“Here you are,” the toy said in the little plastic voice. “Something’s happening.”

“Yeah?” Dane said. “Really? We nearly got burnt alive by our only lead, yesterday, and we still don’t know what’s going on.”

“Maybe this’ll help,” said Wati. “Maybe this is it. Apocalypse.”

“We know that,” Billy said. “That’s why we’re here.”

“Sorry,” said Wati. “That’s not what I mean. I mean there are two of them.”

Chapter Sixty-One

THE WIZARD WHO HAD SOLD HER THE PROTECTION HAD, IN A gruff way, been too kind to answer her question and tell her where to go, if he even knew. But knowing where to look, now, with her own online contacts and link trails, it was not too hard for Marge to find out when, and even hints of where, these competing, overlapping or collaborative apocalypses were due to occur. The Internet debates were over how to respond.

bottl whisky & head under covers

got 2 b squid this is it

C U all in L

“Jesus, really?” Marge said out loud.

have to go cant miss whole world there

It was not that she did not care if she lived or died: she cared about it a great deal. But it turned out that she would not play safe at any price-and who would have predicted that? There were more messages from her friends on her machine. This time she felt as if by not answering them she was less turning her back on than protecting them.

Leon, she thought. We’re going deeper. She had her iPod bodyguard. She needed a lay of the land. If everyone who was everyone in that heretic cityscape would be there, there were things she could learn. And if it was the squid behind it, if this animal thing was it, if as the insinuations insinuated this was the thing incoming, then she might find Billy.

Anyone up for going? she wrote. Keep each other safe? Go as team see wots wot?

I duno

no

no

u crazee???

Screw them, that didn’t matter. Billy might be there. She knew that Leon would not.

Marge loaded playlists onto the iPod. She grabbed them at almost random from her computer, a big mix, using up all the available memory. When she was out, now, she felt watched by the world, under threat, pretty much all the time. She went walking, and she went as it grew dark, before she put her earphones in. She pressed random play.

The streetlights shone at her through the haze of branches, woody halos. She walked through her nearest cheerful row of kebaberies, small groceries and chemists. A voice started in her ear, a tuneless, happy, piping voice, singing push push pushy push really really good pushy good, accompanied by the noise of a record player being turned on and off, and something hit with a stick.

Marge felt bewildered and instantly cosseted, wrapped in that tuneless voice. The iPod screen told her this was supposed to be Salt’ N Pepa’s “Push It.” She skipped forward. Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab,” she read, and heard not the familiar orchestration and that magnificent, once-in-an-epoch growl but a little throat-clearing noise and the same reedy querulous asexual tones as before singing in the roughest approximation of the track they try make me to go to the rehab no no no no no. She heard the repeat-twanging of one guitar string.

The singer did not sound so enthusiastic this time, and the envelope around Marge cooled, as if a gust of air got in. She skipped, to Kanye West’s “Gold Digger.” gimme she gimme money money. The little singer was happy again and Marge was safer.

The voice liked Run-DMC. Marge walked patiently through its incompetent renditions of old-skool hip-hop classics. It liked some of the Specials-this town town aaah ah this is a is ghost town, with a double-tempo clapping. It did not like Morrissey. To Marge’s horror, it raised an enthusiastic rorty voice during “Building a Mystery,” a guilty Sarah McLachlan track that she could not remember why she had.

“Jesus,” she said to the iPod. “If you’re into Lilith Fair I’d rather take my chances with Goss and Subby.”

But though it sulked a bit when she fast-forwarded out of that, she was able to raise the little singer’s happiness on a repeating loop of Soho’s “Hippychick,” the initial Smiths’ guitar sample of which it rendered with a warbling badadadada. She had not been able to get the song out of her mind since she had heard it in the hidden pub. There were worse noises to have to listen to.

Marge walked into the most unwelcoming estate she knew of in her neighbourhood. She stood for several minutes in the hollow at the centre of the high-rises, listening to her protective companion croon, waiting to see what it would do when whatever happened happened. But she was left perfectly alone. Once two passing children on their bikes called something, some incoherent tease, at her, then pedalled furiously off cackling, but that was all, and she felt silly and ashamed at treating herself like bait.

We’ll have to see when it comes to it, she thought. As she walked home, the sprite in her iPod chattered fighty fighty fighty powers that be, its take on Public Enemy.

The night after that, she went, alone as she had no other option, to an outskirt of the city, an imperfect roadway helix, that she had not had too much difficulty establishing would be the epicentre. She arrived early, and waited.

“LISTEN, ONE OF THESE TWO GODS IS SOME KIND OF ANIMAL,” WATI said. That brought them up short. “With that, and what with all these rumours about the djinn and the fire, and stuff, I can’t help wondering if this might be it.”

“An animal church keeping itself secret,” Billy said. “Dane?”

“It ain’t my lot,” Dane said slowly. “I know scripture.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time there’d been a split, would it, Dane?” Wati said. “Some new interpretation?”

“Could there be another squid church…?” Billy hesitated, but Dane seemed not offended. “Could there be another one out there? Could this be some other kraken apocalypse?”

“A cell?” Dane said. “Inside? Doing a deal with the djinn? Behind all this? But they don’t have the kraken. We know-”

“They don’t have it now,” Wati said. “We don’t know what their plans were. Or are. Just that they involve the squid and burning.”

“What if this is it?” Dane said. He was looking out at nothing. “What do we do?”

“Jesus,” Billy said. “We go, we find out, we stand in its way. We’re not going to sit here while the world ends. And if it’s nothing, we keep looking.”

Dane did not look at him. “I got nothing against the world ending,” Dane said quietly.

“Not like this,” said Billy at last. “Not like this. This isn’t yours.”

“I gave your message to the Londonmancers,” Wati said. “They’re keeping the kraken as far away from this as they can.” Because if this were, if this did intend, if an event can intend, to be it, to be the end, then the kraken must not be near enough to burn. That would seem to be what might send the universe up with it.

“Good,” said Billy. “But we don’t know what capabilities these people have.”

“It’s tonight?” Dane said. “Where did this even come from? We should’ve heard about this ages ago. It’s obviously proper, and things like that don’t just spring out of nowhere. There should’ve been tekel upharsins and shit. I guess everyone’ll be there to find out what it’s about. The church’ll be there too.”

“I think everyone will,” Wati said.

“A conjunction,” Dane said. “Been a long time.”

It was inevitable that from time to rare time, two apocalypses might clash, but people should have known about it in advance. In such situations, guardians of continuance-declared saviours, the salaried police and the enemies of whoever was declaring an end-would have not only to end the ends, but step in between the rival priests, each vying to rout a vulgar competing ruination that potentially stood in the way of their noble own.