Something Coming Through

1. Just Another Snake Cult

London | 2 July

Four days till she was due to appear before the parliamentary select committee, Chloe Millar couldn’t take it any more. The rehearsals and group exercises, the pre-exam nerves and pointless speculation, the third degree about the New Galactic Navy…No to all that business. She banged out of there and minicabbed it down the A13 to check out a lead in Dagenham. Traffic glittering in hot sunlight, factories, housing estates and big box retail outlets, sewage works and power stations. A glimpse of the Reef’s dark blister and the river beyond. A welling feeling of relief with an undercurrent of guilt that she tried to ignore.

The minicab was negotiating the Ripple Road junction when her phone rang. Jen Lovell, Disruption Theory’s office manager, wanting to know where she was and what she was up to.

‘I’m chasing a lead. A good one.’

‘We’ve all had to give up our Saturdays. Even you, Chloe.’

‘There’s a cult. Definitely turned, about to break out. They announced it on Facebook, a public meeting supposed to start at one o’clock. I’m late, but these things never run to schedule. I won’t have missed anything important.’

‘Preparing for the select committee: that’s what’s important.’

‘They haven’t shut us down yet,’ Chloe said. She wasn’t going to feel guilty. She was doing her actual job. ‘It’s probably just another snake cult, but I can’t be certain until I see it in action.’

Her destination was a displaced-persons camp at the eastern edge of Old Dagenham Park. A row of single-storey prefab barracks and half a dozen L-shaped stacks of repurposed shipping containers, built a decade ago for refugees from flooding caused by climate change and rising sea levels, privately rented now.

Chloe found a bench in the shade of a gnarly old chestnut tree, ate chips out of a cardboard clamshell, and watched people gathering around a makeshift stage where a scrawny old geezer in tattered jeans and T-shirt was setting up a microphone stand and a stack of speakers. Young children ran about, transformed by face paint into rabbits and tigers. A pair of policewomen watched indulgently. They were wearing new-issue stab vests, spun from tough self-healing collagen derived from a species of colonial polyp that rafted on Hydrot’s world ocean. The Met’s logo stamped in dark blue on the pearlescent material. High above, an errant balloon bobbed on an uncertain breeze, a silvery heart blinking random Morse code in the hot sunlight.

It reminded Chloe of the music festival where she’d first been kissed, seriously kissed, by a boy whose name she’d forgotten. She’d been, what, fourteen. A late starter, according to her mates. She remembered a Hindu procession that wound through the streets of Walthamstow to the temple each year: drummers, men with painted faces in fantastic costumes, men animating giant stick-puppets of gods and dragons. She remembered one Hallowe’en, the first after First Contact, when every other kid had dressed up as a Jackaroo avatar.

The geezer bent to the microphone, dreadlocks hanging around his face as he gave it the old one two one two. And a shadow fell across Chloe and someone said, ‘Give us a chip.’

She looked up, saw Eddie Ackroyd in his uniform of black jeans, black T-shirt and abraded and creased black leather jacket. His pallid face was shaded by a straw hat; his ghostly blue eyes swam behind slab lenses in heavy black frames.

‘The café’s over by the tennis courts,’ Chloe said. ‘You’ve plenty of time to get there and back before the fun starts.’

Eddie didn’t take the hint, settling beside her with a grunt and sigh, taking off his hat and fanning himself with it, fixing it back over greying hair he’d backcombed to hide a bald spot. He smelled of kif smoke and old sweat. The slogan on his T-shirt read I’m a secret lesbian.

‘Lostgirl X, large as life and twice as pretty. You may have taken the corporate shilling, but you still dress like you work the street. Kudos.’

‘When did you become the fashion police, Eddie?’

Chloe was wearing her usual weekend gear: baggy knee-length shorts, a market-stall T-shirt with a stencilled peace symbol, New Balance hiking shoes. Her messenger bag, one seam patched with Elephant tape, leaned against her thigh.

