THOUSANDS OF LONDONERS WOKE AT THAT MOMENT. MEMORY versus the inevitable, going at it, that will play havoc with your sleep patterns. Marge woke, vividly aware that something new had happened. Baron woke, and said as he did, “Oh, here we bloody go.” Vardy had not been asleep in the first place.
Closer to Billy than either of them would have imagined, Kath Collingswood was staring out of her window too. She had sat up at exactly the same second as Billy. The glass of her window helped her not at all, but she had her own ways to make sense of things.
It was obvious, suddenly, that the fake ghosts she had put together had been beaten. She hauled out of bed. No one was with her: she was in her Snoopy nightshirt. Her skin was crawling every which way. Horripilations with interference patterns. London was grinding against itself like an unset broken bone.
“So what are we going to fucking do?” she said, aloud. She did not like how small her voice was. “Who’m I going to call?”
Something easy, something she could get info from without too much trouble. Didn’t have to be tough or clever. Best if it wasn’t. She flicked through a pad by her bed, where she made notes of various summonings. A spaceape, all writhing tentacles, to stimulate her audio nerve directly? Too much attitude.
Alright, a real snout again, then, worthy of the name. She plugged in her electric pentacle. She sat in concentric neon circles, in various colours. This was a pretty, garish conjuration. Collingswood read bits and bobs from the relevant manuscript. The tricky bit with this technique was not getting the summons to work: it was to not summon too much. She was just reaching for one particular little spirit, not the head of its herd.
It did not take long. Everything was raring to go, that night. She barely had to dangle a notional bucket of psychic swill, and with exploratory snorts and gleeful screams, buffeting the edges of her safe space, manifesting as a flitting porcine shade, in came the swinish entity she had enticed away from a herd of such in the outer monstrosity, introduced to London and taught to answer to Perky.
kollywood, it grunted. kollywood food. Not much but a darkness in the air. It had no corkscrew tail, and as if in compensation it spiralled tightly itself, and rooted around the room, sending Collingswood’s tat gusting all over.
“Perky,” she said. She shook a bottle of leftover spiritual scraps. “Hello again. Nummy treat. What’s going on?”
num num, Perky said. num the num.
“Yeah you can num it but first you got to tell me what’s happening.”
scared, Perky grunted.
“Yeah, it’s a bit scary tonight, isn’t it? What’s been happening?”
scared. anglis out. sooss don tell.
“Anglis?” She struggled with impatience. There was no point getting pissy with this amiable greedy thing. It was too thick to mind-fuck. The pig-presence flitted to her ceiling and gnawed the light cord. “I won’t tell. Anglis, Perky?”
ess. ess anglis run fight come member not footer.
Yes. Something had come in, or out, for a fight. Member? Members? Membership? Footer?
Oh fuck right. Collingswood stood still in her sparking pentacle. Remember, and future. Remembrance versus some future. Anglis. The anglis, of course, were angels. The fucking angels of memory were out. They had come out of their museums, out of their castles. They’d gone to war against whatever this incoming to-come was. The very facts of retrospection and fate that had various sides fighting were now out themselves, personified or apotheosed and smacking seven bells out of each other directly. No longer solely reasons, justifications, teloi, casus belli for others to invoke or believe in: now combatants. The war had just got meta.
“Cheers, Perky,” she said. She unstoppered the container and flicked it so the invisible contents sprayed out of the protected circle. The pig went racing around, licking and champing and slobbering in dimensions where, happily, Collingswood did not have to clean up.
Now she knew it was only Perky the cautions were overkill, and she stepped out of the angles of electrostatic protection and switched them off. “Have fun,” she said over her shoulder. “Don’t mess shit up too much, and don’t nick anything when you go.”
kay kollywood byby thans for num.
Collingswood ran her hands through her hair, put on a minimum of makeup, her roughed-up uniform, and went through the deeply threatening city. “Broomstick’s at the garage,” she said to herself more than once. The joke was so old, so flat as to be meaningless. Saying it as if everything was all normal was a very slight comfort.
“You can’t smoke in here,” the taxi driver told her, and she stared at him, but couldn’t even muster enough to wither him. She put the cigarette out. She did not light up again until she was in the FSRC wings of the Neasden Police Station.
You would have had to be a more adept adept than Collingswood to have even approximated some sight of what was going on, loomingly, totally, above everything. Various long-snoozing London gods had been woken up by the clamour, were stretching and trying to assert pomp and authority. They had not yet realised that no Londoners gave two shits about them anymore. The thunder that night was dramatic, but it was just the grump of past-it deities, a heavenly “What the bloody hell’s all this noise?”
The real business was going on in the streets, on another scale. Few of the guards, earthly or unearthly, in any of London’s museums, could have said why they suddenly felt so extremely afraid. It was because their memory palaces were unprotected. Their angels walked. The guardians of all the living museums came together, bar one still rogue on its own mission. The angels hunted the incoming end, that closed-down future. If they tracked it down they intended to mash it up.
VARDY WAS ALREADY IN THE OFFICES. COLLINGSWOOD THOUGHT HE looked unruffled by the night, no blearier or more rushed than he ever did. She hung from the doorframe. She was slightly taken aback by the, if anything, even more unwelcome than usual look that he gave her.
“Fucking hell, rudeboy,” she said. “What’s up with you? Apocalypse rattled your cage?”
“I’m not sure what this is,” he said, scrolling through some website. “But it’s not apocalypse yet. Of that I’m fairly certain.”
“Just a manner of speaking.”
“Oh, I think it’s more than that. I think the word to keep in mind here is ‘yet.’ What brings you here?”
“What do you fucking think? The not-yet apocalypse, squire. You know what’s going on? The memory guards are out looking to smack someone up. Those fuckers ain’t supposed to leave the museums. I want to see if I can work out what’s going on. Whatever just changed. What do you reckon?”
“Why not?”
“Fuck, you know, sometimes, seriously, sometimes you just wish you lived in a city where it wasn’t all this craziness and this and that. I mean I know some of this lot are just villains, you know, just bad boys, but it all comes down to the god stuff in the end. In London. It does, though. Every, single, time. And that, man, what are you going to say.” Collingswood shook her head. “Fucking mad weak shit. Arks and dinosaurs and virgins, fuck knows. Give me a robbery, man. Except they do, innit?”
“‘Mad weak shit?’” Vardy swung back his chair and looked at her with some queasy combine of dislike, admiration and curiosity. “Really? That’s what it stems from, is it? You’ve got it all sorted out, have you? Faith is stupidity, is it?”
Collingswood cocked her head. Are you talking to me like that, bro? She couldn’t read his head-texts, of course, not those of a specialist like Vardy.
“Oh, believe me, I know the story,” he said. “It’s a crutch, isn’t it? It’s a fairy tale. For the weak. It’s stupidity. See, that’s why you’ll never bloody be good enough at this job, Collingswood.” He waited as if he’d said too much, but she waved her hand, Oh do please carry the fuck on. “Whether you agree with the bloody predicates or not, Constable Collingswood, you should consider the possibility that faith might be a way of thinking more rigorously than the woolly bullshit of most atheists. It’s not an intellectual mistake.” He tapped his forehead. “It’s a way of thinking about all sorts of other things, as well as itself. The Virgin birth’s a way of thinking about women and about love. The ark is a far more bloody logical way of thinking about the question of animal husbandry than the delightful ad hoc thuggery we’ve instituted. Creationism’s a way of thinking I am not worthless at a time when people were being told and shown they were. You want to get angry about that bloody admirable humanist doctrine, and why would you want to blame Clinton. But you’re not just too young, you’re too bloody ignorant to know about welfare reform.”