by Hal Duncan
“Vellum,” she says. “I know.”
He said they wouldn’t find him, but they did. They found him and he escaped. Somehow he got away from them and, skipping this way and that, the bloodhounds snapping at his heels, he made it here, to Madame Iris’s tattoo parlor in downtown Asheville, where the boundary between reality and the Vellum is so thin that you could stick a fingernail into it and drag it down and scratch a doorway between this world and the one beneath.
“I know he’s gone,” she says, her voice ragged with memory. “That doesn’t mean I can’t go after him.”
“He’s dead,” says Madame Iris.
“That doesn’t mean I can’t go after him.”
Madame Iris is silent for a second.
“Where angels fear to tread, eh? You know that path is one-way.”
“I don’t care.”
And Phreedom knows it’s true. Under the grief and the rage, under all the bitterness that drives her, is an emptiness. The real sorrow, the true anger, is at what’s been cut out of her heart. The pain she nurses when she lies awake at night in some hotel room bed is only a…stand-in for the pain she should feel but just isn’t capable of, not anymore. Like a dead hunk of meat hung up to drain its blood, stripped of her dignity, flayed and gutted, dead inside. She belongs in hell, a carcass hanging from a cold hook on the wall.
“I’m going over to the other side,” says Phreedom.
“You’re already here,” says Madame Iris, dropping the accent, lifting her veil, showing the face that Phreedom looks at in the mirror.
Phreedom at the Gates of Hell
Phreedom steps into the shower, pulling the glass door shut behind her, and shakes her hair loose under the water, feeling the grime of the road and the sweat of the heat sluice from her body, weariness wash from her bones. She closes her eyes, closes her mind and lets it all drain away in the water, all the shit of memory, all the dust of identity, letting her hands take care of all the lathering and rubbing, working their way over her body, with a soldier-like efficiency in cleaning every part of her. If she enjoys it, if she relaxes in the warm water and enjoys the feel of it, scalding and soothing on her flesh, it’s in an abstract way, a distanced and mechanical awareness of some object labeled pleasure that barely registers as real awareness.
If she was aware, you see, she might remember another shower where she scrubbed herself and scrubbed herself till blood and tears ran with the water down the plughole, but no matter how she scrubbed she couldn’t get the filth out of her soul, she couldn’t get the black filth of the fucking angel out of her head, out of her heart, out of her cunt and all the places inside where he’d probed her with his fingers and his words and his prick, and in the end she just sat there, in the corner of the shower, arms around herself and bleeding from the wounds made by the angel and the wounds made by herself. She might remember that, you see, if she was aware.
So Phreedom washes like a robot, with a military efficiency.
She gives herself the once-over in the mirror before leaving the hotel room, fixing her mascara and her hair—it’s still a little wet—making sure the choker’s tight around her neck and that the chicken-bone charm is sitting right, the way it falls across her T-shirt. She zips the leather jacket up and checks her watch to see the hands all moving independently, the hour hand moving faster than the minute hand, and both of them spinning counterclockwise even as the second hand ticks forward. She has the earphones in already but they’re silent, waiting for her to decide what music is appropriate to her mood.
With a wry stab at humor, she thumbs the toggle on the datastick, tapping and flicking it this way and that until the heads-up display in her lenses scrolls what she’s looking for across her vision.
Hotel California.
She was never a big fan of the Eagles, but as she lays her hand on the door of her room in the Comfort Inn, and pushes it open, and looks out into the bland corridor, it seems somehow appropriate as a bitter joke. Thomas. Fucking hippy fucking Thomas; he always loved that song.
It would have been his birthday today.
The door swings shut behind her.
Click.
Errata
The Book of Life
“So tell us about this Book then,” says Jack. “The Book of All Hours.”
