Ink

by Hal Duncan

  “He told you there were others? Did he tell you where they are? Shit, they must know… think of what they must know.”

  “Ah, Christ, Phree, walk away from it. Burn that fucking book and walk away from it.”

  “Where are the others? How many?”

  “Sure and didn't I say there were seven of them? Didn't I say ye were one of them, Phree. You and me and himself. You live through it, Phree, and what you become … what you're becoming…”

  He digs into his jacket pocket for his cigarettes, pulls one out, holds it.

  “Do ye want to die in a tattoo parlor in Asheville as a queen of death, Phreedom? Is that what ye want?”

  “I…”

  She stops.

  “You tried to cheat the system,” he says, “and you ended up as a piece of meat, carved up by the bitch queen of Hell. What did that bitch queen look like, Phreedom?”

  “No,” she says.

  “You tried to save Thomas, and all you did was lead her demons to him,” he says. “But then you knew the story you were playing, Phree, so wasn't there maybe a little part of you thought you could buy your life with his?”

  “No,” she says.

  “Where's your son, Phree? Where's the wonder boy you were going to keep safe and sound from everything? Why isn't he here leading your fucking army, if he's the fucking bitmites on your arm born in human flesh?”

  “I lost him,” she says, “he was stolen, taken from me. I was…”

  “More intent on destruction? ‘Cause here you are now raising an army to destroy every unkin fucker in the Vellum. What did the bitch queen of Hell look like, Phreedom? Like the face you see in the mirror now?”

  He offers her the cigarette.

  “You don't take this, you know,” he says. “As Sammael told it to me, I saw it all, Phree, and you don't take this. You call your Cold Men, Harker here and all the rest and, God help me, you bind me with yer fookin ink. That's what Sammael showed me. That's how you get me—him, I mean—fighting in your fucking war.”

  She looks at the cigarette. He holds his hand out closer to her.

  “So take it and prove him wrong,” he says.

  “She's a fighter, Finnan.”

  Enki pulls himself to his feet. His voice is low, humble, the voice of a craftsman who's gathered dirt at a riverside to shape it into clay, taught others to shape the pot on the wheel, taught traders how the tokens in the pots can measure a deal, how the marks on the clay mean numbers, how clay tablets can tell tragedies and epics … and all because he knows how fragile life is, the whole sorry mess of it. The voice of Enoch and Cain, the son and father, the creator who is his own creation, the builder of civilization.

  “You're right,” he says. “You always were. But Phreedom here… she's always been a fierce one.”

  “Finnan, I can't just walk away,” she says, “do nothing, leave the Dukes to their apocalypse. What happens then? We just give up and—”

  “I don't know,” he says. “We do this, then, fuck, I don't know what'll happen. Everything Sammael told me will be worthless—a fookin prophecy you've proven wrong. But, I don't know, maybe the story he told me can be something to fookin learn from. The way things shouldn't be. The way things mustn't ever be.”

  He nods down at the cigarette.

  “Suppose we find the Book of All Hours and we cut it up into little pieces. We stitch it back together so's every fookin fold of the Vellum it describes is bol-locksed up. We fuck with it, Phree, until it doesn't make a lick of sense, and the Covenants and the Sovereigns and all the Dukes of the world can't build their empires without them collapsing. Spanners in the works, Phree, glitches in the system. We make the whole fookin Vellum a trap for them, a fookin maze of destinies no unkin fucker can ever master.”

  Harker stands in the doorway, waiting for her decision, her order.

  “You say you want a revolution, Phree. I say we turn the whole world inside out. Let them think we're in the cage looking out, when it's them we're looking in at. And then? Well, I don't know any better than you, but what the fuck?”

  He grins.

  “How does that sound?” he says, and her hand is already reaching for the cigarette as he says: “Phreedom?”

  seven

  THE UNSPOKEN NAME

  TEETH STEELY SHARP, SILVERY SPARKLING

  he elevator Muzak cuts off abruptly and I wince at the hiss of static as the doors slide open onto the hotel corridor. A dude in sleek black suit and tie, black hair slicked back, is stubbing out a cigarette in some steel ashtray-bucket contraption at the side of the doors. Cute, in an angel of death sort of way. Black tear tattoo under one eye.

