Kraken (5 page)

It was as if he were watched by the city’s night animals and buildings, and by every passenger.
I shouldn’t feel like this
, Billy thought. Neither should things. He watched a woman and man who had just got on. He imagined the couple shifting straight through the metal chair behind him, out of his sight.

A gust of pigeons shadowed the bus. They should be sleeping. They flew when the bus moved, stopped when it stopped. He wished he had a mirror, so he could watch without turning his head, see that man in back’s evasive face.

They were on the top deck, above the most garish of central London’s neon, by low treetops and first-floor windows, the tops of street signs. The light zones were reversed from their oceanic order, rising, not pitching, into dark. The street on which lamps shone and that was glared by shopwindow fluorescence was the shallowest and lightest place: the sky was the abyss, pointed by stars like bioluminescence. In the bus’s upper deck they were at the edges of deep, the fringe of the dysphotic zone, where empty offices murked up out of sight. Billy looked up as if down into a deep-sea trench. The man behind him was looking up, too.

At the next stop, which was not his, Billy waited until the doors had closed before bolting from his seat and down the stairs, shouting, “Wait, wait, sorry!”

The bus left him and headed into the dark like a submersible. Through the dirty window at the rear of the top, he saw the man look straight at him.

“Shit,” Billy said. “Shit.”

He jerked his hand defensively out. The glass flexed and the man jerked backward as the bus receded. Billy’s own glasses shivered on his face. He saw no one moving behind the window, past a crack in the glass that had suddenly bisected it. The man he had seen was Dane Parnell.

Chapter Four

B
ILLY SAT UP LATE THAT WEIRD DEEP NIGHT
. H
E CLOSED THE
curtains of his living room, imagining the unsavoury squirrel watching him as he poked around on his laptop. Why would Dane have followed him? How? He tried to think like a detective. He was bad at it.

He could call the police. He’d seen Dane commit no crime, but still. He should. He could call Baron, as he had requested. But despite his discomfort—call it fear—Billy did not want to do that.

There had been such a strange gaming edge to all his interactions with Baron, Vardy and the woman. It had been so clear that he was being played, that information was being held from him, that they had no consideration for him at all except insofar as he pushed forward whatever their opaque agenda was. He did not want to be involved. Or, and or, he wanted to understand this himself.

He slept a very little at last. In the morning, he discovered that it was not as hard to regain entry to the Darwin Centre as he had imagined. The two police at the entrance were not terribly interested, and examined his pass peremptorily. They interrupted his carefully constructed story of why he had to go back in to sort out some stuff on his desk that wouldn’t wait but that he’d be careful and quick and blah blah. They just waved him past.

“Can’t go to the tank room,” one of them said.
Alright
, Billy thought.
Whatever
.

He was looking for something, but he had no idea what. He hesitated by retorts and sinks, by plastic containers of diaphanised fish, their flesh made invisible by enzymes, their bones made blue. A common room was full of stacks of posters for the Beagle Project, a retracing of those crucial early days of Darwin’s journeys, a rerun in a floating laboratory kitschly made to look like the
Beagle
.

“Hey, Billy,” said Sara, another curator who’d been granted entry, for whatever reason. “Did you hear?” She looked around and lowered her voice, passed on some rumour so evanescent and vapid it left his head as soon as she said it. Folklore was self-generating. Billy nodded as if he agreed, shook his head as if it were a shocking possibility, whatever it was she was talking about.

“Did you hear?” she said as well. “Dane Parnell’s disappeared.”

Well
that
he heard. It gave Billy another cold sensation, as he had had the previous night when he had seen Dane all those yards away, through the bus’s glass, and as if Billy had touched him back.

“I was talking to one of the police,” Sara said, “doing stuff in the tank room, and he was saying that they’ve heard things since, you know, it went. Something clattering.”

“Whooo,” said Billy, like a ghost. She smiled. But
Those are
my
hallucinations
, he thought. It was like theft. Those were his imaginings that the police were hearing.

He logged in at a workstation and searched, trying endless different spellings of the names Vardy had said, referring to his scribbled paper and crossing them off, one by one. Eventually he entered the renditions “Kubodera” and “Mori.” “Oh man,” he whispered. Stared at the screen and sat back. “Of course.”

