Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  She steps out into the darkness of the parking lot and it parts around her. Evenfall. A flood of black, of something more substantial than a shadow, less substantial than a form, flowing like liquid or like dust in the wind, blurring the world around her in a haze of darkening gray. The floodlights of the baseball field have been switched off and she can just make out the bleachers by a solitary light fixed on the sports hall like a beacon in the night. The children and parents are all long gone, of course.

  “Begin then, little boy, with a smile, to know your mother who has brought you here with her ten months of suffering. Begin, boy. Anyone who does not smile on a parent will be found unworthy by a god of board or by a goddess of her bed.”

  The door swings slowly shut on its spring, muffling the song still coming from inside.

  The evening swirls around her but, somehow, it doesn’t touch her, these tiny particles of darkness swirling in vortices in the air, dancing away from a wafting hand. They’re everywhere, it seems now, sweeping in with the night to change the world, estrange it from itself, only slightly and subtly, but night after night, shifting it gradually away from what it once was. People call them dust angels or bitmites. Evenfall. In some of the little bubbles of reality she’s stopped off in on her long flight, there have even been attempts at explanations. Secret black ops government nanotech gone wrong. The vials of God’s wrath poured out upon the world. She might well be the only one in the whole of the Vellum who knows exactly what they are.

  And back in Ivan’s sports bar grill and steakhouse, Silence sings.

  All that once, far ago, we wrote, all learned by heart at our laurels’ bidding, all the happy stream of all heard from a brooding sun, he sings. And Silence sings until the smitten valleys echo to the sky, until the evening star appears high in the heavens, telling the shepherds:

  “Tell all your tales of sheep, and go, and gather them, and pen them in the fold.”

  Errata

  The Annunciation of Anesthesia

  Her hand slides across her midterm belly, as she watches the TV screen, flicking from channel to channel with the remote and looking for CNN or something else in English rather than Español. God no, though, anything but Fox. She finds, a little surprisingly, the BBC World News and settles on that. Lying up on the bed, she watches the female anchorman interview a correspondent out in the deserts around Baghdad.

  “—now. According to Allied Intelligence Sources, however, these attacks are not the work of one particular terrorist group, but are in fact the product of a much looser network of affiliated splinter groups—”

  Isn’t that a contradiction in terms, she thinks, affiliated splinter groups?

  “—truth to these rumors about the Allies using nanotech weaponry?”

  “Well, now, we know that the Americans have been using these so-called nanites for surveillance for the last year or so but—”

  Big fucking deal, she thinks. We’ve been doing this shit for…forever.

  She looks at the tattoo on her arm. It’s been stable for the last three months now. She doesn’t feel the same flickering uncertainty about whether she’s Phreedom or Inanna or something in between.

  The earphones and datastick lie up on the dresser beside the TV, just so much junk in a fold of the Vellum where VR doesn’t exist. It still has her music loaded on it, right enough, so it’s not entirely useless; sometimes she lays the earphones on her stomach and plays the baby some Sex Pistols or some Clash. Fuck the classical shit; any child of hers is going to be a fucking rebel. He kicks most for the Rolling Stones.

  His hand slides across her belly, smoothing the gel across it gently, as he smiles at her and makes small talk, asking her is she excited, making plans for the future, she must be so happy, and she’ll probably find this a little cold. He runs the scanner over her gelled skin, sweeping it around and scrutinizing the screen—as she does too, wondering at this little full-formed fetal shape inside her, curled up around itself in comfort.

  “Well, I don’t see any horns,” he says, “so you’ll be glad to know it’s not the Antichrist.”

  He laughs, but it’s a nervous laugh. After what happened in that abortion clinic in New England, there’s a lot of worried obstetricians and a lot of panicking prospective parents. Anyway, he shouldn’t be so fucking sure, she thinks.

  “No wings either,” he says. “That’s quite unusual these days, actually. First one I’ve seen in a long time. One hundred percent normal.”

