Ink

by Hal Duncan

  Soldiers move in around us, and a nod of the head among the looming guards shepherds us toward one of the midsize cages. Guy drives the wagon in past a soldier's waving arm, that way, keep it moving now. A dozen or so of the soldiers follow Jack and me into the cage, flanking our wagon as an armed escort.

  The grilled gate slides shut with a clatter, and the cage's gears grind into action. Deafening clangs and shrieks of metal. The whole cage shudders as it starts to rise.

  Jack presses his nose between the bars, looking up into the height of the grand shaft, down at the floor falling away below us, awed by the fantastic artifices of eternity. I take a seat on the running board beside Joey, frowning as he reads through Guy's script, shaking his head and muttering about how if we just stuck to simple themes for once, maybe dealt with fucking human nature for a change, then maybe it would save us all a lot of pain. He wishes Fox would just leave the big ideas to others, I guess, and, as we chunter slowly up toward the Duke's grand castle in the sky, I sort of see his point.

  Me, I've always found more fun in living life from day to day and night to night, in finding truth not in eternity but in the minutes and the hours. Fuck, isn't that a finer goal to strive for than to live forever in some ivory tower?

  I pick a piece of fluff from Joey's shoulder, flick it away.

  “You want to help me with my lines?” I say.

  He shrugs OK.

  Thing is, what Joey doesn't get is that it shows much more respect for the divine to say the fuck with all these lousy laws—at least I think that's what Monsieur Reynard is trying to say. But Joey, our eternal nihilist, is, of all of us, I guess, the true idealist.

  I hand him my copy of the script, pointing to where I am, and he settles back against the wagon's side.

  “Now, Harlequin,” I sing, “show us your mocking grin. Show us your hundred heads, the bull's horns, and the hair of snakes, the fire of your lion's breath. Come! Throw the deadly noose about the hunter of your pack as he swoops on the Maidens gathered yonder.”

  Jack turns back to grin at Joey and myself. The cage rolls on up the great shaft. Jack the Giant-Killer, I think, going up his mechanical beanstalk to slay the tyrant in the clouds, rescue the princess. Christ, I think, maybe the Duke is just another Jack, a bit of him, a someday might-be dream of him thrown out into the Hinter, living in a giant sandcastle built to be kicked down.

  And I still fucking love him.

  Shit, man, maybe we're all just different dreams of Jack.

  PIERROT IS DEAD

  “O house of Satan, once the greatest of all Hell!”

  A hand appears stage left, slaps round a pillar, leaving bloody smears as Guy Fox staggers on, his shepherd costume, face and hands all crimson spatters.

  “House of the old prince who sowed the serpent's crop,” he wails, “of men born in the fields!”

  He sobs and grabs my arm, leans in to whisper that it's done. I nod. He turns, hamming his horror.

  “I may be a slave, but still … a good slave's heart breaks at his master's grave.”

  “What's this?” I sing. “News of the pack?”

  “The son of Aching, Pierrot, is dead.”

  “My king,” I sing. “My Harlequin!” [My Jack ‘At last you show yourself in all your might.”

  “Woman,” gasps Guy, “what are you saying? You delight at my poor master's pain?”

  “What? Do I sing my joy in a foreign tongue? Pierrot's dead? Good! I no longer fear his chains.”

  “Do you think Themes so poor there's not a man who'll—”

  “I'm a stranger in this land,” I cut him off. “It's Harlequin I answer to, not Themes's demands—”

  “To glory in his murder is a crime, and this of all things will not be forgiven.”

  I snort with derision.

  “Tell me,” I say. “Tell me how he died, that scheming villain.”

  The homesteads of the land of Themes behind them now, Elixir and the Basilisk splash through the Stream of Sophists, and begin the climb up Zithering's heights, the stranger striding out ahead to guide them to the scene, glancing over his shoulder now and then to smile at them with glinting eye and teeth that gleam. Basileus or Bacchus, poor Elixir isn't sure which of the two deserves more fear, and why exactly he is here, but he has no say in it, of course. So, just as the Basilisk follows the stranger, so Elixir tags along behind the Basilisk—

  Basileus, he thinks. Gods, don't forget to use the proper word or the Basileus— bastard basilisk basileus—will have him flogged when they get back to town. It's not as if he'd be the first. His Misery is not exactly known for mercy.

