China Mieville - Kraken

“Right then.” The man pointed at Leon, who froze, as if pinned by the gesture. “Watch him, Subby. Watch him like a little night-badger.” He pointed two fingers at his own eyes, then at Leon. “He makes a move, give him what-for. Now then.” The boy stared at Leon with too-wide eyes.

“Yeah,” the man said. He sniffed at the doorframe. “She ain’t bad. Good notion, this, if I say so my own self, out of my boy’s head. As because what we do not have here is anything nixing egress. Now we’re in there’s nothing to stop us getting out.” He leaned toward Billy. “I say, there’s nothing to stop us getting out. Didn’t think of that, did you? You ferocious little whatnot.”

Billy made a scratchy sound in his throat. The man put a finger to his lips, glancing expectantly at the boy, who slowly did as he did, and gestured shhhh at Billy, too.

“Goss and Subby do it again,” the man said. He unrolled his tongue and tasted the air. He clamped his hand over Billy’s mouth and Billy sputtered into the cool palm. The man went room to room, tugging Billy, licking floor, walls, light switches. He drew his tongue across the face of the television, leaving a spit-path in the dust.

“What what what specimens have you got here, lepidopterist?” he said to the bookshelves. He pulled out books and dropped them. “Nah,” he said. “I can’t taste not but shit of it.”

Leon was suddenly up and running at him. The man whoops-a-daisy-ed and sent Leon sprawling. “And who might you be?” he said. “One of the young master’s friends, hm? I’m afraid the doctors all agree that the lad needs complete isolation, and while your hijinks I’m sure are a tonic, they’re not what young Mr. Billiam needs. I may have to eat you, you unfortunate young macaroon.”

Leon moved and the boy stepped toward him, all predator-fish eyes. The man wheezed out smoke, though he had no cigarette, had sucked no smoke in.

“No…” Leon said. The man opened his mouth, the mouth kept going, and Leon was gone. The man dabbed the corners of his mouth like a cartoon cat.

“Alright you,” he said to Billy, who gasped and fought the relentless fingers. “Got your jim-jams? Toothbrush packed? Left a message for the milkman? Good then, let’s off. You know what airports are like and little Thomas doesn’t travel well and I don’t want to get stuck in a queue behind a group-booking to Ayia Napa, can you imagine? You promised and promised me a quiet weekend away and it’s time, Billy, it’s really time.” He clasped his hands and raised an eyebrow. “You can hush your noise and all,” he said to the boy. “I don’t know, I really don’t, you two! Onward.”

Tugging him by the neck, the man took Billy out.

FOR THE BULK OF HER TWEENS AND TEENS, MOST OF KATH Collingswood’s teachers had either been indifferent or mildly antipathetic to her. One man, her biology teacher, had more actively disliked her. She had known it pretty early in their relationship, and had even been able to express and evaluate his reasons to herself with some clarity.

His opinion of her as sulky she conceded, but considered no more his business than his disapproval of her friends. He thought her a bully, which was, she would say, 65 percent fair. Certainly she found it easy to intimidate more than half her class, and did so. But they were minor cruelties perpetrated without glee, vaguely, almost dutifully, to keep people off her back.

Collingswood had not much reflected on how easy such misery-mongering was for her, how often nothing but a glance or word, if even that, had palpable effects. The first time she thought about it was when she stopped that teacher’s mouth.

She was thirteen. Some altercation had left a classmate crestfallen, and Mr. Bearing had shaken his whiteboard marker at Collingswood like a baton and said, “You’re a nasty piece of work, aren’t you? A nasty piece of work.”

He had turned, shaking his head, to write on the board, but Collingswood had been abruptly enraged. She was completely unwilling to submit to the description. She had not even looked at the back of Mr. Bearing’s head, had stared furiously at her nails and clucked her tongue, and something like a bubble of cold had swelled in her chest, and burst.

Collingswood did look up then. Mr. Bearing had stopped writing. He stood still, hand to the board. Two or three other children were looking around in confusion.

With a sense of great interest, with a sense of pleased curiosity, Kath Collingswood had known that Mr. Bearing would never call her a nasty piece of work again.

That was that. He picked up his writing. He did not turn to look at her. She put off till later the questions of what had happened, and how she had known that it had. She had leaned back, instead, on the rear legs of her chair.

AFTER THAT MOMENT, COLLINGSWOOD TOOK MORE MIND OF HER unspoken interventions: the times she knew what her friends or enemies were about to say; when she silenced someone across a room; found a lost thing that was frankly unlikely to be wherever she uncovered it. She started to think things through.

Not that she was a poor student, but Collingswood’s teachers might have been impressed to see the rigour with which she had pursued this research project. She started with a little tentative poking around online, put together a list of books and documents. Most she was able to download from absurd websites, copyright not being particularly apropos for such texts. The titles of those she could not track down she laboriously copied and requested from surprised, even concerned, librarians and booksellers. Once or twice she even found them.

She picked her way, more than once, through a weed-littered old carpark and bust windows into a small long-deserted hospital near her house. In the quiet of what had once been a maternity ward she dutifully acted out the idiotic actions the texts described. Certainly she felt stupid, but she performed as required, recited all the phrases.

She kept a record in her notebook of what she had tried, where she had read it, what if anything had occurred. BOOK OF THOTH = BOOK OF BOLLOCKS MORE LIKE, she wrote. LIBER NULL = NULL POINTS.

Mostly there were no effects at all, or just enough to keep her at it (a scuttling noise here, an unwarranted shadow there). But it was when she got exasperated and restless and thought fuck it to her studies, when she was resultingly imprecise, that she made the best progress.

“That’s it for today. You can go early.” Packing up her books with the rest of the class, Collingswood watched Miss Ambly’s shock at her own words. The woman touched her mouth in bewilderment. Collingswood flicked her fingers. A pen spun off Miss Ambly’s desk.

And later: “What’s it doing, sir?” some girl asked of a bemused teacher, pointing at the class goldfish, which was swimming with highly unnatural motions. Collingswood, unnoticed, continued what she had started on an exasperated whim, scratching her hands on the desk as if DJing to a classmate’s ringtone, which rhythms quite unexpectedly dictated the fish’s back-and-forth motion.

That had been years ago. There had been a lot of work since then, of course, much tinkering, plenty of experiments, but Collingswood’s baseline impatience continued to truncate her researches. She came to understand that this would ultimately limit her. That she was without question a bit of a talent if she said it herself, and yes she could make it her career no problem, but she would never be one of the very best. Since those days, she had met one or two of them, those very best at this. She had known them the moment they had walked into the room.

But her limits had unexpected effects, and not all negative. The lack of the sternest rigour to perform these competencies at the highest level blurred them, mixed their elements, gave them little swills of backwash. Mostly ignorable effects or demerits, but only mostly.