Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  Fifteen, twenty minutes later, she’s got her filet mignon. More apologies and good-natured smiles on both sides—You need a refill, there?

  “Sure, thanks.”

  The waitress fills her glass from a clear plastic jug.

  The steak tastes great.

  She settles back after the meal, feeling her stomach full to bursting, sated with the simple pleasure of a good, square meal. Square is the word in this little area of the Vellum. All the eateries she passed before she found this place were perfectly in tune with the terrain, the time and space of it—Hardee’s and Wendy’s, Taco Bell or Pizza Hut, a fifties-themed diner called Moondoggy’s. She stopped to look at a menu in the window of a Japanese and realized it was basically all the same dish, different meats—stir-fry prawns with rice, or stir-fry chicken with rice, or stir-fry beef, or prawns and chicken, chicken and beef, beef and prawns. No miso soup here, no tempura here, no sushi.

  Ivan’s is not exactly cosmopolitan either, but who gives a fuck? They do know how to cook a steak, seared on the outside, bloodred on the inside, and the beef is good, high-quality Angus beef raised on the lush dairy farms of a land that’s wetter than you might expect if you didn’t know the little highlands nestling around the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  She eats a lot of red meat, these days; can’t get enough of it.

  She runs a hand over her full-filled stomach, ever-so-slightly bulging now.

  And she realizes that she’s got a cigarette smoking in her other hand, a pack of Marlboros sitting on the table beside her silver Zippo where she’s lain them down unconsciously, completely unaware of ever bringing them out of her jacket pocket, tapping a smoke out of the pack, tapping it down on the pack between her thumb and forefinger, turning it round to slip between her lips and flicking the lighter open and lit and shut again with a flutter of her thumb. She looks around for an ashtray, holding the bastard nicotine demon away from her, like she’s got shit on her fingers and she really needs a wetwipe. A hand motion to the waitress. An ashtray brought over, wiped, lain on her table. Thanks.

  She grinds the cigarette down into the glass.

  Her fingers tap unconsciously as she gazes round the bar, needing some distraction from the demon. The old guy’s still singing; surprisingly it’s not the C & W she expected, but something much more bluegrass—country, yes, and western, yes, but more folksy and bluer, truer.

  THE LIQUID LIGHT OF LANGUAGE

  And he tells of the pyre that cast stones into men when Crow was king with all the cawing, raucous birdmen of his caucus, tells of the theft of primal theos and his torture on the rock, watching the Eagle as he talks of carrion’s king and warrior hawks. Of fate and freedom, thieves of fire.

  He sings, to Chrome and Mainsail, how the sailors of the argot called, cried for their hylic loss, lost at the fountain, calling out until Alas! Alas! called back in echo from the solid shore as they themselves set off again upon the liquid light of language, leaving the land, and all the matters of the flesh behind, a fallen comrade. He works on the loyalties of brothers-in-arms. He works his charms.

  “O dear miss fortune,” Silence sings as others gather in the tavern round his song.

  He sings to soothe those only pacified with their lost love of a white bull, those who’d be happier if the herds had never been.

  “What frenzy grips your soul? The protean daughters filled the fields with their false lowings, but not one of them sought such unholy union, bestial mating, though her neck had shuddered from the plow and she had felt for horns with fingertips, smooth, touching on her forehead. Dear miss fortune, now you wander in the wilds, while he lies on his snowy side upon soft blooms of hyacinths and, under some dark ilex, chews the pale grass, tracks some heifer through the herd.”

  The whole place seems to have quieted down to listen to him singing now. There’s still a little chatter, here and there, but there are fingers to lips and prodding elbows, or even just unfinished sentences, conversations drifting off into the isolation of attention. Faces turn, necks craned to peer over a shoulder, folks leaning out of a booth or sitting back to slump into the plump squeak of the artificial leather.

  He sings a song about a farmboy and his sister who lose their daddy’s farm, and how she watches their white bull being taken away to slaughter and finds her brother lying under an apple tree, brains blown out with a shotgun. Life is hard and death is peace.

