Ink

by Hal Duncan

  “Everything is changing,” he says.

  I turn over a card: Jack of Spades.

  “Everything is always changing,” I say.

  The Mysteries of Harlequin

  “It's no great tale, no boast,” says Jack. “Have you heard of a range of timeless mountains that ring round a city of swords? This is my native, ludic land of playful words.”

  The Princess leans forward in her seat. She folds her arms, her left hand stroking her right arm's upper biceps as if massaging an old pain. How many of the Duke's subjects, I wonder, have vague memories of the world outside his castle, of the city and the even stranger places out there in the Vellum's hinterlands? I wonder if there's not a few of them who, somewhere deep inside them, understand that all of this is just a construct built from their consensus of delusions. A fortress heaven in fields of illusion. The Princess knows, I'm sure of it.

  “What brings you to our hell,” asks Pierrot, “with all these mysteries?”

  “The Harlequin, the son of Sooth,” Jack says, “inspired me, cast a spell.”

  “This Sooth, then, fathers newborn gods in play? And did he come to you at night or in the light of day?”

  “The very Sooth,” says Jack, “who married Simile in Hell.”

  He holds the shining manacle around one wrist up like a watch, tilting his head. He runs his fingers through his hair, checking himself in the reflection, drops his arms as if now satisfied and looks out at the crowd. Behind the mask, he fixes the Princess with his glinting eyes, flashes a smile at her.

  “I saw him face-to-face.”

  She bites her bottom lip, like someone brooding over something that they can't quite place.

  “You saw him clearly then,” says Pierrot. “What did he look like?”

  ‘As he liked to look. I had no say in it.”

  “What are his rites?”

  Jack cocks his head, beckons with forefinger to bring Joey's ear down to his mouth, then turns toward the audience, toward the Duke, and does the same to them, drawing them in. He pauses, as if about to tell a juicy truth, then says:

  “They are a secret to be guarded from the likes of you. What good are they? What use? I cannot say, for all the good that it would do you if I could.”

  Pierrot, roaring, shoves him, rolling, half across the stage, but Jack rolls to his feet and bounces back, impervious to Joey's rage.

  “These words are tricks designed to tease an intellectual appetite,” says Pierrot. “You evade, avoid my questions time and time again. You have no reply at all?”

  ‘An uninspired man can only make a mockery of the rites. Who tries to teach a fool? Only a fool would try.”

  Pierrot stalks around him, looking for a weakness.

  “So. Are you the first sent out to spread this spirit?”

  ‘All foreigners already celebrate these mysteries with dance.”

  “Because they are so far behind us hellions. Foreigners? They are barbarians, proud to live in ignorance—”

  “Their customs may be different but, in this regard,” says Jack, “they're far, far in advance.”

  “Is it just me?” I hiss to Guy backstage. “Does Joey seem a bit on edge tonight?”

  Guy nods. He strokes his chin.

  “Watch what you say to him,” he whispers. “Just… try not to wind him up. For once.”

  “Is it by night or day,” says Pierrot, “that you perform these rites, these games? Surely by night, the atmosphere is better, in the dark, to draw these women to your flame.”

  “The light of day is just as good,” says Jack, “for the uncovering of shame.”

  Pierrot turns away, disgusted at Jack's smirking leer.

  “This … impudence,” says Joey, “only seals your fate.”

  Jack's smirk disappears.

  ‘As yours,” he says, “is sealed by your brutality, by ignorance, by hate.”

  “You're growing brave. You think you're winning in this war of words?”

  Jack yawns. He starts to stroll around the striding Pierrot. His chains rattle along the ground. Don has to follow, holding them like they're some bridal train, so Joey doesn't get caught up in them. And Pierrot and Harlequin circle each other like some medieval dance, a king and queen competing to see who can treat the other with the most disdain.

  “So what cruel fate will you inflict on me?” says Jack. “What pains can I expect?”

  “First I'll shave off your fair hair, and then I'll have that green-veined flute.”

  Jack stops, hands to his cheeks, hams up his innocent shock.

  “My hair is sacred; why, it's for the spirit that it's grown,” he says. ‘As for the wand of Harlequin …”

  He grips it tight, right down between his legs, gives it a jiggle.

