by Hal Duncan
“Ur ye sure?” he says. “Mibbe ye want tae take anither look, missus. It's a'right, missus. Ye don't huv tae be feart noo.”
——
She looks down at the little bundle of blanket, patchwork quilt and ragged bedspread wrapped around it, held so tight in her arms they're almost locked around it as if frozen into place. Ah, Christ. What is she looking at? What is this thing in her hands?
“Look close,” says Don. “Be sure ae whit yer seein.”
Oh, Jesus and Mary. Jesus and Mary, but his tiny face is frozen. No. It can't be true. It can't be. Sure and there's enough woe in her life without this sorry sight.
“Dis it still look like a lion's head tae ye?” says Don.
Oh no. It's not her Leo but his hair is just as golden and his eyes as blue as the savannah skies of her imagination but his cheek it shouldn't be like that his skin is fair but not so white oh not so white as the snow oh no oh not so white and blue as porcelain Pierrot's head when she knocked it off the mantelpiece oh she was only trying to dust it no and the Russian dragged her out into the hallway for it those nine months ago and Mary-Jane took Jack up to her room to hush him in safety as she cried as the Russian tore her best green dress open and forced himself on her and left her there as he left her here he did he's left her here to die after the botched back-street abortion and Jack's never liked the cold he hasn't no and now his tiny hands are frozen.
She can feel her heartbeat slowing.
The truth is here now, cold and timeless. It's 1921 and Anna lies dying in the back alley, one child frozen in her arms, the other torn to pieces in her womb. It's 2019 and Phreedom lies against a Dumpster, shivering with the cold and with the hunger for the needle, arms as empty as her belly now the men in clean suits have taken her Jack away from her. It's 2037 and she's in another New York, yes, there's thousands of them on this long road through the Vellum, and she has to look in every one of them in case he's here in this one, in this fold. And it's eternity. It's out so far into the Hinter that years have no meaning, time itself measured in hours that rise as cities, cities of noon, cities of Evenfall, and cities of eternal night.
Phreedom stands before an empty stage in a solitary spotlight, Don beside her. She feels the weight of the severed head in her hand, the full weight of this murder committed by herself and her bitmite sisters. Christ, what's she become to do this to him? What's she doing holding his head up like a fucking trophy?
Her arm drops to her side, but she can't let go of the gray hair that still has a few gold streaks in it. Say something, she thinks, but there's nothing to say. The bitmites have no line for her.
——
“Mourned by me before you even knew,” says Don.
I flick the page over to read my sister's line, the stand-in Columbine for our rehearsal. Jack and Joey hoist the rigging round the wagon, cranking handles round and locking bolts, and hoisting sandbags up on ropes. Guy waves some of the Duke's guards back, directing them to take the thrones and chairs and place them here and there, leave space between them and the stage. He stands out in the center of the room and looks back at the rig, trying to reckon, I assume, exactly where the Duke will lie. I rub my finger with my thumb, the ink still wet upon the page.
“Where did Pierrot die?” I say. “Here in the house or somewhere else? Where did Pierrot lose his head?”
“In the same place where Action,” Don recites, “was ripped to shreds by his own hounds.”
“He went to Zithering?” I say. “He went to Zithering's mountain heights?”
“He had to mock the Harlequin,” says Don, “and you and your pack at his rites.”
“What were we doing there? Was I insane?”
Don nods his head toward the entrance to the hall.
“The whole damned city was deranged.”
The Duke is entering, all armor-gray and swaggering pride, a consul skittering at his side. I whistle at Jack, who clocks the Duke, ducks out of sight.
“I understand,” I read. “The Harlequin has been our ruin. We insulted him with our disdain, denied he was divine.”
I read the line without emotion, my attention drawn to this old warrior, this thing halfway between an angel and a king. He looks so much like Jack— an older Jack without the flashing grin—that suddenly I feel this horror in my queasy stomach and scrunching balls. He's got my sister trapped here in this castle in the sky, I have to tell myself. A fucking princess in his dream, his lie.
But does that really mean he has to die?
