Kraken

by China Miéville

  Whoa. Something rushed around the room at that. Everyone looked sheepish. What …? thought Billy. What was—? Oh.

  Of course he was one of their prophets.

  “Oh shit,” he said. He slumped against the bookshelf. He closed his eyes. That was why they had given him dreams. They weren’t just anyone’s dreams: they were there to be read.

  Billy looked at the books, textbooks next to the visions. He tried, like Vardy, to channel vicarious Damascene scenes. He could imagine these faithful seeing cephalopod biologists as unknowing saints, their vision unknown even to themselves and the purer for that, stripped of ego. And him? Billy had touched the body of God. Kept it safe, preserved it against time, ushered in Anno Teuthis. And because of Goss and the Tattoo, he had suffered for God, too. That was why this congregation protected him. He was not just another saint. Billy was the preserver. Giant-squid John the Baptist. The shyness he saw in the Krakenists was devotion. It was awe.

  “Oh for God’s sake,” he said.

  The men and women stared. He could see them attempting exegesis on his outburst.

  ANY MOMENT CALLED NOW IS ALWAYS FULL OF POSSIBLES. AT TIMES of excess might-bes, London sensitives occasionally had to lie down in the dark. Some were prone to nausea brought on by a surfeit of apocalypse. Endsick, they called it, and at moments of planetary conjuncture, calendrical bad luck or mooncalf births, its sufferers would moan and puke, struck down by the side effects of revelations in which they had no faith.

  Right then it was swings and roundabouts. On the one hand, such attacks were getting rarer. After years of being martyrs to somebody else’s martyrs, the endsick had never been so free of the trouble. On the other hand, this was because the very proliferation, the drunkenness of an unclosed universe that had always played merry hell with their inner ear, was collapsing. And something was replacing it. Instead of all those maybes, underlying them all, approaching dimly and with gathering speed, was something simple and absolutely final.

  What was this queasiness that had come in in place of the other queasiness, the sensitives wondered? What was this new discomfort, this new cold illness? Oh, right, they began to realise. That’s what it is. It’s fear.

  Animals were afraid, too. Rats went to ground. Seagulls went back to the sea. London foxes rutted in a terrified hormonal swill, and their adrenalin made them good quarries for the secret urban hunts. For most Londoners, all this was so far visible only in an epidemic of birdlime, the guano of terror, as pigeons began to shit themselves. Shops were covered. In Chelsea, Anders Hooper stared at the window of Nippon This! and shook his head in disgust. With a little ding his door opened. Goss and Subby walked in.

  “Bertrand!” Goss said, and gave him a friendly wave. Subby stared. “You got me so excited, I had another question for you!”

  Anders backed away. He felt for his mobile phone. “You call us if you hear anything else from them, right?” Baron had said, and given him a card, the location of which he was trying to remember. Anders bumped into the wall. Goss leaned on the counter.

  “So anyway,” Goss said. “There we are, Subby and me and, oh, you know, all of us. You know. ’Course you know, you of all bleeding mathematicians, eh? So the question is, what’s the skinny?” He smiled. He breathed out cigarette smoke he had never breathed in.

  “I don’t understand,” Anders said. In his pocket, he thumbed for the 9 button.

  “No, of course,” Goss said. Subby walked under the flap in the counter and stood next to Anders. Touched his arm. Tugged his sleeve. Anders failed to dial. Tried again.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Goss said. He pronounced it mo-wah. “I could not agree more. It’s all a bit much at the jockey club, which is why we had to put that doping little saddler bang to rights. Imagine my surprise when I heard my name. Eh? All for the best.” He tapped the side of his nose, and winked. “Those rozzers, eh! My name! My name, can you Adam and Eve it?”

  Anders felt as if cold water filled his belly. “Wait.”

  “Did you was be chatting up my gob handle? Would I be right in that? Now all manner of whatnots are asking after me!” Goss laughed. “It’s all a bit of a pony. Say my name, say my name! You said my name.”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t even know your name …”

  Anders brought his thumb down, but there was a rush of air, a fast and cut-off bang. Anders saw no motion. All he knew was that Goss was on one side of the counter, Anders pressed the button on his phone, there was noise, the hatch was still sailing slowly through the air in a trail of splinters, and Goss was on the other side of the counter, in front of him, up close to him, holding his wrist and squeezing it so that Anders let go of his phone and gasped.

  The hatch hit the floor. Goss made a chat-chat motion with his free hand. “You talky little fellow,” he said. “You and Subby, never a bloody word in!”

  Anders could smell Goss’s hair. Could see the veins below the skin of his face. Goss pulled his face up close. His breath smelt of nothing at all. It was like air wafted by a paper fan. Until another breath and smoke came. Anders began to whimper.

  “I read them books,” Goss said. Inclined his head toward the origami shelves. “I read them to Subby. He was enthralled. En. Fucking. Thralled. Never you Very Hungry Caterpillar me, with this one it was all ‘Oh, now tell me how to make a carp! Now how do I make a horsey?’ I’m ever so good at that one now. Let me show you.”