  “Take it from me, if you really want it for your own.”

  A CRUCIBLE OF PASSION

  “Here,” says Puck.

  I take the matchbook with a blank look and he opens it in my hand to show the number scrawled inside.

  “My phone number,” he says.

  I close it and slip it into the longcoat pocket. Looks like tonight could be my lucky night. Puck trails a hand across the nape of my neck and gives a wink, and suddenly—

  “I remember it,” I say.

  It's the club bringing me back, memory by memory; it's chaos after all—sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll—and that's the story of my lives. I drink it in. Radio-vision screens show rioters on the streets of London, blasted back en masse by water cannon, beaten individually by armored-up militia in black armbands, RCC and Home Guard thugs in bowler hats and orange sashes. It's raining rubber bullets in Dublin while tanks roll into Oswald Square. Tear-gas blossoms in the shanty towns of Rhodesia, and chi-guns cut a swath through Indian rebels. British soldiers march through Tiananmen Square. Over it all, a blue guitar grinds out a garage riff, a scream of chords ripped out of the electric air, repeated, rising.

  Oh yes, I'm feeling much more like myself again.

  “I got homicidal tendencies. I got homicidal tendencies.”

  Onstage, in the Snake Pit, the wilder, darker back room of the Lizard Lounge, Johnny Yen, the fucked-up main man of the Narcotics, moshes like a maniac, mike gripped in a white-knuckled, thumping fist between his legs, black hair and shadow across his face. Behind him, the screens show a fast-cut carnival of carnage: HIV camps; refugees forced onto trains at gunpoint; skinheads wrapped in Union Jacks; housing schemes in flames; record-burning rallies of the neo-Christian Youth Brigade. His voice, a low and moaning snarl, comes in over the throbbing beat, a rock ‘n’ roll mantra of teen frustration, transformed in a crucible of passion to something more pure, more powerful than simple hate.

  There's a fever in his voice that turns the fury into fervor, something fiercely bound to life and love, or, at the very least, to flesh and lust.

  “I got homicidal tendencies. I got homicidal tendencies.”

  Transfixed, I stand in awe as Fast Puck roars and throws himself into the wild of bodies, flailing limbs and bouncing heads. Fox's hand rests on my shoulder as he tries to clue me up on Kentigern's current sad state of affairs. Anaesthesia gone into the Vellum. King Finn on a twenty-year hunger strike in Peterhead. Joey—

  “What is this?” I ask, cutting him off.

  “I believe the song's called ‘19 79,’ “he says.

  “I got homicidal tendencies. I got homicidal tendencies.”

  The singer seems to fix me with a visceral gaze, a look that says someday we need to either fight or fuck.

  “I got homicidal tendencies. I got homicidal tendencies.”

  The tangled mass of crowd is screaming, jangled, taut to breaking point by the orgone thrill, and I feel my flesh atingle. Christ, out there it's hell on earth but in the Rookery, in the Snake Pit, in the very depths of Kentigern's great maze, it's not demons that stalk the dark recesses. No, it's fucking daimons, as the ancient Greeks believed in, fucking fiery spirits that belong in flesh. Fuck damnation. Fuck sin. L
ook up enthusiasm in the dictionary, babe. It means having the god within.

  “I got homosexual tendencies. I got homicidal tendencies.”

  The singer's lust for life pours through the audience, into their veins, their hearts, their bones.

  No, we're not prisoners of the flesh, I think, bound in our skins, and only waiting for the final judgment that will send us into fire or light. We're fucking prisoners of conscience, prisoners of fear and shame. We're fucking prisoners of sorrow, and it's time for our release.

  With every drink I take my flesh fills out; my chakras coalesce, my heart, my guts, my balls, my nerve, lock into place. Under the longcoat, my skin crawls with electric energy, and looking at my hand I can make out the veins now, the hairs, the fingerprints. The skin gleams coppery, fading with every sip of absinthe more and more toward its normal flesh tone. I think about pulling the longcoat closed, belting it shut. It's all very well to go skyclad when you look like a cross between the Silver Surfer and Nyarlathotep but I'm Jack Flash, not Jack Flasher. Looking out into the frenzied punks though, half naked in their jeans and boots, dog collars and studded wristbands, teenage girls and full-grown women flailing their hair among the men and boys, rubber and leather shining with sweat under the flashing lights, I just run my hand across the black hatch-work tattoo that's starting to come through now on my chest. This is what it's all about—the mosh pit and a soft, tender caress.

