Kraken (62 page)

Gunfarmers picked themselves up. They kicked fish from their feet, pulled wracks and weeds from their sodden suits. Byrne and the ink went in.

“What do we do? What do we do?” Simon said. “What do we do?” He was collapsed onto his knees.

“Get it out of there,” Billy said. “Send it anywhere.” Simon closed his eyes.

“I can’t, I … They’ve moved it. My bearings are screwed, I can’t get a lock on.”

“Your lot’ll be here soon, won’t they?” Saira said to Collingswood.

“And what the fuck are they supposed to do?” Collingswood said urgently.

“What do we do?” Saira said.

With the library he had imbibed, Grisamentum knew kraken physiology. He could have Byrne undeath-magic it just back enough to life to coax its flesh into a fear reaction, for its sepia cloud. That was all, Billy thought, he needed to do.

“Saira,” Billy said, calm. “Come with me.”

“Baron,” Collingswood was saying into her phone. “Baron, bring everyone.” She gesticulated angrily—
wait a minute
—but did nothing to stop Billy as he climbed the rear of the house, helping Saira after him. Billy looked down into the garden littered with building rubble and rubbish.

“Get us in,” he said to Saira.

She pushed at the rear wall, moulding the bricks, pressing them into flatness and transparency, making a window. Faded to glass clarity they could see through a film of undersea slime into a small bathroom. Saira opened the window she had made. She shivered with more than cold; she was shaking violently. She made as if she would crawl in and hesitated.

“Fuck’s
sake,”
said Collingswood below them, and snapped her phone shut. She shook her head as if at a friend’s unfunny joke. She pushed her hands apart and rose, not in a leap but an abrupt dainty dangling, up through the impossible twelve feet or more to land on the ledge by Saira and Billy.

Billy and Saira stared at her. “You,” she said to Saira, “wuss-girl, get down there and hold wuss-boy’s hand. You,” she said to Billy, “get in there and tell me what’s what.”

I
T WAS FREEZING WITHIN
. T
HE STINK WAS ASTONISHING, FISH AND
rot.

They stood in a typical London-house bathroom: stubby bath with shower, sink and toilet, a tiny cupboard. The surfaces were white tiled under layers of grey silt, green growth, sponges and anemones reduced to lumps in the sudden air. The floor was inch-deep in water full of organisms, some still slightly alive. By the door was a half-grown sunfish—a huge, ridiculous thing—dead and sad. The bathtub brimmed with a panicking crowd of fish. Something splashed in the toilet bowl. The infiltrators held their hands to their faces.

Outside in the corridor furniture was tugged skew-whiff by a rubble of piscine bodies. The vivid colours of pelagic dwellers, the drabs and see-through oddities of deep water in hecatomb heaps. Creatures from the top floors where the pressure was gentle and skylights illuminated the water.

Shouted orders were audible. Billy set out through the flopping drowning. He steadied himself on banisters interwoven with kelp.

In the kitchen there was a sea-softened door into the living room. The floor was littered with broken crockery. In the sink an octopus floundered. Billy watched it but felt no kinship. He could hear muffled noises from the next room.

“There’s quite a bloody few of them,” Collingswood said.

“We have to get in there,” Billy whispered. They stared at each other. “We have to.” She kissed her teeth.

“Give me a second, Billy,” she said. “Alright? You understand?”

“What are you …?” He started to say. She raised an eyebrow. He nodded, readied the pistol he had taken from Dane.

“If I’ve got all this right … Spill him,” she said. “Alright, Billy? Don’t be a loser all your life.” She pursed her lip and threw a sign with her fingers, something from a music video. “East side,” she said.

She stepped back into the corridor toward the living room’s main door. He heard her do something, some knack, some noise, some unnatural percussion. He heard the door open, a commotion,
“Keep them out!”
in Byrne’s voice, the stamp of footsteps toward her ingress and out of the door. Billy kicked open the other rotting entrance, his weapon raised.

Chapter Seventy-Eight

I
NTO THE GROTTO, THE SEA’S FRONT ROOM
. B
ILLY WAS ABSOLUTELY
calm.

He emerged with a burst of wall-stuff. There were the coralline constructions, the brine-stained everything, big fish lying still. In a corner was a huge sagging body, something he could not work out, though he saw eyes see him from a meat heap. The gunfarmers had left the room to hunt Saira.

