it many times. The glass-jar inhabitants of an apothecary’s shelves on an adventure. It was extraordinary, and frightening.
“You know what happens,” Billy said. “Sometimes when I’m preserving something or doing something in the wet labs or whatever, I clock that I’m singing one of the songs from it. “Spirits of amo-o-o-onia …’”
“Billy.” Leon held out a hand. “What’s going on?”
Billy stopped and tried again to say what had happened. He swallowed and worked against his own mouth, as if expelling some glutinous intruder. And with a breath finally he began to speak what he had intended. What he had found in the basement. He told him what the police had offered.
Leon did not smile. “Should you be telling me this?” he said at last. Billy laughed.
“No, but, you know.”
“I mean, it’s literally impossible, what happened,” Leon said.
“I know. I know it is.”
They stared at each other a long time. Leon said, “There are … maybe there are more things in heaven and earth …”
“If you quote Shakespeare at me I will kill you dead. Jesus, Leon, I found a dead man in a jar.”
“This is heavy shit. And they’ve asked you to join? You going to be a cop?”
“A consultant.”
When Leon had visited the squid, months before, he had said wow. Wow like you might wow a dinosaur skeleton, the Crown Jewels, a Turner watercolour. Wow said like the parents and partners who came to the Darwin Centre for someone else. Billy had been disappointed.
“What are you going to do?” Leon said.
“I don’t know.” Billy looked at the mail that Leon had brought from downstairs. Two bills and a card and a heavy package in brown paper, tied up old-style with hairy string. He put on his glasses and cut the string.
“Are you seeing Marginalia later?” he said.
“Yeah, and don’t take that tone when you say her name or I’ll get her to explain it to you,” Leon said. He fiddled with his phone. “She has a whole riff.”
“Please,” said Billy. “Let me guess. ‘The key to the text is not the actual text itself, but …’” He frowned. He did not understand what he was unwrapping. Inside the package was a rectangle of black cotton.
“I’m texting her, she’ll love this,” Leon said.
“Oh Leon, don’t tell her what I’ve been saying,” Billy said. “I’ve already said more than I should …” He prodded the cloth.
The package moved.
“Fuck …”
“What? What? What?”
They were both standing. Billy stared at the package, unmoving on the table where he had dropped it. There was silence. Billy took a pen from his pocket and poked the cotton gently.
The cloth gave. The package opened.
It bloomed. With a gasp of air it concertinaed, expanding, out-flicking and filling out, and what reached from its end was a hand. A man’s arm, in a dark jacket sleeve. The flash of white shirt at its end. The emergent hand grabbed Billy by the neck.
“Jesus—” Leon pulled Billy away, and the package, still gripping, pulled back, braced against nothing.
Billy was held, and the package continued to unfold. Tongues of cotton flap-flapped open, black and blue and shoes now at the end of limbs bulking into presence, as if the matter of them was uncramping. More arms unrolled clumsy as fire hoses and shoved Leon hard away.
Like plants in sped-up motion, emitting grunts of release, a stale sweat-and-fart smell, and a man and a boy stood suddenly on Billy’s table. The boy stared at Leon staggering to rise. The man still gripped Billy’s throat.
“BLOW ME,” THE MAN SAID. HE JUMPED OFF THE TABLE, WITHOUT releasing Billy. The man was wiry, wore old jeans and a dirty jacket. He shook long greying hair. “Shiver me, that was horrible.” He looked at Leon. “Eh?” he shouted, as if wanting sympathy.
The boy stepped slowly onto a chair and then to the floor. He wore a clean, oversized suit: Sunday best. “Come here, lad.” The man licked the fingers of his free hand and pressed down the boy’s mussed hair.
Billy couldn’t breathe. Darkness closed on him. The man threw him against the wall.
“Right then.” The man pointed at Leon, who froze, as if pinned by the gesture. “Watch him, Subby. Watch him like a little night-badger.” He pointed two fingers at his own eyes, then at Leon. “He makes a move, give him what-for. Now then.” The boy stared at Leon with too-wide eyes.
“Yeah,” the man said. He sniffed at the doorframe. “She ain’t bad. Good notion, this, if I say so my own self, out of