Ink

by Hal Duncan

  “No. They would notice you,” Jack muses. “Even if you came covertly.”

  “Then I'll go overtly,” says Pierrot. “Yes, there's truth in what you say.”

  Jack jumps down off the rock, walks round behind Pierrot and leans in to whisper in his ear.

  “So shall I take you now?” says Jack. “Will you go all the way?”

  He bites his bottom lip, hands reaching out to take Pierrot by the hips. Shit, Guy, I think, you've written one perverted motherfucker of a play.

  Pierrot turns and once again Jack mugs a casual pose, entirely innocent.

  “Lead on,” says Pierrot. “Let's go right now. I hate to wait.”

  Jack takes Pierrot by the tie as if to lead him like a dog, but lets it drop out of his fingers, shakes his head.

  “We'll have to find you some fine linen robes to wear.”

  “Why?” Pierrot protests. “I am a man—”

  “—who wants to join the ranks of women. They would kill you if you showed your manhood there.”

  Pierrot gives a grudging nod, oblivious of any innuendo.

  “That's true,” he says. “You do have some wits after all.”

  “You've barely had a taste,” says Jack aside, and then to Pierrot: “The Harlequin has taught me this.”

  “What do I have to do?” says Pierrot.

  He sounds so small and lost.

  “How do I follow your advice?” he says.

  “Don't worry,” Jack says. “I'll come with you to your rooms.”

  He drapes an arm around Pierrot's shoulder.

  “Yes,” he says, “we'll dress you up real nice.”

  THIS PATTERN OF A POISONOUS FROG

  The sky is thick with churning cloud cover, reflecting back the orange of streetlights muted to a dull and heavy glow. Joey rolls over onto one side; feels like his left arm is broken, but that's OK. The pills kill that pain too.

  Uphill and past the scrub of bushes and trees, behind a wall topped with barbed wire littered with plastic bags and rags of cloth, a string of lights marks out the limits of the civilized. The firefly glows from the windows and the floodlights all along the length of the Circus, together with the burning wreckage of the airtram scattered on the slope above him, give the umber foliage of the park a rich chiaroscuro taint.

  “And now I'm looking out into this dark and stormy night from up here in the heavenly heights and, folks, I'm thinking that the Powers That Be may finally have gotten wise. I think they're out to shut the Rookery down for good tonight, mis amigos. We got an airfleet coming in over the Circus, lean see militiamen moving down en masse from Maryhill Barracks and, with the walls of Hyndland sealing in you boys to the West, only way to run is into the inferno. It's not looking good for Fox's little friends, I tell you.”

  Joey pulls himself to his feet, looks round. There's a few bodies thrown clear of the twisted airtram but what strikes him most is that, beyond the scar of crumpled, buckled carriages and strewn debris, the park is calm, a wild and feral garden but a garden nonetheless, even with the Circus looming on one side and the Rookery on the other, and a streak of metal devastation carved right down the slope between. It's the light that he notices. A crimson and ocher wash paints over the flowers of weeds and, over the long grass, a sickly pattern of yellow and black is marked out where light hits it or does not—the pattern of a poisonous frog. He used to paint when he was a kid—when they were kids—not just graffiti but oil on canvas, stolen or traded for what was stolen; the first thing he ever got high on was turps. He gave that up a long time ago—a pointless pastime—but he can still look into the night and see the way light works in it.

  The Rookery rises, carved out by the volcanic glow of halogen and given a painted solidity by the lightning flashes of militia ornithopters’ chi-beams. They're coming in low from over the Circus now, gathering into a front. The glow of steam vented from Cavor-Reich engines builds and builds as the gunboats circle slowly into position, until it bathes the sky in a green that speaks of absinthe and other worlds. Madness and war machines. Gauche, Joey thinks.

  Out here on the bridge to nowhere, though, there are no lights, and form builds its definitions out of damp olive shadows.