Eddie said, ‘I bet you still carry that little blade. The one you pulled on Gypsy Nick that time.’

‘Keep pushing me and you’ll find out.’

The members of this little cult were driven by urges they probably didn’t understand, prompted by some kind of alien algorithm or an eidolon, a memory fragment, that had crawled out of an Elder Culture artefact and infected them like bird flu, but they were also having fun. Chloe had been happy, waiting for them to put on their little show in the summer sunshine, but now Eddie Ackroyd’s sour little cloud was raining on her parade.

He said, ‘It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I don’t see you in the market or the Ten Bells…’

His fish-eyed stare reminded her that he was the kind of guy who liked to sneak a glance at your tits when he thought you weren’t looking

She said, ‘I guess we move in different circles now.’

‘And you don’t seem to be editing on LFM any more.’

‘You said that the last time you saw me, Eddie. Remember what I told you?’

Chloe resented his assumption that they were colleagues. They had both been part of the Last Five Minutes wiki since its early days, they were both in the Elder Culture business, but as far as she was concerned that was it.

When he didn’t answer her question, she said, ‘I quit. I have other things in my life now.’

‘We could use your help. There are still too many crazy people trying to impose their crazy ideas.’

‘That’s why I quit.’

It wasn’t the only reason. It wasn’t even the main reason, which was that she’d finally realised that she’d never find out what had happened to her mother, and she wasn’t angry about it any more. But yeah, she’d also become tired of dealing with the relentless bat-shit paranoia of the green-ink merchants, and she’d suspected that Eddie and some of the other editors had been actively colluding with them. Most of the people involved with the maintenance and curation of the LFM wiki had lost parents or partners or children; Eddie had become an editor because he loved conspiracy theories, liked to believe that he was one of the chosen few with special insights about the Jackaroo and the Spasm, the lone-gunman plague, the Big Melt, blah blah blah.

He said, ‘So how’s it going, running errands for those sociologists? Looking for stuff to prop up their theories — is that why you’re here? Or are you doing a little work on the side?’

‘I’m chasing a lead, Eddie. How about you?’

‘Well, right now I’m wondering if you’re following me.’

‘I might wonder the same thing about you.’

Eddie pointed his chin towards the people bustling around the stage. ‘I’ve been working on them for three weeks. And this is the first time I see you.’

‘You’ve been working on them? What does that mean? Interviewing them? Gaining their confidence? Becoming their best friend?’

‘I’ve been keeping close tabs on them. Recording their stories for a client. And now they’re about to reach critical mass, the first time they try to reach out to the world, you just happen to pitch up.’

‘It isn’t a secret,’ Chloe said. ‘They put it up on Facebook.’

It wasn’t much, a poster designed by someone who thought that rainbow gradients and dropshadowed text were cool. An image of a man with a Santa Claus beard photoshopped against a false-colour alien landscape overprinted with The Master Is Coming!!! in a shimmering banner, and a modest line of type stating time, date and place. A typical symptom of a small-scale breakout, but this one had caught her attention, she’d needed a distraction from the nonsense about the select committee, and here she was.

‘I found them,’ Eddie said, staring at her from beneath the brim of his hat, ‘the old-fashioned way. Asking questions, following leads. One of them from LFM, as a matter of fact. Someone who thinks they can predict significant breakouts. You would have seen it too, if you hadn’t “quit”.’

He actually drew the quote marks in the air.

‘I found them because they’re trying to reach out to everyone,’ Chloe said. She was amused by Eddie’s petulance, wondered if he’d already taken a down payment for something he knew he probably couldn’t deliver. ‘Don’t take it personally. Besides, it doesn’t look like they’re anything special.’

‘That’s what you think,’ Eddie said. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do. How we’ll sort out this little conflict of interest. I found them first, so I get first dibs on whatever these people are selling. After that, if your pointy-head academics want to interview them, add them to their database or whatever, it’s fine by me.’

