Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  “I’ll tell you all that I foresee,” he’s shouting after Henderson. “No evil comes to me unknown. I know exactly what will be, and I will learn the force of destiny. I’ll bear my fate without a care, but I will neither tell you what you want to hear nor hold my tongue about my state.”

  He screams it at the air itself. The air itself rips with the sound.

  “I have been bound to doom for giving mortal men a gift. I stole fire’s source, carried it off within a hollow reed in stealth, to be the teacher of all art to mortals and increase their wealth. I pay this price for all my pains—riveted under the sky, in chains.”

  And white-eyed Finnan hurls his invocation in a howl that rises from a place inside him deeper than he’s been for near a century, and here, in this charnel house, far from the mire of the Somme, far from the time of blood and mud when he first felt that fierce thing piercing him, he feels the meat hook as an adamantine spike that drives down through his chest and through his heart and through the rock of bleak Caucasian mountains, into the Vellum itself.

  There’s a part of him that’s conscious, that’s still Seamus Finnan. But, right now, it’s lost in the blizzard of white pain and in the curses of a chained god.

  “Behold this luckless lord,” he roars, “the enemy of dukes, reviled by all the lords who walk the halls of heaven, bound for too much love of workers.”

  And somewhere out there in the Evenfall, his words stir up an answer in the air of night filled with a dust that flows like shadow, flits like wings.

  INCHGILLAN WAR HOSPITAL, 1917

  He sits looking out the window, watching the gulls wheel in the air over the cold, gray sea and the cold, gray rocks, trying to project himself out of his head, out of his body sitting here with the wood of the chair hard under his arse and the wood of the table hard under his elbow, and his fingers pressed against the squeaky glass pane of the sash-and-case window, like he could just dissolve himself into it and away, away. The big house is drafty, and no matter how much they tart it up with all the magnolia paint and white gloss on the wooden paneling below, and all the shiny linoleum on the floor, they can’t hide the fact that they’re all fookin alone here, all the mad, the maimed, the blind and the trembling, here in what was once Inchgillan Asylum and before that some dusty old laird’s dusty old castle. So who the fook ever thought of sending us to the bloody Scottish Highlands to fookin con valesce, Seamus wonders, to sit here shivering as much from the fookin cold as from the fookin shell shock, and—O, but wait there, he thinks, it’s not shell shock, anymore, O no, it’s fookin nerve trouble and anxiety neurosis and hysteria and fookin neurasthenia, to be sure, or it’s just plain old fookin NYD—not yet diagnosed—because it’s not the fookin shells what do it, it’s yer own fookin lack of nerve, lad; it’s a fookin coward, ye are. Ye see, it’s only the fookin officers that get shell shock and get sent off to play fookin badminton and cricket and write their fookin poetry at Craiglockhart.

  Not that he blames them for it. No, he’s got nothing against the poor fools that had to give the daft orders or get shot themselves; they’re all in the same boat, underneath the skin, that is, inside their heads. And that Sassoon fellow, well, Seamus only wishes him the best. Sure and he put the wind up them at Parliament with his Declaration, so he did, it’s in all the papers, and Seamus would have liked to see the look on the fookers’ faces when that was read out. Oh, yes, he would’ve liked to see that.

  Seamus slurps a sip of his tea, the stewed and sugary brew that the nurses make so much the same as army tea ye wouldn’t believe it. One for ye and one for me, and one for the pot and one for luck. Sweet as can be and twice as hot. Sure and the sisters are sweet wee lassies, so they are, and they just want what’s best for all the poor broken bastards in their care, but Seamus can’t help thinking that they’re like some well-meaning but dottery ole nan giving a sweety to a greeting wean, too blind to see that the wean is greeting because it’s only gone and cut its fookin wrists open with a breadknife. Och dear, now that’s an awful mess ye’ve made, dear. Och, but don’t you worry yourself none, ’cause the sister here’ll clean it up, so she will, so don’t you fret yourself And while the blood just pumps out and pumps out, they just hand ye yer fookin tea and say, There ye go, now, get that down ye, now, now there’s a good lad.

  Good lad. There’s not a fookin lad among them.

