Kraken

by China Miéville

  “We get underground. Then we start hunting.”

  “And … what about the cops?” Billy said.

  “We ain’t going to the police.” Dane smacked the wheel. “They can’t do shit. And if they could, it wouldn’t be what we want them to. Why do you think they’re looking? They want it for themselves.”

  “So what are you going to do with it if you find it, Dane?”

  Dane looked at him. “I’m going to make sure no one else gets it.”

  DANE HAD HIS HIDES. IN EMPTY-LOOKING SHELLS, IN SHABBY squats, in neat-seeming places that appeared to have permanent tenants holding down jobs respectable and unrespectable.

  “We move, we stay a day or two at a time,” Dane said. “We get hunting.”

  “Surely the church’ll find us,” Billy said. “These are safe houses, right?”

  “Not even the Teuthex knows these. When you do the work I do, you have to have leeway. The less they know the better. Keep their hands clean. It ain’t ours to kill, we ain’t the predators, get me? But needs must.” To defend heaven you unleash hell, that sort of sophistry.

  “Are you the only one?” Billy said.

  “No,” Dane said. “I’m the best, though.”

  Billy put his head back on the seat and watched London go. “Goss just opened his mouth,” he said. “And Leon was …” He shook his head. “Is that his … knack?”

  “His knack is that he’s an unspeakable bastard,” Dane said. “A jobs-worth.” He unfolded a piece of paper with one hand. “This is a list of movers,” he said. “We’ve got a god to find. This is who might’ve done the job.”

  Billy watched Dane for a while, watched anger come and go across his face, and moments of aghast uncertainty. They dossed down finally near the river, in a one-bedroom flat decorated like student digs. There were books on biology and chemistry on cheap shelves, a System Of A Down poster on the wall, the paraphernalia of dope.

  “Whose is all this?” he said.

  “In case it gets broken into,” Dane said. “Or remote-viewed. Scried or whatever. Got to be convincing.” A toothbrush crusted with paste-spit was in the bathroom, a half-used soap and shampoo. There were clothes in the drawers, all suited to the invented inhabitant: all the same size and unpleasant style. Billy picked up the phone but it was not connected.

  Dane checked tiny bones tied in bundles on the windowsill. Ugly little clots of magicky stuff. From a cabinet below the bed he took a machine made of rusty old equipment and nonsense: a motherboard, an old oscilloscope, crocodile-clipped to knickknacks. When he plugged it in there was a thud, waves fluxed on the screen and the air felt dryer.

  “Alright,” Dane said. “Bit of security.”

  Alarm systems and signal-jammers fucking with the flows of sentience and sensation—magic. Call it “knocking,” Billy told himself. The occult machines left not nothing, not a void that would attract attention like a missing tooth, but projected a shred of presence for remote-sensors, a construct soul. The residue of a pretend person.

  When Dane went to the bathroom, Billy did not try to leave. He did not even stand by the door and wonder.

  “Why don’t you want this?” Billy said when Dane returned. He raised his hands to indicate everything. “The end, I mean. You say it’s ending. I mean, it’s your kraken doing it …”

  “No, it ain’t,” Dane said. “Or not like it’s supposed to.”

  It would have made sense to Billy, had Dane hedged and hemmed and hawed, dissembled and evaded. It could not be so uncommon a phenomenon, the last-minute cold feet of the devout. Absolutely I was all signed up for the apocalypse but right now? Like this? It would have made sense, but that was not what this was. Billy knew then and quite certainly that had Dane trusted that this was the horizon of which he had read and catechised since his feisty fervent youth, he would have gone along with it. But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse. That was the problem. It was according to some other plan. Some other schema. Something had hijacked the squid finality. This was and was not the intended end.

  “I need to get a message to someone,” Billy said. Dane sighed. “Hey.” Billy was surprised by the speed of his own anger, as he squared up. The big man looked surprised too. “I’m not your pet. You can’t order me around. My best friend died, and his girlfriend needs to know.”

