Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  “Hey, by the way,” she says. “Mom picked up some paint over in Santa Fe; some guy she was doing hackwork for had it lying around, she said to ask if you could use it.”

  “Sure could,” says Mac. “What color is it?”

  “Eggshell…puke yellow, perfect for the hill.”

  Mac laughs.

  “I’ll bring it over before we head off. Maybe you can have a big ‘Jesus Loves You’ done for when we get back. Real tasteful, like.”

  “So cynical, so young,” says Mac. “In trash lies truth, remember. The Good Lord loves a glow-in-the-dark Madonna much as he loves the biggest cathedral—hell, more so, if it means more to one of his lost sheep.”

  “Baa,” she says.

  A Heart-Shaped Window

  You don’t argue theology with Mac, she reckons; he’s too nice a guy to take away his sense of Grand Purpose in the Simple Act. Nuts, sure, but 50 percent of trailer-park society as a whole, and about 75 percent of Slab City in particular, is at the very least eccentric if not outright certifiable. There’s her own dad, trying to map Atlantis using regressive hypnosis to access the mental database of his prime incarnation’s experience. Then there’s their neighbor at the moment, Mr. Willis, who thinks they should all be buying up NASA leftovers and trying to colonize Mars as autonomous collectives. He already has his own spacesuit. Up in the parks around Lake Superior you get a lot of people who’re real “tolerant” of this sort of weirdness, but she’s always hated their patronizing attitudes. Sure, she thinks Mac and Mr. Willis are bugfuck crazy lunatics, but she respects them for that and, in the same way that she hates to be treated like a little girl, she hates the way some of the middle-class mobiles talk down to people she considers her friends.

  “Hey,” says Mac. “He’s coming down.”

  The rasta angel starts slowly down Jesus Hill, climbing round “LOVE” and over the Sacred Bleeding Heart, cracking “CONSIDER THE LILIES” under his feet and scuffing dirt on “THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.” She waits with Mac at the foot of the hill for him to arrive, her standing in the open, trying to look bored by kicking at the dry grasses under her feet, Mac leaning out the heart-shaped window of his junk-augmented schoolbus-cum-shack, scratching at his gray stubble. The black guy jumps the last five feet or so down the hill and lands damn near in her face.

  “Can I bother one of you for a little water?” he asks, looking at Mac, then shifting his gaze to her.

  The bastard is fucking tall.

  “My…car broke down on the freeway other side of the hill there,” he says. “This desert air’s given me one mother of a thirst.”

  “I’ll get you a bottle,” says Mac. “Offer you a beer, if you want one.”

  “No…thanks, but water’ll be just great.”

  The heart-shaped wooden shutter snaps closed as Mac disappears. The angel is still looking straight at her.

  “What’s your name, little one?” he says and she hates him instantly.

  “Phreedom,” she says, “but spelled PH instead of F.”

  She loves her techno-hippy parents—really she does—but she used to be a little jealous of her brother, Tom, with his normal name. Went through a phase, in fact, where she would only answer to “Anna.” She’s kind of grown to like it now, though. It’s a good way of judging people, how they react to it if they ask, and you tell them, and you just stand there with that look on your face—yeah, and your point is?

  “Is it?” He smiles. “Tell me…Phreedom…do you know of anyone around here good at fixing things…cars, that is?”

  Finnan.

  “You mean like a repairman? A mechanic or something?” she says.

  “Exactly.”

  Don’t lie to an angel, she thinks.

  “What kind of car is it?”

  “Here’s your water,” says Mac, stepping out of his open front door and handing a bottle of mineral water to the stranger. “What’s up?”

  “I was just asking young Phreedom here if she knew anyone who might be able to fix my car.”

  “You want Finnan,” says Mac. “The guy’s some kind of a wizard. Electrical, mechanical, you name it—if it’s broke he can fix it. Slab’s over that way, all corrugated iron and old rubber tires, you can’t miss it. Phree’ll take you, won’t you, Phree? Her and Finnan are great buddies. You’re not doing anything just now, are you, Phree?”

  She looks from one to the other then down at her feet.

  “Guess not,” she says.

  Staring Down an Angel

  “So, how come you’re up and about while everyone else is still in bed?” asks the angel.

  He’s walking about two paces behind her as she leads him the short distance to Finnan’s slab. She takes her time.

  “Just heading out to gather some peyote buttons for Finnan,” she says. “You get better mojo if you collect them at dawn, he told me.”

  “I imagine he’s told you a lot of things.”

  “I like your coat,” she says.

  It’s long and black, with a high, turned-up collar, the leather scuffed and dusty like he’s walked around the world in it.

  “It looks good and warm for the cold, desert nights,” she says.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he says. “I’m never usually this far from civilization…no offense.”

  “None taken.”