  WHAT THE FUCK IS NATURAL THESE DAYS?

  “So, are you going to stay a while or not?” says Jack.

  “What?” I say, mind twisting back to now.

  “Christ, you’ve only been here a couple of hours and already you’re running off. You don’t have to go, you know.”

  He slips his arm around my waist and nuzzles my hair, nibbling at my ear.

  “No…not really,” I say. “But I suppose I should. It’s lunchtime; they’ll be expecting me.”

  “Bad times there just now?”

  “They don’t even look at me. You know, it’s not even that they think it’s immoral. I think they think it’s…unnatural. Of all the people who should understand.”

  He laughs.

  “And just what the fuck is natural these days? You could stay with me, you know…permanently, that is.”

  I don’t want to go home. I want to stay with him and he wants me to stay—but that’s not enough. Jack doesn’t…need me to stay; that’s something he just won’t give, stubbornly insisting that if I come to him I come freely, by my own choice. He won’t try and persuade me. Sometimes I think that cold, dead Jack is some kind of vampire, looking for someone with the will to spend eternity at his side.

  “It just doesn’t feel right,” I say. “They’re my…”

  I tail off, mumble something about how they’ve always looked after me. They didn’t have to, after all. It’s not like they even knew me or my parents.

  “You don’t owe them anything,” he says. “You know that. You don’t owe anyone anything.”

  I want him to tell me that I owe him, that I have to stay.

  Jack scratches at a nipple.

  “I’ve made you an outcast, haven’t I?”

  “I made an outcast of myself,” I say, but I’m lying and I know it. I’m not your teenage rebel, and I know that if I’d never met him I’d have made the step from child to adult just exactly the same way as all the others. A tentative first kiss with a nice girl who went for the more sensitive type—maybe at the Fireday dance, maybe with Mary-Jane; she used to smile at me when we were younger. A question, a ring, a contract of souls. I’d go to the rag-and-bone man and deal for what I needed to build my own little house for us. I’d work the land, maybe take over as Endhaven’s teacher when old Hobbes retired. I’d still look at the soft skin on the back of Sam Finnegan’s neck. I’d still jerk off over ancient magazine pictures of actors whose glittering Hollywood homes now lie sunken at the bottom of the blue Pacific. But I’d have lived the lie.

  Everything changed when I found Jack. Angel, incubus, silkie Jack. The good people of Endhaven have never accepted Jack, and if I do, if I do more than just accept him, well, that makes me like him. Other.

  Half the time now I feel like I’m on a bridge over a ravine, with Endhaven and its rag-and-bone man on one side telling me that I belong with them, that I belong to them, and Jack on the other side not telling me anything, just reaching out a hand to let me know I’m welcome. But I’ve lived most of my life in Endhaven and it’s hard to just walk away from everything you know, even when your friends have given up on you one by one, and the people who raised you think you need some sort of treatment. There’s still the rag-and-bone man and there’s still the Evenfall.

  I wish I had the strength to make an outcast of myself.

  THIS PARADOX OF PATRIOTS AND PACIFISTS

  He sings a song of cattle or of souls as chattels in illusion fields, and of the ancient power, horned and bellowing, they all revere.

  “Now close, you nymphs, you nymphs of creation, close t
he forest glades, in case somewhere our eyes might meet the wandering footprints of that bull; perhaps, lured by the greener grass of other pastures or the scent of his own herd, and guided by the cattle’s tracks, he may come home someday, come back, back to the stalls, back to the garden.”

  “And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

  This one she knows. She looks around at all the quiet faces, wondering how this can be something they relate to. Jesus, 1960s hippy music just doesn’t belong here. This is a small-town world that’s split right down the middle, one foot in the twenty-first century and another in 1950-something. VR simlinks and apple pie. Sure the technology is modern, mostly, but the ideology is retro in a whole other way to, say, big-city kids with forelocks and nose rings. She’s seen the flags flying from all the houses and the churches, even yellow ribbons tied around the trees. She knows in places like this you just don’t mention the war—the wars, rather. You certainly don’t question.