  “That’s well and good,” Dane said. He swallowed. His effort to stay calm was alarming. “But there’s one mistake there. You say I can’t order you around. Oh I can. I have to. You do what I tell you or Goss or Subby or the Tattoo or any one of all the others out there looking for you will find you, and then if you’re very lucky you’ll just die. You understand?” He prodded Billy’s chest one, two, three times. “I just exiled myself, Billy. I am not having a good day.”

  They stared at each other. “Tomorrow the real shit begins,” Dane said. “Right now, there’s nowhere as much knacking floating around as you’d think. There’s what you could call a power shortage. That gives us opportunities. I don’t just know church people, you know.” He opened his bag. “We might not have to do this totally alone.”

  “Let’s make sure,” Billy said carefully. “Just answer me this. I mean … I know you don’t want to get the police in, but … What about just Collingswood? She’s not like the leader of that lot—she’s a constable—but she’s obviously got something. We could call her …” The flat anger of Dane’s face hushed him.

  “We ain’t dealing with that lot,” he said. “You think they’ll keep us safe? They won’t mess with us? You think she ain’t going to hand us right over?”

  “But …”

  “‘But’ fuckity shite, Billy. We stick to who I know.” Dane brought out maps of London felt-tipped with additions, sigils on parkland and routes traced through streets. A speargun, Billy saw to his surprise, like a scuba diver might carry.

  “You’ve never shot, right?” Dane said. “Maybe we need to get you something. I didn’t … I didn’t have time to plan this a whole lot, you know? I’m thinking who might help. Who I’ve run with.” He counted off on his fingers, and scribbled names. “My man Jason. Wati. Oh, man, Wati. He’s going to be angry. If we want to get a talisman or anything we need to go to Butler.”

  “Are these kraken people?”

  “Hell no, the church is out,” Dane said. “That’s closed. We can’t go there. These are people I’ve run with. Wati’s a red, good guy. Butler, it’s all about what he saw: he can get you defences. Jason, Jason Smyle, he’s a good bet.”

  “Hey, I know that name,” Billy said. “Did he work at … the museum?” Dane smiled and shook his head. No, thought Billy, the familiarity abruptly gone.

  They ate from the bag of junk food Dane had bought. There were two beds, but like campers they dossed down on the living room floor. This was a landscape through which they were passing, a forest glade. They lay without speaking some time.

  “How did it feel?” Dane said. “To work on the kraken.”

  “… Like smelly rubber,” Billy said at last. Dane looked as if he would thunder disapproval, but then he laughed.

  “Oh man,” said Dane. “You’re bad.” He shook his head. His grin was guilty. “Seriously. You telling me there was nothing? You’ve got something.” He clicked his fingers, made that spot of biophosphor, like a deep-sea squid. “You didn’t feel nothing?”

  Billy lay back. “No,” he said. “Not then. It was earlier. I was rubbish at what I did, the first few months I was there. I didn’t even know if I’d stick it. But then all of a sudden I got much better. That was when it felt something special. Like I could preserve anything, any way I wanted.”

  “What about in the alley?” Dane said. Billy looked at him across the dark room. Dane spoke carefully. “When Goss was coming for you. You did something, then. Did that feel like something?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “If you say so, Billy,” Dane said. “My granddad was a holy man. He used to ask me who my favourite saint was. He sa
id you could tell a lot about someone if you knew that. So I’d say Kraken, because I wanted to be a good boy, and that was the right answer to most … religious questions. And he’d say, No, that’s cheating. Which saint? I couldn’t decide for ages, but suddenly one day I did. I told him.

  “Saint Argonaut, I said. Really? he says. He wasn’t angry or nothing, he was just, like, surprised. But I think he liked that. Really? he goes. Not Saint Blue-Ring? Not Saint Humboldt? They’re your fighting saints. He said that because I was big like him and everyone knew I was going to be a soldier. Why Saint Argonaut? he goes. Because of that pretty spiral it makes, I says.”

  Dane smiled beautifully, and Billy smiled back. He pictured the intricately fanned fractal eggcase Dane was describing, which gave the argonaut its other name. “Paper nautilus,” he said.

  “He was a tough man, but he loved that,” Dane said.