  He looks around the room at the others: at Peake sitting at the table at the corner, working away on his notebooks with all the cartoons scribbled in the margins, all the faces with their hooded eyes and beak noses, cruel caricatures of nobs and lackeys; at Kettle and Duggan playing gin rummy with two orderlies at the table in the middle of the room; at the new fellow sitting up at the other window and facing out as well, like Seamus’s own fookin mirror image, but in black-tinted spectacles, with the soft, pink scars from the mustard gas around his eyes. If he’s blind, Seamus wonders, what the fook is he doing staring out the window? But then again, maybe he’s staring out the window because he can’t fookin see the world out there, thinks Seamus. If he could see it, maybe he’d just be sitting in his room right now, afraid to come out at all, the way some of them are. The poor fookers that just sit there shaking. Christ, there’s one of them who doesn’t hear a fookin word ye say unless it’s “bomb,” and when he hears that, why then, it’s up he jumps and hides under the fookin bed. No fookin wonder Seamus hardly sees most of the patients here at Inchgillan. O, but he hears them all right. He hears them all night.

  But, no, there’s no such fookin thing as shell shock.

  Seamus takes another slurp of his tea and looks out of the window again; he doesn’t want to think about it, because when he thinks about the others, he thinks about his self. And that’s when he gets his turns, when he starts to feel it all pressing down on him, and the whispering, the sound like cold wind, wings and hammering. No, he says to his self, don’t think about it.

  He blows into the mug and breathes the steam in, feels it warm in his mouth and nostrils, the smell of it so familiar, as—

  “What secret scent?”

  He jerks his head round, jumping a little, and hot tea splashes on his hand. There’s nothing there, just the flap of wings as a gull swoops down to land and strut along the window ledge outside, fixing him in the black bead of its eye. It caws, a harsh sound cutting over the distant crash of sea on rock. “What echo, mortal or divine or both entwined is flying to me?” No. No. Shut up, ye fooker.

  He stares back at the seagull, hating it, loathing it, fookin despising it, but with no idea why. It’s just a fookin seagull, but—“what other purpose brought it to this desolate edge than to be a witness of my sufferings?”

  Shut up! Ah, Jesus Christ, shut up.

  It flaps its wings, still staring at him, and he feels his skin crawl, so he does; he feels his heart beat with—the fluttering of birds—another fookin gull on the ledge, and another, and another, and he’s standing up, chair scraping back across the floor, moving away from the glass—alas, alas—aw shite, aw fookin shite, but what is that, what is that, what do I hear near? And he’s thinking Jesus Christ and Mother Mary but all he can hear is air rustling with the soft rippling of wings—and he just fookin throws the mug right through the fookin window at the gulls, at the world outside—at everything which creeps this way— and the rough hands of the orderlies grab him—fearful to me—but already it’s another grip he’s feeling, one of cold metal closing round and cutting through his soul as the birds’ wings beat and their shrill calls rise in a chorus of raucous caws over rocks, like crows fighting over—O Jesus, no—

  Chorus

  And piercing down into deep-carven caverns of a skull, a cauld wind bellows distant echoes of a hammered stele. The deustreams of sleepless air’s dreams blow around the hearth, offsprung from oceans and rich tethers, stirring strife, contention and intention into barefoot gatherling things of wings. They shift in the dark inside his head, a dirk inside his heart, a hard persuasion winning over their creat
or’s will. The bitmites rise, sweft up and carried on chariot windwings, they rush to his rock…

  Finnan watches the Evenfall flow in through the plastic-stripped rips of the doorway of the abattoir, black trails of dust in the cold air, dancing around the sprinkling shivers of ice falling from the carcasses, twining the steam in the freezer, snaking round his misted breath, and coming closer to him, closer. He pulls his head back but the wire cuts his wrist. Christ, he can feel them touch his thoughts.

  “Fear nothing. Hush,” they friendly shush him, hisspering in his ear.

  The voice comes back.

  “Alas, alack, alas, alack. Behold, look on me, bound by these restraints, tormented in these adamantine chains. On this cliff’s topmost rocks I keep a watch envied by none.”

