Ink

by Hal Duncan

  Jack picks up the soldier's rifle, slings it over his shoulder.

  Everywhere there are shouts, the clamor of feet, doors opening and slamming, women screaming, wailing. Everywhere there are the sounds of war, the sounds of a blood-soaked modern war of murdered innocents, of doors being kicked in and machine guns turning human beings into meat and bone. Everywhere the Turks have thrown themselves into a campaign of terror, dragging men, women and children out into the streets, killing the men and boys, raping the women and girls. Webley in his hand, Jack stands as if at the center of some whirlwind of events, a storm, a whirling pillar of smoke and flame in the desert, facing a deity that's not a wise old man with a white beard but a god of the storm, a dust-deity of wrath.

  MacChuill is trying to peel the woman and her daughter away from the body of her husband, to persuade her that she can't stay here, it's not safe. She just sobs hysterical, unanswerable questions in her own language. Armenian, Jack recognizes. He crouches down to speak to her. You have to go. Now. For the sake of the child.

  “Jesus fuckin Christ,” says MacChuill. “This is bloody chaos.”

  “No,” says von Strann. “This is organized.”

  He kneels over the Turkish soldier, Tamuz standing at his side.

  “Take a look at the sky,” he says. “Which directions is it lit up? Which quarters are they burning? The Armenian Quarter. The Jewish Quarter.”

  Across the wide square of the Beth Ashtart, the night sky above the buildings opposite is lit by fire. Fires, rather, their light gathered in distinct glows, here to the southwest, to the north, one here, another there, maybe five or six separate areas that seem to have been targeted.

  “We have to get out of this area,” says von Strann. “We need—”

  He stops, looking down the street, and MacChuill and Jack act instantly, Jack dragging the woman from her husband's body toward an alley, clamping a hand over her mouth, MacChuill doing likewise with the crying child, Tamuz behind him. Von Strann flattens himself into a doorway as the Turkish militiaman reaches the end of the street. The beam of a flashlight on the bodies lying on the street. A shout.

  And then it's more bloody gunfire, the woman dead while trying to reach the body of her husband, the child bleeding all over MacChuill, and Tamuz, bloody idiot boy, standing out in the open, firing wildly with a Turkish rifle.

  ——

  “I will be OK, eh, Jack?”

  The boy grimaces as he's dragged limping and stumbling up the stairs, Jack under one arm, von Strann under the other, rifle dangling by its strap in his hand, clattering off step and wall. His face is pale.

  “You'll be fine, lad,” says Jack.

  “Wee fuckin scratch like thon, son,” says MacChuill behind them. “Whit are ye, a bloody poof? Ma granny's seen worse—ah, Christ an’ fuckin—”

  Jack glances back, as they shoulder the door open and stagger into von Strann's studio, at MacChuill and the child cradled in his arms, hoisted up next to his ear. MacChuill looks up at Jack, shakes his head.

  Outside, the city is all locked and barricaded doors, waiting for the army to have its fill. The city is streets filled with those who've taken flight and paid the price for it, with those who've taken up arms to fight the Turks and paid for it. The city is gunfire ringing out from the alleys and back streets. The city is riot and rout. It's massacre and mayhem. Tell el-Kharnain, the city of decadence, of the bourgeois bohemians, this city of sin and sensuality, is falling once again.

  MacChuill puts the child on the bed, checking for breath, a pulse, while Jack and von Strann lower Tamuz into a chair. Jack kneels to undo the rip of sleeve knotted round the boy's thigh, double-checking that it's just a flesh wound. Fine. He wraps it round again. Von Strann is tentatively drawing back the bloody bundle of tunic he's held pressed to Tamuz's side all the way back. That's the bad one.

  “Let me see. Do you have bandages?”

  He peels the sodden shirt open, wipes blood away with his sleeve; it's not too far in, not a belly shot, thank Christ.

  “I will be OK, eh, Jack? It does not hurt too much.”

  “You'll be just fine. Trust me.”

  Jack puts his hand to his own chest, then to the boy's.

  “From my heart to your heart.”

