by Hal Duncan
And then the nothing becomes something. It becomes him.
And Jack Flash feels the flesh of his new body, and he knows that it’s all good.
“Keen,” he says.
The Empire Never Ended
A knock. The door opens and Starn glares at the inspector, annoyed at the interruption. The woman just stands there, holding a large brown file in her hand, silently waiting. Starn nods.
“Sorry, excuse me a second.”
He steps out of the room, closes the door quietly behind him.
“You’ve found something.”
“Well, yes and no. Something turned up when we ran his mug shots through the machine. Not sure if it will be any use, though.”
She hands Starn the folder.
“You found a match? A name would be very helpful, Inspector. Anything that can give me a handle on where he comes from.”
“Well, that’s the rub,” she says. “This doesn’t exactly tell us much at all about where he comes from.”
Starn opens the folder. All that’s inside is a printout of an old black-and-white photograph. He recognizes the face immediately, even in the softened, blurry gray tones fading to white around the edges of the ellipse, even wearing the peaked cap and with the solemn air of someone as much in control as his twin in the interview room is out of it. Hair trimmed tight around the ears. Lips pursed in a smile that seems just ever-so-slightly ironic, detached. A certain intensity to the eyes.
“Obviously a relative,” says Starn. “Who is he?”
“Captain Jack Carter,” she says. “English Army officer. Disappeared somewhere in the Caucasus a couple of years after World War One. Fiancée emigrated to America. No brothers or sisters we can trace. To be honest it could just be coincidence…but…”
“But what?”
“Well, he was considered a bit of a character by his men. They called him Mad Jack Carter. And Mad Jack seems a fairly apt description of our boy here. As I say, it could just be coincidence…”
“You have all this on file? It’s a bit past its sell-by date, surely.”
“We have a lot on file these days, Dr. Starn. It is the Information Age. You never know when the tiniest scrap of data might make a difference.”
Starn nods absently. It’s easy to be paranoid these days. DNA profiling. Face-recognition software. CCTV. ID cards. It all adds up to the world that his patient is afraid of, a world of constant observation, of suspicion, control. If the cameras can follow him around the city why shouldn’t they—that mysterious They—have similar technologies to follow him around the inside of his head? Microwave thought control or whatnot. That is the way the schizophrenic thinks. He slides the picture back into the folder.
“I’ll try the name on him and see if I get a response. Worth a shot.”
“One other thing,” she says.
“What’s that?”
“Some old fellow came into Partick station—senile dementia you’d think, but he’d seen our man’s photo on the news, claimed to recognize him. Said he’s the spitting image of a bloke he fought beside in Spain—I assume he meant World War Two, though I always thought Spain was neutral there.”
Starn shrugs.
“History’s not my strong point.”
She smiles—I know what you mean.
“Anyway,” she says, “I wouldn’t mention it but the desk sergeant humored him enough to pass the name back to the team.”
“And?”
“Well, he said our man’s name was Jack Carter.”
Starn opens the folder again to look at the photograph, taps a finger on it idly. A young soldier from a bygone age of Empire. The Empire Never Ended. But the resemblance is remarkable, he thinks. Has to be his grandfather or great-grandfather. Great-uncle?
“You’re sure there were no siblings?”
“None that we can trace is what I said. That’s not the same thing.”
He nods, hand on the doorknob, keen to restart the interview. The inspector puts her hand on the door, cocks her head—between you and me, off the record.
“So,” she says quietly. “What’s your thoughts so far? He’s faking it, isn’t he?”
He shakes his head.
“Too early to tell. Can’t say for sure.”
Her hand stays on the door. Starn knows there were a good few injured bringing the man in. One died on the way to the hospital.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I won’t let him cheat the hangman, Inspector.”
She takes her hand away and he twists the handle, stops.
“Inspector, have you ever heard of someone or something called Guernica?”
“Can’t say that I have. Why?”
“Just something our boy in there said.”
He shakes his head.
“Probably nothing important.”
Errata
Something Bad Happened Here
I look at the ground beneath my feet, nudging a toe at the thin layer of dirt to dust it off the rough edge of a concrete slab, then over at Puck, who’s hauling at a shrub, trying to uproot it with sharp, sudden heaves of his whole body weight backward. The topsoil is particularly thin here, and the stone posts and melted plastic spikes jutting up among the bushes are even more noticeable than they were in the terrain behind us. We have to pick our way with care over the uneven surface, and the cart’s pneumatic suspension hisses angrily as it compensates for the bumps of buried upholstery and mounds of broken wiring, now veiled only by the shallowest coating of red dirt. I had thought, as we came into this region out of the Veldt, that what we were traveling through was a land scattered with the detritus of the buildings once raised over it, now crumbled to their foundations. Now it seems more as if this is the detritus of foundations crumbling to reveal buildings beneath, the land itself merely a scattering over the top. Kick away the dirt and you find your foot very quickly touching rusted steel or misshapen plastic, stone or concrete, brick, bone.
“Something bad happened here,” says Puck. “I’m telling you.”