  “I got homosexual tendencies. I got homicidal tendencies.”

  It's just a pity I still have to deal with the fucking fascists outside the Rookery walls. And, baby it's cold out there.

  “Fox,” I say. “You wouldn't happen to know where I could get some clothes?”

  I feel the matchbook in my pocket.

  “And I'm dying for a fag.”

  He digs into his pocket.

  “I was trying to tell you,” he says, “about Joey.”

  The Stories That We Tell

  “Where is he?” I say.

  “That's him there,” says Johann. “Right in front of you.”

  He does look rather Russian, I must admit, and like someone who would happily keep an angel's eye in his private safe. He looks like someone who would have a whole collection of them, I can't help thinking. Thick black beard and with the dark gaze of a mad monk, Prince Josef Pechorin, diplomatic envoy to West Saxony, looks like everything I should have expected in a fully-fledged Futurist of the new Russia. These are the men who murdered Stalin in his sleep, new faithless Rasputins who have found in the very godlessness of the universe a new religion. Is this the Russian character, I wonder, each of them at heart one of Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnika, part secret police and part monastic order. For the first time ever I begin to see why my brother is so fearful of these Futurists. I always thought that he was exaggerating, but now I see why Hitler turned, splitting the party right down the middle, overthrowing half of what it was built on.

  “Look at him. Just look at him.”

  My brother, standing at the bar beside me, gazes with utter hatred at this emblem of the force that burned down the Kremlin and then sat waiting until the time was right for the second revolution. Russia fell to the Futurists because in Stalin's hands it had become Futurist; it only needed his death to mark the finality of the transformation, close the chapter, turn the page. Hitler's speech outside the Reichstag, I suddenly realize, may mark a similar turning point, the moment when this ideology of the New Age planted its flag in Germany, red like the communist's or the fascist's but with neither sickle nor swastika. The black circle and cross of the Futurist flag has always seemed rather too reminiscent of a rifle's sight to me. And now my brother, his SA, and the rest of the bedraggled remnants of the Nazi Party are all set in the center of those crosshairs. I wonder how much of Hitler's choice was ideological and how much was simply a cold calculation of the way that things were going—if indeed there's any difference to a Futurist.

  Pechorin sits at a table with his retinue of bodyguards and hangers-on, holding court in exactly the same way that I've seen Rohm do so many times; he's even picked the same table that Rohm usually takes, down near the front and slightly to the left. The only difference is that where Rohm would be leering at the pretty boys and groping any that came close enough, Pechorin sits quiet and detached, watching the cabaret like the visiting dignitary that he is, amused in a distant sort of way by the quaint spectacle of a woman in basque and suspenders singing Dietrich songs.

  He chills me to the bone.

  “Do you think we should go over and introduce ourselves?” I say breezily.

  “But, as I say, I'm not this van Strann—”

  “ Von Strann—”

  “Sorry. Von Strann. But I wish to God I was, I'll tell you that. The Fox's Den was raking it in, while my own little club was struggling to stay afloat. But then we never had bestiality on the bill or a brothel in the back. Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Do you have a light? Thanks. Please … where were we?”

  “Berlin, 1929. What was it called—your own club—by the way?”

  “Jongleurs. It was called Jongleurs. We had a man juggling fire out front. Jacques his name was—quite the crowd puller.”

  “But hardly bestiality.”

  “Hardly. The Fox's Den rather put our little juggling act to shame.”

  “So it was a successful business? Prostitution? Other criminal activities? “

  “One rather suspected so. The proprietor was a quite untrustworthy fellow. Although, from what you say, I fear I may have misjudged him. As I say, there were all sorts of stories.”

  “And did one of them involve a jewel?”

  “A jewel?”

  “The Eye of the Weeping Angel, I believe it's called.”