There was the kraken in its tank, now emptied of all but a thin layer of preserver. There was Byrne, some bad-magic book under her arm, the bottle of Grisamentum in her hand. A huge syringe jutted from the kraken’s skin. Byrne was tickling, stimulating the dead animal in some obscene-looking way.

The kraken was
moving
.

Its empty eye-holes twitched. The last, brine-dilute Formalin swilled as the animal turned. Its limbs stretched and untwined, too weak still to thrash, its skin still scabrous and unrejuvenated, but the kraken was alive, or not-dead. It was zombie. Undead.

In panic at the sudden end of its death, it was spurting dark black-brown-grey ink. It spattered against the inside of its tank, and pooled in that last liquid in which the kraken lay.

Billy saw Byrne go for the syringe. He saw her move. He fired. The container of Grisamentum exploded.

•   •   •

B
YRNE SCREAMED AS GLASS, INK AND BLOOD FROM HER LACERATED
hand erupted across her front, fell through her fingers. Ink spattered across the floor, dissipated in the currents of the emptying house. A gunfarmer reentered and stared at Byrne and the ink-slick down her front. Billy roared a triumphant
haaa!
and stepped back through into the kitchen.

“Collingswood!” he shouted.

“What?” he heard. Billy glanced through the doorway and saw the kraken move.

“You got him?” Collingswood shouted.

“I did,” Billy gasped in delight. “I spilt him, he’s—”

Byrne was whispering into the tank. She was dripping, squeezing the ink that drenched her top into the kraken’s ink.

“Shit,” said Billy. He stared. “How much …”

The world answered him.

How much of Grisamentum does he need to merge with the kraken ink? To take it into him?

The world showed him:
not much
.

P
LENTY OF
G
RISAMENTUM WAS RAGING IN WORDLESS LIQUIDITY AS
the slosh of footprints dispersed him. But wrung out by his vizier was a small glassful of him, bloated with Krakenist knowledge from his hungry learning, squeezed into the tank. He swilled and bonded. He mixed with the kraken’s ink, ink also, the two inks one new ink, and changed.

The liquid in the tank began to bubble. The zombie squid flopped and wriggled and butted up against the Perspex. Its ink effervesced.

Billy fired at the tank, urgently. He punctured it right through, breaking off sections, and his bullets hit the dense body of the kraken. The liquid within did not flow from the holes. It held its tank-shape against gravity. A presence gathered into swirl-self out of the conjoined inks, burned man and kraken-writ. A voice made of bubbling laughed.

The dark liquid rose. A pillar, a man-shape that laughed and pointed. That raised both arms.

And started to rewrite rules.

So the wall that hid Billy disappeared. It did not fall down, did not evaporate, did not crumble but instead simply had not been there, was un. The kitchen was all part of the living room now, sinkless and cutleryless, full of lounges and bookshelves, wet with remnant sea.

The pistol in Billy’s hand was gone. Because Grisamentum wrote that there were no guns in that room. “Oh Jesus,” Billy managed to say, and the ink of Grisamentum wrote
no
across his consciousness. Not even God: he was the very rules God wrote. The gunfarmers stumbled. Byrne was laughing, was rising into the air, tugged by the boss she loved.

Billy felt something very dangerous and forlorn settle, the closing of something open across everything, as history began to flex at someone else’s will. He felt something get ready to rewrite the sky.

The ink gathered into a globe, hovering above the tank. Threads from it took word-shape and changed things. Writs in the air.

The kraken looked at Billy with its missing eyes. It moved. Spasmed. Not afraid, he saw, not in pain. Bottling it up. Bottling it up. Where was his angel? Where his glass-container hero?

This is a fiasco
. He might almost have laughed at that strange formulation. It was the catastrophe, the disaster, the, the word was weirdly tenacious in his head,
fiasco
.

He opened his eyes. That word meant bottle.

It’s all metaphor
, Billy remembered.
It’s persuasion
.

“It’s not a kraken,” he said. The ink-god did not hear him until he said it again, and all the attention in the world was, amused, upon him. “It’s not a kraken and it’s not a squid,” Billy said. The eyeless thing in the tank held his gaze.