Don nudges me and hisses—the next line.
“Old man,” I say, “where is the corpse of my dear son?”
“I found it after a long search,” he says. “I've brought it back myself, all pieced together limb to limb.”
I try not to think of what we're going to do to him, what Phreedom has to do to him to break free of the lie. Jack is back now from behind the curtain, with his patchwork costume on, tying the mask around his face so that the Duke won't catch on. Patchwork costumes and patchwork worlds, I think. A million Jacks scattered across the Hinter. All of us—all of us—broken up, torn into pieces by the dogs of our pasts. Christ, is it such a crime for someone who has a little bit of fire in them, a little touch of gold in their gray hair, to offer lost souls sanctuary in the Hinter wilderness? What if we bring this miserable Haven down, tear this lie apart, and Phreedom with it… and what if we can't put the pieces back together? What if you can't ever put the pieces back together?
I flick forward through the later pages of Guy's play. The further I go, the more scratches and scores there are, the more lines rewritten in the margins, arrows, circles marking out the edits.
Fuck, Guy, I think, I hope you know what you're doing.
ALL GOOD MEN
“Fuck, Guy,” says Puck. “I hope you know what you're doing.”
Peachy Puck glares at the shadow slumped beside Jack on the sofa in the lounge of Fox's den, his flat well hidden within the safety of the Rookery.
“We need him,” says Guy. “Now is the time for all good men—”
“What's good about a fucking psychopath who doesn't give a shit about anything or anyone?”
Joey, still not quite himself, incapable of biting back with a sarcastic gibe, just gives him the finger. Think I give a fuck what you say?
We bitmites skitter up and down that finger, flow around it, weaving flesh together, seamstresses of skin. This symbol, this so simple and so singular a statement, is part of the core of him, the heart of Joey. We latch on to it, stitch it into him, re-form all its connections, instance here to instance there. It is the reply of a young man being quizzed by Guy about these new drugs he has somehow gotten hold of, of a youth being questioned by a black-shirted militiaman, of a boy being ribbed about his painting. It is the simple wordless answer to a thousand questions, to all questions. A raised middle finger.
Fuck you.
“You see what I mean?” says Puck.
“Sometimes,” says Guy, “that sort of attitude can come in handy.”
“You're playing with fire, you know,” says Puck.
“But that's what makes life worth living,” says Jack.
And we flit with the glint of his toothy grin from this moment, popping a pill at a warehouse party, to another where he's unbuttoning Puck's fly, to another where a Molotov is flying from his hand. We click them into place, all the clunks and chiks of his lighter, all the leaps from this rooftop to that, to get away from an SS man firing at him, from some gang lord he's just blown a kiss at, from the razor kids whose turf they're on, or simply for a dare. Silkworms burrowing, spiders scurrying, we spin the silky steel on which his moments of sparkle flash like dew caught by a burst of sun. We see him through Joey's eyes as they dangle on monkey-frame of scaffolding, so many feet across to that steel bar, so many stories straight down to the street, and Joey says, you wouldn't dare, and Jack gives his own silent reply. A smile of sheer audacity.
Fuck it.
Jack limbers up from the sofa, s
tretching, wraps his arms around Puck's waist to draw him tight to him.
“What's the worst that could happen?” he says.
Joey watches the two of them—the fly hand Jack slips under Puck's tee, and the way Puck jerks back from the tickling cold, the slaps and shoves—get off—the armlock Jack puts round Puck's neck, his childish, coy attempt to hug the kid. Guy standing over at the window, Puck and Jack pawing each other, Joey sitting in the corner feeling fucked—it's almost like the old days, except that he no longer has that feeling of disgust that used to eat at him. It was at times like this he'd look at Jack and Puck and just see children, idiot children playing at being revolutionaries. He'd see Guy standing alone, so louche, so fucking posed with cigarette and glass, and think just what the fuck are you really up to? Guy Fox, head of the Thieves Guild now that King Finn's gone. Did he really think they could take down the whole fucking system? Did he really believe all that jew good men shit?
