Ink

by Hal Duncan

  “So it is best to live from day to day,” I carry on. “The man who lives that way is blessed, is what I say.”

  A LITTLE MOUSE-GOD

  Joey pushes at the dark surface of attitude; the posturing, the grin, the wink in the eye, there's a whole network of little signs and signifiers woven into a shell, a spell of Jack, but they're all just image—the way this Jack sees himself, the way he wants others to see him. So, before the poor bastard dies, Joey's going to peel away those lies and illusions, prove to the idiot that underneath it all he's just another runner in the rat race, driven by the same pathetic need and greed as everyone else.

  Fuck your glamour, thinks Joey. You're no different from the rest of us.

  Joey presses into the bastard's thoughts like a thumb being pressed into an eyeball, squeezing slowly harder and harder.

  “Seems like there's creatures loose out there that you don't want to meet on a dark night like this. The Pit is burning and there's looters run amok in the Arcade, a wild hunt riding in the skies over the Rookery. I tell you, folks, I'm watching it right now, and things are bad. I can't say as I've seen so many thopters since the Brixton Massacre, and I don't think they're taking any prisoners tonight. Lock up your daughters, mis amigos, lock up your sons, and keep them safe inside, because it's hell on earth out there and there's no sign of our boy Jack. Jack, if you're out there, now's the time to make your move…”

  A grin spreads slowly across his face, an inscrutable rictus expression, irony or pain, fury or joy, or something else, something completely else. The black holes of his pupils dilate and, peering into the fucker's soul, Joey feels … he feels … he can't describe it but he reels back from the sudden vertigo, staggers back unthinking as if from the edge of some skyscraper's roof. For the first time in his life he knows he's looking into something more than the shallow animal machinery of human nature. Not something more profound—’ cause Jack was never that— just something more.

  No fucking way.

  “We're praying for you, Jack. Some folks arepraying to you, I suspect, ‘cause, Jack, you know you've got our deep respect.”

  Joey's will is a cutthroat razor in his hand. He slashes out to slice right through the thin skin round this bastard's soul. He'll carve the fucker open and—

  “Jack, you're just the boy that we've been waiting for, the piper-boy the kiddies and the rats just love to follow, yes, our latter-day Dionysus, our brand-new—”

  Fucking hollow. Joey drops the man's face, lets the broken body slump down to the ground. His chest is still heaving with his attempts to breathe, to … laugh. Jack rolls over onto his back. The blood is streaming from his mouth now, skittering liquid dust, black ink, black oil, black blood of bitmites.

  No.

  “But in the end, my friends, who is Apollo? That Olympian god, you know, he started as a little mouse-god in the cornfields of Attica. A nobody. A nothing. Not a hero but a total zero.”

  PANTOMIME PIERROT

  Jack dances out onto the stage.

  “Yo, Pierrot,” he says, “if you're so keen to see what you're not meant to see, to spy on your own mother and her company, to show your passion for bold acting in outrageous fashion … then come out! Come out before the palace. Yes, and let us see you clad as a mad woman in a maiden's dress.”

  Pierrot enters wearing Princess Anaesthesia's riding clothes, the long, green skirt down to the ground, the tunic buttoned right up to his chin, the hood.

  “Oh yes,” says Harlequin, “you are the very image of a daughter of old Pantaloon.”

  “You are a bull leading me now,” Pierrot says. “I see a pair of horns grown on your head. Were you an animal before? It's strange; I seem to see two suns, a double image of this town of Themes, this city with its seven gates. Now everything has changed.”

  The greasepaint smears like cheap mascara as he rubs his eyes.

  “And you,” he says, “look like a bull at any rate.”

  “The god is with you now,” says Jack. “He hated you before; now he's your mate.”

  Jack slips one arm around Pierrot's waist to pull him out to center stage, all chivalry and charm.

  “You see things different now,” he says. “You see things as they are.”

  “How do I look?” asks Pierrot.

  Where, in the last scene, he was playing dazed, now Joey plays Pierrot truly crazed. He pouts and preens.

  “Isn't my bearing every bit as fine as any woman … even that of my own mother, Columbine?”

  His fingers twirl a lock of hair that's fallen down across his face.

