The Londonmancers would not relax the charms they had to keep Wati from the lorry. Billy was enraged on his behalf, but the strike spirit had been agitated, in any case, had needed to circulate, to fight against another last strike crisis. “Just give me a doll or something on the roof,” he said. “Just something.”
“We need to find Grisamentum,” Billy had said. “He’s got to be-”
And Wati had said, “I’ll do what I can, Billy. I’ll do what I can. There’s things I have to…”
Where could Grisamentum be? Much of the city was still in denial about the fact that he was anywhere at all other than heaven or hell, but there was no way the monsterherds and Byrne’s strange intercession, that terrible knacked gang fight, could be finessed out of facticity. London knew who was back. It just didn’t know where, why or how, and no amount of cajoling of even the most eagerly treacherous or venal set of the city’s streets, grifters or apocalypse chancers would reveal anything.
“What would you rather we’d done?” Dane said to Saira.
“We don’t have much time,” Billy said.
“It’s coming,” Fitch said. “It’s suddenly closer. Much more certain. Something happened to make it… more near.”
“We’ve got the Tattoo,” Billy said. “Do you not get that?”
“We needed to get this poor sod off the streets as quick as,” Dane said. Paul sat still, looked at them all. He stared at the kraken in its stinking liquid, through its glass.
“Don’t show him that,” Paul whispered. They looked at him. He wiggled his shoulders to indicate who he meant.
“No one’s going to show him anything,” Billy said carefully. “Promise.”
“We’ve interrupted him,” Dane muttered to Saira and Fitch. “We can find out what his plans are.”
“His plans?” said Saira.
“He’s been trying to get hold of the kraken,” Billy said. He tapped Paul gently on the back.
“Oh, but it’s… look,” Saira said. “Whatever it is… it’s already happening,” she said. She actually mopped her forehead with whatever expensive scarf it was she was wearing. “The burning’s started.” In the last two days, two smallholdings had gone. Been burned, acts of strange arson. Self-cancelling. The memories of the destroyed buildings went almost, not quite but almost, as totally as the buildings themselves.
One had been part of the Tattoo’s empire, a kebab shop in Balham that doubled as a lucrative source of drug money, distilling down the third eyes extracted from and sold by the desperate. The other, a medium-scale jeweller in Bloomsbury, had historically had an association with Grisamentum. Both had gone, and according to most attempted recall, Saira said, there had never been either such place.
“You remember them, Dane?” Saira said.
“No.”
“Yeah.” She crossed her arms. “You don’t.” The lorry lurched and she adjusted while Fitch staggered, his beard and hair wild. “You and everyone else.”
“So how do you know there was ever anything there?” Billy said. She stared at him.
“Hello,” she said. “Perhaps we haven’t met. Hi. My name’s Saira Mukhopadhyay, I’m a Londonmancer. London’s my job.”
“You remember them?” Billy said.
“I don’t, but the city does. A bit. It knows something’s up. The burn’s not perfect. The… skin’s puckered, sort of. I remember remembering one of them. But they were never here. We’ve checked records. Never there. There was a fire-engine farting around the day Grisamentum’s must have gone up. The firemen were just driving around, didn’t know why they were supposed to be there.”
“It’s Cole’s thing, it’s got to be,” Dane said slowly. “Who is it getting him to… Where’s that paper? The one that was in the book?” Billy gave it. “Here. ‘Katachronophlogiston.’ Look.”
“Burning stuff right out of time,” Billy said. “Yeah. So, who and why?”
“He might know,” Saira said. “He knows more than us.” She stared at Paul. Indicated his back. A long, unhappy pause. “He might know stuff about Cole. Might not even know he does.” They waited, they hesitated. They tried to think of interrogator’s tricks.
Paul spoke. “Don’t,” he said. “He won’t… I can tell you.” He was so quiet they thought they had misheard, until he said it again. “I can tell you. Why he wants it. What he wants it for. I can tell you everything.”
“IT WAS A TATTOOIST IN BRIXTON,” HE SAID. “I CAME IN TO HAVE A big, you know, Celtic cross on my back, but not only black and white-I wanted greens and stuff too, you know, and it was going to take hours. I always rather do that in one go-I can’t get my head around loads of sessions, you know, it’s all or nothing for me; it was always that way.” No one interrupted him. Someone brought him a drink that he drank without looking anywhere other than the nowhere at which he was staring.
“I knew it was going to hurt, but I’d got drunk even though you ain’t supposed to. I been to that tattooist before. We’d talked, so he knew a bit about me. About the people I knew, about what I did, that sort of thing, you know? I think he was saying what he’d been told, because I think he was like searching for candidates.
“He asked if I minded him having this other bloke there, who was like another tattooist, he said, and they were comparing designs, and I said no, I didn’t care. He wasn’t much like a tattooist, I thought. I don’t know what I meant. I was too drunk, though, to care.
“He watched while the guy did me, and he was like giving him advice. He kept going into a back room. I think we know what was in there? Who I mean I should say.” He gave a horrible sad little pretend laugh. This was not the story they had hoped for, but who could interrupt him?
“They kept showing me my back in the mirror. The tattooist was giggling every time he did, but the other bloke wasn’t-he was all quiet about it. They must’ve done something to the mirror. Because when I looked in it, it was a cross. It looked fine. I don’t know how they did that.
“The second day I unwrap the bandages to show a friend, and she’s like, “I thought you was going to get a cross.” I thought she meant it was too finickety. I didn’t even look at it. It was a little while after that, when the scabs came off, that it woke up.”
It had been Grisamentum overseeing the design. And there in that back room, imprisoned and diminished over the hours, the man who then became the Tattoo. What an arcane gang hit. Not a murder-these men were too baroquely cruel for that-but a banishing, an imprisonment. Perhaps it had been blood colouring the ink. Certainly some essence, call it soul, drained from the man and left a man-shaped meat husk behind.
PAUL HAD WOKEN TO THE MUTTERINGS FROM HIS SKIN. THERE WAS no one in his bed but him. The voice was muffled.
“What did they do? What did they do?” That was what Paul first heard. “What did those fuckers do to me?”
When at very last he unwound his bandages the glam had faded and Paul saw the real tattoo. Two shocks in immediate succession: that what he wore was a face; and much worse-much much worse, much greater, quite shattering-that it was moving.
The face was shocked too. It took minutes for it to understand what had happened to it. It terrorised Paul. It began to tell him what to do.
He had not eaten. “I need you healthy,” said the tattoo on his back. “Eat, eat, eat,” until Paul ate. It had him test his strength. It appraised him like a trainer. He told it to leave him alone, that it did not exist. Of course he went to a doctor and demanded to know how it might be removed. The Tattoo stayed motionless, so the doctor assumed Paul was merely an agitated drunk who had taken against his hideous design. There would be a very long waiting list, she told him. For cosmetics.