Ink

by Hal Duncan

  “My tractor goes with my hat!” a madman celebrates.

  I've just woken from another of the dreams and I could use some mind-numbing TV to fill my thoughts with white noise. I dreamed that Thomas Messenger and I were traveling across these folds Jack talks about. We'd been traveling forever using the Book of All Hours as a guide. It wasn't the Book I know, no Titania and Oberon in Eden, no Adonis dying on the cross for our sins; instead, it was all maps and arcane squiggles I'd learned to decipher over the aeons of our travel. Only the Book had changed and now we were lost, ended up stopping in a motel for the night.

  I switch off the TV and put the remote down on the counter, knocking over a saltcellar as I do so. I take a pinch of the spilled salt and flick it over my left shoulder out of habitual superstition, to guard against what spirits lurking in the night I don't know.

  “Follow me,” says Jack. “Come on.”

  He takes off down the hospital corridor, striding forward, turning to walk backward now and then as he urges me to keep up. He lopes down the steps of the stairwell with the rhythm of a cantering horse, heading down to the basement level. I protest, try to tell him that he's not supposed to be down here. This area's for staff only.

  “Jack,” I say. “Where do you think you're going?”

  The door of the morgue swings shut as he whirls inside, and I push through after him, sighing. The complaint stops on my lips as I find myself in a room that stretches out in front of me and to both sides, forever. Cadavers lie on slabs in rows and columns that cannot be counted there's so many of them. Wisps of steam rise from open mouths where, here and there, a sheet is folded down. I've never actually been down here in all my years working at the hospital, I realize; I've never needed to. Given that it's as cold as it is creepy, I'm quite glad of that.

  “What is it, Jack?” I say. “What's so important?”

  “You don't think there's something strange here?” he says. “All these bodies?

  There's millions of them, Guy, millions.”

  I look around, unfazed.

  “We're in the morgue,” I say. “What do you expect?”

  “Look at their faces,” he says.

  Every one of them, I realize, is Puck's.

  I wake up crying.

  You understand, I was there when they brought Thomas Messenger into the hospital, having a fly smoke in the ambulance bay outside the ER as the van pulled up, siren blaring, and the place erupted into a chaos of paramedics and doctors, clattering trolley, swinging doors. I caught a glimpse of his face, bloodied and broken, but with streaks of clear skin visible under his eyes where the tears had washed away the gore.

  I didn't recognize him.

  I walked past the room where he was on the ventilator, lying in a coma for a full week; I looked in and saw him there, his swollen face under the mask, and still I didn't recognize him. I watched the news report as they gradually revealed the horror of this hate crime, and they showed him in a family photo, smiling, with his green hair and his kid horns. I still didn't recognize him.

  I'd never met Thomas Messenger. I'd never met Puck in this fold.

  ROSEWATER AND LICORICE

  Reynard sits in the cafe, sipping at the thick sweet tar somewhere between Italian espresso and Turkish coffee. Hints of rosewater and licorice, bitter sediment at the bottom. On the tabletop, the book is open in front of him, at the first page, where his charcoal name is smeared. He's just about to turn the page to see— just to see—if it has anything to say, when a hand comes down on top of his own and the man with dirty-blond hair scrapes a chair up beside him, sits in it and says:

  “Sure and ye'd be better not to do that right now, not here where everyone and anyone could see it, like. Because you and me both know what that book is, sure—Christ and I could smell the angel skin a mile off—and, well, let's just say there's some as would cut your right arm off just to get their greasy fookin fingers on it. Not their right arm, mind. Yours.”

  The man peels Reynard's hand from the book, picks it up and closes it, slides it back across the table toward him.

  “So ye'd be best to keep that tucked away for now. Christ, don't ye know that there's a fookin war on? The Covenant's fallen. Every fookin angel bastard wants to be fookin top dog now and you're flashing the fookin Book about like it's yer journal of wanky teenage poetry, by Christ.”

  Reynard puts the book in his pocket, numb with questions.

  “King Finn,” says the man. “So you'll be Guy Fox then, or is it Reynard yer calling yerself just now? Sure and I don't suppose it matters, does it? It's all the fookin same.”

  He waves at a waiter.

  “Kave, grazzis.”

  Reynard finds himself shaking hands.

  The Irishman settles back in his chair.

  “No doubt yer a little confused and all, having only just arrived right in the middle of things, but sure and isn't that life for ye? It'd be nice to think that the little folk like yerself and yours truly would be in on the grand schemes of the Powers That Be right from the off, but sadly that's not the way it works. No, we're just the ones wake up one day and realize that the world's gone fookin mental and it's us that has to deal with the big bag of shite the Powers That Be have only gone and got us all up to our eyeballs in.”

  He takes out a pack of unfiltered Camels, taps them on the table and pulls a cigarette out with his lips.

  “Right so. All ye have to know just now is that Thomas is dead. Sure and ye remember Thomas, right? Nice lad, bit light on his feet and short on the common sense but a heart of fookin gold, ye know?”

  Reynard remembers.

