to coax its flesh into a fear reaction, for its sepia cloud. That was all, Billy thought, he needed to do.
“Saira,” Billy said, calm. “Come with me.”
“Baron,” Collingswood was saying into her phone. “Baron, bring everyone.” She gesticulated angrily—wait a minute—but did nothing to stop Billy as he climbed the rear of the house, helping Saira after him. Billy looked down into the garden littered with building rubble and rubbish.
“Get us in,” he said to Saira.
She pushed at the rear wall, moulding the bricks, pressing them into flatness and transparency, making a window. Faded to glass clarity they could see through a film of undersea slime into a small bathroom. Saira opened the window she had made. She shivered with more than cold; she was shaking violently. She made as if she would crawl in and hesitated.
“Fuck’s sake,” said Collingswood below them, and snapped her phone shut. She shook her head as if at a friend’s unfunny joke. She pushed her hands apart and rose, not in a leap but an abrupt dainty dangling, up through the impossible twelve feet or more to land on the ledge by Saira and Billy.
Billy and Saira stared at her. “You,” she said to Saira, “wuss-girl, get down there and hold wuss-boy’s hand. You,” she said to Billy, “get in there and tell me what’s what.”
IT WAS FREEZING WITHIN. THE STINK WAS ASTONISHING, FISH AND rot.
They stood in a typical London-house bathroom: stubby bath with shower, sink and toilet, a tiny cupboard. The surfaces were white tiled under layers of grey silt, green growth, sponges and anemones reduced to lumps in the sudden air. The floor was inch-deep in water full of organisms, some still slightly alive. By the door was a half-grown sunfish—a huge, ridiculous thing—dead and sad. The bathtub brimmed with a panicking crowd of fish. Something splashed in the toilet bowl. The infiltrators held their hands to their faces.
Outside in the corridor furniture was tugged skew-whiff by a rubble of piscine bodies. The vivid colours of pelagic dwellers, the drabs and see-through oddities of deep water in hecatomb heaps. Creatures from the top floors where the pressure was gentle and skylights illuminated the water.
Shouted orders were audible. Billy set out through the flopping drowning. He steadied himself on banisters interwoven with kelp.
In the kitchen there was a sea-softened door into the living room. The floor was littered with broken crockery. In the sink an octopus floundered. Billy watched it but felt no kinship. He could hear muffled noises from the next room.
“There’s quite a bloody few of them,” Collingswood said.
“We have to get in there,” Billy whispered. They stared at each other. “We have to.” She kissed her teeth.
“Give me a second, Billy,” she said. “Alright? You understand?”
“What are you …?” He started to say. She raised an eyebrow. He nodded, readied the pistol he had taken from Dane.
“If I’ve got all this right … Spill him,” she said. “Alright, Billy? Don’t be a loser all your life.” She pursed her lip and threw a sign with her fingers, something from a music video. “East side,” she said.
She stepped back into the corridor toward the living room’s main door. He heard her do something, some knack, some noise, some unnatural percussion. He heard the door open, a commotion, “Keep them out!” in Byrne’s voice, the stamp of footsteps toward her ingress and out of the door. Billy kicked open the other rotting entrance, his weapon raised.
Chapter Seventy-Eight
INTO THE GROTTO, THE SEA’S FRONT ROOM. BILLY WAS ABSOLUTELY calm.
He emerged with a burst of wall-stuff. There were the coralline constructions, the brine-stained everything, big fish lying still. In a corner was a huge sagging body, something he could not work out, though he saw eyes see him from a meat heap. The gunfarmers had left the room to hunt Saira.
There was the kraken in its tank, now emptied of all but a thin layer of preserver. There was Byrne, some bad-magic book under her arm, the bottle of Grisamentum in her hand. A huge syringe jutted from the kraken’s skin. Byrne was tickling, stimulating the dead animal in some obscene-looking way.
The kraken was moving.
Its empty eye-holes twitched. The last, brine-dilute Formalin swilled as the animal turned. Its limbs stretched and untwined, too weak still to thrash, its skin still scabrous and unrejuvenated, but the kraken was alive, or not-dead. It was zombie. Undead.
In panic at the sudden end of its death, it was spurting dark black-brown-grey ink. It spattered against the inside of