Kraken (31 page)

“So?” Dane said. “So he’s talented, made money and pissed it away on tat. He’s a beamer who made himself Mr. fucking Spock.”

“Scotty,” Billy said. He looked at Dane over the top of his glasses, schoolmarmish. “Spock didn’t beam anything.”

“What? What? Whatever. Listen, there’s different ways of porting, Billy. There’s folding up space.” Dean scrunched his hands. “So places far apart touch each other for a moment. But that ain’t what Simon does. He’s a beamer. Disintegrate whatever it is you want, zap its bits somewhere else, stick them back together.”

“Wasn’t there an auction of
Star Trek
stuff?” Billy said. “A couple of months ago? At Christie’s or somewhere? I think I remember … All the auctioneers wore the uniforms. They sold the starship model for like a million quid or something.”

Dane half closed his eyes. “Rings a bell.”

“It’s going weird in-between,” said Wati from a scuffed stone dog. “I think it wants us to turn left.”

“We’re circling,” said Billy.

They slowed. They had done three turns of a towerblock, orbiting it as if the ill-kept concrete pillar were the sun. They were not alone on the street, but none of the pedestrians paid them any particular mind. “It wants to take us there,” said Billy, “but it’s scared.”

“Alright, hold on,” said Wati from a plastic owl, a bird-scarer on a chemist roof. “I’ll have a look.”

W
ATI WENT TO A TINY COSY PLASTIC DASHBOARD
V
IRGIN; TO A
cemetery and a headstone angel, seeing through birdlimed eyes. Staccato manifested moments to the base of the tower, eyeing the building from a bouncing horsey in the children’s playground.

He could feel familiars in a few of the flats. All union members. Two on strike; the other, a—what was that?—a parrot, still working but with dispensation for some reason. The unioned three felt their organiser’s presence with surprise. He stretched out, found a child’s doll in the ground floor. It took him scant moments to see through speck-sized Barbie, to go again, finding a terra-cotta lady in the next-door flat, seeing again, nothing of interest, moving to a China shepherdess on next-door’s mantelpiece.

He slid through figures. His moments of statued awareness proliferated in a cloud. He strobed through floors in doll figure carved-soapdish rabbitsextoy antique relic, seeing, fucking, eating, reading, sleeping, laughing, fighting, human minutiae that did not interest him.

Three storeys from the top, he opened his consciousness in a plastic figure of Captain Kirk. Feeling the seam of his moulding, the hinge of his little arms and legs, the crude Starfleet uniform painted on him, he looked into a ruinous apartment.

Less than a minute later he was back in a novelty alarm clock shaped like a chimney sweep, in the window of a shop where Billy and Dane loitered.

“Hey,” he said.

A clock is shouting at me
, Billy thought, so loud anyone with a hint of nous would have been able to read it. He stared at Wati.
Little while ago I was a guy worked in a museum
.

“Third floor from the top. Go.”

“Wait,” said Dane. “He’s there? Is he alright?”

“You’d better see.”

“J
ESUS,” WHISPERED
B
ILLY
. “I
T STINKS.”

“I told you,” said Wati. Dane held him out like a weapon. Wati was in a ripoff toy, a “Powered Ranga!” they had brought.

The curtains were drawn. The stench was of rotting food, filthy clothes, uncleaned floors. The rooms were littered with mouldering rubbish. There were tracks—cockroaches, mice, rats. Tribble whimpered. The ridiculous scrabbly thing pulled itself out of the bag and half rolled, half hairily oozed into the living room. From where came sounds.

“More of you?” A voice stretched taut. “Can’t, can’t be, I’ve
accounted
, or you have, you’re all done, aren’t you, that’s us, isn’t it? Tribble, Tribble? You can’t speak, can you, though?”

“That’s him,” said Dane. “Simon.” He drew his speargun.

“Oh Jesus,” Billy said.

On every surface was
Star Trek
merchandise: model
Enterprises;
plastic Spocks claimed emotionlessness more convincingly than the character they represented; Klingon weapons hung on the walls. There were plastic phasers and communicators on the shelves.

Sitting on the sofa, staring at them, Tribble on his lap, was a ghastly looking man. Simon’s face was pale and thin, scab-crusted. His
Star Trek
uniform was dirty, the insignia one blot among many.

