Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  Seamus pushes himself upright, shaking his head. So weak he is from the hunger strike and all is what it is, sure, ’cause he hasn’t had one of his turns for quite a while now, but what else could it be but one of those fookin waking dreams that used to haunt him so? Jesus, but Seamus hopes that he’s not going to start with all the gibberish again, with all the crazy talk that got him his discharge—what was it Reynard called it? Glossolalia? Glossodoolallia, more like.

  “Ah, Christ,” he says. “What now?”

  “Aw come on, but. Is that any way to talk to yer ole pal, sir?” says MacChuill. “Ah mean, pardon ma bluntness, but here and I’ve come a long way just to see ye, riding this swift-winged bird, here, guiding it by ma will alone an a’.”

  He points at the crow now strutting on the window ledge, watching him, its dark eye glinting with gold sunlight like there’s fire in it. Seamus shivers but it’s not from the cold, even if he is stark bollock naked. He wishes he had a cigarette, but there’s none of that here, not even out of solitary. He wonders if ghost cigarettes still give ye that wee buzz, ’cause sure and he could ask MacChuill. MacChuill always had a spare one, so he did. Smoked like a fookin chimney. Like a reeky lum, he’d say. Didn’t they all?

  “And I suppose yer come to be spectator of me sufferings?” Seamus says. “Have ye just dropped in to see how I’m doing then, and to offer yer commiserations? That’s a fair journey, so it is, lad, coming all the way across the river that carried yer soul away, all the way from the fookin hole in the ground all covered in rocks and dirt, out of the fookin iron mother earth itself, lad. I mean, I hate to tell ye this, son, but yer fookin dead and buried.”

  He feels a wave of dizziness wash over him, wishes he could just fookin live his life out in the peace of seeing only what is here and now.

  “Sympathy sent me here, Sarge, so it did. But even if we wurnie brothers, there’s naebody I respect more than yersel—Haud on now. Don’t be coming out with any of that bollocks. Ye know fine well that what I say is true. Flattery’s never been ma strong point.”

  He walks round to sit on the edge of the mattress beside Seamus, who’s almost laughing at the absurdity, so he is, and almost crying.

  “Aright. It seems to me that ye could be usin a bit of help here,” says the ghost. “Never let it be said that there’s a firmer friend to ye than ole MacChuill.”

  VISITATIONS, VISIONS, VOICES

  Ah Jesus, look at the sight of me, thinks Seamus, all twisted up with sickness.

  “Some fookin friend I was to you, lad,” he says. “Friend to the dukes, more like, helping them build their bloody Empire on the broken bodies of…”

  Seamus looks round at the face in profile, the left side of it, the good side, and he thinks of the lad from some quarrying town on Scotland’s west coast. Moved over to Ireland when he was twelve, right into the heart of Dublin, because his mother was homesick and his father, black sheep of the family, didn’t give a damn for the Masons and the Orange Lodge that all his brothers wanted him to join with them. MacChuill seemed to have inherited some of that stubborn streak from his old man, kept the gruff accent all his life just to be perverse. When Seamus first met him, sure and he couldn’t understand a word the boy said. And Christ, when he got a few Guinness in him, Jesus, it was like half the fookin letters of the alphabet just didn’t exist anymore.

  “Ah know,” MacChuill says. “Ah know. Yer a wiser man than me by far, Sarge, but…ah just thought ye could use a wee bit of advice, like.”

  He turns to face Seamus, full-on, a tentative solemnity in his broken gaze. MacChuill, the eldest of all poor Seamus’s ghosts, the first to visit him in the darkness of the dugout, after he woke up and they told him what he’d done, after he’d sat there shaking for hours and hours, looking at the bodies piled in the trench around him, while the captain blathered on about commendations, tragedies and medals. Seamus remembers all the nights of visitations, visions, voices, how he woke up in the dark so many times, seeing MacChuill there with his shattered socket, just like Seamus saw him lying on the battlefield below, and all the others in amongst the craters and the blasted stumps of trees, as Seamus stood there caught, wound up in all the barbs of German wire and—No. Don’t think about it.