  “But as my dear old papa always said, Son, you can hunt and you can trap, but if you shoot an animal you better kill it then and there, ‘cause if you only make it mad, if you just wound it, it'll come for you with everything it's got. A crafty fox or cornered rat, boy, if you trap it, well, make damn sure that it can't get loose, because there's nothing wilder than an animal that's soured its taste buds with the bitter steel of chains and cages, knowing it'll never wash that foul metallic flavor from its mouth without the rich red wine of human blood. Well, mis amigos, seems to me like we have all of us been biting on the bars for an eternity and waiting for the day that Dionysus drops by. And now—oh yeah—the fur is gonna fly.”

  Joey looks down the slope. A pedestal of stone rises up out of overgrown flowerbeds before the bridge; a monument to the Boer War, on the top of it a statue of a pith-helmeted soldier once sat, Joey remembers, in a surreally languid catalogue pose, one leg hanging down, the other raised so that the soldier could lean his lazy stone elbow on it as he gazed out across some distant savannah slaughter. Now another figure holds the same pose.

  Jack swivels round to face him, gives a salute.

  “What's this? I hear you ask. Dionne Warwick? Dianetics? No, you heard me right. We're talking Dionysus, god of beer and wine and party times, and god of small trapped animals, no less. Oh, yes! Beware, you trappers, you guardians of the ghettos and the gulags. Beware, you burgher mousers, all you fat cats thinking you can round up all the rats. Beware, lest one day you trap Dionysus in your hunt, ‘cause Dionysus when he's angry is one seriously mad cunt.”

  “You smell it?” calls Jack. “That lush deep scent of … memories. Smells kin da like heat. Kinda … sexy.”

  “All I smell,” says Joey, “is shit and garbage.”

  There is something else though. On top of the fetid stench of the rotting filth under the bridge is a hint of methane and more powerful fuels. It's the smell of the open-cast mines of cavorite seams that powered Albion's industrial revolution. Of the chi-wells of Persia that the Empire was built on. The orgone-rich deposits of the North Sea.

  The wind is blowing from the south, from the carcass of the ICI plant, still burning after twenty years. Joey remembers the radiovision pictures of King Finn being dragged out of the wreckage of it, delirious from the orgone fumes, then the shots of him standing in the dock in chains, spouting his angry rhetoric.

  “Shit and garbage,” says Joey.

  “Ah, now,” says Jack, “even shit and garbage changes if you leave it buried long enough, under constant pressure.”

  And there is something else there, coming from below, something buried real deep, beneath even the rats.

  A Broken King

  Pierrot pulls away.

  “But in a woman's robes?” he says. “I'd be ashamed.”

  “No shame,” says Jack, “no fear. Or else your hope of spying on the maidens ends right here.”

  Pierrot thinks about it. You can see the thoughts go through his mind, the image of himself in drag, disturbing but somehow enticing, this forbidden thing he's never tried, a part of him that's always been denied.

  “What kind of dress do you think I should wear?” he asks.

  “A gown that flows from shoulder down to foot,” says Jack.

  Jack looks him up and down, his head cocked to one side, a queer eye quietly assessing. Brushing Joey's long hair back, he takes him by the chin and tilts his face.

  ‘And on your head we'll put a hood,” Jack finally decides.

  “Describe my costume more,” says Pierrot. “What else?”

  He's getting braver now. Jack flounces all around him, camp as knickers, miming measuring and framing Joey in a square of thumbs and forefingers.

  “Yes, well. You'll need a dappled fawnskin, obviously. A
nd a wand to hold.”

  Oh, but Pierrot's not that bold. His shame resurfaces and he recoils.

  “No. I can't do it. I could never dress up as a girl.”

  “Then it'll end in tears,” says Jack.

  And suddenly the whole queer tailor act is dropped.

  “And when Pierrot and my maidens come to blows,” says Jack, “my dear, the blood will flow.”

  “You're right,” says Pierrot.

  Again he has that distant look, as if he knows somewhere inside that his own tragedy's unfolding, his control unraveling. It's Harlequin who's at the wheel of fate now, and Pierrot's just a passenger along for the predestined ride.

  “You're right,” he says. “I'd best go spy upon them first.”

  “It would be smarter,” Jack says. “You'd just be inviting trouble if you went there looking for a fight.”

  Pierrot faces out into the audience, a broken king, considering the world that's slipping from his grasp. Jack stands behind, his hands upon Pierrot's shoulders, like a boxing coach giving his fighter a massage.

