I said to Clarabelle and Petra that we’d be there in an hour, so tell me tell me.”
Jason had nothing to tell him, so Goss kept pushing. The constable kept his eyes shut and gripped Subby’s hand and tried not to listen to Goss repeat and repeat his questions, heard the noises Jason made go from screams to short hard klaxon barks as much of aghastness as agony, liquid intrusion sounds and some retching animal wrongness and at the very last, nothing. After a long time a hff of effort and the dropping of liquid and the noise of something pushing through moistness. Clack clack. Something maraca-ed.
“He doesn’t know.” Now Goss was up close to the policeman’s ear. “He told me. You can make him tell you too. Make him rattle his teeth. I’m much obliged for showing me where he was, you do a marvellous job, I’m ever so grateful. I remember when people used to care about the uniform, God love you, people had respect then.” The officer kept his eyes closed and did not breathe. “Give us Subby back then, you! Pop him up like a toaster!” Subby took his hand away. The man heard the door open and close. He stayed still for more than three minutes.
He opened his eyes such a tiny bit. No one hurt him, so he opened them again. He turned around. No one stood in the room. Goss and Subby were gone. The man wailed to see blood on the floor and meatlike Jason at his feet. There was a hole in Jason’s sternum. His neck was grossly thickened, burst from inside, his mouth wide open and the roof of his mouth grooved where finger holes were pushed into it, his tongue punctured by a hole for a thumb. Wear him and he could be made to talk, clack clack.
The last lingering of Jason’s knack went out, and recognition slipped from the room, and the officer went from screaming for someone he thought he knew to someone he realised he had never worked with, but who was still exactly as dead as he had thought.
Chapter Fifty-Six
THERE WAS A CHANGE IN THE AIR, SOMEONE COMING INTO THE penumbra of the London Stone, with the stone in mind. London always felt like it was about to end, like the world was over. But now more than ever. No, really, the city was muttering. Honest. Saira could sniff an encroachment, even without Fitch grabbing her and whispering the fact in agitation.
“Someone,” he kept saying.
Saira thought up various possibilities as she readied to face whatever it was. But though she had hoped to see him again, she was utterly confounded to emerge from the Londonmancer back rooms into the shop that fronted and protected them to face a bleary, exhausted, pugnacious Dane Parnell.
Billy stood behind him, phaser in his hand, Wati-filled doll in his pocket. Dane leaned against the doorway.
“Jesus Christ London!” she said. “Dane! What the hell are you …? You got away, thank God, we didn’t know, we were—”
“Saira,” he said. He sounded dead. He stared levelly.
“Dane, what are you doing, you could be seen, we have to get you out of sight …”
“Take me to the kraken.” Saira twitched and patted the air for him to quiet: most of her colleagues knew nothing. “Now,” he said.
“Alright,” she said, “alright, alright alright. I have to get Fitch. What happened, Dane? I have to—”
“Now. Now. Now. Now.”
OF COURSE BILLY AND WATI, WHO HAD FELT BILLY’S EMERGENCE from that protected Nazi zone and gushed into the doll he carried, had clamoured at Dane in relief and tried to make him rest.
“We have to get Jason too,” Billy said, and Dane nodded.
“We will,” he said. At least the police, cruel as they might be, would not, he thought, kill his friend. Not yet. “He was trying to find me?”
“Yeah.”
“We will. As soon as I’ve—” His words ended.
“Do you want to tell me?” Billy said. “What happened?”
And what kind of bleeding stupid question was that? he asked himself the moment it was out, into the quiet that followed. He said nothing as Dane said nothing and they only walked, and at last Dane said, “The Tattoo was there.”
“You saw him?”
“I couldn’t see nothing. But he was; I heard him. Talking through one of his things. He’s desperate. He’s under attack. Some of his business. From monsterherds. If he doesn’t know Grisamentum’s