“Thought maybe you were more of them,” he said.

He was surrounded, encauled, coronaed with whispering figures. They fleeted in and out of visibility, made of dark light. They entered his body and exited it, they faded up, they ebbed out. They moved around the room, they crooned, they hooted in faint lunatic imitations of speech.

Every one of the figures looked exactly like Simon. Each was him, staring in hate.

“What happened, Simon?” Dane said. He whipped his hand through the air to disperse the shades, as if they were insect-clouds or bad smells. They ignored him and continued their cruel haunting. “What
happened?”

“He’s lost it,” said Wati. “He’s completely gone.” In his agitation he went from toy to toy, speaking snatches from each. “Imagine dealing …” “… with that …” “… every moment…” “… every day …” “… and night as well.” “He’s
gone.”

“We need an exorcist,” said Dane.

“I knew it was trouble,” Simon said. He shied from the angry him-spirits. “I started feeling them, in the matter stream. But it’s always one last job.” He made a shooting motion. Several of the figures in joyless mockery finger-shot him back. “Couldn’t not. They made it
real
, God.”

“I told you,” said Billy. Amid scattered novels set in the favoured universe was a box, still surrounded by paper and string. It contained a big book and yet another phaser. The book was the catalogue of an auction. A very expensive
Star Trek
sale. The model of the
Enterprise
—it was from
Next Generation
, in fact—had a reserve of $200,000. There were uniforms, furniture, accoutrements, most from the Picard years. But there were a few from other spin-offs, and from the first series.

Billy found the phaser listed. The details were geekily precise (it was a phase pistol type-2, with removable type-1 inset, and so on). The reserve price was high—the prop had been used on-screen many times. Billy picked it up, and the translucent Simons looked at it wrathfully and wistfully. Below it was a card, on which was written:
As agreed
.

The weapon was surprisingly heavy. Billy turned it experimentally, held it out and pulled the trigger.

The sound was bizarrely and instantly recognisable from TV, high spitting crossbred with mosquito whine. There was heat, and he saw light. A particle beam of some impossible kind burst out of the meaningless weapon, seared the air, light-speeding into the wall as Dane shouted and leapt, and the spirit-Simons screamed.

Billy stared at the thing dangling in his hand, at the scorched wall. The stupid toylike lump of plastic and metal that shot like a real phaser.

“A
LRIGHT,” SAID
D
ANE, AFTER MORE THAN AN HOUR COAXING
sentences from Simon, shielding him from the Simons that surrounded him. “What have we figured?”

“What are they? The hims?” Billy said.

“This is why I wouldn’t travel that way,” Dane said. “This is my
point
. For a piece of rock or clothes or something dead, who cares? But take something living and do that?
Beam
it up? What you done is
ripped a man apart
then stuck his bits back together and made them walk around. He
died
. Get me? The man’s dead. And the man at the other end only thinks he’s the same man. He ain’t. He only just got born. He’s got the other’s memories, yeah, but he’s newborn. That
Enterprise
, they keep
killing
themselves and replacing themselves with clones of dead people. That is some macabre shit. That ship’s full of Xerox copies of people who died.”

“This is why he stopped working?” said Billy.

“Maybe he knew it wasn’t doing him any good. Something was making him nervous. But then he comes back and does it again. And it’s a
huge
job.” Dane nodded. “The kraken. Tips him over the edge. You know how many years Simon spent beaming in and out of places, “getting coordinates,” beaming out with merchandise? You get me?
Do you know how many times he’s died?

“Almost as many times as James T. fucking Kirk is how many. That man sitting there was born out of nothing a few days ago, when he got the kraken out. And this time, when he arrived, all the hes who died before were waiting. And they were pissed off.

“They want revenge. Who killed the Simon Shaws? Simon Shaw is who. Time and again.”

“It’s hardly fair,” Billy said. “He’s the only one of the whole lot of them who
hasn’t
killed anyone; he only just got here. It’s them who killed each other.”

“Yeah,” said Dane. “But he’s the only one of them living, and that anger’s got to go somewhere. They ain’t the most logical things. That’s why Simon’s being haunted by Simons. Poor bastard.”

“Right,” said Billy. “So why did he do it?” He pointed at the phaser, the catalogue, the note. “Someone contacts him. Here comes one of the biggest Trekkie sales for years, and he’s getting none of it, and someone contacts him with an offer he can’t refuse. They’ve done something with this gun.”

