Excerpt from Kraken

INTO SLEEP’s BENTHOS AND DEEPER. A SLANDER THAT THE DEEPEST parts are lightless. There are moments of phosphor with animal movement. Somatic glimmers, and in this trench of sleep those lights were tiny dreams.

A long time sleep, and blinks of vision. Awe, not fear.

Billy might surface and for a moment open his flesh eyelids not his dream ones, and two or three times saw people looking down at him. he heard always only the close-up swirl of water, except in deep dream once through muffling miles of sea a woman said, “When’ll he wake?”

He was night-krill was what he was, a single miniscule eye, looking at absence specked with presence. Plankton-Billy saw an instant’s symmetry. A flower of limbflesh outreaching. Slivers of fin on a mantle. Red rubber meat. That much he knew already.

He saw something small or in the distance. Then black after black, then it came back closer. Straight-edged, hard-lined. An anomaly of angles in that curved vorago.

It was the specimen. It was his kraken, his giant squid quite still – still in suspension in its tank, the tank and its motionless dead-thing contents adrift in deep. Sinking toward where there is no below. The once-squid going home.

One last thing, that might have announced itself as such, the finality was so unequivocal. Something beneath the descending tank, at which from way agove though already deep in pitch tiny Billy-ness stared.

Under the tank was something utter and dark and moving, something so slowly rising, and endless.

from China Mieville, Kraken

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