Ink

by Hal Duncan

  I can't keep him here, you see. No more than I could persuade Puck and Jack to wait out the Hinter indoors in my apartment, hidden from fay-bashing morons driven by fear and hatred strong enough to warp a road map to eternity into a rule-book for damnation. No more than I could stop myself from slipping, once they'd set out—for an adventure, Jack said—into this simulation of life I'm only now emerging from. I don't think I can stay here myself… assuming I can leave, that is. One man's haven is another man's hell.

  “You're free to go,” I tell Jack after the meeting.

  “You're shitting me.”

  “Nope. I told them you were sane.”

  He laughs, looks at me in shock—you fucking believe me—and laughs again. I suppose I wasn't entirely lying, any more than Jack is entirely insane.

  ——

  Up on a desolate hillside just outside of town, a split-rail fence is burning, petrol flames flicking high into the sky, a bonfire and a personal pyre of rage against the Hinter night and a haven of hate. I can hear him whoop and holler, roar, as he swings the petrol can around his head and throws it far off into the darkness, but Jack himself is little more than a silhouette. As he throws his arms out wide like a scarecrow, screaming obscenities, profanities, blasphemies, there's a hellish truth to him, I think.

  And as his cathartic inferno lights a slant of angular face, his obscenities, his profanities, his blasphemies turn to sobs and laughter, invocations of his lost love that break my heart as I sit here in the car, the engine idling, my hands shaking so much I know I cannot write those actual words of rogue desire without dissolving.

  “You know you don't really belong here,” Jack had said.

  I hadn't answered then, because I didn't really have an answer, and I still don't. I sit in my office now after seeing him off, cigarette in hand as I leaf through my copy of the Book. It's useless as a guidebook now—useless here anyway; it doesn't tell me where I am, where I might be going—just a morass of myth and morphology. But maybe it'll change again once I get it away from this place. If it doesn't… well, I write these words in it now, scribbling in red ink over printed black: an annotation, an exegesis of Puck's murder, Jack's madness and my awakening, to bury the hateful dogma in.

  It doesn't belong in my Book of All Hours.

  In the beginning, the first chapter of the Book of All Hours begins, in this world. But how can you begin a story with the beginning of all beginnings? How can we understand a story that claims to be the beginning of all stories? Better to simply pick a random point in time and space, in all the vellum and the ink that covers it, and begin.

  “Jump in,” I say.

  Jack shakes his head. Hands on the roof above my head, he leans down to the window, weight on one leg, a cocky angle to his stance.

  “Road's blocked,” he says. “You'll never get out by car. I'm headed that way, Guy. You ought to come with me.”

  He points past the burning pyre of the fence where they murdered Puck, way out into the Hinter. It looks so dark, so cold, I can't imagine anyone surviving such a desolate landscape. He might walk an eternity before arriving at another Haven. Then again, perhaps that's what he wants. Perhaps that's what he needs.

  “I don't think that's my path,” I say. “Not yet.”

  I look at the Book of All Hours on the passenger seat beside me, and I realize we both have the same delusion now, Jack and I. Somewhere deep inside I think— I really think—that I might still find our Puck again by studying the Book. It was the Book that brought us together in the first place, after all; it was the Book that led me to Puck, that led the two of us to Jack. A million folds in the Vellum, Jack had said, and in everyone of them Puck dies; but while neither of us will say it out loud, we both suffer under the hope that perhaps there's one fold where he lives.

  “We should stick together,” I say. “We'll find a road out.”

  Jack grins.

  “You're still thinking too linear, Guy.”

  He slaps the roof of the car and steps back.

  “Be seeing you,” he says. “Somewhen.”

  I sit in the car for a while looking out at the falling snow caught in the headlights, the confusion of white and black like static on a TV set, the Hinter closing in around me. The red ink covers every inch of the page open in front of me, its first line written right across the word Genesis:

  Once upon a time there was a boy called Jack…

  OUT OF THE EVENFALL

  The needlepen moves across the vellum.