Chloe smiled. ‘We aren’t in the playground, Eddie. If these people stumbled on something useful, came into possession of an active artefact or whatever, I’ll tell my boss, and he’ll make an offer. And you and your client, if you have a client, can do the same.’

Eddie stuck out his lower lip like a disappointed child. ‘So it’s like that.’

‘Same as it’s always been,’ Chloe said, ‘out here on the street.’

Eddie stalked off to a spot in the shade of a stack of shipping-container flatlets and fired up a small drone that wobbled away towards the stage. A tall young man wearing blue jeans and a black windcheater was chatting to the two policewomen. Chloe spotted the Bluetooth headset plugged into his right ear and guessed that he was from the Metropolitan Police’s Breakout Assessment Team, a junior officer who’d drawn the short straw and given up his Saturday afternoon kick-about to check out this little gathering.

Girls and boys in grey jumpers and black trousers or black skirts filed onto the stage and, conducted by a motherly woman in a dashiki, began to pipe out ‘Amazing Grace’ on recorders. Chloe dumped her half-eaten lunch in a recycling bin, put on her spex and walked towards the stage, and the guy in the black windcheater cut across the grass to intercept her, saying that he was surprised to see someone from Disruption Theory.

‘Isn’t this pretty vanilla for you guys?’

‘Everything’s a data point,’ Chloe said, quoting her boss, Daniel Rosenblaum.

‘Are you planning to interview Mr Archer and his acolytes?’

Chloe supposed that Mr Archer was the white-haired guy on the Facebook page. She said, ‘Would that be a problem?’

‘Depends on how they do. Probably not. What about Mr Ackroyd?’

‘You’ll have to ask him.’

‘I expect I will. Take care, Ms Millar.’

Just to let her know that he had her number.

The schoolkids ran through a pretty good version of ‘Scarborough Fair’, bowed to the scattering of applause and were led off the stage by their conductor. Chloe could feel an energy gathering in the little crowd. An MC took to the stage, an amazingly confident young woman dressed in a metallic silver leotard and black tutu who hunched into the microphone and to a backing track of car-crash rhythms began a rap about the great change coming and hard times ending. When she was done and the whoops and applause had died down she asked everybody to raise their hands for the man with the plan, the man who knew.

‘Give it up for Mr Archer. Mr Archer going to speak the truth to you right now.’

There was an awkward pause, some kind of hitch. The MC stood at the edge of the stage, talking to people, shaking her head. The sound system started to reprise the clanging smash of her backing music, then cut off abruptly. Several people were helping someone climb onto the stage.

Mr Archer was a slight old man wearing what was probably the suit he planned to be buried in. His white beard was neatly trimmed; his pink scalp showed through his cap of fine white hair. The MC ushered him to the microphone stand and he clung to it and looked around like a grandfather dazed with pleasure at his own birthday party. A hush fell over the small gathering.

Chloe’s spex were capturing everything. Eddie’s little drone hung in the sunlit air. The moment of silence stretched.

‘Uth,’ Mr Archer said. ‘Uth! Uth!’ And, ‘Penitent volume casualty force. Action relationship. Flow different. Uth! Uth!’

Most in the audience chanted Uth! Uth! too. Those who weren’t part of the cult, who hadn’t drunk the snake oil, looked at each other. A couple of kids in front of Chloe started to jeer.

Chloe felt a sinking sense of disappointment. She’d seen it all, in her time. Fiery-eyed preaching. A woman who spoke through a pink plush alligator. People standing face to face, staring into each other’s eyes, sharing significant gazes. Ritual bloodletting. A young girl walking amongst her followers with a silver wand, touching them at random, causing them to fall into faints and foaming fits. A hundred different attempts to express thoughts for which there were no human equivalents, no words in any known language. Speaking in tongues was commonplace. She’d seen it a dozen times.

