Kraken

Collingswood rolled her eyes and wobbled her head, La di fucking da. She click-clicked, as if at an animal, gestured with her chin toward the other rooms

The world’s closing in. Something rises. And an end. If any augur augurs you otherwise, sack ’em.” Billy heard despair. “Because they’re lying, or they’re wrong

Nothing, boss,” she said. “You know what? No. You got me. This thing was still primed when I got here, you know? That’s why I had to let you in. No entry without invite, and you saw Billy boy-he was way too chickenshit to let anyone he didn’t know in after what we told him

Nor did he go home. Instead, full of an unending sense of being under observation, Billy went to the centre of London. From café to bookshop café, mooching through paperbacks on his way through too much tea

This was what they came for, that pinkly enormous thing. For all its immobility; the wounds of its slow-motion decay, the scabbing that clouded its solution; despite its eyes being shrivelled and lost; its sick colour; despite the twist in its skein of limbs, as if it were being wrung out. For all that, it was what they were there for