  “I never told anyone,” Anders said. “I don’t know who you are …”

  “Shall we make an apple tree?” Goss said. “Shall we make a tortoise? Fold and fold and fold.” He began to fold. Anders began to scream. “I’m not as good at it as you!” Goss laughed.

  Goss folded, with wet-flesh sounds, and cracks. Eventually Anders stopped screaming, but Goss continued to fold.

  “I don’t know, Subby,” he said, at last. He wiped his hands on Anders’s coat. He squinted at his handiwork. “I need more practice, Subby,” he said. “It isn’t quite as much like a lotus as I’d have liked.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  BILLY WOKE AS IF RISING OUT OF WATER. HE GASPED. HE PUT HIS head in his trembling hands. In that deep dream, what he had seen was this.

  He had been a point of awareness, a soul-spot, a sentient submerged node, and had drifted over an ocean floor that he had seen in monochrome, lightless as it would have been, and that had pitched suddenly into a crevasse, a Mariana Trench of water like clotted shadow. His little selfless self had drifted. And after an inconceivably long time of that drifting, again he had seen a thing below him, rising. A flattening of the dark, coming up out of dark. Beggaring perspective. Dream-Billy knew what it would be, and was afraid of its arms, its many limbs and endless body. But when it came into water faintly lit enough that he could see its contours, it was a landscape he recognised, because it was him. A Billy Harrow face, Atlantean, eyes open and staring into the sky all the way above. The huge him was long lifeless. Pickled. Skin scabbed, church-sized eyes cataracted by preservation, vast clammy lips peeled back from teeth too big to imagine. A conserved Billy-corpse thrown up by some submerged cataclysm.

  Billy shivered on his bed. He had no idea if it was the start of a day outside, or if whatever schedule he was given came according to the church’s clockless grooves. He wanted suddenly and very much to tell Marge that Leon was dead. He had not thought of her, until then, and he was ashamed. He shut his eyes tight and held his breath at the thought of Leon. Billy tried to flex whatever inner thing it was that he had touched when Goss had come for him, when the glass had broken and hesitated.

  On his tray was a glass of murky drink. The inky posset. No one would spike him secretly anymore—the choice was his. The offer was there, the hope, though he was dreaming without the ink’s help. Billy was a hostage-prophet, augur-inmate. He was being played as a piece in a variant game of apocalypse.

  You were supposed to run the numbers. Fortune-telling was quantum betting, a competitive scrying of variably likely outcomes. That
variation, the disagreements, indispensable to the calculation. Triangulating possibilities. No one knew what to do now prognosticators all agreed. Billy gripped the frame of the bed. He stared at the ink-intoxicant.

  There was a knock and Dane entered. He leaned against the wall. He wore a coat and carried a bag. For a long time, neither man spoke. They just looked at each other.

  “I’m not your prophet, Dane,” Billy said. “Thanks for saving my life. I never said that yet. I’m sorry about that. But this is … You have to let me go.” Still sought, yes, but. “You can help me.”

  Dane closed his eyes. “I was born in the church,” he said. “My mum and dad met through it. It was my granddad, my dad’s dad, who was the one really into it. It was him taught me. He used to do catechism with me. But I mean, that’s bollocks, ain’t it? It’s not about reciting like a parrot. It’s about understanding. He used to talk me through it.”

  He opened his eyes and took equipment out of his bag, checked it, put it back. A spearhead emerged from the muzzle of what looked like a pistol. “Most of my friends … Well you know what it’s like with church and kids. They don’t stick with it, do they? Me, though … I had a calling. You know what the Teuthex said.” Dane examined his kit. “We can protect you. You’re being hunted by Goss and fucking Subby. Everyone wants what’s in your head, Billy. I know, I know, don’t tell me, there’s nothing in your head. Whatever.”

  “What are you doing?” Billy said.

  “My job. I done such things for the church. You can’t ask me all the things I done for the church, ’cause I won’t tell you. All the faiths got their …” There was a pause during which even the empty hallways seemed to wait.

  “Crusaders,” Billy said.

  Dane shrugged. “I was going to say oddjobsmen. Go-to guys.” The hashish-eaters; the Hospitallers; Francis X. Killy. Sanctioned wet-workers of the devout. “Everyone’s got apocalypse brigades, Billy, for when it all goes down. Waiting like kings under hills. They couldn’t exactly go undercover.” He laughed. “They couldn’t exactly get a job at the Darwin Centre.”

  Dane lifted his shirt. His skin was studded with keloid marks. He pointed and one by one named them like little pets. “Clockworkers,” he said. “Saviour Sect. Mary Martyrs. This one …” A long and snaky path. “That’s not from a godfight, that one, just a straight-on face-off with a crook. He was stealing from us.”

