In the event, when, after almost an hour, her call was answered, there was no question at all. It was not one person but three. All men, they strode urgently along the little paths, looking in all directions. They were big, athletic guys. They wore identical engineers’ uniforms. The oldest, at the front, was gesturing to his two companions to fan out. Marge stood: she would feel safer facing all three of them than one. They saw her immediately. She closed her hand around her knife.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Tyno Helig.”
They hung just a little back. Their fists were clenched. The front man’s jaw worked with tension.
“Who,” he said, “are you? What the hell are you doing? You said you had a message?”
She could see his contradictory emotions. Rage, of course, that they should be discovered and outed at work, when they were in mufti. Rage that they should be mocked like this, their faith scorned, as she could see him think surely this must be. And yet, as well as that anger, wrestling with it, excitement. She recognised that little bastard hope. “What’s your message?” he said.
Her plan had worked, then. Tyno Helig, no person but a place: one of the sunken kingdoms, the Welsh Atlantis. That, she had thought, making her plan, should intrigue them. “Who are you?” the man said.
“Sorry for misleading you,” she said. “I needed to get you out. I’m sorry”-she hesitated for a second, but sod it, she was too tired not to piss people off-“this isn’t about your aspirational tidal wave. I have a question for you.”
The man raised his clenched fist to his head, as if he would hit himself, then suddenly grabbed her by the lapels. His companions crowded them, shielding them from others’ view. “Our what?” he whispered. “You have a question? Do you know who we are? You better start convincing me not to drown you. Do you know who we are?”
SHE HAD AN IDEA, YES. OUTRÉ BELIEFS WOULD KEEP CROPPING UP IN her researches. She had trawled around hard enough for the info.
The Communion of the Blessèd Flood. The rainbow, she gathered from some furtive online theologian, wasn’t a promise: it was a curse. The fall didn’t come when the first couple left the garden: all that was some ghastly prerapturous dreamtime of trials. What happened was that God rewarded his faithful with eventual holy rains.
Mistranslation, she had read. If what Noah, Ziusudra, Utnapishtim or the same figure by any other name had been told to build was a ship, why did the Torah not say so? Why was his ark not an oniyah, a ship, but a tebah-a box? Because it was built not to ride the waves God sent, but to move below them. History’s first submarine, in gopher wood, three hundred cubits long, travelling the new world of God’s promise. It harvested the meadows of kelp. But those chosen for the watered paradise had failed, and God had been wrathful and withdrawn the seas. That landscape of punishment was where we lived, exiled from the ocean.
The Communion of the Blessèd Flood prayed for the restoration of the wet. Marge read of their utopias, sunk not in ruination but reward: Kitezh, Atlantis, Tyno Helig. They honoured their prophets: Kroehl and Monturiol, Athanasius, Ricou Browning, and John Cage’s father. They cited Ballard and Garrett Serviss. They gave thanks for the tsunami and celebrated the melting of the satanic polar ice, which mockingly held water in motionless marble. It was a sacred injunction on them to fly as far and often as they could, to maximise carbon emissions. And they placed holy agents where they might one day help expedite the deluge.
So this little cell, working in what might seem the most blasphemous industry of flood-defence. They were biding their time. Blocking piddling little backtides and holding out for the big one. When that final storm surged, that sublime backwash came roaring from the deep, then, then they would throw their spanners in the works. And after the water closed on the streets like a Hokusai trapdoor the Brotherhood of the Blessèd Flood would live at last in the submerged London of which they dreamed.
And now her message. It was the end of the world, everyone knew that… maybe, they’d thought, it was theirs.
“Count yourself lucky no one’s messed with you till now,” Marge said. She pulled out of his grip. “I never even heard of you until a few days ago. Someone said you speak for the sea. And maybe you took the squid. You know what I’m talking about. I need to know… Someone who did something with that bloody thing did something to my man.”
“You’ve got face,” he said. “I’m not saying that buys you an out, but you’ve got something.”
“I told you, man,” said another. “Everything’s messed up.”
“It’s not face,” she said. “It’s just that I’m really tired, and I loved him. He was with Billy Harrow… Billy Harrow.” She said it again at his reaction. The man rolled his thick neck and glanced at the others.
“Harrow,” he said. “Harrow? He’s the one took the kraken, I thought. That’s what I heard. He’s like its prophet. He went with Dane Parnell, when he ran from the Krakenists. It’s them you want to talk to. They’re the ones took it.”
“No they’re not.” They stared at each other.
“Dane ran from his church when the kraken went, to join Harrow, so if they’ve got something to do with your bloke…”
“I’m telling you,” she said. “That isn’t what happened. I don’t know anything about Parnell, I don’t know much about much, but Billy Harrow did not take the squid. I had a pizza with him.” That made her laugh. “And I know it wasn’t him. I think he’s dead, anyway. And if he knew where Leon was, he’d tell me…” She shut up, at the memory of the on-off-on-off streetlamp. “He’d tell me,” she said slowly. “If he could.”
The man huddled with his companions. She waited. She could hear them in debate.
“Do you think,” she said suddenly, to her own mild surprise, “that I’d be messing around with you if I had any choice?” They blinked at her. “I don’t want any of this, I don’t want this bollocks, I don’t believe your crap, I don’t want a drowned world and I don’t want a squid to be the king of the universe and I don’t want to get involved in this crazy shit, and I don’t even think I’m ever going to get Leon back. I’m just tired and it turns out”-she shrugged to say who knew?-“it turns out I need to find out what happened. You telling me you’ve got no idea what’s going on? What is the use of you people.” She was tearing up a little bit, not weakly or weepingly but out of infuriation.
“Whoever it is been talking to you,” he said, and hesitated. “They don’t know what they mean. We don’t represent the sea, we don’t… How could we? That’s misinformation.”
“I don’t care…”
“Yeah, I do. People need to know. Stuff’s brewing. How do you know all this? Who’s helping you?”
“No one. Jesus.”
“I can’t do nothing for you.” He wasn’t speaking gently, but not aggressively either. “And I don’t talk for the sea.” He spoke with irritated care. Her impression was that this man devoutly wishing for the effacing of the world by water, the reconfiguration of all humanity’s cities by eels and weeds, the fertilizing of sunken streets with the bodies of sinners, was a decent enough guy.
“You need to be careful,” he said. “Stay out of trouble. You need protection. This is a dangerous town any time, and right now it’s mad. And you’re going to tread on toes. Get protection. You’re not wearing a damn thing, are you.” He clutched at his chest, where an amulet might hang. “You’ll get yourself killed. No good to your bloke that way, are you?”
She was going to say I’m not a child, but his brusque kindness unmanned her. “Leave this alone. And if you don’t, go to someone. Murgatroyd, or Shibleth, or Butler, or someone. Remember those names. In Camden, or in Borough. Tell them Sellar sent you.”
“Look,” she said. “Can you, can I take your number? Can I talk to you about all this? I need some help. Can I…?”