Ink

by Hal Duncan

  He sits in one of the leather armchairs I have positioned on either side of the window in my office, facing each other for just such conversations, just such confessions. It's our third or fourth meeting. Sorry, I find it hard to keep a straight line to my thoughts these days.

  “We were like children playing in the Illusion Fields,” he continues. “Let's pretend. One day we'd be soldiers in the First World War—Captain ‘Mad’ Jack Carter, Private Thomas Messenger. Another day, I'd be a seraphim sent to hunt him down across this weird graey version of Amorica. We'd lie in bed together and go to sleep in this world, only to wake up in a town called Endhaven, among black-suited refugees from a nanotech apocalypse. We've been shepherds in Arcadia and rent boys on the streets of Sodom, Doc. I've crossed deserts wider than the world because he dared me. I've led armies to destruction because he was in danger. I remembered it all—Christ, it was like being born again—as I was standing there at his funeral, listening to the Minister spout his bullshit. We've lived a million lives and always ended up together, whatever fold of the Vellum we were in.”

  What he's describing is a psychotic break, a retreat from the horror of reality into elaborate fantasies of eternity.

  “And in these other…folds,” I say, “Puck didn't die?”

  “Oh, no,” says Jack. “He always dies. You should know that, Reynard. You should remember too.”

  THE UNDECIDED WORLD

  It's three in the morning and I should be in bed, but I've always been a night owl, so instead I'm getting out of my car and crunching through the snow into the all-night convenience store to buy a pack of cigarettes I could probably wait until tomorrow morning for. Melissa's on duty again and I smile.

  “Hi, Melissa.”

  She's in her early twenties, drop-dead gorgeous and a total flirt for my accent. First time I came in, she was chatting to a friend when I asked her if they stocked Regals. She started interrogating me about where I was from, what I was doing here, how long I was staying, charmingly excited by this stranger in a strange land.

  “Say my name,” she said finally.

  “Melissa?” I said, confused.

  “Say it again.”

  “Melissa?”

  “Gosh, it sure sounds so much better the way you say it than the folks round here.”

  Outside, I tap a cigarette out of the packet and light it before I slip back into the driver's seat of my car, pull the door shut, blow out a billow of smoke. I reach up to adjust the rearview mirror and, leaning into it, I see my own reflection. I don't have any horns. I don't have to touch my shoulders to know that my wings are also absent. I have a passing notion that there's something wrong about this—should I be disturbed?—but then I realize that, of course, of course, this is just what Jack was telling me about. We all live simultaneously in a myriad of folds, those on Aerth dreaming of Havens for their dead, those in the Havens dreaming of Aerths for those alive. So, then, there's nothing really strange about the cat's eyes looking back at me from the rearview mirror; it all makes perfect sense.

  The world just hasn't decided which reality it wants to be.

  The next morning, as I potter through my daily ritual of Earl Grey and waffles with maple syrup, I'll notice the pack of cigarettes on the kitchen table and remember the dream and the normality that inspired it. I'll remember this feeling of satori I had in my slumber—the world hasn't decided—and find it funny. My subconscious, it seems, is rather enamored of Jack's delusion.

  I'll shake it off, of course. I'll look in the mirror at my horns and wings, my reassuringly human eyes, and all will be right with the world. Jack's psychosis is just that—psychosis. It's strange that in these other folds he has imagined for the two of them Puck dies; it jars with the usual pattern of denial delusions; but I'll figure it out in time, as we carry on our sessions.

  I don't realize that more dreams like this will come, more frequent, more intense, over the next few weeks, until I am no longer sure that they are dreams at all.

  “I think you know I'm right,” says Jack. “You're just not willing to take the plunge yet. You're just not willing to admit it.”

  “So you're saying that you're sane? It's the rest of us who're crazy?”

  He shrugs, grins.

  “One of the folds I knew Puck in—Endhaven—it had these windmills up on a hill outside of town. He told me once he used to imagine they were giants when he was a kid and I said, well, you know, they might be. It's like Don Quixote… but like in that movie where what's-his-face thinks he's Sherlock Holmes in 1970s New York. George C. Scott. He says to his shrink, you know, maybe Quixote was right. They might just be windmills. But they might be giants. I think maybe they're both. Maybe the world hasn't decided yet. They could—what's up?”

  My pen is stopped over my notepad. The world hasn't decided yet. My jaw may not be literally dropped, but the shock of the synchronicity is clearly showing on my face. I shake my head, try to laugh it off.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  That night I have another dream.

  INSANITY IS A CITY

  Insanity is a city, he thinks, a haunting, hounding maze of monsters given stone flesh. Madness made real. Angels rumbling with demons. Gods with wings of steel sweeping down out of the skies to scatter humanity to dust.

  He staggers out of the alley, coat gripped closed with whiteknuckled hands. Behind him, the angel's screams are dying into a gurgle of blood in a throat, drowning in the baying of the mob. Insanity is a city, he thinks.