  They see, they say, speaking with foresight in their way, a fearful mist in eyes full-filled with tears. They see his body, blasted on the rocks.

  He shakes his head, trying to clear the sound, to make sense of his situation; for a second, the black dust flits away from him, clears from his head. His name is Seamus Finnan and the year is…2017. Ah, shit. Aw, shite. He feels the chicken wire wound tightest round his neck and wrists. He twists. The circling bitmites swirl back in to touch his face like feeler fingers, taste his mind. He’s Seamus Finnan, he tells his self. He’s Seamus fookin Finnan. But he can feel their fookin insect intellect prying and probing, working at memories as bound inside his head as he is in the chair, working them loose.

  “Indeed,” they hiss, “new helmsmen steer the heavens and the dukes strengthen their hold with new laws that supplant the old. They make what once was great unknown…not knowing its own name or state, not knowing its own fate, great foresight trapped in its own mind, the one who once saw everything, now blind.”

  And Finnan feels the voice that isn’t his rip out of him again.

  “O, would that they had sent me down to cruel and uncorroding chains under the ground, where hates play host to all the dead, to terraces of tar, to the unbridgeable abyss, that neither lord nor any other could rejoice at this. Look at me now. See how I suffer as the sport of winds, a source of laughter to my foes.”

  And like the bitmites in the air around him, liquid language deep inside him flows.

  “Who of the lords,” the bitmites chorus, “is so cold-blooded as to laugh at torture? Who has no sympathy with your misfortune? Only the dukes. Their stubborn will forever fixed in hate against the sons of the sky, they will not cease until their hearts are sated…or their power taken by some other hand.”

  He understands. He feels it flowing through him, sure he does, feels it the same as when he stood up in that trench in the Somme, down there among the Dublin Pals, and roared of revolutions and of risings. O, but they tried to burn it out of him with all their wires of electric fire but Seamus knows, he knows, he fookin knows. It’s the Covenant who’ve done this to him.

  “Sure and I might be sorely treated now,” he says, “I might be bound, but they still fookin need me, eh? The fookin bastard rulers of the heavens think I’ll show them the conspiracy, I’ll show the way of how one day they will be stripped of all their staff and all their power? Well, they’ll get nothing from these lips with all their fookin honey-tongued persuading charms, and I’ll not fookin cower from their fookin threats and whips, unless they set me free, and pay their debt for what they’ve done to me.”

  The bitmites quiver back. Disturbed dust, pierced by fear, they shiver from his cold rage.

  “You are bold,” they say, “unyielding even to these bitter woes, but speak too freely, with loose lips. We are…concerned about your fate. You see an end to this afflicted state, arriving when? The sons of the Crown are hard to reach, with hearts too tough to turn with ease. These dukes are harsh, taking the law into their own hands, law unto themselves.”

  “But still,” says Seamus Finnan, “in the end, one day, they will be crushed, I say, and when they’re of a mind to see in earnest, they’ll agree; and gentle, friendly and sincere, and swallowing their stubborn fookin pride, they will come here, to me.”

  And while the storm rages its way across his mind, the part of him that’s Seamus Finnan—the part of him that’s not playing some fookin role laid out for him by the fookin powers that be, oh, no, not fookin ever again—that part of him starts to see what’s going on here, with him wired to a chair in a freezing fookin slaughterhouse, with metal piercing right down through him into what’s beneath, and with the bitmites fookin tearing at the scraps of his heart, peeling away the layers of identity.

  It isn’t the first time he’s been through an interrogation.

  THE FREEDOM OF SMALL COUNTRIES

  Inchgillan.

  “I want you,” says Doctor Reynard, “to feel free to tell me everything. The whole account.”