Joey snorts derisively and heads off to the bar to get another round in; Puck, arms draped over Jack’s shoulders, sticks a tongue out at his back. In his long, black coat and brooding silences, I can’t help but think of Joey Pechorin sometimes as a sort of latter-day version of his forebears. His family come from Russia, originally; White Russians from Georgia, they came over after the revolution and he acts like he has cossack in his blood, maybe even a little of Ivan the Terrible’s oprechnika—half orthodox monastic order, half secret police. I’ve seen him in a fight—defending Jack, of course, who’d managed to insult some yob—clear latent case, said Jack—by coming on to him while out of his face on ecstasy—and I’ve wondered what he would be capable of in other circumstances. Puck doesn’t like him at all, but then Puck is only jealous because Jack and Joey go back such a long way. They’ve been through high school in a nowhere town housing scheme and they’re like a double act that nothing can break up—Carter and Pechorin, Pechorin and Carter—except for maybe flighty fairy Thomas.
“OK,” I say. “So this Book was written by the angel Metatron before the world even existed and it’s actually God’s plans for, well, everything. Except that being God’s Word, it’s not just the plans. I mean, it doesn’t just describe reality; it defines it. God says, Let there be light and, bingo, there’s light, and it’s good, of course. He says, Let there be this and let there be that and all of reality pops into existence, and it’s all good. Smashing. But what happens when the sound of his words dies out? I mean, eventually the echoes fade away and you’re left with silence again, the big black void. So, of course, God has his private secretary write it all down for him, make it all a little more permanent. Written in stone, signed and sealed, here we go, mate, sorted, this is reality the way it is, was and ever will be. Boxed up.”
I sip my G ’n’ T.
“But then, of course, his right-hand man decides to stab his boss in the back and take over the business for himself. Everything goes tits-up and war breaks out in Heaven. Most angels stay with the Big I Am, but there’s enough of them on Lucifer’s side that maybe the outcome isn’t as certain as you might think, so some of them, some of them just panic and leg it for Earth. Either that or they’re sent there, secret mission and all that, because anyway, they have the Book. Maybe God is going to fall. Maybe Lucifer’s about to get his hands on the Book and rewrite reality the way he thinks it should be. Whatever the reason, the Book winds up on Earth, hidden or lost, for all of history, just waiting for the day that it’s discovered. Gathering dust in some library somewhere.”
“So if you change what’s written in the Book, you change reality?” says Puck.
“Exactly,” I say. Write someone out of history or write them back in where they don’t belong at all.
“So what happens?” says Jack.
“I haven’t decided yet,” I say. “I mean, I know I want to have the angels and demons both hunting for the Book. I could write it as a straightforward fantasy adventure, you know? Some normal human finds the Book and gets drawn into the whole big cosmic struggle thing. Blond-haired, blue-eyed heroes and black-hearted villains, and all that. But, it’s just…that seems a little escapist.”
“What’s wrong with that?” says Puck. “Escapist sells. I’d buy it. The Book of All Hours, by Guy Reynard. Cool.”
“War isn’t an adventure,” I say. “There’s no glory in war.”
“Bollocks,” says Jack.
He grins as he flicks the Zippo open, lights up another cigarette.
“You don’t fucking get it, Guy. Of course war is bloody glorious. Flamethrowers and Agent Orange. Deforestation bombs. Fucking beautiful. That’s the true horror of it, mate.”
“J
ack,” I say, “sometimes you worry me.”
“Cheers,” he says.
The SEARCH ENGINE
I trace the course of the River of Crows and Kings with one fingernail, running it softly over the vellum of the Book and looking down to the real thing below, down through the glass desk on which the Book sits, down through the glass floor of the ship’s bridge under my feet, down through the clouds toward the churning course of mud and filth; I am thankful that at this height I can no longer smell the rot. Reaching over with my free hand, I grasp the ivory handle of the lever and pull it back. The low hum of the Search Engine heightens slightly, becomes louder as its monstrous turbines rise out of sloth and into life. There is no lurch, no feeling of inertia broken, and at this height it’s almost impossible to see any visible shifting of the world beneath me. Only the glittering light displays of dials and indicators, projected on the glass in front of me, give any sign that we are moving forward. That this leviathan of the sky is rising from its indolence and moving slowly, saurian, across the oceanic clouds, following the path marked out for me in the Book of All Hours, north, ever north, toward the end of the world.