No wonder those names had tantalised. He was ashamed of himself. Kubodera and Mori were the researchers who, a few months previously, had been the first researchers to catch the giant squid on camera in the wild.

He downloaded their essay. He looked again at the pictures. “First-ever observations of a live giant squid in the wild” the paper was called, as if ten-year-olds had taken control of the
Proceedings of the Royal Society B
. First
ever
.

More than one of his colleagues had printouts of those pictures above their desks. When the images were released, Billy himself had turned up at the office with two bottles of Cava, and had proposed that the anniversary should henceforth be an annual holiday, Squid-day. Because these pictures, as he had said to Leon at the time, were momentous shit.

The first was the most famous, the one they had used on the news. Ajut into view in dark water almost a kilometre down, an eight-metre squid. Its arms blossomed, curved left and right around the bait at the end of the perspectived line. But it was the second picture at which Billy stared.

Again the line descended; again there in ominous water was the animal. But this time it was coming mouth-on. It was caught in a near-perfect radial limb-burst: at the apex, the bite. The two hunting arms, longer limbs with paddle-shaped hands, were recoiled in the dark.

A tentacular explosion. That picture banished all slanderous theories of
Architeuthis
as sluggish predator-by-accident, tentacles adangle in deepwater lethargy for prey to bumble into, no more a hunter than some idiot jellyfish.

That image had been cherished by fan-partisans of
Mesonychoteuthis
, the “colossal squid,”
Architeuthis
’s huge, squat-bodied rival. Which,
Mesonychoteuthis
, yes, had also been emerging into the camera and video gaze with highly and historically unusual enthusiasm recently. And it was, yes, a terrifying animal. True, it had greater mass; its mantle was longer; granted, its tentacles grabbed not with suckers but with cruel cat-curved claws. But whatever its shape, however its stats and the
Architeuthis
’s compared, it would never be the
giant squid
. It was a parvenu monster. Hence the trash-talk of those who researched it, eager to demote the long-term kraken for their new favourite: “without parallel,” “… even larger,” “an order of magnitude meaner.”

But observe the Kubodera/Mori images. Hardly the weak opportunist the haters had dreamed up.
Architeuthis
did not wait and dangle.
Architeuthis
loomed, jetted from the abyss, hunting.

Billy stared at the screen. Ten arms, five lines crisscrossing; two longer than the others. The silver design on the pin he’d seen was of this predator incoming. As seen by prey.

H
E WALKED THE CORRIDORS CARRYING PAPERS SO HE LOOKED AS IF
he was going from somewhere to somewhere else. He entered rooms he was allowed to enter, nodded in greeting to the police guarding those he was not. His revelation notwithstanding, he still had no idea what it was he was hoping to find.

He left the Darwin Centre for the main museum. He saw no police there. He walked the route he used to take as a boy, past the staring ichthyosaur, stone ammonites, past where was now the café. There at last, in the middle of everything and everyone, he thought perhaps he heard a sound. The noise of a jar rolling. Very faint.

It came—or sounded as if it did to him, he corrected himself—from a door off-limits to visitors, that led downstairs to storage areas and undercorridors. He listened at it, crowds to his back. He heard nothing. He entered the keycode and descended.

Billy walked windowless halls underground. He told himself that he did not think he was listening for anything real. That whatever hint it was he was looking for came from inside him.
So alright
, he said to himself.
Help me out. What am I looking for? What are you—what am I—on about?

Guards and curators raised their hands as he passed in brief greetings. The rooms and hallways were lined with industrial shelving, on which were cardboard boxes labelled in thick pen; glass cases empty, or full of surplus specimens; papers; unneeded furniture. There below the heating pipes, by high brick walls and pillars, Billy heard the noise again. From around a corner. He followed it like bread crumbs.

The corridor opened out, not a room but a sudden large hallway. It was stacked quite full of taxidermy, charnel Victoriana. Mammal heads watched from walls, like a hundred Faladas; bisons stiff as aging soldiers by a plaster iguanodon and a tatty emu. There was a thicket of the preserved necks-up of giraffes, their heads a canopy above.