  “North Manitu,” he says. “Laramie.”

  “Fookin everywhere,” says King Finn. “They killed him fookin everywhere.”

  “Who?” says Reynard.

  Finn points the cigarette at him.

  “Jesus, but isn't that the million-dollar question? Who and why and when and where and what the fook has his dying done to the whole fookin Vellum. One little thread and the whole fookin thing falls apart, Christ. Sure and who'd have thought a short-arse fairy with his head in the fookin clouds would've left such a bloody big hole in reality?”

  He takes a book of matches out of his packet, tears off a match and folds the flap over to wedge the match tight against the sandpaper as he flicks it into a hiss of flame. Tobacco crackles as he lights the cigarette.

  “But if I could make sense of it to ye here and now, I would, believe me, but, ye see, that's your job—if ye'll take it, like. And seeing as how yer carrying the Book about with ye, I hate to say it, but I think ye'll find it's what yer meant to do. To make sense of it all, like.”

  The Irishman takes his coffee from the waiter, smiles and nods his thanks.

  “ ‘Cause sure and it doesn't make any fookin sense to the rest of us,” he says. “The Evenfall was bad enough, but this is fookin chaos. Fookin Hinter. Jesus, but I hate the fookin Hinter.”

  GOD BLESS AMORICA

  “You know it's always Hinter,” says Jack. “You realize that, right?”

  “It might seem that way,” I say, “but it's only a quarter of the year, Jack.”

  “Yeah?” he says. “So what did you do last summer? You didn't take a vacation, did you?”

  “Well, no, I didn't get a chance,” I say. “Couldn't get away.”

  “So you just worked through it, right? And the summer before that?”

  “Well, the hospital was busy. I ended up—”

  “Really? Christ, when was the last time you had a vacation, Guy? When was the last time you were out of state? How long have you been working in this hospital?”

  “Five years, I think. Give or take. Why?”

  “Have you been out of state at all in any of those years? Have you even been out of town? When was the last time you sat in a park and watched a butterfly?”

  I smile. It's true, I realize, that I haven't had a summer vacation in all the time I've been working here, but I have had trips outside of town. W
hy, I have crystal-clear memories of returning from a conference over in…what's-it-called? Anyway, I remember stopping off on the way home, at the Safe Haven Motel out on the interstate.

  I hand the clerk behind the counter my griftcard and wait as she swipes it through the machine, watches the till monitor for the all-clear. My fingers are crossed in my jacket pocket; the card belongs in another fold entirely, but it should, I hope, be able to adapt to this old system, stalling for time while it hacks the network, finds a suitable host and sets up an account with all the credit we'll need. Looks just like a normal Visa too. I used to feel a little guilty about this scam, but it's rare for two folds to have exactly the same currency, and even in eternity we need to eat and sleep.

  And I am tired. We must have driven for forty hours straight with the night roaring in at our back and only the Hinter wilderness around us, fields with split-rail fences half buried in snow, advertising hoardings for beer and cigarettes. Churches with flags. Crosses aglow with Christmas lights that are just a little too much like dots of flame for my liking. Finally we found the Safe Haven Motel here on the interstate. GOD BLESS AMORICA lettered on the VACANCIES sign.

  As the receipt prints with a rattling chatter from the antiquated machine, I accept the card back with a smile and a thank-you, take the keycards for our rooms and hand two of them over my shoulder to Jack, who passes one on to Puck.

  “Of course I've been out of town,” I say. “For a conference. I was over in…”

  I trail off, drawing a blank on the name of the city just thirty miles north of Laramie.

  “You should try taking a trip,” says Jack. “See how far you get before the fog makes you turn back.”

  “The road's closed today,” I say. “They don't think they'll get it open for a week or so. But maybe next week I'll take a run up to…”

  I still can't remember the name of that city just down the road. But I do remember going there for the conference. At least, I remember the Hinter conditions getting so bad on the way back home it seemed insane to risk the final stretch, better to stop somewhere and wait it out till morning. I remember seeing the Safe Haven Motel on the edge of town, lit up in the night. God Bless Amorica, indeed.

  “Why did you come here, Guy?” says Jack. “When did you come here?”

  “You know, it's nice to see young men who're not ashamed to show their faith,” says the clerk. “Too many cynics in the world, if you ask me.”

  There's a confused moment before she points at the Book under Puck's arm; and I'm still a little confused, to be honest, as I mutter some vague but amiable affirmations. Upstairs in my room, that confusion is partly answered, partly deepened, by the Gideon's Book of All Hours I find in the bedside cabinet. The Book has always been this singular and secret thing we carry, Puck and Jack and I, through folds where no one even knows its name. Now here it suddenly shows up as a commonplace, a giveaway Gospel in a motel room. I don't know what worries me more—the printed pretender on the bedside cabinet, or the fact that the real Book has changed as if to camouflage itself among the fakes. Or that the three of us have also changed to fit into this fold, it seems, in a way that's never happened until now.