  She studies them, trying to get a handle on the contradiction. A guy in a sleeveless checked shirt, army corps tattoo on his shoulder, nodding his head to the hippy music. The waitress mouthing the words to the old song, silently singing along.

  This paradox of patriots and pacifists is utterly alien to her.

  “How should we tell this tale he tells of fluttering cilia of night, this aftertale of white loins girdled with barking monsters, of harried Ships of July dragged down, deep in the whirlpool, down to drown, their trembling sailors torn by hounds? Or how he sings of all the transformations of the Limbs of Tears? Or of that feast of gifts, that full meal all prepared? Or of her flight on wings of anguish, high over her ancient home and out to desolate deserts?”

  There are no windows in the place that she can see from here, but she knows from the time it must be getting dark outside. Maybe this is how Evenfall kicks in around here, with a subtle shift in ambience, in atmosphere. The days are certain, clear and light, but the dusk is a different story, a whole different kind of story. Shit. Sometimes in these diners and roadhouses, at the drive-thrus where you can pull up to a window and order the same cheap and greasy fast food you ate a hundred miles back in the same terrain of neatly numbered road signs carving up the world into ordered routes, sometimes she forgets this is the Vellum.

  You only realize when you turn off a main route onto a road that’s not marked on the map, that takes you out into a desert of rust, or switch on the TV in a motel room to see CNN reporting on the sinking of Atlanta, or on guerrilla battles in the Middle East waged with machine guns against swords of flame.

  DECAY, DERELICTION, DESPERATION

  I think what makes their hatred worse is that they need him. For twelve years before he washed ashore we suffered and survived. The rag-and-bone man’s trade brings us most of the essentials we can’t make ourselves—medicines, machine parts, waterproof textiles, things like that. You could almost say that it’s a sort of rural idyll, a quiet, stable society, getting by on its own, oblivious to what’s going on back in the cities. But Endhaven is a town made up of bank clerks and lawyers, and personal assistants and checkout girls and hairdressers and a thousand other professions, vocations or plain old-fashioned jobs that have nothing to do with anything anymore. We have houses that suffer wear and tear and generators that break down. It’s the twenty-first century and we’re not Amish or hippies or anything like that. So when I was growing up, our little machine town, even with the rag-and-bone man helping to sustain it, it was slowly grinding down into decay, dereliction, desperation. Kids have short memories, and the adults are practiced masters of self-delusion, but I can remember.

  I remember how it was to go without hot water through the winter or to live by candlelight in a house with boarded-up windows. I remember the anger and resentment it fostered, and the retributions—the reckonings—those bred. I remember days when whole families would be shouting and swearing at each other on the streets and someone would be sent running to fetch the rag-and-bone man. I remember him walking into fistfights, screaming judgments on people like some old-style bible-thumping preacher. I didn’t know why, but I realized, in the rag-and-bone man’s reckonings, that the worst thing that could ever happen to you was to be exiled, ostracized. I didn’t realize until later just what the Evenfall could do.

  Jack, when he arrived, was a god-sent repairman with a nuts-and-bolts know-how of the mysteries of machines. Endhaven needs him, maybe even more than the rag-and-bone man, and still they’d like to throw him back into the ocean that he came from.

  It’s his strangeness, I think, his otherness; it seems to remind them that things aren’t what they seem, that while we shelter like trinkets under a rag-and-bone man’s coat in Endhaven, reality elsewhere is torn apart and blown away like leaves, that dead men walk the world while, in the cities and on the edge of town, the living disappear into the night. He came from the sea, from the east, like the Evenfall.

  Down by the jetty that juts out from the dunes, pointing out across the water to the rust-red, brown and gold-flecked headland and the concrete bones of giants half-buried, gulls are fighting over scraps of food; carrion or catch, I can’t tell from this distance. More swoop down from the roof of Jack’s beachside burnt-out squat of an apartment, cawing raggedly as they join the battle.