  Slab City is pretty primitive, she has to admit. When trailer parks first took off in the Home-of-the-Future 1950s, a lot of white-collar families wanted trailers and campers for second homes. By the last decades of the last century, these recreational vehicles were the only thing a lot of shit-poor people could afford as a first home. So you got some trailer parks which were like holiday camps, with leisure facilities and every amenity you could name—just drive up, rent your slab and plug into the water, electricity and disposal pipes, or, better still, get a valet to do it while you take the kids for their tennis lesson. Other places were cheaper and nastier, with fewer and fewer amenities. Slab City’s really just a flat piece of dirt where people started to park one day. With no charges and no power or water, its denizens are pretty much confined to the self-sufficient or the financially desperate.

  “So what kind of car was it you said you had, again?” she asks the angel.

  “A red one,” he says. “Tell me about this Finnan.”

  “I don’t know much about him.”

  “Mac said you were his friend.”

  “He doesn’t talk a lot.”

  “Perhaps he’s got something to hide.”

  “Finnan doesn’t have anything to hide.”

  “We all have something to hide.”

  “So what are you hiding?”

  The guy stops and she turns, shoving her hands in the pockets of her oversized biker jacket—a hand-me-down from Tom before he lit off to find…she doesn’t know what exactly…his fortune, she guesses. There’s a part of her that’s still pissed off at him for it, but…But he left her his jacket and she wears it with his attitude.

  So, she stands there, trying to stare down an angel.

  “I imagine your friend Finnan would call it my…graving,” he says.

  It’s like he’s throwing out the word as a fishing line, seeing if she’ll bite. She looks away, at the dog lying sprawled out on the makeshift porch of a nearby trailer home. Gazing over at them, without lifting its head, it wags its tail, thumping it lazily on the wooden planking. She looks back at the angel.

  “You’re not doing a very good job of it,” she says, and he laughs, the air wavering around him, dust swirling in barely perceptible vortices and currents. He raises a hand like he’s playing with the breeze. And way off in the distance: a high hollow note like the coda of a song played on a flute carved out of bone.

  “Don’t try to teach a birdman how to fly, hatchling.”

  “Birdman?”

  “What does Finnan call us? Angels…gods?”

  “Unkin,” she says. And he looks at her like she’s eaten his grandmother, pushes past and starts s
traight for Finnan’s slab…as if he’s known the way all along. She hurries after him.

  A Plain of Bones

  “I thought you said your friend didn’t talk much.”

  His voice is clipped.

  “He never told me what it means.”

  “Ignorance is bliss.”

  “Bullshit,” she says.

  The angel glances back at her, and the dog they’ve just passed starts to howl.

  “Did he think we wouldn’t gather you as well?” asks the angel.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Then your friend Finnan didn’t tell you everything. Ask him sometime what it’s like to walk the road of all dust. Ask him about the dry wind that blows across the fields of lost days. Ask him.”

  And he mutters something under his breath and suddenly she’s dizzy, her mind filled with this image of a long, dry, dusty road, and the angel walking down it, dust devils spiraling in the air around him, whipping up the sand and grit, the dusky-gray and ochre-red and bleached-white dirt of centuries, of millennia of…she sees his black leather boot coming down on a bird’s skull, in her mind’s eye, and she sees a whole plain of bones, a whole desert that isn’t the Mojave at all but somewhere else, somewhere far, far away. And there’s a word that’s running through her head, something she can’t quite make out…villain? volume? valium?…vellum?

  She shakes her head to clear it, shake off the image and the ringing sound, but she still feels…sick.

  “All I know,” she says, “is what he taught me about mojo, about voudon and Santeria, which is nothing you can’t learn in books. And all I know about you unkin is that some people let the mojo take them over, carve it into their own souls till they think they’re some sort of fucking superior race, some kind of ‘living manifestation of divinity,’ and sure, they’ve got power, but they’re so fucking full of themselves, so fucking self-righteous, so fucking…”

  She loses the word she’s looking for; all she can do is spit on the ground in disgust.

  In some ways it’s true. The little that Finnan’s told her is really just kitchen magic, charms, little gravings on the world. Even the word unkin only slipped out when he was drunk that time and got all weird so that she couldn’t tell if he was sad or angry, at her or someone else. But if this bastard’s going to play fisherman with her then fuck him; two can play at that game.

  “There are righteous unkin and there are fallen unkin,” says the black man, “and there are fools like Finnan who think they can stay neutral, who think they can hide from their duty in the middle of nowhere and pray it never finds them.”

  “And that’s your job, right?” she says. “Finding them?”

  “It’s time for your friend to decide where he stands. On the side of the angels or with those who would…”

  He tails off into a silent scrutiny of her.

  “You have no idea, little one, just what our enemies are capable of. You have no idea what the demons of this world would do to you if we didn’t…draw the line.”

  “So you’re a recruitment officer for the War in Heaven?” She laughs. “Hunting down draft-dodgers and deserters? You going to press-gang him or shoot him at dawn?”

  “I’ve come to gather him,” says the angel. “I’ve come to gather your good friend Finnan.”

  And Finnan’s slab comes into view ahead.