  THE SONS OF SIDIM, BY RAINER VAN STRONN (1933)

  And so the wan and gibbous moon shone over the city by night, whilst by day the sun was red and bloated; and day and night, the siege continued. Day and night, the Sons of Sidim uttered their unearthly ululating song of wailing for their dead. Day and night, the Turuq army wrought their awful terror upon the poor, innocent and weak inhabitants of the city of Sidim. Day and night, the warrior Kartur and his new comrade-in-arms, the artist-prince Vhneszran, watched from the turret room of the now half-ruined Temple of T'hmusz.

  By turns, it seemed, the one would pace back and forth and gaze out over the embattled city, stalking the room like some caged panther whilst the other slept a fitful restless sleep. Only the assured patience of Prince Vhneszran, when set against the grim keen glint, the lust for battle, in Kartur's warrior eyes, distinguished the two men in their attitudes as they waited for the moment that both knew would come. The Turuq army was still a mighty force, even in these days of the Turuq Kingdom's decline, but the Sons of Sidim were a proud and noble race, and they would have their vengeance. Day and night, they sang of it in their lament, in that horrible song of murder, guilt and blood. Day and night, the song reached out from beyond the walls of the city to stir an unutterable terror in the heart of every Turuq soldier, young and old, a crawling horror of the certainty of death.

  Some, the most foolhardy and the most craven of these men, had attempted to desert their posts and their compatriots, to escape from that dread place. Captured and executed by their own comrades, their naked bodies hung now from gibbets raised along the battlements of the city walls, stripped of all armor, stripped of all honor, as a warning to others. And of those few that had escaped this dismal fate, that had breached the city walls and thought to flee across the fiery sands of the surrounding desert? What of them? Their heads now capped the poles of the banners of the Sons of Sidim, banners made from the flayed skins of fallen foes, banners which fluttered in the dry desert wind, in the dust and sand whipped up around them, all around the city. They flapped languidly and seemed to move in time to the abominable elegy of the Sons of Sidim, as did the billowing clouds of dust and sand, as if the very elements, the very desert itself, were bemoaning the devastation and promising a dark and grisly revenge.

  As Kartur watched and listened from the barricaded tower, quite unaware of his impatient hand stroking the leather-bound handle of his gleaming sword, he knew that it was only a matter of time until doom came to the city of Sidim and dealt its awesome blow upon the vile minions of the Turuq king, feeble lackey of the New Ruzzo-Purzan Empire.

  A SONG OF MOURNING, A LAMENT

  21 st March. It is dawn. Through the window, I look out on a sun that rises over the occupied city of Tell el-Kharnain like the rising of the eye of God himself. It feels like the dawning of the Day of Judgment, when every secret will be sung out like the muezzin's song, when truth itself shakes off so many centuries of sleep, and stands.

  But the muezzin is silent this morning, dead on some bloody street no doubt, and the only song being sung here is the quiet murmur that von Strann mouths over the dead youth.

  He sings in the strange tongue of the Enakites, I am sure. It is not Arabic or Hebrew, Armenian or Azeri. It is not any tongue I recognize. But I know this is the Enakite tongue, I know this is the Cant, because I understand exactly what it means. It is a song of mourning, a lament, but in the pain, the sadness, there is also anger, even threat. I am reminded of the tone, the quiet, grim restraint with which he promised a “reckoning”; and it disturbs me. I keep imagining that I can hear the song being sung by other voices far off, almost too faint to be heard. I say it is my own imagination because the voices match von Strann's too well and
with the tension and the weariness, one's imagination can play funny tricks on one.

  But I am not so sure those voices are not real.