Now, though? Now he sees that there's a secret sorrow somewhere under Puck's whimsy, that Jack's wildness is a fierce denial of dull care, and that Guy carries the troubles of the world with a pretense of ease. And he wonders. Was he just fucking jealous that Jack had latched on to this shiny pretty thing, the snub-nosed image of his secret self, or the flickering dream of Kentigern set free? Jealous of Puck and the revolution that had stolen his best friend?
What a fucking crock of shit that would be.
He wanders over to the window beside Fox, looks out into the Rookery. Fox's place sits near the eastern edge, with only a few hundred yards between them and the wall of concrete—and fire now—that seals them from the rest of Kentigern, but you couldn't tell. It might as well be buried in the very heart of the Rookery. To the left, the backyard of the old tenement block, where the bins would once have been, is all built up with multistory prefabs, balconies and ladders. Straight in front of them, across a tarmac car park that used to be full of stalls each morning and kids with footballs every afternoon, a huge hangar of corrugated iron, red with rust and green with moss, blocks off most of their vision. Beyond the roof of it more tenements and prefabs hide behind the scaffolding that rises to support the hodgepodge roofing that seals street from sky.
“So what's the plan?” he says to Fox.
“No plan for now,” says Fox. “I think Jack and yourself should lay low for a while, let the bitmites take down Kentigern's walls. Then we head out into the Hinter, find the next Haven. They must be holding King Finn somewhere. He's too valuable to them.”
Joey ignores the point of the comment, thinks of the rats running burning out into the night, scattering round the Circus and into the city. Bitmites spreading chaos through Kentigern's unending night. The denizens of the Rookery have no fear of chaos, they thrive on it, so they'll be all right, but out there, in the shopping malls and council offices, the police-state city of sleepers in fucking denial that the apocalypse ever happened, it'll be hell.
“What if they get it back under control?” says Joey. “For all the shit the bitmites drag out of their sordid little fantasies and give flesh, at the end of the day, you know—you know it, Fox—the fuckers out there just don't want their freedom. They're afraid of it. Four fools don't make a revolution, Fox.”
“Five,” says Don as he closes the door behind him.
And Fox smiles at Joey as if the moment should have some significance.
“One by one,” he says. “We just take it one soul at a time.”
THE HARLEQUIN's DANCE
She drags the angel into town behind her, him staggering to match her stride. She's still not sure of why she let him live; she can't believe it's Jack, no matter what he says, no matter how his eyes glint with the blue of open skies, electric sparks, but still… there was this moment when she felt her fingers at his throat, her claws piercing his skin, and some tiny scrap of her humanity kicked in and held her back. Even with the bitmites hissing in her head, and the pack behind her howling for his blood, she'd felt some little piece of sense in her saying, no, don't do it, this was never what you wanted. Not revenge. It can't just be about revenge. The world, the Hinter, the whole Vellum, can't just be about revenge.
So she drags the angel through the town he rules, this little Haven out in the Hinter where he's set himself up as fucking king, Basileus. She drags him through the market, toppling stalls and barrows as she passes them, and brings him to his knees up within the portico of his own fucking palace, this once-grand angel of fire, stripped of his armor, stripped to the waist… and stripped of his graving. The hatch-work of scars on his chest is so much like the birthmark graved on her lost son.
But where Jack inherited that strange riven graving from the bitmites and from herself, from the confusion written on her own right arm, this unkin's graving is an artifice. His graying hair, the beard on his face—it's the work of a warrior trying to rewrite his own fate, she thinks, trying to not die gloriously in battle, to exchange a destiny of war for one of will. A small-town king. A reasonable man, he'd say. But in the desperate order he's imposed over his own wild nature she can still read what he was, once, in the world before the Evenfall.
“The fates we make are sad,” says Phree, “but what had he to do with my mistake?”
She speaks the line like she already knows the answer. Everything and nothing. A serving maid starts to sob. The consul grips her arm, looks nervously at Joey's scowl. You made your bed, now lie in it, I can just about hear him muttering.
“He was like you,” says Don, “refusing to respect the Harlequin, to join his dance. He's ruined all of us together now, this house itself, you, me, and him.”