  He sits there behind his desk smoking his cigarette and studying the file in front of him—Seamus’s army record with all the honors and dishonors in it and not an ounce of fookin truth in any of it, Seamus thinks. Sure and it tells of him signing up with Thomas and all the Dublin Pals, but does it tell of them marching down past the Liffey and all their sweethearts marching with them on their way to the boat, side by side, the rich girls of the Trinity boys and the poor girls of the lowlier types like Finnan—though sure and he was a lucky dog having Anna for his sweetheart, Thomas’s sister, well above his station—does it tell of that? And it tells of him winning his sergeant stripes at Gallipoli, and of his platoon being seconded from the 7th to the 1st, but does it tell of the bloody slaughter as they waded onshore from the good ship River Clyde with sixty pounds of kit on them, getting mown down by Fritz’s fookin machine guns, so bad, why, that the 1st Dubs and the 1st Munsters had to form one single fookin “Dubsters” battalion, there was so fookin few of them left, eh, and that being why the 1st had to be built again almost from scratch? Does it tell of the weeks after they got to the fookin Somme just waiting, waiting under the endless fookin German barrage of shells and mortars, and poor Thomas losing his mind and of the English cunt of a captain—Carter, fookin Carter—who gave the order—cowardice, desertion in the face of the enemy—does it tell of that? And Seamus up on charges, and the charges dropped—he’s sure that’s in there. But does it tell of the choice and the captain’s oh-so-fookin-casual way of talking round it—not an outright choice, court-martial or over the top, old boy, but they’re going over tomorrow, by the way, with or without you? And how could he have let the lads go over without him? And the fookin VC that he fookin got for it after—Jesus—after the fookin horror.

  “Just tell me,” says the doctor, “as plainly as you can, in whatever words you want to use.”

  “And what would you like to know, then?” Seamus says.

  “This…crime they caught you in. The details are rather vague here, but you seem, if you don’t mind me saying, bitter. You feel disgraced, insulted, yes? I know how painful it must be to talk about these things, but please…tell me.”

  It hurts as much to talk about as to hold it in, he thinks. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.

  “Well, let me put it this way,” Seamus says. “When the powers that be started this fookin war—the squabbling fookin gobshites that they are—sure and back home ye couldn’t move for those that thought that this was it. We were going to have the fookin ravens flying out of the Tower of London, if ye get me drift. So fookin what? I says. It’s not our fookin war. But, well, one of my friends, ye see—he was a good lad, so he was—well, he kept saying as how we have to kick the Kaiser off his throne, fight for the ‘freedom of small countries,’ like—but of course there’s all these others saying, well, fook that shite. This is the time for action, says they. Let’s kick the fookin British off their fookin thrones here. Ye know?”

  Seamus sits back in his chair, watching the doctor for a reaction.

  “But well now, if my dear old mother told me once, she must have told me a hunner times—salt of the earth, she was, but I tell ye, once she had a theme, she cou
ld go on—Oh, yes she told me time and again: Seamus, she says, ye don’t get anywhere by brute force. Seamus Padraig Finnan, if ye want to get ahead, ye’ve got to use your head.”

  “Sound advice,” says the doctor.

  “O sure. But try telling that to the fookin kings what rule the world…or rule a young man’s heart. Jesus, but…look…where I grew up no one had any time for…crafty fookers…fookin intellectuals sitting by the fireside in their fookin clubs and making their grand schemes without an ounce of fookin…foresight in their thick skulls. And then ye get to know—ye know?—some quiet, young university type what loves poetry and all that shite and he’s a nice lad if a bit light on the old feet, maybe, maybe, but O, his sister’s something else, she is.”

  Finnan smiles a rakish grin.

  “But anyway, ye realize that the eedjits with the big ideas are just as fookin bad as the rest of them. Fookin wars and revolutions, they’re all the same. Just different ways for men to kill each other.”

  “But of course, I’ve hardly got the kind of words that an educated young man will listen to, have I? Ye think I could get any of those fookin eedjits to listen?”

  And Seamus remembers Thomas and his Trinity friends laughing him off, not even realizing the disdain that lay inside their disregard. Sure and he’s too big a man to be stung by it, of course—he’s wiser in the ways of the world than any of them will ever be—but he remembers how it hurt to know their joshing was so fookin foolish in the face of the world outside their quiet quadrangles, sitting there waiting for them to run laughing into its jaws. “Ah, Jesus,” he says to Anna, “but I’ve tried to talk some sense into the boy…but his heart is set on it.”