In scale and style somewhere between a steamship and a cathedral, the Search Engine is the product of some technology far surpassing the world of my origins. I found it in a city as pristine in its desolation as if it had never had inhabitants at all, berthed among a score or so designed on the same principles in a wide dockland of glistening gray warehouses full of steel cargo containers and wooden crates, plastic sheets covering bales of hay, huge reels of cotton or silk thread, canisters of sugar, tobacco. In a way, the whole scene was quite mundane—a dock or port like any other dock or port I’ve come across in my travels. It was only the black river of unspeakable mire and the great hulking sky-ships floating in the air above like zeppelins, grounded by spiraling threads of silver staircase, that made the vision quite different from anything else I’ve seen.
I have no idea how these contraptions fly; if I were to describe them as having wings it would be the type of wings that a mansion has rather than those upon an airplane. From the main hull of the ship, transepts project, three at each side as in the crosses to be found in a Greek or Russian Orthodox church. From below, that hull appears as an inverted vault, like the rib cage or armor plating of some great beast, curving up and opening out to araeostyle intercolumniations, panes of stained glass and pillars between them. Parapeted towers rise above, with spires topped by vast thuribles spewing a blue-green steam, presumably some by-product of their power source, though I really have no idea. I have no idea how they float in the air impervious to the winds buffeting, no idea how they glide smoothly forward or back, up or down at the touch of this lever or that. But thankfully, the controls are rather less inscrutable than the principles underlying their construction. When I finally found my way to the glass bowl of the cockpit-bridge that hangs from the tip of the machine’s prow like some World War Two gunnery emplacement on a bomber, I was relieved to see, at the bottom of the steps leading down into that segmented swimming pool, at the center of this vertigo-inspiring glass bowl, only a deep green leather armchair with a crescent-shaped glass desk and console and a few bronze, ivory-tipped levers and wheels around it. It’s taken me less than a week of experimentation to get the hang of it all; I’d have to say I’m really rather impressed by the elegant simplicity of the design.
And so now, I am off again, a thief at the helm of yet another stolen vehicle, leaving behind me yet another caravan of sundry acquisitions, souvenirs of my seemingly eternal travels. This time, I have to say, I have little regret.
I have been finding it increasingly difficult, these last few centuries, you see, to maintain my memories of the world I left so far behind, and I realize now that it was a mistake to start collecting these various scraps and parchments of the transfigured realities I travel through, the places I have come to call the Folds. I have collected so many birth and death certificates, journals and photographs, newspaper clippings and suchlike, in all relating to perhaps a thousand different variants of what appears to be myself—or Jack, or Joey, or Thomas—so many and so varied that I think my poring over them has begun to blur the boundaries of what I was—what I am—and what I might have been. Perhaps I thought that I might find some pattern among the congruencies and dissonances, as if this whole journey had been laid out for me as a lesson by some greater power. I did work, for a while, on the theory that all souls travel such a journey, drifting through the worlds of other choices, other chances, so that, when they finally reach their destination, they should understand exactly who they are, by understanding who they’re not and why. Now, though…sometimes I get confused. I forget if this scrap of journal or that was written by myself or by some other Guy Reynard or Reynard Carter or whatever bloody name I was born with.
two
THE WAR AGAINST ROMANCE
The Journey of the Dead Man
The angel walks into Slab City off the Jornada del Muerto, the journey of the dead man, which runs north from Kern’s Gate, El Paso, through a dry plain of natron and uranium, salt, sand and dust, and the moment she looks up and sees him she just knows that he’s an angel, because, although she’s only fifteen and has never seen one of them before, one of what Finnan calls the unkin, she recognizes right away what she’s been taught to look out for, the particular kind of graving, the mark of their essence carved into them, into their words, their actions, their existence.
