in fact, changing the subject.

  “A giant squid is …” Billy petered out but he was thinking, Is powerful medicine, a big thing, a massive deal. It’s magic, is what it is. For knacking. “That’s why it’s been taken. That’s why that tattoo wants it. But this is craziness,” he added. He couldn’t stop himself. “This is craziness.”

  “I know, I know,” Moore said. “Mad beliefs like that, eh? Must be some metaphor, right? Must mean something else?” Shook his head. “What an awfully arrogant thing. What if faiths are exactly what they are? And mean exactly what they say?”

  “Stop trying to make sense of it and just listen,” Dane said.

  “And what,” Moore said, “if a large part of the reason they’re so tenacious is that they’re perfectly accurate?” He waited, and Billy said nothing. “This is all perfectly real. The Tattoo wants that body, Billy, to do something himself, or stop someone else doing something,” Moore said.

  “All these things have their powers, Billy,” he said intensely. “‘There are plenty of currents on the way down deep’ is what we’d say. But some go deeper, quicker, than others. Some are right.” He smiled not like someone joking.

  “What would someone do with it?” Billy said.

  “Whatever it is,” Dane said, “I’m against it.”

  “What wouldn’t they?” Moore said. “What couldn’t they? With something that holy.”

  “That’s why we need to get out there,” Dane said. “To find it.”

  “Dane,” said Moore.

  “It’s a duty of care,” Dane said.

  “Dane. We need understanding, certainly,” Moore said. “But we have to have faith.”

  “What could show more faith than getting out there?” Dane asked. “You understand what’s going on?” Dane said to Billy. “How dangerous it all is? The Tattoo wants you, and someone has a kraken. That’s a god, Billy. And we don’t know who, or why.”

  A GOD, BILLY THOUGHT. THE THIEF HAD A BLEACHY Formalin-preserved mass of rubbery stink. But he knew truths were not true.

  “God can take care of itself,” Moore said to Dane. “You know things are happening, Billy. You’ve known for days.”

  “I seen you feel it,” Dane said. “I seen you watching the sky.”

  “This is an end,” Moore said. “And it’s our god’s doing it, and it isn’t in our control. And that’s not right.” He splayed his fingers in a ludicrous prayer-motion. “That’s why you’re here, Bi
lly. You know things you don’t even know,” he said. The fervour in it gave Billy a chill. “You’ve worked on its holy flesh.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “YOU COULD JUST STAMP YOUR LITTLE FEET, COULDN’T YOU, Subby? You could unbuckle your shoe and throw it in the lake.”

  Goss stamped. Subby walked a few paces behind him, his hands behind his back in crude mimicry of the man’s pose. Goss was bent forward and beetling with energy. He uncoupled his hands repeatedly and wiped them on his mucky top. Subby watched him and did the same.

  “Where are we now?” Goss said. “Well you may ask. Well you may ask. Where indeed are we now? Not often his nibs is wrong, but that Mr. Harrow clearly not so butter-wouldn’t-melt as he’d give you to think, if he’s got bouncers like that ready to spirit him away. Still not sure who that was who banged your bonce, you poor lad. You doing better?” He ruffled Subby’s hair to the boy’s openmouthed gaze.

  “What is he like? He’s all snotted up in this like slurry in alveoli. Still our best lead, of which his skin-inked eminence now admits, and, what do you say, once is never enough. We’ve caught up with him before, we’ll do it again.

  “Where? That’s the question mark indeed, my young apprentice.

  “Ears to the ground, Subby, tongues aflap.” He did as he said and tasted where they were, and if pedestrians or shoppers in that pre-suburban shopping precinct noticed his slurping snake lick they pretended not to. “Mostly we’re after Fluffy, so any flavours of the you-know-what, a distinct and meaty-bleachy-gamey bouquet I’m told, then veer we go, but otherwise, seems Mr. Harrow knows a little smidgeon, and of him I still recall the savour.”

  THERE WERE ALL KINDS OF DRAMAS OCCURRING IN THE CITY IN those days: machinations, betrayals, insinuations and misunderstandings between groups with distinct and overlapping interests. In the offices, workshops, laboratories and libraries of angry scholars and self-employed theorist-manipulators were screamed arguments between them and those nonhuman companions still around. “How can you do this to me?” was the sentence most regularly spoken, followed by, “Oh go fuck yourself.”

  In the headquarters of the Confederation of British Industry was a hallway between a much-frequented toilet and a small meeting room, that, if most members of the organisation noticed, they did so to briefly wonder why they had never done so before; and they tended not to again after that first time. It was not as brightly lit as it should be. The watercolours on its walls looked a bit vague: they were there, certainly, but rather difficult to pay attention to.

  At the end of the corridor a plastic plaque read STOREROOM or OUT OF ORDER or something—some phrase tricky to recall with exactitude but the gist of which was not this door, go somewhere else. Two figures ignored that gist. In front was a large man wearing an expensive suit and a black motorcycle helmet. Just behind him, her hand in his, a woman in her sixties stumbled and tripped like an anxious animal. She was slack-faced, dressed in a threadbare trench coat.

  The man knocked and opened without waiting for an answer. Inside was a small office. A man stood to greet them, indicated the two seats in front of his desk. The suited man did not sit. He pushed the woman into one of the chairs. He kept his hands on her shoulders. Her coat swung open and she wore nothing beneath it. Her skin was cold- and sick-looking.

  For several seconds nothing happened. Then the woman moved her mouth extraordinarily. She made a ringing noise.

  “Hello?” said the man behind the desk.

  “Hello,” said the woman, clicking and hollow-sounding, in a man’s voice, a London voice. Her eyes were blank as a mannequin’s. “Am I speaking to Mr. Dewey of the CBI?”

  “You are. Thank you for contacting me so quickly.”