  “Room 1313,” says the Mafioso Pierrot, “far end of the corridor.” I have a very bad feeling about this: butterflies in my tummy and ants in my pants, sorta déjà vu meets heebie-jeebies. Don't know why—it's just another John looking to get jiggy—but as I'm walking down the corridor toward my waiting client, every hair on my furry little balls is telling me to turn and run. Black-suit dude looks just a little too expensive for a cabinet minister's bodyguard. I've got the feeling something else is going down tonight, other than Mr. Minister or me.

  I'm halfway along the corridor when I hear the chi-blast up ahead. Walls, floor and ceiling reverberate with the explosion. I stop, turn. Behind me black-suit dude is drawing a huge fucker of a double-barreled chi-gun, a Scorpio 99, brand-new and state-of-the-art … blow your head clean off your body, blow your soul right out into the chaosphere. Ah, fuck. In front of me, the door of Room 1313 kicks open and out of the billowing blue-green smoke of what could only be an orgone bomb steps a sexy silhouette. As the trails wisp away around him, he comes clear—a grin, a gun, a glint.

  ——

  Hair of flame and eyes of neon, he stands there in shreds of black and brown— leather, I think, under some kind of overcoat—all little more than rags now. I don't know what kinda übermensch he is to walk out of a blast like that, but I can smell the orgone on him, like cheap aftershave on a car salesman. Fuck, I can taste it, feel it, raw and fiery, and I may be a professional hustler and a trained tantra adept, but I'm having a hard time not jizzing in my jockeys.

  He winks at me, teeth steely sharp, silvery sparkling, and clenching a cheroot. And I'm staring down the barrel of the chi-gun in his right hand.

  ‘Ah, Puck,” he says. “Duck!”

  I'm still lying on the floor, feeling plaster rain down on me, when his hand on my dog collar pulls me, choking, to my feet. As he sets me down and lets go, I cough, try to gasp a complaint and cough again. I look at the black-suit dude slumped on the floor and against the wall in an obvious oxytocin daze, the wet patch on the crotch of his trousers.

  “Sorry for the roughhouse, rough trade,” says the madman as he swings me round into an embrace.

  He plants a kiss on my lips, this sex-gunned maniac, mouth open, tongue headed for my tonsils. Pulls back after a ball-scrunching thirty seconds.

  “You'll have to narrate this, pumpkin,” he says. “No time for chitchat. Get on the astral to Fox and tell him … tell him I fucked up … again. Brace for temporal aftershocks and…”

  He trails off, head cocked like a dog's.

  “What the fuck is going on?” I say. “Who the fuck are you?”

  He does a little shrug with a side-to-side bounce of the head that somehow I just know means, fuck, it figures.

  “I'm Jack,” he says. ‘And I'm here to rescue you, princess.”

  A Satchel of Scribblings as His Shield

  “In one tale we tell,” says Anat, “the child Isaac was anointed for a sacrifice that never took place. He was promised to God; his life, his future, everything that might possibly come from him was to be slain and burned. Every scion of his line is forfeit to the Lord. In that story, God is well pleased each time a Jew is killed. This is the God the angels seek to summon.”

  Jack shakes his head. He perches like a mountain lion on an outcrop of wall, part shielded by it and gazing through
binoculars at Azazel, likewise positioned on a crumbling turret at the Jericho Gate. He scans the wasted city. Only the Beth Ashtart remains unharmed. The Enakites consider it a sacred site, the temple of the last teraph in the Holy Land. The angels are likewise concerned to keep it whole, but for another reason it would seem. He listens to the conversation down below though he already knows the story.

  We are the story, after all.

  “Ah Christ All-fuckin-mighty,” says MacChuill. “The fuckin bampot—”

  Christ? thinks Jack. Christ? He thinks of Anat's words, of the slaughter of the innocents. Thinks of a whole generation dead and what an offering it would be if the sole survivor were nailed up to a cross to die. The lamb of God. Isaac Mark Two.