  “But how will I get through the city? I'll be seen,” says Pierrot. “In broad daylight…”

  “Then we'll go by quiet back streets. It'll be OK.”

  Jack's hands run down to squeeze Pierrot's arms.

  “I promise you,” says Jack. “I'll take you the least visible way.”

  ——

  Pierrot's eyes close for a second. Something glistens on the greasepaint, on the smears of black under his eyes. He looks at me, his pupils wide and dark, and I know that right now, right here, for all his ice-cold attitude of callous cynicism, Joey really is the king of tears.

  “Whatever,” he says quietly. “Just as long as no one laughs at me.”

  “Oh, Pierrot,” says Jack. ‘As if we would.” [He gives the audience a wink.] “Let's go into the palace then, and plan the route.”

  “OK,” says Pierrot, “I'm ready now. I'll go inside. I need to think about it though. I could still ride out, sword in hand.”

  His words ring hollow.

  “I could follow your advice. Let me decide.”

  A SURGE OF RODENT PASSIONS

  “Look out, my saucy jack. Look out, you rogues and ragamuffins of the Rookery. They're coming for us all They're coming hard and fast and, boys, tonight looks like the sky is gonna fall. They're coming with the lethal needle and the damage done by one angel assassin's chi-gun's going to look like scratches on a dreadnought's hull by the time they've finished what they've only just begun.”

  Joey can Jeel his last pill kicking in now. Emotion muted like a radio set buried underground and running out oJ batteries, the signal itselJ degenerating to a hiss oJ white noise. It doesn't matter iJ it is Jack. It doesn't matter if it isn't possible that it is Jack. Joey has a job to do, and he stopped worrying about the world's impossibilities a long time ago.

  The shadow on the pedestal rolls backward like a diver going off a boat, disappears behind the stone to land with a quiet crush of bushes underfoot.

  “I'm Screaming Don Coyote, coming to you on the one and only Radio Free Kentigern, coming out to you from Hell on Earth, and if this show is our last, if we're all lost, well, friends, we're going to go out with a bang, ‘cause right now, mis amigos, yes, right now we've got for you the music that they said had died, the tunes they said we'd never play again. Well, listen up, my friends, ‘cause this is the Narcotics with their grinding, pounding, speed-thrash cover of a classic track. This one's for Jack, but it's for Joey too, because we know that underneath it all you're just a little blue.”

  “As a wise man once said, you can't always get what you want, my friends, but keep this in mind, you know sometimes, you just might find you get, yes sir, exactly what you need… And that's to ‘Open Up and Bleed’…”

  A simple blues riff starts, low and repeating. One two three four, one two three. One two. One two. One two three four, one two three. One two. One two.

  Joey circles sideways round the low metal railing that bounds the flowerbeds at the foot of the pedestal. Jack steps out of the bushes and onto the broken tarmac of the park's path, backing away from him out onto the bridge. Yellow-and-black police tape flutters from the sandstone balustrades. The white chalk outline of the sentry's body has been spray-painted by vandals already, fleshed out in multicolored patterns, like some cartoon tattooed man steamrollered into the ground. It's the sort of thing the two of them used to do—tear up crime-scene cordons, spray-paint over fingerprints or fibers … fuck with the pigs at every opportunity.

  Joey nods at the sentry's psychedelic shadow.

  “One of your own, you fucking moron,” he says.

  “Bollocks,” says Jack. “Thought he might be a rook. Ironic, eh? Considering.”

  Considering this is where you killed me. The thought doesn't have to be spoken for Joey to hear it.

  “You're not Jack Flash,” he says.

  Jack Flash is dead, he thinks.

  ‘Aren't we all?” says Jack.

  Joey reaches out a little, probing the fucker's psyche, trying to get a handle on him, but his soul is slick and dark and every move he make slides off this stealth mind. There are only glimpses, glances—memories of a father whose combed-back hair fell across his forehead when he was angry, of traveling with Grandpapa on the autobus into Stadde Cintrale, to the tabak, and the smells, the smell of his pipe tobacco and the smell of wet dog fur as the setter shook its rust-red coat, and the sound of a mother humming a folk song at a family wake, and the feel, the first nervous touch of fingers as they run through a girlfriend's soft hair and—

  He can't shake the feeling that none of these memories really belong to the bastard. Some of them don't even belong in Kentigern.

