Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  And she knows he’s right. She knows why he’s walked away from all that shit. But she doesn’t know if she can walk away from it herself.

  The Song of Unknown Lands

  “Are you sure about this?” asks Finnan.

  Evening is falling and she lies in his arms in his bed in his trailer in his world. The last echoes of the black angel’s true name are fading now, but she can still feel the call, the Cant, the song of the land, in the rhythm of Finnan’s breath, in the beat of his heart, and in her own breath and her own bloodstream. She touches his thigh and life quivers.

  “Nothing I’ve ever done felt so right,” she says. “I want you to be the one who graves me, and I want this to be the…the sacrament.”

  “It’s not me graving you,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s not like that, it’s—shit, you know I could go to jail for this,” he says, a little slurred, smiling gently.

  “We’re unkin,” she says, knowing it now, knowing that there’s something between them, that there’s always been something between them, that’s more than friendship.

  “We’re different. Other people, they—”

  He puts a finger to her lips.

  “No they, no us, just you and me, OK?”

  “OK.”

  They stay there for a while in silence, not doing anything. Then Finnan slides his hand down to her ass, almost absentminded, like he’s thinking of something else.

  “What does it feel like to you,” she says, “the Cant, I mean?”

  “It’s like a million tiny wires firing charges through my flesh,” he says, “down into my bones. Sometimes it’s just a low buzz, other times feels like I’m burning in the fucking electric chair. It’s like a fucking magnetic force, and every cell in my body is just a little piece of iron being shaped by…interfering fields.”

  “With me it’s like a song, like something calling me…from I don’t know where. It’s like everything is resonating around me, inside me.”

  “Everything is broken up, and dances,” he says.

  “That’s it exactly.”

  “I envy you.”

  She turns over to lie on her back, looking out the west-facing window, where the red and golden sunset seems almost artificial in its numinous washes of light, like the painted backdrop of some 1950s Technicolor and Cinemascope movie—it all seems so staged.

  “How long do you think I’ve got,” she says, “before they come for me?”

  “Not long,” he says. “Seems like they’re gearing up for a final showdown. The gatherers will be scattering across the face of the earth right now, hunting down, one by one, every last rogue, every last free unkin. They want me, and, sooner or later, they’ll want you. They’re already looking for…”

  He stops, as if thinking better of something.

  “Fucking angels,” he says. “Christ, save us from the fucking angels.”

  “Maybe…”

  She hesitates.

  “Maybe it’s a war we have to fight.”

  “A fucking glorious battle for the kingdom, Phreedom? You and me saving the world?”

  “Maybe.”

  He shakes his head.

  “Promise me, when they come for you, you’ll run, just fucking run. Don’t be a hero, Phreedom. Don’t play their game.”

  But she realizes she can’t promise that.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about the Vellum?” she asks.

  “Cause it’s a fucking pile of shite,” he says. “A fucking dream. This is reality, here, now, and anything else is just…smoke and mirrors. The Cant is real but the Vellum’s just…myth.”

  She can hear the lie in his voice, though. Hell, she can feel that other reality pressing on her, trying to push through. Smoke and mirrors. There’s no smoke without fire, and there’s another world through the looking glass.

  “I’m ready,” she says. “I want to know my name.”

  He rolls over so he’s on top of her, resting his head on her shoulder, kissing her neck as he fingers her clit. She can smell the beer, bitter on his breath. He started drinking as soon as the angel left and she could have stopped him. She could have stopped him, but she didn’t. He might not have done this sober.

  “Fuck,” she says.

  And his other hand presses down through her and curls electric fingers round her heart, reading her, writing her, fusing sacred and profane in grace and obscenity, and he leans close to her and he whispers it in her ear.

  A Half-Empty Pack of Cigarettes

  She wakes in his bed in his trailer in Slab City in a new world, her world, and he’s gone. Outside, Mac is up early, working on his Jesus Hill, but she’s alone in Finnan’s castle of junk. Even the air is empty of his sepia lifelight and steely soulscent. She looks around inside the Airstream for any clues to why he’s gone or where he went, a note, a goodbye message of some sort, but all there is is a half-empty pack of cigarettes, his Zippo lain on top of them. And a lot of empty beer bottles.