  He looks down at Anat, tries to form the question, manages only:

  “Christ?”

  “In the tale we tell of that,” says Anat, “the slaughter of the innocents was an attempt by Jibril—Gabriel, you would call him—to bind God into a body with blood. He acted alone, though, without the authority of the Host, so it is said that Metatron found a twin of your Good Shepherd to die on the cross in Yeshua's place. The rabbi lived; his poor beloved disciple died.”

  Makes little difference either way, thinks Jack. What the fuck is this Book of All Hours worth if they don't use it, if the Enakites just spend centuries, millennia, God knows, standing idly by, watching the slaughter? If this shepherd lives but another dies in his place, some poor scapegoat.

  Thomas Didymos, thinks Jack, suddenly.

  He looks at the wooden box and the satchel, both lying at his feet, and comes to a decision.

  “Can we get by the fuckers?” calls MacChuill. “What can ye see?”

  Jack says nothing, simply closes the flap on his satchel and buckles it, mind blank as a monk's in meditation, and rises, throwing the wooden box down to von Strann, steps up clear of his cover, and then screams out across the city at the angel of death, not with our Cant, we realize, but with something simpler and more honest and more human, calling the angel out in the tongue of his homeland, calling down his own destruction, and we panic, rush to him to fill his eyes with fire, to fill his voice with ours, throw his hand forward to catch the lightning with a flick of a finger and a thumb as only our Jack can do, but he throws off all our mastery of this liquid language, flicks us off with a shake of the head, throwing his arms out wide to take the blast full in the chest, to die, to be destroyed, and then at the last fraction of a second swinging his leather satchel round in front of him, with a single motion of his lips, a word, it seems, so quiet that even we can't hear it, and with a satchel of scribblings as his shield against a sword of fire, he lets it hit him and—

  He comes crashing down the wall, backward and folded over, hits the ground on his back, arms spread. There's nothing of the leather satchel left except for a shred of handle, and there's little left of the front of his shirt either. He can feel it. He can feel his chest open to the air, cool on the outside but burning inside, fucking burning something fierce. Even the hand he was holding the satchel with, the whole arm, feels like it's on fire.

  He opens his eyes. Tamuz is kneeling over him, checking for a pulse. Jack feels the involuntary spasm of his own jaw muscle, a tightening of his chest. Tamuz's hand on his skin. The wonder in the boy's voice.

  “Your scars are gone,” the lad says, running a hand over the smooth skin of a chest that should be charred, scorched back to bone, to ash even.

  Tamuz and MacChuill pull Jack up to his feet, MacChuill leaning on his rifle to make up for his own wounded leg. He reaches to take the box back from von Strann, tucks it under his left arm.

  “So can we fuckin get tae the Beth Ashtart fae here or no?” he says.

  “We can bloody well try,” says Jack.

  SAMUEL IN THE BETH ASHTART

  […] cannot let it happen this way. They have told […] that the Book is a living thing. The skin of angels living on even after it has been stripped from off their bodies, though what is graved on it, in this abominable Cant, fades over time. So with each generation they must write the future and the past anew, with words that, when spoken, send tremors through the world itself. They never change it, they tell […], remaining neutral, walking between the curses of the Lord and the Enemy, as they say, denying Heaven and Hell with equal resolution. But it could be changed. The course of history could be altered.

  So […] must try, even if it means […] own obliteration.

  The Egyptians talked of seven souls: Sekhu, the dust of the corporeal bodies that we leave behind; Khaibit, the shadow of our past which follows us though we run from it; Ka, the mirrored surface; Ba, the heart; Khu, the guardian angel; Sekem, the pure force; and Ren, the secret name. […] think now that […] am only one of these souls, though which one […] do not know. From what […] understand of the book […] can now make … mappings of sorts. The corporeal corporal, the old soldier, MacChuill, is surely the Sekhu. Pechorin is unquestionably the Khaibit, the shadow. Tamuz must surely be the heart, the Ba of any such group soul, Anat, the fierce warrior, the Khu.

