Why were they making him do this? For whose benefit was this? He pressed his forehead to the metal and thought he would cry, but he was whispering his message again, and remembering the scene that he could hardly remember, the confrontation between Leon and Goss, and Leon’s disappearance. And he did not feel like crying anymore. He did, in fact, feel like he had dropped something into the hole.
“Feel better?” said Dane when he stepped away. “You look better.”
Billy said nothing. Saira said nothing, but there was something in how she did not look at him.
“HERE,” FITCH SAID. THEY WERE IN A CUL-DE-SAC CLOTTED WITH refuse. Behind a wooden hoarding, cranes swung like prehistoric things. There was a pounding and whine of industrial machinery, the shouts of crews. “No one’ll hear.”
Fitch opened his bag. He took out overalls, goggles, a mouth-mask, a crowbar and a well-used angle grinder. A strange, strange image in one so frail. Dane had told Billy, “Marcus has got something to do with the immunes, Saira’s a plastician, but Fitch is boss even though he’s past it because he’s the haruspex.” And seeing Billy’s face, he had added, “He reads entrails.”
Fitch was an old man in protective gear. He started the cutter. With a groan of metal and cement, he drew a line across the pavement. Behind the blade welled up blood.
“Jesus Christ,” said Billy, jumping back.
Fitch drew the cutter again along the split. A spray of concrete dust and blood mist dirtied him. He put the angle grinder down, dripping. Put a crowbar in the red-wet crack and levered harder than it looked like he could. The paving stone parted.
Guts oozed from the hole. Intestinal coils, purple and bloodied, boiled up wetly in a meat mass.
Billy had thought the entrails of the city would be its torn-up under-earth, roots, the pipes he was not supposed to see. He had thought Fitch would bring up a corner of wires, worms and plumbing to interpret. The literalism of this knack shocked him.
Fitch murmured. He poked the mess with his fingers, gentle as a pianist, moving the fibred tubes subtly, investigating the angles between the loops of London’s viscera, looking up as if they mirrored something in the sky. “Look look,” he said. “Look look look. Do you see? Do you see what we’ve been saying? It’s always the same, now.” He sketched shapes in the innards pile. “Look.” The offal moved. “Everything closing down. Something coming up. The kraken.” Billy and Dane stared. Was that new? The kraken? “And look. Fire.
“Always fire. The kraken and all the jars. Then flames.” The guts were greying. They were oozing into each other, their substance merging.
“Fitch, we need details,” Dane said. “We need to know exactly what it is you’re all seeing…” But there was no containing, corralling, shepherding Fitch’s flow.
“Fire taking it all,” he said, “and the kraken’s moving, and the fire taking everything, the glass catches on fire until it goes up in a cloud of sand. And everything’s going now.” The pooled guts were oozing into a slag pile, becoming cement. “Everything’s going. Not just what’s there. It’s burning undone. The world’s going with it, the sky, and the water, and the city. London’s going. And it’s going, and now it’s always been gone. Everything.”
“That is not how it’s supposed to go,” Dane whispered. Not his longed-for teuthic end.
“Everything,” Fitch said. “Is gone. Forever. And since forever. In fire.”
His finger came to a stop, on what was now a bubbled-up, setting mound of concrete. He looked up. Billy’s heart had accelerated with the pitch of the old man’s speech.
“Everything’s ending,” Fitch said. “And all the other maybes that should be there to fight it out are drying up, one by one.” He closed his eyes. “The kraken burns and the jars and tanks burn and then everything burns, and then there’s nothing ever again.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
KATH COLLINGSWOOD WAS IN A WINDOWLESS STOREROOM LIKE some forgotten dollhouse heart of the Neasden Station. Baron watched through the door’s wire-reinforced glass. He had seen Collingswood perform this before. It was a methodology of her own creation. Vardy was there, standing back, his arms crossed, watching over Baron’s shoulder.
The room was dusty. Collingswood thought the presence of that desiccation, the sheddings of time, was efficacious. She could not be sure. She replicated as many of the circumstances of her cavalier first success as she could, knowing each might be mere superstition, and she a kind of Skinnerian rat. So the pile of empty cardboard boxes in one corner were left as they had been for months. When Baron had inadvertently knocked one out of position, she had given him an earful and spent minutes trying to rebuild the stack as it had been in case of some nuance of force in the angles.
“Wati ain’t going to come here,” she had said to Baron, “even if he could.” There were wards in place keeping figures and toys within the station empty of hitchhikers. “We got to get him where he lives.” Not in the statues-those were moments of rest. Wati lived in one of the infinite iterations of the aether.
In the middle of the striplit room was a pile of magicky stuff: a brazier in which burned a chemically coloured fire; a stool on which were bottles of blood; words in old languages on particular paper. Three old televisions were plugged in surrounding the pile, beaming static into it.
“Here,” said Baron conversationally to Vardy, “come the PCDs.”
COLLINGSWOOD DRIPPED BLOOD INTO THE FIRE. EMPTIED LITTLE urns of ashes into it. It flared. She added papers. The flames changed colours.
The fluorescent lights flattened out the conjuration, gave shadows few places to gather or hide, but shadows managed. Patches like dirty air welled. Collingswood murmured. She pressed a remote control and the televisions began to play well-worn videos to the fire. The audio was low but audible-ragged theme musics, jump-cut editing, men snarling.
“Officers,” said Collingswood. “Duty call.” The gusting things coiled around the rising fire, muttering. leave it she heard one whisper.
Collingswood threw two videos into the brazier. They gushed smoke that clotted, and the darknesses dived through it. There were hisses like pleasure. She turned up the televisions. They started to shout. Vardy shook his head.
“Think what you like,” Baron said. “She’s smart as a whip to think this up.”
“Just because you’ve passed on,” Collingswood said to the muttering nothings, “don’t mean you ain’t on duty.” They gibbered at the hard men with outdated haircuts, the screened car chases and fist-fights. She threw another video onto the fire, some paperbacks. Shades crooned.
PCDs, Baron had called the presences she was invoking-Police Constables, Deceased.
There are a thousand ways of inhabiting it, but the aether, that in-between, is always what it is; and ghosts, spirits, the souls of lucid dreamers squeeze past each other in complex asomatic ecology. Who better to close in on Wati the bodiless subversive than bodiless forces of the law?
“Come on, Constables,” Collingswood said. “I’d say you live for this shit, but that would be a bit tasteless.”
She pushed each television closer to the flames. The shadow-officers spiralled over the fire. They barked like spectral seals.
Cacophony of overlapping old shows. The glass fronts of the televisions blackened, and first one, then rapidly the other two sets banged, ceased transmissions. Smoke gushed from their vents, then gushed back in under pressure from the PCDs, who tore down the gradient of heat into the sets, jabbering.
as high. A snarl in the room’s abrupt silence.
as high was proscenium longy eye’s tree.
leave it, Collingswood heard, evenin evenin all evenin all, hes a nonce sarge, fell dan the stairs. as high was proscenium.
“Alright,” she said. “PC Smith, PC Brown, and PC Jones. You three are heroes. You all made the ultimate sacrifice for the force. Line of duty.” The dirty smoke ghosts shivered, in and out of sight, proudly waited. “Now’s your chance,” she said, “to do it again. Work for those pensions you never got, right?” She lifted a big file.