The audience stand round the walls like statues, eyes fixed on the grim sight of the body of the Duke. It's almost gone now, dissolved into the swirling mess of bitmites rising from the floor, filling the room; there's something even more unsettling in the absence of it, though, the fact that all there is now is the head in Phreedom's hand. Strange how we talk about decapitation as losing your head, when it's as much a head losing its body, becoming heartless, gutless, spineless… dead.
“I'll be reviled, an outcast from this hall of dreams,” says Don. “The once great Pantaloon, who sowed the seeds of Themes and reaped the harvest.”
On Phree's face the tears write the distress and shame of a young woman who has felt a child slain in her womb, or held it frozen in her arms, or watched it laid to rest in a dark tomb. Or who just doesn't know. It's all the same. ‘Cause even if there is no blame, the dream of it all being a lie is all it takes to drive someone insane. The death of innocence is the death of hope, I think, and the death of hope is the death of reason. Mourning is madness, Phree, in every way that you can take those words.
——
She circles the angel.
He must have hacked himself up, she reckons, in the days when the bitmites swept howling through reality, in the Evenfall, or in the Hinter that followed behind it, like some war criminal whose troops are vanquished going under the knife, choosing survival over glory, obscurity over execution. But there's enough still there of his graving that she can read his past in it, the flames and the smoke of war. In the scars on his chest she can read the firework trajectory of his ascent, the slashing curves of cities falling in his path, the thousand nicks of souls, pinpricks and razor cuts of slaughter in some terrible apocalyptic struggle. He only had to say the word and fire fell from the sky on Baghdad, Tehran and Damascus.
She looks at his graving and she can see him: see the identity disguised within; see him ordering executions of angels, demons and humans alike; see him trying to hold the remnants of the Covenant together by brute force; see him brooding on his throne as the Evenfall roared outside, the noise of it rising to drown out even the Cant of his own personal guard; see this angel overlord turn and flee, abandoning his brethren to their fates, to the bitmites and the humanity they'd allied themselves with, now tearing down the gates.
It's me, he'd said. It's Jack. And she wanted it to be true
so bad she almost killed him when she realized that it wasn't, when she took her clawed hand from his throat to tear his shirt open and knew exactly what he was, who he was. An angel of fire who thought he could conquer every demon but who found human hatred a more powerful force than any simple, power-hungry unkin. An angel of fire on the run from Evenfall, and the bitmites and all the rage and sorrow and uncertainty let loose in it. The angel of fire.
Gabriel.
She leans down to whisper it in his ear, to let him know he's bound to her now. She's not going to kill him, she says. As long as he understands that she's in charge now. That he's not a king now. He can be… a duke, maybe, but not a king. She knows there's an even deeper cruelty in what she's doing to him and to herself by letting him live, but she wants so much for him to be Jack, and this is the Hinter, this is the wild world after the bitmites, where the lies can be made real, where scattered souls gather together round the dreams they share.
And maybe his dream is not so incompatible with her own.
The bitmites flow down from her arm, over her bloody claws, onto the head, fusing the two in a filigree of crawling symbols. They begin to eat the flesh, and the nausea of the image hits me once again. Joey and Jack seem unconcerned, but Guy, like me, can barely face this sight. Phree's hand trembles a little with a judder of her spine. Yes, this is death, Phree. Even in the Hinter, even in these realms of fantasy where wicked tyrants die by their own sword, and where their bodies melt away, death isn't clean; it leaves its tokens, visible, obscene.
Don lays a hand upon her chin and turns her face to look at him. There is no horror in his eyes, only a solemn quiet.
“Pantaloon,” I say, “I pity you this doom. Although your grandson only got what he was due, it is a bitter blow to you.”
He takes the head out of her hands, a gentleness in the way he opens up her fingers and untangles them from the dissolving hair. He holds her trophy by the jaw.
“Our house looked up to you,” he says, “my daughter's son when I had none. The keystone of my hall, you ruled the city with such fear no one would dare insult the old king when he saw you near; he'd get what he deserved.”