  “Ah mean…maybe ye want to think of what yer daein here, and get yerself an attitude that’s new, because the big man among a’ the lords, he’s also new, and if ye carry on chucking a’ these rude words at the dukes, ye know, as far above ye as they’re sitting on their thrones, they’re going to hear you—maybe no today but sometime soon—and when they dae, yer present troubles, Sarge, they’re going to seem like child’s play. Aye, life’s no fair, and yours, well, it’s just misery, but if ye want release from this despair, ye’ve got to lay aside this rage.”

  Seamus tries to stand up, to get away from him. The accent is MacChuill, the language is MacChuill, but there’s something in the flow of it, in the rhythm of it, that’s not quite right, even for a thing that’s not of this world but the next.

  “Ah know, ah know, I’m sure I seem like a right ole man saying this, but ye know, Sarge, being deid gies ye a whole new way of looking at things.”

  Seamus tries to stand up, but his legs don’t work; even if he tries to push himself up with one hand on the iron-railed head of the bed, all he feels is the cold metal in his palm. His heart is fluttering, his breathing hard. Sure and he’s just too weak.

  “Sarge,” says MacChuill, “yer hardly what ah’d call the meek and mild type, no a man to gie in to the carrot or the stick, but listen…yer too wild, yer tongue’s too quick, and this is how yer paid. Ye shouldnae kick against the pricks, unless yer looking for mair pain. Ye know it’s a harsh, reckless tyrant reigns.”

  He lays a hand on Seamus’s shoulder, weighted with sympathy.

  “Ah’m goin now. I’ll try and see if I can get you free from all these sufferings. But ye cannae speak so loud, so rude. With all yer wisdom, Sarge, ye ought to know yer proud words will be punished. Sir, this isnae doing anybody any good.”

  The Unknown Soldier

  MacChuill steps out of Finnan’s nightmare for a second, takes a wee breather from the work of playing someone else’s ghost. Only a couple of minutes and already he feels disoriented. For a second he almost hears an Irish mother calling on him as he’s playing in the street—Donald O’Sheen MacChuill, you get yerself in here this minute. But that’s not him and never was; it’s a composite of him—Donald MacChuill—and some O’Sheen that served in Finnan’s platoon. MacChuill has never even been to Dublin…far as he recalls. Not that he recalls too much.

  He blows into his hands and rubs them, trying to warm them up, but it’s no just the slaughterhouse that’s cold, he thinks. He looks down at the man bound in the chair by chicken wire and chains, and knows that what he’s doing is wrong. This isn’t what he signed up with the angels for at all and while he’s lying to the poor man in a’ sorts of ways, there’s a part of him that’s no playing a fucking role…and that’s the sympathy.

  MacChuill glances over his shoulder to the plastic-curtained door, where Henderson is standing, smiling cruelly at the sight of it. He looks around at the butchered carcasses of cattle, red meat, white with the fat and bone and frost.

  No, this isn’t what he signed up for, not at all. When they found him living wild in the Burmese jungles, lost and stripped of all his thought and memory after so many decades that he couldn’t tell them anything of how he got there, who he was, nothing but his name and rank and number, when they told him he was something special, something risen from the ranks of base humanity, transformed by war into this strange and ageless thing—unkin, they said—and told him that they needed him—it all seemed such a great relief that he just laughed at it at first. They offered him…simplicity and structure…meaning to his life…a chance to serve the greater good. The greatest good, they said. And MacChuill, the unknown soldier who had long since lost his regiment in a war he couldn’t even name, swallowed and almost cr
ied with pride, knowing that he was back where he belonged, in an army once again, a soldier now not just for his own noble Empire but for…the noblest Empire of them all.

  They told him there was a war in Heaven. Your eternity needs you.

  But this is a new world that they’ve brought him back to, and a new war, a new kind of war. A war for the hearts and minds of every human on the planet, they say. A war for souls, they say, where the battlefield is something that they call the Vellum. History, they say. Myth, they say. It’s no just distant lands across the water, now; this is war outside reality itself and inside people’s heads. Heaven is, they tell him, like a little island separated from vast continental powers by a sea of dreams. Dark continents and ancient powers. He doesn’t really understand the metaphysics, doesn’t have to; he’s a product of the British Empire, so he knows exactly what they mean. So it’s no German militarism anymore, or Indian mutineers—it’s no the Mau-Mau or the Zulus or any of those other savage and uncivilized races—but it’s still a…tiny nation trying to spread enlightenment to primitive and brutal heathens. It’s still a fight against the foreign devils.