  “I look at you and I see her,” says Jack. “But wait, your hair is out of place. Just let me tuck it up beneath the hood.”

  Pierrot looks abashed, shy as a schoolgirl.

  “It came loose up in my rooms as I was tossing—whirling—my head here and there in joy.”

  He giggles.

  “I'll take care of that,” says Harlequin, [Jack taps his hand away and takes the strands of hair.] “Just hold your head up.”

  ‘Am I straightened out now?” Joey says. “I'm at your mercy here, you know.”

  Jack tuts and tsks around him like a mother hen—or Mother Goose perhaps, given the panto spectacle that Joey makes, all rouged and lipsticked up. He took a lot of talking into this scene, on the part of Guy. Beneath the batting eyelashes and giggles, I would guess he's not a happy pup.

  “Your waistband's loose,” says Jack.

  He gives a tug that activates a little mechanism underneath the dress, then kneels to fix the hem.

  “Your skirt's not hanging properly down at your heels.”

  As he leans down the audience sees the bawdy jut that pokes the air at Joey's crotch. The fake erection bobs as Jack tugs at the hem of Joey's skirt. The audience hoots at the dirty joke.

  “Yes,” Joey says, “you're right. It's all wrong on the right side” [he says, pointing with his left hand] “but the left side is all right” [he says, now pointing with his right].

  He looks at his crossed hands, confused now as to which is which, then holds his left hand up.

  “That's right.”

  “Hold it,” says Jack.

  He ducks his head under the dress.

  “Hmm? With my right or left hand?” says Pierrot, looking down. “Which way will I fit in more as a member of this band of women?”

  He reaches down to grab the bulge; it jerks off to one side. He reaches with the other hand; it darts away again, much to the crowd's delight. From right to left, from left to right, each time that Joey reaches for the thing, it darts out of his grasp. He puts his hands upon his hips and scowls, as if oblivious to the audience's laughs.

  Then, with a pop, to Pierrot's surprise, the bulge is gone and Jack is out from underneath the dress, a second flute held as his prize. He twirls it, proffers it to Joey.

  “Hold it in your right hand. As you walk, raise it in time with your right foot, just so.”

  He demonstrates, skipping to some internal rhythm. Poor Pierrot, following his lead, has the whole audience in stitches now. But Joey's dancing always was abysmal.

  “I have to praise your change of heart,” says Jack. “Your mind was sick before; it's now exactly as it ought to be.”

  Pierrot puffs with pride.

  “I feel like I could lift a mountain on my back, maidens and all.”

  “Well, if you wanted to, I'm sure you could,” says Jack. “The question is whether you should.”

  Pierrot wraps his arms around a polystyrene boulder.

  “Shall we take a lever with us? Or will I just get my shoulder underneath the rock, and pull it up with my bare hands?”

  “No,” says the Harlequin, “let's not destroy the homes of nymphs, the haunts of piping Pan.”

  “Too true. We should not use brute force to overcome these girls. They are already caught in the sweet snares of love. I'll sneak up first and, from the trees, I'll spy on them as if I was a nesting bird. I'll hide myself among the firs.”


  “I'm sure that fate has somewhere set aside for you,” says Jack, “somewhere to hide. It's for this very reason you should go with caution though. Maybe you'll catch them. Maybe they will catch you first.”

  ——

  The beating of a drum begins, not loud but pounding just enough to drown out any sounds of backstage conversation.

  “But, contrary to all your expectations, in the end,” says Jack, “you'll see that these are moral maidens, and that I'm your one true friend. O Pierrot, you bear your nation's burden, you alone. The struggles waiting for you are the price of power, of the throne.”

  “Then lead me through the very heart of Themes,” says Pierrot.

  He puffs his chest.

  “I want them all to see I am the only one—the only one of all of them— who has the balls to do what must be done.”

  He stands there with his arms crossed over his false breasts.

  “Then follow me,” says Jack. “I'll guide you safely there. Another hand will bring you back. And, yes” [he smirks] “you can be sure that everyone will stare.”

  His tone of voice should set alarm bells ringing.

  “Yes,” says Jack. “You'll be brought back in your own mother's arms.”