  They circle each other, both looking for a weak spot, an opening. Joey can feel the chi-energy writhing beneath the surface—sex and death, a stripper dancing with a snake—but it's just power, just another narcotic, like Joey's stock of uppers and downers, inhibiters and facilitators. There's a lot of New Age bullshit talked about the chi, about spirit, the soul of the earth, the fossil fuel that was once flesh like us, that we will all in time become, but Joey doesn't believe in spirit. He doesn't believe in ghosts or demons. The chi doesn't have avatars, just addicts.

  So he knows this “Jack Flash,” he knows the fucker has a history, a reality, a tawdry little truth that makes him tick. Not Jack, not his Jack, but another Rookery brat, fucked-up on orgone, dreaming that the world is just a dream because reality's too hard to face.

  “I know who you are,” he says. “I know exactly where you come from.”

  But this other Jack smiles and Joey feels a sudden blast of bestial desire and fear—a surge of rodent passions bubbling under the surface—rats under his feet—a sentience devoid of reason—only mood and attitude.

  “You can't even imagine where I come from.”

  A God Most Terrible

  Don's out among the audience now, talking in frantic gestures with the Duke. We have a problem; look, it's clear our Pierrot's under the weather, dodgy stomach bug, we think—oh no, not castle food—but we were wondering whether—yes, you saw how wet he was with sweat—almost delirious, indeed—well, what it is—I mean—we need some sort of substitute and who else could, or would, or even should play noble Pierrot, prince Pierrot, the king of tears? We are professionals, so, oh no, we will not let this ruin your night's entertainment. No! On with the show, we say. It must go on. There's only just a few more scenes to come. Our man can carry on for maybe one at most, but if—and honestly, I tell you it will be such fun—if you were to become involved in our divertissement, our humble, poor attempt at your amusement—well, imagine, a great Duke of Hell like you, how well you could command the stage. M'sire, you'd show them rage, I'm sure—and there's no lines to learn, there's just Pierrot, grand in his destruction, roaring over everything, a king who's lost his head, you know—a lion of a man like you, m'sire—we know that you could do it. You could knock ‘em dead.<
br />
  “Girlfriend,” Jack says to me, “it's time to act. The Harlequin is getting close. The quarry's almost in the trap.”

  A homicidal snick of teeth, a flash of blue eyes underneath the mask, he backflips over to me, spins and kneels to take my hand, my irresistible Jack Flash. He rises, twirls me, pulls me into an embrace, a kiss. His tongue darts in between my lips as hands slip under silk to tickle down my side and smooth my hips. One travels round toward my butt.

  “No underwear,” he whispers. “Slut.”

  “Fuck you,” I hiss.

  He whirls away. He cartwheels to the curtain's edge, stage left, and pulls it back to peek around: a glimpse of Joey getting changed, a ciggy dangling from his lips. Half-naked Joey flicks his circled thumb and fingers at him, and mouths a silent tosser,—mad but not deranged. As far as Joey's method mania is concerned, we're past the worst of it at least. His character's a puppy from now on. It's not him who's the wild beast.

  Jack twirls to me again, a dog that knows he's going for his walk, circling excited between door and leash.

  “It won't be long,” he says, “until we reach the rites and we can take our vengeance out on him. Let Pierrot pay with his life.”

  He licks his lips. I think we're lucky Joey is the only one who packs a knife.

  Meanwhile, Don rattles on with all his prattle, trying to convince the Duke to join the show, give it a go. He flatters and cajoles, he uses fast talk and slow sell and plain old-fashioned begging. He uses all his skills of what he calls neuro-linguistic programming, craft of street hypnotists and mind readers, signals and clues so subtle that the Duke's not even conscious of the way he's being led. What with the psychoactives we've been pumping out into the crowd all night, he's in a quite suggestible state already and, as Jack keeps everyone else amused with his display of tumbling dance, I watch the Duke rise from his chair. He nods his head, deep in the trance.