  You have to understand, Jack, I am so tired. The Baron sits on the edge of the bed beside the body of Tamuz, while I sit at his kitchen table, where I've spent most of this long dark night deciphering what I could of Samuel's notes, poring over the ragged pages, so much of it illegible, torn and burnt and bloodstained. There is too much to make sense of, too many inconsistencies, and I fear I'm only adding to them with this entry, but maybe it will be of some use to you. Have you read the other journal entries, I wonder. Are you reading this too late? Has it all already happened? Did you, like me, spend too long with all the irrelevant nonsense of Samuel's first meeting with von Strann, his introduction to the tribe, their strange customs, and with all that bloody hypocritical horror at the “abhorrent and unmanly” rituals which gave Sodom its reputation? I leaf back through the pages of this journal to three days ago, and the words are those of a stranger so obsessed with what it is to be a man that he spent his life trying to kill his own desires.

  You know this, Jack. You can deny it to yourself, but you cannot deny it from yourself.

  I look at Tamuz, dead because of my self-hate and arrogance, and, Jack, if Samuel only found these words within the Book, if you can only find them in his notes, I pray to God that you can choose another path.

  ——

  Jack puts the page down, looks around the room, von Strann sitting on the bed, but with the girl on it instead of Tamuz. Tamui on the cot, wounded but still alive. MacChuill curled up beside the cot, asleep, instead of captured by the Turks. A present different from the journal of this other, broken self, but not so different, not so very different. Not different enough.

  Von Strann mutters his strange song over the dead child. And in the distance other voices sing the same hollow lament.

  21 st March, he writes. How much did Samuel glean from his studies that might be of use to us if we can only separate what's true and what is false? The movements of troops that are only now being planned, of alliances and betrayals that have not yet happened, Allied war plans for the coming decades, and even the subtlest strategies of the Futurists. I have read so much of what he wrote about the past, the present and the future, of things he should not, could«oi know unless the Book is real; of the internment camps of the Futurists, of what is really happening there, and why.

  Sacrifice, he called it, the sacrifice of the chosen.

  Errata

  —

  Room

  innan stands up, and waves wash over him—of revulsion, reverence— not felt as his so much but as an outer force as physical as sunlight on your back, as a caress or a cut. He's past the sex-and-death, carrot-and-stick part of the trip now, shucking those shallow neuroses, headed deeper down into the psychodrama that the drug's performing with his dreams, a play cast from his past. He snatches glimpses of Phree as an angel anima, winged guardian, Tom as the self, lost soul of summers gone. Black-suited unkin torturers play id and shadow. In the corner of his eye he sees himself in chains, an ego bound in pride and pain. The fall of shadow here becomes an aging soldier with one eye, a raven on his shoulder; there he sees a face he doesn't recognize, a rakish chap with pencil tache. A fox dashes across his vision.

  And along with the hallucinations, elemental and ephemeral certainties assault him now, peyote plucking out chords on his heartstrings till convictions blossom in him like unfolding lotus flowers. He's a fucking god, is Seamus Shamash Sammael Sodding Finnan. Sure and this is what it is to be a god. But with his years of mescaline and mojo and the magic of the Cant, Finnan knows fine well the folly of believing such delusions. So he throws his head back with a belly laugh, throws off the flattery of heart and head, and throws himself into the dream, pushes for a sense more visceral, more honest. To get something worthwhile out of a trip you have to listen to your guts, forget the truths you want to hear, have the cojones to cut through the crap. You have to kick away the crutches offered by your psyche; the unconscious can be just another carney, like these Cold Men trying to scam the rube into a false faith in its charms.

  Illumination is the ultimate confidence trick, Finnan knows.

  ——

  The crowd and the marketplace fall away behind him as he lays his hand against the peeling paint of the woodwork and pushes a heavy door open, with a smooth and sanguine movement, to enter a fallen falling ruin of a room. Tumbled sandstone walls that once defined the boundaries of a stable now slide and skew into a new perspective. The room has become as vast as a whole landscape, the dirt floor wide desert, and every stone a towering mesa. Immense and open, this isn't a room, it's Room, and the wooden beams that hold up and hatch out what is left of the roof are the architecture of the sky itself. That's the illusion, anyway.