  She doesn’t want to hear. She doesn’t want to hear about what they’re calling the “rate of child immortality.” She doesn’t want to hear about the newborn babies opening their mouths and squalling prophecies instead of wordless wails with their first breath. She doesn’t want to hear about the fucking omens and portents and miracles that are ten a penny these days.

  “Is it a boy or a girl?” she asks.

  “A boy,” he says. “Do you have a name picked out yet?”

  “You should call it Phuture,” Finnan had said, “spelled PH.”

  “I was thinking of something nice and normal,” she says. “Like Jack.”

  The scalpel cuts down her belly but she doesn’t really feel it, floating in a haze of anesthetic; her whole lower body’s numb from the spinal block, the needle inserted in her spine with her hunched forward, rounding her back to open up the vertebrae for them; and now she can’t even see what they’re doing, with the surgical drapes blocking her view of her own bloody, open body, the shaved pubic hair and the catheter in her bladder, so she just wonders how big the scar will be as she feels the vague pushing, pulling sensations—no pain, just the strange to-ing and fro-ing of her insides. Not that she’s worried about the scar, but she knows it’s a fifteen-centimeter incision that they make, that the longest part of the procedure is actually the removal of the placenta and the membranes and the stitching up of all the layers of the uterus and muscle, fat and skin. She’s read up on it, she has, anesthetized Anna, Anna Anesthesia, because she thought that it might come to this, after all, with her still being young and all, and all, and all the risks like scarring or wound infection or blood clots just like any other operation or decreased bowel function, blood loss or damage to the organs close enough to the uterus, like the bladder, and is the spleen close to the uterus, is it? She doesn’t know, no, who the fuck knows what the spleen is anyway, but just as long as they don’t take the spleen out by mistake, but that’s ridiculous, Anna, it should only be ten minutes before they’ve sucked all the amniotic fluid out and plucked her baby boy out of her and started to put her back together, knit her up again nice and tight, Anna, Phreedom, Inanna, Anna, Anesthesia…

  He runs his hand across her belly, rough and callused on her soft skin, and she puts her own on top of his to hold it there, just on the scar at the bikini line. His fingers, his hands, are solid now, skin weathered with age, and she lets her own fingers follow the line of his knuckles down to the hollow between thumb and wrist, and over the studded leather band and along the ribbing of the muscle of his forearm with its fine dark hair and—switching her own position, turning over and onto him—curving the bicep and the tricep, filled out with the decades of hard work and hard fighting, solid now, like a miner or a boxer, not at all like the young boy she once knew, dear soft Don who seemed so much like Tom when she met him, so much like Finnan as he grew older, but is now his own man.

  He flicks a buzzing fly away from her ear.

  “What are you up to?” he says, amused.

  “Nothing,” she says.

  It’s been sort of their mantra during their journey through the craziness that used to be reality, ever since they met during the Evacuation of New York. Since he found her out of her face on smack and crying because she’d lost Jack, because they’d taken him away. Because no matter how fucked-up the world was, people hung on to bureaucracy as if it all still mattered. What are we going to do now? she’d say. Nothing. What have we got to lose here? Nothing.

  She pulls herself up to s
traddle the barrel of his chest, look down at his graying temples. She would be worried about him drifting away from her into old age and decay, but he seems stronger now than ever. Even the gray hair just makes him look like some wolf-pack leader ready to snarl his warnings at any upstart with the stupidity to try something. He wears his age much better than he wore his youth, looks like some grizzled Templar with his beard now. An aged knight.

  “Don Coyote,” she says.

  He runs his rough hands up her rib cage and round to her breasts.

  “What time is it?” he says.

  She looks at the alarm clock on the bedside cabinet, its red LEDs flickering randomly in horizontals and verticals that don’t actually signify numbers at all.

  “It’s the Apocalypse,” she says. “Who gives a fuck?”

  That Moment of Perfection

  “I give a fuck!” snarls Metatron.

