The captain drummed his fingers on the console. He was afraid that he might soon be conducting his own research project to find out what happened to a statistically small sample of whaler captains who came back without a factory ship full of research material. He wondered what they did to you. Maybe they locked you in a room with a harpoon gun and expected you to do the honorable thing.
This was unreal. There ought to be something.
The navigator punched up a chart and stared at it.
“Honorable sir?” he said.
“What is it?” said the captain testily.
“We seem to have a miserable instrument failure. Seabed in this area should be two hundred meters.”
“What of it?”
“I'm reading 15,000 meters, honorable sir. And still falling.”
“That is foolish. There is no such depth.”
The captain glared at several million yen worth of cutting.. edge technology, and thumped it.
The navigator gave a nervous smile.
“Ah, sir,” he said, “it is shallower already.”
Beneath the thunders of the upper deep, as Aziraphale and Tennyson both knew, Far, far beneath in the abyssal sea/The kraken sleepeth.
And now it was waking up.
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
? Some mysticism here, one fears.
Fate turne, let harts en-
[A F Device, Octbr 17, 1889]
join, there are othere
fyres than mine; when the
wynd blowethe the blos
soms, reach oute one to
anothere, for the calm
cometh when Redde and
Peas/blossoms? [OFD, 1929, Sept 4]
Whyte and Blacke and
Pale approche to Peas is
Revelations Ch 6 again, I presume.
Our Professioune.
[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 whipround 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..