  What of von Strann and […]?[…] am not sure. But […] am sure that Jack, the Jack of these myriad journals, is none other than the Sekem itself.

  We are our own worst enemies. How banal and trite that sounds, but […] have come to believe that all the greatest truths are trite and banal when spoken aloud in their simplest and most honest terms. Perhaps they can only truly be imparted in the Cant, in a language which writes itself onto your heart so that you understand not just the words but all the shattering ramifications of a sentence which, when heard without true understanding, seems quite risibly simplistic.

  We are our own worst enemies.

  People die.

  […] have sent Tamuz off with the letters for Jack and von Strann, gave him no clue as to where […] was going, what […] am planning. He would not understand, […] think. Then again, maybe he would understand more than any of us. Jack, […] imagine—no, […] know from the Book—will have no understanding at all, not until the end. It is pointless for […] to try and explain what […] have realized, so […] offer him a mystery of a sort that will bring him here. He must make this journey, for the sake of us all. So […] do not say, we are our own worst enemies. Instead […] say, in this letter, the enemy is not what we thought.

  […] wonder if […] am the mirror, the Ka, broken by the terrible knowledge carried in the Book. Or am […] the secret name, the ren, best forgotten, best lost forever, if to speak it brings this awful truth into existence? […] still do not understand it all. But then, who of us truly does, until the end?

  SOMETHING's ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF EVERYTHING

  I clock the carnage of the hotel room, the body of the cabinet minister, the bloodstained sheets, the shattered window with the moonlight shining through—and, mis amigos, I feel blue. I'm getting tired of these long dark nights—man, it's already getting bright outside—and there's some times I wish that someone else, somewhere, somehow, could carry on and fight the good fight for me. But it's cruel but true: We're all alone in this cold world and all we got are stolen moments, flashes of light, before the reaper comes to drag us screaming into that cold night.

  So here I am in these wee hours, “Coyote” Don MacChuill, consultant spook with special powers, summoned from slumber long before the dawn and stifling a yawn as I look round me at the score or so militiamen engaged in measurements and murder-scene manipulations. Assassinations are a tricky business, friend; the Powers That Be wouldn't want to rock the faith of your common or garden-variety joe schmoe in the invulnerability of the established order—but they've still got to try, try, try to find the madman monster on the murder spree before all hell breaks loose.

  So you have your constables and cleaners to cover up and uncover as required, and you have mooks like me who work a bit more free—free market, anyway.

  Anyway.

  I spark up another smoke and take a toke. Another murder with the MO of the
Spartacus Killer, another scent of crime noir thriller, yes, a matchbook with a phone number written on it, up on the dresser beside a Curzon-Youngblood Mark I chi-gun. I've seen the same set now so many times, I sometimes think I dream it in the night. That's right. But, mis amigos, this scene had a little extra staging to the rest, what with the black-suited bodyguard dumped unconscious on the bed, his arms around the dead man, sweet as a kitten. Awake now and answering questions from the constables with his cold and certain voice, he might well be the plain paid heavy that he claims he is, but he's got a look that says to me he's owned by no one, an uneasy scent that sets my spider-sense a-tingling— that suggests just maybe, maybe, there ain't nothing there to own.

  Joseph Pechorin, he says his name is.

  “Excuse me, old chap,” says a voice behind me.

  The newcomer is natty in his leather overcoat—M15 Black Ops Division mufti or I'll eat my hat and the cat that was in it too, though with his louche wave of a hand he looks like he'd be more at home in cricket whites.

  “If you could send your men out for a minute, if you don't mind,” he says, “I'd be much obliged. There's a delicate matter to discuss here. No, the bodyguard can stay.”

  I give the word and, as the last of my boys in black and blue closes the door behind him, this charming disarming SS man sits down in an armchair, drapes one leg across the other and smiles.

  “My name is Guy Fox,” he says as the gambler's gun flicks from his sleeve. “Please relax, Mr. MacChuill, Mr. Pechorin. The temporal aftershocks no doubt have you a tad… confused, but if you'lljustholdon, the others should be here in a…”