  Tomorrow she’s supposed to leave with her family for the north, head out of here before the scorching sun becomes too fierce with the heat of summer, head for somewhere cooler, less harsh. She’s not sure that she wants to go with them, but it’s not that she wants to stick around in case Finnan comes back; she’s guessing that he’s never coming back.

  No, it’s more that she just knows she doesn’t belong here anymore. One strange thing about being a mobile is, she thinks, wherever she’s been she’s always felt like she was home. It seems strange, maybe, but that’s the way it is. Slab City or way up north, traveling or camped, she’s never felt that she was anywhere she wasn’t meant to be. Now it’s different.

  She looks out over the junkyard where, she notices, one of the bikes is missing, but another of them has its heavy green tarpaulin thrown back off of it, its keys in the ignition—an invitation, an offering. Promise me you’ll run, he said, but she can’t do that. There’s something out there, gathering in preparation for a war to burn this earth to dust and ashes, and she doesn’t want to be a hero—really, she doesn’t—but that doesn’t mean she won’t fight. Fuck it, she thinks. Fuck Finnan. He doesn’t know everything. He’s just fucking scared. He’s just—

  And she remembers that image of the plain of bones, of a boot crushing a bird skull underneath it and she knows that whatever this so-called Vellum is, whatever the black leather angel with his book was talking about, this road of all dust, these fields of lost days, she knows that Finnan had a right to fear it. But she won’t live like that. If she takes the bike it won’t be to run from the angels or demons but to find them. Maybe she’ll go looking for Finnan, maybe she’ll go looking for Tom—she doesn’t know. All she knows is she’s not going to wait for it to come to her.

  Before she leaves she rearranges the alphabet letters on the fridge door so they spell out PHREEDOM, then she lifts her chicken-bone necklace, the Santerian charm to ward off bad mojo, from the Formica tabletop where she laid it last night, last night when she was still a human being. She has the language of the angels in her head now—in her body, in her blood—so she doesn’t really think she needs it any longer.

  But then again. Maybe that means she needs it more than ever.

  Errata

  The Journals of Guy Reynard Carter—Day Infinity

  The trailer town they call Slab City, in the world where I belong, sits four miles or so out of Niland, off the 111, down there on the east coast of the Salton Sea in the southeastern corner of California, with the Sonoran Desert all around, and the Mojave somewhere far up to the north. It gets its name from the foundations of the buildings of an old naval base abandoned after World War Two, slabs of concrete that now serve as parking spaces for the RVs and the trailers of those who travel with the seasons, to Canada in the summer, California in the winter. Snowbirds, they’re called.

  New Mexico, with its Jornada del Muerto, is a whole state of Arizona away.

  The Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of the Dead Man, runs from Kern’s Gate, El
Paso, north through a dry plain of natron and uranium, salt, sand and dust, up to Santa Fe, up to Los Alamos and Trinity, where they shattered atoms, those destroyers of worlds. It’s a section of the old Camino Real by which the Mexicans came north, from Teotihuacan into the Land of Dreams, and Peter Kern must have known this when, on his return from the Alaskan Gold Rush, he built his suburban housing development and gave it a towering gate of wrought iron, two pillars branched and bedecked with silver globes, swastikas and other occult ornaments, joining across the road more like an entrance into Chinatown than into Suburbia. Or like an entrance into Hell, more accurately. This Gate of a Thousand Doors stands open, for anyone to drive through.

  To get to Slab City from there, in my world, you’d have to walk…how many thousand klicks?

  I lay the maps I’ve gathered of this corner of this world on the Formica tabletop of the old Airstream trailer, spread out edge to edge—New Mexico, Arizona, California. In this world, Slab City stretches across them all.