  He walks down cobbled streets, through shaded courtyards, wide plazas of marble flagstones with stone benches and ornamental fountains, barren trees and snow-mantled statues. There are tram stops, bus stops, but he has no money for this fold, so he just watches where the rattling dinosaur-machines go lumbering, and follows the ones whose frontboards proclaim Stadde Cintrale, until he reaches what may or may not be the city center with its shops and arcades, pedestrian precincts, a tourist center with racks of maps and bus routes. He picks up one of each—thirty, forty of them—filling his pockets with numbered trails that snake through this district or that quarter. All he wants is to find somewhere he feels safe. He has nothing here but the clothes on his back and a book whose only purpose now is to carry the reminder of his name, scrawled on its frontispiece.

  He clutches the Book of All Hours to his chest, his last connection with his own identity.

  It used to be a book of maps, he's sure. He's sure he can remember a time when it was a book of maps, each turned page showing the world at an exponentially increasing scale—streets, cities, countries, continents, and larger still, impossibly larger, vast fields of reality like the surface of some gas giant, page after page scaling up to inconceivable distances. A guidebook to eternity, to the Vellum.

  He remembers graving human lives as glyphs upon its parchment.

  He remembers cramming its yellowed surface with sigils that crawled across the page even as the people that they marked moved through their daily lives.

  He remembers these gravings multiplying into a storm of ink, obscuring the terrain drawn underneath, skittering here and there as if they sought to tell, in combination, some strange, shifting story of Evenfall.

  Then the Hinter came, and he lost… what did he lose?

  The last time he looked, every page in the Book of All Hours was as blank as the white waste of snow and bone around him, featureless plains of vellum stretching out beneath his fingers, his own glyph fading to gray. Sitting at the last remnants of his burnt-down campfire, hypothermia blurring his mind, he'd scrawled his name in charcoal on the opening page before passing out, a message to whoever found his body.

  “Es mortu,” he'd heard a voice say.

  “Neh, es liffen.”

  Then he'd woken up in the city, in a hospital of sorts. He'd taken his clothes out of the locker by his bed, put them on, picked up the Book and just walked out the door, into a city at the end of time, where mobs of teenagers broke the wings of angels in the alleyways
, tortured them for sport.

  A homeless man sits huddled at the entrance to a covered escalator which glides down, step turning over step, to the subway station at the foot of an elaborate iron bridge of electric candelabra streetlights and wrought heraldry emblazonings. Posters for gigs and clubs peel from its square stone pillars and Reynard watches the people passing into and out of the brown perspex entrance with its garish orange “U” for underground; some of them wear suits, others dress casual, but all of them look soft, middle-class—even the ones in ripped, badged thriftwear. Across the bridge a Gothic spire rises up from among a jumble of sandstone walls, slate roofs and branches. A pine-furniture shop sits beside the stone steps that lead down, parallel to the escalator, to the car park and grass patched with snow around the subway station. It's a university district of lecturers and students, professional bohemians and bohemian professionals. The street map that he carries shows a large park down there to the south, nestling in a nook of river, a good place to sleep rough if it comes to that, if he can't find a doorway to shelter him from the Hinter night.

  He's standing, leaning on the bridge, and trying to stop his shakes—as he has been for the last ten minutes—when he feels the hand on his shoulder.

  “Nove migres?”

  It's the homeless man. Reynard shrugs, shakes his head, blithers desperate apologies, his body still shaking with that tension between laughter and tears, I don't understand. I don't understand. He trails his fingers through his hair.

  “Peregrim nove en de stadde, ev? Tu ne sprash lingischt?”

  “No.” He sort of understands. “No, I don't speak the language.”

  And the man reaches into his cup and gives him, with a toothless grin, a goldish coin.

  “Per kave,” he says, pointing over the bridge at God knows what. “Kave, ev?”

  He lifts the cup to his lips, tilts it once, twice. Kave.

  Reynard nods dumbly, realizes that the tension has released itself; he's both laughing and crying as he says, “Thank you. Thank you.”

  OUT OF FABLE AND FOLKLORE

  My last meeting with Jack was even less official than the first, not even a meeting as much as a farewell. It was months later and the wounds on his back had long since healed. Apart from the scarred stumps on his forehead and the eerie absence of wings, which gave him the somewhat eldritch appearance of a graey straight out of fable and folklore, he was quite healthy, physically speaking. Stretching his arms out wide and arching his back as he stood just outside the sliding glass doors of the hospital entrance, as if gathering the morning-fresh air and the future to him, he had a limber grace, moving the way an athlete does, entirely at one with his body. He looked over his shoulder as the porter whirled his wheelchair away, back through the doors into the hospital.

  “Thank fuck,” Jack had said. “Christ, I'm not a fucking cripple.”

  I'd shrugged, smiled wryly. He'd complained about being wheeled all the way to the door.

  “Hospital policy, Jack. Insurance.”

  “I'm fucking fine,” he'd said.

  I knew, of course, that he still considered himself a changeling, but by now I also knew that he was not entirely insane in this respect. A little, but not entirely. No more so than I myself.

  “I'm fucking fine,” says Jack. “Peachy keen.”

