“Harris says the body was put in the bottle, she reckons, a good hundred years ago. That’s how long it’s been in that muck.”

“Holy shit. Bit of a turn-up, isn’t it?”

“Just you wait. That’s not all. There’s an ‘and.’ Or maybe I should say a ‘but.’ Isn’t there some word that means both?”

“Get on with it, guv.”

“So that body’s been preserved like that for a century. But-stroke-and. Have you heard of GG Allin?”

“Who the eff’s that?”

“Search me. Luckily Dr. Harris is a dab hand with Google. He was a singer, says here. Though it also says that stretches the definition. Delightful. ‘Scum rocker,’ it says here. More of a Queen man myself. ‘Don’t stand in the front row,’ Harris says. Anyway, he died about a decade ago.”

“So what?”

“So we should probably not ignore the fact that one of our deceased chap’s tattoos reads ‘GG Allin and the Murder Junkies.’”

“Oh, shit.”

“Indeed. He was apparently pickled several decades before he got his tattoo.” They looked at each other.

“You want me to find out who he was, don’t you?”

“No need,” he said. “We got a hit. He’s on the database.”

“What?”

“Fingerprints, DNA, the whole lot. That would be the DNA that is both a century old, and also gives his DOB as 1969. Name of Al Adler. AKA various stupid things. They do love their nicknames.”

“What did he get done for?”

“Burglary. But that was because of a bargain, he got to do a bit of regular bird. The original charge was on the other list.” Codes against illicit magery. Adler had been breaking and entering by esoteric means.

“Associates?”

“Freelance when he was starting out. Did a stint as some sort of stringer for a coven in Deptford. Spent the last four years of his working life full-time with Grisamentum, it looks like. Disappeared when Griz died. Grisabloodymentum, eh?”

“Before my time,” Collingswood said. “I never met the bloke.”

“Don’t remind me,” Baron said. “It should be illegal to be so much younger than me. He was alright, Grisamentum. I mean, you never know who you can trust, but he helped out a few times.”

“So I bloody gather. Geezer does crop up. What exactly did he do?”

“He was a bit of a one,” Baron said. “Finger in a lot of pies. Sort of a player. It’s all gone a bit tits-up since he died. He was a good counterweight.”

“Didn’t you tell me he didn’t die with…”

“Yeah, no. It wasn’t anything battley and dramatic. He got sick. Everyone knew about it. Worst-kept secret. I tell you what though: his funeral was pretty bloody amazing.”

“You were there?”

“Certainly I was.”

The Metropolitan Police could not not mark so important a passing. So advertised a good-bye. The details of where and how Grisamentum would valedictory the city had been leaked so ostentatiously they were clearly summonses.

“How’d you finesse it?” Collingswood said. Baron smiled.

“A not-very-competent surveillance, ooh, look at us, you all saw us, tish, we’re so silly.” He waggled his head.

Collingswood was long-enough inducted, subtle enough in her policeness now, stalwart of the FSRC and London protocols to understand. The police could not officially attend the passing of so questionably licit a figure, but nor could they ignore that public event, show disrespect or ingratitude. Hence a mummery, an act designed to be seen through, the putative incompetence of their spying on the event leaving them seen, and understood to have attended.

Collingswood said, “So what did Adler do? To get bottled?”

“Who knows? What he did to piss somebody off, your guess is as good as mine.”

“My guess is way better than yours, guv,” she said. “Get the necessary, I’ll fetch my shit.”

She went to her locker for an old glyph-fucked board, a candle, a pot of unpleasant tallow. Baron sent Harris an email, requesting a rag of Adler’s skin, a bone, a hank of his hair.

HE COULD NOT LEAVE, BUT HE WAS NOT OTHERWISE RESTRAINED. Billy spent hours in the sunken library. He saturated himself in deepwater theology and poetics. He looked for specifics about the teuthic apocalypse.

A swallowing up and a shitting out, taken from darkness, in darkness. A terrible biting. The elect like, what, skin-bugs, little parasites on or in the great holy squid body, carried through the vortex. Or not, depending on specifics. But it wasn’t like this. When at last one time he sighed and took off his glasses and reshelved verses on the tentacular, blinked and rubbed his eyes, he was startled to see several men and women who had been in the meeting with the Teuthex. He stood. They were various in age and clothes, though not in their respectful expressions. He had not heard them enter or descend.

“How long’ve you been here?” he said.

“We had a question,” said a woman in a gown, gold tentacle-sigil winking. “You worked on it. Was there anything about this kraken that was… special?”

Billy ran his hands through his hair. “You mean was it specially special? Unusual for a giant squid?” He shook his head hopelessly. “How would I know?” He shrugged. “You tell me. I’m not one of your prophets.”

Whoa. Something rushed around the room at that. Everyone looked sheepish. What…? thought Billy. What was-? Oh.

Of course he was one of their prophets.

“Oh shit,” he said. He slumped against the bookshelf. He closed his eyes. That was why they had given him dreams. They weren’t just anyone’s dreams: they were there to be read.

Billy looked at the books, textbooks next to the visions. He tried, like Vardy, to channel vicarious Damascene scenes. He could imagine these faithful seeing cephalopod biologists as unknowing saints, their vision unknown even to themselves and the purer for that, stripped of ego. And him? Billy had touched the body of God. Kept it safe, preserved it against time, ushered in Anno Teuthis. And because of Goss and the Tattoo, he had suffered for God, too. That was why this congregation protected him. He was not just another saint. Billy was the preserver. Giant-squid John the Baptist. The shyness he saw in the Krakenists was devotion. It was awe.

“Oh for God’s sake,” he said.

The men and women stared. He could see them attempting exegesis on his outburst.

ANY MOMENT CALLED NOW IS ALWAYS FULL OF POSSIBLES. AT TIMES of excess might-bes, London sensitives occasionally had to lie down in the dark. Some were prone to nausea brought on by a surfeit of apocalypse. Endsick, they called it, and at moments of planetary conjuncture, calendrical bad luck or mooncalf births, its sufferers would moan and puke, struck down by the side effects of revelations in which they had no faith.

Right then it was swings and roundabouts. On the one hand, such attacks were getting rarer. After years of being martyrs to somebody else’s martyrs, the endsick had never been so free of the trouble. On the other hand, this was because the very proliferation, the drunkenness of an unclosed universe that had always played merry hell with their inner ear, was collapsing. And something was replacing it. Instead of all those maybes, underlying them all, approaching dimly and with gathering speed, was something simple and absolutely final.

What was this queasiness that had come in in place of the other queasiness, the sensitives wondered? What was this new discomfort, this new cold illness? Oh, right, they began to realise. That’s what it is. It’s fear.

Animals were afraid, too. Rats went to ground. Seagulls went back to the sea. London foxes rutted in a terrified hormonal swill, and their adrenalin made them good quarries for the secret urban hunts. For most Londoners, all this was so far visible only in an epidemic of birdlime, the guano of terror, as pigeons began to shit themselves. Shops were covered. In Chelsea, Anders Hooper stared at the window of Nippon This! and shook his head in disgust. With a little ding his door opened. Goss and Subby walked in.