said. “This is Anno Teuthis. We’re in the end times. What d’you think’s been going on? You think it’s just bloody chance that when you bring god up and treat it as you do, the world suddenly starts ending? Why do you think we kept coming to see? Why do you think we had someone on the inside?” Dane bent his head. “We had to know. We had to watch. We had to protect it too, find out what was going on. We knew something was going to happen.
“You realise the reason you had a kraken to work on is because in roaring it rose and on the surface died?”
Chapter Seventeen
IF YOU GOT INVOLVED WITH LEON, MARGE HAD ALWAYS UNDERSTOOD, you took certain behaviours for granted. It wasn’t a bad thing—it gave leeway for your own behaviour, the indulgences of which might have caused all manner of resentments and bad bloods with previous lovers.
For example, Marge felt no compunction about cancelling a night out if she was working on a piece and it was going well. “Sorry sweet,” she’d said, many times, leaning over the battered video equipment that she rescued from skips and eBay. “I’ve got something going. Can we raincheck?”
When Leon did the same, even if it annoyed her, it also often came with satisfaction, the knowledge that these were credits she could cash in later. For similar reasons, knowing she had no intent to become monogamous when they got together, she found his own occasional non-her-focused sexual liaisons (mostly obviously telegraphed) rather a relief.
In and of itself, she would not have thought much or anything of not hearing from Leon for two, three, five days, a week at a time. That was nothing, any more than was a last-minute cancellation. What, however, gave her some anxiety, some pause, was that they had had a specific arrangement—they had been going to see a James Bond marathon, because “it’ll be hilarious”—and that he had not called to change plans. He had simply texted her some nonsense—that itself not news—and not turned up. And now was ignoring her messages.
She texted him, she emailed him. Where are you? she wrote. Tell me or i’m going to get worried. Call rsvp text carrier pigeon whatever you prefer xx.
Marge had deleted the last message Leon had sent, thinking it some drunk foolishness. Of course she regretted it deeply now. It had said something like: billy says theres a squid cult.
“FATHERS AND MOTHERS AND UNCARING AUNTS AND UNCLES IN freezing darkness we implore you.”
“We implore you.” The congregation mumbled in time, in response to Moore the Teuthex’s phrases.
“We are your cells and synapses, your prey and your parasites.”
“Parasites.”
“And if you care for us at all we know it not.”
“Not.”
Billy sat at the back of the church. He did not stand and sit with the small congregation, nor did he murmur meaningless phonemes in polite lag of their words. He watched. There were fewer than twenty people in the room. Mostly white, but not all, mostly dressed inexpensively, mostly middle-aged or older, but, a strange demographic blip, with four or five tough-looking young men, grim and devout and obedient, in one row.
Dane stood like a hulking altar boy. His eyes were closed, his mouth moving. The lights were low, there were shadows all over the place.
The Teuthex recited the service, his words drifting in and out of English, into Latin or Pig Latin, into what sounded like Greek, into strange slippery syllables that were perhaps dreams of sunken languages or the invented muttering of squidherds, Atlantean, Hyperborean, the pretend tongue of R’lyeh. Billy had expected ecstasy, the febrile devotions of the desperate speaking in tongues or tentacles, but this fervour—and fervour it was, he could see the tears and gripping hands of the devout—was controlled. The flavour of the sect was vicarly, noncharismatic, an Anglo-Catholicism of mollusc-worship.
Such a tiny group. Where were others? The room itself, the seats themselves, could have contained three times as many people as were there. Had the space always been aspirational, or was this a religion in decline?
“Reach out to enfold us,” Moore said, and the congregation said, “Fold us,” and made motions with their fingers.
“We know,” the Teuthex said. A sermon. “We know this is a strange time. There are those who think it’s the end.” He made another motion of some dismissal. “I’m asking you all to have faith. Don’t be afraid. ‘How could it have gone?’ people have asked me. ‘Why aren’t the gods doing anything?’ Remember