Kraken

“He knows religion is bollocks,” Collingswood said. “He just wishes he didn’t. That’s why he understands the nutters. That’s why he hunts them. He misses pure faith. He’s jealous.”

That reconstitutive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense. Vardy even smiled. “Paranoia,” he said. “Theology.”

Architeuthis lives in the aphotic zone: what purpose would the spray of dark sepia serve in a world without light? It was there for other reasons. We just would not get the hint, not for millennia. We didn’t invent ink: ink was waiting for us, aeons before writing. In the sacs of the deepwater god.

Who would ever have trusted a representative of the cephalopod fundamentalists to deal with the issue of the kraken? A rogue, on the other hand … Who could be more trustworthy? Billy shook his head. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “It was all an act. You were under the Teuthex’s orders all along.” “It wasn’t an act. It was a mission.” That ostentatious re

“I just done in the most dangerous piece of shit you can imagine by the most horrible method I ever had to use to do anything,” he said. “Wati said you got into this because you was paid to and you might’ve saved the world. If Griz’d got what he wanted earlier … So thank you. For that. But you are going to help. Knacking ain’t a drug. What did for

“What is it you want to do?” Dane said. “You say we need to understand the situation, but we have to hunt. We can deliver it from evil.” “Enough,” the Teuthex said, silencing everyone else. “Does it not occur to you that this is a test? You really think God … needs rescuing?” He held himself like the head of a church, for the first time. “Do you kn

It would not have been Dane’s church’s planned end, their infolding of convolutes into the glint on a giant eye, when roaring perhaps at the surface the elder kraken might rise like belligerent continents and die, and spurt out like ink a new time. This would not have been that hallelujah-worthy end, but an antiapocalypse, a numinousless revelation

“Don’t worry, Billy Harrow. That’s perspicacity, not paranoia, that, what you’re feeling.” Baron turned, taking in the London panorama, and wherever he looked, whenever he paused facing some particular patch of blackness, Billy looked too. “There is something wrong. And it’s noticed you. That’s not always the best place to be.” Billy sat in the mid

Last-ditch defenders were not new. There were always kings under the hill. The golem of Prague—though that was a bad example, had missed its call, a dreadful oversleeping. Each of the cults of London had hopes in its own constructs, its own secret spirits, its own sleeping paladins, to intervene when the minute hand went vertical. The Krakenists ha