  When Dane went to the bathroom again, Billy opened the little bottle and dripped several bitter drops of the squid ink onto his tongue. He lay back and waited in the dark. But even with all the adrenalin of that day, and the inadequate snack supper, he went quickly to blank sleep, and outraced any visions or dreams.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  WHAT MARGINALIA WAS THINKING WAS, WHAT THE HELL IS going on?

  When Leon still did not answer any messages, she tried Billy, who did not answer either. She managed to persuade a locksmith of her bona fides, and at last got into Leon’s flat. Nothing was out of place. There was no hint to his location. She did not know Billy’s friends or family to call them.

  Marge had walked into the police station closest to her when Leon had gone and not come back, when neither he nor Billy would answer their phones. She had reported two missing persons. The officers treated her with brusque sympathy, but they told her the number of people who disappeared every year, every week, and they told her how many soon returned from drunken trips or absentminded weekends. They told her it was best if she didn’t worry too much, and they warned her not to expect too much.

  To her own great surprise, Marge began to cry in the station. The police were embarrassed and cack-handedly sweet, offering her tea and tissues. When she calmed down she went home, expecting nothing and not knowing what to do. But within an hour and a half of getting back (certain keywords coming up in the report of her visit, correlating with other words, the names she had mentioned attracting attention, Leon’s imperfectly recollected but telling last text, red-flagged on computer systems not nearly so hopeless as ostentatiously cynical commentators would claim) there was a knock at her door. A middle-aged man in a suit and a very young blonde woman offhandedly in police uniform. The woman carried a leash, but was not followed by any dog.

  “Hello,” the man said. He had a thin voice. “It’s Miss Tilley, isn’t it? My name’s Baron. DCI Baron. This is my colleague WPC Collingswood. We need a word. I wonder if we might come in?”

  Inside, Collingswood turned slowly, a full circle, taking in the dark walls, the posters for video events and basement electronica parties. Baron and Collingswood did not sit, though Marge gestured them at the sofa. She got a breath of some earthy, porky smell, and blinked.

  “I gather you’ve mislaid some friends, Miss Tilley,” Baron said. Marge considered correcting him, Ms. did not bother.

  “I wasn’t expecting to see you,” she said. “At your office they told me you couldn’t really do anything.”

  “Ah, well, they don’t know what we know. What relation are you to Billy Harrow?”

  “Billy? None at all. It’s Leon I’m with.”

  “With?”

  “I told you.”

  “You haven’t told me anything, Miss Tilley.”

  “I told them at the station. He’s my lover.”

  Collingswood rolled her eyes and wobbled her head, La di fucking da. She click-clicked, as if at an animal, gestured with her chin toward the other rooms.

  “And you haven’t heard anything from Leon since he went to meet Billy?” Baron said.

  “I didn’t even know for sure that’s where he’d gone. How come you came so fast? I mean they said not to expect …” She opened her mouth in a sudden zero of terror. “Oh God, have you found him …?”

  “No no,” said Baron. “Nothing like that. What it is is this is one of those dovetailing situations. Collingswood and I, we’re not generally Missing Persons, you see. We’re from a different squad. But we got a heads-up about your problem, because it may have bearing on our case.”

  Marge stared at him. “… The squid thing? Is that what you’re investigating?”

  “Fu-u-u-ck!” said Collingswood. “I knew it. That little bastard.”

  “Ah.” Baron raised his eyebrows mildly. “Yes. We sort of wondered if Billy’d been able to resist a natter.”

  “Got to give it to him, boss, for someone who don’t know what he’s doing, he’s got some clout. Come on, you.” She said the last to no one, so far as Marge could tell.

  “We’d much rather you kept whatever he mentioned to yourself, if you don’t mind, Miss Tilley.”

  “You think this has something to do with Leon going missing?” Marge said, incredulous. “And Billy? Where do you think they are?”

  “Well, that’s what we’re looking into,” Baron said. “And you can rest assured we’ll let you know as soon as we know anything. Was Billy talking a lot about the squid? Had Leon been to see it? Was he a regular at the museum?”

  “What? No, not at all. I mean, he’d seen it once, I think. But he wasn’t that interested.”