  An Old Sepia Photograph

  The place has the look of an old sepia photograph, with its sand-scoured chrome and rusted steel and everything all dusty faded brown. The old Airstream trailer stands high up on redbrick piles and girder stilts, forming the center of a large structure of retrofitted salvage. Canvas, corrugated iron and even old car hoods form the walls and roofs of annexes built around and under the main living area, accessed by an old rusting ladder.

  Round the back of this industrial gothic folly, rubber tires are piled up to form three walls of an open garage-workshop area, roofed with obsolete twelve-foot solar panels and linked to the Airstream by wires and cables. In front of the main construction, the sandblasted shells of two dead automobiles stand like two stone lions at the steps of some grand city hall. All around, the place is littered with electrical and mechanical equipment, old and new, broken and fixed, with computers, TVs and satellite dishes, with stripped-down washing machines and motorbikes built up from spare parts.

  It was Finnan who’d built the bike her brother Thomas left on, just picked up and left one day, without a note or a word of goodbye. She knew the two of them well enough to know that if anybody had an answer for her it would be Finnan. Finnan had an answer for everything. So she had stormed up to Finnan’s slab and started throwing stone after stone against the aluminum of his trailer, stood there, hands on hips, cursing him and shouting at him to come out, demanding to know where Tom had gone. That’s two years past now and she still isn’t convinced that Finnan doesn’t know exactly where Tom is, but she’s learned to trust him in so many other ways…she’s learned to trust him that Tom had a reason for just disappearing.

  Part of it is, she’s seen what Finnan can do. His slab is a junkyard in its own right and Finnan…Finnan is the junkmaster, the man who can take a broken food processor, a Frigidaire, an electric boiler and a bus engine, and rebuild them into a single unit that turns raw sewage into fresh water, fertilizer and sterile nontoxic dust. But he can do other things as well. She still remembers when Mac had his “episode” and they found him lying on the ground, and before she knows it Finnan is down beside him, one hand on his chest, and he gives just a little flick—it wasn’t a laying on of hands or nothing, she wouldn’t say that exactly, but no way was it a cardiac massage. She was trying to take Mac’s pulse and it just wasn’t there, she remembers, she couldn’t find it there at all until Finnan gave that tiny flick of the wrist…and then it was.

  And right now, Finnan is standing in his dead-car gateway, waiting for them patiently with his staff in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth.

  Finnan

  Finnan looks about twenty and has for as long as she’s known him. He claims to be in his late thirties, but there’s nobody who knows for sure. The clothes he wears seem always the same, the same white button-neck T-shirts, the same sandstone-colored chinos and the same scuffed desert hiking boots, everything always smudged with the same black engine oil and grease that slicks back his dirty blond hair. Short and skinny, but with muscles that look like they’re made of steel cable, every fiber of them showing under the taut skin of his arms, shifting as he moves them as he works on whatever his latest project is.

  “That’s the demon inside me,” he’s joked with her a few times, but she’s never been sure just how much of a joke it really is. “Got a little bit of something in me,” he says, “seems to just eat up all my body fat.”

  She’s sure there’s something underneath the joke. Finnan has an air about him, a sense that he’s constantly on edge, constantly restrained, like he’s burning all his energy just holding back, holding himself back from doing God knows what. As she’s come to know him, from the late nights when the three of them would get wasted, back when Tom was still around, or chasing him around in the months after her brother left, trying to get some answers out of him, she’s come to realize that, in a way, it isn’t a joke at all.

  We’ve all got a little bit of demon in us, she thinks, and a little bit of angel. Finnan talks about it in terms of the graving, about the way everyone has an…ability to find the Cant inside themselves, to open up a locked door in their heads and let it loose. She thought he was talking in metaphors until the day he held his hand out in front of her, closed in a fist, then opened it up to show her the palm of his hand, closing it again quickly. It might have been some magic trick, but the scar looked real for that instant, the weird shape that looked like it’d been carved in with the point of a knife; she didn’t get that good a look at it but she caught a glimpse of something that looked vaguely like an eye in outline—an ellipse with a circle inside b
ut with four little bumps coming off the outside of it.

  Then he opened up his hand again and it was gone, just the rough skin of his workingman’s hand. He closed his hand into a fist again, flexed his bicep, looking at his arm like it didn’t belong to him.

  At the moment, she can see the tension in those arms of his, the knotted muscles and wire veins, as one takes the cigarette from his mouth and flicks it away, while the other grips the iron railing that functions as the shaft of his staff. A TV aerial is fixed at the top of the railing, pointing downward, its crossbars hung with chains and charms, wound round with barbed wire and crowned by a plastic doll’s head. Finnan holds the thing with white knuckles like it’s his only connection to sanity. He calls it his disruptor. Magic for the TV generation, he says, for an electronic world of nanotech and simware. There’s mojo in skin and bone and graveyard dirt, of course, but you have to keep up with the times. The Cant is powerful enough just whispered in an ear; and in these days of bitmites, nanite surveillance systems blowing in the wind they breathe, riding on the dust they taste on it, well, the Cant is even stronger as a whisper in the head.

  She doesn’t know what powers it, but Finnan’s disruptor gives a low buzz if you listen close to it, as he grips it in his hand. Like now.