I’m not convinced about that. For all that the wreckage in the earth is so often blackened and burned, twisted or broken out of shape, there may be no more catastrophe here than in any common or garden rubbish dump. There are a number of possibilities that Puck refuses to consider. Oblivion’s Mount rises over us, still far ahead but just a little more to our right—north by northeast instead of simply north—and for all of its scale, its shape is more than a little reminiscent of the tells common in areas of ancient civilization where towns have been built over the ruins of towns and gradually accreted in layers over centuries until, eventually abandoned and buried by the winds, they lump there on the horizon, broad, buried masses waiting for archaeologists to mine for knowledge. Well…its shape is not quite right, but if you were to take one of those plains and build towns between the tells and let them live and die the same way until the plain was filled and turned into a plateau, and build towns on top of that plateau and go on and on and on, towering tell on top of tell, then maybe what you would be left with, after an eternity or so, is Oblivion’s Mount.
I try to explain this to Puck, but after his yawning, rolling his eyes, twiddling his fingers, kicking his heels, shifting his weight from foot to foot, swinging his arms at his side, picking dirt out from under his fingernails, playing with his hair, and finally checking the time on an entirely imaginary wristwatch, all within my first sentence, I give up with an exasperated sigh and offer an alternative explanation.
“It’s probably just one big landfill,” I say. “Eternity’s garbage. The Happy Dumping Ground in the Sky.”
“Bollocks,” says Puck, “something bad happened here,” and he goes back to trying to yank the bush out of the ground. “Look at Jack,” he says.
Jack sits on the ground maybe a hundred yards away, arms hugged around his knees, eyes scanning the skies absently as if watching a fly, but glancing every now and then at Puck, with the furtive, nervous intensity of a guilty dog. It was Jack that le
d us here in the first place with his ungodly howling, and he seems to have convinced Puck, with his fevered bursts of clawing at the ground followed by sudden panicked sprints to cower at a safe distance, that there is some terrible secret buried under the bush. Or as Puck puts it, that something bad happened here.
“Give us a hand, then, eh?” says Puck.
I join him at his bush and push one arm through the thick of leaves and twigs to get a backhand grip on a fatter branch, scuffle my feet into a lodging scrunch of dirt and, on the count of three, we heft.
“One, two, three, hnnnh. One, two, three, hnnnh.”
There’s a creak on the third heave, a crack on the fourth, and by the fifth the dirt is rustling as the roots lift through it, pulling up in a clump of twists untangling. I’m suddenly reminded of unpotting a neglected bonsai; I recognize the feel of pulling roots out of the wire mesh they’ve grown through, the teasing, tearing feel, like pulling a comb through matted hair. A final heave rips the bush free but for a few thick roots at the side we’re pulling from, free enough for us to see what’s under it and confirm my suspicion.
The bush has sprouted in the dirt blown over a thin film of plastic bag, snagged, at some point in the past, on the sharp steel of grillwork over a drain of some sort, the roots of the bush eventually bursting through the bag and working their way down through the mesh. It’s all quite mundane, if it wasn’t for the skulls piled one on top of the other, filling the hole in the ground like marbles in a jar.
I have to admit that, yes, well, maybe something bad did happen here.
The Tavern
“You never talk about him,” says Don.
“What’s the point?” she says, pushing the door open.
Voices quiet for a second as they enter, hoods shadowing their faces, raincapes cloaking their forms. Faces turn to scope these shadowy strangers like, she thinks, the locals in a western saloon or a horror movie inn. Questers in a fantasy epic entering the tavern. Templars on some grand secret mission to the Holy Land, stopping off at a hostelry and reticent to reveal the shining armor beneath their cloaks. With their disrupters—the six-foot chi-lances, part crossbow, part spear, part rifle—they even look the part. Apart from the fact that their raincapes are waterproof synthe and the armor underneath is biker leathers, Phreedom thinks. Apart from the fact that the only destination they have in sight is away. Away from reality. Away from the unkin. Away from the bitmites. Just plain fucking away.
But as far as they go, they never quite seem to get away. That’s the problem with the Vellum; when time has three dimensions you can drive whole decades only to find yourself back at the day you started from, or at least a day just like it.
“Come on,” she says.
She flicks back her hood and Don does the same. The locals turn back to their beer and conversation, satisfied now that the two of them have clicked into the role of mysterious strangers. Gazes flick across at them from here and there, now and then, but Phreedom knows that’s how the game works, how the ritual runs. It’s a scenario they’ve played a thousand times on their journey into the Vellum. She scans the room for the big lunk who’ll come on to her as she’s ordering at the bar, force a fight and get creamed. She scopes out the local moneyman sitting at the booth at the back of the tavern, all gold jewelry and immaculate suit, surrounded by his goons; Latin American drug lord, Wild West cattle baron, ghetto pimp or goodfella, there’s always some villain with a story all curled up and packed tight into the situation they walk into, just waiting for the catalyst to unfurl it, the drifter. She and Don sometimes run a book on how long before the moneyman tries to hire them or run them out of town.
“Fifteen minutes,” says Don. “What do you reckon?”
“One,” says Phreedom.