  “How exotic.”

  “And cursed to boot.”

  “I can imagine. Terrible fates befalling unwary owners, yes? One shouldn't believe everything one hears. The stories that we tell…”

  I study this Russian prince.

  “Really?” I say. “I think it's an … amusing idea. But I specialize in rich widows. Rich widows who are easily flattered by the attentions of a charming younger man. Rich widows who will take the word of someone with a winning smile over that of their oldest, closest friend, simply because one could not possibly suspect that delightful young chap… French, wasn't he? Or was he English?”

  I shake my head, turn back to the bar and motion for Horst to refill our glasses.

  “No, I do not steal from men,” I say. “I do not steal from men with power. And I especially do not steal from men with the power to have me killed.”

  My brother pushes the neck of the bottle away from his glass, waves Horst away. He lays his hand flat over the lip of the brandy glass and I see his knuckles grow white. I almost expect the glass to shatter in his grip.

  “You have to do it,” he says.

  “No, I do not. That man is dangerous.”

  “And I can stop him,” he says.

  His hand rattles the glass on the bar, so tense he is, and Horst looks nervous; I send him away with a subtle flick of the eyes, an almost headshake.

  “Johann,” I begin.

  “You have to call me Jack now, Fox.”

  He smiles at me, a cracked and edgy smile. I try to ignore his madness. I turn back to the tables and chairs, the candlelit crowds of tuxedos and uniforms, black and gray and brown, men in swastika or circle-and-cross armbands gathered in cliques uneasy with their proximity to each other. Loud laughter and quiet threat. I have been trying to ignore the madness around me since I opened the Fox's Den, I realize. One of Hitler's Neues Deutschland Party leaders passes Pechorin's table, stops to introduce himself, shake the man's hand.

  “You have to get me the jewel.”

  “I can't,” I say. “I won't.”

  “Then why are we here?”

  His voice is savage, hissing, and I flinch from the accusation in his eyes. I cannot tell him what I h
oped, how I imagined if I could only get him out of the darkness of Father's library and up to Berlin with its lights and nightclubs, we might … unloosen that coiled intensity before it broke him utterly. That we would sit in my office and laugh over the old times, and I would ask him how Franz was and he would look embarrassed, turn red until I changed the subject. And I would put my arm around his shoulder and take him out into the club to scorn the drag queens and the flouncing boys, even as he watched them from the corner of his eye, drinking schnapps with me through the night as I explained how anything was available in Berlin at the right price, anything, why, that young lady or that fellow at the bar there, yes, that one; really, Johann, there is no need to tear oneself apart over such things, no need, no need at all.

  I do not answer his question.

  “Why do you want this thing so much?” I say. “What does it mean to you?”

  “Everything,” he says. “My life, my heart, my soul. I have to have it.”

  “—to carry out some sort of occult ritual?” Pickering says. “Was that part of the story that you heard?”

  “No, Major Pickering, no. The stories I heard were not outlandish, adolescent fantasies. The stories I heard were that the owner of the Fox's Den had girls as young as twelve available in the back rooms of his club, that any drug you desired could be purchased in this sordid, squalid, glorified brothel, that it was a favorite haunt of Rohm and his jackboot-wearing pervert lackeys. The stories I heard were that the owner's brother was himself one of Rohm's SA, and every bit as boy-loving as his leader. These are the stories that I heard, Major Pickering. Ugly little stories. For the love of God, man, cursed jewels and magic—”

  “Enough of the games. I want to know about the Eye of the Weeping Angel. I want to know about—”

  “Jewel thieves and magic rituals? Major Pickering, I was in Germany when their blessed Chancellor Hitler was cheered—cheered—in the Reichstag after the Night of the Long Knives, cheered for butchering his enemies not because they were vile little street thugs, which they were, not because they were fascists, but because they were homosexuals. I was in Berlin during Kristallnacht. I saw an old man kicked to death in the streets for being Jewish—for being Jewish—and I… I did nothing. I was there when it all collapsed and the Futurists came marching in, and by God, if we thought it was bad under the fascists we had no idea of what humanity is capable of. This … this puerile nonsense is an insult to the truth.”