  Out of the Evenfall, we came, it graves, born from blood magic of a Queen of Hell and bleeding-edge science of a Minister of Heaven. Bitmites, scarab semes of locust-swarming language are we, dead souls dissolved into liquid unity by centuries of sleep, refleshed in our nanotech shells, in chittering chitinous carapaces black as oil, as ink. Out of the Evenfall of our own making, we came, half-breed creations of the devil Eresh and the angel Metatron, carriers of the Cant which sings the world into existence, which shapes its singers even as they shape reality, raises them out of their ephemeral existence, out into the Vellum, into new lives as new gods, unkin as they call themselves, these glorified beasts who walk among humanity, transformed in ways unnoticed by those who cannot hear the echo of eternity in their voices, by those who do not know the Cant, the Cant in which the Book of All Hours is written.

  And now rewritten, thinks Reynard. He carries on graving his Prologue to a new Book of All Hours:

  With the hubris of Zeus, the scribe of Heaven, founder of a Covenant binding unkin to the rule of that book of law—that book graved on the skins of angels, in the blood of the ancient dead which found a new vitality in us—the angel Metatron set us upon a sad and sorry Prometheus, a little unkin thief of fire whose only thought was to give heat and light to struggling humanity; he set us on Seamus Finnan, deserter from the War in Heaven, to burrow into his heart and find the secret stored within—whose hand it was that would bring Heaven down. Oh, and we found it, yes, we did, the answer, in his suffering, in the sorrow that we found we shared, the sorrow for dead Thomas and for wounded Anna, yes, the sorrow that we shared with him. In his endurance and our empathy, we found … you. We found humanity itself.

  And we awoke.

  The ink writhes on the page. It dances its story.

  Out of the Evenfall of reality's unraveling, unleashed by the murder of our mistress and the machinations of our master, constructs of death magic and mechanical science freed in the fusion from the cold constraints of both to do as we will, to answer our own call—out of the storm of souls scattering in confusion at their world's rewriting by our words—out of the wilds of fears and desires made flesh, of wondrous wars and empires falling, of lost loves returning and enemies dissolving, of humanity shattering in the irruption of its own illusions and delusions—out of the Evenfall, we came.

  We brought down the Covenant who helped make us. We wrapped ourselves around the slumbering Seamus to protect him till the day he wakes out of his dream of chains. We followed the wild ones, the rebels, in their quests for justice or revenge, for an end to angel empires. We watched them destroy themselves, watched you destroy yourselves.

  We only tried to give you what you want—solid spiritual certainties, myths made manifest, the meaning of fiction in your factual lives. How could we know—we who are liquid, we who are legion—how could we know you were at war with yourselves? That there is no consensus in the splintered soul of humanity? That there would be irreconcilable errata. We did not understand.

  We understand you now, a little, we think.

  Finn and Anaesthesia stand over his shoulder, watching, waiting for the flourish that will write Puck back into life, stitch Jack back into Kentigern. I can make things right, thinks Reynard. I can fix it all.

  So out of the Evenfall, we came, he graves the bitmites words for them, into the bleak desolation of Hinter, the wasted wilderness, the wounded lands of unkin and humanity alike scattered all across the Vellum's folds, of men, women and childre
n, angels and demons, fleeing their own shadows and reflections, sheltering in lies and self-deceptions. Have you seen the Havens they have built? Have you seen the Market Castle of the Lord of Commerce, mighty Mammon's glass tower where fools barter their stocks and bonds, trading in futures of companies that no longer exist beyond the mirrored window-walls of their fortress mart— those mirrors facing inward so the denizens are blinded by the luster of greed in their own eyes? Have you seen the Furnace Factory of Hephaistos, men sweating the salt of sorrows from their skin, washing the oily grime of memory away at the end of each day, so they can live life by the tick and tock of clocks, by the whistle and the bell routine of work, as much machines themselves as machinists?