  The two newbloods stand there dumb and sullen, and he glowers at them. The replacements for Carter and Pechorin, if anything they’re worse. Like all of these flyboy warrior unkin, they’re little more than weapons with the initiative to know what they have to kill, and Metatron is just tired of them all. There are a thousand ways humans can break through the walls inside their minds and catch a little glimpse of the Vellum, a thousand different types of crises and catastrophes that can crack that boundary just wide enough for a crowbar placed in the right spot to break their heads wide open, and let the dead soul deeps pour in and through. All the poets and prophets who see eternity in a grain of sand, the mathematicians who stumble on the geometries of heaven and actually manage to retain their sanity. But where do these creatures find their great moments of satori, their blinding flashes of enlightenment? In the great glory of war. In being the last man left alive on a field of limbs. In the…beauty of jungles blossoming with napalm. So they step out of reality for a second, and when they find themselves back in it, they’ve brought something over from the other side. A little fragment of eternity caught in their memory of that moment of perfection.

  So there’s Henderson. New IRA. He found his mark from a Hand of Ulster car bomb, saw eternity as he was standing at the lace-curtained window of a suburban bungalow, watching his wife put the dog into the back of the car and slam the door closed, walk round to the driver’s seat and look at him for a second, face blank with the grip of emotion—she was going to stay with a friend, she said, just for a while—and then she was getting in, pulling the door shut, key in the ignition. It wasn’t that he loved her, although he did love her dearly. It was the fact that, in that moment, he hated her just enough for him to catch, as the double-glazing blew in over his face, the full brutal aesthetics of the moment.

  A terrible beauty is born.

  And then there’s MacChuill. He was a soldier with the Royal Scots Engineers, the stuff the British Empire was made on—send them out anywhere, they’ll build you a bridge or blow one up. His past’s a bit murky; he was living in the jungles of Borneo when they tracked him down, didn’t know the first thing about unkin or the Vellum; he’d forgotten how to speak English, let alone the angel tongue. Metatron still doesn’t know what war it was that stranded him there, but he does know that the man spent some time in a prisoner-of-war camp, watching his comrades getting tortured one by one and executed one by one until all that was left was MacChuill. And then MacChuill started singing to his captors, at his captors, tearing his voice out of a parched throat as if he was tearing his very soul out with it, to throw it down at their feet as a gauntlet: just try and fucking break me. No, he doesn’t know the angel tongue at all, this one. But there’s a thick resonance in his guttural voice that makes the floorboards of any room he speaks in shudder in subsonic frequencies.

  There was a soldier, a Scottish soldier.

  And then there’s Finnan. Sergeant Seamus Finnan. Signed up to fight for King and Country against the Kaiser, or to look after the little brother of his darling fiancée, rather, who’d volunteered along with five of his school friends and countless other children with noble, foolish dreams. Maturity and sheer canniness had seen him get the rank of sergeant pretty quickly, and he might have had an actual army career ahead of him if he hadn’t had to shoot his sweetheart’s little brother for desertion in the face of the enemy.

  Seamus Finnan, bloody-faced and drunk, out cold and dragged into the warehouse between Henderson and MacChuill, feet trailing behind, like a sack of cement. Metatron had given them express orders not to kill the man, not to harm him, just bring him here, and they’d clearly beaten the living shit out of him.

  “Who gives a fuck?” Henderson had said. He’s nothing.

  Finnan. Crouching down before the slumped form, he studies the man’s hand like a palmist reading someone’s future, except of course he’s reading Finnan’s past, reading his mark. It seems, if Metatron is reading the mark correctly, that Sergeant Seamus Finnan found his own little fragment of eternity in a suicide attempt, a few years after shooting the boy he’d promised to look after. Presumably he made a decision that living and fighting just weren’t for him. And presumably he failed to follow through quite well enough. Metatron twists the hand round a little for a better look; actually, there is a definite sign of death in there, and not a soul-death, not a symbolic one, but a literal one. It’s there as good as if it were written in black and white. Sergeant Seamus Finnan died not in the trenches of the Somme but sometime after, by his own hand.