  That’s what they say.

  This Finnan bloke that Henderson and him were sent for, though, this draft-dodging renegade, hardly seems like a great threat to the Covenant. He put up little fight other than to curse and swear at the two of them, even as Henderson, black-hearted bastard that he is, laid into him with fists and feet. And now that MacChuill has walked a while in Finnan’s dreams, wearing the face of some poor dead boy called O’Sheen, forging a history somewhere between what was and what just might have been, to try and build a bond with him, as his orders said, the problem is that he really has. MacChuill looks down at the man bound in the chair, his chest splayed open by the hook, the black dust crawling over him, inside him, and he feels exactly the affinity he has been told to fake. He wants to set the man free from his torment, wants to help him. Surely if he just speaks to his superiors—

  “I don’t blame ye, lad,” the prisoner mutters, answering some absent voice of memory or hallucination. “Ye’ve shared and dared it all with me, son. Now…”

  His head drops for a second then pulls up again.

  “Leave me alone. Don’t let it worry you. Ye’ll not convince them; they’re not easily convinced. But you just mind or it’s yerself that’ll be in the drink.”

  MacChuill reaches out his hand to touch the prisoner’s shoulder, to step back into his dreams.

  Another memory of sorts. Another reconstruction of the past…

  TIMES CHANGE

  Seamus passes the cigarettes out to the soldiers, takes one for himself and lights a match, holds it up first for the one, then for the other. He blows it out without thinking before lighting his own cigarette with another; it’s an old superstition from the trenches—you light one ciggy and the German sniper sights it, light a second and he takes aim, light a third and bang, somebody’s dead. Ye never light three cigarettes with the same match.

  He leans against the ornate painted ironwork of Kelvinbridge, a cart clattering across the cobbled stone behind, beneath him water flowing white and wild over a natural weir of sorts, rocks cropping out into the shallow river. So Maryhill Barracks has some would-be mutineers. Sure and it’s what Lloyd George was scared of, so it is, enough that when the tanks arrived in Glasgow on the morning after Bloody Friday and the city turned into a fortress in a grip of iron, the hands that held the guns weren’t native-born. Two weeks later, the soldiers up in Maryhill were still confined to barracks in case fraternizing with the Clydesiders brought their loyalties into question. The soldiers that patrolled the streets to keep the peace were sent in from outside by a prime minister and a king shitting themselves that the Red Clyde was about to see a full-scale revolution.

  That was four years ago now, though. Times change. Maclean is dead, health broken by prison sentence after prison sentence, by constant hunger strikes and beatings. Gave his coat away to a beggar on the street and caught pneumonia. Sure and the whole city is in mourning for him, so it seems, some of them sad and others angry, like these two. Seamus tells them not to be such bloody fools.

  “Ye give advice to others better than you give it to yerself,” says the one called MacChuill. “Do as I say, not as I do, eh?”

  And what can he say to that, sure, eedjit that he is? By Christ, he’s famous enough for being an eedjit that these two recognized him, called him by his name as they passed in the morning gloom. He would have walked on without even acknowledging it, thinking them drunk and maybe looking for a fight, expecting a bottle to fly past him any second, but they called again, they called him comrade and, in their mouths, he knew, it wasn’t a dirty word.

  So he had stopped and turned and nodded his hello. Sure and they are both drunk, actually, pissed out of their heads, the smell of whisky on their breaths sitting uncomfortably with memories deep under all his thoughts. He’s tired with the end of his night shift and two Glaswegian soldiers off on leave, out on the piss, are a little more than he can handle right now, sure, but, no, they only want to talk to him, they do. They only want to talk to one of the men what knew Maclean, so it ends up as just one of those passing moments of maudlin friendliness that you get sometimes with total strangers in this city, all the aye, big man and och, away of people who’ll open up their hearts, it seems, to anyone.

  They tell him that they want to help and he remembers how he said the same thing to Maclean, back when it seemed like just one man could make a difference.

  “There’s nae way,” says Corporal MacChuill, “that ye’ll dissuade us. Ah mean, come on, if it’s the army coming out with it, the dukes, they huv to listen to whit we huv to say.”