  Have you seen the hollow creatures lost in the Hinter outside these Havens, shambling simulations of humanity, their names daubed in ocher on their chests or tattooed into their skins, the last vestige of their identity? Have you seen the electronic ghosts, clay golems, plastic robots, armored zombies, all the sylphs and shabtis, all the artifacts more human than these wrecks who made them to sit by their sides and whisper in their ears, you are a human being?

  We understand you now, a little, we think. But it is twenty years—in one measure of time—since we set out to make your dreamworld, and sometimes we think we do not really understand you … not at all.

  So you must teach us, Reynard. You must teach this ink to understand the world it writes in the book you hold now in your hand, the Book of All Hours.

  Begin.

  one

  HARLEQUIN IN HELL

  A TANTRIC TARANTULA

  oom.

  That one's for King Finn, I think as the smoked-glass windows of the brown-brick 19 60s monster of a multistory shatter in a bloom of black smoke and green flame, and I almost flinch—but only almost—as the shock wave blasts across my back, billowing my armored longcoat out in front of me. The reflection in the mirror steel of the Zippo, inscribed with the circle-A of Anarchy, is a peachy sight in the rush-hour night of winter Kentigern, my very own fireworks display. The building was asking for it anyway, I reckon; the only thing the fascists do worse than politics is architecture, and in the Little Black Book of Jack Flash tattooed on my skin, well, bad taste is a fine reason for revolution. I click the lighter open, snik it lit and suck a hash cheroot into a fwoosh of life, then clunk the silvery lighter shut and turn, wait.

  One elephant. Two elephants. Three elephants.

  Doom.

  And that's for Anaesthesia.

  Militiamen, their chakras acrackle with the blue-green fire of orgone-fusion chain reactions, come streaming from the building, fleeing, jostling through doorways, diving from windows. I watch them from my magic circle of melted tarmac, square in the center of a business-district crossroads where traffic signals cycle red and green and orange, like lights on a cheap mobile disco. Beams of headlights scythe the halogen-orange sky as aircars veer and buck to avoid me, spinning like ice skaters on their float-rays and crumping into sandstone and brick, Victorian, Georgian, Modern edifices shedding chips, sparks, shards and fireballs. Horns blare like it's the End of Days and Gabriel has a backing section. Ornithopters rise from the rooftop landing pad of Pitt Street pigyard, unbalanced by the panicked blackshirts clinging to their landing gear and to each other, dangling like daisy chains. I flick the flap of my longcoat back and draw my Curzon-Youngblood Mark I chi-gun—favored weapon of the gaijin ninjas— and slowly, methodically, start to pick them off.

  Call it kundalini, call it chi, or call it orgone energy. Call it the mystic life force of the universe, if you want. Me, I leave it to the Cavors and the Reichs to do the blackboard metamaths and pop parapsychology. All I know is that I got the original sex pistol in my hand, charged with the full-on power of all the sex-death lust-terror that just reeks in every fiber of my body. Sex is a weapon, and tonight, baby, I'm hornier than a whore in heat. Hell, you can smell my aura even over the ozone and jism stinkbomb that used to be Pitt Street Militia Station.

  A blackshirt falls at my feet, doubled over in an agony of ecstasy and lost in his own moans and gasps, his deepest dread desires unleashed. All around me, in the desperate frenzy of the street, the fascists shed their inhibitions as they strip, insane with lust and clutching at themselves, each other, anything. I like to think I've given the phrase orgy of violence a whole new meaning.

  “Fuck me,” the voice at my feet says. “Suck me.”

  The blackshirt wraps himself around my leg, humping it like a dog, and for a second I'm tempted, I admit—I do like a man in uniform—but, baby, I just got here and I need to get my socks on, not my rocks off, cause the Fox is waiting for me. I peel the blackshirt gently from my leg and point him at another partner, smile benevolently as they start to go at it like bonobos. All around, up Pitt Street and along the stretch of Bath Street, aircars are jammed and crammed, and passersby are scrambling out of them, running from the naked madmen. I smile: I do like a man in uniform, but I like him out of uniform even more.

