1908. Bertrand Hubert, the only French Teuthex we’ve ever had, took him out to sea. They were in the Bay of Biscay for four days. Hubert performed a particular ritual, of which sadly we no longer have much record, and brought up a little god.
“He must have been pretty powerful. He’s the only one since Steenstrup who’s been able to tickle up more than images. The actual … fry. So the godling waited while Braque, falling over himself and nearly overboard, apparently, sketched it. It went under waving a hunting arm as Braque said ‘exactement comme un garçon qui dit aux amis.’” He smiled. “Silly beggar. Not the slightest idea. It was “comme” nothing of the sort. Sounds odd, but he said it was the coiliness of what he saw that made him think in angles. He said no curves could do justice to the coils he’d seen.”
Cubism as failure. Billy walked to another picture. More traditionally representational—a fat, flattened giant squid mouldering on a slab, surrounded by legs in waders. Quick, wisping brushstrokes. “Why did you drug me?”
“That’s Renoir. That over there, Constable. Pre-Steenstrup, so it’s what we call the atramentous epoch. Before we emerged from the ink-cloud.” The works around Billy looked suddenly like Manets. Like Piranesis, Bacons, Breughels, Kahlos.
“Moore’s my name,” the priest said. “I am very sorry about your friend. I sincerely wish we could have stopped that.”
“I don’t even know what happened,” Billy said. “I couldn’t tell what that man …” He swallowed into silence. Moore cleared his throat. Behind heavily framed glass was a flattish surface, a slatey plane. It was brown-grey rock perhaps two feet square. In organic lines, in charcoal ink and stained a dried-blood red, overlooked by outlined human figures, was a torpedo shape; a conclave of spiral whips; a round black eye.
“That’s from the Chauvet Cave,” Moore said. “Thirty-five thousand years old.” The carbon eye of the squid looked across epochs at them. Billy felt vertigo at the preantique rendition. Was it meant to be seen in the licking of a fire light? Women and men with sticks and deft fingertip smuts rendering what had visited at the edge of the sea. What had raised many arms in deepwater greeting while they waved from rockpools.
“We’ve always commissioned,” Moore said. “We show them god.” He smiled. “Or god’s young. That’s what we used to do.
“Since the end of the atrament we can generally only offer dreams. As we did you. How Hubert called up a young god we don’t know. Even the sea won’t tell us. And we’ve asked it. You’ve seen the young, Billy. Baby Jesu.” He smiled at his little blasphemy. “That’s what you preserved. Architeuthis is kraken-spawn. Gods are oviparous. Not just our gods, all gods. God-spawn’s everywhere if you know where to look.”
“What was that tattoo?” Billy said.
“Those kraken that make it to the last stage?” Moore jerked his thumb at the cave painting. “They sleepeth, is what they do,” he quoted. “‘Battening upon huge seaworms,’ as they say. They’ll rise only at the final end. Only in the end, when ‘latter fire heats the deeps’”—he did quote fingers—“only then to be seen once, roaring they shall rise and on the surface die.”
Billy looked past him. He wondered how the search of his almost-colleagues was going, whether Baron, Vardy, and Collingswood were making headway as they looked for him, as they must be doing. With a moment’s startling clarity he imagined Collingswood with her so un-uniform uniform and swagger knocking heads together to find him.
“We were there at the beginning,” Moore said. “And we’re here now. At the end. Baby gods have started manifesting all over. Kubodera and Mori. That was just the first. Pictures, video, making themselves known. Architeuthis, Mesonychoteuthis, unknowns. After all those years of silence. They’re rising.
“On the twenty-eighth of February, 2006, the kraken appeared in London.” He smiled. “In Melbourne they keep theirs in a block of ice. Can you imagine? I can’t help thinking of it as a godsicle. You know they’re planning one for Paris which is going to be, what do they call it, plastinated? Like that strange German man does to people. That’s how they’re going to show god.” Dane shook his head. Moore shook his head. “But, not you. You treated it … right, Billy. You laid it out with a kindness.” Odd stilted formulation. “With respect. You kept it behind glass.”
His squid had been a relic in a reliquary. “This is kraken year zero,” Moore