A clink, a clack. Under the striplights the stuffed bodies shed hard shadows. Billy heard another tiny noise. It came from the dark by the wall, deep in the specimen undergrowth.

Billy stepped off the path. He pressed through unyielding antique bodies, shouldering deeper into the little forest of animal remains. He glanced up as if at birds and pressed toward the whitewashed walls. He did not hear another of the sounds, only his own efforts and the brush of his clothes on dry skins. He rounded a stack of hippo parts, and came abruptly up against something of which he could for moments not make sense.

Glass, an old glass container as large as any he had seen. A chest-high lidded cylinder with scalloped base, full of pee-coloured preserver, and a specimen at which he stared. Something rather too big for the container, shoved crudely inside. Part-peeled, with eyes and paws up against the glass and ragged skin suspended like open wings, but even as he thought that he shook his head
no
.

Billy saw that what he had thought pelt was a ruined shirt, what he had thought peeled was hairlessness and bloat, that
oh my Jesus fucking Christ
what stared deadly at him in broken pose pressed up and misshaped against the bottle’s inside was a man.

B
ILLY STAYED OUT OF THE POLICE’S WAY
. I
T WAS NOT EVEN HIM WHO
called them. In those initial terrified moments, when he had torn upstairs unable to breathe, he had not thought to make the call. He had instead run to the two officers guarding the Darwin Centre and screamed, “Quick! Quick!”

Their colleagues came quickly in numbers, cordoning off more of the museum, declaring the basement out of bounds. They took Billy’s prints. Gave him hot chocolate for shock.

No one questioned him. They put him in a conference room and told him not to leave, but no one asked how he had found what he had found. Billy waited by an overhead projector, a TV on a rolling base. He listened to the museum being cleared, the consternation of the crowds.

He wanted solitude more than he wanted fresh air. He wanted his body to stop the last of its panicked shaking, so he sat and waited, as he had been told to, his glasses steaming when he sipped, until the door opened and Baron peered in.

“Mr. Harrow,” Baron said, and shook his head. “Mister
Hah-
row …

“Mr. Harrow, Billy, Billy Harrow. What
have
you been up to?”

Chapter Five

B
ARON SAT NEXT TO
B
ILLY AND SHRUGGED AT HIM SYMPATHETICALLY
.

“Bit of a shock,” he said.

“What the
hell?”
Billy said. “What the hell, how did they get that …? What even happened?”

“Gives a whole new meaning to ‘Someone getting bottled,’ doesn’t it? I apologise, I apologise,” Baron said. “Morgue humour. Defence mechanism. You’ve had a horrible shock, I do know. Believe me.”

“What’s going on?” Billy said. Baron said nothing. “I saw Dane,” Billy said.

“Is that right?” Baron said slowly. “Really now?”

“I was coming home. Last night. On a bus. He was on there. He must’ve been following me. Unless he could’ve just … no. He must’ve been there deliberately. It wouldn’t be hard for him to find out where I live …”

“Alright. Alright, now, listen …”

“I feel like I’m going mad,” Billy said. “Even before that … Before what’s in the basement. I’ve been feeling like I’m being followed. I didn’t say anything because, it’s stupid, you know …” The wind shook the windows abruptly. “I tell you I’m losing it … What happened downstairs? Did Dane do
that?”

“Let me think for a second, Mr. Harrow,” Baron said.

“When I was in with you, why was there a psychology professor there? Vardy. That’s what he does. I looked him up. Come on, Baron, don’t look like that—all it took was a bit of an online poke about. I could tell he wasn’t a cop.”

“Is that so? You can ask him yourself in a bit.”

“Was he there because … Is it that you think I’m mad, Baron?” There was another silence. “Is that what you think’s going on with me? Because, Jesus …” Billy breathed out shakily. “Right at the moment, I think you have a point.”

“No,” said Baron. “None of us think you’re losing it. Rather the opposite.” He glanced at his watch. This time, when he arrived, Vardy shook Billy’s hand. He had one of those unpleasant too-hard grips. He was carrying a briefcase.