  As he stretches, rolling his shoulder blades like a rower, for some reason I have “Could We Start Again Please?” from Adonis Christ Superstar running through my head. Not exactly the sort of music you hear on the hospital radio here, not in this corner of Amorica so touchy about faith and blasphemy. A white cloud condenses in the chill morning air, the whistle of the tune under my breath. Sometimes, I must confess, I miss the old country and its heathen irreverence; I want to hijack the radio and pump the Sex Pistols out across the wards at full blast. I told Jack once about that idea and he nearly pissed himself laughing.

  “So what the fuck are you doing here?” he'd asked. “I mean, what the fuck is an old public school rebel doing out here in the Midwest… in the middle of fucking nowhere?”

  “I rather suppose I was looking for a fresh start,” I'd said.

  A sloughing rustle of snow slips from the overloaded branch of a tree to land on the bonnet of a car—sorry, the hood of a car. Beyond the parking lot, the mist and the shadows of the tree line meld into a bleak gray nothing.

  The Hinter is harsher here too than it was back home.

  “You should go home,” says Jack. “Back to Albion. You know you don't really belong here. You, me, Puck… we never belonged here.”

  I don't answer. Later I'll go back to my office and I'll sit there looking at the copy of the Book of All Hours I keep on the shelf behind my chair, now lifted down and laid upon my desk. Later I'll lock my door and twirl the blind closed to hide me from any passing prurient eyes and from the backward golden lettering on the glass which reads GUY REYNARD CARTER, MD, PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSULTANT. I'll open a window and I'll drag my chair into the center of the room, so I can stand on it to lever the batteries from the smoke detector, so I can have a cigarette as I leaf through the pages of the Book. Later.

  Right now I don't want to think about what I've learned from Jack in the two and a half months he's been my patient. Right now I don't want to think of the realities of the Havens out there in the Hinter, not some mythical paradise, some pie in the sky when you die, but Havens as real as any Haven can be, ruled by gods as real as any god can be. A vast realm of eternity and scattered fortress worlds within it—Havens—like this one. So I just throw a question back at him.

  “What about you?” I say. “Where will you go?”

  He shrugs.

  “Maybe the question should be when,” he says.

  “You don't notice how the world keeps changing?” says Jack.

  It's our fourth—maybe fifth—session and he's starting to really open up, it seems. We're really making progress, digging down into his changeling delusion and the cause of it, why he insists he's not a faery but a graey, stolen at birth from another world, from another fold of this Vellum. They altered him to fit in, he thinks, added the wings and the horns so he didn't look like a freak here. Or something. Sometimes it seems so clear, he says, but he keeps forgetting. Like his memory is being fucked with. I've just finished telling him that this kind of denial is as natural as the desire that makes him different from all the other good ole boys—the White Angelo-Satyr Protestants who inhabit most of Midwestern Amorica. It's genetic, I've been telling him; he was born a faery, and all the bornagains and bookthumpers can't change him, shouldn't even try. There's nothing wrong with his renegade lust, no matter what they say. He doesn't need to be cured.

  “Jack, all you have to do is look in a mirror. Look at the glimmer of your eyes, the golden glamour of your skin. You're a faery.”

  He shakes his head. Condensation on the window of my office, flurrying snow beyond it, the world outside is whitewashed, a blank page.

  “Christ, Doc,” he says. “I wish I knew the word that would wake you, make you realize that you're living in a fucking dreamtime. I'd sing it from the fucking rooftops.”

  DEAD CHANNELS, WHITE NOISE

  I pull the car over to the side of the road, where the signpost proudly proclaims that we are now entering North Manitu. A picture of a cowboy in denims and checked shirt welcomes us, the archetypal Marlboro man with a lasso looping over his head, eagle wings outstretched behind him. Beyond the sign the landscape is low rolling hills, barren trees and snow.

  I lean over the back of the seat.

  “Where are we? What does the Book say?”

  Puck lounges across the backseat, head in Jack's lap, the Book of All Hours open in his own, a joint dangling from his lips.

  “Fucked if I know,” he says. “This thing's gone weird.”

  Puck turns the Book toward me and I see that it's changed; the pages that once held maps to guide us through this endless Vellum have long since been made illegible by my annotations, but this is
new. The annotations squirm and wriggle on the page as if alive. Maybe we should turn back, I think. Try another route. But the clouds rolling in behind us are the gray of wet slate, and there are rumbles in the distance. If we just push on, then with a little luck we might reach a motel before the night comes in, before the Hinter sweeps over us.

  “When did it change?” I say. “How far back?”

  Puck shakes his head. He looks worried.

  “I can't remember. Shit, Guy, I can't remember.”

  I sit at my kitchen table in my boxer shorts, smoking a cigarette and drinking a glass of water, flicking through the dead channels on the television. The cable's on the blink, it seems, probably a power-out in a transmitter somewhere—I don't know, some technical fault that probably won't get fixed until the weather's cleared; it never does. Anyway, I can't get CNN, ABC or any of the nationals, only the local public access and North Manitu State TV with its ads for farming goods emporiums that sell everything you could need…