  The handwritten pages of the girl’s journal—if it is a journal—hang on the door of the fridge, pages of errata overlapping like scales on a fabulous beast, stuck there by magnets covered in the shapes of plastic letters just like the ones she mentions. I’m trying to understand what process must have gone on in her mind to shift and skew a world so certain, so solid, into the terrain of artifice where her strange tale of angels takes its place. Is it possible that she, like me, is not from here, that this journal or fiction with its reinvented world is, like myself, a traveler on the long road?

  The journey of this dead man, Guy Reynard Carter of Eternity, as I wryly style myself these days, began 527 worlds south of here. I’ve been traveling north for how long now? I don’t know. I stopped measuring it in days and weeks and months and years and centuries and millennia about two hundred worlds back. Even worlds is an inadequate measure of the distances; I’m not counting the wide plains of broken bones, or stretches of marble causeway across shallow tranquil oceans without tides, places where I’ve walked for decades in a straight line, waking every morning to a sight the same as yesterday. It’s just that every now and again the area that I find myself in has been defined enough by those who were its denizens that you can walk into a library or bookshop and pull out all the atlases and encyclopedias and know its boundaries the way they did. These are the places I count as worlds. I’m not counting the wide areas in between I’ve had to walk to get from this one to the next—the Jungle of Filigree, the Bay of Afternoon.

  The Jornada del Muerto

  This world is one of only a score or so I’ve been in that resembled my own place of origin so well that you could lay a tracing of the continents of one across a map of the other and see only the smallest differences—a missing Ireland, a Britain without a land bridge to Europe, a California split right down the middle by catastrophe. There are always more errata in the encyclopedias or dictionaries, assuming those mundane texts are decipherable—Nazi victories in Europe, actors as presidents, British Empires on which the sun never set. It’s the similarities that really interest me, though. A world might have no Christianity at all and yet still have a Holy Roman Empire founded by a Constantine, even Crusades against the heathens in the Middle East who did not worship Dionysus on his cross. Mona Lisa with the eyes of a cat, but still that same so-famous smile.

  I left my last truckload of moldering journals in the truck outfitted as a library in its articulated trailer, left it two hundred worlds back there in a place where the crescent sun just couldn’t power its solar engine any longer. I’ve done that only once or twice, abandoned my records of this endless pilgrimage into Eternity when, for whatever reason, I no longer had the means to carry them with me. But both times I managed to salvage maybe a backpack’s worth of notes, maybe a summary of a century’s experience in a page or two, maybe a sketch of a plaza in a Renaissance city that I settled in for a decade or so, before the emptiness became too much and, for all that I was loath to leave somewhere so beautiful, I knew that it was time for me to move on.

  Sometimes I make small sacrifices—leaving an encyclopedia that I picked up in one world on a shelf in a bookshop in another—or elaborate projects—filling a warehouse with silvery computer disks of scans—whatever I’m carrying in whatever fantastic vehicle I’ve managed to obtain in whatever world of awesome technological advancement. I always keep the Book, though, of course. As long as I have the Book, I know the road I’m on, even in a world where po-faced humans in the garb of burgermeisters, in the oil paintings in the galleries, have glittering fairy wings and horns.

  Slab City, California. The trailer town sits four miles or so out of Niland, on the east coast of what once was Salton Sea, where sundered California’s new coastline cuts in a ragged rip from north to south, from onetime desert town to onetime desert town, all now ports, but ones with parking lots as wharfs, jetties of downtown commercial districts, crumbling into the Pacific. Sometimes, at night, I stand where broken roads end at a clifftop with a road sign marking out the distance to a city now sunken, cities of saints—Diego or Francisco—or the very City of Angels itself, now swallowed by the sea. I imagine Hollywood as a new Atlantis, glittering in the depths.

  three

  ALL ETERNITY OR NOTHING

  A Vague but Passionate Way

  A sheville, July 13th, 2017.