  “That's what I'm going for,” says Pierrot. “To bring my mother home, I mean, not for the glory But… my mother carrying me? You'll spoil me with the luxury.”

  “If you want to put it that way, but” [Jack takes Pierrot by the hand] “you do deserve it for the task you're undertaking now.”

  And exit Harlequin, Pierrot following behind him to the slaughter, like a cow.

  NO FUTURE

  There's no hope in this man, no faith, no dream. Joey looks into his soul and what he sees is … nothing.

  It's a nothing that he recognizes from a childhood growing up in the Rookery, running wild with the razor kids, sitting on walls and smoking weed, just waiting for the day the Futurists and the fascists finally fired those nukes at each other; listening to Don Coyote's radio show playing ‘Anarchy in the UK,” just a single signal in the ether now among the saturation coverage of shit. And what else is there to do? Because punk, fucking punk, has sold out to the bootboys with their skinheads and their Union Jacks.

  It's the nothing that takes root in you when you realize that even nihilism's pointless. No future? So what? So fucking—

  “What makes a mouse a man? What makes a man a myth? You wanna know? I'll tell you this. A myth has nothing at its heart but what the rest of us read into it. No secret meaning, no great truth, friends, what you see when you look into it is you. And if a myth is the reflection of your dreams and fears, if Jack the Lad is just a little mad, well maybe what it is, my friends, is there's a little bit of Jack in all of us, both you and me.”

  It's the nothing that made Joey interested in Guy Fox, more because he had the contacts to score top-grade acid than for any revolution bollocks. It's the nothing that was growing in Joey even as Jack got deeper and deeper into Fox's bullshit, making a name for himself with concrete blocks dropped on militia aircars, Molotovs thrown through pigyard windows. Every fucking riot, he was there; not just Jack now, but Jack Flash, flame-haired poster child of Generation Why. Jack had made rebellion his religion, Joey figured. He'd lost the lack of faith that Joey held to like some jewel, some diamond, cold and clear and sharp. He was sure of it. He was so sure Jack had bought into the lie.

  But Joey looks into the nothing at the heart of this Jack and he knows now he was wrong. No, there's a nihilism in there that's as empty and dark as Joey's own heart, more so even.

  The fucker lies there, laughing as he's dying, with the answer to Joey's why the fuck should I care? shining in his eyes, in his teeth still glinting white even as the black blood trickles from his mouth.

  Why the fuck not?

  Jack's hand slaps the tarmac of the bridge, reaching up and behind him, reaching for the Zippo, Joey realizes, even now trying to play the devil-may-care hero. Light up a fag even if your lungs can't suck the smoke in. His eyes keep closing and opening again, like a dog trying to stay awake.

  “I tell you, mis amigos, you can't stop the children of the revolution. You can't stop the spirit of rebellion. You can shoot it, bayonet it, burn its mind out, leave it for dead and bury it in a mass grave with the rotting corpses of a thousand dreamers, and it will still come back. You don't need a city of martyrs, mis amigos, just one Jack.”

  The blood, ink, oil, bitmites—bitmites? what the fuck are bitmites?—the black stuff spreads out around the broken man—too much of it—it isn't right—and it isn't pooling but trickling in streams, tiny channels that spread out from him like an impact pattern of cracks on a windshield. A spiderweb. Crazy paving under Joey's feet now.

  He steps back, gun raised, but he knows he's aiming at nothing now.

  ——

  “You think that you can trap your own soul under a decade of fear and greed, two decades, or a century? Try a millennium, mis amigos, try the whole of human history, and you'll still find it there under the foundations of the Empire, that roaring music of the river of blood that's pumping in your veins and thumping in your head.”

  Like a doorway into the abyss, his mind opens up now all the way. A barrage of anti-aircraft gunfire comes from somewhere in the Rookery but Joey hears it like a sound effect turned low. Distant. Unreal.

  “Dream on, you petty tyrants. Let me tell you all a little story about Pentheus, the King of Tears, who tried to trap the god of wine and song…”

  Jack flicks the flap of his longcoat back and Joey's hand trembles as he points the gun at that empty heart under the scarlet shirt with the chi-gun shoulder holster crossing it and—

  And there's a stick of orgone-saturated dynamite jammed in the holster, and Jack's opening his fist now, shit, and there's a silver Zippo in it which he opens up with a flick of thumb and, fuck, clicks into flame in one swift move. And Jack, eyes closed, touches the fire to the fuse beside his silent heart, and opens up his arms.