  They follow the trickling water of a brook through a nook in a rock wall, and Elixir listens to the tread of each footfall as they pick their way beneath the pines, light on the bed of needles, his own breath held tight, released in whispers. They stop in the shade of shrub, crouched down to look without being seen, and gaze into a grassy glade.

  The Maidens sit there busy with the work of joy. Some wind fresh curling ivy-sprays around their wands, while others sing hymns to each other, to the rapture of the pack. Like colts let loose from the yoke of a carved chariot, Elixir thinks, they have no cares.

  The stranger is smiling at the sight. Elixir is nervous at his own furtive delight. The Basilisk just glares.

  “Stranger,” he says, “I cannot see the pack from here. I'll have to find some higher ground or climb a tree to see their shameful acts.”

  Elixir sees the stranger work a wonder then. He pulls a vine out of the ground and, like a whip, he snaps it through the air and round a dead tree's splintered tip. He draws it down lower and ever lower to the dust, this dead tree; stripped of needles, bark and branches, little more than ragged, jagged trunk, but this man bends it like Accordion strings his bow, so smooth, so easy; or like the old philosophist Hairclippers drawing a curve of wheel in a slow line of stick in sand.

  So the stranger draws the tree down, bends it to the earth by some inhuman power; and it does not break. The stranger tells the Basilisk to hold on to the highest branches near the tip, then lets it straighten up into the sky, lets out the whip, hand over hand, so slow, so careful, so as not to shake Elixir's master from his grip. It rises like a flag over a battlefield, or like some amphitheater's hoisting trick of rope and pulleys built so that, at the climax of the show, some god can enter from the sky.

  But now the Basilisk up on his perch, this lofty throne, is seen far better by the Maidens down below than he sees them, and, oh, as soon as he is seen, Elixir thinks … He turns to voice this fear but finds the stranger disappeared, and now Elixir feels the terror of a dream out of control. And from the sky there comes a voice, the voice of Dionysus it would seem. The sound of thunder, a drumroll.

  “Maidens, I bring the man who tried to mock us and our mystic rites.”

  A shaft of sun between the clouds picks out the tree, a fiery pillar rising bright between the heaven and the earth.

  “Take vengeance on him,” says the light.

  Don yanks a knot loose and the sandbags drop, and rising from behind the wagon, bound like a queer Christ upon his cross, the victim in his riding dress, face hidden by the hood, appears. The skirt, once green, is stained with blood still streaming from his wounds; it flutters as he struggles. I can hear his screaming even through the gag. His arms bent back over the crosspiece of a rupter, bodice open, showing his scarred bloody chest, he rises like some knight speared on a pike, like some unholy banner of unholy war. Jack, crouched upon the wagon's roof, howls his delight.

  I look out on the audience, the mix of fear and thrill upon their faces. Serfs and courtiers who know their places, maybe they don't know what's going on, so maybe they're still thinking this is just a show, a song. But somewhere in their dreams, I think, this is a scene that part of them desires; and will desire as long as they live in these Havens built on fear. The Vellum is a harmony of op-posites, of tensions, good and evil, order versus chaos, and the Troupe d'rey-nard … well, we al
l have to play our parts. As long as there are Dukes of Hell, there will be those like us, the rogues and rebels, drunks and junkies, thieves and tarts, and the true king, unbound because unrecognized, my saucy Jack, my Jack of Hearts.

  “This is the ritual death of reason,” Guy explains as we ride through the doors into the hall where all the lords and ladies of this corner of eternity are gathering, the serfs and courtiers ruled by their sorrow for their own lost lives, trapped in this fantasy of reason's power over sin. And Joey grumbles that we'll never win, and Don is gruff and skeptical—-just how reliable is Jack? Guy worries over every line, each scene, each act, and I complain about soft skin but all the time I'm watching Jack. And Jack just grins:

  “The play begins.”