Mr Archer spoke for some time, enthusiastically expounding his thesis in his private language, repeating his catchphrase at intervals, smiling as his followers chanted in response. The two kids who’d been jeering walked away; others followed. Chloe wondered how it would end, a procession or a mass hug or a conga line, but instead the old man simply stopped speaking, laboriously stepped down from the stage, and hobbled off at the centre of a cluster of acolytes. His audience gathered up their children and drifted towards the camp. They looked pleased. They had spoken in public. They had marked their territory. They had let out the ideas jostling in their heads, like that ancient rock star who’d shaken out a box of butterflies at an open-air concert in Hyde Park. Most of the butterflies had died, but it was the gesture that counted.

This was something that couldn’t be quantified by Disruption Theory’s surveys: the happiness of the people possessed by alien impulses and strange memes. The ecstasy of expression. The simple childlike joy of creating a channel or connection. Although the breakout was nothing special, Chloe was glad to be reminded of that. She took a flyer from one of the kids who were handing them out to the few non-believers who remained, slipped it into her messenger bag and got out of there while Eddie Ackroyd was packing up his drone.

It was too late to head back to Disruption Theory, and she was too buzzed to fold herself into her studio flat. She returned to the park’s café and sat with a carton of iced coffee and wrote up a short report on her tablet. She studied the flyer: the speaking-in-tongues Santa Claus, Mr Archer, photoshopped against an alien landscape, with a single word, BELIEVE, printed above his head. After a minute, she pulled up the copy of the Facebook page that had led her to the park. The same kind of landscape in the background, a cluster of towers or spires in some kind of red desert.

Chloe looked from screen to flyer, flyer to screen, then dropped the Facebook page into an image editor, cropped out a portion of the background and fed it into a search engine. Got a hit for the website, a bunch of old sci-fi flicks, landscape photos from the fifteen worlds gifted to the human race by the Jackaroo…And, hey, look at that, a set of images posted on a tumblr by someone calling themselves Mangala Cowboy. Drawings and paintings of red cliffs, dunes of red sand saddling away towards distant hills, a crowd of thorny spires glowing in orange sunlight. A view of the spires from a distance, a view from a high angle, as if from a plane or helicopter. The same spires at night, outlined in dabs of red phosphorescence. A close-up of thorny projections silhouetted against a pink sky. They looked like teeth, or the ends of broken bones. A tangle of grey vegetation with a fleck of incandescent yellow burning in its centre. A pavement of black slabs winding around red rocks. Some kind of room or space outlined in dense black scrawls. A flock of what might be balloons drifting across the freckled face of a fat sun. And over and over again, the same cliffs, the same dunes, the same spires.

One summer, fifteen years old, restless with self-pity and unexamined anger because she felt that the death of her mother, how her mother had died, had denied her any kind of ordinary life, Chloe had taken to cycling long distances. From Walthamstow into the City of London. Down the course of the River Lea, past the Olympic Park to Bow Creek, where she now worked. Across Epping Forest, through the banal suburban landscapes and strip malls of Enfield. She’d taken her bike on trains out to Kew and Richmond; once, one day close to midsummer, she’d ridden all the way to Amersham. And from Amersham she had cycled through a maze of B-roads into the Chilterns, and as the sun had begun to set she’d come out at the top of a ridge and seen a patchworked valley spread beyond: immemorial England parcelled into fields and stands of trees aglow in that magic hour when light is a property of the air. As if she had intruded on a secondary world, a fairyland where everything wore its True Name.

She felt that same vertiginous recognition now. A freezing pleasure, an emotion as deep and poignant as nostalgia for places she’d never before seen. And then she thought of Eddie Ackroyd, slouching like a malignant shadow through the displaced-persons camp, searching for Mangala Cowboy, and a sliding sense of urgency seized her and sent her hurrying through the late afternoon sunlight and the ordinary little park.