Don points at an empty table—rough-hewn wood with benches instead of seats, it would look more at home in the picnic area of a park than in this tavern, but then the whole place has a slapdash quality like so many places they’ve hit as they get farther out; the booths at the back are Formica, with padded leatherette seats like a diner, the bar is oak and brass, saloon-style, but there are tables with waxed cloth covers, broad-checked like some little European cafe, empty wine bottles used as candleholders or with flowers in them. Sawdust covers a mosaic floor. Neon behind the bar and gas lamps on the walls. TVs in the corners hanging from the ceiling. A weird-ass piano on a raised stage over to one side—a mechanical contraption somewhere between baby grand and player piano, its cylinder turns as it plink-plonks out a murderous version of “My Way.” The past is the new future, she thinks. Tomorrow is so last year.
She nods and, as Don slides down onto the bench, she flicks her raincape back to dig out her wallet.
“One minute?” says Don.
She grins.
“Time me.”
Five seconds. She’s at the bar, asking for two beers and sliding in at the spot right beside the big guy, the big, drunk lunk in the leisure suit who checks her out as she pushes in, looks her up and down, then grins at his friends over at the back, the ones around the moneyman. Eight, nine, ten seconds. He’s turning to leer at her.
“Hey there, pretty—”
She hits him, fist full in the face, breaking his nose and sending blood spraying down over his tache and white shirt, flicks her ruptor from left hand into right and does a little Bruce Lee twirl that smacks him across the cheek with it and leaves her standing there, legs spread, ruptor out and horizontal, aimed right at the booth at the back where he’s going down into a slump at the feet of the moneyman’s chief stooge. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. The moneyman looks down at the red wine dribbling off the table and into his lap, the glass rolling on its side. Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. His chair scrapes back and the goons close in in front of him, blocking her shot, and reaching for their own weapons. She smiles, shrugs, flips the ruptor back to vertical and puts her other hand up, palm forward. Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. She turns away from them, slowly and deliberately shouldering the ruptor and picking up the two beers, one in either hand. They have a little side bet, she and Don, on which glass gets shot out of her hand.
Thirty-two. The glass in her left hand explodes. Phreedom smiles.
Thirty-three. She doesn’t even bother looking as Don cuts them down from his seat, just asks the bartender for another beer, waits for it, then carries it back to the table.
“Forty-one seconds,” he says.
“Personal best.”
She slides onto the bench, props her own ruptor against the table beside Don’s. She reaches into a pocket to pull out a smoke but as she brings the lighter up, he takes her hand.
“You never talk about him,” he says. “About either of them.”
She pulls her hand away and lights the cigarette.
“I can’t fucking change what happened,” she says. “Any of it.”
She takes a draw.
“I wish I could.”
four
THE SCYTHES OF CRONOS
PETERHEAD, 1920
Your request has been heard and noted, says the letter, and an answer will be given presently…once the full facts of the matter have been ascertained…considered to our satisfaction, and more shite like that, but Seamus is too weak to read it now, lying up on the blanketless bed, naked and cold, as sure and he won’t wear their fookin convict arrows, and he’s exhausted, so he is, not from the laboring in the quarry, ’cause he won’t fookin do that neither, but from the endless fookin fighting. His throat sore from the feeding tube forced down it, the rest of his body is still black and blue from all the previous struggles; and the bruises from today are yet to form, of course. He lets the letter from the office of the Home Secretary drop from between his fingers. Fookers. Three months of penal servitude, they call it, in their fancy language. Call it what it is, hard fookin labor, done looking up the barrel of a Civil Guard’s Lee Enfield rifle. And he’s already two months in. It’s the 25th of October.
So
he lies there gazing up and back through bars at the pure sky, the paths of birds, wondering if he’ll be dead or free before they ever accept that he’s no fookin common convict but a political prisoner. Outside there’s the sounds of footsteps. A crow circles.
“Well, now, ah have to say it makes me right sad to see ye in this state, but.”
He looks down at the foot of the bed. It’s just one of the boys, Lance Corporal Donald O’Sheen MacChuill (Irish Catholic mother, Scots Protestant father, Seamus remembers—the Dubs always were a mixed bunch, and MacChuill was about the most mixed of the lot of them—spoke Gaelic and knew The Sash by heart and refused to see the contradiction). MacChuill stands there, in his full kit, backpack and helmet, rifle slung over his back, with a stupid big eedjit grin, sure, and the big hole in his face where his right eye used to be, the gaping black-red hole with the hard white shards and soft gray stuff all messed up in the midst of it. It doesn’t scare Seamus anymore though, sure, ’cause he knows it’s just a waking dream and if all the electroshock at Inchgillan didn’t do a single thing, well, he did learn something from the doctor, with his talk of that fellow’s work over at Craiglockhart and facing your demons, and all that shite. He wasn’t a bad sort, after all, that Doctor Reynard. Such a wound, he’d said, such a horrific wound…this MacChuill must have died instantly. He couldn’t have suffered. I want you to try and keep that in your mind. That he wouldn’t have suffered. It was after that that Seamus stopped screaming when MacChuill came visiting.
“Ah shite,” he says.