  “Not a problem,” the woman said. She drooled slightly. “I understand you have a proposal for me. With regard to the, ah, current dispute.”

  “I do, Mr…. I do. We were wondering whether you might be able to help us.”

  IT WAS IN CRICKLEWOOD THAT, AFTER A CONSULTATION BASED ON highly specific geographopathic criteria, the Metropolitan Police had located its abquotidian operatives: the FSRC and their highly specialist support staff—secretaries unfazed by the information they were required to type, pathologists who would autopsy whatever bodies were put in front of them, no matter how unorthodox their arrangements or causes of death. Vardy, Baron and Collingswood met in the cold lab of one such, Dr. Harris, a tall woman vastly unfazed by absurd and knacked evidence. They had her show them the remains from the basement of the museum one more time.

  “You told me to leave it in one piece,” she had said.

  “Now I’m telling you to open the ruddy thing,” Baron had said, and half an hour later, after a crack and careful prising, the jar rocked in two pieces on the steel. Between them, the man who had been inside almost retained his cylindrically constrained form. The edges of his flesh, the pose of his hands, still looked as if he were pressed up against the glass.

  “There,” Harris said. She laser-pointed. The man stared at her with the intensity of the drowned. “Like I told you,” she said. She indicated the bottle’s neck. “There’s no way he could have got in there.” The FSRC operatives looked at each other.

  “Thought perhaps you might have had a change of heart about that,” Baron said.

  “Couldn’t have happened. He couldn’t have been in there unless he was put in when he was born and left to grow up in it. Which given that he has several tattoos, plus for all the other obvious impossibility-related reasons, is not what happened.”

  “Alright,” Baron said. “That’s not what we’re concerned with here. Right, ladies and gentlemen? What do we know of the methods of our suspects? Do we see any signature moves here? Our question here is about Goss and Subby.”

  GOSS AND SUBBY. GOSS AND SUBBY!

  Collingswood was sure she was right. Anders Hooper was a good origamist, but the main reason he had got the job was because he was new, young, and did not recognise his employer.

  He was no younger than she, of course, but as Vardy had said, with stern approval, “Collingswood doesn’t count.” Her research might have been unorthodox, her learning partial, but she took seriously knowledge of the world in which she operated. She read its histories in chaotic order, but she read them. How could she fail to know of Goss and Subby?

  The notorious “Soho Goats” pub crawl with Crowley, that had ended in quadruple murder, memory of the photographs of which still made Collingswood close her eyes. The Dismembering of the Singers, while London struggled to recover from the Great Fire. In 1812, Walkers on the Face-Road had been Goss and Subby. Had to have been. Goss, King of the Murderspivs—that designation given him by a Roma intellectual who had, doubtless extremely carefully, resisted identification. Subby, whom the smart money said was the subject of Margaret Cavendish’s poem about the “babe of meat and malevolence.”

  Goss and fucking Subby. Sliding shifty through Albion’s history, disappearing for ten, thirty, a hundred blessed years at a time, to return, evening all, wink wink, with a twinkle of a sociopathic eye, to unleash some charnel-degradation-for-hire.

  There was no specificity to Goss and Subby. Try to get what information you can about precisely what their knacks were, what Collingswood still thought of as their superpowers, and all you’d get was that Goss was a murderous shit like no other. Supershit; Wonder-shit; Captain Total Bastard. Nothing funny about it. Call it banal if it makes you feel better but evil’s evil. Goss might stretch his mouth to do one person, stories said, might punch a hole in another, might find himself spitting flames to burn up a third. Whatever.

  The first time Collingswood had read of them, it had been in a facsimile of a document from the seventeenth century, a description of the “long-fingered bad giver and his dead alive son,” and for some weeks afterward, unfamiliar with old fonts, she had thought them Goff and Fubby. She and Baron had had a good laugh at that.

  “Fo,” she said. “Iff it? Iff it the work of Goff and Fubby?” Baron did
, in fact, briefly, laugh. “Iff it their MO?”

  And there was the problem. Goss and Subby had no such thing as an MO. Baron, Vardy and Collingswood peered at the preserved man. They referred to their notes, made more, circumnavigated the corpse, muttered to themselves and each other.

  “All we can say for sure,” said Baron at last, peering, leaning in, “is that so far as we know, there’s no record of them having done anyone in like this before. I pulled the files. Vardy?”

  Vardy shrugged. “We’re flying blind,” he said. “We all know that. But you want my opinion? Ultimately I think … my opinion’s no. What I know of their methods, it’s always been up-close, hands, bones. This is … something else. I don’t know what this is, but this isn’t that, I don’t think.”

  “Alright,” said Baron. “So we’re after Goss and bloody Subby, and we’re also looking for someone else, who pickles their enemies.” He shook his head. “Lord, for a bloody Grievous Bodily Harm. Alright, ladies and gents, let’s get moving on this fellow. We need an ID on the poor sod ASAP. Among many other bloody things.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  INTO NEW LONDON? THE CITY’S VAST UNSYMPATHETIC ATTENTION’S on you, the Teuthex said. You’re hunted. Billy imagined himself emerging big-eyed as a fish, and London—where the Tattoo, Goss, Subby, the workshop waited—noticing. Oh there you are.

  He walked almost as if free under the city. More than once Krakenists passed him and stared and he stared back at them, but they did not interrupt him. In places the grey bas-reliefs of cephalopods were crumbled and beneath were antique bricks. He found a door into a bright-lit room.

  It made him gasp. It had the side-to-side proportions of a small sitting room, but its floor was way below. Absurdly deep. Steps angled down. It was a shaft of roomness, shelved with books. Ladders dangled from the stacks. As the church’s holdings grew, Billy thought, horizontal constraints required generations of kraken worshippers to dig for their library.