Nearly everybody has some kind of graving in them, Finnan’s told her, because nearly every thing does. Every thing in the world has its true name, its name in the Cant, the unkin tongue, and humans are no different. It doesn’t have to be physical, although sometimes people wear it in their eyes or on their skin for everyone to see, a thousand-yard stare or a knife-scar or tattoo. But what makes it a graving, a name that you can read and maybe even use, is that it’s real close to the surface, some event has brought it out, a welt on the surface of reality. You get it for your own reason, if you ever get it at all; maybe you get it the first time you fuck, maybe the first time you kill, either way it’s your own special graving, it’s you, that secret name carved into your consciousness at that precise moment when you suddenly, instantly realize: I know what I am. Just a moment, just a day like any other, like today, April 12th, 2014. But what happens on that day marks you for the rest of your life, says Finnan, and maybe even longer.
Of course she doesn’t have her graving yet, so she can’t really be sure he’s not just shitting her about it; first time he told her, in fact, she said so in her foulmouthed tomboy terminology. Except. Except since then Finnan has been teaching her to read those secret names, to read them in the squint of an eye, the set of a jaw, the hunch of a shoulder, a rap of a knuckle on a table. For most people it’s like a gambler’s tell, a little characteristic that gives away their whole hand, their whole game, but for some that mark is just a little bit more defining and a little bit more definite. They wear it like an aura and it flickers through the air around them, ahead of them even, turning heads when they walk into a room, hushing conversation. Nearly everybody has some kind of graving, all right. But not everyone has it graved so deep that it goes right down through them and under the skin of reality itself. Not everyone has the Cant.
So she knows he’s an angel, all right. She knows he’s unkin. She could damn near smell him on the dead, desert air, even before he came into sight over the low brow of the Jesus Hill.
He’s black; at first she thinks it’s just shadow, but, no, the sun is due east, still rising, and he’s coming in from the south, so he isn’t in silhouette. He stops at the top of the hill for a while and stands under one arm of the large, wooden cross like a man waiting to be hanged calmly scanning his audience, and though the air is shimmering around him she can suddenly see him in perfect focus, his black leather clothes, his black leather skin, his dreadlocks and goatee, his deep hooded eyes. He’s carrying what looks like a small but thick leatherbou
nd book in one hand. As dogs, chained to their owners’ trailers here and there, bark at the dawn, and somebody, somewhere, plays “Crawling King Snake” on a tinny radio, she hears him clearly as he whispers to the wind: Finnan.
The Jesus Hill
“Never saw anyone walk into Slab City before,” says a friendly voice behind her.
“Morning, Mac,” she says. “Maybe…uh, maybe his car broke down…or something.”
She’s pretty sure that that’s not even near the truth, but she doesn’t want to start on the subject of unkin with Mac. Mac, he’s this weird fusion of old-style Christian evangelist and acid-crazed flower child who never quite made it into the ministry, just a bit too eccentric for any orthodox faith to handle. Instead, he took to his vocation in his own, individual way. He took to painting a hill.
He started his mission before she was born, before her parents even started their seminomadic lifestyle. For as long as anyone can remember here, in fact, he’s been painting one side of the low hill that marks the southern boundary of Slab City, decorating it inch by inch in whites and pinks and corn-yellows and sky-blues, with giant hearts and massive flowers. Originally he’d just freshened up the paintwork as often as he could afford it, but as time went on the thing took up more and more hillside and more and more paint, so that Mac found it hard to keep up with the wear and tear of New Mexico weather. Then someone suggested using clay as well and the Jesus Hill took on a whole new dimension. By the time her family arrived to spend their first winter in Slab City, it had become a permanent adobe sculpture, a landmark-sized masterpiece of Christian kitsch.
She remembers watching it growing larger still throughout the warm winters of her childhood, its bible slogans in six-foot letters proclaiming love to the world and salvation for all. Despite her neo-pagan upbringing she’s always found it a welcome sight to return to this in the fall, after a summer spent around the cool Great Lakes up in Canada, and she’s always sort of sad to leave it in the spring as they follow the other mobile families, snowbirds escaping from the coming heat of the Mojave summer. Between May and September, Slab City belongs only to the real desert-rats, non-mobiles like Mac or Finnan who, it’s generally accepted, have long since fried what’s left of their brains.