  “Did he talk to you about it?”

  “Leon?” she said. “You mean did he tell me about it disappearing? He thought it was hilarious. I mean he knew it was a big deal for Billy. But it was so weird, you know? He had to take the piss. I wasn’t even a hundred percent sure if Billy was bullshitting, you know?”

  “Yeah, no,” Collingswood said.

  “Why on earth would you think he’d make something like that up?” Baron said.

  “Well. It hasn’t been in the news or anything, has it?”

  “No,” said Baron. “Ah, but therein, therein is a tale. Of gag orders the like of which you’ve no idea.” He smiled.

  “Anyway, it’s not like Leon approved of it. He just … the whole idea of it made him laugh. He texted me some joke about it before he …”

  “Oh yeah,” said Collingswood. “It is quite the riot.”

  “Come on,” said Marge. “Someone nicked a giant squid. Come on.”

  “What can you tell us about Billy?” Baron said. “What do you think of him?”

  “Billy? I don’t know. He’s alright. I don’t really know him. He’s Leon’s friend. Why are you asking?”

  Baron glanced at Collingswood. She shook her head and tugged the lead. “Not a sausage,” she said. “Ooh, sorry Perky.”

  “What’s going on?” Marge said.

  “We’re just doing some detecting, Miss Tilley,” Baron said.

  “Should I …? How worried should I be?”

  “Oh, not very,” he said. “Would you, Kath?”

  “Nah.” Collingswood was texting someone.

  “You know the more I think about it, I don’t think this is related to what we’re up to. So if I were you I wouldn’t worry.”

  “Yeah,” said Collingswood, still thumbing her message. “Nah.”

  “Now,” said Baron, “obviously we’ll let you know if we realise otherwise. But I must say I’m doubtful. Many thanks.” He nodded. He touched his forefinger to the brow of his nonexistent cap; Cheerio then.

  “Hey, what?” Marge said. “Is that it?” Collingswood was already by the door, popping her collars like a dandy. She winked at Marge. “What just happened?” Marge said. “Are you going? What happens now?”

  Collingswood said to her, “Rest assured we’re going to leave no stone unturned in our search for wossname and thingy.”

  Marge gasped. Baron said, “Now, Kath.” He shook his head, rolled his eyes at Marge l
ike a tired father. “Miss Tilley, as soon as we have any ideas of what’s going on, we’ll be straight back in touch.”

  “Did you hear what she said?”

  “Kath,” Baron said, “off you go, get in the car. I did, I did, Miss Tilley. And I apologise.”

  “I want to make a complaint.” Marge shook. She clenched and unclenched her fists.

  “Of course. It’s absolutely your right to do so. You have to understand it’s just a question of Collingswood’s gallows humour. She’s an excellent officer, and that’s her way of dealing with the trauma we have to see every day. Not that it’s any excuse, I grant you. So you go ahead, it might shape her up.” He paused on his way out, his hand on the doorway. “I’ll let her know I’m very disappointed in her.”

  “Wait, you can’t just leave now. How do I get in touch with you if I need …?”

  “Your local station gave you a contact officer, right?” Baron said. “Go through her. She’ll pass on any information to me and my squad.”

  “What the hell? You can’t just suddenly …” But the door was closing, and though she shouted demands to know what was going on, Marge did not follow the officers. She leaned against the door until a strong feeling that she would cry passed. She said to herself out loud, “What the fuck was that?”

  What was it? It was a judgement call, and a bad one. It had been a hunch of the kind one infrequently hears about: a hunch that was wrong.

  “Not a fucking thing,” Collingswood said. She lit a cigarette. The little winter wind snatched its smoke. “She doesn’t know shit,” Collingswood said.

  “Agreed,” said Baron.

  “And none of this has shit to do with her. We’re not going to get anything with that one.”

  “Agreed,” said Baron.

  “No one’s hexed bollock all anywhere near that flat,” Collingswood said. “Not like bloody Billy’s.” Someone or someones with soul or souls starched with witchery of one or other sort had certainly been there. At Billy’s place her poor aetherial animal companion had swivelled and whined and squealed so loud even Baron could hear him.