  The explosion rips their world apart.

  Let Justice Show Herself

  And Jack appears up on the wagon's roof, a dancing god of horn and hoof. The lights drop to a single spot on him.

  “How strange your path is, Pierrot,” he says. “It leads to scenes of woe so weird you'll win a fame that reaches high. Reach out your hands, Columbine. You, her sisters, daughters of old Pantaloon, reach to the sky, the sun and moon.”

  Coyote's trickery projects a scattering of constellations on the ceiling of the hall. Jack throws a hand into the air as if to grab and swing it round. Almost diagonal, one foot kicked out behind to balance him, he flips the move into a twist, a sort of angled spin, a tap-dance step, I think, or Cossack thing. The drum keeps time and, as he reels, the constellations start to wheel, slow at the start but gradually faster. Gold and silver disks of sun and moon flash past, in time with Jack and with the drum. The cycling signs of days and months, of seasons, years and aeons, turn. It seems the circling wheel of time itself, of fate.

  Then Jack stops suddenly. The stars stop in their track.

  “The end to which I bring this young and foolish king is great. The vietory will be Harlequin's,” says Jack. “It will be mine. I'll say no more. You'll see the rest in time.”

  “Run to the hills,” I sing, “swift dogs of madness howling in the night. Run to the hills where Columbine and all the daughters of old Pantaloon revel in mysteries and rites. Howl at the moon!”

  And lights come on behind the wagon. Don has dropped the screen again and shadows dart across it, shapes too quick to see, just the suggestion of an arm, a head, a whirling sword, a wing outspread. A human form with antlers and a rupter raised. A lion's slashing paw.

  “Excite the Maidens into a wild rage,” I sing.

  The shadows flit across the screen, a silhouette of bovine horns out to the left, three dancing things with bestial heads.

  “Yes, let his mother catch first sight of Pierrot her son in drag, dress
ed as a slag to spy among them, peeping from behind some boulder, through a tree split by a lightning bolt. Her call will raise all of the Maidens.”

  A shadow points in accusation. Amped and modulated by Coyote's tech, the voice of Phreedom shakes the hall.

  “Who is this son of Pantaloon come speeding to the hills to spy on us, my pack? Whose spawn is this?”

  I hear her whisper after it, as well.

  “You're not my Jack.”

  The shapes of shadows swirl into confusion, suddenly resolve, a man in woman's dress, his arms spread wide by chains. He struggles, flails from side to side. His horned, winged captors hold him tight. The chaos under the thin skin of everything, Guy calls this scene. The creatures of Pierrot's id. The creatures of the night.

  “Let justice show herself,” I sing, “her sword in hand, to thrust it through the throat of Aching's son, that godless, lawless child of dust!”

  The creature caught behind the screen gives out a muffled shout. He thrashes, pulls against his chains and lashes out. It looks like Guy and Don are having trouble holding him.

  “He was not born of woman's blood, but spat from some gargantuan lion's lips. With wicked heart and lawless rage, with mad desire and frantic aim, he comes to meddle with his mother's holy games, defies the spirit of the pack. He thinks to tame with his weak arm a strength untamable as yours.”

  “Let justice show herself,” I sing, “her sword in hand, to thrust it through the throat of Aching's son, that godless, lawless, child of—”

  Dust flies up beneath Jack's feet as he jumps down from the wagon to the flagstones, landing by my side. I sneeze.

  “Gesundheit.”

  “Dankeschon.”

  We look around. There's no other exits from the prison courtyard of a square, just the portcullis of the seventh gate closing behind us now, its distant glint of daylight disappearing as the outside doors swing shut, just that and the wall to either side of it all chains and tracks going up, it seems, forever, lit by torches for as far as I can see. It's a vertical terminal of funiculars, caged metal carriages all topped with gears and cogs like clockwork cable cars, some no larger than an apartment-building elevator, others built to carry carts or larger cargoes. There are counterweights the size of small buildings, loading platforms, ramps and cranes.