The stage and sound system had been cleared away, but a gang of little children were chasing each other across the dry grass and several pre-teen girls clustered around the bench under the chestnut tree, sharing images and clips on their phones. Chloe went up to them and got into a conversation with their leader, Niome, a sharp-faced girl dressed in pink shorts and a blue T-shirt, hair scraped up and exploding in an afroball at the top of her head. Chloe told her about Disruption Theory, asked about Mr Archer. Who’d just been this geezer until a couple of months ago, apparently. No bother to anyone, spent most of his time sitting outside his front door or in the café gossiping with other geezers. He carved stuff, Niome said, birds and shit like that from bits of wood. Sometimes gave them away, sometimes sold them in the local street market.

‘Then he started having meetings,’ Niome said. She was perched on the back of the bench, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and her bright red sneakers planted on the seat. ‘Him and a few geezers at first. Then other people too. It was like they were in church. Like Mr Archer was giving a sermon, or they were singing hymns. But in this funny language.’

Chloe asked her if she or her friends had ever gone to these meetings.

‘I didn’t,’ Niome said. ‘Get mixed up with that chump ranking? No way. But Bunny did. Her mum got caught up, and she took Bunny along. She played recorder today, didn’t you, Buns?’

Bunny was a shy plump girl who ducked her head and shrugged.

‘Tell her what it was like,’ Niome said.

Bunny shrugged again, pleased and embarrassed, said she couldn’t exactly explain.

Chloe showed the flyer to Niome, said that she was wondering who had made the picture.

‘Oh, that,’ Niome said. ‘That’s one of Freddie’s.’

Freddie Patel and his little sister, Rana, had come to live in the camp about three months ago. No sign of their parents, according to Niome, who didn’t seem to think it was anything unusual. Mr Archer was Freddie’s upstairs neighbour, she said, and the old man had taken a shine to him because of his drawings.

Chloe said, ‘Is he part of this thing of Mr Archer’s?’

‘He isn’t really part of anything.’

‘But he did the flyer for Mr Archer. And a poster they put up on Facebook.’

‘Yeah, but Freddie was never into Mr Archer’s church stuff. I mean, you never seen him there, did you, Buns?’

Bunny shook her head.

‘Freddie mostly keeps himself to himself,’ Niome said. ‘Man of mystery innit.’

‘Niome’s in love with Freddie,’ one of the other girls said, half-singing it in a teasing lilt, and Niome said, ‘I am so not. He’s lush, yeah, but he’s sort of weird, too.’

‘Weird in what way?’ Chloe said.

‘Like he’s lost in his head. You say hi to him, he say hi back. But otherwise it’s like he don’t see you.’

‘What about his sister?’

‘Oh, Rana’s just a cute little thing.’

‘A normal little girl.’

‘I guess.’

‘She doesn’t ever talk about ghosts, or anything similar?’

The stuff that encoded eidolons interacted with people’s optic nerves on some deep quantum level, generating weird, blurry images. Shadows and shapes. Ghosts and monsters.

Niome said, ‘I don’t think so. She’s just this little girl.’

Chloe said, ‘Have you seen anything weird, you and your friends?’

Niome laughed. ‘You mean like spooks and such?’

‘Or strange animals, strange noises, strange dreams.’

‘What kind of strange dreams?’

‘Dreams about the kind of places Freddie draws, for instance.’

Niome asked to see the flyer again. She studied it carefully, shook her head, showed it to her friends. ‘This mean anything to you?’

More head-shaking.

‘There’s this bunch of shiners who sit around the other end of the park,’ one of the girls said. ‘They see all kinds of stuff that isn’t there.’

‘She means ordinary people seeing, like, super-strange paranormal shit,’ Niome said, and smiled at Chloe. ‘If you want, we can ask around. Do some detecting.’

The girl was bright and bold and inquisitive, far more together than Chloe had been at her age. It occurred to her that Niome had never known a time when there hadn’t been aliens in the sky and a lottery for easy travel to other planets. It made her feel old.

She gave one of her cards to Niome, and a couple of five-pound coins for her help. Niome asked if that meant she was one of Disruption Theory’s informers now.

Chloe said, ‘Be sure to let me know if you hear about any super-strange stuff. Meanwhile, how about pointing me at Freddie’s home?’