Dane nodded. “Contracted some mage. Some shaper’s knacked it so it’s real.”

“What’s he going to do?” said Billy.
“Not
want the world’s only working phaser? They say you just have to port one thing. So who wrote this note? Simon didn’t want a giant squid. Whoever dangled this gun in front of him’s our mystery player. They’re the ones who’ve got your god.”

PART THREE
LONDONMANCY

Chapter Forty

B
ILLY STARED AT
S
IMON’S ANGRY DEAD SELVES
. D
ID
S
IMON FEEL
the guilt they laid on him, the culpability for countless unintentional suicides? What an original sin.

At last Wati returned into a statuette of an Argelian dancer. “Open the door,” he said. Outside, a harassed-looking woman waited carrying a coiling ram’s horn.

“Dane,” she said, entered. “God almighty, what’s been going on here?”

“Mo’s the best I know,” Wati said. “And no one knows her …”

“Are you an exorcist?” Billy said. The woman rolled her eyes.

“She’s a rabbi, you moron,” said Wati. “Simon couldn’t give a shit one way or the other.”

“I’ve seen legion possession before,” Mo said. “But never … God almighty they’re all him.” She walked through the ghost corona and murmured to Simon gently. “I can try something,” she said. “But I’ve got to get him back to the temple.” She shook the shofar. “This won’t cut it.”

Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children. Wati was on watch, circling through figures a mile around. Dane, Billy and Mo watched the moaned malice of Simon’s haunters.

“We have to go,” Wati said suddenly from a foot-high McCoy.

“Too early,” Dane said. “It’s not even midnight …”

“Now,” Wati said. “They’re coming.”

“Who do you …?”

“Christ, Dane! Move! Goss and fucking Subby!”

And everyone moved.

“T
ATTOO’S THOUGHT LIKE US
,” W
ATI SAID AS THEY GRABBED THEIR
stuff and hauled poor Simon in his ghost-cloud. “He’s tracked Simon down. His knuckleheads are coming. And
Goss and Subby
are with them.

“Some are in the main stairs. The rest are close. Goss and Subby are close.”

“Any other way out?” Dane said. Wati was gone, back.

“If there is there’s no statues by it.”

“Must be one at the back,” Billy said. “A fire escape.”

“Take a figure,” Wati said. “I’m going to get Goss and Subby off you.”

“Wait,” Dane said, but Wati was gone. Billy grabbed the phaser, the auction catalogue, a plastic Kirk. There was no one in the corridor. Dane hustled them round corners. Mo and Billy dragged Simon in a blanket that inadequately hid his tormentors. They heard the lift arriving. Dane raised his speargun and motioned Billy and Mo away.

“Down,” he said, pointing at the fire escape. “Mo, don’t let them see you. Billy, don’t let them see her.” He ran toward the lift.

“H
UFF HUFF HUFF, EH
S
UBBY?”

Goss was jogging. Not very intensely, and with an exaggerated comic wobble of the head. Behind him came Subby with the same motion, unselfconsciously.

“The rest of the bears are just over the stream,” Goss said. “Once we cross the magic bridge we can help ourselves to all the honey. Huff huff huff.” There were two or three more turns between him and the base of the tower. Goss looked the length of the dark street. At a junction with a cul-de-sac were a band of battered dustbins. A moment of hard wind sent a full bin-bag falling, sent the bins wobbling, jostling among themselves, as if they were trying to shift away from Goss’s attention.

“Remember when Darling Bear and Sugar Bear came home with the Princess of Flower Picnics?” Goss said. He clenched and unclenched his fingers. He smiled, pulling back his lips from his teeth carefully and completely and biting the air. Subby stared at him.

“Billy, shift.”

At those faint words Goss stopped.

“Shut it, Dane.”

Whispered London voices. They were just off the street, in one of the darknesses that abutted it.

“He’s
nearby,”
said a voice. And from farther away came an answer,
Shhh
.

“Subby Subby Subby,” whispered Goss. “Keep those little bells on your slippers as quiet as you can. Sparklehorse and Starpink have managed to creep out of Apple Palace past all the monkeyfish, but if we’re silent as tiny goblins we can surprise them and then all frolic together in the Meadow of Happy Kites.”