  So now Jack dances as the Harlequin, as Dionysus, god of tragedy and comedy, of epics and romances. With Guy and Joey at my side, I watch him pirouette, arms wide.

  “Take vengeance on him!” Jack roars as he whirls to point up at the Duke, our surrogate Pierrot, the head who rules this body politic of dreamers, raised now on his cross before them like the head of, well, the hero of that Scottish play up on its spike. We'll give them heroes, if that's what they want.

  This isn't just another rescue of some princess, though. This is a fucking revolution of the psyche.

  Errata

  —

  SOMETHING LIKE THE TRUTH

  o,” says Reynard, “it won't work.” “Do it.”

  “But Monsieur Carter, surely …”

  Reynard looks over to the Irishman for support but he's out cold in the armchair now, empty wine bottles at his feet. In this last year, it has been harder on him with each passing month. Even drunk, the visions are too much to bear, and Reynard can hardly blame him for his wretched state. A million Polish workers taken away on trains at German gunpoint to join Czech civilians, to be worked to death. Copenhagen and Oslo taken by Hitler's forces. Bombs aimed for the bridges of Rotterdam falling on the city center. British troops evacuated from Norway. Germans marching into Brussels and Antwerp. The British falling back from Boulogne and Calais.

  Dunkirk.

  They have a week before the Nazis enter Paris now, a week to stop it all, to find some turning point that they can change to rewrite history; but Finnan is a wreck and both of them … they've been almost without sleep now for the last four months, both Reynard and Carter, working round the clock just to transcribe the Irishman's mad ravings, the could-bes and the might-have-beens, pinning timelines, glossaries and indexes to the walls, planned alterations scribbled in margins. There are drafts and redrafts written in normal ink on normal paper everywhere; scratched over or scored through, the paper crumpled up and thrown away in despair, a novel's worth of gravings in this madman's language litters the floor of Reynard's study. Mon Dieu, they've tried to map not just the history of their world but its permutations also and, for all of this, they're still no nearer to an answer.

  Reynard picks up the bottle of ink, the black and swirling fluid that the Englishman produced from God knows where. … But no, Reynard knows all too well where it came from; he's seen the cuts on Carter's chest. It's just… what kind of creature has black blood? But no, he doesn't want to know. He puts the ink back in its place to one side of the desk, as if in ordering his tools he might somehow put everything in order: history; reality; his life.

  “We have to try,” says Carter. “We have to take the risk.”

  ‘And what exactly are you risking, Monsieur Carter?” says Reynard. “Do you have a wife and child? Do you have anyone you love?”

  Anger flashes in the Englishman's eyes for a fraction of a second, anger, pain and guilt, and Reynard knows his words have cut him deep as any little scalpel drawn across his chest. It's not the first time that this man has bristled at his talk of family, of loved ones.

  What exactly made you join the army, Captain Carter? thinks Reynard. Just what exactly are you fighting?

  “If we can bring both Britain and America into the War in Spain,” says Carter, “Christ, an Allied victory there … or before that, if we could stop it happening, destroy fascism before it even—”

  Reynard throws his arms up.

  “No! It will not work. Look …”

  And he traces through the sigils of dark logic here and here on this scrap of paper on this wall, from there to this one, see, from victory in Barcelona and Madrid to Gibraltar's fall, and on and on, the bitter truth that Carter can't accept. Yes, it has to work, it has to, but it doesn't. Murder Stalin. Kill Hitler in the trenches while he's still a private. Have the Turks change sides in 1917. There's an infinity of alterations they could make, and somehow, always, there's this page that does not change. This one infernal set of symbols that remains inviolate no matter what they do.

  The Englishman rams a cigarette into an overflowing saucer, one of a dozen makeshift ashtrays round the room, Anna's best Dresden china.

  Anna … He had to beg her to stay again yesterday, her suitcase already packed, Tomas holding her hand as they stood in the doorway, and the poor boy crying because of course it's all beyond his infant understanding. All he knows is that Mama is angry with Papa and his new friends, and all the shouting scares him, wakes him in the night, the voices raised in fear and anger. Reynard can't blame her, and he's tried to tell her … something, something like the truth. The men are British agents. What they're doing is important, so important, and they need his help. And why him? Why us? Why you?