  My reflection in the window has gray wings and ram's horns curling from my forehead, an image of some strange sprite ghosted over the winter-dark night outside. Jack's pinions are golden brown, an eagle's. Puck, leaning against the jamb of the connecting doorway, has an iridescent shimmer to his peacock wings, and somehow I know it is a good thing they were hidden from the clerk beneath his oversize parka.

  I have a bad feeling about this fold.

  “What the fuck's going on with the separate rooms for me and Puck,” asks Jack. “You going Bible-basher on us, Guy?”

  I have the Book open on my lap, the Gideon's in my hand, comparing the identical texts. In the beginning…

  “Just trust me on this one, Jack,” I say. “It's only for one night; we'll move on tomorrow morning … early. So go get some sleep. I want to try and figure out what's going on here.”

  THE BOUNDARIES OF THOUGHT

  Reynard moves into his small flat in the West End university district and, funded by the crazy Irishman, he begins his job. He papers the wall with the maps, the bus routes, the tram routes as a start, laying them out so that they overlap and building them up in layers, realizing quickly that none of them actually quite work together. In isolation they make sense, but they contradict each other. This road is on one, not on another; on a third it's in a different place entirely. Two buses follow the same route but have stops labeled with street names in entirely different orders. He starts to think of traffic lights here as sitting not at junctions but at disjunctions; while one set is green the flow of one reality goes on, only to halt when the light turns red and a different set of truths pull away to stream straight on or round the corner, horns blaring as one cuts in in front of another.

  A consensus reality with no consensus, he thinks. A world in flux because it's trying to be all things to everyone.

  ——

  He learns the language—the lingischt—and buys a library of opposing histories from the secondhand bookshops in the area, ripping out pages—more maps, geopolitical, cultural—marking the boundaries of thought in the spread of shelves around his flat—mathematics, physics, geology, chemistry, biology, psychology, archaeology, philosophy, metaphysics, pataphysics—spreading out of the study and into his hall, his living room, his bedroom, pages from volume after volume of encyclopedia or telephone directory. Newssheets and printouts from the Web. Transcripts of interviews he holds in cafes with anyone who cares to talk about their memories of home, of where they were before they came to the city.

  “What's the last thing you remember?” he asks.

  “The Evenfall,” they say.

  As he builds his model of this mutual dreamtime he also hacks it back, scoring out inconsistencies, irrelevancies. His methods grow more experimental. He takes a sacred religious text and cuts it up with scissors, shuffling the phrases round until his suspicion is confirmed; it corresponds exactly with a Victorian cookbook of two thousand recipes, most involving lamb and red-wine sauce. He burns copy after copy of the same dictionary, and with each one the only scorched fragment that survives is a tiny piece of page containing the word lexicon. No definition, just the word. He scans books or downloads them from the Web, runs the texts through automatic translation programs, comparative searches, stylistic analyses. It takes him a while, of course, but he has eternity. He has eternity to understand what lies at the heart of the city's madness.

  In the end, he has a theory. It's not entirely consistent and it's nowhere near complete, but it's a damn sight more coherent and comprehensive than the world around them and it runs from about two million years BC up to August 4th, 2017. The day the Evenfall broke the boundaries between reality and dream.

  Now all he has to do is write it.

  The Book lies on the desk, his charcoal name now long since faded, barely a gray shadow. He picks up the needlepen, clips the ink cartridge in and flicks it on. It's special ink, according to Finn and the girl; he has a theory but he doesn't ask too many questions about where they got it, who they got it from.

  “You're ready?” she says.

  The girl, Anna—Anaesthesia, she calls herself—is dangerous, he's sure. King Finn only wants to see an end to the fighting, but she has a hard, warrior's stare, tough as the leather armor that she wears, a latter-day Joan of Arc. It's why he doesn't want to ask where she got the ink from, who she got the ink from.

  He runs the buzzing needlepen over the gray shadow of his name—or rather the composite of various possibilities he's long since settled on as his name—and it colors in, deep scarlety-purply black:

  Guy Reynard Carter.

  Above that he traces out the title in ornate and grandiose calligraphy, in keeping with the sheer audacity of the venture:

  The Book of All Hours.

  “I'm ready,” he says.

 
Beside the title page of this new, revised edition, the pile of foolscap-size sheets of blank vellum rises thick and high as four or five phonebooks piled one on top of another—scrap for his workings, loose leaves where he can make all the errors he wants. He takes the top sheet from the pile.

  He doesn't ask where she got the angel skin either.

  RED INK OVER PRINTED BLACK

  I lie, at the hearing, about Jack. I lie through my teeth, telling the chief of staff that the self-mutilation was a simple cry for attention, precipitated largely by his exclusion from the news reports, the prejudice that same absence implied even in the outpourings of shock and sympathy directed at the family. He felt a burning need to physicalize his grief and rage over the murder, I explain. Repression and denial. Sublimated sorrow. He's gone through the grieving process now, well on the road to recovery. He's still a bit fractured, conflicted, but all he needs is therapy and time to heal. Given time, a new whole Jack will emerge.