  Thomas watches the blond frat boy sit his glass down on the table so he can use his hand to argue with a crow-haired friend—who shakes his head, sneering. He watches the wild gestures of that cutest member of the frat pack; there’s six or seven of them, all crew-cut and clean-shaven, mostly decked out in the red-white-and-blue of their trendy logoed togs so out of place in this college town bar with its foreign beers and alt-rock ambience. The only ones who look at all like they belong here, in their leather jackets and boot-cut jeans, are that lion of a golden boy and the one he’s arguing with; the rest are square to the hair, the legal eagles and football bulls of the future. They’re arguing about the war, it sounds like, the golden boy—the delicious closet case with the sideways glance—going on about freedom and democracy in a vague but passionate way that Thomas finds dumbly endearing. It’s at least a little better than the ones who’re using words like sand-nigger. Jack, his friends call him.

  He darts another glance at Thomas again, losing his train of thought apparently and finishing his bluster with a wave of his hand. Thomas keeps his eyes on him as he looks away again just as quickly.

  You know you fucking want it.

  “You’ve got to be fucking crazy,” says Finnan. “This has the stink of demon all over it. Honest-to-God, bona fide, ‘kill your own soul rather than let the Covenant have it’ demons. Sovereigns. Jesus, the fuckers who think of themselves as angels aren’t bad enough for you?”

  “All I want is a way out,” says Thomas.

  He’s still watching the frat boy.

  “You think the Vellum is a way out? It’s not an escape. It’s fucking death.”

  Thomas turns back to his friend.

  “No. Death is this world. Death is a suicide bomber on a bus. It’s a car on the road going too fast. It’s that poor, gorgeous bastard over there getting old and fat and dropping dead from a heart attack in his fifties. Death is reality and if the Vellum is anything, it’s what…it’s what starts where reality ends. You told me that yourself.”

  “Well, maybe I was talking shite.”

  Thomas notices that Finnan’s accent kicks in when he’s pissed—pissed-angry or pissed-drunk, it doesn’t make much difference—and he wonders again just what the Irishman’s story is. Seamus Finnan. Where do you really come from? When do you really come from?

  He fidgets with a beermat.

  “Come on. You’re the fucking original dropout, angel-eyes. Huckleberry Finnan. Man, I thought you’d be with me on this one. You and me, Butch and Sundance, we could—”

  “Shite. Will ye just fookin listen to me for fookin once, Tommy? Tom. Yer fookin twenty-odd years old
and ye think ye know what death is. Yer barely graved and ye think ye know what the Vellum is. This isn’t a fookin game. It’s not some fookin doorway into Never-Neverland that we’re talking about here.”

  Thomas runs a finger over a gouge that cuts across the grained surface of the table. He thinks of the tree it was made from, its trunk of capillaries drawing water and minerals up along them, streams of…time all arranged as a thin skin round the inner rings of dead matter. Like the Vellum, their world just one stream. He’s been cutting across from stream to stream these last few years, up and down, and side to side, looking for a way to get out of it entirely, to dig his way out onto the surface of it, or in, into the quiet, solid wood. Neverland? He smiles.

  “Second star to the right and straight on till morning.”

  Finnan says nothing for a while.

  “OK,” says Thomas. “OK, I’m sorry. I know this isn’t a game. Fuck it, Finnan, I wouldn’t be living out of motel rooms and hopping freight trains between decades if I didn’t know it was serious. I’m not dumb. The thing is…what other choice is there?”

  Thomas has been on the run now for nearly two years, hasn’t seen his sister or the folks for that long. It’s not so hard roughing it when you’re what Finnan calls unkin, not as hard as it would be otherwise; there are plenty of…tricks you can use. He takes a sip of the beer he paid for with a smile and looks past Finnan at the blond frat boy. And there are plenty of tricks you can use.

  But, still, he wouldn’t be running at all if there wasn’t good reason.

  “Do we just keep running forever, Finnan? I mean, do we? You’ve heard about the weird shit going on in Jerusalem. And we’ve got a fucking fundamentalist in the White House who’s obviously a Covenant man, whether he knows it or not. How long before the whole shithouse goes up in flames?”