  “What choice do we have?” says Carter.

  Reynard studies Carter as he stalks the room, as riven, driven as the notes strewn all around them. Like some lion avatar of all this chaos, Reynard thinks. The pile of angel skin sits on the desk so neat and orderly, in contrast, that it almost seems the book itself is what they're up against, some demon sentience lurking hidden in the ink. A grim, inhuman tyrant known as truth against which they are little more than animals caged for an emperor's sick delight. Carter remains untamed, still roaring, straining at the bars, but Reynard … all he thinks of now is Anna and Tomas. If there's really no way out should he be wasting time with this mad scheme? Non. He is an imbécile. Un crétin.

  Carter tears a sheet down from the wall and slams it on the desk, one of the trial drafts that Reynard knows will only result in the same horror that they're trying to remove. Worse, actually.

  “This one,” says the Englishman. “Just do it.”

  He stares in silence at the man, and—

  He sees the death of reason in his eyes. God, no. And then he's grabbing desperately for the top sheet of angel skin, but Carter's thrown the chair right back and Reynard hits the floor. Balled notes scatter under his outflung arms. He flounders, rolls and scrambles to his hands and knees, only to feel ribs crack beneath the boot that sends him sprawling.

  Carter's opening the bottle now, as Reynard, gasping, pulls himself upright. The study door is open and Anna standing in the frame. Not now. Reynard just yells at her and throws himself at Carter. Black ink spatters, burning on his hand, as Carter staggers to the side, throws out an arm for balance. Another grab to clamp a hand round Carter's wrist, to pry the bottle from his tilting, twisting grip. He yanks it free, but God, it's black fire as it spills across his palm and Reynard screams. He drops the bottle, tries to catch it; it goes tumbling, trails of black ink spilling out into the air. The bottle thumps down on the desk, ink everywhere.

  He hears the curses of the Englishman, Anna's screams, Tomas crying, Finnan's roar, but he can't even see them at the edges of his vision. All that Reynard can look at is this splatter-pattern of black blood on angel skin, a dark blotch on the vellum of his century.

  The Howl of Its Rage

  The room roars with the sound of thunder, waterfall or hurricane, a whirling wall of noise that's wild with lashing whips of air, tendrils of sound, of something, whipping at my sleeves, my hair, my very breath, as if the noise itself is trying to gain purchase, trying to drag me in, make me a part of this monstrous creation. Back flat agai
nst the bookcase, fingers clutching to an edge of wooden shelf, I know that what I'm trying to hold on to is life and sanity, my soul itself. The room roars as if it is alive. My God, it carves the very air into a form, invisible but touching, trailing liquid, cold, across my skin, drowning my pitiful shouts. The candlesticks roll round the pentacle upon the floor and, here and there, flames lick the floor and walls, the books in the bookcases. On the desk, the pages of the book flick back and forth as if some spirit seeks some reference in it on a page long since forgotten—only the certainty of an answer left, and fury at its inability to find it. With its voice made from a hundred rivers or the river of a hundred voices, the room roars like a thwarted beast. Is this what gods are made of, I wonder, surfaces of sounds of souls? Is this the god my brother's called down on us, sucking in the souls of Rohm's slaughtered inner circle to give it substance?

  Is this the howl of its rage?

  “For God's sake, no!”

  He stands there in the center of it, screaming invocations unintelligible amid the havoc all around, the dagger raised in his right hand. He stands in scattered light that blossoms from the jewel in his left hand, the light of all those little fires refracting and reflecting all around him like the air itself were crystal, each flame with its own partner in a shadow skittering across the walls, the shelves, the darkwood panels and the forest green of Father's favorite wallpaper. A pagan bonfire in the depth of pines at night. A blizzard whirling snow around some Loki as he calls the spirits of Walpurgisnacht itself to him, to him. Or of the Night of the Long Knives.