would not lose this view, this angle through the window, that suddenly provoked something.
“What is it?” Dane said.
Good question. The street, yes, the lights, yes, the bricks, the shadows, the bushes turned into shaggy dark beasts, the personlessness of the late night, the unlitness of the windows. Why did it brim?
“Something’s moving,” Billy said. Close to the edges of the city some storm was coming toward them. The clouds’ random rush was just random, but through the window they looked like self-organising ink, like he was watching a secret, that he had an insight into whatever metropolitopoiesis was happening. He had no such thing. How could he with those inadequate eyes? It was just the glass that gave him anything, any glimmer, a refracted glance of some conflict starting.
• • •
THOUSANDS OF LONDONERS WOKE AT THAT MOMENT. MEMORY versus the inevitable, going at it, that will play havoc with your sleep patterns. Marge woke, vividly aware that something new had happened. Baron woke, and said as he did, “Oh, here we bloody go.” Vardy had not been asleep in the first place.
Closer to Billy than either of them would have imagined, Kath Collingswood was staring out of her window too. She had sat up at exactly the same second as Billy. The glass of her window helped her not at all, but she had her own ways to make sense of things.
It was obvious, suddenly, that the fake ghosts she had put together had been beaten. She hauled out of bed. No one was with her: she was in her Snoopy nightshirt. Her skin was crawling every which way. Horripilations with interference patterns. London was grinding against itself like an unset broken bone.
“So what are we going to fucking do?” she said, aloud. She did not like how small her voice was. “Who’m I going to call?”
Something easy, something she could get info from without too much trouble. Didn’t have to be tough or clever. Best if it wasn’t. She flicked through a pad by her bed, where she made notes of various summonings. A spaceape, all writhing tentacles, to stimulate her audio nerve directly? Too much attitude.
Alright, a real snout again, then, worthy of the name. She plugged in her electric pentacle. She sat in concentric neon circles, in various colours. This was a pretty, garish conjuration. Collingswood read bits and bobs from the relevant manuscript. The tricky bit with this technique was not getting the summons to work: it was to not summon too much. She was just reaching for one particular little spirit, not the head of its herd.
It did not take long. Everything was raring to go, that night. She barely had to dangle a notional bucket of psychic swill, and with exploratory snorts and gleeful screams, buffeting the edges of her safe space, manifesting as a flitting porcine shade, in came the swinish entity she had enticed away from a herd of such in the outer monstrosity, introduced to London and taught to answer to Perky.
kollywood, it grunted. kollywood food. Not much but a darkness in the air. It had no corkscrew tail, and as if in compensation it spiralled tightly itself, and rooted around the room, sending Collingswood’s tat gusting all over.
“Perky,” she said. She shook a bottle of leftover spiritual scraps. “Hello again. Nummy treat. What’s going on?”
num num, Perky said. num the num.
“Yeah you can num it but first you got to tell me what’s happening.”
scared, Perky grunted.
“Yeah, it’s a bit scary tonight, isn’t it? What’s been happening?”
scared. anglis out. sooss don tell.
“Anglis?” She struggled with impatience. There was no point getting pissy with this amiable greedy thing. It was too thick to mind-fuck. The pig-presence flitted to her ceiling and gnawed the light cord. “I won’t tell. Anglis, Perky?”
ess. ess anglis run fight come member not footer.
Yes. Something had come in, or out, for a fight. Member? Members? Membership? Footer?
Oh fuck right. Collingswood stood still in her sparking pentacle. Remember, and future. Remembrance versus some future. Anglis. The anglis, of course, were angels. The fucking angels of memory were out. They had come out of their museums, out of their castles. They’d gone to war against whatever this incoming to-come was. The very facts of retrospection and fate that had various sides fighting were now out themselves, personified or apotheosed and smacking seven bells out of each other directly. No longer solely reasons, justifications, teloi, casus belli for others to invoke or believe in: now combatants. The war had just got