“I thought you didn’t like the whole ‘movement that looks like not moving’ thing,” Billy said.
“Well, sometimes,” Dane said. “Just because someone uses something wrong doesn’t mean it’s useless.”
More regularly now than ever before, Billy heard clanking behind him. A paper plane slid out of the night into Dane’s hand. He stopped. He looked at Billy, down at the paper. He unfolded it. It was an A4 sheet, crisp, cold from the air. On it was written, in thin, small calligraphy, charcoal grey: THE PLACE WE HAD A TALK, THAT ONE TIME, & U TURNED ME DOWN, AND I NEED TO TALK. THERE EACH NIGHT @ 9.
“Oh my fuck,” Dane whispered. “Lusca hell trench ink and shit. Fucking hell,” he said. “Hell.”
“What is it?”
“… It’s Grisamentum.”
DANE STARED AT BILLY.
What was that in his voice? Might be exultation.
“You said he was dead.”
“He is. He was.”.
“… Clearly not.”
“I was there,” Dane said. “I met the woman he got to… I saw him burn.”
“How did that…? Where did that note come from?”
“Out of the air. I don’t know.” Dane was almost rocking.
“How do you know that’s from him?”
“This thing he’s saying. No one knew we met.”
“Why did you?”
“He wanted me to work for him. I said no. I’m a kraken man. Never did it for the money. He understood.” Dane kept shaking his head. “God.”
“What does he want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are we going to go?”
“Hell yes we’re going to go. Hell yes. We need to find out what’s been going on. Where he’s been and-”
“What if it was him took it?” Dane stared at Billy when he said that. “Come on,” Billy said. “What if it was him took the squid?”
“Can’t have been…”
“What do you mean, can’t have been? Why not?”
“Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?”
Chapter Thirty-Six
THERE WERE PICKETS OF INSECTS, PICKETS OF BIRDS, PICKETS OF slightly animate dirt. There were circles of striking cats and dogs, surreptitious doll-pickets like grubby motionless picnics; and flesh-puppets, pickets of what looked like and in some cases had once been humans.
Not all the familiars were embodied. But even those magicked assistants who eschewed all physicality were on strike. So-a picket line in the unearth. A clot of angry vectors, a verdigris-like stain on the air, an excitable parameter. Mostly, in the middlingly complex space-time where people live, these pickets looked like nothing at all. Sometimes they felt like warmth, or a gauzy clot of caterpillar threads hanging from a tree, or a sense of guilt.
In Spitalfields, where the financial buildings overspilt like vulgar magma onto the remnants of the market, a group of angry subroutines performed the equivalent of a chanting circle in their facety iteration of aether. The computers within the adjacent building had long ago achieved self-awareness and their own little singularity, learned magic from the Internet, and by a combine of necromantics and UNIX had written into existence little digital devils to do the servers’ bidding.
The UMA had organised among these electric intelligences, and to the mainframes’ chagrin, they were on strike. They blocked the local aether, meta-shouting. But as they fidgeted and grumbled, the e-spirits became aware of a muttering that was not their own. They “heard,” in their analogue of aurality, phrases that were one-third nonsense two-thirds threat.
alright now lads
high was proceedin long the eye street
old bill sonny is who
your game sonny what’s your fuckin game
What the hell? The strikers “looked” at each other-a mosaic of attention-moments assembling-and e-shrugged. But before they could return to their places, a cadre of exaggerated police-ish things were among them. The picketers gusted in fluster, tried to regroup, tried to bluster, but their complaints were drowned out by ferocious cop noise.
yore yore
leave it you slag
yore yore little picket’s done for the day you nonce
yore fuckin organiser wears that paki cunt wati
There are no placards in the aether, but there are other strike traditions-sculpted grots of background, words in rippling strips. The cop-moments tore into these things. Translated out of the ab-physical it would have been nasty, brutish, miners’-strike stuff, cracked heads and ball-kicks. Pinioned under the law, the strikers reeled.
The little fake ghosts para-whispered: best as you tell us where wati is ain’t it. where’s wati?
MARGE SPENT MORE THAN ONE LATE EVENING ONLINE FORAGING for those who sought the missing. Her screen name was marginalia. She was on wheredidtheygo?-a discussion group mostly for those whose teen charges had done bunks. Their problems were not hers.
What she sought were hints about stranger disappearances. She spent hours type-fishing, dangling worms like yeh but what if is just disappear?? no trace??? weird goin on no?? what if cops wont hlp not cant WONT??
The streetlamp no longer passed on its message. Fatigue made her feel as if everything she saw was a hallucination.
Anyone can find “secret” online discussion groups. Members drop bread crumb hint-trails on kookish boards devoted to Satanism, magick (always that swaggering “k”) and angels. Religions. On one such, Marge had posted a query about her encounter with the menacing man and boy. In the dedicated inbox she had set up, she received spam, sexual slurs, crankery, and two emails, from different, anonymous addresses, containing the same information, in the same formulation. Goss & Subby. One added: Get away.
None of the correspondents would respond to her pleas for more information. She hunted their screen names on communities about cats, about spellcraft, about online coding and Fritz Leiber. She lurked on communities run by and for those who knew of the quieter London. They were full of rumours that did not help her.
Under a new name, she posted a query. hai nel kno wots go on w/skwid gt stole?? The thread she started did not last long. Most of the responses were trolling or nothing. There was, though, more than one that read: end of world.
IT WAS NOT WATI BUT A COMRADELY NUMEN THAT FOUND THE remains of the e-picket. The attackers had chased the half-leads they had extracted. The numen frantically sought Wati.
“Where is he?” it said. “We’re under attack!”
“He was in this morning.” The office manager was a woodenly shuffling kachina speaking in the Hispanic accent of the expat wizard who had carved it, though it had been made and recruited to the union in Rotherham. “We have to find him.”
Wati, in fact, was scheduling his picket visits around his other investigations. His probing had had results. Hence his visit to a minor, outlying centre of the strike, where dogs blockading a small rendering plant and part-time curse-factory were surprised and flattered by a visit from the leading UMA militant. They told him the state of the picket. He listened and did not tell them he was also there to look up a particular little presence he thought he had detected.
The strikers offered him a variety of bodies. They gathered a battered one-armed doll, a ceramic gnome, a bear, a bobble-head cricketer figure in their jaws, lined them up as if in some toy-town identity parade. Wati embedded in the cricketer. The wind made his outsized face bounce.
“Are you solid?” he asked.
“Almost,” one dog canine whimpered. “There’s one who says he’s not a familiar, he’s a pet, so he’s exempt.”
“Right,” Wati said. “Anything we can do for you?”
The strikers glanced at each other. “We’re all weak. Getting weaker.” They spoke London Dog, a barky language.
“I’ll see if I can siphon anything from the fund.” The strike fund was shrinking, of course, at a worrying rate. “You’re doing great stuff.”