  Jack stands there with the off-white building, once some fashionable city dweller’s expensive escape, lurking behind him. Raised on square stilts at the beach-facing side, with its balcony running all the way along in clean, modernist lines, the empty frames of windows and sliding glass doors running along behind, it looks like a bunker. A lookout post or gun emplacement.

  “Stay?” says Jack, one last time.

  I shake my head, and he looks at me with a wry smile.

  “One of these days,” he says.

  “I’ve got to go.”

  THE GOLDEN AGE RETURNS

  “Now the last era of the sibilant song has come,” he sings, “and time itself is pregnant. The great series of the centuries is born anew. The pattern of the centuries to come is in concord with destinies decreed by Fates who tell their spindles: run. Now virgin justice has returned, the reign of Crow restored, and with the poll as consul, leader now, an age of glory dawns and the procession of great months starts to advance. Look at the world rocked by the weight of heaven pressing down on it.”

  The old guy turns to her at one point as he sings; she holds her eyes on his for a second before looking away, not sure of what she saw there—something drunk but wise. He puts the mike down on the top of the karaoke machine. He doesn’t need it now. The whole bar’s quiet, listening to him in rapture, transported. She rises, dropping a fifty into the saucer to cover her bill. It’s late. It’s time to leave.

  “We’ll banish the last trace of sin,” he sings, “and, as it vanishes, we’ll free the world from its long night of fear. See how we all sing for the century to come. For now the newborn of the new age comes, comes down to us out of the deep blue sky, the wide lands, and the reaches of the sea, now, here.”

  And Chrome and Mainsail watch like hawks as Silence gives his gift to Eagle.

  “This boychild now being born,” he sings, “through him the iron race will end, and men of gold rise in the world again. So bless his birth, immaculate lacuna: your own Apple comes to rule at last.”

  He stops her with his hand as she walks past, his hand lain soft and low upon her full-filled belly.

  “He’ll gather with the gods,” sings Silence, “see them mixed up with the heroes of the past. And they themselves will see him take this world subdued by ancient virtue, the traditions of his ancestors. Where faint traces of primeval treachery survive, we’ll venture on the sea in ships, build walls around our cities, carve deep furrows in the scorched earth. With a new typhoon as steers-man, another argot will set out to carry chosen heroes.”

  “There will be other wars,” he sings, “and great Achilles will be sent again to Troy.”

  She backs away, turns round him. She
doesn’t have to hear this. She knows. The world is coming apart outside, beyond the sealed-up towns and cities of this little state of Middle America. And she knows she’s pregnant.

  “Begin,” he sings, “the hour is near, dear offspring of the gods, great child of Joy. Embark on your illustrious career and when age makes a solid man of you, the merchants will give up the sea, the pine, wood ships carry no goods. Each land will bear all that it needs. Soil will not suffer hoes, nor vine the hook; the oaken plowman will at last loosen the yokes upon his bulls. The wool will not be taught to fake this color or that; instead, the very ram in the meadows will transform his fleece, now to sweet red purple, now to saffron yellow; lambs gamboling in pastures will wear scarlet coats.”

  At the bar, the blond guy’s leaning forward to curl a note into the tip glass on the inner tray that runs around the bar. He turns to look at her as she pushes the wood-and-glass door out of Ivan’s open, and she sees the fire reflected in his eyes. He must be wearing lenses, a heads-up display of a news channel showing an explosion happening somewhere out there in the fucked-up world. Or maybe he just has fire in his eyes.

  ALL THAT REMAINS

  “To me,” he sings, “all that remains is the last days of a long life and breath that will not be enough to tell your deeds. Neither the thrashing calliope of Orphan nor the beauty of an Apple’s lines can sing beyond me though, not with their mother’s help nor with their father at their side. Pan even, with Arcadia as judge, if he compete with me, Pan, even with Arcadia as judge, would tell of his defeat.”