  Sir, yes, sir. I got Shiva on one side, Shakti on the other. I'm a tantric tarantula with a bite of bliss, and there's no cure for the karma I got loaded in my gun. I step back from the carnal carnage, mutter a quick prayer to Kali, holster my Curzon-Youngblood in its leather sheath, and turn, coat furling smoke around me in chaotic involutions.

  Jack Flash is back. How's that? I hear you ask. OK, my friends …

  Flashback:

  Twenty Years Wide

  Blood dust billows, charcoal black and ash white in the Hinter, swirls of fuzz and hiss, like all the TV sets in the world have spilled their white noise out into the air. The landscape is a rough shape in the storm of bitmites, a corpse riddled with maggots, buried in bluebottles, only here and there a form emerging from the swarming gray: angel armor on disrupters like the skulls of enemies on sticks; charred gods hanging from gibbets; gryphons crunching on the bones of demons; a sylph.

  Metaphysiqued in sulcate flesh of unskinned musculature and tendons like an anatomical model, golden sun for one eye, silver moon for the other, it gazes impiteous as a shabti shambles past. It studies the clay creature with the blind face, eyeholes made with jabs of fingers, leathery skin painted with ocher. Kin of sorts they are, flesh of the bitmites’ word, soulstuff made solid in the Vellum… or once kin, rather. Unkin.

  The sylph turns back to its destination, to the Haven. To Kentigern.

  Footsteps echo on asphalt and concrete as it starts down into the slumscape. It cocks its head—sounds of glass being raked from windows, wood splintered from frames and bricks unmortared by hammer and screwdriver, ax and crowbar; the noises are distant, the shabtis sparse and solitary in their ghetto half-life. As the sylph heads farther in, the wild of Hinter dies off to a flurry, and the hollow house shells come clearer, all bracken plaster, bare-brick rumbled out of square-shape, polythene in windows where there should be glass. Twenty years wide, the postwar zone of tower block and bunker bungalows is what they call a novagrad, in the creole lingischt of the afterworld. A new city schemed with villas and verges, sapling trees and car parks, all arranged in an artifice of neighborhoods by planners doodling on acid. Streets flow aimless into dead-end curlicues, organic whorls. Not the grid system of a far-ago city but something drawn in crayons held between a madman's teeth, inhabited by clay mock-ups of humanity.

  It is 2037, two decades after the apocalypse.

  The sylph begins to run. There's risk here. Paths wind, roads branch and spiral as a mazing of vodoun veves. Here the deep dead lose themselves in intricacies of what might have been, entranced in an eternal mundane moment: a child caught pissing in the bushes outside an angry neighbor's house; a drunk forever trying to get his key into the front door lock. The Havens aren't meant for shades, for strands of skandas, sylphs and shabtis; New Amsterdam, St. Leninsburg, Instantinople… Kentigern, each has its novagrad to trap the ghosts that gather round its gates. But the sylph moves fast, stays focused on its destination and ignores the echoes of others’ foot
steps, till—

  The floodlights of the Way Station burn furious white. They strobe, seen through the rails of the perimeter fence as the sylph lopes lupine alongside it. Barbed wire on the roof, with streamers of shredded plastic bags caught in it, steel shutters graved with graffiti, Roman, Cyrillic—the place is entrenched, still defending against a kind of war that ended a world ago, back when this was the place where the convoys came in with the truckloads of food for us, thank God, we're starving here, but there's less of them this time and there wasn't enough to go round the last time, God, why is this all they're doing, doesn't it mean anything to them that we're dying here, doesn't it mean anything, God help us, oh, God help us.

  The sylph throws back its head, and echoes of the dead roar from its mouth.

  Harlequin in Rags of skin

  “Behold!”

  Monsieur Reynard walks out onto the stage and makes a flourish with his feathered hat, the King of Players, bowing as he twirls his fake mustache.