  The aged cracked black leather of horses’ harnesses and saddles hang, and turn and twist, as he looks at them, into weathered coats and cloaks. These are the abandoned attributes of elder gods; this is the cloakroom of the Old Ones, and in every stall there's a shadow that Finnan's flickering mind can give a name to, arbitrary and invented but as meaningful as any name: Ixzoche, God of the Dead Soul Deeps; Kavajokee, God of Firewater and Iceblood; Nixo, Little God of the Mantelpiece. He makes them up as he walks down between the stalls, looking from one side to the other, nodding to each one in turn. Even spurious gods deserve at least a casual respect.

  He steps into the open ruin of the room, and every shadow in it comes alive. That's the illusion, anyway.

  Crows’ wings and serpents’ coils crack around him as he sits cross-legged in his simworld of a sweat lodge, surrounded by his leathered weathered shadow-elders, by the harnesses and saddles that are skins and irons now, flayed hides of slaughtered angels, shackles for defeated demons, veils of Vellum to be torn and chains of Cant to be broken. He's in that stage of satori where every object is a symbol, every symbol has a mythic meaning, sense turned into nonsense to make new sense, make a new sense of himself as he was always good at, making a nuisance of himself, sure—but Finnan has done peyote too many times to buy into the wonder. Time to strip the trip down to the truth. These aren't gods, just god-hide saddles and soul-steel bits for the human horses ridden by the loas, the orishas, spirits of vodoun and Santeria. Skinsuits and gravings worn by hunter-gatherers to mimic and to mask the face of the divine in mystery. The fabric and framework of the Vellum stripped of flesh, the surface and structure of a reality shorn of substance.

  Come on then, he thinks. Show me what you're really made of.

  And he smiles as we spirits stream out of the walls, across his vision, our voices like a river rushing, roaring of our archaic and arcane authority, we dead souls of this dereliction deep in the desert, we who have been deified and damned by time.

  He takes a drag of his cigarette and blows out curls of dragon's breath.

  So what's the story here? he thinks.

  In the ruins of the stable then, we show him how the cities sank into the Evenfall, the people wandering lost among the rubble, watching TV news of the End Days, the unraveling of all they thought they could rely on in a slow but steady corrosion of consistency. We speak in the crackling hiss of radio announcements, tell of the disassembly and the dislocation of the world, our voices empty of emotion reading out the toll of disappearances, disturbances; a tale of driftworlds in the Vellum, Havens dug down to survive the cold of Hinter. How we tried, we tried, to shape a world for all their dreams, and found the one consensus in them their belief in enemies.

  Two scorpions crawl across the floor toward each other, edging sideways, first one way and then the other, stretch their stinging tails up as each studies its opponent. The noises of the crowd outside, in his altered state, in our Cant, are the sound of drums and song, of Caribbean carnival.

  “Rum, rum, lovely rum! When I calls ya, ya has to come.” The scorpions dance, and we dance round them, a million dust angels on the point of a sting. This
is the gathering, we show him, the sifting of souls into good and evil, right and wrong, chaos and order… us and them. “Rum, rum, lovely rum! When I calls ya, ya has to come.” The scorpions dance, and we dance round them. This is the gathering, we show him, the drift of it all to an apocalypse that will wipe out both sides in one last almighty cataclysm.

  “Gonna send for my scorpion to fight your centipede. Rum, rum, lovely rum!”

  And Finnan stretches to his feet, looking toward the door, out to the Mission, as the voices call to their carnival saint, to this Sante Manite; but we let him hear the true source of the name now, in the song they sing, in a celebration not quite sane:

  “Sante Manite,” they sing.

  And sans humanite is what he hears.

  The Last Bastion of Religion

  The air in the church is darkness filled with dust and sliced by diagonals of light and, with the candles giving off their golden glow, it all seems just too staged to be what it pretends, the sacred fallen to the profane. No, thinks Finnan, there's something here beyond the grandiose American Gothic of a church in dereliction, of statues of saints and madonnas with their paint peeling, of black candles on the altar, scents of sex and urine in the air. Even with the toppled crucifix and the rosaries trampled on the ground, there's a… piety here. The place reeks of religion even in its denial, its deliberate travesty. He closes the doors behind him quietly, running his fingers softly across the rough grain of the wood, so solid and so solemn.