  Footsteps approached but passed on. Dane looked at the ceiling. “You know what the question is?” he said. “What is it you’re loyal to. God? The church? The pope? What if they don’t agree?” He kept his gaze up. “What you want and what I want ain’t the same thing. You want to be safe, and … not to be a prisoner. Which do you want more? Because it’s safer here. You want a bit of revenge, too? What I want’s my god. Maybe that’s in the same direction for a bit.

  “If we do this, Billy, you and me, I got to know you’re not going to run. I ain’t threatening you—I’m telling you you’ll die if you try to deal with shit on your own. If we do this I’ll help you, but you have to help me. That means you got to trust me.

  “It ain’t going to be safe even a tiny bit, understand? If we go. You got everyone after you.” He lifted the bag.

  “You’ll be safer if you stay here. But they won’t let you go. They want to know what you see.” He tapped his head.

  “Why are you doing this?” Billy’s heart was speeding again.

  “Because it ain’t our place just to watch. There’s a god to save.”

  “They think it’s the right thing,” Billy said. “I read about the movement without movement. Moore thinks he’s doing the holy thing, moving like a kraken on a board. By not moving.”

  “Well ain’t it convenient that this interpretation lets him sit on his arse? They won’t let you go. I want your help, but I ain’t going to force you. Time ain’t with us. So?”

  “I’m not what you think,” Billy said. “I’m not a saint, Dane, just because I cut up a squid.”

  “Are you more worried about being a prisoner or a saint?” Dane said. “I ain’t asking you to be anything.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “You fallen in the middle of a war. I’m not going to bullshit you, I’m not going to tell you you can get your revenge for your mate. You can’t take Goss and neither can I. That ain’t what I’m offering. We don’t know who has the kraken, but we know the Tattoo’s after it. If he gets hold of something like that …

  “It’s him who got your friend killed. The best way to ruin his day’s to get the god back. Best I can do.”

  Billy could stay among obsequious jailers. Offering him hallucinogen, taking devout and monkish notes on whatever drivel he subsequently raved.

  “Will they come after you?” Billy said. “If you go rogue?”

  What this renegacy would mean! Dane would be without the church that made him, an apostate hero taking faith into the heart of darkness, a paladin in hell. A lifetime of obedience, followed by what?

  “Oh yeah,” Dane said.

  Billy nodded. He pocketed the ink. He said, “Let’s go.”

  THE TWO MEN ON DUTY AT THE GATE LOOKED SHOCKED AS DANE approached. They nodded. They piously averted their eyes from Billy. It made him want to pretend to speak in tongues.

  “I’m out,” Dane said. “On a job.”

  “Sure,” said the younger doorman. He transferred his shotgun from arm to arm. “Let us just …” He fumbled with the door. “Only,” he said, and pointed at Billy. “Teuthex said we need his permission …”

  Dane rolled his eyes. “Don’t bugger me around,” he said. “I’m on a mission. And I need him for a moment to taste some stuff out. Need what’s in there.” Tapped Billy’s head. “You know who he is? What he knows? Don’t waste my time, I’m bringing him straight back.” The two men looked at each other. Dane said, in a low voice, “Do not waste my time.”

  What, were they going to disobey Dane Parnell? They opened the gate.

  “Don’t lock it,” Dane said. “He’ll be back in a second.” He led Billy up the stairs, Billy behind him risking a tiny backward glance. Dane pushed open the trapdoor and pulled him out past bulwarks of rubbish, into the rear room of the South London Church of Christ.

  LIGHT BURST THROUGH WINDOWS. LONDON DUST SETTLED AROUND them. Billy blinked.

  “Welcome to exile,” Dane said quietly, lowering the door. He was a traitor now, in his fidelity to his duty. “Come on.” They went past the kitchen, the toilet, the bric-a-brac. In the main room, chairs were circled. Billy and Dane came out into a meeting of mostly elderly women, who broke off chatting.

  “Alright love?” one said, and another, “Is everything okay, sweetheart?” Dane ignored them.

  “Do they …” Billy whispered. “Do they worship the, the kraken …?”

  “No, they’re Baptists. Mutual protection. Any second the Teuthex’s going to find out we’re gone. So we’ve got to get far away, fast. Follow me close and do exactly what I say, when I say. You try to go off on your own, Billy, and you will be found and you will die. Neither of us wants that. You understand? Walk quickly but don’t run.

  “Are you ready?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  THERE WAS NO PLEASURE, NO I-TOLD-YOU-SO AMONG THE hedge-seers who had for so long predicted that the end was on its way. Now that everyone who cared to think about it agreed with them—though they might abjure the insight—those who found themselves suddenly and unexpectedly the advance guard of mainstream opinion were at a bit of a loss. What was the point of dedicating your life to giving warnings if everyone who might have listened—because the majority were still unbothered and would possibly remain so till the sun went out—merely nodded and agreed?

  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?”