It was in the nearest cluster of container flatlets. The steel boxes had big windows at either end and were stacked side by side in an L shape three storeys high, with steel-mesh walkways on the inner side. People sat on stairs, in open doorways. The mingled murmur of TVs and radios, a domestic hum and clatter.

Freddie Patel’s flatlet was in the middle of the second storey of the short arm of the L. Like most of its neighbours, its window and glass-panelled door were blanked with curtains. Freddie Patel twitched the heavy blue material aside when Chloe rapped on the glass, then cracked the door open to ask what she wanted.

He looked much younger than she’d expected, a slender teenager a good head taller than her, dressed in cargo shorts and an oversized T-shirt. When Chloe showed him the flyer and asked if he was the artist, his suspicious look darkened.

‘Who wants to know?’

Chloe introduced herself, speaking quickly before he could shut the door in her face. ‘The people I work for are interested in happenings, festivals, that kind of thing. Like the one here today? I was wondering if you could help me, answer a few standard questions for a survey. It will only take a couple of minutes, I promise. And there’ll be a small payment for your time and trouble.’

‘Mr Archer’s meeting? I wasn’t even there. You want to know about that, you should talk to him,’ Freddie Patel said.

He was looking past her, scanning the walkway as if expecting to see someone else. Over his shoulder, Chloe could see a wedge of wall tiled with a mosaic of mostly red drawings.

She said, ‘You helped Mr Archer with his flyer. His website, too.’

‘So?’

‘It caught my attention. It’s a sweet piece of work. Would you mind talking about it? Your inspiration, and so on,’ Chloe said, putting on her spex.

‘You want to record this?’

‘It’s our standard procedure. I mentioned a small payment, didn’t I?’

‘No way.’

‘That’s okay, we can do it without,’ Chloe said, and made a big deal of taking off her spex and folding them away. Hoping that she’d got a nice steady shot of the pictures.

A chubby little girl of four or five, cute as a button in dungarees with an appliqué flower on the bib, came up behind Freddie and gave Chloe a bold stare. When Chloe said hi she looked away, looked back. Ringlets tangled over her forehead. A piece of paper was crumpled in one fist.

Chloe said to Freddie, ‘Is this your sister?’ Said to the little girl, ‘How are you, sweetie? Rana, right?’

‘I made a drawing,’ the little girl said, and held up the multicoloured scrawl so that Chloe and her brother could inspect it. A red string was tied around her chubby wrist, a single green bead threaded on it.

Freddie told her, ‘I’ll take a look in a minute. Go on inside now.’

‘Ugly Chicken says she’s nice,’ the little girl said.

Freddie’s tone hardened. ‘Go on inside. Now.’

The little girl waved bye-bye, hand flapping at her wrist, and toddled away.

Chloe said, ‘So your sister’s an artist too.’

‘Exactly what is it you’re trying to sell me?’

Freddie Patel was attempting to project an attitude, but he looked away when Chloe met his gaze. He didn’t have the fuck-you stare of a real street kid.

‘I work for a little company, Disruption Theory. Here’s my card,’ she said.

Freddie glanced at it, shrugged.

‘You can check out our website, see that we’re totally valid. What I’m interested in, all I’m interested in, are your pictures. If you have anything else like the flyer, I’d love to see them, talk about them.’

‘No way,’ Freddie said again, and started to close the door.

Chloe said quickly, ‘Maybe I could buy one.’

‘You don’t go away, I’ll call the police,’ Freddie said, and the door clicked shut and the curtain fell.

Chloe wrote call anytime on the back of the card Freddie hadn’t taken from her, and stuck it between the glass door and its frame. A bare-chested man sitting on a canvas stool at the end of the walkway was watching her. She resisted the urge to give him the finger and went down the stairs, feeling that something or someone was tracking her, following her through the stacks of containers and into the park beyond. But when she looked around, half-expecting to see Eddie Ackroyd or his damn drone, there was no one there.