“Kraken’s a kraken,” Billy said. “Nothing to do with us.
That?
That’s a
specimen
. I know. I made it. That’s ours.”

A troubled look went across Byrne’s face as she spun on her axis.
Bottle magic
, Billy thought. The ink shuddered.

“Thing is,” Billy said, in abrupt adrenalized bursts, “thing is the Krakenists thought I was a prophet of krakens because of what I’d done—but I never was. What I am—” Even if by mistake; even if a misunderstanding, a joke gone wrong; even if a will-this-do; how are any messiahs chosen? “What I am is a
bottle
prophet.” An accidental power of glass and memory. “So I know what that is.”

There was a sink by Billy again, and the wall was coming back, a few inches of it. The bottled kraken wheezed from its siphon. The wall grew.

“It’s not an animal or a god,” Billy said. “It didn’t exist until I curated it. That’s my specimen.”

The new rules were being crossed out. Billy could feel the fight. He saw the wall shrink and grow, be there and un-be and have been and not have been; he felt able to stand and not; he felt the fucking
sky
reshape and rework as with instructions written and put under erasure in penmanship-duel the consciousness of Grisamentum—full of new krakeny power, ink-magic—battled with the tentacled thing that
was not kraken at all
.

The specimen pressed its arms against its tank. Suckers pressed vacuum-flush against the plastic, pulling the great body into position. It was not trying to get out
—that was where it belonged
.

Billy was standing.

He had birthed it into consciousness. It was
Architeuthis dux
. Specimen, pining for preservative. Squid-shaped paradox but not the animal of the ocean.
Architeuthis
, Billy understood for the first time, was not that undefined thing in deep water, which was only ever itself.
Architeuthis
was a human term.

“It’s ours,” he said.

Its ink was vast magic: Grisamentum had been right about that. But the universe had heard Billy, and he had been persuasive.

Maybe if Grisamentum had harvested ink direct from those trench dwellers, not from a jarred, cured, curated thing, the power would have been as protean as he had intended. But this was
Architeuthis
ink, and it was disinclined to be his whim. “It’s a specimen and it’s in the books,” Billy said. “We’ve written it up.”

The comixed inks raged against each other. The universe flexed as they fought. But as Grisamentum mixed with the ink it mixed with him; as he took its power it took his. And much of Grisamentum had been spilt: there was more of it than of him. It was specimen ink, curated by a citizen of London, by Billy, and bit by bit it metabolised the ink-man. The wall was rising again, and Byrne was falling to the ground.

Grisamentum sent out anguish that made the house quake. He slipped out of selfness like all the rest of him, in the tide, in the drains. He was overwritten. He was effaced by ink that, as it won, in an instant’s satisfaction returned to its unthinking form and fell out of the air like dark rain.

T
HE WALL WAS BACK
. T
HE KITCHEN WAS BACK
. T
HE WET HOUSE WAS
full again of dead fish.

“What did you do?” Byrne screamed at Billy. “What did you do?”

The sense, all sense, of Grisamentum, was gone. There was only the undead
Architeuthis
, still moving, stinking, chemical in its tank, poor skin flaking, poor tentacles palsied, drenched in ink that was nothing, now, but dark grey-brown liquid.

Chapter Seventy-Nine

T
HE GUNFARMERS RAN
. W
HY WOULD THEY STAY
? B
YRNE STAYED.
Why, and where, would she go? She let Billy disarm her. She ran her fingers through the water on the floor.

“Nice one, rudeboy,” Collingswood said to Billy.

He sat with his back to the streaming walls. London was safe, Billy kept thinking, not subject to that cosmic scriptic totalitarianism. He heard Saira and Simon coming, having seen their enemies run. Collingswood turned as they entered.

“Alright, nobody move,” she said. “This is the police.” They stared at her. “Nah, I’m just fucking with you,” she said. “What happened, Billy? Jesus, look at that thing. And it’s fucking
moving.” Architeuthis
wriggled sluggishly.

Collingswood took half-hold of Byrne, who slumped and did not try to fight.

“Where’s your ghost?” Billy said to Simon.

“… I think it’s gone.” They heard sirens, the swish of wheels on the sea-wet street. Police came to the house, in not a very long time.