  They’ve no shortage of zeal, sure; he admires that in a man and always will, but he just doesn’t think now that the suffering will ever cease, that his poor fellow man will ever find release. What can he say? Strive not; ye’ll only strive in vain. There’s still a part of him says, nothing ventured, nothing gained. But still. He thinks of Ireland now, only just coming out of its two years of bloody civil war, partitioned, riven. They have Home Rule, sure and they do, but with the North still British…Christ, forgive them. Don’t they see what’s coming?

  “Hold yer peace,” he says, “and hold yerself out of harm’s reach.”

  And all he wants, all that he fookin wants now, is to see an end to it, and that no more should suffer, not on his account.

  A heron flaps down languidly to stalk the shallow Kelvin down below.

  Ah Jesus, no, thinks Seamus. All ye’ve got to do is look at a fookin atlas and what else is there to do but weep for the fortunes of yer brothers standing in the distant lands past the horizon, bearing their hard loads on their shoulders, those poor fookin pillars of the Empire? Look at the massacred natives of Armenia in their graves. Pity the savage monster with a hundred skulls of Indian slaves around her neck, eyes flashing gorgon light, her frightful jaws hissing the truth of all the slaughter, sure and it’s the fookin Age of Kali, so it is, goddess of chaos and death, Amritsar’s fookin typhoon of a daughter.

  Christ, thinks Seamus, and ye want to stand against the lords, ye think that ye can overthrow the sovereignty of dukes? Let’s see.

  A revolution in Iraq, is it? Well, then, the dukes send fookin airstrikes, thunder falling, fire spitting from the sky like lightning bolts, to strike out from the rebels their high hopes. They’ll cut the very heart out of ye and leave yer strength all scorched and thundered out.

  How goes the revolution now, in Italy, with Mussolini now in power? A fookin useless, bloated corpse it is, buried under the fookin mountain of a fascist state, while industry hammers the flaming masses, sure, in their dire fookin straits. By Christ though, but one day there will be a fookin real eruption there—and not just Etna’s rumbling threats to Linguaglossa either; no, it won’t be Sicily’s smooth fields of fruit and flowers facing the wild jaws, but everywhere it will be rivers of fookin fire bursting out, devouring. Sure
and as long as one rebel still breathes, the anger seethes below, a fookin tempest nothing can appease, a rage that rises, boiling, ever higher. It may be burnt to ashes now by the lightning bolts of dukes; one day, though, sure, the blasting furnace will blow storms of fire. Sure and today though, Seamus thinks, what is it that they have? Unholy Roman fascist fookin Empire.

  Seamus realizes that his hands are gripping the cold iron of the bridge, his knuckles white. Ah fookin Jesus fookin Christ. Where does it end? Where do they start?

  NOTHING CHANGES

  He tells them that there’s nothing to be done. Go home. It’s over.

  “What harm is there in asking?” says MacChuill. “What harm is there in trying? Tell us.”

  “Pointless pain, and empty-headed folly,” Seamus says, aware of just how bitter he sounds. “But anyway,” he says, “ye’re not without experience. Ye don’t need me to tell ye what to do.”

  So save yerself, he thinks, if ye know how, and as for me, I’ll bear my present state, until the minds of dukes are turned from hate, ’cause what can one man do against a whole establishment, against a world ruled by the rich and powerful, against these new lords sitting all-powerful on their seats? Jesus, it’s like the fookin heavens themselves, and God and all His fookin angels are on the side of all that’s worst in us. What kind of fookin eedjit stands up against that?

  Well, him, of course, the fookin big gob that he has and can’t keep shut.

  “And just what fookin use is there in talking anyway?” he says. “Take care in case their anger’s turned on you.”

  He takes a draw of his cigarette and accepts the bottle of Bell’s whisky that MacChuill offers him, takes a slug. Sure and the lad’s got his heart in the right place and Seamus has no right taking it out on him, it’s just that he’s so fookin tired of fighting other people’s battles. Christ, but it’s cold in Glasgow in December, but the whisky warms his chest. Down in the water of the Kelvin, the heron splashes, catches a fish and guzzles it back. It flaps up with a flourish, distracting him. Sure and what is a heron doing here in December?