  Metatron looks at the drunken, beaten man, unconscious but clearly very much alive. It’s a puzzle, but he should have the answer soon enough.

  “Get him cleaned up and secured,” he says to Henderson. “Let me know when he’s conscious.”

  The hatchling girl and the runaway boy are both long gone, one gone on the long walk into the Vellum, the other dead, a harmless ghost haunting the margins of reality, one death buried in a thousand others. There’s no direct link between Finnan and Eresh, but maybe, just maybe, the Messenger boy knew something of what Eresh was up to, what kind of twisted forces she was playing with, what kind of twisted forces killing her let loose.

  And maybe, just maybe, he told his old friend, Seamus Finnan.

  one

  THE HAMMERS OF HEPHAESTOS

  BEYOND THE WAY OF SCYTHES

  “To the end of the earth we’ve come,” says Corporal Powers, as he and Slaughter drag their drugged, bedraggled charge. “Beyond the way of scythes and lands unwalked by men.”

  He looks around him at his world, so much of it off-scene—the distant boom of Hun artillery, the sky a strip of blue above the trench. To him it seems a stage, dressed with the wooden plankings and the sandbags, sleeping soldiers for its props, so distant from reality, distant from humanity.

  “You have your orders from the dukes,” he says to Smith. “Bind this bold rebel to the soaring rocks, in uncorroding adamantine chains. He stole your glory, precious fire, gave it as a gift to men so all their arts now flower. For such a crime it’s only right that he should pay his dues to the divine, that he may learn to love the tyranny of dukes, and end his philanthropic ways.”

  Smith limps along behind the redcaps, chinking with the chains he carries, slowed by the trenchfoot, and thinking that he shouldn’t even be here. Private with the Sheffield Pals, this is not his bloody business. No, it’s not.

  “Powers and Slaughter,” he says. “Your duty to the dukes is done, your part in this all over with, but I for one can’t stand to bind a brother lord to this bleak precipice by force.”

  And, in front of Smith, between Powers and Slaughter, the prisoner’s boots drag after him, rattling on the duckboards; Powers and Slaughter stop a sec to heft him higher, adjust their grip under his arms, then set to pulling him on again along the trench.

  “Ah, God, but I must steel myself,” says Smith, “be brave enough to carry out this deed; it would be grave to disregard the dukes’ decree.”

  As loath as he is then—but not quite as loath as the straight-talking and high treasonous son of
Tims—he has no other option but to hammer home these hard chains in this harsh wasteland where, without a sight of any mortal frame, without the sound of any human voice, scorched by the sun’s white flame, he knows the prisoner’s beauty’s bloom will be destroyed.

  “You’ll welcome night’s dark cloak of stars over the light,” he whispers, “welcome the sun when it dissolves the frost of dawn. But you will always wear the burden of your present pain, for your deliverer is as yet unborn.”

  These are the fruits of all philanthropy, it seems to Smith. A lord who scorned the wrath of lords, and gave more glory to the workers than was due, condemned to guard this joyless rock, stand sleepless and erect, and utter sighs and lamentations, to no end. The will of lords, like your own knee, Smith thinks, is hard to bend.

  “All kings,” he says, “are hardest when their power is new.”

  THE WASTED WOUNDED LAND

  Seamus notices that Powers and this other fellow are talking like a right pair of fookin toffs, sure, and it’s almost funny, it is, and he’d fookin laugh but he’s too busy trying to put his best foot forward, as they say, and finding it kind of difficult on account of the world heaving up and down and his stomach and his head doing much the same thing only in different directions and at different times, and these two cherrynob bastards, Powers and Slaughter, dragging him along between them faster than he can keep up with. Sure and if they’d only let him be, he could fookin walk his self, he’s not that fookin drunk.

  “Why the delay and all this pointless pity?” he hears Powers’s poisoned little voice say. “Why not hate the lord all lords hate most? He has betrayed your prize to common men.”

  “The bond of brotherhood is strange,” says Smith, somewhere behind him.