Millions of tons of deep ocean ooze cascade off its flanks as it rises.
“See,” said the navigator. “Three thousand meters already.”
The kraken doesn’t have eyes. There has never been anything for it to look at. But as it billows up through the icy waters it picks up the microwave noise of the sea, the sorrowing beeps and whistles of the whalesong.
“Er,” said the navigator, “one thousand meters?”
The kraken is not amused.
“Five hundred meters?”
The factory ship rocks on the sudden swell.
“A hundred meters?”
There is a tiny metal thing above it. The kraken stirs.
And ten billion sushi dinners cry out for vengeance.
The cottage windows burst inward. This wasn’t a storm, it was war. Fragments of jasmine whirled across the room, mingled with the rain of file cards.
Newt and Anathema clung to one another in the space between the overturned table and the wall.
“Go on,” muttered Newt. “Tell me Agnes predicted this.”
“She did say he bringeth the storm,” said Anathema.
“This is a bloody hurricane. Did she say what’s supposed to happen next?”
“2315 is cross-referenced to 3477,” said Anathema.
“You can remember details like that at a time like this?”
“Since you mention it, yes,” she said. She held out a card.
3477. Lette the wheel of Fate turne, let harts enjoin, there are othere fyres than mine; when the wynd blowethe the blossoms, reach oute one to anothere, for the calm cometh when Redde and Whyte and Blacke and Pale approche to Peas is Our Professioune. [? Some mysticism here, one fears. [A F Device, Octbr 17, 1889] Peas/blossoms? [OFD, 1929, Sept 4] Revelations Ch 6 again, I presume. [Dr Thos. Device, 1835]]
Newt read it again. There was a sound outside like a sheet of corrugated iron pinwheeling across the garden, which was exactly what it was.
“Is this supposed to mean,” he said slowly, “that we’re supposed to become an, an item? That Agnes, what a joker.”
Courting is always difficult when the one being courted has an elderly female relative in the house; they tend to mutter or cackle or bum cigarettes or, in the worst cases, get out the family photograph album, an act of aggression in the sex war which ought to be banned by a Geneva Convention. It’s much worse when the relative has been dead for three hundred years. Newt had indeed been harboring certain thoughts about Anathema; not just harboring them, in fact, but dry-docking them, refitting them, giving them a good coat of paint and scraping the barnacles off their bottom. But the idea of Agnes’s second sight boring into the back of his neck sloshed over his libido like a bucketful of cold water.
He had even been entertaining the idea of inviting her out for a meal, but he hated the idea of some Cromwellian witch sitting in her cottage three centuries earlier and watching him eat.
He was in the mood in which people burned witches. His life was quite complicated enough without it being manipulated across the centuries by some crazed old woman.
A thump in the grate sounded like part of the chimney stack coming down.
And then he thought: my life isn’t complicated at all. I can see it as clearly as Agnes might. It stretches all the way to early retirement, a whip-round from the people in the office, a bright little neat flat somewhere, a neat little empty death. Except now I’m going to die under the ruins of a cottage during what might just possibly be the end of the world.
The Recording Angel won’t have any trouble with me, my life must have been dittoes on every page for years. I mean, what have I ever really done? I’ve never robbed a bank. I’ve never had a parking ticket. I’ve never eaten Thai food—
Somewhere another window caved in, with a merry tinkle of breaking glass. Anathema put her arms around him, with a sigh which really didn’t sound disappointed at all.
I’ve never been to America. Or France, because Calais doesn’t really count. I’ve never learned to play a musical instrument.
The radio died as the power lines finally gave up.
He buried his face in her hair.
I’ve never—
There was a pinging sound.
Shadwell, who had been bringing the Army pay books up to date, looked up in the middle of signing for Witchfinder Lance-Corporal Smith.
It took him a while to notice that the gleam of Newt’s pin was no longer on the map.
He got down from his stool, muttering under his breath, and searched around